Dark Country (Dungirri)

by Parry, Bronwyn

  He met Kris’s long, appraising look without blinking. But if she guessed that the information Marci had involved him in some way, she didn’t pursue it directly.

  ‘You paid her debts, tried to get her out of Sydney. What was Marci to you, Gil? And what are the two of you caught up in?’

  He hesitated, wondering how he could explain it all, where to start. ‘It’s a long story,’ he said.

  She curled her hands around her coffee mug and lifted it to her mouth. ‘Then start at the beginning.’

  The beginning. It seemed so long ago, the beginning of that part of his life, but it was where he and Digger and Marci and the Russos had first crossed paths.

  He took a mouthful of coffee. ‘Marci was married to Digger Doonan, back fifteen years ago. Digger gave me a job as a bouncer and general dogsbody in his pub, when I’d been sleeping rough in Sydney for weeks after I got out of prison. The pay was a joke but I got food to eat and a cockroach-infested room to sleep in on the premises.’

  She listened without commenting, and he had another drink of coffee before continuing, ‘Digger was a Vietnam vet, but he never really got his head back together afterwards, and with the booze he was easy pickings. He held the deeds to the pub, but he’d got himself in too deep with the Russo family. They’re big in the ‘Ndrangheta in Sydney.’

  She leaned forward. ‘The ‘Ndrangheta? The Calabrian mafia?’ Her short laugh held no humour at all. ‘Oh, Jesus, my day just keeps getting better.’

  So, Petric hadn’t tried to discredit him by telling her the seedier aspects of his connections. That made him wonder whether Petric was game-playing with his country colleagues, too. Or whether he just didn’t regard them as important enough to warrant sharing with them significant information.

  ‘The Russo family made their money from marijuana and cocaine in the 1970s and ’80s,’ he explained. ‘Vince, the one who died today, pursued mostly legal interests after that – imports, investments, property development – and left most of the running of the illegal business to his brother, Gianni. At least, that’s how Vince wanted it to appear. In reality, he exercised authority when Gianni crossed over what Vince considered a line. Gianni ran a tight territory, keeping control of drugs, brothels and pubs in his part of the inner south. Vince’s son, Tony, preferred Gianni’s style of business, and worked with him for years. It was Tony who oversaw Russo’s interests at Digger’s pub – drugs, girls, extortion.’

  Kris didn’t say anything, her mouth tight and disapproving.

  ‘Digger owed Tony, and Tony sent his thugs after him one night, just to put the frighteners on him, but Digger had a heart condition, and that’s how he died.’

  ‘Was Tony charged?’ she asked sharply. ‘Or his accomplices?’

  ‘No. They didn’t leave much evidence of anything but natural causes, and Tony cleaned up any messy questions by calling compliant cops to the scene, and a coke-addict doctor who certified that Digger had a heart condition and sky-high blood pressure.’

  Her frown deepened, but she merely said, ‘Go on.’

  ‘I’d been at the pub more than a year by then. I knew Vince a little. Thing was, he’d known Marci since she was a kid, had a soft spot for her, and he used to come and visit the pub sometimes. He had some control over Tony and kept him from squeezing Digger dry. In return, Digger lent me to Vince a few times when he needed a driver or an extra bodyguard.’

  That didn’t go down well, judging by the hard look she shot him.

  ‘One of the things I’d learned was that information could be more powerful than knives or fists. So I kept my eyes open, and watched and waited. When Digger died, it turned out he’d left the pub to Marci and me, a fifty–fifty split. Maybe he had the guilts because I’d been running the place for him for all of a few bucks every now and then. Maybe he figured if he left it all to Marci she’d lose it within a month. I don’t know. The pub had been in his family for almost eighty years, and he was proud of that. But he didn’t have any family of his own.’

  ‘Let me guess.’ Her tone was dry and cold. ‘Tony wasn’t happy?’

