Текст книги "Harum Scarum"
Автор книги: Felicity Young
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13
The late afternoon sun weighed on the heads of the investigating officers, yet the mood remained buoyant as they combed the area around the crashed Toyota. This prick was no loss, Monty heard one of the SOCO officers say, the killer had saved them all a pile of bother. Another answered that he’d shake the killer’s hand, buy him a beer if he ever ran into him. Fine, he thought, but at this stage, despite the discovery of the dog, he wasn’t discounting the possibility that two men were involved, and who could say which was the nastier piece of work.
Monty was sitting under a tree, filling out an evidence label, when he heard the crunch of approaching footsteps.
‘“Thwackum was for doing justice, and leaving mercy to Heaven.”’
He looked up. ‘What?’ he asked Angus Wong.
‘Henry Fielding, Tom Jones.’ With his Asian looks, his ocker accent and his propensity for producing a literary quote for most occasions, Angus was a maze of incongruities. Monty stared at him for a moment and wondered if he was also a mind reader.
Angus flopped onto the ground next to Monty, reached into one of the folds of his overalls and handed him a bottle of water. A television news chopper slashed through the air above their heads. Monty thanked him, took a long draught and returned to the task of labelling two small paper evidence bags.
‘What’ve you got there?’ Angus asked.
‘A bullet and a shell case; the slug was embedded in a tree at the lookout, the shell case near the rubbish bin.’
‘Beauty, can you tell what they’re from?’
‘Looks like a point 40 S&W cartridge.’
Angus met Monty’s eyes. ‘Semi-automatic pistol? Interesting.’
‘Could be.’
‘Anything else?’
‘They found several of what appear to be Bianca’s short bleached blonde hairs in the Toyota, subject to confirmation of course. Plus a long dark brown hair on the dashboard.’
‘Another victim?’
‘Who knows? The results will be sent to missing persons, there’s always a chance it might match someone in their database.’
They fell silent. Monty put the bags into the top pocket of his overalls.
He spotted the mortuary van bumping along a rough weir-side track. They’d sensibly decided not to come down the steep path. Upon vacating their van, the assistants grappled with the Stokes stretcher while Henry Grebe buzzed around them like a blowfly. At the Toyota, Grebe raised a hand to signify a halt and beckoned his team around him for a briefing.
‘Found anything else of interest?’ Angus asked Monty.
Monty switched his gaze from Grebe and pointed to the red-brick structure at the water’s edge. ‘That’s the old pump station, long since abandoned but with a new padlock. Stevie found the key in Kusak’s wallet.’
‘You think that’s where he kept the girl?’
‘More than likely. Forensics have swept it clean—already sent their samples back to Perth for analysis. There was bedding in there.’
‘His own private hideaway,’ Angus looked sickened. ‘Anything else I should know about?’
‘No sign of Bianca’s laptop, but we found a PC in the back of the van. It’s had the sun glaring down on it like a laser beam for most of the day so I’m not sure what kind of nick it’ll be in. It’s on its way to Central. Also found camping stuff and enough food supplies for about a month in the wilderness.’
Angus gazed at the enormousness of the vista. ‘Looking at this place, I’d say he might have got away with it too. How are the others going?’
‘Stevie’s visiting Mrs Kusak, breaking the news about Miro’s death and returning the dog, and Barry’s conferring with the Mundaring police. Wayne wasn’t doing much except whinging about jock itch, so I sent him with some uniforms to start questioning Kusak’s neighbours.’ He paused, gave Angus a faint smile. ‘And I’m supervising the crime scene.’
‘The press are gathering at the lookout. Want me to give them a statement?’
Monty nodded gratefully, took another pull on his water bottle and watched as Angus made his way back up the track. He felt like shit, his toothache had become a headache and his stomach churned. The last time he’d felt this lousy was when he was a kid when he’d been out all day on the mustering at Stevie’s family station and got heat stroke. He poured some water from the bottle over his head, rubbed it into his scalp and attempted to lose himself in the activities of the crime scene investigation.
