‘It’s okay, son, it’s okay,’ Monty said, guiding him away from the vehicle and into the shade. Tears ran down the young man’s face as he gasped and choked down his anger, humiliation and fear. Monty handed him some water, which he promptly threw up.
‘You’re fresh meat, that’s your problem,’ Monty said, turning his back on the kneeling, puking kid. If he wasn’t careful, he’d soon be joining him. ‘But this is above and beyond.’
When the constable had recovered, Monty handed him the evidence bags containing the bullet and case. ‘Take this up to the lookout and get the exhibit officer to make a record of it, then I want you to take it personally to the ballistic lab in the city, lights and siren, top priority. I’ll ring and tell them to expect you.’
Nagel wiped his mouth, flicked Monty a grateful smile and headed up the track.
The body snatchers were scowling around the Toyota when Monty returned, at last getting on with the job in hand. They’d laid the body bag open on the Stokes stretcher and two of them were struggling to remove Miro Kusak from the car seat. Henry Grebe watched the proceedings from the shade of a nearby tree, still smiling, hands on hips.
Monty walked over to him and met his arrogant glare head on.
And then he punched Henry Grebe, smack on the end of his long beaky nose.
Mrs Kusak nodded and dabbed at her eyes with a lace hanky. This was the second round of bad news Stevie had had to break in forty-eight hours, but this time, her sympathies could not have been less stirred. Mrs Kusak’s eyes streamed, and her plump fingers traced the cross at her neck, but her beady black eyes conveyed no sense of grief.
The knock at the front door came as a welcome reprieve. There was an unpleasant odour about the place of rancid oil and stale cheese and she was glad of an excuse to escape. She found Wayne on the front step, patting the head of a white concrete swan.
The day was cooling, but Wayne’s thin hair stuck to his head like a helmet, feathery sideburns plastering his cheeks like beached seaweed. He wore herringbone flares and a floral nylon shirt bright enough to give you a headache. When he lifted his arm to give his head a scratch, Stevie caught an unpleasant whiff and stepped back, making an obvious point of fanning herself. Wayne couldn’t have cared less; Stevie even detected a slight smile on his craggy features. She suspected he enjoyed the distaste he stirred in others. Here was another one who followed a carefully rehearsed act. But given the choice, she’d take Wayne’s BO over the cloying cheesiness of the Kusak house any day.
He pointed to the Christmas lights threaded through the porch eaves and the melting ‘Merry Christmas’ written in fake snow on the window.
‘It’s weeks past Twelfth Night,’ he said. ‘Miro’s certainly had his dose of bad luck. What about her?’
‘I’m not sure if she regards this news as bad luck or heaven sent,’ Stevie said.
Wayne had gleaned some interesting information from the neighbours. As he made his report Stevie wondered if Tash had discovered the same when she’d visited yesterday.
She returned to the small, black-frocked woman in the cluttered lounge room, and couldn’t help but think of Rosemary West, Catherine Birnie, Myra Hindley. Was it the dog, or could Mrs Kusak have been the figure in the passenger seat when Bianca Webster’s body had been dumped? And if she wasn’t an accomplice, how the hell could she have been so oblivious to her husband’s activities?
She offered to make Mrs Kusak the traditional cup of tea, keeping her voice as gentle as possible, struggling to resist falling into any kind of judgemental trap.
Mrs Kusak shook her head and reached down to pat the dog at her feet. Bonza seemed exhausted from his harrowing experience at the weir; he twitched as he dreamed. Stevie wondered what he had seen, wondered if dogs suffered from nightmares too.
‘When the police first told you that your husband was a suspect in the murder and abduction of a child,’ Stevie said, trying to keep the accusation from her voice, ‘why did you tell them that you had been separated for over a year?’
The woman spread a puffy hand over her mouth and said nothing.
‘You see, we’ve been given reason to doubt that,’ Stevie continued. ‘Apparently on the day after the child’s abduction, your neighbours spotted you with a trailer load of things, believed to be your husband’s possessions, and then another neighbour saw you at the dump with them. These same neighbours said they’d seen your husband’s four-wheel drive parked outside the front of your house many times over the past few weeks.’ Stevie let the silence linger. ‘Can you see what I’m getting at Mrs Kusak?’
