Lethal Factor

by Gabrielle Lord

  My plan was for Vic to take this straight down to my place of work, Forensic Services in Canberra, for examination. There’s been a renaissance in microscopy in the last few years and I would take full advantage of this with a closer look at whatever might be found on the surprise sweet wrapper.

  It took nearly three-quarters of an hour before I was ready to go, hosed and sprayed and decontaminated by the HAZCHEM boys until they were satisfied that I was thoroughly sterilised. I looked around to see if the kookaburras had returned, but they’d missed their chance to laugh at me. Instead, the firies made their usual bad jokes as they worked me over. I put on my own clothes in the cramped quarters of the mobile police station, set up at the outer perimeter of the crime scene. Was this a one-off, I wondered, or were we in for more, as in the USA?

  I saw the senior detective on the case, stooped Gavin Wales, his thinning hair stretched across his pate, having a cigarette out on the street and I remembered him from the briefing we’d had with other agencies after Tony Bonning’s death.

  ‘Get anything, Jack?’ he asked me, throwing the fag end onto the grass and crushing it.

  Smokers. They use the world as their ashtray. I used to do exactly the same for years.

  ‘I can’t say until I examine it,’ I said. ‘I’ll let you know if I find something.’

  ‘Just keep me up to speed if you can. We’ve never had anything like this to deal with before.’ He paused. ‘That postal worker’s just hanging on, the doctors say. The world’s a bloody different place, mate, to how it used to be. But I’m not surprised. I’ve been waiting for something like this.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘We’re in the front-line now. A terrorist attack.’

  ‘It’s far too early to be making that sort of assumption,’ I told him. ‘All we can be certain about is that it was an intentional contamination.’ But I could see that his mind was made up.

  I thought of the postal worker, Natalie Haynes, a young mother, who’d had the ill fortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, in a mail sorting section, doing what humans do all the time as she worked, breathing. Her place of work had tested positive. And despite thorough decontamination, the general public, including postal workers, was feeling nervous. And understandably so.

  ‘I’ll need tissue samples,’ I told the detective, ‘from the autopsy of Tony Bonning. Who did the autopsy? Was it Bradley Strachan?’

  The detective nodded. ‘I know Strawney well,’ he said. ‘I can send someone down with samples for you if you ring and ask for them.’

  I nodded.

  Two

  I drove back to Malabar, leaving the huddle of Fire Brigade officers and police near the mobile station outside the dead man’s house in one of the small streets near Centennial Park. Vic was going straight back to work at Forensic Services in Canberra and I planned to do the same. He was training up well and, if all went smoothly, would shortly be out of his probationary period.

  I drove through a clear winter morning. The white mist that had enveloped my house in the early hours had not quite dissolved from the higher areas of Centennial Park. Some of the larger ponds were still wreathed in mist and a black swan, mirrored upside down on the shining water, was a double silhouette, black velvet on silver.

  I live in the last house of a quiet street. The land rises with my house at the highest point then falls away suddenly near my right-hand border straight down the roadway. My only neighbour on the left is hidden from me by a lot of coastal growth, tea-tree and grevillea trees, and that suits me well. I like living opposite the coastal shipping lanes, watching the ships glide past, even though nothing very glamorous plied up to the port at Botany. The noisy miner birds who lived around my garden and who were better than any dog at alerting me to movement in the area, fussed and alarmed as I walked through. Yesterday, while my brother Charlie and I were having lunch, I’d heard them making an alarming sound I’d never heard before. When I looked outside down the back where they’d been carrying on, I saw a small brown snake disappearing at my approach.

  ‘You’ve got a snake in the grass,’ said Charlie, as we walked back to the house. ‘Don’t forget that.’

  I thought he was merely stating the obvious. But today, I wondered if his warning could be taken in a wider context. I felt a chill and hurried to unlock the side door, pleased to be home.

  Jacinta hadn’t stirred when my mobile rang three hours earlier in the pitch blackness of a winter pre-dawn and she was still not up. I put coffee on to perk and found some eggs for breakfast, still preoccupied with the events of the morning. My mobile rang and I snatched it up.

