Dusty shook her head. “I don’t think he’s a psycho.”
“But you were using the Dusty Kent lie detector on that innocent young monk, weren’t you?” Her grin was enough to tell me I was right. “So? What did your lie detector tell you about the prime suspect who found the body?”
Suspecting me of mockery, Dusty flashed me a sideways glance then, when she realised I was not being flippant, shook her head.
“Nothing.”
The monks we talked to as we strolled through the grounds were engaged in various activities: arranging flowers, making bread, picking vegetables in the garden, preparing food in the kitchen, sweeping and cleaning around the buildings. Dusty observed them, pausing occasionally to speak briefly to some. Each one accepted her interruption to their work with a smile and willingly answered her questions.
“Did you identify any psychos lurking among the yellow robes?” Now I was being flippant.
Dusty rolled her eyes. “Stop taking the Mickey!” She laughed and matched my teasing mood. “The Dusty Kent psycho detector was off duty today.”
“Now ain’t that a savage shame.” That earned me a playful punch in the arm.
At the exit, Dusty turned to look back and cast her eye over the buildings, a thoughtful expression on her face.
“Are they exactly what they seem? Or are we just seeing the smooth surface – like looking at their lovely gardens without seeing the dirt and compost and writhing worms underneath? What lies behind Saya’s unflappable exterior?” She looked at me for confirmation, her brow furrowed. “I’m too suspicious, aren’t I?”
“That’s one of your strengths. You wouldn’t be so good at catching murderers if you didn’t forage right down to the bottom layers.”
Dusty gripped my arm but not in response to my insightful comment. She was staring up into a tree. I followed her gaze. A black bird was perched in one of the high branches, almost camouflaged by leaves.
“I told you!” she hissed.
“How long do crows usually hang around to warn of evil?”
Dusty shrugged. “A few days.”
I pointed out it had been three weeks since she first spotted the crow at the Sanctuary. She acknowledged my point but remained troubled, unable to shake the conviction the crow was a messenger of death.
Back at the car, we paused to admire the view.
“I was thinking about what Saya said.” Dusty was staring out at the ocean in the distance. “He’s no fool yet he’s convinced Ram was a good person. He might be right, you know. What if Ram left Walker the abuser behind when he entered the Sanctuary and became Ram the good monk?”
Dusty tapped the screen of her phone, bringing up the photo of Ram’s painting of a coffin in a tree trunk. “This could symbolise a metaphorical death; the death of Paul Walker.”
“Are you saying he locked himself away in a monastery as a way of stopping himself from hurting young girls again?”
“It’s possible. The trauma of being openly accused and having to defend himself in court could have been a turning point for him so he resolved not to offend again. I went to a website about paedophilia.” Dusty screwed up her face in disgust. “It was more about treatment and prevention so not too gross. Apparently, paedophiles are driven by urges they find virtually impossible to control. According to this website, therapy can help them curb their sick impulses.” She swallowed. It was a repugnant subject to talk about. “Walker might have had therapy after he was caught and decided the only way to be sure he wouldn’t reoffend was to remove himself from temptation. As far as we know he abused only females, so a monastery would hold no temptations for him. He didn’t own a mobile phone so had no access to online child pornography.”
I started to feel marginally less hostile toward Walker. If Dusty’s theory was correct, at least he’d tried to stop himself from abusing. But had he succeeded?
“If he was genuine about not wanting to re-offend why did he start going out into the community? Did he find it too difficult to give up his so-called urges?”
“There’s no evidence he attempted anything improper while he was in town. Volunteering might have been his way of doing penance for his past actions.”
“So we’re back to his past; to his past victims?”
“I think so. Unless sinister secrets lurk below the serene surface of Sunyarta.”
Chapter 35
“Come on. Time for another talk with David Kowalski,” said Dusty one morning.
“Another drive to Mossman?” I enjoyed taking Dusty’s car out on the open road.
“Nope.” She grinned at me. “He’s right here in Port Douglas.”
“You want to check their stories? David and Abbie’s?”
Dusty shook her head. “I’m thinking of something else. What if he saw the monk one day and recognised him?”
“Right. You’re seriously considering David as a suspect?”
“If Abbie was your sister and you came face to face with her rapist, what would you do?”
In my mind’s eye I could see the familiar, happy faces of my sisters and felt the anger rising in me. I might be ‘sort of a computer geek’ but I was a man. What would I do if someone abused one of my sisters? I considered this before answering Dusty.
“I think I would have gone for his throat and tried to throttle him. I couldn’t have just let him walk away. You don’t really think about the consequences when someone close to you has been hurt.”
“Exactly!”
“Just the same, I don’t think I would have carried out a premeditated murder. I might have wanted to, but I doubt I’d have gone through with it.”
“What if you had also been the victim? Your anger and need for revenge would have been even stronger.”
“David?”
“So far we’ve assumed Walker only abused girls. But what if that was not the case?”
David was working at a business premises in the process of being refitted. The work vans parked outside were the only clues work was being carried out there until we stood in the open doorway. The sounds of machinery, hammering, men’s voices and a booming radio greeted us.
