Hermit Page 2

  ‘That’s how I see it,’ Bill replied. ‘Stabbed here . . . fell back to here . . . and either he or someone else clamped something on the wound to stop the flow.’

  ‘Does our suspect have any blood on him?’

  Bill stood again and smiled. ‘Oh, yeah. He has blood on his hands. Bent over the guy, hand pushed against the wound.’

  ‘Burglary gone wrong?’

  Bill waved at a corner of the store. ‘Looks like he climbed in through that window over there. Professional, too. Put a bag on the windowsill so there’d be no marks, and bags on his shoes, too. He had a rucksack full of loot, but . . .’

  Dana had reached the end of the aisle and could see the entry point. She scanned the floor less for prints, more for detritus like leaves or burrs; but there was nothing. The guy had entered smoothly and professionally, like he’d done it a hundred times before.

  She turned back. ‘But?’

  ‘See for yourself. Weird.’ Bill pointed at a red rucksack to her left. It was well worn but still in good shape – in the gathering daylight she noted fresh dubbin recently applied to the seams. Through the open top she could see several paperbacks and two packs of mosquito repellent. Prising past these with a pen, she saw cans of beans and some chocolate bars. The rest was lost in the bowels of the rucksack. She’d get a full inventory later.

  She ducked her head around the corner as Bill took out his phone. ‘Why was he stealing this? He could buy all this for next to nothing.’

  ‘Exactly. Why kill for that? Why be killed for that?’ Bill shrugged his shoulders and turned away to dial.

  Dana took a glance back towards the exit and the preceding aisles. A couple of mountain bikes would be worth several thousand; she imagined fishing rods weren’t cheap. There were cigarettes for sale behind the counter, but they were secured by a roller door as per the law: she hadn’t seen any in the rucksack. The burglar seemed professional enough to enter seamlessly but amateur enough to steal cheap, largely unsellable items. The owner appeared ready to die for a minor point of principle – for stuff that wouldn’t even register on his insurance premium.

  Halfway down the next aisle, splayed across the tiles, a packet of kitchen knives lay at an angle. The plastic lid had been ripped and one knife was missing. It seemed, from the indentation in the packaging, about the right size. She heard a murmur of Bill’s conversation, then his farewell to whoever.

  ‘Hey, Bill,’ she called over the top of the shelving. ‘Killer didn’t bring his own weapon?’

  Bill leaned around the corner. ‘Yeah, looks pretty ad hoc, doesn’t it? Assuming that gap in the packaging turns out to be the weapon.’

  She looked more carefully at the way the lid was ripped. It was still creased from the guy’s grip: rushed, but not frenzied. She wondered briefly why whoever did it had taken the third-longest knife and not the biggest one. Surely he would have wanted the best weapon he could get if the attack was spontaneous? And what had Cassavette done to make him feel he had to attack?

  ‘Did Cassavette have a weapon?’

  Bill rocked his hand. ‘Maybe. Haven’t found one for him either. When Forensics get here they’ll search the whole place. But nothing yet.’

  She realised she was wasting battery and switched off the torch. Golden light was now spearing in through the skylights on the eastern side of the building, glittering off the visible silver insulation in the ceiling. She could see cobwebs in the corners. Refrigerators hummed. The whole tone of the place was upbeat and direct – buy now, try this, grab one of these, limited time offer. All the colours on the walls, the packaging, the posters and special offers; they were lurid candy and cartoonish. Lonely, desperate homicide was a counterpoint.

  ‘So . . .’ Dana scuffed a foot against a kick plate below the shelving. ‘Guy comes in, ready to steal some beans, apparently. Gets halfway through; Cassavette makes himself known.’ She turned and went to the end of the aisle, pointing with the torch. ‘That’s our man’s escape route. I’m guessing all the doors were locked.’

  ‘Yup, and the lights were off. Someone opened the mains box and shut the power off before they came in.’ Bill joined her near a display of toys for kids of all ages. ‘Patrol switched it back on after they found the suspect and the body.’

  ‘This place doesn’t have back-up generators?’ Most did these days; the cost of replacing stock after an outage was horrendous.

  ‘They do, but they’re only wired to the freezers and refrigeration.’

