Challis - 05 - Blood Moon (3 page)

Constable.

Challis turned to Sutton. Check if
theres any CCTV coverage from local businesses.

Boss, Sutton said.

* * * *

4

Ellen
Destry had reached the Waterloo police station, which was on the roundabout at
the head of High Street, with a Caltex service station, a McDonalds and
Waterloo Stockfeed on the other three corners. The building itself was a
low-slung tan brick and glass structure set amongst some bark-shedding gum
trees with access from a little side street. It was a major regional station,
serving Peninsula East, and employed uniformed police, CIU detectives, crime-scene
officers, probationary constables and several civilians: clerks and canteen
staff, and the collators, who gathered, analysed and cross-referenced all
intelligence relating to solved and unsolved crimes and the movements and
associations of known criminals on the Peninsula.

She parked outside the station and
entered through the foyer, where a middle-aged woman was watching the duty
sergeant witness a statutory declaration. She tapped in her code, entered the
network of offices and corridors behind the reception desk and checked her
pigeonhole: a circular for the end-of-year Police Ball, a reminder that she
owed $12 tea money, and a copy of the November
Police Life
magazine. Hal
had been on the front cover once, years ago, after hed played a role in the
arrest of the Old Peninsula Highway killer. He hadnt liked the attention. He
liked to slip through life unnoticed.

The cells, interview rooms, admin
offices and canteen were on the ground floor. Ellen took the stairs to the
upper level, which housed CIU, a couple of briefing rooms, a small gym and a
tearoom. The Crime Investigation Unit was small, with four detectives rostered
on nights, four on days. It never worked out quite like that, of course. There
was always someone away sick, attending a training course or giving evidence in
court. When extra hands were needed they were seconded from other CIU teams,
mainly from Mornington and Rosebud.

Sitting at her corner desk in the
controlled chaos of the open-plan CIU room, Ellen routinely checked her e-mailsand
began to realise that she felt faintly miffed about being asked to do desk work
today. It was great having Hal back, but shed headed a major inquiry while he
was away, and shed acquitted herself well. She wanted to be out and about, not
stuck behind a desk.

Still, there was never anything
minor about a sexual assault. Seeing no e-mails from the forensic science
centre, she phoned, identifying herself and the case number. Sexual assault,
she prompted, in Waterloo last Saturday night.

She heard the tapping of a keyboard
on the end of the line, and eventually the forensic technician said, Semen on
the victims clothes, right? Were backed up here, Sergeant Destry. DNA takes
time.

Ellen sighed. Just checking, she
said, and hung up.

She stared at the ceiling battens,
not seeing them. There was nothing unusual about a sexual assault on a Saturday
night; nothing unusual about that anywhere in the world. But the victim in this
case had been a schoolie, shed been assaulted during Schoolies Week, and her
attacker might have been a fellow schoolie.

Or a toolie. one of the locals who
preyed on the school leavers. Older men, mostly, some with records for theft,
dealing drugs and sexual assault. They were sly and predatory, and seemed to
hate the schoolies for everything they lacked: education, job prospects, money,
youth, good health, a clean record.

Had toolies been active at last years
Schoolies Week? Waterloo hadnt been the least bit prepared for the event. The
police had had to deal with three drug overdoses, two claims of drink spiking,
the theft of tents, sleeping bags and backpacks, and a vicious mugging that
placed a kid in hospital minus his runners, iPod, mobile phone and wallet. Theyd
made several arrests, for serious assault, drunk and disorderly, drug use and
obstructing police, and Ellen had also heard rumours that some local girls had
been sexually assaulted.

Meanwhile the local residents had
been up in arms over the noise, the brawling, the drag races and burnouts on
the foreshore, and the stoned, drunk, drug-addled or distressed and weeping
kids wandering the streets and through the shops and passing out in pools of
blood, piss or vomit on front lawns. The street cleaners worked overtime,
raking up condoms, beer cans, unpaired shoes, knickers, makeshift bongs and
paper scraps from the beach and parkland areas.

What made it worse, in many ways,
was the behaviour of the rich kids. They arrived in costly cars and were
indifferent to the money they splashed around. They expected it to get them out
of trouble. Accustomed to expensive overseas holidays, they were viciously
bored and disappointed in humble little Waterloo, and took it out on the locals
and the poorer kids.

It was a conundrum for the towns
worthies. On the one hand, they deplored the bad behaviour; on the other, they
estimated that the schoolies would inject up to $200,000 into the local
economy, and no one wanted to deny these kids a holiday by the sea. So the
mayor and the councillors had worked out a strategy. The community would
provide camping areas, counselling and general information. The police would
liaise and mingle with the schoolies, but also strike hard against public
drunkenness and hooliganism, levelling $100 on-the-spot fines for drinking or
possessing alcohol in an open container in a public place, lighting campfires
on the foreshore, and sleeping in a car rather than a designated campsite tent
or a room in a hotel, a motel, a boarding house or a bed-and-breakfast
establishment.

