by T. J. Beach
But pedophiles didn’t cross their eyes and dribble out of the corner of their mouths. They hid their perverted desires behind marriages and normal jobs. How did you flush them out?
Craig, the insurance man, offered the only opening. “Dave said you’re into photography, Gaz.”
“Yep.”
“What camera have you got?”
“A Canon with a 500 mil lens.” Deb would let him borrow the Ridenour Investigations gear.
“You do Photoshop and all that? I’ve got a mate — you know Gino, Tim?”
“Yeah, from Main Roads?”
“That’s him. He’s up in the dark to photograph the dawn. Treks for miles into the bush to get an angle. Sets timers. You should see the photos he gets. He could sell them for sure. He’s got incredible photos of sunlight on the buildings across the Swan River, reflections — amazing. He gets the photos and fiddles with them on his computer. You’re into all that?”
Hollins made a mental note to research Photoshop. “Not so much.” He glanced at McManus. “I’m more into portraits, people, candid shots.”
McManus’s eyebrows bunched a little. “Were you thinking of doing some photography with the boys on the camp?”
“Mmm.” Hollins hedged, having no idea what might be possible. He had every intention to unmask McManus and crush him long before the next camp.
“You’ve got other cameras?” McManus asked.
They’d need more than one camera to do a photography session. Hollins hadn’t thought of that. He improvised. “The boys will have their phones, I guess.”
“Yeah, because no one can leave home without a cellphone for a safety blanket.” Craig nudged Greg, who told him to piss off and kept typing on his Samsung.
Hollins was in bed when his phone rang. He almost dropped it trying to grab it up off the side table.
“Gary?”
“Christ, Deb, it’s nearly midnight.”
“McManus is on the move.”
“What?” Hollins sat up. The covers slid down his chest.
“He’s got the hard drive out. I’m watching now. We’ve got him.”
“Holy shit.”
“Come around here first thing.”
“Lachy and Jenny?”
“Good point. I’ll drop them off early. Come to the office at eight. Oh God, this is sickening.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
DEBBIE HAD BEEN too nauseated for breakfast, even for coffee.
She made straight for her computer and set up the USB that had the video file.
“Can I hear a radio?” Hollins asked as he shuffled up behind her for a view of the screen.
She stopped to listen and picked up muffled squawks from the office behind her. “G’day, Kim,” she hollered.
The volume rose as a door opened and socks pattered in the corridor. Kim poked his unshaven cheeks around the corner. “You’re in early.”
“Things to do,” Debbie said, willing him to nick off.
“Gary?” Kim stared at Hollins’ chinos as if they were a mini-skirt kilt.
“Kim.” Hollins nodded.
“He’s driving Austin Gould today,” Debbie explained.
Kim grunted. “I don’t know why the bloody hell—”
“I’m slugging them two hundred bucks an hour,” Debbie said.
“Oh. That’s alright then. I just boiled that kettle.”
“Thanks.”
“I’ll get on.”
“Okay, Kim.” Debbie gave him her sunniest smile.
He sniffed and backed off to do whatever he did in his office and the bathroom. Debbie didn’t like to know.
“You don’t want your boss involved?” Gary asked.
“No. I thought he’d never go.”
“Why don’t you want Kim to know?”
Debbie paused to think about that. She hadn’t considered consulting her boss, a retired detective inspector, on-call for the hour or so a day he was sober and present before he headed for the TAB at the Vasse Hotel. Yet Debbie checked everything with a caravan park dropout. Admittedly, she’d seen Gary Hollins in action when he cared and the stakes were high. Debbie wanted him on her side when smelly stuff hit swiftly revolving objects. Kim was semi-comatose when he hired her and had regressed since. It had to be running in the two-thirty at Flemington or on the shelf behind the bar to stir Kim Ridenour.
There was also the small matter that if she told the agency owner about Dave McManus, she’d have to explain how the cameras got into his house, and Kim had a puritanical streak.
She clicked to the McManus video, set it running, held her breath and put her hand to her stomach, roiling in anticipation.
Vague shadows, a desk lamp snapped on, Dave’s shoulder hunched over the keyboard as he pulled in his desk chair and hooked the hard drive to his fancy laptop.
Gary sucked a breath in through his teeth as the big screen activated. The angle from above distorted everything on the twenty-seven-inch monitor, but you could see enough. McManus typed in a password, leaned back in his chair, and rubbed his chin as he clicked to a folder packed with ranks of tiny tiles — photographs.
McManus’s stomach rose and fell, deep, slow breaths. He highlighted a dozen or so images. His hand slipped off the mouse, and his index finger hovered over the top right of the keyboard. His head jerked. His hand flicked back to the mouse. McManus clicked on a tile. The image opened to the full height of the screen. You could hardly make a positive identification, but clearly a young boy, naked from the waist down.
Gary grabbed the back of the chair.
Debbie reached over her shoulder to cover his hand with hers, blinking to hold back tears.
McManus clicked on another, then another. Every so often, his index finger tracked to the top to the keyboard, hovered, hesitated, then went back to the mouse to open others.