“Smoko!” Dusty called, standing on the doorstep with a container of coffee and a meat pie she’d bought on the way.
“Bribery,” she’d explained to me. “He agreed to talk during his smoko if I supplied the snack.”
A lull in the buzz of conversations inside followed Dusty’s announcement. David’s answering voice yelled, “Room at the end!”
We stepped onto the protective matting into the dark interior of the hallway. Paint smells and a dusty haze greeted us. In one room two workmen were hammering while another was using a sanding machine. One of the hammerers looked up as we passed, grinned and jerked his hammer toward the end of the hall. David was working alone in the ‘room at the end’ where electrical wiring emerged from various holes in the wall. Dressed in work boots and long shorts well equipped with pockets containing various tools, he was on a ladder guiding a length of wiring along the top of the wall where it met the exposed ceiling.
“Smells good,” he said over his shoulder as he descended the ladder. When he stepped onto the floor and turned around, I saw the front of his T-shirt bore the slogan Ladies Love Tradies. Either this was the T-shirt he reserved for days when special visitors were on site, or David’s tastes were more refined than most other tradesmen.
Dusty gave him the coffee, standing well back and holding it out with one arm extended.
“Hey! No need to be so cautious. I’m not going to knock this one to the ground.”
Dusty grinned and handed him the paper bag containing the pie. David gestured to the window sill which jutted out from the wall enough for us to lean on and use as a stool seat. Finding the sill too high, Dusty turned a large spool of electrical wiring upright and sat down on it.
“Righto,” said David, crossing his feet at the ankles and reaching into the paper bag. “You’ve kept your end of the bargain. What did you wan
t to ask me?”
His unguarded manner might have been due to the fact that Dusty had assured him beforehand she would not interrogate him about his sister. He obviously felt confident about handling any other queries.
Dusty looked up at him. “I wanted to ask about your school days.”
David dismissed his school days with a derisive snort. “School wasn’t my favourite time.” Dusty’s interest was piqued. “Sitting at a desk all day, writing things down,” continued David. “It just wasn’t my thing. English was the worst.” He looked at Dusty with a rueful smile. “You would have been one of those kids English teachers love. I wasn’t.” He stared down at his feet. “Reading was a nightmare. I couldn’t figure out how to stop the letters from jumping around all the time. The teachers just scoffed at me when I tried to explain what was happening – thought I was making up excuses.”
I remembered a kid at my primary school who complained about letters jumping around on the page. During reading time he would stare at his book with beads of perspiration glistening on his forehead. When the teacher asked him to read aloud, he just looked at her with tears in his eyes. Reading was easy for me so I didn’t understand his problem and, like any other heartless brat, I dismissed him as ‘one of the dumb kids’. I subsequently learned he’d been diagnosed as dyslexic, a condition I didn’t understand until later in life. Remembering this child gave me a glimpse of what school might have been like for David Kowalski. I realised his vulnerability could have made him a target for the likes of Paul Walker.
“I suppose you were bullied as well,” said Dusty. “Because of your unusual surname.”
“Yeah. A bit. But I gave as good as I got in the school yard. Hearing my name mispronounced all the bloody time during roll call and presentations – that was what annoyed me.”
Dusty’s empathy for the young David was not about to distract her. She took aim with an unexpected question. “Were you one of Paul Walker’s students?”
David lowered the pie he was about to put in his mouth. “Why do you want to know?”
“Were you?”
His eyes narrowed. “Bloody hell! Are you suggesting…?” He scrunched the paper bag into a ball and threw it angrily to the floor. I quickly reached across to steady his container of coffee which he’d placed on the window ledge between us.
“That scum didn’t touch me. If he’d tried, he would’ve come off second best. I can tell you that.”
Such a strong denial was either true or he wanted to believe it was.
Dusty eyed David pensively for a moment before signalling surrender with a raised hand. “I had to ask, David. I’ll be writing a book about this case when I’ve solved it. My readers will want to know I’ve covered all angles.”
That was true but I suspected part of the reason for posing the question was to unsettle David and consequently weaken his resistance to the question she was about to ask him.
“Well, you can tell your readers that if I’d known about my sister at the time, I would’ve…” He broke off, pressing his lips together in a hard line.
David seemed to have lost his appetite for the pie. He placed it on the window sill, picked up the coffee container, popped the plastic lid and gulped down some of the hot coffee.
“Which leads me to my next question.” Dusty offered David an apologetic smile. “Don’t take this as an accusation. It’s just one of those things I have to ask.”
David finished his coffee, tossed the empty container into a plastic bucket in the corner of the room and looked at Dusty warily, his brow wrinkled in a deep frown.
“No-one would blame you if you wanted to punish Walker for what he did to your sister. As you say, if you’d known what Walker was doing at the time you’d have acted.” Dusty paused then went in for the kill. “Did you have anything to do with the death of the monk known as Ram?” She watched David’s reaction intently. The look on her face told me she had switched on the Dusty Kent lie detector.
David maintained eye contact and answered tersely. “No. Neither did my sister. Tell your readers that.”