  Dana nodded. ‘So it’s totally dark. Cassavette comes out of his hidey-hole over there; the burglar’s only way out is back through the window he used. You have to assume Cassavette – either deliberately or accidentally – blocked the escape.’

  ‘Logical. He’s clearly been waiting up nights expecting a burglary; he figures help’s on its way because the silent alarm was activated when the window opened. All he has to do is contain the guy until the cavalry arrives.’ Bill went to the window and looked out at the parked vehicles. The uniforms were trooping back to three marked Commodores, disconsolate.

  ‘Yes. So why would the burglar go crazy? I mean, he looks like a pro – the forensic awareness, the very particular choice of what to steal. That isn’t random, it’s planned. So if he’s a pro and it’s all gone a little wrong, why fight your way out? Why so desperate?’

  ‘Maybe he’s on two strikes and this will send him away for a while?’ Bill turned back to face her and held his palms open. ‘I dunno. First sweep of the databases might tell us.’ There was a crunching of gravel outside. ‘Ah, proper search team.’

  ‘He was completely silent about what happened?’ asked Dana as they headed for the door.

  ‘He hasn’t said a word, as far as I know.’ Bill waved to Stuart Risdale, the head of the search team, who gave the thumbs-up as two others disgorged themselves from a darkened SUV. ‘Check that. The guy repeated one word.’

  Bill turned to face Dana as the freezing air hit them from the doorway.

  ‘Guy said, “Sorry.” Several times.’

  Chapter 3

  It was fourteen minutes’ gentle drive from Jensen’s Store, down a series of backroads, to the Cassavette house on the outskirts of Earlville. Dana had time to find a classical-music station on the way.

  Earlville was considered the less prosperous of the ‘twin towns’. It had a sneering, fractious relationship with Carlton; a kind of sibling rivalry between orphans. Marooned in a region of forests, swamps and lakes, the two towns were merely background noise for city dwellers three hours away. Earlville thought Carlton was full of snobs and the wasting of public money; Carlton thought Earlville should give up its nostalgia for low-paid sweat jobs and join the modern world.

  Most of the properties along the route were large ‘lifestyle blocks’: homes set back among the gums and myrtle, surrounded by pony paddocks. Faux-hacienda, with terracotta tiles replacing Colourbond, seemed the look du jour. Well-tended horses chewed thoughtfully near the road, steam rising gently from blanketed flanks. Twice she saw puffing teenagers hoisting tack on to a shoulder. Maybe the first thing in their adolescent lives they’d shown consistent sacrifice for; perhaps that was why their parents indulged it.

  Many homes on this road had ostentatious stone entrances; Dana could tell which ones had electric gates, too. She’d noticed a while ago that shuttering off the outside world – and thus implying that everyone was a threat – was something that had seeped gradually from the city to Carlton. Score minus one for the famous Aussie egalitarianism, she thought: now, just like in so many other places, ‘others’ were a potential risk to be managed.

  Bill was now at the station, debriefing the first-on-scene officers and prepping the suspect for interview. Lucy was driving in from home. Mike was on his way back from Earlville Mercy hospital and would ride as first assist to her investigation. Mike was a completer-finisher. Thank God: Dana had proper back-up.

  Too early for commuting SUVs, she had the road largely to herself. Her p
re-dawn excursion to Pulpit Falls kept pushing itself to the front of her mind. She had enough strength to shove it back temporarily, but she knew it couldn’t be contained.

  Even murder was just a displacement activity. Investigating a killing staved off the force and resonance of memory, the crippling panic and catastrophic damage it caused. She’d granted her blind-siding depression one Day of freedom, and now she was compromising that. It would exact a price for the betrayal.

  Her mind drifted a little: the Day seeped in. Slivers of a scalding blue sky long ago, scarlet blossom on cool grass, filigreed shadow and soap bubbles: she could almost feel the light that had sparkled in front of her. She shook her head. If there ever was a right time to consider that – and she didn’t feel there was – now was not it. She held the steering wheel tight and in her head she screamed, Focus. Work: work would surely drive out everything else. It always had.

