SH02 - Harum Scarum

by Felicity Young

  He looked away.

  Tash circled the table like a shark. During an interrogation, detectives can move around as much as they like but they can insist the suspect remain seated. It was all a part of the tactics of maintaining control.

  ‘You can probably also obtain photographs from this site,’ Tash said, keeping her voice level. ‘You had two hundred and fifty photos of children on your computer ranging from soft to hardcore abuse and everything in between.’

  ‘They’re just pictures,’ Mason mumbled.

  Tash placed her palms on the table and leaned in towards him. ‘Oh yeah, so they have no grounding in reality; that’s what you’re trying to say?’

  ‘Yeah, well kinda...’

  Tash slammed her hands upon the table, making Mason start. Good one, Tash, Stevie thought, that’s just the right amount of fright we want from him. Too much and he’ll clam up all together. She caught Tash’s eye and mouthed, ‘My turn.’

  Tash stepped back and leaned against the wall, rubbing her stinging palms.

  ‘Strangely enough it’s the soft stuff we’re interested in at the moment,’ Stevie said. ‘Our experts tell us that these photos bear a strong resemblance to each other, were taken in the same location and probably by the same photographer.’

  ‘Soft, what do you mean soft?’ He looked at the detectives blankly until realisation finally dawned. ‘Oh, you mean the art shots?’

  Tash pushed herself from the wall. ‘That’s what you call them, art shots? Now it’s high culture is it? Give me a break!’

  ‘You can’t say there’s anything wrong with them—Jesus, what’s wrong with you people? The kids are dressed...’

  ‘Yes, Robert, most are dressed, but often in revealing, sexualised clothes and provocatively posed,’ Stevie said.

  She saw the ‘art’ pictures lined up in her head, in particular a snap of a little girl sitting up proud and straight in her school uniform, like the one she had of Izzy on her mantelpiece. It was innocent, it was unsuspecting and it made her stomach lurch. ‘If we can find the source of these art shots we might also be able to nail the origin of the hardcore photos and videos,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know where any of the photos come from, the webmaster ups them.’ Mason’s voice rose. ‘But jeez, what’s the big deal about all this? I’ve never even touched a kid, all I do is look at pictures.’

  ‘But you were planning on doing more than look at Angel12, weren’t you?’ Tash asked.

  ‘Look, it was just an experiment, right? If anything had happened with her, it would have been what she wanted too.’

  ‘What, with the help of money, drugs, CDs?’ Tash said.

  They were getting off the point; if the interrogation were to turn to Mason’s court case, they’d be obliged to turn the tape on. Stevie guided Mason back to where she wanted him.

  ‘We think the man who murdered Bianca Webster might belong to this Internet group of yours. Your computer log shows us you visit a site called the Dream Team—you may’ve run your files through a shredding program, making the information hard to access, but it’s not impossible.’

  ‘Next time buy a better shredding program, Mason—though I suppose there’s not much left in the coffers once you’re done spending up on kiddie porn,’ Tash said.

  ‘It’s not porn, why do you have to make it sound so degrading? It’s all just natural, kids are still sexual beings, they enjoy it, just like the rest of us,’ Mason said.

  Tash clenched her fists at her sides. ‘Oh yeah, the girl being raped in the video looked like she was having the time of her life.’

  ‘I don’t know how that clip got there, someone must have planted it. I don’t do violence.’

  Tash consciously unclenched her fists. ‘I was called to the hospital not long ago, to a toddler who’d been so brutally sodomised he’ll be wearing a colostomy bag for the rest of his life.’

  ‘And I’m not into boys either.’

  Tash slammed her fist onto the table again, ramming her face up close to his. The pulse throbbing through the flush at her neck looked fit to burst; she wasn’t playacting. ‘You just don’t get it do you? People like you should be burned alive!’

  Stevie pulled her away from the table. Tash rubbed both hands over her face and took a breath. ‘I’m okay,’ she murmured, shaking her head when Stevie offered to continue.

  To Stevie’s relief, Tash changed tack, dropping the subject of the rape video; they’d been through it with him before and maybe it was a one off. ‘Our experts will be able to piece together the data from your computer, but it would save time if you just gave us the information,’ Tash said, in control again.

