Malicious Intent (17 page)

‘No one. Colleagues didn’t even know where she lived.

She’d meet them out.’

‘What about the carer?’ Brian asked.

‘The agency told the local detectives the carers Debbie Finch picked were all middle-aged women. Wouldn’t have anyone young or pretty, and never a man in the house,’ Kate answered.

‘You’d think if she hated him that much, the old man would have had to be loaded for her to stay,’ Hogan mumbled.

A young tanned detective, dressed in a navy, fine pinstriped suit, joined the conversation. He looked like he should have been patroling a beach.

‘I just checked the bank accounts,’ he said, addressing Kate.

‘The old bloke had nothing when he died. The daughter was the one who squirreled money away. She was worth a mint –

$350,000 in shares. Not only that, but she rented out four properties at prime locations on the coast. A local real estate agent reckons they’re worth over two million.’

Kate smiled approvingly. ‘Mick, don’t suppose you found out who she left it all to?’

‘Some center for abused women.’

Hogan shrugged. ‘Guess we can rule money out as a motive.’

Anya wondered why a woman like that had a firearm.

‘What about the gun? Was it registered?’

Brian Hogan pulled out a crumpled hankie and wiped it across his nose. ‘Could have been bought on the black market anywhere. We’re checking the Gosford pubs and dealers now, but don’t expect to get an answer,’ he said, shoving the handkerchief back into his trouser pocket.

‘Do we know what she did in her time off? Where she went?’

‘The carer said she’d go to Sydney sometimes. She’d say she was going shopping but didn’t seem to buy much.’

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‘That could mean anything,’ Kate said. ‘Maybe she had a man, a hobby, bought handguns. Hell, she could have spent her time at the bloody art gallery for all we know.’

Anya looked more closely at the photos. Who could blame her for getting away?

A phone rang and as Hogan answered it, Kate leaned over Anya’s shoulder. ‘Maybe it all means nothing. Maybe the carer cleaned the bowl and just left the lid up.’

‘If she’d been cleaning you’d think she’d have picked up the towels and tidied the rest of the bathroom up, too,’ Anya deduced.

Kate agreed. ‘If there was someone else in the room, we’d better find out.’

The lung slides bothered Anya. ‘What did Peter Latham say about the fibers?’

‘There weren’t any in the old man’s lungs. Only in the daughter’s.’

‘That suggests she wasn’t exposed to them in the house. So the father’s lungs were clear?’

‘I didn’t say that. He had a whopping great lung cancer.’

‘Mesothelioma?’

Kate handed her a pathology report. ‘You can interpret.

Looks like hieroglyphics to me.’

Anya read the words ‘squamous cell carcinoma.’ ‘No luck.

It’s not the sort of cancer men who’ve worked with fibers in the past get. We can’t blame him for bringing home the fibers in his clothes, which could have explained how his daughter inhaled them.’ Anya read on. ‘The tragedy is that with a cancer the size of this, he was dying anyway.’

Brian Hogan finished his phone conversation and rejoined Anya near the computer. ‘Is this some kind of death or euthanasia pact?’

‘Pretty unlikely,’ Kate replied. ‘His own doctor didn’t even know about the cancer.’

The sweet-faced surfer looked surprised. ‘So what you’re saying is, whoever pulled the trigger killed a dead man.’

Anya was still worried about the fibers. ‘We haven’t KATHRYN FOX

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explained where the fibers came from, or why they’ve turned up in three different women.’

‘Is that so unusual?’ Mick seemed interested.

‘The chances of three young women having them at autopsy have got to be a million to one against,’ Anya explained.

‘Coincidences like this don’t just happen. The fibers don’t occur normally. They have to have been inhaled from somewhere. Is there any chance the women spent time at the same place, or knew the same people? Do they have anything in common? That’s what we need to find out.’

Hogan wheeled his chair alongside Anya’s. ‘Is this like one of those infections people get from air-conditioning? Legionnella or whatever they call it?’

Anya smelled the combination of coffee and cigarettes on his breath. ‘Not exactly. None of the victims died from it, but they may have spent time in the same place. All we know is that three young women apparently committed suicide, all three were missing before their deaths and all of them had the fibers.

