by John Byron
‘See you, Spud,’ said Mack to Murphy’s back, before turning to Janssen and raising his eyebrows.
The detective shrugged then nodded at the door. ‘Is Chartier here still?’
‘Out the back,’ said Mack. ‘Come and have a look.’ They went inside as Murphy spun his tyres in the wet. An angry roar of the V8, and Murphy was gone. ‘You picked a hell of a morning to go AWOL, young fella.’
‘Arteries and veins, is it?’ asked Janssen.
‘Yep. Volume Three.’
‘Is Spud convinced?’
‘He is, finally. Probably contributing to his mood.’ Murphy didn’t much like being wrong. ‘That and a kick in the balls playing footy on the weekend, apparently.’
They entered a formal lounge and dining area featuring a half-metre-wide smear of rust curving into the room from the hallway beyond. The body was on the table, more intact than the other two but still deeply excavated, the scene recognisably consistent to Janssen’s increasingly schooled eye. The skin had been incised this time, folded back along the limbs and up the sides of the neck to the skull. The abdomen and thorax had been completely excavated from neck to pelvis, the ribcage chopped away and the viscera removed. The large blood vessels running up the back wall rang a faint bell for Janssen, with their complexes of tributaries. Then it came to him, and he wished it hadn’t: the Pompidou Centre.
‘Verdomme,’ said Janssen, quelling a wave of revulsion. ‘This must have taken longer than a weekend.’
‘Definitely. Three or four days, I reckon.’
‘Damn.’
‘He’s just moving things out of the way now, see?’ continued Mack. ‘He’s only after displaying the vessels. He’s chopped away the viscera specifically to get to the blood supply. And there’s something else. Come here.’ Mack led Janssen to a cupboard in front of a wide window overlooking a tall hedge. An assortment of carefully dissected tissues was spread across the top.
‘So that’s where it all went,’ said Janssen, wincing. They were looking at the remains of the victim’s genitals, alongside his liver.
‘You noticed.’
‘It was hard to miss that he’d been castrated, Mack. What’s the story?’
‘Unfinished business from Volume Two. Chapters Thirty-Three, Thirty-Four and Forty-Nine: muscles of the testes and the penis.’
‘I see. Surely this clinches it, then, that he’s following the Fabrica?’
‘Certainly does, although it’s interesting he didn’t give Laura Newman the corresponding treatment. Chapters Thirty-Three and Thirty-Four canvass the uterus and muscles of the ovaries as well.’
‘Maybe he’s planning to come back to it. Is there a section specific to the reproductive organs?’
‘Yes, it’s shared with the gut, Volume Five.’
Chartier came through from the kitchen, smiling wryly. ‘Hey, Matthijs, I heard your welcome ceremony from out the back.’ Janssen nodded bashfully.
‘How well do you know Joanna King?’ Mack asked the detectives.
‘Yeah, a little,’ said Chartier. ‘We have lunch most days.’
Janssen’s pulse quickened, but he remained outwardly calm. ‘Why, Mack?’
‘I think she should see this for herself, to best utilise her expertise. But.’
He didn’t need to expand on the last word. The two detectives looked down on the very untidy corpse. It looked good only in comparison to the two previous victims. They looked at one another and held a brief exchange without saying a word. It wasn’t pretty, but Jo would know what to expect. Anatomical drawing wasn’t reality, and a crime scene was more confronting than a medical scenario – still, a body was a body. It would be tough on her, but this was the job. The silent dialogue ended in agreement, and they turned back to Mack.
‘Fair enough,’ said Chartier. ‘Have you spoken to her about it?’
‘Can’t reach her. Spud tells me she’s at the uni today, but her mobile’s off.’
‘Might be lecturing,’ said Janssen, although he knew exactly why she’d been out of range all morning. ‘Try her office phone.’ He gave Mack the number.
‘Come on,’ said Chartier, looking through the window. The wind had dropped and the rain had settled into a steady shower. ‘Let’s get started on the doorknock.’
Janssen raised one eyebrow. ‘I’m supposed to do that by myself.’
‘Yeah, but since the boss departed in a huff, you’re my lift back to civilisation.’ She selected a pair of golf umbrellas from their gear stash by the door and handed him one.