  ‘I can give you the password, but I don’t think you’ll get much further than the home page. There’s all sorts of security there—even I couldn’t get through it.’

  ‘But we need to know where the soft photos have come from. Some shots are of a candid nature, of girls getting dressed in what looks like a change room,’ Tash said calmly.

  ‘There’s a hotmail address of a photographer,’ Mason said, shoulders slumped, mouth turned down in defeat. ‘We can buy the photos from him and download them from a file sharing site.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Twenty bucks a hit.’

  ‘Your habit doesn’t come cheap,’ Tash said.

  Mason rested his chin on his hand and thought long and hard. ‘You said if I cooperated, the judge might be more lenient.’

  ‘We’re going to take you up to our ops room in a minute and you can show our experts as much about this site of yours as you can.’ Stevie flicked him a tight smile. ‘Is there anything else you’d like to add while we’re still down here?’

  Mason pressed his fists into his eye sockets and sniffed. ‘Well, these photos I told you about that cost twenty bucks? For forty you can get the personal details of the kids in the art shots. Names, addresses, ages, email, the lot.’

  Stevie and Tash exchanged glances. Shit.

  Mason narrowed his eyes and glared at Stevie, ‘But I wish I’d seen a genuine photo of Angel12 and not that fake one you sent me.’ He curled his lip. ‘Jesus, that was wishful thinking, eh? You’d never have looked like that in your dreams, baby!’

  ‘How’s it going?’ Stevie addressed the plump middle-aged constable hunched over her keyboard in the ops room. Clarissa D’Silva, computer nerd extraordinaire, was one of a bunch more than happy to sit behind a screen for eight hours a day, leaving active duty to the likes of the more physically inclined like Tash and herself.

  ‘It’s like Mason said, this website has a minefield of security measures. I’ve found the hotmail address of the photographer, but its ISP is listed as coming from Turkmenistan, so matters are somewhat complicated.’

  ‘Terrific,’ Tash sighed.

  ‘I said it complicates matters, I didn’t say it puts an end to them. I’m going to have to sign up if I want to get further in. What shall I call myself?’

  ‘How about Peter File?’ Tash suggested.

  Clarissa laughed. ‘They’re not paedophiles remember, they merely love children.’ She put on an arch vaudeville accent, in imitation of an elderly rock spider they’d apprehended a few weeks ago. ‘There’s nothing unnatural about what we do. In ancient times it was common practice for older men to go with young girls—and boys. It’s no different to how it was when people got shocked if a woman showed her ankle. Who knows, in one hundred years, it might be considered normal again...’

  Tash laughed, ‘Yeah, right, and I’m running off to join a nunnery.’ Stevie laughed too, glad to see that Tash had recovered her humour.

  ‘What’s the latest on the dead girl from last night?’ Clarissa asked Stevie, back to her normal voice.

  ‘They traced the rego to a Miro Kusak from Mundaring,’ Stevie told her. ‘When our guys turned up with a warrant for him, all they found was the ex-wife. Separated nearly a year, pending divorce, so she said; claimed she didn’t know where he was living. They pulled the house
apart, found enough high tech stuff in his den to launch a space shuttle, but nothing incriminating. His wife said he took his main computer and flash drives with him.’

  ‘You want me to go and have a talk with her, Stevie?’ Tash asked, jumping down from the desk. Her face clouded when she read the look on Stevie’s face and she pulled her away from Clarissa’s earshot.

  ‘What’s the matter, don’t you trust me? You think I’m going to take it out on his missus?’

  Stevie hesitated. ‘No, of course not. Go on,’ she indicated the door with a tilt of her head. ‘Find out everything you possibly can about Mrs Kusak’s estranged husband.’