The photos had been taken, the pathologist long gone.
But the body snatchers seemed to be taking their time. It should have been a routine job, but for some reason they seemed to be discussing the body’s removal at length.
From where he still sat under the tree, Monty saw Henry Grebe beckon to the probationer, Constable Nagel. After a few moments, Nagel nodded and walked with hesitant steps to the Toyota. Monty hauled himself to his knees and squinted through his aviation sunglasses. As far as he knew SOCO guys wearing breathing apparatus had thoroughly searched the back of the van, photographed and removed the camping gear. It was hard to believe the body snatchers had noticed something in the Toyota the experienced searchers had missed.
The SOCO team had worked their way in a radius away from the Toyota and were now out of sight in the bush. The police divers had not yet arrived to search the surrounding waters. A group of local police were positioned at the lookout, holding the media and the curious at bay. As far as Grebe and his assistants were concerned, there was no one in their immediate vicinity. They don’t know I’m sitting here under the tree, Monty thought.
Nagel opened up the back door and stepped inside. Right behind him, Grebe closed and latched the back door, then skipped over to rejoin his men who were laughing themselves stupid a few metres away.
Monty had seen enough. Heat exhaustion forgotten he leapt to his feet and strode towards the Toyota. He could hear the blows hammering upon the doors from within, and the anguished cries from the constable trapped inside. He turned the handle and wrenched the door open. Through the sickening miasma of methane gas the hapless constable all but fell into his arms.
‘It’s okay, son, it’s okay,’ Monty said, guiding him away from the vehicle and into the shade. Tears ran down the young man’s face as he gasped and choked down his anger, humiliation and fear. Monty handed him some water, which he promptly threw up.
‘You’re fresh meat, that’s your problem,’ Monty said, turning his back on the kneeling, puking kid. If he wasn’t careful, he’d soon be joining him. ‘But this is above and beyond.’
When the constable had recovered, Monty handed him the evidence bags containing the bullet and case. ‘Take this up to the lookout and get the exhibit officer to make a record of it, then I want you to take it personally to the ballistic lab in the city, lights and siren, top priority. I’ll ring and tell them to expect you.’
Nagel wiped his mouth, flicked Monty a grateful smile and headed up the track.
The body snatchers were scowling around the Toyota when Monty returned, at last getting on with the job in hand. They’d laid the body bag open on the Stokes stretcher and two of them were struggling to remove Miro Kusak from the car seat. Henry Grebe watched the proceedings from the shade of a nearby tree, still smiling, hands on hips.
Monty walked over to him and met his arrogant glare head on.
And then he punched Henry Grebe, smack on the end of his long beaky nose.
14
Mrs Kusak nodded and dabbed at her eyes with a lace hanky. This was the second round of bad news Stevie had had to break in forty-eight hours, but this time, her sympathies could not have been less stirred. Mrs Kusak’s eyes streamed, and her plump fingers traced the cross at her neck, but her beady black eyes conveyed no sense of grief.
The knock at the front door came as a welcome reprieve. There was an unpleasant odour about the place of rancid oil and stale cheese and she was glad of an excuse to escape. She found Wayne on the front step, patting the head of a white concrete swan.
The day was cooling, but Wayne’s thin hair stuck to his head like a helmet, feathery sideburns plastering his cheeks like beached seaweed. He wore herringbone flares and a floral nylon shirt bright enough to give you a headache. When he lifted his arm to give his head a scratch, Stevie caught an unpleasant whiff and stepped back, making an obvious point of fanning herself. Wayne couldn’t have cared less; Stevie even detected a slight smile on his craggy features. She suspected he enjoyed the distaste he stirred in others. Here was another one who followed a carefully rehearsed act. But given the choice, she’d take Wayne’s BO over the cloying cheesiness of the Kusak house any day.