Gary shuddered, tried to say something that stuck in his throat, coughed. “How much of this is there?” he croaked.
“Tons of it.”
“Stop. Please. I can’t look at it.”
She turned it off and bit her lip as her desktop picture — Jennifer and Lachlan on Matt’s knees, grinning like idiots — replaced the disgusting images from McManus’s spare bedroom.
Gary dropped his head, puffing out breaths.
Debbie closed her eyes and screamed inside. If one of those kids was Lachlan …
“Okay.” Gary got his composure back first. “Go back to the start of the video.”
Debbie shook herself out of temporary paralysis. “Huh?”
“Where he’s typing on the keyboard at the start. We might be able to work out his password.”
That was the whole damn point of putting in the cameras.
They watched together. The pedophile’s fingers flashed over the keyboard — a touch typist, damn it — first among the letters, then the numbers along the top row.
“I can’t get it,” Debbie said.
“Can you slow it down?”
At a quarter speed, the images quivered.
“Shit,” Debbie said.
Gary put his hands on the desk, fingers spread like a typist. He imitated the movements on the screen. “I think it’s like that.”
Debbie ran the tape through a few more times, full speed then slow, concentrating even harder. Focusing on detail helped keep the contents of her stomach where they should be. “Yes, you’re close.”
“More left hand?” Gary asked. “It’s like tap,” one of the smallest two fingers of the left hand, “tap,” middle finger of the right hand, “tap, tap,” left hand again.
“Yes. It is.”
“All at the edges of the keyboard.”
“None in the middle, you’re right, you can see the,” she looked at her own keyboard, “G, h, t, y, n. He doesn’t touch those keys.”
Gary straightened. “So, only twenty-one to choose from.”
“It’s a start.”
“Then he hammers the numbers. Similar sequence. Low number, high numbe
r, then …”
“Yeah, the last one’s really hard to pick out.”
“Letters then numbers,” Gary summed up.
It felt like very little, but they had positive, gut-wrenching proof Lachlan’s primary school sports teacher had child abuse images on his hard drive.
Gary touched her shoulder. “Are you okay?”
“No, I’m bloody not.”
“Me neither. Fuck, fuck, fuck. But we’ve got him. Thank God for that, eh?”
“I wish Matt was down here.” He’d find a way to ease her pain. He always did.
“You want to show him that?” Hollins pointed at the screen.
“No way. No one should see that.”
“Except me.”
“It’s your job. And Stu Reilly.”
“It’s definitely his job, and he can keep it. Look, it’s going to be okay, Deb. We are going to stop this piece of shit and all his mates from the camping club if they’re involved.” He leaned down to meet her eyes across the desk. “Lachlan was not in those pictures.”
“You can’t say that.” She wished he could. The pictures weren’t clear enough to identify any of the poor boys in the photos.
“He looked at the pictures at the top of his folder. They’d be the most recent.”
“How can you say that? They could be in alphabetical order or oldest first.” She looked away. The sympathy in Gary’s eyes made her want to cry — again.
He shifted to regain eye contact. “You’d know if it was Lachy.”
“Bullshit. I’d recognise his penis? Come on! In most of those photos—”
“You’d just know.”
She stared at the ceiling so he’d have to climb on the desk if he wanted to spook her out with his caring, but he was right. Deep down, she’d have sensed if one of the repulsive pictures was her son. A straw to cling to. “If we had the password, I could go in while he’s at school and …” No. She couldn’t. Her soul would be destroyed if she looked at all those photos. The policemen who did those things must have nightmares.
“Forensic guys should be able to do something with the video to work out the password, or their IT experts will be able to crack it,” Gary said.
“We have to get this to them fast, before he wipes the photos.” She waved her index finger where Dave McManus’s digit had strayed at the top corner of the keyboard, over the delete key.
“That’s what I thought, too. McManus was going to get rid of them, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it.”
“So, he looked at them again instead.” Debbie’s stomach churned bile into her throat. She pulled out the USB and flicked it on the desk like a slimy slug. “What happened at the pub, Gary? What made him get out his hard drive?”
Gary dropped into one of the visitors chairs. “I dunno, but he gave me a strange look when I told his mates how much I like taking candid portraits. I thought I might have gone too far.”
“Just far enough, it looks like. Did the grubs slobber?”
“No.”
“What were they like, the other rock spiders?”
“Not like pedophiles. I mean, Dave hardly oozes slime, but I didn’t get the faintest hint the others were anything but what they seemed to be — ordinary family men.”
“Your new best friends.”
“No. No. Not my type at all.”
“You have a type?” Debbie seized the opportunity to taunt Gary, an echo of normality. “What is your type?”
Hollins frowned. “A bit less … suburban … a little rougher around the edges.”
“I can see why you have no friends,” Debbie said.
“I have friends.”
“You do? Name six.”
“Tommy and Sylvie.”
“Your landlords.”
“They invite me over for meals and look out for me.”
“They pity you. That’s two.”
Hollins ground his teeth, brow furrowed. “Jenny and Lachy … Matt …”
Debbie shook her head.
