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  Kittyhawk Down

  ( Inspector Challis - 2 )

  Garry Disher

  Garry Disher

  Kittyhawk Down

  CHAPTER ONE

  The National Parks sign said 'Bushrangers Bay 2.6 km' and 'Cape Schank 5.4 km'. Hal Challis edged through the barrier designed to thwart trail-bikes and stepped out along the track, the bushland warm and some of the flora turning red and yellow on this Easter Saturday afternoon in early autumn.

  Bushranger.

  A name that denoted violent crime and romance. An apt name, given that Challis had come here for a murder and had come here for love.

  Autumn. 'Fall', as the Yanks call it.

  You couldn't get a better word than 'fall' to describe the season and his life now. Leaves everywhere had begun to fall. Since yesterday, Good Friday, his spirits had fallen, love gone wrong. And he thought of the body falling, falling through the water.

  Challis strode on, disturbing a small snake. He was tall, thin but hard-boned, and looked slightly out of date in his jeans, scuffed flying jacket and plain leather shoes. His sunglasses were not an accessory perched above his forehead but shaded his eyes. He'd never worn a T-shirt as an undershirt or tracksuit pants out of doors. He'd never owned a pair of runners. His hair was straight, dark and lifted a little in the wind. It was cut once a month by a young woman who worked beside her father in a Waterloo barbershop. She was skilful and attentive, and for the sum of $10 returned him to the world with a neatly shaped head. And so Challis was outwardly unremarkable that day, nodding with grave courtesy to the people coming toward him along the track. This late on an Easter Saturday, five-thirty pm, couples and families were streaming back to the carpark. Only Challis headed the other way, happy to leave them to the roads of the Peninsula, which would be choked with holidaymakers right now. Very few noticed that he was wound tightly, as if insulating a knot of powerful feelings, and the sunglasses hid the habitually weary, unimpressed and disbelieving cast of his face.

  There were better things that Challis could have been doing. He could have been halfway through an Easter walk of the Peninsula beaches with Tessa Kane, but yesterday he'd had to pull out, and that had been the start of his falling spirits. He could have been at home reading or mulching leaves, but early in the afternoon he'd found himself listening for the phone to ring with more bad news from the women's prison, where his wife was serving eight years, and so he'd left the house. He could have been spending time with friends, but they all had children and Easter was a time for family connectedness and strife, and no one wanted a forty-year-old single man hanging around them.

  And so he'd started thinking about murder. As the Homicide Squad inspector for the Peninsula, thinking about murder was his job. In fact, there were two murders to think about, both relatively old and both unsolved. The first involved no body, only a strong suspicion. Ten months ago- June last year-a two-year-old toddler named Jasmine Tully had gone missing. She lived with her mother, Lisa, and Lisa's defacto in a rundown fisherman's shack on the outskirts of Waterloo. CIB detectives at Waterloo suspected the defacto,

  Bradley Pike. When they had failed to shake Pike's story or turn up evidence of any kind, they'd called in Challis. Challis was inclined to suspect Brad Pike too, and had spent hours trying to break his story. Cases involving children were the worst. He hated them. They left him feeling scoured and futile.

  But it was the second murder that had brought Challis to Bushrangers Bay.

  That, and love. If Tessa Kane was sticking to the timetable they'd mapped out with each other, she'd be walking in from Cape Schank about now. Maybe he'd encounter her. Maybe she'd want to talk.

  Maybe not.

  As for the second murder, this time there was a body, and Tessa Kane had called it the Flinders Floater on the front page of her newspaper. Unfortunately the name had stuck, and now even Challis was calling it the Flinders Floater.

  It had been found by a commercial fisherman from Flinders about six months ago. He was pulling in his anchor and noticed how heavy it was. He kept hauling, and that's when he saw the second anchor, caught in the tines of his own. But that alone hadn't accounted for the extra weight. Attached to the second anchor-belted on, in fact, so you could be sure it wasn't accidental-was a body.