He pointed to the Christmas lights threaded through the porch eaves and the melting ‘Merry Christmas’ written in fake snow on the window.
‘It’s weeks past Twelfth Night,’ he said. ‘Miro’s certainly had his dose of bad luck. What about her?’
‘I’m not sure if she regards this news as bad luck or heaven sent,’ Stevie said.
Wayne had gleaned some interesting information from the neighbours. As he made his report Stevie wondered if Tash had discovered the same when she’d visited yesterday.
She returned to the small, black-frocked woman in the cluttered lounge room, and couldn’t help but think of Rosemary West, Catherine Birnie, Myra Hindley. Was it the dog, or could Mrs Kusak have been the figure in the passenger seat when Bianca Webster’s body had been dumped? And if she wasn’t an accomplice, how the hell could she have been so oblivious to her husband’s activities?
She offered to make Mrs Kusak the traditional cup of tea, keeping her voice as gentle as possible, struggling to resist falling into any kind of judgemental trap.
Mrs Kusak shook her head and reached down to pat the dog at her feet. Bonza seemed exhausted from his harrowing experience at the weir; he twitched as he dreamed. Stevie wondered what he had seen, wondered if dogs suffered from nightmares too.
‘When the police first told you that your husband was a suspect in the murder and abduction of a child,’ Stevie said, trying to keep the accusation from her voice, ‘why did you tell them that you had been separated for over a year?’
The woman spread a puffy hand over her mouth and said nothing.
‘You see, we’ve been given reason to doubt that,’ Stevie continued. ‘Apparently on the day after the child’s abduction, your neighbours spotted you with a trailer load of things, believed to be your husband’s possessions, and then another neighbour saw you at the dump with them. These same neighbours said they’d seen your husband’s four-wheel drive parked outside the front of your house many times over the past few weeks.’ Stevie let the silence linger. ‘Can you see what I’m getting at Mrs Kusak?’
The woman sniffed but said nothing.
‘It makes us think that maybe you knew what your husband had been up to and were trying to get rid of evidence—had he told you to get rid of evidence, Mrs Kusak?’
The woman twisted her hands on her lap and spoke in heavily accented English. ‘We were separating. Miro was a worthless piece of shit. He’s a Slav, I’m Italian, I should have listened to my mamma, but I didn’t. I should have thrown him out years ago, but I didn’t. When I went to the dump I didn’t know what Miro had done, all I knew was that I wanted to be rid of the worthless shit Slav and all his worthless shit things.’
‘Our crime scene officers will be able to recover his things. If anything incriminatory is found you might find yourself charged as an accessary to murder.’
‘No no, only clothes, books and shit.’
‘What about a computer?’ She knew that a hard drive and a flash drive had been found in the Toyota, but she wondered how much the woman knew.
‘He took the computer with him when he left.’
‘Which was when? Not a year ago? When was he last here?’
‘Three days ago was the last time I saw him.’
After Bianca’s abduction but before her death, Stevie calculated, when she was most likely being held prisoner in the pump house.
‘Did he spend a lot of time on the computer?’
Mrs Kusak nodded. ‘Always, he spent all his time and money on computers. Always the latest and the best.’
‘Doing what?’
‘Looking at filth. He made me sick.’
‘Did you know that he had an unhealthy interest in young girls?’
The woman inspected her rings. They were hardly visible between the folds of fat on her fingers. ‘Maybe. It was filth.’
‘Your neighbours said he used to stare at their children. They never let their kids near him. Or you.’
‘He only looked. That’s all. I told him it was wrong but he never listened to me.’ She sniffed. ‘My neighbours are nosy bitches, I’m gonna move.’
‘Do you admit to lying to the police then, about the separation?’
‘I no speak good English, they heard wrong. I told them we was separating, that’s all. He was looking for somewhere to rent. This week I told him to take his computer and leave.’
‘Where did he work?’
