Only the Dead

by Ben Sanders

  ‘So you’ve lost your job?’

  ‘We’ll see.’

  She looked away. Awkward with the quiet, teeth gritted gently. One of the boxes was open at the top, like slack lips. She waved the flap idly, revealed squat plastic tubs packed side by side. ‘Protein powder,’ she said. ‘I order it online, then on-sell. I used to have a couple of gyms I sold to, but I’m going to get a website-thing set up so people can just look me up and do orders. I’ve got to ring the guy next week.’

  ‘Good for you.’

  She flicked a nail on a plastic lid, smiled shyly. ‘Thirty-four fifty if you’re that way inclined. Just add milk. Although you don’t look like you need it.’

  He laughed. ‘I’ll take it as a compliment.’

  Something boomed in the stairwell and she flinched, raked her hair one-handed to camouflage the motion. ‘You sure Don won’t send anyone to follow up?’

  ‘I wouldn’t worry about it.’

  She didn’t look convinced. She moved around to the counter and picked up his card, delicate and two-handed. She inspected closely.

  ‘Let me know if he comes back,’ Devereaux said.

  ‘Who, Don?’

  He nodded. ‘Or anyone with a badge.’

  She didn’t reply. He let himself out and took the stairs down to ground.

  He’d forgotten about the paperwork.

  His pilfered files, courtesy of McCarthy’s cabinet, sitting in his own inbox, untended.

  Shit.

  He should have moved them sooner. Unopened and undeleted, they were a liability.

  His phone rang. Caller ID told him it was Don McCarthy. Imagination offered a stern précis — he felt it wise not to pick up. He tossed the phone on the seat and sat quietly in the dark. Nobody had reason to check his computer. Unless The Don had already filed a complaint — in which case his computer contents rated low on the worry list. On the other hand, if he wanted to see what the documents contained, he might not get another chance.

  Just do it.

  Devereaux smiled. He’d given himself that same advice before, and it hadn’t ended well. He started the car and cruised south uptown towards the station. He channel-hopped between patrol and CIB Comms frequencies. Just standard chatter: Sean Devereaux didn’t make the Be On Lookout alerts. He played it safe anyway, and left the car in the Civic parking building in favour of the station basement. He walked across Mayoral Drive and went in the main entrance, rode the lift to CIB.

  Still in the clear: his desk hadn’t been red-taped. Nobody looked up as he arrived. Lloyd Bowen breezed straight past him, not even a nod. Devereaux claimed his seat, cleared his screen saver and brought up his emails. A page worth of unopened messages unfurled. He skimmed subject headings: nothing threatening. He found his illicit document cache, fifty-three pages all told. He couldn’t afford the time to read anything. Printing was off limits too: fifty-plus pages of usurped paperwork, Murphy’s Law guaranteed a computer breakdown followed by awkward questioning. Plus he couldn’t risk Bowen stealing a look over his shoulder.

  He brought up Hotmail. He didn’t have an account, but surely it wasn’t hard to register. It proved more difficult than anticipated: sean.devereaux@hotmail.com and sean_ devereaux@hotmail.com were both taken. He scored third time lucky with sean_devereaux56@hotmail.com. The time it took to supply the required information, maybe he should have just risked a full print.

  He forwarded the scanned document to his newly minted Hotmail. Sluggish progress: PDF conversion had bulked out the file size. The upload would take a while. He ran a search on the name Leonard while he waited. The National Crime Information database offered up screeds. A litany of misdeeds by people named Leonard unfurled: Male Assaults Female, theft, receiving stolen goods. He made a fast scroll-through. Nothing leapt out at him. Nobody stood out as likely to pursue stolen money. Or maybe they all did.

  He picked up his phone and called Frank Briar. The purpose was two-fold: Briar had worked drugs, and might divulge Leonard-related info. More importantly, he wanted to know if Briar had heard about the gun incident. He needed to know how much time he had.

  Briar let it ring a long time. He must have recognised the number: he answered and said, ‘What is it?’

  ‘That’s not a nice way to answer the telephone.’

  ‘It’s late.’

  ‘It’s called police work. We keep tough hours.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘You used to work drugs.’