  The crime scene had been a series of pieces, not a coherent whole. If the killer was the burglar, it didn’t make sense – the burglary seemed like a professional job, and a professional would surely simply hold up their hands to the break-in and take the consequences. There would be no need to do anything more. Maybe Cassavette was the type to fly off the handle: How dare you steal from me?, and so on. But even then . . . the knife packaging. If the burglar had punched or kicked Cassavette and he’d hit something fatal on the way down: that would have been an understandable death. But when someone reached on to a shelf, tore open a pack of knives – selected the third smallest; that bothered her, too – and then stabbed: it was a degree, however small, of forethought that seemed at odds with an ad hoc altercation. There was something big beyond the obvious.

  If it hadn’t been the burglar, the options would fan outwards from the life of Lou Cassavette. Family, business partners, friends, disgruntled former friends, people he owed, people who owed him, former lovers, spurned would-be lovers. She mulled over a list of possibles and how they might be narrowed down. She’d put Mike on to it. Dana was the primary and would pursue the prime suspect. Mike would look at other options and play devil’s advocate to whatever she was thinking.

  As she got nearer the Cassavettes’ home the landscape changed. Lush gardens and majestic trees disappeared, replaced by scrubby lots and small industrial units. Roofs turned to scrappy and rust-flecked old Colourbond, neat verges dissolved, spangled concrete prevailed. The luxury of space disappeared and the average wage spiralled down to . . . mean. Next to a small strip of stores, high-set floodlights still illuminated the mist-draped parking area, where hooded skateboarders regularly outnumbered cars. A barricaded store in the middle of the strip promised to buy your gold for cash. To one side, a mini-mart offered to unlock any SIM card; on the other, an office window claimed that no cash was kept on the premises overnight.

  She turned past a faux-stone entryway on to a new estate. It had been built to exploit the new freeway junction ten minutes away but had turned into a money-laundering opportunity for international crime. The banks now owned half the houses, and most of the rest were held by the courts and tax authorities: shells where it was foolish to fit copper pipes, or wiring. Earlville’s now-shunned mayor had opened the estate in a flurry of ribbons, flashbulbs and gurning optimism. He had been indicted but was still awaiting his chance ‘to put the record straight’. Actual owners were thin on the ground and either full of regrets or blessed by their endless and ignorant patience.

  Low homes, more roof than brick, hunched on curved streets that must have looked lovely in the artist’s rendering. In the publicity the streets would have shimmered under blue summer skies, casually populated by hand-holding couples smiling as their offspring launched a toy yacht in the ornamental lake. In the chilly early morning of a weekday the streetscape was silent and bleak: kerbside holes awaiting ‘heritage street lighting’, front-yard saplings shivering and inconsequential. Roads finished abruptly, with vandal-proof fencing shielding vacant blocks. The developer hadn’t finished the street signs yet: it took three attempts down identikit cul-de-sacs to find the place.

  Dana parked outside the Cassavette home as a grey BMW swept towards the main road, xenon headlights slicing the gloom. The driver held his phone to his ear, barking silently as he passed her. She took a deep breath. The Cassavette house was identical to the one each side; a series of three joined at the garage. A way of shoving smaller blocks on to each development. A country the size of a continent, she thought, and we’re ramming people together. The homes would each have the same floorplan, and neighbours would feel a bizarre sense of familiarity when they entered the house next door. The Cassavettes had forgotten to bring in the rubbish bin – it sat forlorn at the beginning of their path.

  Uniform patrol hadn’t spoken to anyone yet; she would have to do The Knock. Some officers ran from that responsibility: she had an autopilot mode she could use. Telling the nearest or dearest had a rhythm, structure and etiquette she could understand, which both reassured and rescued her. Dana had done it twice before. Those hadn’t felt as difficult as they should have: she’d been cocooned by the recipient’s shock. Their emotional concussion allowed her to get away with her own reticence. They seemed to want to make tea or coffee or offer cakes; they rarely asked tricky questions.

  She skirted around empathy because, primarily, it wasn’t helpful to the investigation. Close family were close enough to do more harm than good, to harbour grudges and nurture fears: they knew weak spots and moments to strike. Dana knew that well enough. Close family were therefore suspects until proven otherwise, and it hindered clear thinking to have already been sympathetic. Dana tried to strike a balance between humane and professional – if push came to shove, she’d always take the latter.

