by Robert Sims
‘He’s selling off the firm next month. We’re all getting the chop.’
The waitress came over and Rita ordered a latte.
‘When I say he’s evil,’ Flynn resumed, ‘I mean it literally. He’s got everyone fooled, the way he charms the pants off people. Like the devil himself. But underneath he’s got the scruples of a thug.’
This was beginning to sound like nothing more than personal resentment. She wondered if there was any real information for her.
‘Is he really that bad?’
‘I’ve accessed his private data. It shows what he’s up to. He manipulates everyone. Exploits their strengths and weaknesses.
Corrupts whatever he touches. His public image - fake. Business ethics
- non-existent. Marriage - a sham. Private life - degenerate. And he doesn’t care who gets hurt. That’s why you should stop him.’
‘Me? Personally?’
‘You’ve got him worried. He thinks you’re onto him.’
‘About what?’
‘Whatever you suspect him of.’
‘I suspect him of a lot of things,’ said Rita. ‘What can you tell me about Kelly Grattan’s sudden exit?’
‘I’ve already told you all I know, which is nothing.’
‘When you say Barbie’s corrupt,’ she went on, ‘have you got any hard evidence against him?’
Flynn cut her short. ‘That’s your job. This is off the record, remember?’
The waitress placed a latte on the table as a suburban train rumbled out of the station.
Apart from confirming her opinion of Barbie, this didn’t seem to be going anywhere helpful.
‘Why do you say his marriage is a sham?’
‘It’s just about money. For both of them. That’s why she whored for him in Tokyo.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I don’t know the details. Just that Giselle’s body was part of the deal. What you’d call a sweetener.’
There was nothing she could do with this information, amazing as it was - though she wondered if it was true. ‘You mentioned his private life.’
‘He uses prostitutes.’
‘I saw that for myself,’ she said. ‘At his party last night.’
‘No, you don’t get it.’ Flynn shook his head. ‘He uses them all the time. He’s addicted to them. That’s how you catch him out.
Expose him. Destroy his reputation.’
‘I’m not some sort of moral crusader.’
‘You’re a hotshot detective with the Sexual Crimes Squad,’ Flynn interrupted again. ‘We’ve all seen what you do - how you crack cases, deliver summary justice, blow away criminals.’
‘Don’t be conned by the media,’ she said. ‘Look, I know Martin Barbie’s an immoral man with a fake image. But unless he’s breaking the law, he’s allowed to be manipulative. He can also be as decadent as he likes with consenting adults, including his wife.’
‘What about his complete lack of business ethics?’
‘Again, that’s only relevant if you can prove he’s breaking the law.’
Rita sighed. ‘In my opinion the closure of Xanthus Software is no great loss. The firm is riddled with corporate neurosis. If it wasn’t being shut down, I’d recommend a team of industrial psychologists go in and blitz the place.’ She drank some coffee and decided there was nothing she could act on. ‘So let’s be realistic.’
‘Huh.’ Flynn showed his contempt. ‘Same fucking thing he said to me. You and Barbie have more in common than you realise. You play by the same rules.’
‘It isn’t a game.’
‘Of course it is. Like everything else in life.’ He pushed away his empty whisky glass and got up from the table. ‘I’ve been wasting my time talking to you and I’ve got better things to do. Like deciding what happens with the rest of my fucking life.’ With that he walked off.
Rita shook her head and finished her latte.
As she left the cafe the railway bells were clanging again, prompting a tired father in distressed denim to chase a toddler along the path, the little boy excited at the approach of the train. While she waited for the gates to open she cast her mind back to the hospital interview with Kelly Grattan. The question mark over Kelly’s injuries was lodged in her case notes like an unresolved discrepancy, while Kelly’s deceit, pay-off and flight overseas were consistent with the culture of angst that infested the firm. Xanthus was an investigative itch that Rita couldn’t scratch, and Flynn had added nothing to alter that. As a line of inquiry, it was still a dead end.