Fatima Deab died of an OD in Merrylands and Clare Matthews jumped off the Gap earlier this year.’

‘If you think the deaths are linked, shouldn’t there be a task force to investigate?’ Mick asked.

Kate took command. ‘A link hasn’t been established or ruled out. Before we get carried away, we need to find out a bit more about this case. I want phone records cross-checked, friends and neighbors reinterviewed. Did Debbie have a boyfriend, did the family have any enemies? Where did she bugger off to?’ Kate took her jacket off and slung it over the back of a chair. ‘Was anything missing from the house? I also want to know if she had anything to do with Fatima Deab or Clare Matthews. Any connection at all.’

22

The following day, Anya returned to Cleveland Street and met Kate in the foyer. Together they rode the lift to the third floor. During that time, Kate checked her watch four times and cleared her throat at least twice. Either she couldn’t wait for the meeting, or couldn’t wait for it to be over.

‘Is there something I should know before we go in?’ Anya broached.

‘Just don’t get your hopes up. These guys will do anything to avoid a bigger workload. Filano fancies himself as inspector material and won’t risk stuffing up. He didn’t like it when I got called to the morgue when Clare Matthews died. Just wanted to close the book and make himself look good. You can decide about Faulkner for yourself.’

‘Fair enough. All I can do is try.’

They settled into the second meeting room, with a rectan-gular table, six chairs and a whiteboard. Vertical blinds on the glass wall adjoining the main office remained open. Anya was introduced to Detective Sergeant Ernie Faulkner, a potbellied man with a few gray hairs combed over his head to give the illusion he wasn’t balding. More like self-delusion, Anya thought. Detective Constable Ray Filano stood and almost bowed a greeting. Aged in his thirties, he wore a black shirt and KATHRYN FOX

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matching tie. It wasn’t difficult to work out that Ernie Faulkner came from western Sydney’s Merrylands branch and the immaculately dressed Detective Filano fit right into the eastern suburbs locale.

Kate took a seat at the table. ‘Thanks for coming in. I appreciate your input.’

‘Happy to help, if we can.’ Ernie Faulkner’s chair sat directly under the air-conditioning vent as evidenced by two of his comb-over hairs floating skyward.

‘We’re looking into possible links between three of our cases. An OD in your territory, name of Fatima Deab; Clare Matthews, a nun who died off the Gap; and an apparent murder-suicide up the coast, name of Debbie Finch.’

‘What sort of link?’ Ray Filano inquired.

‘Well, Dr. Crichton has been looking into some unusual findings postmortem. I’ll let her explain.’

Anya stood up and pulled the lid off a marker.

‘Each woman had an unusual finding – a lung fiber – which was deemed incidental on post-mortem. It is extemely rare to get this sort of finding in older people who’ve had a lifetime of exposure, let alone young women.’ She drew an hourglass fiber in black ink. ‘We have no idea where it’s come from, but it may mean the women have spent time in the same place.’

Filano appeared interested. ‘The stuff that spreads through air-conditioning?’

‘I think you mean Legionnella, which is an infection. That’s quite different from this fiber, but they are both acquired by inhalation.’

‘Then is it a new kind of drug they’re snorting or smoking?’

‘No, that’s a good thought, but it’s more likely to be in some kind of building material. Air-conditioning is still a possible means of spread.’

‘I thought that was something the unions or workers’ compensation usually investigate. Are we looking at some form of
criminal
negligence?’ Filano said, in a tone usually reserved for children.

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Anya disliked him already. ‘No, it’s likely the owner of the source of the fiber is unaware of its –’

‘Excuse me,’ Ernie Faulkner interrupted, ‘didn’t you just say this was incidental, which means it has nothing to do with the deaths?’

‘Technically speaking, but it may be highly significant. The chances of a young person having this pathology are so rare, to my knowledge, it hasn’t even been recorded.’

Kate spoke. ‘We’re talking about Fatima Deab, a nineteen-year-old who overdosed after going missing for a few weeks.

Clare Matthews was about to take her final vows as a nun when she disappeared and turned up off the Gap. Debbie Finch, the third woman, also disappeared, for a week.’

The Merrylands detective rolled his eyes and closed his notebook. ‘Regarding the Deab case, we looked at the possibility that someone else may have been there in the toilet block and got
nothing.
We’re more interested in her old man bashing the shit out of some poor kid.’