‘Samson’s factory in Welshpool, he worked shifts. I never know if he was coming or going.’
Stevie’s gaze slid across the mantelpiece, taking in the colourful religious cards, noticing the absence of family photos. ‘Do you have children?’
‘No. He was married before. There was,’ she hesitated, ‘problems with the kids of his first marriage. We think better not to have them.’
Stevie could guess what the problems were. Jesus Christ, lady, you’ll think twice about marrying a Slav but not a paedophile? This exercise in patience was getting harder by the minute.
‘Was he capable of killing a child, Mrs Kusak?’ she asked, suppressing a shudder. Talking to this woman was testing enough for her—she flinched at the thought of the effect she would have had on Tash. She wished she’d listened to her instincts and seen the woman herself yesterday.
The woman shook her head vehemently. ‘He never would, no, never. He couldn’t kill nothing. He hated blood, he even hated fishing. If she died, it was accident. He didn’t kill her.’
For all that the woman filled her with revulsion, Stevie believed her. It helped too that the pathologist had determined the murder to be a sexual assault gone wrong.
‘The child had been missing for nearly two days when her body was found. Have you any idea where he might have taken her after he abducted her?’
Mrs Kusak seemed to ponder the question, but who knows where her mind was.
‘Mrs Kusak?’
The woman let out a sigh and rolled the hem of her black dress between her fingers. ‘Yes, I think I know,’ she said. ‘Mundaring Weir. He always takes the dog to a special place there where no one else goes—it’s a good dog, but it always fight other dogs.’ She nodded to herself, ‘Yes, he would have taken her there.’
‘Where is this special place?’
Mrs Kusak stopped her fidgeting but still couldn’t look Stevie in the eye. ‘Near the old pump station, by the water. People aren’t supposed to go there. They’ve closed off the track but Miro parks at the lookout and walks down with the dog. He always hangs about down there. He even takes me sometimes. It’s what I told that bitch woman cop yesterday.’
Stevie kept her face impassive while she thought hard. Tash had known this yesterday and not told her. Damn her for not saying anything, damn her bloody migraines. How could she have said nothing? What the fuck was she playing at?
‘Does anyone else know about this place where he takes the dog?’ Stevie asked, her eyes fixed on the cross hanging on the wall above Mrs Kusak’s head.
‘Why you need to know that?’ Mrs Kusak asked.
Why do you think, you stupid bitch? ‘Because we need to find out who killed him, Mrs Kusak,’ Stevie said with brittle patience.
Mrs Kusak narrowed her eyes. ‘Then why don’t you ask that woman cop from yesterday?’
Stevie stood up. ‘Are you accusing Constable Hayward of your husband’s murder?’ she asked.
The woman’s eyes dropped. ‘Yes—no—I dunno.’
‘You have to be very certain Mrs Kusak, before you start making accusations. What time yesterday did Constable Hayward come to see you?’
Mrs Kusak shrugged and touched her hair, making the pendulous folds at the top of her arms swing. She looked through the window at the pink-flossed sky. ‘Before now, four o’clock maybe. My neighbour’s kids was having a party, they start at lunch and go all night. I asked her to go and see them, warn them to shut up. She said no, tell me I no deserve to ever sleep good again.’
Now that did sound like something Tash might’ve said. Stevie cleared her throat. ‘What time did she leave?’
Mrs Kusak shrugged. ‘I dunno, about five maybe.’
Stevie had called at Trish’s at about six thirty and she was still not home. ‘Do you wish to proceed with the harassment charges against Constable Hayward? If you do, you’ll need to put your complaint and any other suspicions you might have about the constable in writing.’
There was a momentary pause before Mrs Kusak answered, ‘No.’ She dropped her head into her hands and began to sob, her plump body wracked with self-pity.
‘You told me on the phone that Constable Hayward showed you pictures from the child’s autopsy. Is that true?’ Stevie asked, unmoved.
