Youre not making yourself very clear.
My wife. The property division has all but ruined me.
I still dont understand.
You want me to spell it out? Kill the bitch for me, okay? I dont care how long it takes, just do it. I heard you were the one to do it.
Stolle reached for his pad. Name and address?
Jesus, youre not keeping a file on this?
I cant start until I know who and where, now can I?
Stolle said it sarcastically. The man seemed to shut down in the face of it. Eventually he muttered his name and address and the name and address of his ex-wife. Stolle made a show of writing these on the pad and putting the paper into his pocket.
Now, he said, I want you to listen to something.
He opened the drawer, pressed rewind, pressed play, and their voices swelled from concealed speakers, filling the tiny office. The mans face suffused with anger. As he came out of his chair, Stolle waved an automatic pistol at him. To reinforce the point, Stolle drew back the slide, jacking a round into the chamber. It was an oily click, sharp and nasty. Sit down. Youre also on camera.
You bastard.
Youre the one who wants to kill his wife, Sunshine. Give us your wallet.
The man tossed a fraying wallet across the desk. As Stolle guessed, there was big money in it. Not the five thousand upfront fee the man had mentioned, but seven hundred and fifty dollars good-faith money. He pocketed it, tossed back the wallet.
This is as far as it goes, he said. I keep the audio tape, the videotape, insurance in case you do anything stupid. I also know where you live. Take my advice about the wifegrin and bear it. I did.
You bastard.
Only the one payment, and youve already made it. Im not greedy.
The man got up. He looked paler, weaker. Maybe hell get his courage back and try knocking her himself, Stolle thought. He could warn her. Then again, it was nothing to do with him.
The man stopped in the doorway. He looked compressed and dark again. Was that bullshit, what I heard, that you get rid of people for a fee?
Stolle rocked back in his chair, grinned, laced his fingers behind his head. Youll never know.
Five
In fact, Stolle had carried out four contract killings in the past three years: an errant wife; a junkie whod got a company directors daughter hooked on crack; an investment banker whod developed a conscience during a Royal Commission; an armed hold-up man suspected of killing a cop. Two had looked like accidentsthe banker, the junkie. The wifes murder had been attributed to a burglary gone wrong, the gunmans to an underworld score settling.
The point was, Stolle did referral killings only. His clients didnt know who had been hired and he never met them face to face. When he was wearing his private investigators hat, he liked to meet his clients. He liked the fact that they needed him, and there was always something more than the cash in it for him. But he wasnt interested in meeting clients when he was wearing his killers hat. He wasnt interested in their fear, greed, anger, their banal motives.
It was satisfying work, but he wasnt making a career out of it. Four jobs in three years was about right for him. The background research, the wait for the right moment, the swiftness of the hitall those things were satisfying but they were no match for the singular, prickling sensation he felt in his nerve endings when he was doing what he did best: tracking somebody.
He didnt even have to be in the field to experience it. A lot of the work was spent sitting on his backside, reading faxes, leafing through files, peering at computer or microfiche screens. When rumours first surfaced that things were crook in the National Safety Council, hed been hired by an investment company to do a background check on John Friedrich. He discovered that there was nothing on paper for Friedrich before 1975. He reported back to the client, the client pulled out of a deal with Friedrich, and Stolle earned himself a handsome bonus.
Most of his work entailed finding a spouse, a lover, a creditor. There was a standard approach and it worked eighty-seven per cent of the time. He started at the end: where was she last seen, and who was with her? He handed out pictures, he talked to family, friends, enemies, hotel and motel staff, taxi drivers, bus drivers, reservation clerks. He looked at passenger lists. If that failed, he followed the paper traiclass="underline" credit card receipts, parking fines, passport applications, travellers cheques. If people changed their ID, he dug deeper. There was always a bureaucracy somewhere that had what he needed.
He liked the hunt, but he also liked the hidden benefits. A bit of the old in-out with female clients whod gone over budget; blow-jobs from sixteen-year-olds whod run off with boyfriends; hush money from embezzlers who didnt want to be found.
Stolle liked to get inside the skin of the people he was hired to find. He knew that a stranger in town didnt attract curiosity anymore, the nation being so mobile, so what Stolle did was not look for someone who was new to a place but look for that same person in a different guise. More often than not the people he was looking for tried to be the exact opposite of their former selves. Take his last case: a solicitor had done a bunk with money from his trust fund. He had exchanged his Porsche for a fishing boat and a Holden ute, his DB suit for jeans and thongs, his South Yarra townhouse for a fibro beach shack, his smooth cheeks for a beard and sunburn. What he hadnt changed were his basic tastes and habits. The man liked to play tennis, bet on the horses, borrow music videos, subscribe to yachting magazines. The stupid prick had even given himself a name similar to his real one: Ross Wilson, Ray Wilkes. Stolle wouldnt have been surprised if Wilson had eventually contacted his family or hung around outside his kids school.
Missing teenagers, mostly girls. If they hadnt been murdered and their bodies dumped in the bush, they were the easiest to find. More often than not the clients were exclusive boarding schools or wealthy executives who didnt want the police brought in. Stolle started with friends and relatives. If the girl wasnt shacked up with her boyfriend or she hadnt convinced an elderly aunt that she was taking an extended semester break, he checked railway stations, squats, refuges, the morgue. When that failed, he went straight to St Kilda or Kings Cross. Once, accompanied by a father, hed dragged a fifteen-year-old PLC girl from a brothel and been attacked by pimps armed with fireaxes and knives. The girl was doped to the eyeballs and HIV-positive. Stolle and the girls father went back a week later and torched the place to the ground. It was the least Stolle could do for the poor bastard. The girl? Stolle guessed she was dead by now.
Since the big-paying jobs were scarce, and the money always found its way into the pockets of the bookmakers, Stolles bread-and-butter income came from process serving and debt collection. He worked 12 to 14-hour days sometimes, six or seven days a week. The car became a mobile office and he was on the phone every few minutes, to his snouts, his answering service, his staff. He flashed his ID twenty times a day. He wasnt a cop but often people thought he was. It was in the words he used: Im licensed by the State of Victoria as an investigator
Sure, it was obsessive, but it made him feel connected to the street, in control of the flow of information, free for a while from that permanent hunger that made him want to chance all he had on the fall of the cards, the roll of the dice.
Stolle had one advantage over his competitors: he drank with a sergeant in the protective security group, the crowd responsible for Victorias witness protection program. They supplied anything from intermittent surveillance, around-the-clock guard and 008 hotline, to relocation under a new identity. Stolle had learned a lot that way; the sergeant enjoyed explaining the job. Apparently the easiest people to hide were the natural mimics. They knew how to fit their appearance, body language, speech and manner to a new place, a new name, a new job, a personal history saturated with solid information: passport, bank account, educational qualifications, birth and marriage certificates, employment record, club membership, Medicare and tax file numbers, drivers licence, photograph album, old letters and Christmas cards. Everything was recorded on computer, every file protected by an inbuilt code to prevent printing or copying. One day the sergeant showed a file to Stolle. Stolle wasnt interested in the file. He was interested in the mechanics of identity creation. Once he understood that he could anticipate, intercept or uncover the moves that people made.