‘Any chance we could get an espresso first?’
Chartier shook her head sorrowfully.
‘Nothing outside the shopping mall,’ said Mack, dialling Jo’s office number. ‘It’s all just houses.’
‘Verdorie,’ said Janssen. It was going to be a long afternoon.
Friday 17 August – afternoon
The detectives stood in the briefing area, caffeine in hand and raiding the big packet of Tim Tams that Jo and Chartier had brought back from lunch, hoping to inspire a breakthrough. The idea was to hold the killer’s method up to the light and see if they could find the right angle. There had to be a diamond in there somewhere, but so far it had all the sparkle of a lump of coal.
‘We just don’t know enough to connect them,’ complained Harris.
‘We don’t know anything,’ said Nguyễn.
‘We know he’s targeting wealthy people,’ said Chartier. ‘That must mean something.’
‘Perhaps it just correlates with the time and space he needs,’ said Janssen.
‘They all seem to be arseholes,’ observed Nikolaidis from his perch on the filing cabinet. ‘According to the neighbours and relatives, anyway.’
‘They didn’t actually say that, Niko,’ said Chartier.
‘A couple practically did, and most of the others implied it,’ said Nikolaidis. ‘Don’t you reckon, Nguyễn?’
‘Yes, the families seem less bereaved than usual, apart from the gruesome aspects.’ Nguyễn had done a good deal of the family and workplace liaison. ‘The friends and colleagues don’t seem to be too cut up, either.’
‘So to speak.’ Nikolaidis pointed at the Tim-Tams. ‘Give us one of them, will you?’
‘A bit of respect for the dead?’ Chartier objected, while holding out the packet for him.
Nikolaidis shrugged. ‘Even arseholes die. Not soon enough, I grant you, but still.’
‘It’s all so smooth, too,’ added Harris. ‘He must be doing heaps of work beforehand.’
‘Yeah, it’s like naturalism,’ said Jo.
‘What do nudists have to do with it?’ Murphy said, smirking.
‘Naturalism, dimwit, not naturism.’
‘Same thing.’
‘Like fashion icon and fascist icon are the same thing?’
‘What are you getting at, Jo?’ asked Chartier, slicing through the sibling banter.
‘It takes a lot of artifice to make a movie look realistic. The more real it looks, the less real it is.’
‘Okay, I get it,’ conceded Murphy. ‘He’s expending all his energy before he goes in so he leaves no trace for us after.’
‘But you can’t expend energy without emitting heat and light,’ said Nikolaidis.
‘So what does his heat and light look like?’ Chartier waved a chocolate biscuit around for emphasis. ‘Why haven’t we seen it?’
‘He’s someone who has the time and the solitude,’ said Janssen. ‘Lives by himself, works flexible hours, comes and goes without being noticed.’
‘Yeah, but he also knows a hell of lot about his targets before he rocks up,’ said Murphy.
‘Like the layout of the houses, you mean?’ asked Harris. ‘Security cameras?’
‘Yeah, but more than that,’ said Murphy. ‘How does he know they’re alone? And that he’ll have that much time.’
‘Maybe he doesn’t,’ suggested Harris.
‘But mate we’ve had no near misses and no dead bystanders,’ reasoned Nguyễn. ‘
He must already know it’s safe, before he starts.’
‘So how does he reduce the odds to practically zero before he even knocks on the door?’ asked Chartier.
‘He has to have access to their data,’ said Nikolaidis. ‘Maybe where he works?’
There was a flurry of suggestions from the detectives: a telco, an internet provider, an energy retailer, a security firm, the motor registry, the tax office.
‘An intelligence agency?’ proposed Harris. His colleagues all laughed, except Nikolaidis, who just raised his eyebrows and puckered his lips.
‘Let’s save the deep-state conspiracies for later,’ said Murphy.
‘What else is bothering you?’ Jo asked the cops.
‘The entry method,’ said Janssen. ‘How does he get into the houses without being known to his victims?’
‘What makes you so sure they don’t know him?’ asked Jo.
‘If he did we’d expect to find some common thread between the three victims,’ explained Chartier. ‘But there’s nothing there at all. No childhood link, no uni days together, no workplace in common. He’s just come at them out of the blue, as far as we can see.’