  ‘On and off. If you’re wanting to score cheap smack, you’ll have to grease someone else.’

  ‘Hilarious.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘What do you know about a guy called Leonard?’

  Briar laughed. ‘The drug guy?’

  ‘Yeah. The drug guy.’

  ‘It’s a pseudonym. Nobody knows anything about him.’

  ‘So how do you know it’s a pseudonym?’

  Briar didn’t answer. Devereaux caught background TV noise. He said, ‘An informant told me a dealer named Leonard’s after the guys who did the bank and armoured van job.’

  ‘Is your informant reliable?’

  ‘I don’t know. I only met him once.’

  ‘Well. Whether he’s reliable or not, saying Leonard the dealer’s looking for someone means fuck-all, because nobody knows anything about him. People have name-dropped him, but nobody can say what he looks like.’

  Devereaux went quiet. Briar ramped up his TV noise: canned laughter came through loud and clear. He seemed bored, eager to brush him off. Devereaux’s gut feeling: Briar didn’t know about what had happened between him and The Don. Maybe he had more time than he thought. Maybe McCarthy would anoint it their little secret.

  He said, ‘Thanks for your help.’

  ‘Whatever. How’ve you been sleeping lately, now you’ve got a dead man sitting on your conscience?’

  Devereaux put the handset down gently and stood up. The computer had finished. Devereaux erased the original email, then shut down the machine. He passed McCarthy’s office on the way out: door closed, no light beneath. He was back across the street and in his car by ten o’clock.

  Grayson’s address was south of central city, off Gillies Avenue, in an upmarket area west of the Southern Motorway. His home was the right mirror-half of a two-unit building, close to the street behind a high ivy-draped wall. Plush living on a young cop’s wage, especially given the young cop in question had a wife and two kids. Police station rumours spoke of a breathtaking mortgage.

  Devereaux parked illegally on a yellow line, mindful of headlights waking sleeping children. He crossed the street and knocked on the front door. Grayson’s wife answered. She was still made-up, dressed formal as if she’d just got in.

  ‘Hello, Sean.’

  ‘Sarah. Hi.’

  ‘Sophie.’ She smiled. ‘Close.’

  ‘Sophie. That’s right. Is he in?’

  He waited at the open door while she went to find her husband. Grayson himself appeared a moment later, noose of a tie round a stubbled throat.

  ‘Shit. Are we on call?’

  A sing-song instruction from beyond to mind his language around the kids.

  ‘No. I just need to use your printer, if that’s okay.’

  The question took a moment to register. Devereaux got the feeling a ‘no’ was tempting. Light and dinner smells ebbed out around him. An excuse formed on Grayson’s lips, but it never made it off the mark: ‘Yeah. Sure. Just brush your feet on the mat.’

  They had a small home office down stairs at the rear of the house. A desktop PC and a boxy laser printer huddled on an L-shaped desk in one corner. A window above showed a neat rubbish bin line-up on a narrow backyard path.

  ‘You only just on your way home?’ Grayson said.

  ‘Yeah. Big day.’

  ‘What do you need to run off?’

  Devereaux sat down at the desk and told him.

  Grayson propped himself in the doorframe. He looked at the floor and
thumbed more slack in his tie. ‘I thought that stuff was all off limits,’ he said.

  ‘It was. It is.’

  ‘So where did you get it?’

  ‘McCarthy’s office.’

  A pause. ‘Was he in there at the time?’

  ‘Guess.’

  ‘Shit. You broke in?’

  ‘I’ll pay you back for the ink.’

  A little girl about four or five wearing pink pyjamas appeared at the door. A bold T-shirt slogan proclaimed her Miss Perfect. She reached up and tugged on Grayson’s trouser pocket. He got a start and glanced down. ‘Hey. You should have been in bed ages and ages ago, Miss Naughty.’

  He got a shy giggle in reply. She eyed Devereaux, tilted her head back and cupped a stage whisper, one-handed, up at Grayson. ‘You have to brush my teeth and tuck me in.’

  ‘Mum already brushed them.’

  ‘Yeah. But I drank juice.’

  ‘You drank juice. Right. Well, go upstairs and hop into bed, and I’ll be up in a minute. Did you say hello to Sean?’