“Err … Yvette from the cricket, maybe.”
Debbie snorted.
Hollins raised his hands. “You win. I need to get out more. What are you going to do with that video?”
“Take it to Stu Reilly. He has to act now.”
Hollins’ phone rang. He looked at the screen, then up at Debbie. “I think he heard you. This is Stu.”
Before he could take the call, Kim swung out from the corridor, his radio blaring in his hand. “Did you hear that? They found a body in the Tuart Forest. This place is turning into murder central!”
Hollins glanced at his screen as if it might jump up and bite him, then swiped and put the phone to his ear. “Yeah?”
He listened, eyes tracking back to Debbie. “Yes, I met Keith Tupaea … Yes. Face-to-face … Shit. How will I know? … Okay. I’m leaving now.” He hung up. “They think it’s Keith. Stu wants me to identify the body.”
Hollins called the campaign office and told the lady who answered the phone that he’d be late. He didn’t tell her why. She didn’t ask.
Debbie drove him in her car, a forty-minute trip.
The government had preserved a few square kilometres of Tuart trees on the way to Bunbury. They didn’t look much different to other eucalypts as far as Hollins could tell — straight, grey trunks, dark green leaves, taller than the run-of-the-mill Jarrah — but different enough to justify a state park.
Two lanes of asphalt cut straight through the middle of the forest, what used to be the main highway before they built a bypass. Debbie paid little more attention than Hollins to the undeniably spectacular vista of forty-metre Tuarts crowding to within a few steps of the road.
She’d bonded with Keith’s mum, felt a connection with the missing son. It must be an almost unbearable shock to learn he was dead coming on top of a night tearing her heart out over half-seen child abuse photos.
Hollins had little doubt the body would be Keith. Stu had seen the missing person photos. The limited southwest population of slim, young Polynesians didn’t allow much possibility for error.
“We can tell him about the video,” he said.
Debbie nodded.
Their destination was as hard to miss as the detective promised. Half a dozen police vehicles crammed into a picnic spot right on the highway with uniformed officers in hi-viz vests blocking the entrance and exit.
Debbie stopped at the policeman’s signal and wound down her window.
“Sorry, madam. We’ve closed the parking area.”
“We’re here for Detective Sergeant Reilly,” Hollins said. “I can identify the body.”
“Oh, that’s alright then.”
Debbie parked blocking two patrol cars.
“They might need to rush off to an emergency,” Hollins said.
“Then they can take one of the other squad cars.”
Detective Connolly, who’d been with Reilly when he came to campaign headquarters, waved them down a walk trail that branched into the forest beyond the picnic tables.
Stu saw them coming and broke away from a group staring over crime scene tape at forensic scientists in space suits working behind bushes a few metres off the track.
“Debbie, Gary. Thanks for coming.”
Hollins shrugged. “It’s him?”
“Pretty sure. A young lady found him. Her dog ran off into the bushes, and she followed. I’d like a more reliable identification before I break the news to Mr Tupaea’s mum. Sorry to drag you away from your important work on the election.” Stu raised his eyebrows to show he was being sarcastic. “I could get one of his friends, that car salesman maybe, but I thought I’d keep it in the family as long as I could.”
Hollins kind of liked the idea of being part of Stu Reilly’s crime-fighting family. The fact that he’d called Stu before he went back to the Gould campaign might have paid off in a softening of the official attitude to his involvement in police matters.
“You’ll have to put on one of those monkey suits,” Stu sai
d.
A constable had disposable hooded white plastic overalls, gloves and booties. While Hollins struggled to get them over his street clothes, Debbie took a surreptitious photo of Hollins with her phone.
The same policeman lifted the tape and called over one of the crime scene technicians.
“You’re doing the ID?” Hooded dark eyes peered over a dust mask.
Hollins nodded.
“This way. Put your feet exactly where I put mine, and don’t, for Christ’s sake, touch anything. I mean anything.”
“Got it.”
The expert led him in a wide circle around the bushes and tapped his colleague on the shoulder. He cleared the way, and Hollins’ guide pointed. “Feet there, the body’s—”
“I get it.”
Behind the bushes, screened from the hiking trail, a low mound of newly turned earth had been covered in forest floor detritus. At one end, leaves and twigs had been scuffed away to reveal a torso. Hollins gagged at the dirt in the staring, lifeless eyes. The face was swollen, but recognisable. A deep narrow bruise circled the neck.
The handsome youth he’d met at the Espy had met an ugly fate.
“I’ve seen enough,” Hollins said.
The crime scene officer took him back.
He slipped under the tape and went to Debbie. “It’s Keith.”
Her face crumpled. She turned away with a sob.
“Thanks, Gary. That’s all we needed,” Stu said.
Hollins put his palm to his neck.
Stu nodded. “It looks like murder.”
“He didn’t bury himself, that’s for sure,”
“Strangled?” Debbie said. “Oh, God.”
“There’s nothing you could have done,” Stu said. “It’s handy you came, though, Debbie. Tell me about the people you spoke to when you were looking for him. Every one. They’re all suspects.”