by John Byron
Murphy pictured the blood draining from the former cop’s face. ‘Spud, come on.’
‘You murdered a thief for money, Adams. You involved me by doing it in front of me. Then you tried to bribe me with half the cash.’
‘Please, mate, don’t —’
‘And then you threatened my family, to keep me quiet.’
‘I never threatened you! You told me you’d let it go if I went quietly!’
‘That’ll be your word against mine, mate. Your weapon, your slug, your prints. Your record of violence and graft.’
‘Fuck you, Murphy. I retired, as we agreed. We even handed the money in.’
‘At my insistence, because I’m not a fucken thief.’
‘Pascoe was a killer anyway. He had it coming, you said so yourself.’
‘Pascoe was a fucking scumbag, but that won’t impress the court, will it?’
‘Fuck you, Murphy,’ Adams repeated.
‘That’s two strikes, Adams. I know you’re upset, but you want to think very carefully before saying that to me again. There’s a lot at stake for you. We will not be having this conversation again.’
There was a long pause, then an anguished groan. ‘Half a mil, Spud. Each! They never would’ve known.’
‘Like I said, mate, it’s not my way.’ Murphy softened his tone. ‘Here’s the deal: you give me the login. I use it strictly to look around, press no buttons. Just this arvo, then I’m gone. Never coming back.’ He paused for dramatic effect. ‘And you’re off the hook for Craig Pascoe.’
‘For real?’
‘For real, Tom. For good. Far as I’m concerned, you do this? You’ll’ve repaid your debt to society better than any prison term. We square this thing today, for all time.’
‘Jesus.’ Adams was sobbing. Murphy cringed but kept silent. ‘I … okay, Spud.’
‘The people thank you, Tom.’
‘Just today and you’re gone, right?’
‘That’s right.’
‘No matter what you find?’
‘Yes, mate. You’ve done enough.’
‘Okay, okay. Just don’t fuck this up for me, Spud, I’m not kidding. They’ll fire me if they find out. I’ll never get another job.’
‘They won’t know a thing. It’ll be like I was never here.’
‘I’m going to have to wipe your search soon as you’re done. I can’t have any trace left behind.’
‘No worries.’
‘There’ll be nothing for you to use in court.’
‘I understand. I’ll do my work and leave, and you’ll wake up from a bad dream.’
Adams sobbed again – Murphy had held a lien on his future for so long he must’ve forgotten what freedom felt like. When he could speak again he rattled off the login string and the password. Murphy typed, and he was in. He promised to text Adams when he was done, and hung up.
Murphy found the user monitoring system, but then he stalled. Adams had revealed Murphy’s activity by tracking the fake user ID, but Murphy needed to come at it from the opposite angle, finding the user ID based on activity. He tooled around until he found a way to trace search activity by query target. He entered a few names – Anthony Williams, Laura Newman, Brendan Evans – and looked at the search histories. He soon established that each one had been the subject of detailed queries in their final days. He ran Patrick Hall, Damien Henley and Amber Darcy through as well, and came up with the same thing. Finally, fucken finally, something concrete that linked the victims to one another.
None of this had shown up in the routine searches. Homicide always checked victims’ financial records for anomalies, including account maintenance. They’d all come up clean: no address changes, no account closures, no large transfers, no cigar.
Yet someone had run numerous search queries on these six customers in the days before each one had died. Someone logged in as SP07M378.
Murphy returned to the main menu, found the staff files and entered the user ID.
Stephen Samuel Porter.
Systems Monitor and Help Desk Operator, Systems First Response. Sydney Computer Centre, Alexandria.
Tuesday 8 January – afternoon
The police commissioner was hunched over a speakerphone along with his senior subordinates, with an irate premier and a tense police minister on the other end.
‘The opposition’s hammering me and you’re getting nowhere,’ fumed the premier. ‘The only thing that’s working is this anatomist angle, and that was my idea.’ That raised some eyebrows, but nobody contradicted him. ‘Maybe this Murphy character isn’t up to it, is that the problem?’
‘No, sir, he has the best clearance rate in the country, and he leads a very effective team,’ said Commissioner Carr.
‘Is he off his game for some reason?’ the police minister chimed in. ‘Something at home?’
‘I don’t think so, sir,’ said the superintendent, Murphy’s line manager. ‘He’s stressed about the failure to apprehend, but that’s all.’
‘Well what’s the fucking problem, then?’ barked the premier.
Deputy Commissioner Hughes leaned in. ‘The perpetrator’s extremely well prepared, sir. He’s reduced his exposure to the minimum. But sooner or later he will be seen or disturbed, it’s just simple probability.’
‘So he’s a sneaky prick. Murphy’s a sneakier prick, I bet,’ said the premier. ‘You’re the cops, just work something out. I can’t tell the voters our best idea is to let him keep killing them until he fucks up.’
‘We understand, sir,’ said the commissioner.
‘I go to the polls in eleven weeks and this needs to be ancient fucking history before I stroll over to see the governor. You need to wrap it up now, you hear? Not Easter, not Christmas – now.’