  ‘Jack McCain,’ I said and listened.

  ‘Digby,’ I said, surprised to hear my boss’s voice. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘It’s Livvy,’ he said, and I wasn’t surprised at the heaviness in his voice as he mentioned his wife. ‘She’s caught that awful flu everyone’s had.’

  Livvy Worthington’s brilliance didn’t help her control her moods. I knew she suffered from bouts of depression. And I could understand Digby’s concern. A recent bout with flu had left me feeling low for months.

  I concentrated on what my boss was saying.

  ‘I’ve decided to take leave for a while and spend some time with her.’

  I waited, wondering what he was on about. Although my boss and I aren’t close, we get along well together professionally. Jacinta and Livvy are well acquainted. Jacinta sometimes visits to ride the horses.

  ‘What I’m saying,’ Digby continued, ‘is that I’d like you to take over my job for a while, Jack. I’ve put you down as my replacement. Acting Chief.’

  I was surprised at this. Digby must be very concerned, I thought. I’ve never been ambitious in the way my boss is. Digby’s ambitious nature had always been very obvious; I’d sensed that being Chief Scientist of the Criminalistics Section at Forensic Services in Canberra was not quite enough for him, that he wanted something bigger and grander. He was a hardworking scientist, and every moment away from work was spent on his private research project.

  ‘It means you could be acting for a while,’ Digby was saying. ‘I’ll drop in from time to time, and there are a couple of cases that I need to tidy up and send off, but my return will largely depend on how Livvy shapes up.’

  My surprise increased. What on earth would he do with himself? Taking care of a depressed and ill wife would hardly be fulfilling for a man like Digby. I found myself wondering about my boss’s marriage. Then I stopped myself. Of all people, I was about the last person in the world to have any insights into that particular happy state.

  The fact that he wanted me to be Acting Chief scientist was certainly a feather in the cap of an ex-cop and I felt pleased, but there’s often a catch to this sort of thing. Ordering new wastepaper baskets and listening to people grizzle about each other are not really my cup of tea. I’m an analytical investigator and that’s my first love. I mentally reviewed the cases I was working on. As long as not too much new stuff landed on us, I estimated they could all be made to fit around the Acting Chief position.

  I found I was staring sightlessly at the bronze figure of Kwan Tei, Chinese god of detectives, prostitutes and triads, a gift given to me ages ago, standing on the windowsill. Maybe I should burn some incense in front of you, for good luck, I thought, remembering silent, morose Henry Dupont, the most senior scientist after Digby.

  ‘What about Henry?’ I asked. ‘He’s got much more seniority. He won’t be too happy to be passed over.’

  ‘Henry’s never happy,’ said Digby. ‘And he’s not a team player. He’s too much of a loner.’

  I nearly laughed out loud. Compared with me, Henry Dupont was a screaming party animal. I was the only one who hadn’t gone to Digby’s birthday drinks in the common room last week even though I’d been in town. Nor had I gone to see him and Livvy in t
he local mummers production of The Boyfriend last year, let alone the wrap party after it. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d socialised with my colleagues, much preferring over the years I’d worked in Canberra to jump in the car on a Friday afternoon and drive back to Sydney each weekend, to my wife and family. These days I had no wife, and my son Greg was out of the country just now.

  Despite his scientific acuity, I thought, there were some things Digby failed to notice.

  ‘I’d feel happier,’ he continued, ‘if I knew you’d be okay to do the job in this open-ended fashion. Especially with Bacillus anthracis raising its ugly head at the moment. I doubt if Henry could cope with the pressures that’s going to bring to our work.’

  ‘I’m okay to do it,’ I said, knowing I worked well under pressure, hoping I wasn’t taking on too much.

  ‘Good.’ I could hear the relief in my boss’s voice. ‘Livvy wants to go out to Seven Oaks. Reckons it’ll do her good if she can get out of town for a few weeks.’