Mrs Kusak didn’t look up. She spoke through her hands. ‘No, I said that to make you listen. But she was still a bitch. She told me all about how she died, that little girl...’
‘You lied about the separation, you lied about the autopsy photos. What else have you lied about, Mrs Kusak?’
When the woman looked up, Stevie saw for the first time genuine tears of grief carving their way down the powdered cheeks.
‘My Miro, what am I gonna do without him, the dirty no good Slav...’
She loved him, Stevie realised. Despite it all, she still loved him.
15
Monty drove while Stevie sat in the passenger seat of the unmarked police car, pondering the various forms of love. Mrs Kusak had told the officers making the initial enquiries that she and Miro were separated, then she’d told Stevie they were in the process of separating. It was obvious upon the search of the house that despite her trip to the dump, he was still very much in residence. They’d found his shaving equipment in the bathroom, his underwear in the bedroom drawers, even his pyjamas folded under the pillow. If she had really planned on chucking him out, they would never know. What made a woman stay with a man like that, she wondered, when she was so aware of his foul proclivities?
And what about you, her inner voice nagged. You lived with a man who raped you and caused misery to countless others. You’re a cop, you of all people should have seen through him—you are in no position to judge.
I threw Tye out as soon as I knew he was up to no good, Stevie answered in her defence, reaching for the water bottle at her feet. She took a swig and tried to wash down the lump that rose like bile in her throat. She looked over at Monty as he drove and wondered how she could ever have thought that she loved anyone else. The problems she faced now with Monty were a walk in the park compared to what she’d endured with Tye. The demands of the job affected plenty of other police couples too.
Or so she tried to tell herself.
But tonight there was such a crackling tension in the car between them. Monty was answering her questions in grunted monosyllables, turning what could have been a comfortable silence into a bed of nails.
His flat delivery suited the subject matter when at last he began to speak at length. ‘You remember that case of the abducted girl in Mundaring a couple of years ago?’ He kept his eyes on the road, his face glowing in the dashboard light. ‘She was found tied to a tree in the state forest after an anonymous tip off.’
Stevie hadn’t worked the Mundaring case, but she remembered the frustration of all concerned. ‘Yes, the victim had traumatic amnesia, couldn’t remember much about her ordeal. She was sexually interfered with, but otherwise physically unharmed.’
‘The state forest where she was found borders the east side of Mundaring Weir,’ Monty said. ‘The anonymous caller who raised the alarm was male and had a slightly foreign accent. We always presumed he was the perpetrator, though the only leads we had at the time were some dog hairs found on the girl.’
Stevie smacked her palms upon her knees. ‘It’s Kusak, it has to be,’ she said. ‘He didn’t mean to kill her; he was planning on leaving her tied up like he did the first girl. He must’ve panicked when he realised she was dead, had no kind of plan for the body disposal and did the first thing that came to his mind—dump her at the building site.’
‘SOCO found a rape kit in the back of the Toyota: duct tape, mask, more or less what he used on the first girl. Kusak’s undoubtedly our guy and, yes, Bianca’s death was probably an accident.’
‘Any signs of a double act?’
Monty shook his head. ‘Evidence suggests that Kusak abused her alone, although that doesn’t rule out Mrs K as an accessory of some kind. The pathologist said Bianca had a bad head cold; she wouldn’t have been able to breathe through her nose and probably suffocated when she was gagged. They also found dog hairs on her body.’
Monty’s despondency spread to Stevie like a virus. At least he’d acted alone. I should be elated, she thought, but I’m not. We should be going out for a celebratory drink, but the thought sickens me. We’ve solved the crime; this man will harm no more children, and there will be no protracted court case. Someone has done us all a huge favour by knocking the creep off, yet I feel cheated, unsatisfied. She wondered if this was Monty’s problem too.
He started to speak, hesitated, moistened his lips and glanced at her. ‘Is Mrs K going to pursue her complaint about Natasha?’