  ‘Tony was enraged. He wanted control of the pub, made all sorts of threats. But I wanted to run the business on my terms, not Tony’s. Turn it into something decent if I could.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I made a deal with the devil. With Vince. I met with him, and let him know about the contents of a package locked up in a safety deposit box, and that it would stay there as long as Gianni and Tony and their dirty business stayed out of my pub, but if anything happened to me or the pub, the contents would be copied and sent to some senior police officers, the anti-corruption commission, and a few top journalists.’

  Her mug thumped down on the table. ‘Shit, Gillespie, what the hell did you have on him?’

  He took a slow breath, knowing he was about to damn himself, steeling himself for the condemnation that would darken her eyes. For all that he expected it, the loss of her trust would leave a jagged emptiness inside him. He’d only known her for twenty-four hours, and he shouldn’t care. It shouldn’t matter to him. But it did.

  With no choice, he held her suspicious look. ‘I had a video, proving he ordered and was present at the murder of a cop.’

  She’d been punched in the face once long ago, and his words hit with the same hard slam of betrayal, anger and nauseating shock.

  ‘Oh, Jesus. You were there? And you never reported it? A murdered police officer?’

  ‘He was no hero, Blue. The guy might have carried the badge, but he was up to his neck in corruption and vice. Drugs and kickbacks were only part of it. He was trafficking teenage girls – some of them only thirteen, fourteen years old. He and his mates made a mint from kids being raped and brutalised. Even Tony didn’t touch that kind of stuff.’

  If he’d been defensive, making excuses, it would have fuelled her anger further. But his explanation was just that, an explanation, delivered with the weary tone of disillusion, and her anger faded a notch.

  ‘That doesn’t make it right.’

  ‘No, it doesn’t. I couldn’t have stopped it, though. If I’d tried, I would have just ended up on the slab myself. The guy had made the mistake of luring in a Russo girl, a cousin of Vince and Gianni’s. However, it did give me a lever, later, to get the pub clean and out of the Russos’ territory.’

  ‘And what if that evidence could have put them away?’ she challenged. ‘Cleaned the streets of Gianni and Vince?’

  ‘There would have just been somebody else move in. Tony taking over, or rival groups expanding their empires. Believe me, there are far worse criminals out there than Vince Russo, and one of them is Tony. Vince’s honour and morals might have been skewed, but at least he had some, and he curbed his family’s excesses. Besides, who would I have given the evidence to? The only cops I knew then were the ones taking kickbacks and running drugs.’

  She would have bristled at the criticism of her colleagues, if it wasn’t for the bleakness in his words.

  ‘You don’t have a high opinion of the police, do you?’

  ‘I haven’t met many I trust, Blue.’

  ‘Do you trust me, Gillespie?’

  He took a long time to answer, and she found herself stilling her breath, trying to read something, anything, in the midnight dark of his eyes.

  ‘I don’t think you’d be easily corrupted,’ he said eventually.

  ‘Well, that’s not quite the ringing endorsement I expected,’ she commented wryly. But she’d asked a question, and he’d answered it, and his frankness probably spoke more about his confidence in her than his words.

  ‘What was the information Marci had?’ she asked, getting back to the real questions at hand. ‘And why was it so dangerous?’

  ‘She thought she knew who informed on two bent detectives, and figured their associates would pay for the name. But she refused to believe that since she gave the person the information to start with, they’d hold her accountable, too.’

 
Kris quickly added up what she knew, and took a punt. ‘The person she gave the information to – the informant – that would be you, right?’

  He stared down into his mug, then swallowed the last mouthful and put it on the bench beside him. The glance he threw her had more than a touch of defiance, as if he expected her to disapprove. ‘Yeah. That would be me.’

  The defiance left her wondering. Had he sold the information for money or other advantage? Or did he think she’d side with fellow officers, no matter how corrupt, and condemn him for informing on them?

  Everything he told her left her with more questions than answers.

  ‘Is that what you argued about? The night you carted her out of the pub?’

