by Ian Edward
Before the end of the movie, Kate eased herself off the lounge and went to the doorway that led to the balcony. She stood quietly a moment, watching Adam. He was cradling a Scotch that he’d barely touched, sitting with feet propped against the railing, gazing out over the night sky, seemingly lost in thought.
It was, of course, rude behaviour on a dinner date. Normally Kate would have made a cutting remark and left in a huff, the relationship over. And yet, despite the fact she hardly knew this man she felt unusually comfortable in his company.
She wasn't offended. She sensed something troubling Adam and it wasn't anything personal between the two of them. The clouds had thinned, the air was fresh after the storm, and the moon was a perfect crescent shape. ‘I didn't think the movie was that bad,’ she said softly.
‘It wasn’t. And I’m sorry, Kate, I’m being a damn lousy date.’
She laughed. ‘Yes. The manner’s need work. Otherwise you’ve got potential.’ She sank into the chair beside him. ‘Is it anything you want to talk about?’
He didn't answer straight away. He sighed, stared off, then back again. ‘I guess it must’ve been that girl in the surf tonight. I didn’t think it would get to me like this...’
‘Instead of being able to unwind, your mind kept switching back to that beach?’
‘Yeah.’
She leaned forward, touched his arm. ‘I don't suppose something like this ever gets any easier, no matter how much experience you might have had.’
‘I see this sort of thing from time to time, Kate. You learn to deal with it. But...’ He stopped mid-sentence and looked to the distance again, allowing the thought to fade.
‘What...?’
‘I had a sister. She drowned here in Northern Rocks when we were kids, twenty two years ago.’
‘Oh my God-’
‘It's not something that ever goes completely away. But I never expected to be...rocked like this. Not after so long.’
Kate’s eyes met his and she moved in closer. ‘I’m guessing the anguish came back, and it was like a real bolt from the blue.’
He nodded.
‘It's perfectly understandable,’ Kate said. ‘Would it help if we talked about it...’
They sat on the balcony until the dawn broke, hands touching from time to time, and Adam told her all about his sister Alana.
CHAPTER THREE
It had been their third day stalking the banks of the great Adelaide River, beating their way through dense mangroves that flanked the waterway. Three days and nights of excessive heat and maddening mosquitoes, of mud that stank like rotting food as they pushed deeper and deeper into the Marrakai flood plains of the Northern Territory.
Normally, Greg Kovacs liked the heat and the open spaces of the Australian Outback. But even he was struggling against the extreme conditions in this part of the Territory. He couldn't help but marvel at the composure and stamina of Walter Coolawirra. The Aboriginal tracker, a good humoured man with a short, wiry build, never seemed to tire and hardly seemed to sweat.
‘They are close now, Greg, very close,’ Walter said, standing perfectly still with his face lifted to the sky, eyes alert and focused on a point somewhere in the tangle of vegetation that draped the horizon.
There was very little daylight left and the first visible stars were already twinkling in the inky blue of the sky. But there was no peace, not with the constant, thunderous babble that filled the air. The swamps were a vast nesting and feeding ground for hundreds of species of birds. Their cries and squeals made up a frenetic symphony that had at once both a beauty and a savagery that can only be experienced in the wild.
‘How close?’ Greg asked. It was already past time for them to find higher ground to set up camp.
‘North. Maybe twenty minutes, maybe thirty.’
‘Are they setting up camp?’
‘Cannot say, boss. But most likely. They have left it very late today.’
‘What about us?’
‘We should set up camp now. We’re close enough to close the distance in the morning. Early, early start for us, eh?’ Walter had been born and raised on the Aboriginal settlement in the Northern Territory town of Settler’s Gorge. One of the most skilled trackers in the region, he made a decent living. He often freelanced for the local police, the emergency services and the N.T. Wildlife Conservation Commission.
They pitched their tent and began cooking tinned foods on the carbine bush stove. As they had the past three nights, they rigged a kerosene lamp on wire over the camp to give them a small pool of light. Walter wouldn’t allow the lighting of even a fire. He wouldn’t allow anything that had the slightest chance of alerting the hunters to his and Greg’s existence.
‘They travelled a bloody long way today,’ Greg said as they squatted on the patch of dry grass, digging into the canned beans.
‘Bad day for them, Greg. No crocs. Who knows why? I expect they wanted to get as far in to the swampland as they could. They know that’s where the crocs are moving to this time of year. I’d say that when they do stop, they want to catch as many as they can in a short time and then head back. I think all the stories about these men have been true. They are professionals. They know their stuff.’
‘Who the hell are they?’ Greg wondered aloud. He had been a Wildlife Conservation Officer with the Commission for ten years. He and Walter had worked together many times, but never on such a lengthy foray into such a desolate area of the Territory as this. There had been reports of this mysterious gang, dubbed ‘the phantom hunters’ by Commission officers, for the past eighteen months.
The first reports had trickled in to the Commission at random – over a year ago a couple of trackers reported a large boat on the Adelaide River, with several on-deck, water submerged croc cages. The Commission’s light plane scanned the area but the boat was long gone.