It was late Sunday, around the time of evensong, when she arrived, and Barbie was wearing a gold silk robe. She walked hesitantly into his suite and gasped at the panoramic view, the gleaming lights of the skyline filling the windows.
‘Very impressive,’ she said, her voice rich with the intonation of old Europe.
He looked her up and down. She was a good choice, young and fair-haired with high cheekbones and sultry eyes. She was dressed in a suit that would deflect suspicion.
‘Where are you from?’ he asked.
‘Moscow.’
‘How old are you?’
‘I’m twenty-two,’ she said pertly. ‘And I offer all services.’
‘Very good, Natasha. We’ll start with the oral.’
As she undressed he tossed aside the robe and sat naked on his embroidered sofa. Then she got down on her knees between his legs.
Her compliance was what he needed - someone at ease with venality, no questions asked.
He’d set the scene before her arrival, scattering rugs, putting candles on the table and lighting the incense. Its pungent scent drifted through the room, adding to the strangely blasphemous mood induced by the Gregorian chant playing softly on the music system.
It appealed to his sense of decadence, letting the sound of religion calm his mind while the young Russian knelt in front of him, her perfect body glowing in the candlelight. She was like a lubricious nymph - and she was at his mercy.
Rita arrived at the police complex on Monday morning to be called into an immediate briefing with fellow taskforce officers. As they filed into the room the reason for the urgency became obvious. An additional set of crime scene photos had been stuck to the wall. The Hacker had struck again, and his latest victim was obviously dead.
Mace was again in charge. Loftus stood beside him, expression sombre, as the detectives settled around the table, cups of tea and coffee in their hands, tight Monday morning frowns on their faces.
Mace waited for the grunts and shuffling to subside. ‘The call came in just before one o’clock this morning,’ he began. ‘Victim number four. DSS Strickland and DSC Matt Bradby were called out to the scene. They and the crime lab people spent most of the night there or backtracking the girl’s movements and waking up witnesses. They only packed up a couple of hours ago, so we’ve got a pretty good idea how the Hacker carried out his latest attack.’
He cleared his throat. ‘To summarise - victim’s name: Catherine Lentz. Known to her friends as Cathy. Age: twenty-one. Full-time student, part-time prostitute. Doing her final year in business studies at Monash. Lived in Geelong till she got a place at uni. She was sharing a rented house with another female student and supplementing her Austudy money by taking cash for sex, the deal being she only took clients back to her bedroom when the other girl was away, which was the case on Friday. Our killer picked her up at a bar, the Scholar’s Tavern, around nine p.m. and drove her back to the house in Oakleigh, where the sequence of events went like this …’
Mace looked down at his notes. ‘The chain of events we’ve surmised is as follows: Cathy agreed to a bondage session, attaching handcuffs to the four corners of her bed. She also agreed to light a fire in the bedroom hearth, despite the warm weather. About this stage she let in two angora rabbits from the backyard - her housemate’s pets - to feed them. We assume the killer went to the bathroom at the same time. Having put the rabbit food on the kitchen floor, Cathy went to her bedroom and got
undressed. Her killer came back from the bathroom with a metal towel rail that he’d dislodged from the wall.’
He glanced around at them grimly. ‘Cathy tried to fight him off
- we found defensive injuries on her hands and forearms. Broken knuckles, severe contusions. He was hitting her hard. Smashed her skull, front and back. He cuffed her, hand and foot, and as she lay on the bed, probably unconscious, he had sex with her. Then he went to the kitchen, found a sharp carving knife and used it to slice her nose off to the bone. She was still alive at this stage and bleeding from the external wound, but it was the massive trauma to her brain - and the internal haemorrhage - that killed her a few minutes later.
When he’d finished, he dumped the knife on the floor, went to the bathroom, washed his hands and left.’
Mace breathed out a heavy sigh. ‘The place is a mess. The body wasn’t discovered by the housemate till after midnight this morning, and in the meantime the rabbits went berserk. They weren’t used to being shut inside for so long. They panicked, tried to get out, jumped onto shelves and got at food, crapped all over the place, knocked everything off tables, shredded the furniture, and one of them impaled itself on a magnetic knife rack. At first we thought the killer had done the rabbit as well, so the pathologist had to do a post-mortem on it. Turned out to have died thirty-six hours after Cathy.’
