Authors: James Patterson
“YOU’RE NOT GOING to believe this!” Darlene gushed as she came round the open doorway into my office. She had a paper file in her hand.
I got up from the desk.
“Just off the phone. Sergeant Tindle called. They’ve ID’d the remains of the man at the Bondi house.” She sat at the other end of the sofa from me, opened the file. “Name’s Bruce Frimmel.”
She handed me a photograph of the man from police records.
“He’d served time. Assault charge five years ago. His DNA was on file. He vanished two months ago.”
“And you reckoned the guy in the garden had been dead for two to three months.”
“Police Forensics have also identified two distinct sets of blood splatter in the bathroom at the house. One is Frimmel’s, the other Granger’s blood. They were both killed in the same room.”
“Interesting.”
“It gets much more interesting. Bruce’s girlfriend, Lucy …” Darlene glanced at the file again. “… Lucy Inglewood … was
questioned when Frimmel vanished. She told the police he had crossed a few people. There was a biker gang in Blacktown he’d upset and a few months earlier he’d broken up acrimoniously with his last girlfriend who he’d lived with for a few years.”
“The police looked into these I take it?”
“They interviewed everyone who’d known Bruce Frimmel. Sergeant Tindle worked with Inspector Talbot on it. They talked to twenty-odd of Frimmel’s associates and those close to him, including his ex, Julie O’Connor. The sergeant called me, Craig, because he had just seen the security camera stills of the woman in the copy shop I sent over this morning.”
She plucked two sheets of photographic paper from the file and handed one to me. “This,” she said, “is the best image from the security camera.”
I stared at the woman approaching the copier.
“And this is the woman Sergeant Tindle interviewed two months ago, Julie O’Connor.”
I glanced at the second photo, held the two images side by side. “We have our killer,” I said.
“And you know the best bit? According to police records, as of two months ago, she was working at SupaMart in Bellevue Hill.”
“JESUS! MAGGIE … MY favorite madam!” Geoff Hewes exclaimed as the woman in the red silk dress walked in. They were in Geoff’s office in the CBD.
She rolled her eyes and helped herself to a chair directly opposite Hewes. In her late fifties, she was heavily made-up, saggy cheeks. She’d clearly lived, and then some.
“Must be important,” Hewes added and looked past Maggie through a pair of glass doors toward the reception area. “So how is my Mosman House of Sin? All the pervs having fun?”
“I try to make sure of that,” Maggie retorted. “And Geoff, baby, I try to please you too.”
He raised an eyebrow, giving her a skeptical look.
“Can’t say I’m happy about these bloody cameras going in and out of the place.”
“Ah yes, well, we have Mr. Loretto to thank for that. But it won’t happen again, Maggie. They’re there to stay.”
She let out a heavy sigh and held up a DVD.
“What’s that?”
“I was unsure what to do with it. It’s a film from one of our rooms, recorded just before Mr. Loretto took the cameras out.
I was thinking of chucking it. I didn’t want to get into any trouble. But then … the man on this –” She waved the DVD in front of her face, “– came back in last night and acted like a right pig.”
Geoff was surprised. “Isn’t that what the punters pay for?”
“We have a strict house rule,” Maggie replied. “No fists. If a John wants that he can find some backstreet slut who’s willing … not my girls.”
“And this guy was violent?’
“He booked one of the prettiest girls, Jill. The bastard fractured her nose, broke two of her teeth, cut her face up. The poor kid won’t work for weeks.”
“I see. So, you thought …”
Maggie handed him the DVD. “Do what you want with it,” she said.
Hewes slipped the disc into his computer and tapped a couple of keys. The inside of a room in Maggie’s brothel appeared. A bed, a low ceiling. A woman in a corset, high-heels and stockings came into shot and lay on the bed. A man appeared. Geoff couldn’t see his face. He flicked forward. The office filled with the sounds of copulation, the man grunting loudly. The prostitute was straddling him now. She moved to one side, and there, lying on his back, was the prominent Liberal MP, Ken Boston.
GEOFF WAS STARING into space, still a little shocked. Maggie had just left and the DVD case lay open on his desk, the disc still in the machine. Then he reached for the phone.
“Ken Boston’s office, please.”
A female voice picked up. “Mr. Boston’s rooms.”
“Good morning,” Hewes began. “Could I speak to Mr. Boston, please?”
“Who’s calling?”
“Mr. Geoff Hewes.”
“From?”
“I’m a Sydney businessman and a constituent.”
“Does Mr. Boston know you, Mr. Hewes?”
“Not yet.”
“I see. I’m afraid I cannot put you through, but I can convey a message.”
Geoff smiled. He hadn’t expected anything more. “Okay. Could you please tell Mr. Boston I’ve called about Chester Street. He’ll know what I mean.”