Kate folded her arms. ‘We had the father under surveillance following a phone call from someone claiming the girl was murdered. While we had him under our noses, he committed GBH. This guy is brazen, violent and teaches people lessons.’

‘Yeah, when he’s got his mates and an iron bar. Not with needles.’

‘Okay,’ Anya said, ‘but you think it’s possible the Deab girl wasn’t alone when she overdosed? We have no idea where any of these women went before being found dead.’

‘Comb-over’ grunted. ‘Isn’t it a bit of a stretch linking these women? Do you know how many people are reported missing every week? Most of them turn up sooner or later – these just turned up dead. As far as I know, they died from different causes. The Deab case inquiries were based on a history of domestic abuse and threats to the girl. I wouldn’t be surprised if the prick was there when she died, but there’s not a damn thing we can do to prove it.’

Anya now understood why her friend had seemed edgy. ‘It KATHRYN FOX

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is, however, important to identify the source of the fibers. There could be other cases with similar findings that are related.’

As she spoke the words, Anya realized how uninterested the detectives were.

Faulkner wriggled in his seat and the floaters on his head swayed in the flow of cool air. ‘Last I heard, we’re not research assistants who run around so you can make some great scientific discovery.’

‘Where are your manners, Ern?’ Filano said. ‘Let’s hear the lady out.’

‘All right,’ Kate said, ‘I know this may seem a long shot, but let’s at least go through what we’ve got. In the Finch murder-suicide –’

Filano interjected. ‘We’ve all heard about what happened and what
went down
with that one.’

Faulkner slowly licked his lips.
For God’s sake
, Anya thought.

It was worse than dealing with prepubescent children.

Kate ignored the bait. ‘We know someone left the toilet seat up in the house and we’ve pretty much excluded household members, domestic help and the police. We can’t discount a third person being present when this woman and her father died.’

DS Faulkner forcefully clicked the tip of his pen. The hairs seemed to dance on his head, mocking his superior tone.

‘Remember the case in Maroochydore where someone twigged that the toilet seat was left up, the one where two losers knocked off a woman and tried to make it look like an OD?

Only problem was they cleaned up all the gear. How was the victim supposed to have injected herself with enough crap to kill a horse, tidy up and, oh yeah, put all the stuff in the neighbor’s bin before going inside, getting into her pajamas and dying quickly not on her own bed, but her flatmate’s one?

Didn’t need to be Einstein to figure something was wrong with that little scenario. The toilet seat was just a bonus but it got a hell of a lotta press at the time.’

Ray Filano became serious. ‘What about the gunshot residue?’

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Kate answered, ‘Consistent with the Finch woman pulling the trigger.’

‘Signs of struggle or theft?’

Anya described what she’d seen on the 3D images. ‘A couple of things were knocked off a table and broken, like a vase and old family photos. We know they were knocked over after the father’s shooting because the blood spatter marks were on the photo sides of the glass. There were two bloodied handprints on the carpet, so we think the daughter touched the old bloke and maybe tried to help him, then wiped her hands on the floor.’

‘So she shoots the old man in haste, has second thoughts about what she’s done and panics. When she realizes he’s dead, bang. Her handprints are on the floor. She kills herself.’ Detective Filano made it sound so simple.

Anya decided to reenact the shooting to make her point.

She pointed at Ernie Faulkner’s shortened neck and collarbone.

‘The bullet caused extensive hemorrhage as it passed to the left, downward and backward. It went through the insertion of the sternocleidomastoid muscles, then down to the left brachiocephalic vein, then to the origin of the carotid artery.

Here’s where it does the most damage. Through the aorta, before it tore through the upper and lower lobes of the left lung. It fractured a couple of ribs and the shoulder blade before embedding in the tissue under the skin at the back of the chest wall.’ Anya laid one hand on Faulkner’s back at the site of the bullet’s final location. ‘He took a while to die, long enough for her to shove jam down his throat. I think it’s more likely that a shot in anger would have been straight through his chest. She was, after all, a casualty nurse and would have seen her share of gunshot traumas.’

Kate added, ‘If she’d had regrets, there was plenty of time to call an ambulance.’