Kathryn Fox - Without Consent

Then she thought of Meira Sorrenti. It couldn’t have been easy working with someone who knew a lot less about investigating sexual assaults.

“Guess we’re all under pressure.” She lifted her head. “So what brings you to this salubrious part of town? Have you come to tell me Melanie wrote that letter?”

“Nope, handwriting doesn’t match. We’ve also turned up a number of rape cases that could fit the pattern, but victims are proving hard to find.” Hayden threw the tape into the air and caught it. “To cheer you up, I brought Geoff Willard’s initial confession.”

There had to be something unusual about it, or he wouldn’t have bothered. Anya moved to another room and returned with a portable TV/video. She plugged it in on the desk and inserted the tape.

A young-looking Willard appeared in black and white. The quality of the picture was poor, but she could make out that he was sitting at a desk in an office. The uniformed officer, a younger, thinner Charlie Boyd, sat with his back to the camera.

She turned up the sound.

“Here comes the good bit,” Hayden pre-empted.

“All right.” Willard wiped his nose with the back of a blood-stained hand. “I’m hungry and I wanna go home.” He had the look of a rabbit startled by a shooter.

“You tell us what we want to know, and we’ll let you go,” the policeman said. “And your mama will stay out of prison, too.”

“All right, I killed Eileen Randall. I saw her and stabbed her to death on the beach.”

“And what else did you do?” A beardless Charlie Boyd tapped the table with his pen.

“I stuck my penis into her insides.”

“You mean you raped her vaginally?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

Charlie Boyd noted the time and date Willard had confessed.

Before he could shut off the tape, Willard asked, “Can I go home now? I said what you wanted.”

Anya stopped the tape. That wasn’t a confession. It was a frightened adolescent saying what he was told. He was scared and probably didn’t understand what had happened.

“That last bit didn’t get heard at the trial,” Hayden said. “The local cop thought he was doing the right thing. Screwed up big-time with that effort.”

The confession should never have been shown at trial. It failed the most basic standards of policing.

“After I saw that, I decided to do some checking. Nick Hudson’s no cleanskin. He served some time in Queensland for assault in the early 1990s. He’s got a charge-sheet for minor offenses, but no other convictions.”

“Nice family.” The timing suggested Nick hadn’t been in prison with Gloria Havelock’s rapists, so would not have had access to Melanie’s photo. Three questions remained: why Geoff had small amounts of blood on two shirts, who’d written him the letter and how he’d got Melanie’s picture.

“Have you checked out where Nick was the night of the Dorman murder?”

The phone rang and Anya answered it, gesturing her visitor to give her a minute. He wandered into the corridor while she spoke to a victim’s local doctor. When the conversation ended, Hayden returned to the doorway.

“Hudson works at a local pub. No tax records, just cash in hand. He says that on the night in question, the owners went out and asked him to cover the bar. The owners confirmed it and every dropout from Fisherman’s Bay frequents the place, so the guy’s got a firm alibi.” He leaned his head on the door again. “They all know someone who recruits at the local chicken factory. It’s like some kind of magnet for them all.”

Anya wondered if Hayden had a back problem and was more comfortable standing.

“For all we know,” he said, “there could be more fatal cases, ones we’re missing because Willard was in jail at the time. I’m thinking our killer’s struck before.”

“Funny you should say that.” Anya swivelled back in her chair to the empty fax. “I was wondering the same thing.”

“Damn!” he said, sat and pulled the chair between his legs. “You know something.”

So much for the bad-back theory, she thought.

His foot met Brown-Eye, who was temporarily deposited under the desk. “Jeez, you’ve gotta take that back. It’s disgusting.” He screwed up his nose. “And it smells worse than ever in here.”

“Thanks for that.” She wondered what other smell he was referring to, one when Brown-Eye wasn’t there. “It’s going back tonight. I just want to grab some aspirin and check the other fax. I’ll be right back.”

In a few moments, Anya returned with a blister-pack of tablets and a glass of water. Under her arm, she clutched some papers. “This just came through-your timing’s impressive.” She squeezed past the detective to get to her seat and deposited the papers on her end of the desk. “A friend did a search of the National Coroners Information System. I can’t access it from here.”

The NCIS had been established in 1998 to collate autopsy findings around the country. Its purpose was to identify clusters of disease, trends and similar cases to reduce preventable death and injury. Its role had become important in occupational health and safety, pinpointing the types of work-related deaths, occupations most at risk, and equipment linked with deaths.

Pathologists also found it useful for looking up similar pattern injuries. She’d ring and thank Peter Latham later.

Hayden wanted to get in first. “Well, I came up with a case from three years ago. A woman up north was stabbed to death in Port Macquarie. Local police thought it was a break-and-enter gone wrong, and never even had a suspect. No fingerprints or DNA at the scene. Hard to say if anything was taken. The investigation was pretty sloppy.”

Anya looked through the faxed sheets. “Leonie Turnbull?”

“Bingo!” Hayden suddenly looked brighter. “What have you got?”

“I’ll tell you in a minute.” Anya gulped the tablets and read the report. She recognized the name of a locum pathologist who’d done the autopsy. Thankfully, Alf Carney hadn’t been involved. The deceased, Leonie Turnbull, was in her mid-twenties, five foot two and weighed fifty-five kilograms. Cause of death was massive blood loss due to thirty-eight stab wounds. Some were superficial. One penetrated the thoracic aorta, which was probably the fatal wound.

“Looks like she was stabbed multiple times; wounds look confined to the chest and neck, some deep, others superficial. Some look like they’d been done after death.”

“Anything to suggest she’d been sexually assaulted?”

“Not according to this, but that doesn’t exclude it.”

Hayden flicked through his notebook. “Apparently she was a medical student from Sydney sent there for a country rotation. She’d just returned from a few days off. No one even knew when exactly she got back, but she was having problems with her supervisor. Seems she didn’t really like the place and wanted to get back home.”

“Any patients bother her?” Anya knew that a young medical student could easily attract unwanted attention in a small place. Doctors were at a much greater risk of being stalked than anyone else, given the relationship they had to forge with patients. Even the most innocent exchange could be misinterpreted and deemed intimate by someone with dysfunctional thinking.

“Not that we know. According to the supervisor, she looked young, but her work was fine. He thought she was bright, shy and a bit strange, but he wouldn’t explain what he meant. He thought she was irresponsible when she just took off for a few days. Sounds like he’s pretty guilty about what happened to her. Thinks he should have spoken to her more.”

Hindsight was 20/20, Anya thought. Everyone would do things differently if they had the benefit of what medical people termed the retrospectoscope.