Garry Disher - The Dragon Man

Pam immediately turned the tape on again, saying, ‘Sergeant Destry re-enters the room. Interview continues, 2.45 p.m. Danny, if you have information about a crime, now is the time to share it with us.’

‘Why does it have to be here?’

‘Regulations, Danny.’

The door opened and the woman who entered the room was dressed for power. She wore a costly-looking dress, an expensive haircut and plenty of gold on her neck, fingers and wrists. She was about fifty, slim and hard and fast. ‘You’ve got no right to interview my client in my absence. Danny, you’re coming with me.’

Pam was happy to let Sergeant Destry take charge. ‘Marion, he waived his right to have a lawyer present.’

‘Ellen, I expected better of you. What’s he here for?’

‘Suspected burglary.’

‘Who arrested him?’

‘Marion, meet Constable Murphy. Pam, this is Marion Nunn.’

‘I hope you cautioned him, Constable.’

‘Hello?’ Danny said. ‘I’m here, in the room with you all.’

‘Danny, you just let me do the talking.’

And that’s where it stalled. Danny was charged and bailed, and left without revealing anything. Pam was even obliged, by Marion Nunn, to return the backpack to Danny.

Mid-afternoon. Challis took the call, staring out of the Displan room windows at the carpark. ‘A body, you say?’

‘Dead. She’s a woman.’

‘Where?’

‘Devil Bend Reservoir. Near the edge. There’s a track to it.’

He glanced automatically at the wall map. Not so far from where he lived, a Peninsula Water catchment reservoir. ‘Your name, sir?’

Audible breathing, as though in heavy concentration. Challis was convinced that a second person was there with the caller.

‘I don’t want to get involved.’

‘For our paperwork, sir.’ Sir. The caller was a kid, sounded no more than fifteen.

‘You’re gunna trace this, right? Well, I’m getting off the line before you dob me in.’

Challis watched from the perimeter, his shadow long now that the sun was low in the west. Inside the crime-scene tape they were taking photographs of the body, and of footprints and tyre tracks. Plaster casts after that, then a sweep with a metal detector to see if anything-a ring, a weapon, a man’s neck chain, a wristwatch-had been trampled beneath the mud and the muddy grasses and reeds. Meanwhile, behind Challis, and supervised by Ellen Destry, a line search of ten constables and cadets had finished tracing the tyre tracks between the body, which was at the reservoir’s edge, and the gravelled surface of the Peninsula Water access track, and now were tracing footprints, two pairs, that headed west from the body toward a belt of scraggly gums. Farmland after that. Not so far away, no more than four kilometres, was Challis’s house.

Challis looked across the reservoir. What a godawful place to die. Blackberry thickets, bracken, stiff, wiry grass, small, dark, knobbled trees, defeated-looking gums, a stink of primeval gases. There were waterbirds, but they were mostly silent, and rather than seeming cool and alive, the body of water sat still and heavy under a layer of algae, and Challis felt oppressed by the humidity. The mosquitos were out. One landed on his wrist. He slapped it, saw a smear of blood.

Freya Berg, the pathologist, stood and waved to him. ‘Hal, you might as well come in now.’

Challis climbed over the tape and approached the body. He should have thought to pack rubber overshoes. He felt water seep into one sock.

First he tried to read the signs. The body itself could wait. ‘One vehicle, quite marked tread pattern, two people on foot. Wearing gumboots?’

‘Looks like it, sir,’ the forensic officer said.

Challis followed the footprints with his eyes. ‘They came around the reservoir, saw the body, walked around it once or twice, then headed out that way.’ He pointed toward the distant gums and farmland.

‘You want my job, sir?’ the officer said.

Challis grinned. ‘You tell me the rest.’

‘No other tracks. I’d say our victim was thrown out of the rear of the vehicle. See how he’s reversed in and gone out again?’

‘He didn’t step out of the vehicle, on to the ground?’

‘No other tracks, sir, only those two.’

‘A car? A van?’

‘Probably something with a rear-opening door, like a station wagon or a hatchback, if it was a car, but the tyre tracks indicate a heavier vehicle than that. Minivan? Four-wheel drive? Something with inside access to the rear compartment.’

‘Or a ute, and he swings over into the tray from the driver’s door ledge.’

‘A possibility, sir.’

Challis turned to the body. It lay on a patch of mud at the water’s edge. He wondered about the absence of grass. People regularly stood there, he decided. Birdwatchers, Peninsula Water engineers, kids skipping stones across the sluggish water, blackberry pickers later on in the new year. People fishing. Anyone at all, really.

The body had been face down. Now it lay on its back. The pathologist had bagged both hands; she’d examine them later for skin samples, traces of fabric, anything that might point to the killer. She’d also take swabs of the mouth, the vagina and the anus for evidence of saliva, sperm or acid phosphatase, the cardinal signs of sexual assault. If it’s the same killer, Challis thought, she’ll find signs of latex condom lubricant and not much else. The legs, from the bare, bruised pubis area to the Nike runners, looked grey and mottled. The upper body was clothed in a T-shirt, torn at the neck. Challis peered. Bite marks. There were also early signs of decomposition. The face was contradictory-swollen as a result of strangulation, yet curiously slack. Even so, it was clearly Jane Gideon.

Where was the lower clothing?

‘Find a skirt, pants, underpants, anything like that?’

‘No, boss.’

Just like Kymbly Abbott.

Ellen Destry joined them. ‘We’re running out of daylight, boss.’

‘I know, but we’re almost wrapped up here. Just make sure the wider scene is sealed off tonight so we can resume the search in the morning.’

‘Will do.’ She nodded at the body. ‘Raped, Freya?’

Freya Berg said, ‘Looks like it, but you know I can’t say till I’ve had a proper look at her.’

‘What can you say?’

‘She was abducted at midnight on the seventeenth, right? I’d say she was killed and then dumped here soon after that. Over forty-eight hours ago, in the hot sun for a lot of that time, so there’s some decomposition. The cause of death was strangulation, but she’s also had a blow to the head.’

Unlike Kymbly Abbott, Challis thought. Then again, Kymbly Abbott had been drunk and half doped and therefore malleable. Jane Gideon had been fit and healthy and wide awake. Either she struggled or the killer thought she might, and so he’d struck her. ‘What kind of blow? The old blunt instrument?’

‘There’s blunt and there’s blunt, Hal. This one had a rounded edge.’

‘Like a rock, or narrower than that?’

‘Narrower. More defined. A metal bar of some kind, or a lump of wood.’

He brooded. A tool handle. A tyre iron. ‘It didn’t happen here in the mud. Anything you can tell me about where it might have happened?’

‘That depends on what your forensic people find on her. Meanwhile I’ll need a closer look at her on the table before I can say anything definite.’

Challis nodded gloomily. Jane Gideon could have been raped and strangled inside the killer’s vehicle, or taken somewhere. Either way, it would have been somewhere away from the highway, for Jane Gideon had made a phone call and the killer would have been expecting someone to come for her.