Four months later local rangers in the south east, searching for a missing boy, had heard sounds that they associated with men capturing crocs. Later on, from a distance, they’d sighted a river craft that matched the one seen months earlier.
The rangers hadn’t been able to pursue the craft. They’d continued their search for the boy whom they found alive and unharmed several hours later.
And on the Aboriginal settlement at Settlers Gorge, the locals began to spread stories, heard from passing jackeroos and bushmen, of an organised gang with a sleek boat and sophisticated gear, traversing the waterways at staggered intervals and capturing crocodiles.
Six months earlier, a small team of the Commission’s rangers had spent five days flying over the area where the boat had been reported. On one occasion they’d spotted what appeared to be a boat. It was on a narrow, winding tributary of the Adelaide River, difficult to observe for very long because of the thick canopy of forest. They’d radioed the location back to HQ and the Commission had organised help from the Northern Territory police. They’d packed five armed officers into a four-wheel drive and sent them into the region. The objective was to intercept the craft whenever and wherever it banked first.
Once again the phantoms were long gone. All the police found were the remains of a day old camp on the bank.
There had been no further sightings or rumours for five months, until just five days ago when a Flying Doctors aircraft, diverting from its normal route to avoid a storm centre, radioed the police with the sighting of a boat heading toward the northern swamplands. The Flying Doctors, like all land and air services in the region, had been asked to report any boat sightings in the desolate outer-lying reaches of the Territory.
The Wildlife Conservation Commission’s chief executive, Harold Letterfield, acted quickly. There was no point, he decided, sending out planes or boats or a consignment of police – not into country like that. Instead he teamed the best Aboriginal tracker available with the fittest officer with the most field experience. Their brief was to follow the riverbanks, on foot, locate the hunters and keep track of them without being seen. They were to radio through t
he hunters’ movements on a regular daily basis. In the meantime, Letterfield had both rangers and police on standby with land and river craft.
The moment these poachers were on their way back and in more accessible areas, Letterfield’s combined forces would pounce.
That night it was Walter’s turn to take first watch. They’d been lucky thus far for the first two nights. No crocs or wild bush animals had approached their campsite.
Greg couldn’t sleep. He listened to the relative silence of the night – the birds were quiet – and despite the humidity he felt an uncharacteristic shiver run through him.
It was over twenty years since the Government outlawed the hunting of crocodiles. The saltwater crocodile, facing extinction at that stage, had become a protected species and in the two decades since then, their numbers had flourished once more.
There had, of course, been isolated incidents of hunters defying the Protected Species Act. But nothing like this.
Despite the shiver that touched his spine, Greg was looking forward to the morning. He had a love of all types of wildlife and he held a passionate belief in the Act and in the Commission’s role in upholding it. He knew that Walter felt the same. They both wanted to see these hunters stopped, and brought to justice.
But the shiver persisted, bringing with it a strange sense of dread.
CHAPTER FOUR
The mud flats were exposed on both sides of the river: wide, sloping mounds with reeds eddying the water, the river at low tide. The mangroves were swept by a brisk, warm wind. Greg Kovacs opened his eyes groggily, uncertain at first of where he was or what had happened. He blinked and looked about, taking in the banks overgrown with bush and trailing vines, and the low, swirling water. He was in an upright position, knee deep in the water, his arms outstretched, something digging into his wrists.
Rope. Thick coils of it, strung between the overhanging branches of trees. He tried to move and couldn’t, and the rope cut deeper into the tender flesh of his wrists. Slowly, he began to remember: Walter had woken him before the dawn, whispered to him to stay quiet. The tracker had heard sounds that he believed were those of men. He told Greg to remain still and alert and to wield the rifle in case of danger.
Walter then vanished into the shadows to investigate. He told Greg he wouldn’t be long; he had an unnerving suspicion that the hunters had become aware they were being followed, and in turn were now looking for them.
Greg didn’t remember how long he’d been crouched in the silent campsite. He knew he’d felt a sudden, crashing blow to the back of the head. He recalled just an instant of intense pain. Then nothing.
An hour must have passed because the sun was over the horizon now, soft light filling the spaces of the landscape. The heat was already strong and humid.
Who had attacked him? The hunters? If so, where were they?
Even as those questions rolled across his mind the reason became suddenly obvious. It was the eyes that Greg saw first as the rest of the saurian body blended in perfectly with the surroundings. Eyes that were the colour of gold, staring with cold intent, devoid of emotion, boring into him from the riverbank. Greg screamed out for Walter. Where was the tracker? Why hadn’t he come back for him? And then another terrifying thought: had the hunters found his friend as well?
The crocodile slid silently into the river. It’s teeth, designed perfectly for catching and holding living creatures, had spiky, crystal sharp edges. It’s jaws, powered by massive base muscles, are able to close with lightning speed and crushing strength.
Effortlessly it glided beneath the water toward its prey.
CHAPTER FIVE
Arriving early at the morgue, Adam was shown through to the lab by the security guard. Brian Markham was completing the final stages of the autopsy. He was writing on the lab chart, the body lying flat on the metal slab. Adam hesitated at the doorway. It certainly wasn’t his first time in the coroner’s lab, or the first time he’d stood here as Markham performed one of his post mortems, but Adam always felt the same creeping sense of unease. Normally, he wouldn’t have called by until later. His curiosity, and his sense of emotional attachment to this girl’s drowning, had drawn him earlier.