  9

  People in various stages of physical or emotional distress lined the corridors of Royal Perth Hospital. In fact the casualty department wasn’t much different to Central Police Station on a Saturday night, Monty decided. He sat on a bench next to an old man whose chest rattled and wheezed like the water pipes in Stevie’s kitchen, and watched the parade of walking wounded. A bikie in leathers staggered by with blood streaming from his head, another followed with a bunch of reddened tissues to his nose. A couple were screaming abuse at each other near the automatic doors until a security guard came to escort them from the hospital. A listless child was wheeled past on a trolley, his mother crying and wringing her hands by his side.

  God, there was no getting away from it.

  For the third time in half an hour he checked his mobile phone for messages. He doubted he’d be hearing back yet from the team he’d dispatched to China Town, but his restless hands needed something to do, some kind of distraction from the misery surrounding him. He yawned, wiped tears of exhaustion from his cheeks and massaged his jaw. An intermittent toothache seemed to be flaring up again.

  Izzy had shown him how to work one of the games on his phone and he wondered if he could remember her instructions. Even with his glasses on, he had trouble finding the right keys and hit several in error before he was in. Ah yes. He had to get one of the heads with the gaping mouths to devour...

  ‘Inspector McGuire?’

  He gave a start and quickly turned the phone off. A young nurse stood above him with a look of amusement on her face.

  ‘Doctor Sutcliffe will see you now. Please come with me,’

  she said.

  He followed her past several cubicles of quivering curtains to the last one. A middle-aged doctor stooped over a trolley, finishing his notes.

  ‘Good of you to see me, Doc, I appreciate how busy you are,’ Monty said.

  The doctor looked over the rims of his glasses. ‘Sorry to keep you waiting, Inspector, a hectic day.’ He pointed to the empty trolley. ‘An infarct right here, a man only about your age, your build, stressful job—chronic smoker of course.’

  Monty felt himself being examined. He shifted his feet and cleared his throat. ‘You said you had some luck with my query about an Asian man with kidney necro...’ he struggled to remember the rest of it.

  The doctor smiled, ‘Nephropathy.’

  ‘That’s the one.’

  ‘You suggested the patient might have been an illegal migrant. Well, you were right in assuming he might have presented here for treatment. We get quite a few at Royal Perth—no Medicare cards, just a wad of sweaty cash, and of course we treat them with no questions asked. I spoke to one of my registrars and she remembers seeing just such a man. She’d talk to you herself only she’s just come off a week of nights. I told her I’d handle it.’

  ‘Okay, you might start with telling me about this disease, keeping it simple, please,’ Monty said with a smile.

  ‘The common name for IgA nephropathy is Berger’s disease. It affects three times more men than women, with Asian men at the top of the list. It’s a kidney disease characterised by abnormal deposits of the protein IgA in the kidney’s filtering system and one of the symptoms is blood in the urine—that’s what the man presented with when he checked himself in.’

  ‘Did he speak English?’

  ‘A bit.’

  ‘Name?’

  The doctor smiled. ‘Bruce Lee.’

  Monty smiled wryly. ‘Of course.’

  ‘As well as the blood in his urine, he had a history of upper respiratory infection and high blood pressure. My registrar made the preliminary diagnosis and arranged tests to confirm. But when she mentioned the possibility of a kidney biopsy, he jumped off the trolley and became quite aggressive, forcing her to press the emergency button for security assistance. He was eventually escorted from the hospital, having refused treatment altogether.’

  ‘How sick was he exactly?’

  ‘Still in the early stages of the disease so he would’ve been able to function relatively normally for a while. Left untreated however, the disease would most likely have slowly progressed to acute renal failure and possibly death.’

  ‘Did he know the dangers do you think?’

  ‘My registrar explained them. She said he seemed to take them on board because he got more and more agitated with everything she said.’

  Monty rubbed his chin thoughtfully. ‘When you tell something to patients that they don’t want to hear, what do they tend to do?’ he asked.

  ‘I see your point,’ the doctor nodded. ‘They usually get a second opinion.’

  Monty thanked the doctor, stepped into the corridor and phoned Wayne Pickering, asking him to make some enquiries at Northbridge Chinese herbalists and medicine centres. If the guy thought he’d been let down by the western medical system, he might very well have gone down the street to one of these for a second opinion.