A pause. “And what was your name again, Mr …?”
“Hewes. Geoff Hewes. My number is …”
I CHECKED MY watch as we drew up outside the branch of SupaMart in Bellevue Hill. It was just past noon. Mary stood on the sidewalk, pulled on her shades and waited a moment for me to get out of the car and lock it. I led the way to the store, keeping the keys in my hand.
The manager’s office was at the back. A girl standing on some steps filling shelves pointed the way.
“Take a seat, take a seat,” the manager, Matt Jones, said enthusiastically.
“Obviously bored,” I concluded. “Slow day in Bellevue Hill.”
“We’re looking for Julie O’Connor. Understand she works here.”
“Julie? Yeah, she does. Should be here now, but isn’t.”
“What do you mean?”
“Didn’t turn up for her shift this morning.” He frowned. “So what’s this all about? You cops?”
“No,” Mary said. “We’re from an investigative agency. We’ve had a call from one of Julie’s relatives,” she lied. “An old aunt has died and the family wants to reach Julie.”
“Really? So she might be in for an inheritance!”
“Maybe.”
“Well of course … I understand … Mustn’t assume anything.”
“No,” I responded. “You couldn’t give us Julie’s address, could you? And maybe a phone number?”
Jones looked doubtful for a few moments. “That might not be possible. There’s a certain confidentiality …”
“Sure,” Mary said in her sweetest voice. “It’s just the family is
desperate
to get in touch with Julie. She apparently left her relatives in Queensland under a cloud, years back.”
“I didn’t know that,” Jones responded. “Might explain a thing or two.”
I gave the guy a questioning look.
“I like Julie, but she’s never been the most … communicative of my staff. Never made friends with the others. She’s a bloody good worker though – that’s why I kept her on.” He paused. “Okay, I can’t give you her number – she doesn’t have a phone. But the address …” He turned toward a mini filing cabinet on top of his desk. Flicked through the cards. “Yeah, here it is: 6 Neptune Court, Impala Road, Sandsville. Let me know what the outcome is, will you? It would be good to know if Julie will ever be coming back!”
JULIE WAS SITTING on her threadbare sofa. The TV on, sound off. Beside her lay her scrapbook and a notebook. She picked up the notebook first. She kept this in her overall pocket at work. In many ways, she had the perfect job for her purposes. Working at the checkout of SupaMart in Bellevue Hill each day she would see potential victims. Each day, a parade of spoiled wives of successful Eastern Suburbs bankers, brokers and doctors passed by. These women came into SupaMart Gucci-clad and dripping Tiffany to buy zero-fat milk and goat’s cheese with their private-school-uniformed brats. To them, she was either invisible or an object of contempt. She loathed them.
But she had access to their personal details. She had their credit card data, she caught their names when they bumped into their snooty friends and had a little “chat” at the checkout. She noted down everything she heard. The same women, perhaps fifty of them, came in each week, often several times a week. A month of listening and note-taking and she knew a great deal about Samantha, Sarah, Donna, and dozens of others including Yasmin Trent, Stacy Friel, Elspeth Lampard
and, of course, Jennifer Granger, the wife of the bastard who’d started it all.
Returning the notebook to the top pocket of the lumberjack shirt she was wearing, she picked up her scrapbook. She’d devoted a double page to each of the murders, numbered them. 1. JENNIFER GRANGER. 2. STACY FRIEL. 3. ELSPETH LAMPARD. 4. YASMIN TRENT. Beneath these, descriptions of each murder recounted in her scratchy handwriting, every other word misspelled. Interspersed with the words, Julie had pasted in pictures of babies taken from magazines.
In the middle pages, she’d itemized everything she’d learned at SupaMart … credit card numbers, addresses, friends’ names, husbands’ details, where they worked, kids’ schools. All of it had been routinely transferred from the notebook, keeping the original as a backup.
She flicked through the pages of the scrapbook, studying all the information she’d transferred over the months. “Tabatha,” Julie said aloud. “Married to Simon, a ‘very handsome’ broker at Stanton Winslow. Address: 8 Frink Parade. Four kids … Shit! Busy girl!” Turning the page … “Mary, ah, nice Catholic girl, Mary. Irish ancestry, no less. Works for a local charity – ‘Homes for Rejected Pets’. How lovely! Two kids, Fran and Marcus. Husband, a spinal surgeon at Royal North Shore Hospital … tempting, very tempting.”
She flicked to the last page. A newspaper article about the murder of Jennifer Granger. Skipped forward. Stopped, read a name at the top of a double-page profile. Let her eyes drift down to the material she had collected on this woman.
“Well, hey … looky here,” she said in a whisper. “Just
looky here. I’d almost forgotten … Oh, that would be perfect!”