No, she realised, his problem ran a bit deeper than one murdered paedophile. His tone of voice, the way his eyes left the road to glance at her face, made her wonder if he was already aware of her doubts about Tash. She felt a sudden rush of anxiety. Shit, am I that transparent? What has he found out?
She shifted in her seat; the air conditioner didn’t seem to be working properly, it felt like a hair drier aimed at her face. She fiddled with the angle of the vent and turned down the fan. ‘No, she’s dropped the complaint.’
No more questions about Tash please, Monty, she silently begged. I have to get a few things straight in my own mind first.
‘Emma’s minding Izzy,’ she said. ‘Her mother said it was okay for her to sleep over when I said I might be back late. I think Emma will be disappointed when Dot comes back,’ Stevie rattled on, hoping to draw Monty into conversation.
No such luck.
‘The bullet that killed Miro was fired at the lookout from an automatic pistol,’ Monty said. ‘I found it embedded in a tree with the casing on the ground near the bin. There was also broken glass and a small amount of what looks to be blood splatter. I think someone either sat in the passenger seat or leaned through the open passenger window and shot him while he was sitting in his car.’
‘When I arrived, the passenger window was closed.’
Monty shrugged. ‘It could’ve been wound up again. SOCO have found fingerprints, but none yet that are identifiable with anyone other than Kusak.’
She took a breath, wondering where he was going with this. ‘Go on.’ Let’s get this over with.
‘The dog was probably out of the car when the shot was fired,’ Monty went on. ‘We found its tracks at the lookout and also plenty of tyre tracks. After Kusak was shot, the gear stick was placed in neutral and the Toyota pushed down the hill. There are some fresh dents in the side where it clipped vegetation on the way down.’
Stevie thought for a moment. ‘Maybe someone went down the track on foot after to check all was as it should be. That could explain the piece of torn shirt I found on the bush.’
‘Possibly. The Toyota’s been towed away for forensic examination. One of the first things we need to do is eliminate Mrs K as a suspect in her husband’s murder or as an accomplice in Bianca’s murder and abduction.’
‘She’s never had a driver’s licence,’ Stevie said. ‘I can’t see her getting herself the ten kilometres home from the lookout without a car.’
‘Unless she had some help. She might have paid someone else to knock him off. I’m going to get people onto her bank accounts. I’ve also asked the media to put out a plea for public assistance, see if anyone saw anything from the road that night.’
Close family members of a victim were always the first suspects, but Stevie couldn’t discount the feeling, despite the unpalatable taste it gave her, that Mrs K had actually loved her husband.
‘I was looking through Wayne’s witness statements while I was waiting for you to pick me up,’ Monty went on. ‘Some local kids were having a gathering that started at lunchtime and went on into the night. Mrs K rang them several times to complain, first in the afternoon about a car parked across her driveway, then about beer cans tossed over her fence. By the time it was dark and the party really cranked up, she was threatening them with he police. They finally conceded to her wishes at about midnight and turned the music down. Wayne’s got records of the times.’
‘Still a bit dodgy. Kusak was apparently killed sometime between early evening and midnight.’
‘The time of death is just a preliminary estimate. We won’t know until the autopsy. Whatever the TOD, she’s still not clear, she could have paid someone else. Then again...’ Monty tapped his fingers on the steering wheel for a moment and frowned. The dense bush on either side of them was dark as they headed down the hill to the city. Stevie felt disorientated, had no idea how far they were from the well-lit highway below.
‘Early evening.’ She cleared her throat, reluctant to tell him what she knew, but his silence compelled her to speak. ‘That was about when Tash visited her,’ she said, deliberately vague about the time.
Monty took his eyes off the road for a moment and searched her face. ‘Find out the exact time,’ he snapped. ‘And find out where she was when she was supposed to be at the team meeting in Central.’
Jeez, can a couple know each other too well? ‘She was home with a migraine,’ Stevie said.