The woman sniffed but said nothing.
‘It makes us think that maybe you knew what your husband had been up to and were trying to get rid of evidence—had he told you to get rid of evidence, Mrs Kusak?’
The woman twisted her hands on her lap and spoke in heavily accented English. ‘We were separating. Miro was a worthless piece of shit. He’s a Slav, I’m Italian, I should have listened to my mamma, but I didn’t. I should have thrown him out years ago, but I didn’t. When I went to the dump I didn’t know what Miro had done, all I knew was that I wanted to be rid of the worthless shit Slav and all his worthless shit things.’
‘Our crime scene officers will be able to recover his things. If anything incriminatory is found you might find yourself charged as an accessary to murder.’
‘No no, only clothes, books and shit.’
‘What about a computer?’ She knew that a hard drive and a flash drive had been found in the Toyota, but she wondered how much the woman knew.
‘He took the computer with him when he left.’
‘Which was when? Not a year ago? When was he last here?’
‘Three days ago was the last time I saw him.’
After Bianca’s abduction but before her death, Stevie calculated, when she was most likely being held prisoner in the pump house.
‘Did he spend a lot of time on the computer?’
Mrs Kusak nodded. ‘Always, he spent all his time and money on computers. Always the latest and the best.’
‘Doing what?’
‘Looking at filth. He made me sick.’
‘Did you know that he had an unhealthy interest in young girls?’
The woman inspected her rings. They were hardly visible between the folds of fat on her fingers. ‘Maybe. It was filth.’
‘Your neighbours said he used to stare at their children. They never let their kids near him. Or you.’
‘He only looked. That’s all. I told him it was wrong but he never listened to me.’ She sniffed. ‘My neighbours are nosy bitches, I’m gonna move.’
‘Do you admit to lying to the police then, about the separation?’
‘I no speak good English, they heard wrong. I told them we was separating, that’s all. He was looking for somewhere to rent. This week I told him to take his computer and leave.’
‘Where did he work?’
‘Samson’s factory in Welshpool, he worked shifts. I never know if he was coming or going.’
Stevie’s gaze slid across the mantelpiece, taking in the colourful religious cards, noticing the absence of family photos. ‘Do you have children?’
‘No. He was married before. There was,’ she hesitated, ‘problems with the kids of his first marriage. We think better not to have them.’
Stevie could guess what the problems were. Jesus Christ, lady, you’ll think twice about marrying a Slav but not a paedophile? This exercise in patience was getting harder by the minute.
‘Was he capable of killing a child, Mrs Kusak?’ she asked, suppressing a shudder. Talking to this woman was testing enough for her—she flinched at the thought of the effect she would have had on Tash. She wished she’d listened to her instincts and seen the woman herself yesterday.
The woman shook her head vehemently. ‘He never would, no, never. He couldn’t kill nothing. He hated blood, he even hated fishing. If she died, it was accident. He didn’t kill her.’
For all that the woman filled her with revulsion, Stevie believed her. It helped too that the pathologist had determined the murder to be a sexual assault gone wrong.
‘The child had been missing for nearly two days when her body was found. Have you any idea where he might have taken her after he abducted her?’
Mrs Kusak seemed to ponder the question, but who knows where her mind was.
‘Mrs Kusak?’
The woman let out a sigh and rolled the hem of her black dress between her fingers. ‘Yes, I think I know,’ she said. ‘Mundaring Weir. He always takes the dog to a special place there where no one else goes—it’s a good dog, but it always fight other dogs.’ She nodded to herself, ‘Yes, he would have taken her there.’
‘Where is this special place?’
Mrs Kusak stopped her fidgeting but still couldn’t look Stevie in the eye. ‘Near the old pump station, by the water. People aren’t supposed to go there. They’ve closed off the track but Miro parks at the lookout and walks down with the dog. He always hangs about down there. He even takes me sometimes. It’s what I told that bitch woman cop yesterday.’
Stevie kept her face impassive while she thought hard. Tash had known this yesterday and not told her. Damn her for not saying anything, damn her bloody migraines. How could she have said nothing? What the fuck was she playing at?
‘Does anyone else know about this place where he takes the dog?’ Stevie asked, her eyes fixed on the cross hanging on the wall above Mrs Kusak’s head.