He thumped the table with his fist. ‘This freak’s attacked four times in less than three weeks, leaving two dead, two maimed for life and a trail of forensic evidence. We’ve got his fingerprints, blood type, DNA, hairs, fibres. We have his age group and a consistent description - the man who picked up Cathy was neatly groomed and smartly dressed, wearing mirror shades. We’ve got so much to nail him with
- but we still don’t know where to look. We know he drives an MX-5
and a ute, but we’ve already ruled out the list of drivers who are registered owners of both types of vehicle. We’ve taken the prints and DNA of nearly fifty Plato’s Cave customers and none of them is our man. With the club now shut, Kavella dead, his databases erased and his membership list a work of fiction, what looked like our best line of inquiry has hit a wall.’ He sighed, before adding finally, ‘We need to come up with a fresh approach. When you get your assignments I want you all to read through the files. We need to identify evidence, leads or people we haven’t followed up. Okay, let’s get on with it.’
Rita finished reading the case file updates in her office, pushed back from the desk, stretched out her legs and put her hands behind her head. Another freshly issued .38 lay holstered beside her keyboard.
When Loftus knocked lightly on the glass-panelled door and walked in, she swivelled around to face him.
‘Glad to be back profiling?’ he asked.
‘It’s a welcome change.’
‘So have you come up with any ideas?’
‘It’s the psych that bugs me,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘The contradictions.’
‘Maybe the Hacker just flips, then panics.’
‘Flips, possibly. Panics, no. His parting acts of mutilation are unnecessary and deliberate. They have deep meaning for him. He’s leaving his signature. But I can’t square the inconsistencies.’
‘One thing I’ve learnt, Van Hassel, through the long and lonely years, is the universal presence of miscalculation. Not just for evildoers, but for us too.’
He tapped one of the postcards taped to the wall above her desk with his finger. It was a picture of the Mandelbrot set with a quote superimposed: ‘Reality is structured chaos.’
‘Are you telling me I’m way off beam?’ asked Rita.
‘No. I’m saying for every classification - social, criminal, psychological - there’s always the odd one out.’
‘But he’s not on his own.’ She clicked on the mouse and called up a past file. ‘He makes two of a kind with the Scalper.’
‘In what way? The Scalper spiked women’s drinks with Rohypnol then hacked off their hair.’
‘Yes, and his first two victims were scarred for life, but survived …’
‘The final two,’ interrupted Loftus, ‘he decapitated. Then he seemed to stop. What are you getting at?’
‘I wasn’t here for the investigation, so tell me how it ended.’
‘Funny you should ask - Mace and I were discussing it earlier this morning,’ said Loftus uncomfortably. ‘We seem to be reliving the same scenario. The Scalper taskforce reached a similar position to the one we’re in with the Hacker - four attacks over a few weeks with two fatalities, a load of forensic evidence, eyewitness descriptions - and then nothing. With no more attacks, the case just drifted away from us, though of course the file is still open. But frankly I don’t see any link. How could there be? The methods are different, the types of victim are different and, most significantly, the DNA is different.’
‘Yes, different crime signature completely,’ Rita agreed. ‘But from a profiling perspective, the similarities are uncanny. Both killers are well-dressed and articulate. They seem to be organised attackers who leave sloppy crime scenes with plenty of evidence, fingerprints, DNA.
They both inflict mutilations as part of their sexual violence. And weirder still, they’re both reported as driving the same type of car, a black Mazda MX-5.’
That made him stop and think. ‘A copycat?’ he asked. ‘If that’s what you’re getting at, it seems to be stretching a point.’
‘I don’t know if I’m making any point at all. Just kicking ideas around. Thinking the unthinkable.’ She bent over and picked up her shoulder bag. ‘But I won’t make any progress without the mindset.’