The line dropped out and the three brass sat in silence for a moment. ‘All right,’ said the commissioner. ‘If what distinguishes our perpetrator is his preparation, then we disrupt his preparation.’
‘Murphy’s already working that angle, sir,’ said Superintendent Manning.
‘Then he needs to work it harder,’ said the deputy commissioner. ‘We can give him more uniformed help. Clearly we have the green light.’
‘No, I’m afraid that’s not enough.’ The commissioner sighed. ‘I hesitate to say this, with a character like Murphy, but it’s time to set him loose.’ He raised his eyebrows at his deputy.
Hughes held his gaze for long enough to convey her misgivings about letting a rogue like Murphy off his leash, but her boss didn’t waver. ‘All right,’ she said eventually. ‘I’ll speak with him.’
Tuesday 8 January – afternoon
‘Stephen Fucking Porter,’ said Murphy to the staff profile. ‘You’re fucked now, sunshine.’ He poured a celebratory mug of whisky and nearly rang Janssen, but caught himself in time. This knowledge was entirely illicit: he had to bring Porter in by legitimate means that would stand up in court. Nobody could know.
First he checked Porter’s recent activity to see if he was researching his next victim. Murphy was disappointed to find everything quiet – had Porter already selected his target, it would have been a simple matter of setting an ambush and waiting. Murphy was going to have to do this the hard way instead, by working out the killer’s method.
Porter had collected a prodigious amount of information on each of his victims, but Murphy still didn’t know how he’d selected them in the first place. While patiently exploring Porter’s surveillance history in pursuit of that question, Murphy had discovered another twenty-odd customers the killer had studied over the past year, but who’d somehow avoided dissection.
Nothing seemed to differentiate Porter’s searches on the two kinds of subjects, so Murphy turned to the customer records themselves. He compared the file of a survivor named Richard Elliott with the late Brendan Evans. Flicking back and forth between them, Murphy found that Porter had cancelled Elliott’s credit card at the point he’d stopped his research, while Evans’s card had not been cancelled. It was the sam
e for all the others: the credit cards of the living had been cancelled by Porter, while those of the dead had not been cancelled, by Porter or anyone else.
Murphy eventually noticed a field called Open MCR that was starred for the victims, but empty for the survivors. The system’s online user manual told him it stood for ‘open missing card report’: an electronic report had been opened but never filed, so it was flagged as incomplete.
Murphy stepped through the process mentally. The customers would report their credit cards lost or stolen, and Porter would filter them as potential candidates, on some mysterious criteria. Then he did his homework, excluding three out of every four, for whatever reason. For those he rejected, he cancelled their cards and they were none the wiser: they received their new cards and life went on. For those selected to die, he left the missing card report unactioned.
Adams had mentioned that most staff had to open an action report in order to gain access to a customer’s detailed record. Some kind of privacy measure, presumably. Porter may not even have realised that abandoned reports left this tiny permanent trace.
Then Porter would show up at the victim’s home, probably claiming to have their new credit card for them. With Amber Darcy he would have produced the Hordern’s card he’d lifted, but the mechanism was the same: the MacGuffin was a credit card. Once they opened the door to collect the card, it was goodnight, Irene.
Murphy had a disturbing thought, and navigated to his own Denison Bank file. Sure enough, there was the Open MCR flag: Porter had looked into Murphy’s own customer records months ago. Well, it figured – his name had been attached to the case since the beginning – but it unnerved him all the same. The serial killer wasn’t the worst bad guy who knew where Murphy lived, but most of the others were guests of Her Majesty.
Murphy took another swig and shook it off. There was no time for paranoia. He returned to the staff system and wrote down Porter’s data: home address; date of birth; home and mobile phone numbers; car rego, make, model, colour. He recorded everything he could find – bank account numbers and balances, historical mortgage details, emergency contact and next of kin (blank), tax file number – using the unlimited access while he had it. He found the systems monitor roster and checked where Porter was at that very moment: not at work, it turned out. The killer had finished a night shift early that morning and was now not due in until the weekend. Murphy noted down Porter’s shifts for the current fortnight and the next.
Now Murphy had to fabricate an alternative story for the benefit of his squad and the court about how they’d found their killer. He’d have to be very careful: everything from now on would be raked over minutely in the trial. He couldn’t workshop this with his unit. He had to lead Homicide to Porter along a plausible chain of deduction, without anyone realising he already knew the way.
He could say they were playing a hunch about the way Denison Bank kept cropping up, and how the killer seemed to know everything going in. They’d had plenty of those discussions, like Harris and Jo going on about the odds. Their suspicions were not nearly enough to obtain a warrant, but that was immaterial with the cooperation of the Fort’s security chief. A raid and lockdown was out, but an exploratory visit timed for Porter’s shift could work.
He wargamed the encounter. If they went to Alexandria, they had to leave with Porter in custody, no question. But that would mean bringing serious firepower, while claiming to be there only for information. The defence lawyers would smell a rat, and the crown prosecutor would be antsy, too.
Moreover, Murphy would need a reason to make the arrest. If they were lucky, Porter would panic and give him a pretext, but their killer seemed a pretty cool customer. So Murphy would have to re-enact his breakthrough about Porter’s method during the visit – in real time, with his detectives watching over his shoulder, without anyone realising that he already knew what he was looking for. Not likely, with only a day’s practice in the bank’s staff surveillance system.