  The fisherman used his mobile phone to call the police, and bobbed in the sea off Bushrangers Bay for an hour until a police launch arrived to take charge.

  No one knew who the dead man was. Challis saw the body before the pathologist had started sawing at it. The flesh was soupy, bloated, chewed about, apt to fall away from the bones like a cooked chicken's. Only the finger-pads of the right thumb and forefinger remained intact, the tips badly softened and wrinkled, but by injecting fluid under the skin the lab had distended them sufficiently to make serviceable fingerprints. No matches with the national computer. Then, when it was suggested that the dental work was foreign, Challis had tried Interpol, the Home Office National Computer in the UK, and the FBI.

  Still nothing.

  The clothing-jeans, T-shirt, underwear and Nike running shoes-had been made in Asian sweatshops for sale in Australian stores. They were a dime a dozen.

  All that Challis knew was, the guy was in his thirties and his skull had been smashed in before he'd been thrown into the water. There were also stab wounds to the stomach, but the cause of death was drowning, the pathologist said, noting the presence of a large volume of seawater in the lungs. The blow to the head? Possibly to stun the victim. The stab wounds? Probably to release gases and so ensure that the body remained under the surface of the water.

  The blow to the head was possibly administered by the anchor that had taken him to the bottom, the pathologist reported, after comparing the shape of the indentation in the skull with the shaft of the anchor. The anchor had been intended to hold the body down until the fishes had picked the bones clean. Fortunately the fisherman had happened along about two or three days later. Or unfortunately, because identifying victim and culprit had become a headache for Challis.

  At least the anchor told Challis a couple of things: the body had been dumped at sea, not pushed over a cliff, and he'd be saved the tedium of mapping body drift as determined by the tides and the shape of the coastline.

  One other thing: the victim had been wearing a Rolex Oyster watch. Silver, with an expanding metal band. It wasn't the costliest Rolex available, but it was a genuine Rolex, not a ten-dollar Singapore or Bangkok fake. If the Rolex spelt a certain level of class or income, nothing else about the murdered man did. The clothes and Nike trainers didn't.

  Challis walked on, allowing the Flinders Floater to rest there in his head like a shimmering wraith that would one day clarify, take on a corporeal being and tell him the story of his final days and minutes before he was thrown into the water to die.

  He could see kangaroos grazing in the early evening light on the grassy slope above the walking track. He nodded at a young family, stepping off to let them through, and wondered what he was going to do when he got to the fork on the cliff-top above the little bay. Walk down to the beach and commune with the elements in the hope that he'd solve the case? Continue toward Cape Schank and hope to encounter Tessa?

  Dusk was settling. He could see lights on the water and the lights of Phillip Island beyond the water. A cool autumn wind blew in from the sea. He zipped up his windproof jacket. He was hungry, sleepy, cold, depressed-and owed it all to one phone call.

  An ordinary everyday sort of man might not have answered the phone at seven o'clock on Good Friday morning. But Challis was a homicide inspector and always answered the phone. And had heard his wife, using her phone card at the prison, announce that she intended to kill herself.

  Her spirits always
deteriorated at holiday time. Her spirits always fell.

  He'd hung on to the phone for twenty minutes, letting her talk herself out of her depression. But the damage was done. He'd been making love with Tessa when the call came, and an hour later-the mood for love gone and just as he'd been about to set out for the two-day walk of the Peninsula beaches with her-Challis's parents-in-law had rung to say that their daughter had snapped her phone card in two and tried to saw through her wrists with it, and was in the prison infirmary. She wasn't in any danger, but Challis's presence would help stabilise her mood, and if he wasn't busy would he mind…

  Challis had said yes.

  Tessa had said, 'It's time you let go of her, Hal,' then had driven off, announcing that she intended to undertake the walk alone.

  Challis had almost set out to find her when he returned from seeing his wife in the afternoon.

  Perhaps he should have. He was no good at gauging these things, but suspected that it would have been better then than now, a day later, when she'd had time to stew and set her mind and heart against him.

  Self-conscious suddenly, he turned around and walked back to his car.