‘We know he’s not making appointments with the vics, either,’ said Nikolaidis. ‘There’s nothing unaccounted for in their diary entries, or the phone and email records.’
‘So what does he have to offer that gets him inside?’ Harris took a Tim Tam, bit off the opposite corners and sucked his coffee through it as though it were a straw, then popped the result into his mouth. He moaned with pleasure.
‘We’ve been around and around on this; it’s a dead end.’ Murphy huffed with impatience, but the rest of the squad ignored him.
‘Ah.’ Jo’s eyes lit up. ‘It’s a MacGuffin.’
‘That Hitchcock thing?’ asked Janssen.
‘That’s right, Thijs. It’s an object that drives the narrative, something valuable or powerful. People behave in ways they normally don’t, because they want it so much. They lose judgment and perspective, do desperate things.’
‘Like the Maltese Falcon,’ he said.
Jo nodded. ‘The briefcase in Pulp Fiction. The Ark of the Covenant in Indiana Jones.’
‘You’re saying he has something they want,’ said Chartier. ‘Something they’ll put aside their usual caution for.’
‘What if it’s not an object?’ Nguyễn asked. ‘Could it be information?’
‘But information can be passed through a closed door,’ Jo said. ‘A physical object at least gets the door open.’
Murphy waved his hand dismissively. ‘Opening the door is not the issue, Jo,’ he said. ‘People do it all the time.’
Jo turned away to look out the window. This was typical Murphy. Reject anything that doesn’t fit his thinking. Look for the short cut, the flash of inspiration.
And he was punishing her for not making it to the crime scene: by the time Mack had reached her at work, the body had been on its way to the morgue, so she’d only been able to observe the autopsy.That had been absorbing – and clinical enough to take the edge off her initial revulsion – but it had not inspired any insights. Her brother was annoyed with her for missing the chance to examine the corpse at the scene, so he was ridiculing her contribution. He’d been doing this kind of thing all her life.
She took a deep breath and turned back around. Janssen offered her a sympathetic smile, but nobody else had noticed.
‘Say you’re right,’ she told her brother. ‘It still doesn’t solve your problem. Williams and Newman fought well inside the house, not inside the front door. And Hall didn’t struggle at all. So how does he get such an advantage on them? I’m telling you, Laura Newman’s not inviting a stranger in for just anything. Something made her take the risk.’
‘Maybe she didn’t think it was a risk,’ said Harris. ‘She was in great shape.’
‘But look how it ended for her,’ said Nguyễn.
‘So she was wrong, doesn’t disprove the point,’ said Murphy. ‘She opened the door —’
‘But why?’ asked Chartier.
‘Doesn’t matter why, she just did,’ said Murphy. ‘Point is, she didn’t think he was a threat. It’s that simple.’
‘I still don’t see her just opening the door to him,’ insisted Jo.
‘But why not?’ asked Harris. ‘Sure, in hindsight, but at the time it was no big deal. I mean, are you saying she was worried he was a rapist?’
‘Not necessarily, Cooper. It’s broader than that, more like a default setting. She’d have been more wary than you think.’
‘Anyway, not all men are rapists,’ her brother added, the opening line to many an argument between the siblings over the years.
‘That’s true, Murphy,’ Jo said, rising to the bait despite herself, ‘but the ones who are don’t wear big, red rapist badges, so you never can tell.’
‘Yeah all right, Jo, cool your jets,’ Murphy replied. ‘Bloody hell.’
He looked at the others for a supporting reaction, but their smirks were at his expense, not hers. They were obviously enjoying Jo giving the boss a touch-up.
‘It’s Schrödinger’s rapist, okay?’ continued Jo. ‘The cat is dead; the cat is not dead – you have to look inside the box to find out.’
‘By which time it’s too late,’ added Chartier.
‘Actually, it’s not quite a perfect analogy,’ said Harris. Everyone went a little still, but he failed to notice. ‘The cat is both dead and not dead until you open the box, causing the wave function to collapse into one state or the other.’
‘What’s your point, Cooper?’ asked Jo tautly.
Nikolaidis nudged the rookie in the leg with the toe of his shoe, but Harris ploughed on regardless.
