25
SATURDAY MORNING SAW Jill at a computer terminal in the detectives' quarters of the Liverpool police complex. She and Gabriel had decided to split tasks; the pressure from the media upon the investigations team was huge. Jill would've preferred Superintendent Last to get angry, scream at them – anything other than having to watch his stoop deepen. He had chewed through half a packet of antacid tablets in the meeting yesterday morning.
Jill and Gabriel knew they needed to find the connection between Henry Nguyen, Isobel and Joss. At the same time, because they had learned so much from re-interviewing the victims of the home invasions, they'd decided they couldn't afford to abandon that process. The logical choice was for Gabriel to continue the interviews, while Jill investigated Isobel and Joss's backgrounds, looking for links with Nguyen.
She'd expected another warm day, and now Jill sat freezing and miserable in shirtsleeves in the squadroom. The temperature on the air-conditioner, she was convinced, had been set by some demented maintenance guy who hated cops. She knew without checking that her top lip would be blue; she had the kind of headache she usually got when she ate icecream too quickly. No good trying to get someone to make the thing warmer. In these buildings the thermostat was always 'centrally controlled' and adjusting it 'a major drama'.
She stuck her hands under her armpits for a moment and then turned her attention to Henry Nguyen, creating a file of what they knew about him already. The anonymous caller – Isobel Rymill, they were almost certain – had rattled off a series of his convictions and sentences. Jill opened another window on the computer and called up his sheet. There was a long list, as Superintendent Last had indicated yesterday, and the caller had missed a few. Juvenile record, Jill noted. Career criminal. She copied the information and tidied it up a little; pasted it into her own file.
One of the juvie cases caught her eye. Nguyen had done nine months at Dharruk for a smash and grab that had left an adolescent dead, his throat cut. She calculated dates and figured young Henry had been thirteen. The charge was break and enter – with the actions leading to accidental death – but she wondered whether there had been more to it. What did they call Nguyen? Cutter. Maybe he'd started early? His record did not include murder or manslaughter, or anything involving serious knife attacks, but she knew that a charge sheet generally only reflected a fraction of what an offender had been up to.
She searched the COPS database for the juvenile case and scanned it quickly. She copied it, deleted irrelevant notations, and pasted it into her file. The smash and grab had been at a bike shop; the deceased, the owner's son. Henry Nguyen's fingerprints, already on file even at that early age, had been found at the scene, and when they'd gone around to his grandmother's home in Cabramatta to pick him up, they'd found one of the stolen bikes in his bedroom. Jill could remember nothing of the story at the time. She'd have been about eleven when this went down. Eleven. A year before her own world went to hell when she was abducted.
The victim, Carl Waterman, had been around the same age as Nguyen at the time; the cops investigating figured that the boy, who lived with his father above the bike shop, had heard the noise when Cutter broke into the store and come down to investigate. There were ten COPS entries on the same event.
According to the files, Nguyen had told the investigating officers that he'd broken into the store alone by smashing one of the two glass panels at the front of the shop. He'd told the officers he hadn't seen the Waterman boy in the shop and couldn't explain how the kid had come to be impaled by a large section of the glass. He also could not explain how he'd managed to steal five bikes on his own.
Jill skimmed the wrap-up on the case. The officers assumed that Nguyen had committed the robbery in company with at least a couple of older youths, possibly adults – people smart enough not to leave fingerprints. They believed the second panel of glass, destabilised when the first had come down, was what had killed Carl Waterman. The prosecutors had had to ask for a committal, given the child's death, but Jill figured that the relatively light sentence reflected a belief that Nguyen had been led astray by more seasoned criminals.
She wondered whether the smash and grab had really gone down that way. The case could actually establish a very early propensity for this Cutter to make people bleed. They knew he liked blood a hell of a lot nowadays. She thought with horror of young Justine Rice watching this sicko bring himself to orgasm by cutting himself. They had to find him fast.
Jill needed to stand up. Pins and needles throbbed in her fingertips. This cold is ridiculous, she thought. She stared at the ceiling above her terminal. A half-metre air-conditioning vent was positioned directly above her chair. She imagined she could see the frigid air streaming from the vent, drenching her desk. She cupped the tip of her nose in her palm to try to get some feeling back. The back of her throat felt scratchy, and she wished she could be doing this work from home. Or at Gabriel's. She bet his computers would have access to these databases.
She walked to one of the windows of the squadroom, hugging her arms around her body, and stared down into the street below. A camera flashed. She stepped sideways, back against the wall, and angled her head to peek out without showing her face. Two media trucks occupied the parking spots in front of the courthouse below. She saw a third in the Spotlight carpark across the road. A news camera was now angled up at her, two men and a woman sidestepping, heads weaving, trying to see behind the window. Anything at all to do with this case was big news. Not since the 'Bodies in the Barrels' homicides in Adelaide had Australia been as deliciously terrified. People in the immediate area, however, got no thrill at all from it. Counsellors had been brought into local schools because children had been producing artwork depicting their fathers and pets dismembered.
Jill wondered what Gabriel would be able to get out of the dead man's daughter, Donna Moser. He planned to interview her sometime today. She was well enough to have been moved to a private psychiatric hospital in Burwood, so she should be up to talking, they'd figured.
On her way to the coffee machine, Jill passed another woman, head down over a computer. Muriel? Marilyn? Lawrence Last had introduced them a couple of days ago. Marion? Yep, that's it, she thought. The woman raised her head briefly and nodded at Jill. She looks comfortable enough, thought Jill, starting to shiver. The extra twenty kilos Marion had on her would be helping. She slid a mug under the expensive espresso maker and added two heaped teaspoons of sugar. Wrapping her hands around the cup, she held its warmth to her body as she walked back to her desk.
Next step: known associates of Henry Nguyen. There had been no mention in the meeting yesterday of any known past connection between Nguyen and Dang Huynh – the suspect forensics had identified as having vomited at the Capitol Hill crime scene. Jill thought about Gabriel's rapid conclusion that the vomit indicated that at least one member of the gang didn't have the same bloodlust as the killer. Huynh hadn't been able to keep his dinner down, so there was little chance he was the one doing the butchery.
Jill wondered how long Huynh had known Cutter as she typed and underlined his name in her notes. She entered his nickname, 'Mouse', and called up his sheet. Car theft, aggravated robbery. She kept digging. Well, well. At age seventeen, Dang Huynh had gone up on an assault charge in company with Henry Nguyen. They'd bashed a boy and a teacher at Bonnyrigg High during school hours. Neither attacker had been a student at the school. Jill remembered the case from Nguyen's criminal records. The school's vice-principal had lost an eye when Nguyen had smashed a bottle into his face; the teacher had been trying to break up the attack. Nguyen had been sent to Mt Penang that time. She read on. Yep, there it was, Mouse had also been remanded at Mt Penang after the assault.