So, scratch option one.
Murphy reached again for his whisky. Perhaps he could lead Porter to the unit, instead of leading his police to the killer? Murphy could wait for Porter to select his next victim, then nab him in an ambush. But that would involve watching his search activity, and after today his high-level spook access was finished. Murphy had pushed Adams as far as he would go: any more stress and he could freak out and blow the whole thing apart. No, an ambush wasn’t going to work. Anyway, involving civilians was always untidy – they were too unreliable. People often got hurt, or worse.
A snare-trap, then? Dangle a victim so juicy that Porter would rise to the bait. It avoided civilians, and Murphy could steer the trap towards a time and place of his choosing. Being unable to see Porter’s activity on the bank’s system was less of an issue with a known target. All he’d be missing was whether or not Porter had taken the bait. The lure would just have to be irresistible.
But a snare-trap would be an official operation, requiring brass approval and a lot of personnel. Murphy would need to explain the reasons for his confidence. The question wasn’t whether anyone in the squad would suspect he knew something he wasn’t sharing – someone would suspect, for sure – the question was how far he could go before they couldn’t keep those suspicions to themselves. It would be delicate, especially during the trial.
Ah: but what if it never came to trial? Because snare-traps had other advantages, in Murphy’s view. Set up right, a deadfall snare allowed you to close the case right there, old-school. Justices Smith and Wesson presiding, with half a dozen jurors of the .357 Magnum variety. Saved the taxpayer a whole lot of time and money.
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ Murphy muttered to himself, topping up his mug. This was a promising line of attack. Bring him in, let him make his move, and shoot the fucker dead. Problem solved.
A resolution at the point of capture would give Murphy the latitude he needed on prior intel, and otherwise it would be mostly just logistics. He knew Porter’s method, he only had to bait the trap right. Going off the Hordern’s tape and what the families, neighbours and colleagues had told them, the victims were all pretty much arseholes: that told him how to get on Porter’s shortlist. Since a fake customer profile was out of the question – it would need the bank’s assistance – Murphy would have to be the bait himself. He just had to get under Porter’s skin, spur him into action and lure him onto a killing ground that Murphy could control.
His main problem was that he was running out of time – he had to work out all the details right then, before he left the warehouse, because there was no way Adams was going to let him back into the system.
He checked his watch – coming up to half past two. That ought to do: he could plot this out in three or four hours. But he had a niggling feeling, like he had something to do – a meeting he’d forgotten about. The commissioner? No. Then he remembered – he was thinking of Sylvia’s gynaecology appointment, at 2.45 this afternoon. He’d seen it on the notepad that morning.
He tried to get his mind back onto planning, but he was distracted now. Something wasn’t right. Then it hit him: Sylvia had seen her gyno only recently. Usually she saw this Christel at the hospital – they worked together at Prince of Wales – but for some reason last time Sylvia had needed to go to her private rooms in Paddington, and Murphy had dropped her off. Why would Sylvia need to go back to the cunt doctor so soon? She hadn’t said anything about tests or a follow-up, and she hadn’t mentioned any trouble down there. It didn’t make sense.
Unless.
And then Murphy remembered how Sylvia had eaten like a horse at Christmas. They’d even joked about it. Admittedly, Cath was a fucken outstanding cook, but Sylvia had eaten more than Murphy had. And she’d had a healthy appetite since then, too. It was definitely out of character.
Unless.
What about her period? He tried to remember when Sylvia had last been on her rag, but he drew a blank. That didn’t mean anything, though: he never paid attention to that business.
But that was the last big session of hers he could remember, and it had been a long while since the one before that. They used to knock off a bottle at a sitting, easy – two on a good night. She’d been tapering, he realised, and he’d been picking up her slack without noticing. On reflection, he hadn’t seen Sylvia drink at all for at least a week, maybe two. Unusual in summer. She loved a G&T on a hot afternoon.
Unless.
Okay, he told himself, don’t jump to conclusions. Be rational, consult the evidence. He pulled out his mobile phone, opened Sylvia’s calendar and searched for ‘Christel’: every twelve months like clockwork, almost to the day, then this one only seven weeks later. He pulled the indented notepad pages out of his pocket and unfolded them, looking again at the rubbings. The two entries appeared to have been written on the same sheet, with a similar degree of pressure coming through. The notes were both scrawled, rather than neatly formed in Sylvia’s usual style. He could see no reason why she’d be agitated while writing down a doctor’s appointment.
Unless.
There was no obvious connection between appointments with a gynaecologist and a divorce lawyer.
Unless.
Then he remembered the vomit on the underside of the toilet seat the other day. It had obviously splashed up from the bowl and he’d assumed it was his, from New Year’s Day. He’d idly thought it was unusual the cleaner had missed it, but now he realised he hadn’t noticed it before then. And he would have – he lifted that seat every time he pissed. But Sylvia had no need to lift the toilet seat, so she wouldn’t realise the spew was there. Hard to figure why she wouldn’t mention throwing up.