  ‘Hello, Sean.’

  ‘Hello, Miss Perfect.’

  She giggled behind clenched fists and scurried off back down the corridor. Devereaux smiled, wondered briefly whether his own home would ever hold that same cheerful patter.

  Grayson stepped inside the room and pushed the door closed quietly. He slipped his hands in his pockets. ‘I don’t know about this,’ he said.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘I’m struggling to reconcile this on a moral level.’

  ‘Which part?’

  He smiled weakly, shrugged. ‘The breaking and entering. The theft.’

  ‘McCarthy’s a shitbag.’

  ‘That’s subjective. Stealing stuff isn’t. There’s no crime in being an arsehole.’

  ‘Look. I went out on a job with him tonight. He used drugs uncovered in an illegal search to coerce information out of a witness. He physically assaulted a guy in the course of an interview.’

  He shrugged again. ‘It’s happened before. It’s happened worse.’

  ‘I know it’s happened worse because he’s probably the one responsible.’

  ‘So what did you do?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You say he assaulted this guy during an interview. What did you do?’

  ‘Pulled a gun on him.’

  ‘On McCarthy?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Oh, Jesus.’ He pushed hair off his brow. ‘You’re not serious.’

  Devereaux nodded. ‘You might be getting a new boss.’

  Grayson was shaking his head, not listening. ‘I can’t deal with this. I can’t deal with this. What if they track the files you stole here? You’ll land me in a bunch of shit.’

  ‘Nothing will be tracked here.’

  Grayson opened the door, took a step out into the corridor. ‘Look, I sympathise, I really do. If you say the guy’s bent, you’re probably right. But I just can’t get involved. Like, I can’t have anything to do with this.’

  Devereaux didn’t answer.

  ‘I’ve got a family, man. I mean, far as I’m concerned, ignorance is bliss.’

  He stood with his back to the door and pulled his tie up over his head. ‘I’m going to draw a line under it there. I don’t want to discuss it with you, I don’t want to run decoys while you burgle offices, I don’t want to do late-night printer runs.’ He gestured at the screen. ‘Do whatever you need, but that’s the end of it.’

  He moved away from the door and called from the end of the hallway. ‘You can let yourself out.’

  He did let himself out. The house was dark when he left. He drove home in the quiet, radio off, just thinking. The ghost of a dead man right there in the car with him. When he got home he sat on the couch under a reading light and started in on the paperwork. It was after eleven p.m. He could feel the weight of the day, but he knew he wouldn’t sleep if he left the file for tomorrow.

  He scanned photographs: street-perspective shots of a house off Swanson Road, close-in images of two men dead and bloodied by the entry. A crew cab truck abandoned in the yard, doors open, keys in. He read witness accounts and got a sense of chronology: six a.m., January thirtieth, two armed men had driven the truck onto the property. Shooting ensued, hence the bodies out front. The guys from the truck went inside the house. More shots were heard. They exited a minute or so later, whereupon a third man in a gold Nissan sedan collected them at the kerb and drove them away.

  Police reports: the dead men out front were cops. Constable Ian Riley, Senior Sergeant Kyle Miller. A third murdered man found in the living room of the premises was identified as one William Rankin. Rankin had a criminal background: armed robbery, possession of stolen goods, assault. Scene examination notes: the attackers had used shotguns, and recovered all spent shells. A strange precaution, given they’d left a truck in the front yard.

  He read until half past eleven that night. Then he turned the reading light off and sat there in the dark. He didn’t know what time he went to sleep, but he stayed awake a long time.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  WEDNESDAY, 15 FEBRUARY, 6.58 A.M.

  Witness work. Duvall rose early and donned the funeral suit, no tie. It struck him as a good look: sharp, not oppressively formal. He downed a canned peach breakfast, and packed a site-visit carry bag: business cards, the laptop, a cut-down version of his own case file. He left just after seven and drove south to town, turned west out towards Henderson, traffic still sluggish after waking up.