  Almost six pm… On the way home he tuned in to the news. Two asylum seekers had escaped from the new detention centre near Waterloo. Challis shook his head, imagining the fallout, the divisions, the extra work for Ellen Destry and her CIB detectives.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Ellen Destry would rather have been home tonight, Easter Saturday, but she was a detective sergeant at the Waterloo station and she could sense the hunger in Dwayne Venn.

  What Venn liked to do was drive to three or four of the Peninsula's lovers' lanes and park deep in the maw of the roadside trees and attack couples in their cars. In the watery green light of the night-vision fieldglasses he resembled exactly a creeping psycho in a Hollywood slasher film, but on the two occasions that CIB had shadowed him in the past six weeks he'd never done more than watch. Not even taken his old boy out and tugged on it.

  Ellen was almost beginning to doubt the veracity of Pam Murphy's information. 'Maybe your informant's given us a peeping tom instead of a rapist,' she'd said to the young uniformed constable last week after another three hours spent in the dark.

  But Dwayne Venn was a nasty piece of work and there had been two rapes late that summer, both involving a knife and a hint of unhinged violence. Now Tessa Kane, Challis's editor girlfriend, was asking questions in her newspaper, and so Ellen would continue to watch Venn for as long as the budget could stand it. Senior Sergeant Kellock had taken a brief hard look at the figures that afternoon and told her, 'Two constables, Murphy and Tankard, that's all I can spare, what with those fanatics escaping from the detention centre.'

  Fanatics? Next he'd be calling them 'ragheads' or 'sand niggers', like some redneck in a film. According to the detention centre management, the escapees were Iraqis, one an engineer and the other a taxi driver. They weren't her concern-or not yet anyway. Her concern was catching Venn.

  And so now she was in the bushes where she could not be seen but where she could see the station's unmarked blue Falcon as a dense shape against the general blackness. In bushes on the other side was John Tankard, one of the uniformed constables. The other, Pam Murphy, was in the Falcon itself, huddled on the back seat with Detective Constable Scobie Sutton. They were playing lovers. Neither wore shirts. Pam's bra was black, which seemed to indicate passion and willingness for some reason, if you listened to the ads. All four officers were armed, and in radio contact via earpieces and small microphones. To the casual eye, the microphones worn by Sutton and Murphy could have been matching necklaces.

  Ellen said softly, 'Destry in position.'

  Scobie murmured in her ear, 'Sutton in position.'

  'Murphy in position.'

  'Tankard ditto.'

  Trust John Tankard to be different.

  And they settled back to wait. They were a hundred metres away from the tourist road that gave access to the lookout. There was little local traffic-everyone was down on the coastal flatlands, heading herdlike to or from parties, pubs, restaurants and the cinema on this Easter Saturday evening.

  Just then a Kombi van drove in. It stopped for thirty minutes, there was soft music, and then it clattered away again, leaving behind a trace of marijuana smoke. There were lights upon Port Phillip Bay, and the distant horizon glow of the Melbourne suburbs beyond the black water. Cloud wisps obscured the stars and the moon.

  Ellen's mind drifted. Back at home in Penzance Beach her daughter was having a party. Ellen fretted a little. It was Larrayne's seventeenth birthday and Ellen wanted to celebrate the fact that her daughter was better now. Just over a year ago Larrayne had been abducted by a man who'd already abducted and murdered three other women. She'd been full of adolescent moody rattiness before the abduction, but since then had become quieter, more studious, inclined to stay at home. The party was also meant to mark her jettisoning of the ratbags she'd once hung around with at school and cementing new friendships. They were decent kids, these new friends, but- along with all the other shit that happened at night on the Peninsula lately-there had been instances of gatecrashing that had ended in violence.

  'We could register the party with the police,' Ellen had suggested.

  'Sweetheart,' her husband said, 'we are the police.'

  Alan Destry was a uniformed senior constable in Traffic. He was sour about his prospects. He'd failed the sergeants' exam and was married to a detective sergeant on the fast track. Beating her at something, however trivial, made him feel a little better about himself.

