Private Oz (2 page)

A COP CAR pulled up to the gate, tires screeching. Close behind, a van, “FORENSICS” on the side.

Outside, Thorogood made the introductions. He seemed oblivious to the animosity in the air. “Craig Gisto and Mary Clarke, Private Sydney – a new investigative agency started by a friend of mine, Jack Morgan in LA. These guys head up the Sydney branch. Craig, Mary … this is Inspector Mark Talbot, Sydney Local Area Command.”

“And what are they doing here?” Talbot studied my face. I half-smiled back.

“We have an arrangement …” Thorogood responded.

“Arrangement, sir?”

“Didn’t you get my memo? We help Private, Private helps us … Understand? So what do we have here, Craig?” the Deputy Commissioner turned to me.

“Lotta blood. Your forensics guys’ll have fun. The hard drive for the security cameras walked.” I flicked a glance toward the booth. “And I found this.” I pulled the tissue from my jacket pocket and handed the bullet casing to Thorogood.

“That should have been left where you found it …” Talbot
remarked angrily.

“.357 Sig.” Thorogood ignored the Inspector. “Okay, so what do you want from us, Craig? Mary?”

“Give Darlene access to the crime scene and ten minutes with the body before it’s taken to the morgue.”

Thorogood nodded. “Fine.”

“What!” Talbot exclaimed and glared at us. Then he saw Thorogood’s expression and shut up.

THE PARTY ROOM was almost empty. Most of the Police Forensics team were still down in the garage, dusting, photographing, videoing, gathering samples. The guard was en route to hospital. A single police scientist in a blue plastic boiler suit crouched beside the corpse. The man looked irritated.

I walked over. Darlene was on her knees, her face close to the dead kid’s back. The forensics officer was holding a plastic sample bottle in one gloved hand, a pair of tweezers in the other. Beside him in a metal box lay half a dozen more sample bottles.

“She with you?” the guy asked without moving his head. “She’s
really
pissing me off. This is a crime scene.”

Darlene treated him as though he wasn’t there.

“We have clearance to observe,” I told him.

“I’ll need that officially verified.”

“No you won’t,” Darlene snapped. “But, if you insist, I’ll have my good friend, Deputy Commissioner Thorogood, remind you … Oh, and …” She nodded toward the box of samples. “I’ll need access to those too, please.” She gave him a killer smile.

SUMMER RAIN HIT the windshield as I pulled the Ferrari out of the lot and headed for the North Shore. My mind was churning. Not only because of the dead kid at the drinks reception. My head was buzzing with just three words: “The Bastard’s Back”. Mark fucking Talbot had returned to Sydney and he was going to get right up my nose, just as Private starts in business. I punched the wheel in frustration, glared at the girders of the Harbour Bridge and the memories started up, couldn’t stop ’em.

I’m twelve. My crack-head mom is burned to a crisp in the London project I grew up in. Poor little orphan Craig is shipped out to Sydney and Uncle Ben. Within a week, I go from a mildewed tenement in winter to a four-bedroomed house in Narrabeen and sunshine.

The Talbot family meet me at the airport and there’s my cousin, Mark, giving me the sort of hostile look he’s never lost. He obviously hates me straight off the bat.

Four years later, I’m alone doing my homework. Mark bursts into my room with a couple of mates. They’ve been drinking. They stink. I go to get up and Mark slams a fist in my face. One of his friends kicks me in the balls. I spit blood onto the
carpet. They hear my uncle turn the key in the front door, run. I spend the next day under the covers pretending I have flu so Ben doesn’t see my face until I can come up with an excuse.

Then sweet release. I’m eighteen and go to university to study Law. In my second year I join an exchange program with UCLA, spend a year in the States. It turns out to be the best year of my life. I return home to Oz at Easter – it’s the last thing I want.

Ben picks me up at the airport. We jump in the car.

“Mark’s engaged,” he says.

I look stunned.

“Why so surprised?”

I shake my head. “Nothing … just. I didn’t know he was even seeing anyone …”

“All been a bit quick, I admit. Becky’s a babe though. There’s a party tonight.”

Mark has changed, almost friendly. Amazing what love can do, I think. Then I see Becky and I understand. Love at first sight.

I still don’t know how the fight started. I was chatting to Becky in the kitchen and Mark must have thought I was flirting with her – which maybe I was. He was drunk and abusive. He took a swing at me, and that was it. We crashed into the lounge, parting stunned guests like a knife through an engagement party cake. Would have killed each other if it hadn’t been for Ben and three other guys pulling Mark and me apart.

When I’d recovered enough to see straight, I realized Becky had slipped away unnoticed.