  Newspaper coverage of the January thirtieth shooting had been scant, but he’d managed to glean the street name. Quarter to eight in the morning, he turned into the little cul-de-sac, just south of Swanson. It was nondescript housing. Only homicide could ever have found it fame. He slowed and checked frontages. The address hadn’t been published: he ran mental comparisons against his paltry file photos to try to get a fix. The car engine held a low murmur. It was an old Commodore, ’nineties vintage, a typical CIB pool car circa his retirement. If nothing else, it made him feel authentic.

  He found the place midway along the street. Single-storey, deep porch, twin grassed-over wheel ruts across the front lawn. He parked further up the street and walked back. It was full daylight, sun bright amid neat blue powder-coat surrounds. Cars passed, faces blanked by thoughts of yet another nine-to-five obligation. No other foot traffic: murder makes for good pedestrian management.

  He stood at the kerb and surveyed the house. A few doors up across the street, an old guy in a mid thigh-length dressing gown claimed his morning paper, eased away hunched and bow-legged. Duvall stepped up onto the porch. Dry boards squeaked at his weight. He saw bloodstain shadow: dark irregularities implied seepage. He stepped to one side and tried to take it all in, identified two overlapping patterns.

  He ran his hand over the woodwork. Dimples in the grain: maybe sunken nail heads, maybe shotgun pellets, extracted and plastered over. He stepped back. Too random for a nail pattern: odds on a half-load of buckshot.

  He stepped onto the lawn and crouched over the wheel ruts. They were deep and harsh, grass growth a little balder towards the house, like a front-wheel skid had ripped down through the topsoil. Impossible to tell whether they’d been inflicted the morning of January thirtieth, but they looked recent enough. He stayed on his haunches and theorised. Pellet damage in the front of the house implied gunfire from the direction of the yard. Maybe a sudden lurch in off the street from a heavy vehicle, a shotgun round out a side window.

  He looped the house on foot and found no further exterior damage. He checked the street again. The guy with the paper had wandered back out to his letterbox, front page snapped open waist-high, remaining sections rolled beneath his upper arm. His presence made front door entry too risky. The ranch slider at the rear was bolted solidly from inside. Which left the side door as the only real option. Frosted glass with a neat butterfly imprint: he smashed an elbow through and reached in to free the lock.

  He set himsel
f three minutes once he was inside. If the old guy called him in for burglary he didn’t want to hang about. He made a quick walk-through. Old indoor air with a faint chemical undercurrent. Stale, but sterile. The place was barren. No furniture. He checked the kitchen. Pale lino and empty shelves behind open cupboard doors; the whole room naked and slack-jawed.

  He moved through to the entry. Polished timber floor: varnish would have repelled spilled fluids. The shotgun damage was visible in the wall, in perfect inverse to the exterior pattern. He moved through to what might have been a living room. The wallpaper had been torn back to the gypsum board. Light switches dangled from short lengths of electrical lead. Random stains of filler suggested gunshot damage repair. He leaned close and looked one-eyed along the plane of the wall. Hasty patch-up work had left subtle bullet-sized divots. He stepped through to the adjacent room. Rounds that missed framing timber had made it out the other side of the wall. He shuffled between rooms, gauging the line-up. A neat half-dozen row was stitched up high, near the ceiling architrave. Assuming living room discharge, the entry holes were smaller than the corresponding exit holes, meaning hollow point ammunition. The stitched line-up, maybe a police M4 on full automatic.

  He stepped back to the living room. Massive bloodstain shadow on the carpet by one wall. Maybe one person’s hard farewell, maybe several people’s visit to an ICU. He struggled to make sense of it. Extensive bullet damage made trajectories seem non-coherent. He stood in the middle of the room. Pellet damage near the floor on one side, the neat stitch near the ceiling on the other. Maybe a shotgun round from the door, met by an assault rifle volley from the floor.

  Carnage.

  He went out the broken side door. The street was still quiet. He hadn’t gained any undue attention. No watchers behind split curtains. Maybe the suit made him look halfway kosher. He walked back to the car and made a flip-through of his file. Recountals of the January thirtieth shooting were imprecise: ‘early morning’ was as specific as it got. Maybe the neighbours would shed some light.

  He crossed the street and started door-knocking. The file came with him. Paperwork imbued legitimacy. He figured post-shooting police canvassing would have been extensive: visitations by big men in suits would have been common. This shouldn’t be too hard.