‘So what’s the point of having a pursuit car with all the fancy shit on it?’
‘Just stay with the car, all right? Check the registration. Search the glovebox. Make yourself useful.’
John Tankard made himself useful to the extent of finding a dead woman in the boot of the car.
25
Challis arrived to find Tankard directing a long line of traffic past the car and the crumpled gate post. Coolart Road on a Friday afternoon was always a nightmare of school buses, private cars, farm vehicles, delivery vans, 4WDs; of school kids, parents, tradespeople, city workers getting an early start on the weekend. Right now, they were content to be rubberneckers, in no hurry to arrive anywhere.
The first thing Challis did was order the traffic unit to set up a detour at Hodgins Road. Presently the flow of vehicles ebbed, then ceased. The departure of the unit’s cars and motorbikes also eased congestion at the crash site, leaving only Challis’s CIU car, an ambulance to convey the body, the pathologist’s BMW, the sex crimes Holden and a vehicle belonging to the crime scene unit.
Then he joined Schiff and Murphy at the rear of the crashed Holden. Today the sex crimes sergeant looked like a cross between a slinky schoolteacher and a certain young criminal lawyer famous for her front-page cleavage, client list and corner-cutting. Schiff wore black leggings under a short red skirt, black top with a dramatic scooped neck, hair in a corkscrew at the back of her head. And different glasses, he noticed: rimless lenses, silvery titanium frames. Meanwhile Murph was dressed in thin cotton cargo pants, white running shoes, a fawn cardigan over a vivid white T-shirt. She shot him a grin, her body taut, almost quivering with energy, as if all she wanted to do was run, climb, swim or knock heads in. The old Murph back again, after weeks of the doldrums?
He stood with the women, looking over the bowed back of the pathologist, Freya Berg. First impressions: a bloodied face, bruising, the slackness of death. A closer look. The victim was aged in her early twenties, plump, all tension gone from her trunk and limbs. Bruised thighs and neck, a bitten nipple, stubbled pubic hair. Her nose, squashed to one side, was caked with blood.
He backed away.
‘Not getting any easier, Hal?’ Dr Berg said.
The pathologist had registered his presence without looking at him. ‘Nope.’
‘I hear you’ve been ruffling feathers.’
‘Some other dude,’ Challis said.
‘That’s what I thought,’ Berg said, continuing to palpate the flesh and work the limbs. ‘If you three fine police officers could just give me another five minutes…’
Schiff said, ‘Raped, punched and strangled?’
‘Five minutes,’ repeated the pathologist, inserting a thermometer into the victim’s rectum.
‘Leave the doc to do her job,’ Challis said, motioning Murphy and Schiff away from the car.
In the meantime, they speculated: terse, muttered, a mix of observation and guesswork honed on similar cases over the years.
‘Same guy who snatched Chloe Holst?’
‘Could be. It’s been a few days, time for him to feel the urge.’
‘And this time things went too far.’
‘Or he took them too far.’
‘See the lividity?’
‘She’s been there for a while.’
The minutes passed. Challis and the women walked around to the front of the car, where Scobie Sutton was scrawling in a notebook.
‘Anything?’
Sutton pointed his pen in the direction of the house at the end of the driveway. ‘I spoke to the householder. She was in one of the front rooms, vacuuming curtains she said, and saw a man run a short distance towards the house then trip over that stone border and fall into the bushes. Then he got up again and ducked back through the trees towards the road.’
‘Police uniform?’
Scobie shook his head. ‘I really grilled her on that. He was too far away for her to get an impression of his face, but he was definitely wearing jeans and a T-shirt.’
Challis thought about it. The guy changed his clothing, or he had an accomplice, or he’d had nothing to do with the abduction and rape of Chloe Holst. Then he stopped thinking about it. Save it for the briefing. ‘Anything on the car?’
Sutton flipped back a page. ‘Reported stolen yesterday from the car park behind the TAFE College in Frankston. I spoke to the owner: Mary Mackenzie, college librarian, sixty years old.’
‘Husband? Son, nephew…’
‘Widow. One daughter, lives in Perth.’
‘Prints?’
‘Plenty. Probably not his,’ Sutton said. He nodded in the direction of the pathologist. ‘The crime scene people haven’t done inside the boot yet.’
‘You were first on scene apart from Tank and the RTB boys?’
‘Yes.’
‘She was dead when you arrived?’
A spasm crossed Sutton’s face, and Challis was reminded again why Scobie had never been a good detective. Okay with a paper trail or CCTV footage, but bewildered by ambiguities, feelings, humankind’s capacity for cruelty or indifference. ‘Yes,’ he said, voice cracking a little.
‘It’s okay, Scobe,’ Pam Murphy said, shooting Challis a go-easy-on-him look, ‘we’ll get the details from Dr Berg.’
But Sutton couldn’t shake his distress. ‘Someone used her as a punching bag, sir.’
‘I know,’ Challis said.
‘And there is bruising around her, you know, her…’
The words made pictures in Sutton’s head, defiling and defeating him. Challis touched his forearm. ‘Thanks, Scobie, that’s all I need for now.’
Leaving Sutton and the others, he wandered away along the gravel verge of Coolart Road, between the tarred surface and the fence line, where the roadside grass was thick and browning, no longer scrappily nourished by spring rains but growing combustible, waiting for one of summertime’s discarded cigarettes. The paddock grass inside the fence had been shorn for hay and baled in the form of huge, blue polythene-wrapped cylinders that squatted on the broad hillside like futuristic dwellings. This effect was enhanced by the presence of uniformed constables walking through and around them, heading upslope to a distant stand of trees, where a police helicopter chopped at the air. Challis watched. There was no sudden urgency, so he returned to the others.
Freya Berg approached them with her vivid smile. ‘Preliminary findings. The neck is locked, the stomach on the way, but there’s still some movement in the extremities. The blood is not fully clotted yet, so indications are she’s been dead between six and eight hours. The boot of a car is a sealed environment, but I still think six to eight hours. If this were mid-summer or mid-winter, I’d probably revise the time.’
Schiff said, ‘The lividity…’
‘All down one side. She was placed in the boot soon after death.’
‘Anything else?’
Dr Berg gave the sex crimes detective a tight smile and went on with her briefing. ‘There are indications that she struggled with someone before death. Before her wrists and ankles were taped together, in fact. Petechial haemorrhaging indicates that she was strangled, but I’ll know for sure when I get her to the lab. Blood and bruising around the genital area, broken nose, I’d say our hero was expressing a lot of rage.’
Challis said, ‘Thanks, Freya.’
‘How’s Ellen?’
Challis was aware of Murphy and Schiff watching him. ‘Fine. Overseas study tour.’
‘I’d heard. You should join her.’
‘I wish,’ Challis said.
His mobile phone sounded in his pocket. He checked the screen, saw McQuarrie’s name and knew he couldn’t keep avoiding the man. He answered and McQuarrie said, ‘What possessed you, Inspector, walking out on-’
Challis overrode him. ‘A home invasion and then a murder, that’s what possessed me.’
Silence, and he found himself adding, ‘Doing my job, in fact,’ guessing he was driving another nail into the lid of his coffin.