She leaned forward, the scrapbook on her lap, turned back to her pages listing the murdered women, flicked to a fresh page and wrote: “NUMBER FIVE.” Then a name.
JULIE SMILED. “SOMETIMES,” she thought, “I can’t believe how easy all this has been.” She switched on a lamp with a pink shade she’d bought for two dollars from a charity shop, swung back round and saw Bruce on the TV screen.
She felt a shiver pass through her and quickly ramped up the sound.
“… the body has been identified as Bruce Frimmel,” the newsreader said, and the camera held the image of the dead man. “He is thought to have disappeared in November and was probably killed soon after …”
Julie jumped up at the sound of tires screeching outside. She dashed to the small window of her first-floor apartment and saw a white car pull up hard on the other side of a small scruffy courtyard.
She snatched up the scrapbook, ran into the bedroom, tossed it on the bed, scrambled in the bottom of her wardrobe for her backpack already prepared with the things she knew she would need sometime soon. In the kitchen she found a box of matches, darted back to the bedroom, struck a match and flicked the flame over the end of the scrapbook.
The paper resisted. It felt to Julie that seconds were passing as minutes. She had to quell the rising panic. The match expired without the flame catching properly. She’d just singed the edge of the flimsy cardboard cover. She struck another match and steadied her fingers by gripping her wrist with the other hand, blowing gently on the flame.
It caught. She couldn’t wait a second longer, dashed out of the room and into the hallway, leaving the door ajar. She could hear footsteps on the stairs, a woman’s voice. She sped up to the second level, round the bend and onto the next flight taking her to the top floor.
She leaned over the railings and saw two people, a man and a woman, approach the door to her apartment. As they slid along the wall and disappeared inside, Julie turned on her heel, pushed the exit door onto the roof.
She’d moved here after splitting with Bruce, it was cheaper. Within a week she’d explored every nook and cranny of the block and had quickly found the caretaker’s shed on the roof. He was always careful enough to keep it locked, but she knew where he hid a spare key.
The roof was eerily quiet, just the hum of traffic on the main road, the occasional squawk of a lorikeet. Julie crouched beside a utility pipe running along the edge of the roof, felt around for the brick she knew was there, found it, shifted it, plucked up the key.
She ran back to the shed, slotted the key into the lock, pulled open the door. After the glare of the midday sun the inside of the shed seemed almost black, but her eyes adjusted quickly. She scanned the shelves of jam jars filled with nails and screws, tins of paint, rolls of wire, bits of plastic tubing
and a bench scattered with tools. On the floor stood a five-gallon plastic drum, “FLAMMABLE” written in large black letters around the middle. She locked the door from the inside and crouched down, keeping her breathing shallow and listening for approaching feet.
SANDSVILLE IS PROBABLY the worst part of Sydney. Happen to be there at the wrong time, in the wrong gang in the wrong street and your life expectancy would make a mayfly proud.
Realizing that driving my Ferrari into Sandsville would be about as clever as vomiting over the Queen, Mary and I had taken a detour back to Private and switched to her sensible and unassuming white Toyota.
The apartment blocks of Neptune Court looked as though they would collapse any moment. I guessed they were mid-’80s vintage. There were three buildings clustered around a scrap of land, the grass worn to nothing.
The three buildings had six-foot-high digits written on their south-facing walls. Nos. 1-20, 21-40 and 41-60. We headed for the first.
We could hear a horrible clash of sounds. Kids screaming, a baby’s cry, several different TV shows, a rap track. From my right came a bass drum throb and the growl of some God-awful death metal band.
The door into Julie O’Connor’s block was closed, but the
steel-reinforced glass had been smashed in. I climbed through the hole, Mary half a second behind me.
Number 6 was on the first floor, but I smelled the smoke before I’d reached halfway up the flight of stairs. Mary went ahead, leaned on the wall next to the door, then swung inside. I was right behind her. She turned into the living space, swept the room, proceeded to the only other part of the apartment, a tiny bedroom.
Yellow flames swirled up from blackened sheets. The fire was small – a pile of papers, but smoke had filled the room. We grabbed a pillow each and smacked at the fire, then I found a quilt on the floor, threw it over the small blaze and snuffed it out.
“This was just started,” Mary said.
“Must’ve missed her by seconds. You search the place. I’ll be back in a minute.”
I ran onto the landing. No one around. I noticed half the doors were boarded up. There were two more floors above this one. I ran up, saw no one, reached the top floor. There was a ROOF EXIT sticker on a door. The door had been pushed outward.
I approached it cautiously, eased out onto the roof. It was deserted. I spotted a workman’s shed in one corner, paced over to it slowly, carefully. I tried the handle. It was locked.
I did a three-sixty, saw the black metal railings of a ladder descending from one corner. Walking across the roof, I peered over the edge. The ladder dropped three floors to the ground. No one in sight.