‘And where do you get that?’
‘Same place as always. The crime scene.’
Rita was now familiar with the drive towards Monash University, but when she left the freeway she had trouble finding her first point of reference. The Scholar’s Tavern turned out to be a low breeze-block building with a corrugated-iron roof tucked away in a back street behind the broad, windswept campus. She parked and went inside. It was hardly the classic Australian pub - more a glorified shed serving cheap meals and booze to students. It wasn’t crowded.
Just a few dozen sat at tables eating an early lunch, their textbooks and lecture notes stacked alongside the plates and beer glasses. She went up to the counter, ordered a lime and soda and showed her police ID to the young barman. He was a student himself, doing the job part-time.
Rita told him she was investigating the murder of Cathy Lentz.
‘I was working the bar Friday night when she was in here,’ he volunteered. ‘Served her the usual - a couple of Bacardi and Cokes.’
‘You knew her?’
‘Oh yeah. She was a regular. Mostly at weekends.’
‘How well did you know her?’
He caught the undertone in her question and hunched forward, lowering his voice. ‘D’ya mean did I pay her for sex?’
‘Did you?’
‘Yeah, once. Last semester. She was a real babe. Worth the eighty bucks.’
‘You went back to her place?’
‘Nah. We did it in my room at the hall of residence.’
‘On Friday night, did you notice the man she went off with?’
‘Too right. But like I told the cops this morning, I’d never seen him before.’ He ran a damp cloth over the surface in front of him.
‘I assumed he was a tutor.’
‘Why?’
‘He was about ten years older than most of the kids in here, and his manner was different.’
‘In what way, what was he like?’
‘I only saw him from a distance but he was slick-looking, you know - good haircut, jeans, denim shirt, black leather jacket, designer shades. And the way he sat there, you know, a cool type of guy, confident.’
Rita nodded, then asked, ‘What makes you think he was from the university?’
‘That’s all we get in here. Undergrads, mostly - and faculty staff when they’re slumming it.’
‘Wha
t about the neighbours? Local residents?’
‘Avoid it like the plague. Think all students are fuckwits.’
As he slid off along the bar to serve some fresh customers, Rita realised something about the killer’s background. He was familiar with this backstreet pub. It wasn’t a place you found by cruising for a pick-up, because you didn’t know about it unless you had a connection with the university. That tied in with the geographic profile as well. The first three attacks fell within a six-kilometre radius from the city centre, indicating he worked and lived within that area. But this last one was nearly twenty k out. What was his link with the campus?
She finished her drink, thanked the barman and left.
The crime scene was a five-minute drive from the Scholar’s Tavern.
As she homed in on it she could feel her pulse quickening and her lungs tightening. No surprise there. Her plan of action had worked.
The mindset was returning, along with the adrenalin rush.
She pulled up outside an ordinary-looking cream brick house in a dull suburban street. No one was around. No pedestrians, no traffic. Just a few cars parked at the kerb. The sun, at its zenith, laid a scorching light and heat on road, pavement, yards and roofs, wilting the shrubbery and filling the air with a burning lethargy.
The house looked like a place where only mundane things could happen, its blandness seeming to defy any notion of horrific violence.
It was semi-detached, with a low brick fence, a short driveway and a front yard with nothing in it but lank, dry grass. The only sign of something sinister was the yellow crime scene tape.
Rita crossed the narrow porch, let herself in with the key and closed the door behind her. The stifling heat and pungent air inside the house enclosed her. It was heavy with something like a barnyard smell and the rooms were buzzing with flies. As Mace had said, there was mess everywhere. The lounge carpet was covered in broken china, overturned lamps, chewed-up magazines and dry rabbit droppings. The furniture upholstery was bursting through rips and claw marks.
The front bedroom had less wreckage. It had been cleared of personal items. This had been the housemate’s room. She’d packed her belongings, collected the one surviving rabbit and moved back to her family home in Bundoora. Like Cathy Lentz, she would never come back here. The horror of finding the brutalised corpse would stay with her for the rest of her life.