  He pocketed his phone, about to turn on his heel and leave the hospital when an unsettling thought stopped him in his tracks. He looked back into the examination cubicle where Doctor Sutcliffe was still finishing his notes.

  ‘Just one more thing, Doc,’ Monty said through the parted curtains.

  ‘Yes Inspector?’

  ‘The bloke you had in here before, the one who had the heart attack. What happened to him, where did he go?’

  ‘He didn’t go anywhere. I’m afraid he died.’

  Monty felt the blood drain from his face.

  The doctor looked concerned. ‘I’m sorry, did you know him?’

  Monty shook his head vigorously. ‘No, I didn’t. No.’

  He tried to call Stevie as he was leaving the hospital, but all he got was a message from her answering machine. He told her to ring him.

  Later that afternoon Monty caught up with Wayne, Barry and Angus Wong in his office. It seemed his hunch about their mystery victim seeking a second opinion about his diagnosis had proved correct.

  ‘It was about the third herbalist shop we visited, wasn’t it fellas?’ Barry checked with his colleagues.

  Angus nodded, said to Monty, ‘Mr Cheng’s shop—he speaks practically no English.’

  ‘But he had a pretty dolly of a Chinese interpreter with him,’ Barry added.

  ‘Angela Nguyen is multilingual Vietnamese,’ Angus answered with a long-suffering sigh.

  Barry shrugged, ‘Same diff.’

  ‘I went into the back room to talk to Cheng,’ Angus told Monty, ‘while Barry and Wayne spoke to Angela in the front, in between serving customers.’

  ‘It was interesting, Mont,’ Wayne added. ‘When we got together to swap notes, we discovered a discrepancy in their stories.’

  ‘Yeah, Mr Cheng told me the man’s name was Zhang Li.’ Angus spelled the name for Monty. ‘Cheng had never met him before but had heard on the grapevine that he was a money lender, an illegal who’d only been in the country for a couple of months. He wanted something for the blood in his urine and Mr Cheng mixed him up a herbal concoction...’

  ‘And Cheng said Zhang Li had a kid with him.’

  Angus scowled, ‘Yes, Barry I was getting to that. He had an Asian kid with him of about fourteen or fifteen, a scruffy little bugger who wasn’t introduced to Cheng.’

  ‘But Angela Nguyen’s version wasn’t nearly as helpful,’ Wayne said
. ‘She said she remembered the man with the blood in his urine, but not his name. She also denied seeing a boy.’

  ‘It’s because you got her all in a fluster,’ said Barry, straightening the collar of his Boss polo shirt. ‘You should have let me do the talking. You just have no idea about handling women, you have no couth.’

  ‘And I suppose you would have done better?’ Wayne said.

  Angus muttered under his breath in Chinese, having little patience with the love-hate relationship between these two. Barry and Wayne went back years and had worked with each other long enough to know exactly which buttons they could press to good effect. Despite their constant bickering, they were a good team though, complementing each other in their differences.

  Angus brought a different set of skills to the job: a cool professionalism and an almost obsessive eye for detail. Monty could see Angus being selected to take the reins should he decide to toss the job in. Tossing it in—he had no idea where that thought came from, what else he wanted to do or even what he was capable of doing.

  His attention kicked back in when he heard Wayne say, ‘I’m going back to see Angela Nguyen later. Alone. She’s hiding something, I’m sure of it.’

  10

  EXCERPT FROM CHAT ROOM TRANSCRIPT 121206

  BETTYBO: wanna meet F2F?

  HARUM SCARUM: Y?

  BETTYBO: I wan 2 rt Katy Enigma stories wit u

  HARUM SCARUM: Me 2 but not yet. we cn rite on line 4now

  It was Stevie’s turn to cook. She ran through her mental shopping list as she hurried from the lifts in Central. For seafood chowder she’d need prawns, a few snapper pieces, mussels maybe, coconut milk, coriander and crusty bread. With any luck Izzy would be out of school on time and they could pick the ingredients up before Emma came around.

  She spotted Monty in the front foyer, standing half a head taller than most of the bustling figures. He held up his hand to stop her, hurrying over before she could pass through the revolving door.