EDITOR'S NOTE
Monday, October 1, 2012
Wit & Wisdom
LINDA LANDRIGAN, EDITOR
Few would argue that intelligence is a necessary prerequisite for the successful detective, but as the self-help books tell us, there are different kinds of intelligence. This month's stories...
FICTION
FICTION
EDITOR'S NOTE
Wit & Wisdom
LINDA LANDRIGAN, EDITOR
Few would argue that intelligence is a necessary prerequisite for the successful detective, but as the self-help books tell us, there are different kinds of intelligence. This month's stories showcase characters who display their smarts in a variety of ways. There are the coping skills of Steve Hockensmith's memory-impaired retired detective; the cooperative skills of cops from different agencies in David Edgerley Gates's complex procedural; the cultural intelligence of Rex Burns's Aboriginal police officer in the Australian outback; the systems intelligence of Chris Muessig's security professional; the extrasensory perception of the detective in Raymond Goree's tale; and the native cleverness of Jas. R. Petrin's two teenage boys caught in the wrong place.
Of course, mystery readers are known for their intelligence as well, which is why we're sure you'll find this month's issue an intellectual delight.
FICTION
FICTION
CONSTABLE SMITH AND THE LOST DREAMTIME
REX BURNS
Constable Leonard Smith squinted against the glare of the Indian Ocean. The girl's body looked as if it had washed up along with the wisps of sea grass that marked high tide. It lay half on its side,...
MAD DOG
JAS. R. PETRIN
"It's him," Robert told us. "I know it is." We were at Pappy's, a local steakhouse, a place we'd frequented in our twenties but had gotten away from in recent years. Recent decades, more like it. I...
COMING UP FROM CAPE FEAR
CHRIS MUESSIG
We sat in the fantail of Difile's fifty-footer enjoying an excellent single malt and the Diamond Crowns he had handed around. The sun had just set, and the marina was left mostly to quiet parties and...
FRANK
STEVE HOCKENSMITH
A Sunny Day The old lady was talking to him about toothpaste, and he didn't know why. "I always buy Colgate. Always. I'm very loyal," she said. "And I get it in the big tubes. Economy size. It's...
A CHANGE OF HEART
RAYMOND GOREE
Not many people get a second chance at life. Most of them just seem to disappear when they die, leaving behind nothing but worn memories and a hole in the lives of the people who loved them. I guess...
CRAZY EIGHTS
DAVID EDGERLEY GATES
Their caseload was murder that October. Literally. Boston had seen seventeen homicides in the month so far, a spike mostly attributed to gang violence, but the month wasn't half over. Major Crimes...
EDITOR'S NOTE
DEPARTMENTS
Next Article
FICTION
CONSTABLE SMITH AND THE LOST DREAMTIME
REX BURNS
Constable Leonard Smith squinted against the glare of the Indian Ocean. The girl's body looked as if it had washed up along with the wisps of sea grass that marked high tide. It lay half on its side, one arm under the torso, the other folded against the foot of the steep bluff.
He took photographs as he approached the corpse across the wave-swept sand by following the footprints of Indigenous Ranger Nathan Ross. Above Smith, on the bluff that towered thirty meters over the beach, Ross squatted in the hot winter sun and kept his eyes away from the body.
Scratches in the packed beach ran from the girl's black hair to a scatter of sand balls dredged from a small black hole where a crab waited hungrily for the intruder to leave. Leonard knelt and saw what had lured the creature: Where the curve of scalp should have been, light showed through the tangle of hair. The crushed skull no longer bled, but a thread of gray brain had been tugged out, along with the girl's life and hopes and dreams.
He pushed that thought away and went to the distant, cold place in his mind where he could photograph the body and study the injury. Something hard, something heavy enough to bash the bone deeply. But other than the tattered flesh on eyelids, lips, and ears caused by feeding fish or crabs, no injuries to the face. No bloating that he could see. The girl's palms and the soles of her feet showed the beginning of washer-woman's skin from immersion. A cloud of flies, busy with hunger, swirled over the corpse. The autopsy would determine when she died and how; but from the absence of maggots, Smith guessed that she had lain here less than a day.
It was possible the blow came after she was in the water—that she dived in and struck her head on a reef before drowning. But he saw no abrasions on her knees or elbows where the surging water might have dragged her across the seabed. No cuts from coral on the torso beneath the twist of half open blouse, none along the girl's legs beneath the cut-off jeans.
He stood and gazed up and down the long, sun-filled beach. To the north, cliffs of red pindan earth jutted into the calm sea; south, pink sand faded emptily into mist. Almost on the horizon, a sport fishing boat, probably headed south to Broome, was too distant to show its wake as it made a gliding white dot. A seagull's faint cry heightened the emptiness of the wind.
"Handle it, Smith." On the sat-phone, Senior Sergeant's voice had been weary. "Business as usual until the effing courts make up their minds about the bloody Sovereignty issue. Record the scene, get the body down here, that's all you have to do. A detective will take it from there." But, Sovereignty issue aside, Leonard doubted that any district detective, even in a tourist season this slow, would rush to investigate something as common as one more Aboriginal death.