‘If you apply that to your scenario, right, every man is both a rapist and a non-rapist until the woman opens the door, causing him to become one or the other.’
Everyone just looked at him for a long, silent moment.
‘Unbelievable,’ Jo said eventually. ‘Hashtag Not-All-Men, mansplaining and victim-blaming, all inside a minute. That must be a record.’
‘Welcome to the New South Wales Police Force,’ said Chartier dryly.
‘Moving on from quantum mechanics,’ said Murphy, shooting Harris a what-the-fuck-was-that look. ‘Even if Newman had her knickers in a twist about a man at her door, that wouldn’t have been an issue for Williams and Hall. Not unless our guy is a bikie or an enforcer of some kind.’
‘It’s still about the MacGuffin,’ Jo maintained. ‘It doesn’t just get him in the door: it gets him inside and distracts them somehow.’
‘But a MacGuffin can be anything, can’t it?’ asked Janssen. ‘It has no meaning.’
‘Not exactly; it’s only arbitrary to the audience,’ said Jo. ‘To the participants its meaning is self-evident. And significant. It’s always valuable, at least to them.’
‘So it’s something valued by the victims, but completely innocuous to us,’ said Nikolaidis. ‘Perfect.’
They all stared at the floor in silence as they imagined the MacGuffin in their killer’s hand – after he’s been invited through the door, when his victim’s back is turned, their attention drawn away from the unthreatening visitor. It glowed softly golden in Jo’s mind, like that briefcase in front of John Travolta.
What the fuck could it be?
Wednesday 22 August – evening
Sylvia opened her front door, keen to get in from the cold, dark night. As soon as she entered, she was enveloped in a rich, warm, comforting aroma wafting down the hall from the kitchen. ‘Hey, gorgeous,’ she heard Murphy call.
‘Hello, Dave,’ she replied as she walked through. ‘No footy training?’
‘Nah, I decided to leave them to it and cook tea for my best girl instead.’
She dropped her keys into the mortar and slung her bag onto the table, next to a tall vase of spectacular oriental lilies.
‘For you, darlin’.’ Murphy wore a linen shirt, cotton shorts and a wide
smile.
‘Thanks, Dave, they’re beautiful.’ She could smell their perfume even over the cooking. ‘What’s in the oven? It smells great.’
‘I’m trying Cath’s lasagne recipe.’
‘From scratch? Bechamel and all?’
‘Yep, made it from the ground up.’
‘Oh, lovely. Any vegies?’
‘Steamed broccolini with toasted almond slivers.’ He wiped his hands on the tea towel and came around the counter. ‘And baby carrots.’
‘Sounds great.’
He smiled again and opened his arms for her. She moved inside the arc and he pulled her close, wrapping his arms around her.
‘Sorry we got out of sorts on the weekend, Sylv.’
That was one way to put it. ‘That’s okay, Dave.’
‘You just riled me up again with all that radical crap.’ He left a pregnant pause.
‘I didn’t mean to provoke you, honey.’
‘But you know how that stuff gets to me, Sylvia. It’s not the first time.’
‘I’m sorry, Dave. I was just in a mood.’
‘All right, love,’ he said. ‘Let’s not let it happen again, eh?’
‘Okay.’
‘All better, now?’ He stroked her hair.
‘All better, now.’ She reached up and kissed him on the cheek.
‘That’s my girl,’ he said, turning to kiss her on the mouth, one hand running scales up and down her spine.
Keen to move on, she moved her body into the shape of him. ‘So what’s for dessert?’
‘I thought every man for himself.’ A hand slid inside her scrubs to caress her arse, the other wandering up beneath her top. ‘I’m thinking pussy, myself. Hot pussy in pussy sauce.’
But Sylvia wheeled away when his fingers began working her bra catch. ‘Not so fast, cowboy, you’ll burn the lasagne.’
‘It’s in there for another hour yet!’ he protested, but she was already moving.
‘I really need a shower,’ she called back from the hall.
Sylvia closed the bedroom door behind her then went into the en suite and started the water running. She shed her work clothes and leaned against the wall, just clearing her mind, until the space steamed up, then she stepped into the shower. She knew how it was going to go, and that was fine. She just needed a moment to settle first.