Markham motioned for him to come closer. ‘You’re just in time to fill in for my assistant. Jones just took off for the loo with some stomach virus.’
‘Great.’
‘No question the girl drowned,’ Markham said as Adam moved beside him. ‘The classic symptoms are all there – foaming at the nostrils and mouth, skin wrinkling on the palms and the soles, distending of the lungs. Condition of the body is consistent with its having been in the ocean for between twenty to thirty hours.’
‘So why are you wearing your something-isn’t-right face?’
‘Am I?’
‘I know that expression. It’s the way I’ll remember you in years to come.’
‘Is that so?’ Markham allowed a brief smile.
‘You think there’s something suspicious about this drowning?’
‘Suspicious? Yes. With bodies found in lakes and rivers, Adam, one of the many things we look for, to determine drowning, is the presence of stones or weeds grabbed by the subject and caught in the clenched hand by cadaveric spasm. There was nothing caught in the hand or under the nails of this girl, which is consistent with her being found in the ocean. However, both hands were formed into tight fists. You certainly wouldn’t expect a drowner to be forming fists if she drowned in the deep sea.’
‘Fists?’ Adam pondered this a moment.
‘Totally unnatural. In drowning incidents a calm is known to descend on the victim in the final moments – a dream-like state, if you will. Despite that, this girl still hadn’t unclenched her fists as she entered that fantasy state. Something kept the adrenalin pumping.’
‘You think she was striking out at something?”
‘Yes, although in an advanced state of drowning it would have been a slow motion movement. What’s more, as I’ve already stated, there is bruising. On the fingers and knuckles of both hands.’
‘It doesn’t fit an ocean drowning,’ Adam said.
‘No. Now, having said that, it could be that the fists are the result of a medical condition, known as abnormal posturing. By that, I mean forming fists or forming something like an arched back, any positioning known to be brought on by medical trauma like a stroke or a brain haemorrhage.’
‘There’s no evidence of such trauma?’
‘Nothing conclusive, but I can’t completely rule it out at this stage because such posturing could result without any medical stimulus. It’s been witnessed, for a variety of reasons, in near-drowning victims, though in actual drowned corpses there would be very few, if any, examples.’
‘Okay. So, abnormal posturing aside, what we may have here is a girl being held down in shallow water and beating her fists against an attacker.’
‘Possible, but still unlikely. A drowning person, held down in a near horizontal position, couldn’t put much force behind such blows. Even if they did, punching an attacker isn’t going to cause contusions like these.’
‘They’d have to have been smashed against something harder.’
‘Much harder.’
‘Like the side of a pool or a bathtub?’ Adam said.
‘Yes. But if we theorise that the girl was drowned by an attacker, then she would’ve been hitting out at that attacker, not striking out elsewhere.’
‘True.’ They stood silently for several moments.
Markham’s P.A., a plain but bubbly middle-aged woman named Maureen Gates, popped her head through the doorway.
‘Mornin’ all. Any takers for coffee?’
‘Morning, Maureen,’ said Markham. ‘And yes, please.’ He gave Adam a questioning glance.
‘For me as well.’
Maureen cocked her thumb and forefinger into a pistol shape and aimed it at Adam. ‘White with one if I remember correctly.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Marvellou
s woman,’ Markham said after she’d left. ‘Always switched on, don’t know how she does it. Mind you, it’s not a bad thing around a place like this.’
Adam nodded his agreement. He turned his attention once more to the autopsy. ‘Lashing out at a hard surface suggests the girl might have been trapped. A well or a cave?’
‘In which case I’d expect weeds or dirt or tiny particles of rock under her nails.’
‘Okay, but putting that aside a moment, she could’ve drowned somewhere else and then been dumped at sea.’
‘It’s an option. If so, I’d suspect the victim drowned in something other than saltwater. The concentration of chloride in the bloodstream would be a lot lower. But as putrefaction of the corpse has begun, I can’t determine that.’
‘The chemistry of the blood changes.’ Adam released a sigh of frustration.
‘I ran an FBC anyhow. Curiosity’s sake. The chloride level had increased, the sure sign of a saltwater drowning. However, the chemistry of the blood changes once a body has been submerged ...’
‘We can’t draw definite conclusions from the blood?’
‘Frustrating, but no…’
Adam returned a pained but accepting expression. ‘You mentioned needle marks. Drug use?’
‘Or a medical condition requiring blood transfusions. There’s no evidence of either from the organs, nor from the blood, but of course the blood work can’t be relied on.’
‘Okay, so for leads on her ID we have possible blood transfusions or drug dependence, along with fingerprints and dental matches.’
‘There’s nothing at all likely on the Missing lists?’ Markham pressed.
‘Not locally. We’ll have checked the national database by later this morning.’
Markham shook his head with the sad observation of the professional. ‘Girl’s no more than sixteen or seventeen. Someone should’ve known she was missing almost straight away.’ He cleared his throat. ‘There’s something else.’