He shouted up to Ross. "Oy, mate! Throw down the tarp from the ute—it's in the tray behind the off seat."
The man looked at Smith for a long moment before getting up to slap sand from his trousers. He disappeared and a few moments later tossed the folded cloth down. Smith straightened the arms and legs as best he could and closed the torn blouse over the girl's swelling but unformed breasts. Spreading the canvas, he carefully anchored its edges with damp sand to shelter her until the ambulance made the hundred kilometers up the Cape Leveque Road from Broome. Then he climbed up the bluff to settle beside the ranger.
The Indigenous Rangers was an Aboriginal group that coordinated with state and commonwealth agencies to care for the ancestral country. Its members worked with local communities to protect the Dampier Peninsula's wildlife and plant life from poachers, and to combat illegal fishing offshore. Any ranger—Land or Sea—knew far more than Leonard about this area and its inhabitants.
"Good thing you found her before the seagulls did."
Nathan grunted. "If you call it good."
"Recognize her?"
A nod.
Smith wasn't surprised; the population of the peninsula, scattered over twenty-thousand square kilometers and six language groups, was less than a thousand people. "Name?"
The ranger shook his head. To say the victim's name would call her spirit back to seek revenge. "Lives in Ganlargin Community."
"Parents' names?"
"Both parents dead: grog. She and her brother Ronald live with her mother's father." The ranger added, "He's a community elder—teaches the kids about bush lore, hunting, dreamtime stories."
Grog-orphans—familiar on Aboriginal reserves, even those that had banned all alcohol. "Any recent dustups? Any humbug she was into?"
Nathan shrugged. "Don't know her that much. Just see her around now and then."
"Do you remember what time you
found her?"
"Sun was half high when I called in—nine, maybe ten."
Senior Sergeant had called Smith around eleven, and it had taken him almost two hours to make the drive from the Multi Function Police Facility in Lombadina to the isolated beach.
"You know anybody who might have bashed her?"
"No." Nathan sucked a deep breath and stared out at the ocean. "You think she was killed?"
"Maybe."
The ranger frowned into the sea glare. "That would be bad. Real bad."
That was true. "This beach part of your patrol?"
"Yeah—Camp Inlet to Carnot Bay." His hand flicked toward the ocean. "Sea Rangers have all that."
"What are the currents along here?"
"Maybe two knots at full. Run southeast with the rising tide, northwest when it falls."
"Tidal range?"
"Anywhere from three to five meters. This time of the moon . . . maybe four meters. Up to the cliff, anyway."
"What time was high tide this morning?"
He thought a moment. "Probably around six."
A tiny ripple in the southwest horizon some thirty kilometers out snagged Leonard's gaze. "Is that the Lacepede Islands there?"
Nathan squinted. "You got good eyes. Yeah, the East Island light, anyway. Can't see the islands—too low."
"Anyone live out there?"
He shook his head. "Nature Reserve: sea turtles, dugong, bird rookeries. There's some pearl farms and a lot of fishing boats—good fishing on the reef. But no landing without a permit from one of the local communities. Poachers can make forty, fifty thousand dollars stealing green and long-necked turtles, so the Sea Rangers keep a good eye out." A thought struck him and he nodded toward the corpse. "The one she lives with, he issues the landing permits for Ganlargin Community."
Leonard considered that. "Any idea which direction she could have drifted from?"
"Has to be south—tide's still going out. It'll turn soon, maybe in an hour." He added, "She wasn't here too long or the salty would have her."
Saltwater crocodiles swam off all of northern Australia. "Would he smell her?" Although the sun's heat had lessened the rigor mortis in the arms and legs, the flies had only begun to smell death, and as yet the odor did not reach human noses.
"See her. They got sharp eyes—cruise outside the break for whatever might wash up." Nathan's arm made a sweeping motion. "I see one along here now and then: nose, eyes, spurs on the back and tail breaking water. He sees me, too—stays offshore and watches me until I'm gone."
"Big one?"
"Good six meters, maybe seven." He added, "It's his territory—been going up and down this piece of country for years."
Leonard could not help looking over his shoulder toward the bush.
Which Nathan saw. "He's not up here. Has a nest somewhere on a quiet inlet."
"Could he crush a skull?"
"Sure! But he'd take what he found." He nodded at the canvas. "Wouldn't leave her."
"Did you see any people around here this morning?"
"A few boats out of Broome headed north." He explained, "Fishing and swimming's better up the coast. And that's where the tourist camps are, the whale watching, and all."
"What's the grandfather's name?"
Nathan murmured so the answer would not carry to the beach. "Billy. Billy Yaburara." He frowned at the horizon. "You going to tell him?"
"My job."
"I'm glad it's not mine. He told me he was teaching her to be the first female ranger. Was real proud of her. Said she learned faster than her brother."
"He had no trouble with her?"
"Not her, not her brother Ronald. Both good kids, I hear. Don't know anybody would want to hurt either of them."
Smith's sat-phone rattled. The display said it was the ambulance from Broome, and the voice asked for more specific directions. "Bloody tracks run all over the place, mate. What's your coordinates?"