  The Worthingtons had a twenty-five-acre hobby farm out of Canberra that they’d bought quite cheaply because it was unsuitable for agricultural grazing. Even so, their horses, big dopey Taffy and Duchess the ill-mannered thoroughbred, flourished there and Digby indulged in breeding fancy fowls, highly decorative Chinese Silkies that looked like walking powder puffs, housed in a building far too grand to be called a henhouse; a state-of-the-art chookery with air-conditioning to keep the delicate creatures in a temperate environment. He grew nut trees that never fruited. And housed in a huge glass floor-to-ceiling enclosure was his ant research farm, with its teeming colonies of Myrmecia pilosula. Out at Seven Oaks, they were both different people. Livvy enjoyed taking a break from her own research at the Australian National University, to enjoy the pollution-free air and make life-threatening cakes for friends, often accompanied by Digby’s dubious home-brew.

  During the week, they lived in a town house in the city. Digby and Livvy had no children and instead had made their lives together in science as well as matrimony. Their ‘family’ was their colleagues in Forensic Services and the university where Livvy carried out her research into synthetic ‘decoy’ receptors in human cells, screening small molecules for sites that might bind to cancer-related proteins and block their deadly growth. She was very protective about her work, deftly steering questions away from it, so much so that I wondered if she might be working on something for Defence. She’d gone to Sydney for supervision of her thesis, I seemed to recall. Digby’s private work, when he had the time, took him down another highly specialised area—the development from his ants of an immunotoxin that targeted malignant cells. His position as Chief Scientist made it hard for him to get the time for his research. We were always snowed under with work. Now, I expected, we would be even busier.

  Thinking more about it, I wasn’t completely surprised by my boss’s decision. He had seemed weighed down of late, although in the last couple of months he’d started weights and circuit training at the campus gym and that seemed to have improved his mood. The reality of having to care for an increasingly delicate wife for who knows how long would burden any man, I thought. I resisted comparing myself to Digby because any smugness on my part was immediately deleted by the knowledge that my ex-wife Genevieve still hated me, despite getting everything she wanted and more in our divorce proceedings. For some people, a hate relationship seems more lively than a love-based one and Genevieve seemed determined to punish me as long as she could. I knew from my own career and the violent crime scenes I’d examined, how powerful a motive hatred is.

  Even now, the New South Wales police were trying to find who it was that hated Tony Bonning enough to send him something through the mail that would kill him. Once, murderers had used letter bombs. Now, the explosion was of a different order—silent, stealthy and deadly.

  ‘I’ve just got back from Tony Bonning’s house,’ I said to Digby. ‘I’m very hopeful I may have what we need. I’ll start culturing up samples as soon as possible.’

  ‘Good . . .’ he said. There was a pause. ‘One more thing,’ he added. ‘Lennie Lowenstein is due to arrive in the next week or so. I’ll do what I can but I won’t be there all the time to supervise his visit.’

  My boss was a protégé of the famed New York forensic analyst, Dr Lowenstein, and largely owed his speedy elevation to Chief Scientist some years back to Dr Lowenstein’s glowing recommendations. Digby’s earlier research, published in the USA, had impressed the influential American. ‘He’ll be landing on us before we know it.’

  I could hear tension and strain in Digby’s voice; he had a lot on his plate just now, I thought, and felt sorry for him.

  ‘And on your way down,’ he said, as casually as if he’d been asking me to pick up a litre of milk, ‘will you call in on a crime scene? Convent of the Assumption on the Heronvale Road. One of the sisters was found dead in her room. Looks like murder.’

  ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘What’s the story?’

  ‘That’s for you to find out,’ he said. ‘It sounds nasty. Someone’s done some carving. On her skin.’

  Three

  As I put the phone down, my attention was caught by the smell of the eggs catching and I hurried to scoop them onto some buttered toast.