The next day she called Mark to call off the engagement. It was to be five years before I saw her again.

DARLENE’S LAB STOOD along the corridor from where Private’s launch party had been. It was her fiefdom. In here, she felt relaxed, isolated from the troubles of the outside world. Which was a little ironic, considering what was in the case she dumped on the counter.

She had designed the lab herself and been given carte blanche to install the best equipment available. Better still, through her contacts, she had some technology no one beyond Private would see for years to come. She was very proud of that.

Police forensics had worked through the night and catalogued everything before passing on the samples to Darlene an hour ago. A courier had delivered a case of test tubes and a USB at 6 am. She’d already been at Private for an hour.

She opened the clasps of the sample box and looked inside. Each test tube was labeled and itemized by date, location and type. They contained samples of the corpse’s blood, scrapings from under his fingernails, individual hairs from his jacket. She had a collection of her own photographs and a file from the police photographer.

There was no ID on the body. The victim was male, Asian, between eighteen and twenty-one years old. Both eyes removed with a sharp instrument. Wasn’t a professional job. By the condition of the wound, it was done at least thirty-six hours before death. Sockets were infected. He was a mess, his clothes badly soiled. They stank of sweat, urine and excrement. He’d probably been in them for days, held captive some place. But the jacket he’d worn was expensive – Emporio Armani – and his hair had been well cut, maybe two weeks ago. He was obviously from a wealthy family.

So it seemed likely they were looking at kidnap, Darlene mused. Maybe the kid had escaped his captors. Maybe he’d stopped being useful. No way of knowing … yet.

She removed a selection of test tubes from the case and walked over to a row of machines on an adjacent bench, each device glistening new. She slotted the test tubes into a metal rack, pulled up a stool, switched on the machines and listened to the ascending whir of computers booting up and electron microscopes coming on-line.

The first test tube was labeled: “Nail Scraping. Left
digitus secundus manus
.” With the tweezers, she slid out the piece of material. It was a couple of millimeters square, a blob of blue and pink. She placed it on a slide, lowered a second rectangular piece of glass over it and positioned the arrangement in the cross-hairs of the microscope.

The image was a pitted off-white. Set to a magnification of x1000, human flesh looked like a blanched moonscape. She tracked the microscope to the right and refocused. It looked almost the same, only the details were different. She set the
tracking going again, back left, past the starting position. Refocused. Paused. Sat back for a second, then peered into the eyepiece once more. “Now that
is
weird,” she said.

I WAS PULLING into the parking lot below Private when my cell rang.

“Hey Darlene. So what’d you find out?” I wiped away a trickle of sweat running down my cheek. My car’s thermometer read ninety-two degrees.

“The police have ID’ed the victim. His name’s Ho Chang, nineteen, left Shore School last year. His father is Ho Meng, a well-known and very wealthy importer/exporter. The boy was reported missing two days ago.”

“Well that’s something.”

“I found out some other stuff too.”

“Great … What?”

“I’d rather show you – in the lab.”

“See you in a minute.”

Mary and Johnny were in reception before me. I was surprised. It was only 8 am. I was even more surprised to see a tall man in a finely tailored suit getting out of one of the chairs across the coffee table. Beside him stood a guy in a gray suit.
A bodyguard, I guessed. He had that boneheaded look about him.

Johnny retreated and Mary led me over. “This is Mr Ho Meng … My boss, Craig Gisto.”

We shook hands.

“I just heard,” I said. “Please accept my …”

He raised a hand, shaking his head slowly.

I was lost for words for a moment, then put out a hand to indicate we should walk along to my office.

Mary and Ho sat at opposite ends of my sofa and I pulled round a chair. The bonehead stood by the door, arms folded.

“Mr. Ho and I have met before,” Mary began. She was wearing cargo pants and a tight, short-sleeved tee that accentuated the girth of her arms. “Mr. Ho was a Commissioner in the Hong Kong Police Force. I met him when he delivered a special lecture at the Military Police College a few years back.”

“I would like you to find my son’s killer,” Ho responded. His voice was remarkably refined. I guessed Oxford or Cambridge.

“I assume the police are …”

“I do not trust the Australian police, Mr. Gisto.”

I watched him. He’d drifted off into grief for a second, but then his expression hardened, a carefully constructed shield against the world.

“Well, of course, Mr. Ho. That’s what we do.”

“My son was reported missing more than two days ago. His death was preventable. The police did nothing.”

“I’m sure they tried.”

“Don’t make excuses for them, Mr. Gisto.” He had his imperious hand up again. “They’re either incompetent, lazy or lack resources. Whatever it is I won’t work with them.”