Leonard read the location from his GPS and added, "Due west of Ngardalargin, five—six kilometers." Then, to Nathan, "Should be here in twenty minutes."
But it was twice as long before the sun glinted on a slowly bobbing windscreen as the bulky vehicle picked its way across the pindan toward them. In the Wet, leaving the sealed Cape Road was impossible; in the Dry it was almost so. Leonard stood so the driver could see which bit of cliff to aim for.
"Hell of a long way beyond the black stump, mate." The two men carrying a stretcher stared down at the tarp. "Give us a hand, then."
Leonard could hear Nathan swallow as he took a deep breath and joined them. In his effort to avoid touching the corpse, he did not help place the body in the bag nor load it onto the canvas. But he put his back into working the stretcher up the cliff and into the open rear door. The vehicle slowly lurched away, starting the victim's long journey first to Broome and then the twenty-two hundred kilometers south to Perth for the postmortem and toxicology tests at the state mortuary.
Nathan threw a few handfuls of sand on his chest and shoulders and scrubbed it off.
Leonard watched him try to wash away the lingering feel of death. "You have a spirit doctor to smoke you?" Most of the Indigenous communities had men of high degree whose rituals maintained a balance between the spirit world and this one, and who were called on for protection when the world of the dead approached too near the living.
"Yeah. But I don't know when he might get to it. Long time, maybe." He shook his head. "If she was killed . . ."
The mysteries of dealing with malevolent ghosts had their requirements, many of which took often lengthy and always secret preparations. Leonard had been taken away before he could be initiated into his clan's skin lore, but he knew how strong were the beliefs of those who had. And something as serious and spiritually disruptive as a murder would call for serious and spiritually profound rites.
As Leonard said, it was his duty to inform the victim's nearest relatives. Nathan gave Leonard directions to Ganlargin Community and then headed along the cliff to complete his patrol. Smith steered his Tojo down a two-rut track cut roughly across the pindan toward a scatter of metal roofs rising above low bush. A sun-bleached wooden sign identified the community and warned NO GROG. At its foot, rusty beer cans and splintered bottles made reply. A woman in the first house Leonard stopped at pointed out Billy Yaburara's roof.
Like the other ten or twelve homes scattered about, the roof was elevated a meter or so above the wooden walls to let air circulate and to provide deep verandas on three sides. A cook-shed was tacked on the fourth side and a sandy path led to the dunny. Smith clumped up two board steps and knocked on the door frame. "G'day—anyone home?"
A muffled thump of bare heels came from somewhere and a silhouette crossed a window in the far wall. Then a furrowed, white-bearded face peered through the fly-wire. Behind him stood a youth in his early teens.
"Mr. Yaburara? Billy Yaburara?" Leonard introduced himself. "May I come in?"
The old man studied Smith and his truck, eyes suspicious. "What you want?"
Leonard took off his hat. "I have some bad news for you. It's your granddaughter, sir. . . . I'm sorry to tell you her body's been found."
Yaburara pressed his forehead against the fly-wire. After a few moments, he asked in a hoarse whisper, "What happened?"
"Not sure. Could have been an accident—or not. Her body's been sent to Perth to find out."
The wrinkles and lines that creased his dark skin seemed to harden into a mask. "Will they send her home?"
"Yes. It might take a week or so, but yes—she'll be coming home."
The man's reply was less word than groan.
Leonard asked the youth, "You're Ronald—her brother?"
The youth stepped backward as if Leonard had threatened him. "Yes."
"I need to ask both of you some questions."
Yaburara finally opened the door for Leonard. "Where was she?"
"On the beach north of here. When did you see her last?"
He st
ared somewhere past Leonard, bony shoulders lifting and falling. Ronald stared at the dark planks of the floor. It was jarrah wood, hard as iron, lasting forever, and—in the towns—eagerly sought and expensive. Finally, Yaburara's whisper broke the silence, "Last night. Dinner."
"Do you know where she went after dinner?"
"Women's camp—to learn women's business."
"Who was she meeting at the Women's Camp?"
"Her mother's sister's daughter: Clara Wiggin."
"She was going to stay all night?"
Yaburara nodded.
That would not be unusual—ceremonies often took an entire night or even several.
Leonard hesitated, but finally asked, "Do you know anyone who maybe wanted her dead?"
Yaburara's eyes went bloodshot with anger or fear or pain, but he only shook his head in silence.
"Maybe she was drinking with someone? Sniffing petrol, maybe? Got drunk, fought over nothing, somebody didn't mean to hit her?"
"No. Not her. She didn't do none of that."
Or at least the old man did not know that she did. "What about you, Ronald? Do you know if she did any of that humbug?"
The youth looked up. "None of that here."
It was everywhere, but he nodded as if he believed the boy. "Someone may have killed her, Mr. Yaburara. Do either of you know why someone might do that?"
The old man, mouth a tight line, shook his head again.
Leonard waited for a question or a challenge to his assertion, for some sign of shock at the idea of the girl being murdered. But the two were silent and he could feel them stifling emotion. Finally, "I need her name and age for the police report."
The old man flinched, but he murmured, "Nancy. Nancy Ngambe. She's fourteen."
Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine 10/01/12 Page 1