I would once have seen his ability to look Dusty in the eye and answer her question directly as an indication he was telling the truth. However, on a previous occasion Dusty had informed me that the ability to hold eye contact during questioning is often a skill developed by liars. Did that apply to David? Dusty might enlighten me later.
Chapter 36
“We can cross Lena Patterson off our list of suspects,” Dusty said a few days later.
My research on Lena had been time consuming. Knowing she would have turned nineteen in 2003 had given me a starting point. I was able to confirm, using my ‘highly trained IT skills’ to navigate some secret corners of cyber space, that Lena Patterson had flown to Thailand that year and later to the United States.
I then tried all sorts of internet searches, using her name, variations of her name and whatever background details I had, to find her in America. It was not a fruitful search, made more difficult by the fact that Patterson is a fairly common name. However, in the end I satisfied myself Lena had not returned to Australia and that was all we really needed to know.
Initially, Kimberley Grey was also dismissed as a suspect. I had established that the Grey family had returned to live in Western Australia several years ago. But I subsequently discovered both Kimberley and her brother Lyell had come back to the east coast. Lyell was working as a fashion designer in Melbourne while Kimberley had moved to Sydney and was now working in the skin care section at a large department store in the city centre.
Dusty had telephoned Kimberley, introduced herself and explained she was investigating the murder of Paul Walker. Kimberley had understandably been cool but answered Dusty’s questions politely, saying she had had no idea Paul Walker was a monk or that he was living in Queensland. At first, Kimberley seemed to have a solid alibi. She worked Monday to Friday so could not have been in Port Douglas on the day of the murder which was a Wednesday.
However, after checking the airline schedules, Dusty found the route from Sydney to Cairns was well serviced with daily flights and decided to delve further.
“What if Kimberley did know Paul Walker was in Port Douglas? What if she found out somehow and decided to get her revenge for what he’d done to her? She might have asked someone to cover for her on the Wednesday, sign her in or whatever they do in big stores. She could have flown to Queensland after work on Tuesday, stayed in Port Douglas that night, and flown back to Sydney on Wednesday morning. After murdering Walker.”
Dusty called the department store using her celebrity status to be put through to a senior executive who was happy to oblige by personally checking Kimberley’s work records.
“Kimberley didn’t have anyone covering for her,” said Dusty when she finished the call. A smirk of satisfaction and the gleam in her eye warned me of more to come. “On Wednesday February 19, Kimberley Grey was not at work. She’d called in sick.”
“Right. So she lied. Not a good look.”
Dusty grinned. “Especially when it’s Dusty Kent she’s lied to.”
“It was months ago though. She might have simply forgotten she had had a sickie.”
“Exactly what she’ll say if I call her and confront her. Which I won’t, because I’m not going to waste my time. I have what I need: the indisputable fact that she was not at work on the day of Walker’s death and therefore had the opportunity to kill him. She only had the one day off sick so if she did come to Port Douglas, it was by plane. What we’ll do is check to see if she took a flight to Cairns on the Tuesday.”
“You mean what I’ll do.”
“Yes, Mr Maze Master. You will go sneaking into those dark pockets of cyber space using your hacking skills to check the passenger lists of flights from Sydney to Cairns. Oh, excuse me, did I say hacking? I meant highly developed IT skills.”
I acknowledged her teasing with a nod. Using ‘highly developed IT skills’ as a euphemism for ‘hacking’ was a stand
ing joke between us. Technically, hacking is what I do to get the information for Dusty but all I do is gain unauthorised access. I don’t spread viruses or attack websites. I’m really just spying.
This morning we had returned to the same cafe we had breakfasted at when we first arrived in Port Douglas. I had not yet had a chance to complete my latest spying assignment. Instead of coconut juice, this time Dusty had opted for tea. She stirred the tea leaves round in the pot thoughtfully.
“If Kellie’s telling the truth about what time she was at Sunyarta on the morning of the murder, and if Moose is telling the truth about the time he was there…” She paused and looked at me as though waiting for me to finish her sentence. Unfortunately, I failed to understand the significance of what she was saying. Dusty spelled it out for me. “There must have been someone else there that morning. Moose glimpsed someone in the shadows at around five o’clock; it couldn’t have been Kellie since she wasn’t there until closer to six.”
“Right. Moose and truth? They don’t seem to go together.”
Dusty laughed. “I agree. If he’s telling the truth, who was the other person? It could have been any one of the other possible suspects: Kimberley, Abbie or David.”
“Or a rogue monk at Sunyarta,” I suggested.
“Yes. There’s still that possible snake in the grass to keep in mind.” Dusty closed the lid of the teapot.
“You haven’t forgotten Ram’s missing thong?”
Dusty looked at me quizzically.
“That’s the one aspect of the murder scene that doesn’t fit with one of Walker’s victims being the killer.” I was still hoping the murderer wasn’t one of the girls. “Isn’t a psychopathic monk more likely to take a trophy? Surely, Walker’s victims would be just as loathe to keep anything belonging to him as Kellie Edwards would be.”
I saw Dusty’s acceptance of my point reflected in her eyes.
“I agree. However, it’s possible the missing thong will be explained by something we don’t yet know.”
Disguising Demons Page 16