“Mr. Ho, what can you tell us about your son? Any clues how he got into trouble?” Mary asked.

He sighed. “Chang was a wonderful boy. Headstrong, for sure. He was profoundly deaf, but struggled for independence. He was a brilliant lip-reader. Insisted he have his own apartment as soon as he left school.”

“He was deaf?” I said, surprised.

Ho nodded. “From the age of four.” He glanced at Mary. “I would be the first to admit that this is partly my fault. I’ve not exactly been a model father. Chang’s mother died twelve years ago. I’ve been obsessed with my business. I could never find the time. I shouldn’t have let him leave home so young.”

“When did you last see your son?” I asked.

“Thursday night. A family dinner … rare.” Ho stopped speaking and looked away.

“So that would be three days ago?”

“Yes. I went to his apartment on Friday morning. He wasn’t there. I tried to SMS him, emailed him. Nothing. I reported him missing by late afternoon.”

“The police called me just after midnight when they’d identified Chang’s body. I went to the morgue at six this morning.” His voice was brittle. “I saw what they did to him.” He looked at Mary and then at me, his face like a mannequin’s. “You have to find the killer Mr. Gisto. I am a very wealthy man. I don’t care what it costs.”

DEPUTY COMMISSIONER THOROGOOD was coming through the main doors just as Ho Meng was leaving. I met him in reception and we walked along the corridor.

“That was the father of the murdered kid,” I said as we sat down. “He’s mighty pissed with your people.”

Thorogood’s face creased into a frown.

“He can’t understand why you didn’t save his boy.”

“So, he’s come to you?”

I nodded.

“Well, you know our agreement, Craig. We share Intel.”

“He doesn’t want to talk to the police.”

The Deputy Commissioner blanched, anger building in his eyes. “Well it’s not up to him, is it?” he snapped. “If he’s withholding evidence …”

I let it go, went to change the subject. There was a knock on the door. Darlene poked her head round. “Bad time? You said you’d …”

“Sorry, Darlene,” I said quickly. “Come in.”

“Deputy Commissioner, you’ve met Darlene Cooper, haven’t you?”

He stood up, extended a hand. “We … ah … met last night at the …”

Darlene gave the man a brief smile. The girl was a cool paradox, beautiful
and
brilliant – the only nerd who could grace the centerfold of
Playboy
. She’d done the whole modeling
shtick
for a year after finishing her degree in Forensics at Monash, became a disciple of Sci, Jack Morgan’s resident lab genius at Private LA. Then she’d come back to Oz and our Private.

“You wanted to know the latest,” she began before flashing her baby blues at the Deputy Commissioner.

“Absolutely,” I said.

She handed me a couple of sheets of paper. They were covered with graphs and numbers. I turned them sideways, then back again.

“Analysis of skin samples, and DNA,” she explained.

“Oh, great.”

“That was bloody quick!” Thorogood said.

“So what’re your conclusions?” I asked.

“I took a range of samples from the body. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to get any prints, but I found three distinct DNA profiles. One of these is certainly the victim’s.”

“Any luck finding a match for the other two?”

Darlene shook her head. “Nothing close on any database.”

“Anything else?” I asked.

“Well yeah, actually. I took a sample of material from under Ho Chang’s fingernails.” She handed me a photograph. I stared at it for several moments, passed it to Thorogood. He sat back, held the photo up to the light.

“It’s human skin. I suspect there was a serious struggle. Ho must have taken a chunk out of the other guy.”

“But what’s the blue?” Thorogood asked, studying the image. It showed a highly magnified ragged rectangle of skin. One corner was dark blue.

“Stumped me,” Darlene replied, “… for a few seconds. Then I realized it was probably a bit of a tattoo.”

Thorogood looked at Darlene, back at the picture.

“Very clever,” I said.

“Oh, I’m even cleverer than that.”

I flicked a glance at Thorogood who was now giving Darlene a skeptical look.

“I took a sample and ran it through a gas chromatograph that separates out the constituents of a blend. Tattoo ink is a cocktail of many different ingredients. The gas chromatograph pulls these away from each other and gives a readout to show everything that makes up the blend. This is what I got.”

I took another sheet of paper from my science whiz. It showed a graph with different colored bars lined up across the paper.

“There were forty-seven different compounds or elements in the ink – vegetable dyes, traces of solvent, zinc, copper. But one thing stood out.”

I handed the sheet to Thorogood.

“An unusual level of Antimony.”

We both looked at Darlene blankly.

“Only Chinese tattooists use that type of ink. It’s most commonly found in the tattoos of Triad gang members.”