‘Why you need to know that?’ Mrs Kusak asked.
Why do you think, you stupid bitch?
‘Because we need to find out who killed him, Mrs Kusak,’ Stevie said with brittle patience.
Mrs Kusak narrowed her eyes. ‘Then why don’t you ask that woman cop from yesterday?’
Stevie stood up. ‘Are you accusing Constable Hayward of your husband’s murder?’ she asked.
The woman’s eyes dropped. ‘Yes—no—I dunno.’
‘You have to be very certain Mrs Kusak, before you start making accusations. What time yesterday did Constable Hayward come to see you?’
Mrs Kusak shrugged and touched her hair, making the pendulous folds at the top of her arms swing. She looked through the window at the pink-flossed sky. ‘Before now, four o’clock maybe. My neighbour’s kids was having a party, they start at lunch and go all night. I asked her to go and see them, warn them to shut up. She said no, tell me I no deserve to ever sleep good again.’
Now that did sound like something Tash might’ve said. Stevie cleared her throat. ‘What time did she leave?’
Mrs Kusak shrugged. ‘I dunno, about five maybe.’
Stevie had called at Trish’s at about six thirty and she was still not home. ‘Do you wish to proceed with the harassment charges against Constable Hayward? If you do, you’ll need to put your complaint and any other suspicions you might have about the constable in writing.’
There was a momentary pause before Mrs Kusak answered, ‘No.’ She dropped her head into her hands and began to sob, her plump body wracked with self-pity.
‘You told me on the phone that Constable Hayward showed you pictures from the child’s autopsy. Is that true?’ Stevie asked, unmoved.
Mrs Kusak didn’t look up. She spoke through her hands. ‘No, I said that to make you listen. But she was still a bitch. She told me all about how she died, that little girl...’
‘You lied about the separation, you lied about the autopsy photos. What else have you lied about, Mrs Kusak?’
When the woman looked up, Stevie saw for the first time genuine tears of grief carving their way down the powdered cheeks.
‘My Miro, what am I gonna do without him, the dirty no good Slav...’
She loved him, Stevie realised. Despite it all, she still loved him.
Monty drove while Stevie sat in the passenger seat of the unmarked police car, pondering the various forms of love. Mrs Kusak had told the officers making the initial enquiries that she and Miro were separated, then she’d told Stevie they were in the process of separating. It was obvious upon the search of the house that despite her trip to the dump, he was still very much in residence. They’d found his shaving equipment in the bathroom, his underwear in the bedroom drawers, even his pyjamas folded under the pillow. If she had really planned on chucking him out, they would never know. What made a woman stay with a man like that, she wondered, when she was so aware of his foul proclivities?
And what about you,
her inner voice nagged.
You lived with a man who raped you and caused misery to countless others. You’re a cop, you of all people should have seen through him—you are in no position to judge.
I threw Tye out as soon as I knew he was up to no good,
Stevie answered in her defence, reaching for the water bottle at her feet. She took a swig and tried to wash down the lump that rose like bile in her throat. She looked over at Monty as he drove and wondered how she could ever have thought that she loved anyone else. The problems she faced now with Monty were a walk in the park compared to what she’d endured with Tye. The demands of the job affected plenty of other police couples too.
Or so she tried to tell herself.
But tonight there was such a crackling tension in the car between them. Monty was answering her questions in grunted monosyllables, turning what could have been a comfortable silence into a bed of nails.
His flat delivery suited the subject matter when at last he began to speak at length. ‘You remember that case of the abducted girl in Mundaring a couple of years ago?’ He kept his eyes on the road, his face glowing in the dashboard light. ‘She was found tied to a tree in the state forest after an anonymous tip off.’
Stevie hadn’t worked the Mundaring case, but she remembered the frustration of all concerned. ‘Yes, the victim had traumatic amnesia, couldn’t remember much about her ordeal. She was sexually interfered with, but otherwise physically unharmed.’
‘The state forest where she was found borders the east side of Mundaring Weir,’ Monty said. ‘The anonymous caller who raised the alarm was male and had a slightly foreign accent. We always presumed he was the perpetrator, though the only leads we had at the time were some dog hairs found on the girl.’