  And he was earning brownie points tonight, staying home, watching over a bunch of partying teenagers. Ellen imagined his scowling presence at the door as they arrived, his visual scrutiny, his quick search of jacket pockets, handbags and daypacks for booze and dope.

  There was some booze allowed. Not enough to cause Larrayne's friends to waste themselves and turn nasty, though.

  Drugs were another matter. There was evidence that a major network had taken over on the Peninsula: increased arrests for possession and pushing, more overdoses, reports of ecstasy and amphetamines being sold at rave parties. The rave party scene scared Ellen. Admission was cheap, about $15 to cover the hire of a DJ and portaloos, and the parties were often held in out-of-the way factories that lacked basic safety measures like fire sprinklers. Kids heard about them by word of mouth and liked the sense of community encouraged by the music, the drugs, the secrecy, the air of being outside the mainstream. The drugs were also cheap and readily available, with ecstasy selling for $50 a pop and the effect lasting for hours. The kids believed that ecstasy was harmless and loved the boost it gave them, the ability to dance all night and feel invincible. They had a touching faith in the purity of the ecstasy, unaware that it had probably been made by a bikie gang in some backyard garage and contained heroin, speed and the horse-drug ketamine, bound together with glucose or caffeine. They risked poisoning themselves or fusing their brains in the long term, and at the parties they forgot to drink lots of water, got dehydrated, risked death.

  Larrayne had been to one rave party. It had been well managed and publicly advertised, but the pushers were there, she said.

  Ellen looked at her watch. Ten forty-five. Where was Venn? Assuming their rapist was Venn, he liked to take a knife from his boot and burst in upon a pair of lovers, demanding money. Then he'd threaten to start slicing pieces of flesh from the woman unless she undressed fully and handcuffed her boyfriend's hands behind his back and performed oral sex on him. Finally he'd insert the handle of the knife inside the woman's vagina and leave after cutting clumps of pubic hair from her and pocketing any cash the couple had on them.

  Ellen badly wanted to catch him.

  Then she saw him. 'He's here,' she murmured.

  She had heard the engine and at first thought it was a passing motorist, but then a lowered black Longreach ute with a roll bar appeared in her glasses, slowing for the entrance, then U-turning t
o make another pass, and giving her a clear view of both its numberplates. She saw the ute enter finally, then coast past the police Falcon and stop some distance away, pointed toward the exit. The Longreach looked fast and hard, like the driver.

  They were going to make an arrest no matter what. If Venn simply spied on Sutton and Murphy, then they'd have him on a public nuisance charge and would work on him to confess to the rapes. But what Ellen wanted was to arrest him as far along the stages of assault, unlawful imprisonment and rape as possible, so that she could make a firm arrest yet not imperil her officers.

  Venn opened his door. Ellen took the fieldglasses from her eyes and saw nothing: he'd removed the interior light bulb. She put the glasses to her eyes again and saw that he wore darkjeans, a dark T-shirt and lightweight army surplus boots. The balaclava sat like a pelt of short black hair on his scalp. He was big, but light on his feet. The fear he inspired, one person going up against couples, made sense to her finally.

  She murmured into her mike, 'Approaching you now, Scobie, coming in on your rear passenger side.'

  'Roger.'

  The reply was a whisper. She watched Venn reach the Falcon and apparently meld with it as he put his face to the glass and looked in at Sutton and Murphy in their partial nakedness. Then she saw him break away from the car and bend swiftly to his right boot before straightening with a knife and unzipping and tugging out his penis.

  'Get ready.'

  Venn didn't shout. Witnesses to his previous assaults said he always kept his voice low and even, but crackling with menace. Ellen Destry watched him open Pam Murphy's door and heard him say, 'Surprise! See the blade, lover boy? It slices open your girlfriend's windpipe, you give me any aggro. And feast your eyes on this, sweetheart. I'm gunna slip it up your cunt and your arse and in your mouth and your boyfriend's gunna fucking watch.'