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Burke saw Towne stop, crouch, stand and move on again. He sighed, tugging at his collar, feeling uncoordinated, his suit a rotten fit.

The show pony stopped again. He peered, straightened, said, ‘ Ah hah! ’ half mockingly.

‘What?’

Towne pointed down at the soil between a pair of stubby rose bushes. The roses were giddily perfumed, bees droned and Burke sneezed.

‘Gesundheit,’ Towne said.

Burke trumpeted into a handkerchief. ‘Footprints, so what? We took casts.’

‘Size elevens?’

‘Yeah.’

Towne nodded-he was a nodder-and moved on, glancing at the house now, veranda, windows and eaves. ‘Like I showed you,’ Burke said, ‘he used a glasscutter on the study window.’

‘Yes. But why didn’t the alarm sound?’

‘It probably did but he smashed it. We found a croquet mallet tossed under a bush.’

‘Not wired to the security company or local cop shop?’

‘No.’

‘The blessed ignorance of some people,’ said Towne, shaking his head.

Burke had had enough. ‘So what brings a man like you to our humble B and E?’

Towne ignored him, par for the course. Burke felt like smacking the guy over the ear hole. In his long experience, hotshots like Towne liked to keep you offside. Tell you everything was on a need-to-know basis-and of course someone like you didn’t need to know.

Towne walked on. Then he stopped and said, ‘I’ll need to see the logs for the three days prior to this incident.’

Incident. It was a fucking burglary that had tied up four officers for two days. ‘Looking for what, exactly?’

A car passed by on the dirt road, its suspension rattling. Then dust was pouring across the lawn towards them, Burke amused to see the AFP guy brush futilely as it settled onto the fine cloth of his suit.

‘Burglary logs,’ Towne said at last, blinking his eyes. ‘Break-ins, high-end and domestic, anywhere in the Clare Valley.’

‘You think he was active here for a few days?’

‘She,’ said Towne. ‘It’s what she does sometimes.’

‘A female suspect?’ said Burke, using the language of official reports. ‘Wearing size eleven shoes?’

But Towne was walking down the driveway, towards the road. Burke scurried a little to keep up.

‘Do you play golf, Sergeant?’ said Towne, tossing the words over his shoulder.

‘What?’

‘It’s good for all-round fitness.’

Burke’s loathing grew. He joined the federal policeman at the road’s edge. ‘What are you looking for?’

‘Trying to get a feel for her, that’s all,’ Towne said.

The wanky, outer reaches of police work, thought Burke. ‘Do we have a name? Description? MO?’

Towne closed and opened his eyes and suddenly looked deeply fatigued, vulnerable, hair poorly combed. He looked almost human for a moment. But it vanished.

‘She’s youngish and presumably very fit, given the kinds of stunts she pulls. Good at throwing us off the scent.’

‘The shoe prints,’ said Burke with dawning comprehension. ‘She shoves her shoes into larger shoes.’

‘Exactly.’

‘What else?’

Towne exhibited one of his abrupt mood shifts, spinning around and returning to the house. ‘Highly mobile.’

Burke hurried after him. ‘She gets around?’

‘One month she’ll hit a gated community on the Gold Coast, the next a few houses on the Swan River, the next some heritage houses in Battery Point, and so on. Every state, so far, except Victoria.’

Burke brooded on that. ‘Could mean that’s where she lives.’

It was clear from Andrew Towne’s body language exactly what he thought of this observation. A hick observation. Made by a hick.

But then the federal policeman went very still, looking at Burke with a smoky, hellish darkness in his eyes. ‘What did you just say?’

28

By Saturday morning the station’s main briefing room was cluttered, the air poisonous. Additional desks, phones and computers had been scrounged from downstairs, detectives and collators from other police districts on the Peninsula. But it had been a big Friday night for some of these men and women. Breath was sour, alcohol leached from their pores, eyes were grainy and bloodshot.

Challis cranked open the windows and said, ‘This is Sergeant Schiff of sex crimes. She’s here because we had an abduction and rape, and now we have a murder that might have started out as an abduction and rape.’

He watched as sets of eyes flickered over Schiff. She cast a last glance at her phone and stood, facing them down, before positioning herself at a commanding spot in the room. An attractive woman, Challis thought. Slim, vivid and implacable, wearing a clinging skirt today, glossy hair not pinned up but swinging about her shoulders. Very attractive, in fact: intelligent, wry, competent, with an air of mischief under it all. He thought she’d irritate some of the women and arouse a mix of desire, hostility and rivalry in some of the men.

He inclined his head slightly, signalling that the floor was hers. She positioned herself between the wall map and portable display board, swishing a pointer. ‘The first victim,’ she said.

With a flick of her slender wrist she tapped a head-and-shoulders photograph. ‘Chloe Holst, twenty years old, worked part-time at the Chicory Kiln restaurant here-’ she tapped the map ‘-and abducted here-’ another tap ‘-when a man dressed in a Victoria Police uniform, and carrying police ID, stopped her car. He got into her car, and forced her to drive around at knifepoint. She was sexually assaulted several times in the hours that followed, and finally dropped at this nature reserve.’

This time Schiff slapped the wall map. It swung as if caught in a gale.

‘Forensics?’ a voice called.

Challis shook his head. ‘Nothing much. According to Miss Holst, her attacker used a condom, and when he was finished with her he washed her down and combed out her hair.’

‘The second victim,’ announced Schiff, into the pause that followed. ‘Delia Rice, twenty-six years old, from-’ she hesitated over the word ‘-Moo-roo-duc.’

‘Moorooduc,’ half-a-dozen voices said fluently, some helpful, others with a faint sneer. There was little that Challis could do about the sneers. Jeannie Schiff would be watched and assessed over the next few days. If she passed, the eye rolling would cease.

‘From Moorooduc,’ Schiff said. ‘Recently divorced and back living with her parents-who reported her missing yesterday afternoon, about the time her body was discovered in the boot of a crashed and abandoned Holden sedan found here.’

The map swayed again. ‘Now, similarities between the two cases. Both were found naked, with bruising around the neck and on the stomach, thighs and genital area. Signs of forced intercourse, with condom lubricant found in the vagina, anus and throat. Both women were washed in a bleach solution and it’s likely that Delia Rice’s hair was combed out, just as the first victim’s was.’

‘Pubes, too?’ said Neil Staines, a Frankston detective. He was young, a smirker.

Schiff said, ‘Since you find the genitalia of even a dead woman arousing, perhaps you’re not the right person for the job.’

There was a stunned silence, then laughter, but Staines’s two colleagues hooted, as if to say that Jeannie Schiff was being overly sensitive, couldn’t take a joke. One of them muttered, ‘Pre-menstrual.’

Schiff indicated both men, and Staines, with the pointer. ‘You, you and you, you’re off the case. Frankly, you’re a dead weight and a disgrace to the force.’

They gaped, looking around for support and finding none. ‘Yeah, well, good luck,’ Staines said, climbing out of his chair in his lazy, fatalistic way.