‘But she wasn’t there when you called around. Do you know exactly when she did get home?’
‘For God’s sake, you’re acting like you think Tash had something to do with...’ A bounding shape leapt out into the road from the bush. He braked hard, only just missing the roo.
‘Watch out, there’ll be another,’ Stevie warned.
Sure enough, a joey darted out, bouncing after its mother.
Monty expelled a pent up breath. ‘I’m pulling over,’ he said as he glided the car to a stop on the shoulder of the road. He left the lights on but turned off the ignition, swiping his forehead with the back of his hand.
There wasn’t another car on the road. A recent bushfire had burned the surrounding vegetation into a moonscape and she could smell the acrid dead smoke through the air conditioning vent. Darkness and silence closed in upon them.
Monty’s face appeared green and distorted in the dashboard light, his forehead glistening with sweat. People in relationships reflected each other like mirrors, Stevie decided. Right now Monty’s was a magnifying mirror, sending all her flaws and faults right back to her.
But she was not going to make this about her. She touched his arm. ‘Are you all right?’
‘No, I’ve had a splitting headache all day. It started in my tooth. Is there any Panadol in the glove box?’
‘You need to take some time off and go to the dentist. That tooth’s been bothering you for a while.’ She found a packet jammed between the maps. After popping the pills out of their foil she handed them to him with the water bottle that had been rolling around at her feet.
‘These migraines must be contagious,’ he said, giving her a pointed look before swallowing the pills. When she didn’t reply, he slapped the steering wheel in frustration, the sudden sound making her flinch.
‘I don’t understand you,’ he bellowed, at last losing any semblance of self-control. ‘I saw Mrs Kusak not long after you saw her and she mentioned then that she told Natasha Hayward where her husband was most likely to be hanging out. She told you too, yet you’ve said nothing to me about it. Why are you protecting her? Is it because her parents died tragically and she’s nobly dedicated herself to looking after her retarded brother? Or is it because she’s gay and you figure she needs all the help she can get in a job that’s dominated by a mob of overbearing straight males?’
Stevie struggled to maintain her composure; one of them had to. ‘Forget the stereotypes, okay? Try loyalty, trust and friendship instead. But protecting her? I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Oh come on, Stevie,’ he slapped his thigh in frustration. ‘Miro Kusak was killed by an automatic pistol that uses point 40 S&W ammunition. I got the bullet and cartridge dispatched to ballistics as soon as I found them. I heard back from them about half an hour ago while I was waiting for you to pick me up.’
Stevie swallowed. ‘So?’
‘So, we happen to have a couple of Glock 22s in the armoury, which could easily match the murder weapon. They were handed in for the weapons amnesty.’ He lapsed into the interrogator’s most effective weapon, silence. It gave the suspect the chance to incriminate herself.
Stevie wouldn’t fall for it. After a lengthy pause she said, ‘I can’t see what you’re getting at.’
‘How about the gun used to kill Miro Kusak was borrowed from the armoury at Central? I called the property sergeant and he had something interesting to tell me. It seems...’ Monty hesitated.
Stevie became aware of an ache in her jaw and forced herself to unclench her teeth. ‘What?’
‘It seems Natasha was hanging around the armoury the other day, chatting to the property sergeant and looking at the confiscated weapons. We have so many in there at the moment, there’s not room enough in the gun cabinets for all of them. When the week’s up, they’re going to be moved to the firearms repository and destroyed.’
‘Get to the point Monty.’
‘The point is, the property sergeant didn’t worry too much about a missing imitation Glock, which was actually a very well crafted water pistol. It was handed in with a bunch of genuine weapons and he didn’t get the chance to check it properly before the guy bolted. He was quite pissed off that someone received tickets for the test with a bloody toy, and he didn’t report it missing because a) he knew he’d be in the shit for it and b) he knew it was harmless.’ Monty paused. ‘But at least he was being straight about it with me.’