  ‘She wanted a share of what I’d sold the pub for, even though I’d paid her above market value for her half, years ago. I said I’d help her out of the mess she was in, if she left Sydney and the boyfriend. She didn’t like that, started making threats, and I told her not to be stupid.’

  ‘Some people might consider that kind of threat as a motive for murder.’

  He conceded the point with a small nod. ‘Some people might.’

  But he’d told her he hadn’t murdered Marci, and she believed him. None of what she’d learned about him added up to the kind of man who would beat a woman to death to protect himself. Which still left the problem of who had killed her. Not to mention all the other questions raised by Gillespie’s revelations.

  Sorting through it in her head, trying to decide what she most needed to find out, what she needed to do, she absently lifted the mug to take a sip of coffee and discovered it already empty.

  He noticed, lifting the half-full plunger in offering.

  ‘No, thanks. Any more at that strength, and I’ll be awake until Christmas.’

  The painkillers and the slug of caffeine had returned some clarity to her brain, and when she stood it was stiffness more than pain that she felt. She found a notepad and a pen under a pile of bills on the table, and passed them to Gil.

  ‘I’m going to make a couple of phone calls. I want you to write lists,’ she told him. ‘Who might have murdered Marci, who might want to frame you. And since Vince Russo’s dead and he has links with both of you, I want to know who you think could have murdered him, too. When it comes to murder, I’m not big on coincidences.’

  He took the pen and pad and didn’t argue.

  As she reached the door, she remembered something he’d said, and although it wasn’t directly connected with Marci’s death, she wanted an answer.

  ‘You said you wanted to turn the pub into a decent place, Gillespie. Did you succeed?’

  It wasn’t much of a grin, but he’d been so tense and wary all day that the unexpected curve of his mouth, the light of pride in his normally guarded eyes caught her by surprise.

  ‘Yeah, Blue,’ he said quietly, ‘I did.’

  The knock on the back door jerked Gil out of the momentary distraction of her smile and back to blunt reality. He cut in front of her and caught her hand just as she raised it to open the door.

  ‘Find out who it is first,’ he warned her, releasing her hand quickly, too aware of its warmth on his skin, and not daring to interpret her quizzical frown.

  His growl must have carried further than he meant it to, or sounded threatening, because they heard Adam’s worried call, ‘Kris, are you all right?’

  She pulled the door open wide. ‘Everything’s fine, Adam. Come on in.’

  The young constable didn’t relax or take his hand off the weapon at his hip until he’d given Gil a long, hard stare. Gil didn’t blink.

  Adam eventually relaxed enough to pull a rolled-up piece of paper from inside his jacket.

  ‘What can you tell me about the vehicle that ran Kris down?’ he asked Gil.

  Gil repeated pretty much what he’d told Kris, out on the road. ‘Black or very dark in colour. Large four-wheel drive type – the size of a Patrol or a Land Cruiser. The way he accelerated, it has to be a powerful engine, and probably petrol rather than diesel.’

  ‘Do you know anyone who owns a vehicle like that?’

  The edge of suspicion in Adam’s cool cop stance and tone put Gil immediately on guard. ‘No. Why?’

  ‘What’s going on, Adam?’ Kris demanded.

  Adam tapped the paper against his fist, and then unrolled it and passed it to Kris.

  ‘Jeanie’s security system caught this vehicle around four this morning. This is the best image we have of it. They used the driveway to turn from the side street back on to the main road. But before that, it parked by Gillespie’s car, and two people manoeuvred something large out of their vehicle and into his.’

  Kris sat down heavily in the nearest chair, and handed the photo to Gil.

  The grainy image showed the vehicle side on, silhouetted by the streetlight behind. Gil didn’t know enough about recent models to be able to pick the make from the shape, but it was definitely large and dark.

  Watching for his reaction, Adam asked, ‘What’s the odds of two dark four-wheel drives being involved in incidents on the same day?’

  ‘Bugger all.’ Gil provided the unnecessary answer, and didn’t bother keeping the bitterness from his words.