  The door knocker was a metal lion’s head. When she used it, the door – being cheaper than the knocker it held – clattered in the frame. They threw these places up, she thought. Above the door, the soffit was already peeling paint.

  The woman who answered was small, neat and oozed rapid capability. Dana made instant calculations. The woman would have fast-twitch muscles, she would eat and walk quickly, she would glance around like a bird, and she would struggle to relax. People would call her a dynamo, sparky, busy. Megan Cassavette was around one metre sixty, dark hair pulled back from a scrubbed, pretty and slightly freckled face. No-nonsense, she would be slightly unaware of her own attractiveness and as a result underestimate who she could attract. She wore a black business suit over an electric-blue blouse. Dana never noticed shoes.

  ‘Yes?’

  Dana offered her ID palm up, as if inviting the woman to pick a card, any card. ‘Good morning. I’m Detective Dana Russo. Are you Megan Cassavette?’

  Megan took a half-step back. Her hand rose to her throat, where it touched a thin gold necklace over a slight skin-blush. ‘Yeah, I am. What is it? Lou? Is Lou okay?’

  ‘Maybe better inside, Mrs Cassavette?’

  Dana waited at the threshold until Megan had retreated almost behind the door. The walk into the living room was too long for both of them: Dana wanted to blurt it out and Megan had already guessed. It seemed a charade to say it out loud. Megan perched on the edge of an armchair and reached into her sleeve for a handkerchief, while Dana set the recorder going.

  Dana started speaking as she sat. ‘Your husband was at Jensen’s Store last night?’

  Megan nodded, and her breath caught for a second. She flashed a look to a framed photograph next to a large-screen TV: the couple waving kayak paddles triumphantly in crisp New Zealand air, bookended by snow-capped peaks. He was a head and neck taller than her. Wet hair suited Megan; a damp T-shirt accentuated Lou’s gut. It struck Dana that Megan was a fair bit younger than her husband – perhaps ten years. Or maybe, simply much better looking.

  ‘Uh, yeah, we own it. Lou thought someone was stealing, so he camped out there sometimes. I told him . . . oh, God. What happened? Is he hurt? Tell me.’

  Dana focused her effort on keeping eye contact. Megan Cass
avette had grey eyes; she’d rushed the mascara. ‘We don’t know all the details. Mr Cassavette was stabbed this morning, at around five thirty. He died at the scene, before officers could reach him.’

  Sometimes they crumbled, but often they didn’t. Megan opened her mouth to speak, then closed it. Dana didn’t want to stare obtrusively, didn’t want to look away. She re-set her position on the couch purely for something to do. Raw emotion was heading her way; it prompted her flight response.

  ‘Mrs Cassavette? Is there someone I can call for you? People usually don’t like to be alone—’

  ‘Usually?’ It was snapped, and there was a moment when Megan seemed on the point of attack. Then it faded. ‘Oh, of course. You must do this all the time. God, how horrible for you. Uh, no, thanks. I’ll call my mother soon. Yeah. No. Thanks.’ She swallowed hard to keep the tears back – Dana saw a shard of stubborn pride in it.

  Dana nodded. ‘I understand this is the last thing you want to do, but it would really help our investigation if you could answer a few questions. Are you up to that, Mrs Cassavette?’

  Megan glanced to the fireplace then drifted slowly back to Dana, as though she were spinning through the air and couldn’t tell which way was up. ‘Uh, sure. Ask away.’

  ‘Thank you. Have the two of you lived here long?’

  Megan was looking straight at her, but Dana understood that she wasn’t really seeing anything. Megan coughed and tried to focus. ‘Mm, nearly a year. Yeah. A year next month. Moved out here when we bought the store. Country scenery, you know?’ She waved vaguely at the kitchen, which lay at the far end of the living room. Through its window was a framed view of a metal fence, a water butt and a Hills Hoist that hugged itself in the chilly gloom. ‘Fresh air, fresh start. That sort of thing.’ Her reply held a trail of bitterness. ‘Who did it? Have you caught him?’

  Dana took a second. ‘It’s very early in the investigation, Mrs Cassavette. Very early. There’s a lot of ground to cover.’