  I sat down at the table in front of the dry eggs, not realising how hungry I was until I started eating. I poured myself a coffee, wondering when my daughter would appear. Coffee aroma was usually about the only thing that would shift her in the mornings. I ate quickly, looking out past the grevillea bushes to the sandstone outcrop of Boora Point across the bay. I was feeling very curious about the convent murder. I recalled the high brick wall of the old building out on the Heronvale Road, its elaborate wrought-iron gates and park-like grounds, once some distance from the city but now a lot closer to the new housing estates. Together with what I’d collected from the late Dr Bonning’s bedroom, another investigation would give me two interesting new cases. Too many of the cases I work on are sheer routine, dull and predictable, the same old offender already locked up and the physical evidence readily and visibly available. I was at the stage of my career where I needed something more, something to stimulate a mind that was searching for bigger and better adventures.

  Some of my colleagues never attend crime scenes—it’s not their job. But my many years as a crime scene examiner with the New South Wales police before I joined the Federales as a scientist gives me an edge over bench scientists. Crime scenes are much better protected now than they were in the old days. I remember the case of a murdered stripper’s flat revealing no less than forty-three separate sets of fingerprints, all of which belonged to the police, dropping in out of sheer curiosity to have a bit of a perve. I couldn’t imagine a crime scene more different from a nun’s cell in a convent. No stickybeaks there. I recalled my treatment at the hands of the Sisters of Show No Mercy in Springbrook when I’d been a little fellow at school. Maybe the nuns were finally showing the homicidal streak I’d always suspected in them. I thought of waking Jacinta before I left but decided against it because she’d be cranky about our walk being postponed. She’s like a bear with a sore head when she first gets up. Her mother was the same except Genevieve’s mood often didn’t improve with the day.

  My mobile rang again and I was delighted to hear the voice of my friend, Bob Edwards.

  ‘I heard you’d been seconded interstate somewhere,’ I said.

  We go back over twenty years, Bob and I, from when he was my partner in the old days. ‘Where the hell are you?’

  ‘Waiting for you, you old bugger,’ he said, ‘at the convent. Who do you think wanted you here?’

  ‘I didn’t know you cared,’ I said, realising now why Digby had dropped it on me when there were plenty of personnel in Canberra. ‘Don’t know what use I’ll be to you. It’s a bloody long time since I’ve had any dealings with nuns.’

  ‘Then you’ll feel righ
t at home with this bunch,’ said Bob. ‘The winds of change have passed them by completely. They’re still medieval. Some of them haven’t left the grounds in fifty years.’

  I was surprised to hear that such places still existed.

  ‘What’s the Assumption?’ Bob was asking.

  ‘One of the wilder ones assumed by Rome,’ I said. ‘I’ll tell you about it some time.’

  ‘Dad?’ Jacinta’s voice wailed from her bedroom. ‘Who are you talking to? What’s the time?’

  ‘I’m leaving shortly,’ I told Bob and glanced at my watch. ‘Should be there around one. What have you got?’

  ‘Middle-aged woman, a nun, murdered,’ said Bob matter-of-factly. ‘I’ll go and have something to eat and then be back in time to meet you.’

  I rang off. Sunlight glowed on the small oval framed portrait of my little sister Rosie hanging in the hallway, frowning in the bright sunlight of the last November she would ever see, some thirty years ago. Since discovering what had happened to her and making my peace with her, I like her picture hanging here, a household guardian, keeping an eye on the rest of us. Sometimes, I remember to put a couple of flowers in a vase on the hall table in front of her.

  ‘Give us a hand, Rosie,’ I said to her. ‘This job could be tricky.’

  ‘Are you talking to someone?’ my daughter called from her room.

  ‘I was talking to Bob,’ I said. ‘And it’s nearly ten. Have you got classes later?’ There was no answer so I continued gathering up the things I’d need to take to Canberra with me.

  I was just about to zip up the overnight bag when a lump in a yellow doona shuffled to my doorway and leaned against the lintel. ‘Where are you going?’ asked Jacinta, her pretty face hidden in the folded cowls of the doona.

  ‘To Canberra. Unfortunately, a new case means I have to head down there.’