  It hadn’t been some smart alec local on the road tonight after all, and that knowledge doused the relief at there being evidence of someone else dumping Marci’s body. Rage boiled in him, and he wanted to ram his fists into something, rip someone apart for menacing her. The threat to Kris was real, and he’d brought it on her. Whoever was after him had already come close to killing her.

  But if the realisation had thrown her for a moment, Kris showed little sign of it now. She held out her hand for the photo, and when he passed it back, she briskly assessed it.

  ‘Can’t see anything distinguishing on the car. No roof-rack, aerials or markings. Did any of the other images show anything, Adam? Or anything identifiable with the people?’

  ‘No. The shots across the road are too far out of focus. One bloke is a little taller than the other, that’s about all I can tell. Might be able to get a height estimate if we can identify the make of car.’ He pulled a USB drive from his pocket. ‘Jeanie’s printer didn’t have much ink, but I copied the whole sequence of images.’

  ‘Good. Come into the office, and we’ll take a look at them. You, too, Gillespie.’

  They crowded around the desk in her small office, and Gil tried to force his attention to the computer screen, and not the woman sitting at it. But standing beside her, closer than they’d been in the kitchen, he was all too aware of her – and of Adam, on the other side of her, who kept him under close scrutiny. Kris might have decided to trust him, but her constable had yet to make up his mind.

  There were well over a hundred images, most too fuzzy to decipher any detail, and she flicked through them quickly. The dark shape of the vehicle pulling up beside his car. Two figures, little more than shadows near the cars. But then the camera had caught them at the back of his lighter vehicle, with a large smudge of white between them. Marci. The rage burned again, but he made himself watch. It took them too many frames to get her into his boot, and his imagination filled in the gaps, seeing them callous and disrespectful, manhandling her body to fit her into the awkward space, sickening him.

  Kris’s face was pale, her forehead creased in a frown, but she kept clicking through the frames as the reversing lights of the car flared in an image, then a headlight, side on, in the next. For several frames, it was out of sight, only a glow on the edge of the image indicating the turn into the Truck Stop, before the frame Adam had printed, of the whole vehicle in as much detail as they would get, right in centre front of the camera.

  ‘Can you take it back a few frames?’ Gil asked.

  The diesel pumps stood sentinel in the illumination from the security light, only darkness beyond and the glow off to the right. Gil counted eight or nine frames.

  ‘They stopped, out of the picture,’ Kris said. ‘But why?’

/>   ‘Yes. That glow doesn’t change. What’s over behind the building?’ Gil wracked his memory of parking on that side of the building last night and slammed his hand on the desk. ‘Christ, it’s the garbage skip. They’ve dumped something in the garbage.’

  ‘Shit. Wait a minute. Let me check back a few frames again.’ Kris studied the screen closely as she reversed back a few more images. ‘There, see that?’ She pointed at a lighter smudge on one of the figures. ‘It’s almost like a reflection, or a shine, on something large that he’s carrying.’

  ‘Plastic?’ Gil wondered aloud. ‘Did they wrap her in plastic sheeting before transporting her?’

  ‘They could have wrapped her in something,’ Adam said. ‘There were blood smear patterns. Vinyl or plastic would fit them. I never thought to look in the garbage skip.’

  ‘None of us did. We weren’t looking for a murder weapon. There was no reason to think there might be something across the road.’ Kris leaned back in the chair, rubbing her temples with both hands. Overtired, in pain, with too heavy a load on her shoulders – a load that he’d put there – yet she pulled herself together within seconds, deciding the necessary action. ‘Adam, we’ll need to secure the skip until Forensics can get back here. Can you go down, keep an eye on things while I call Sandy and see if he can come back tonight? I’ll get a couple of guys from the Birraga night shift to come over as soon as they can.’

  ‘No worries.’ The young man’s cheerful willingness to work even longer hours impressed Gil, and he didn’t begrudge the copper’s caution where he was concerned. Adam’s loyalty and commitment lay with Kris and the police service, and she needed as much of that as she could get right now. ‘I’ll just go grab a torch.’