Ellen had selected Pam Murphy to be
the main liaison officer for the police, figuring the young detective would be
more sympathetic and understanding than Scobie Sutton. But Ellen also kept a
watching brief, and so now she logged on to the Schoolies Week website. She
hadnt known it existed before Murph told her. Maybe the kids didnt know about
it, either, or maybe it was poorly designed, or inadequate. She should find
out.

The site, mounted by the state
government via the Education Department, was out of date, concentrating on the
traditional schoolies hotspots of Lorne, Portsea and Sorrento. Were not big
enough yet, Ellen thought.

She checked the useful phone
numbers list. The obvious ones were therestate-wide numbers for the police,
fire brigade, ambulance, twenty-four-hour drug and alcohol advice, poisons
information, sexual assault and suicide hotlinesbut no local numbers. What if
the schoolies camped at Waterloo wanted a youth worker or a clean needle? Even
a bus or a taxi?

She scrolled down. All reasonable
advice: check home regularly, look out for each other, keep your room locked,
secure your valuables, carry ID at all times, together with enough
moneyseparate from your walletto pay for phone calls and transport. If in
trouble, seek help from the police and official volunteers.

She read on. Never swim under the
influence of alcohol or drugs. Drink plenty of water. Eat at least one solid
meal a day. Space your drinking. Be alert for drink spiking and dodgy
strangers. Dont get into a car with a stranger or an inebriated driver. Dont
let your friends go off with strangers, get hassled by others or sober up
alone. At Portsea two years ago a kid had drowned in his own vomit.

Next, accommodation. Last year some
kids had trashed a motel room and been thrown out of a bed-and-breakfast joint
near the boardwalk. It occurred to Ellen that maybe kids were being ripped off
by landlords. The website advised them to check the fine print on their
accommodation contractswould she have thought to do that, when she was
eighteen?and get a receipt for the bond money. She scanned through: complaints
procedures, Accommodation Code of Practice, blah, blah, blah.

Ellen rubbed her eyes. She hated
computer work. As she continued to follow the links she had to admit that the
information was useful and solidbut did the kids read it? She thought of
further local information that was sorely lacking. Like where to swim safely,
for example. How Western Port Bay emptied treacherously when the tide went out,
so that you could find yourself stranded on a mud bank and drown when it came
racing in again. The black spots in the mobile phone coverage. The fact that it
can be cold at night, and that November can be rainy. The fact that many shops
and restaurants in the little burg of Waterloo closed early.

Also, where the town of Lorne
offered its schoolies a free clinic, a free shuttle bus and plenty of youth
workers wearing distinctive orange T-shirts, Waterloo offered a handful of
untrained volunteers from the local church communities operating from a safe
haven called the Chillout Zone, in the grounds of the Uniting Church behind
High Street. Ellen had called in last night and found herself helping Pam
Murphy to dispense drinks and snacks to wasted, lonely, bored and befuddled
kids, or those who were simply broke.

And Scobie Suttons wife, Beth, had
been lurking there. According to Murph, Beth Sutton had been at the Chillout
Zone since Friday, handing God-bothering leaflets to the schoolies and
murmuring to them in an intense monotone.

Ellen looked up from the monitor and
into the distance. The volunteers. Pam Murphy had introduced her to last nights
bunch shed vetted them all, she saidbut Pam couldnt be everywhere at once,
and wouldnt it be easy for some pervert to pass himself off as an official
volunteer or youth worker?

Nothing about this job gets any
easier, Ellen muttered. She looked at her watch. The others should be
returning from the Trevally Street assault soon.

* * * *

5

Caz
Moon was on Trevally Street. She was walking to work, HangTen, the surf shop up
on High Street, where she was the manager. For now, anyway. Caz was no cute
surfie chicksuntanned, blonde, mini-skirt, chewing gum snapping in her jaws.
Caz couldnt be bothered with any of that. Her jeans and T-shirt were cheap, her
hair and makeup vaguely Goth. She was saving her money. She was slim, quick and
clever, twenty-one years old, and very soon she would leave Waterloo far
behind, leave her peers to their pregnancies and joblessness.

Caz Moon hadnt reached the crime scene
yet, although she could see the police car, the uniforms and the tape in the
distance. She was still down on the stretch of Trevally devoted to seedy
boarding houses, run-down motels and faded holiday apartments, all of them
facing patchy parkland between the coin barbecues and the boardwalk that ran
out into the mangrove swamp. The parkland was Tent City this week, flimsy green
and blue nylon structures flapping in the breeze. No one stirring, though. The
little dears were still sleeping it off.

It was in front of the Sea Breeze
Holiday Apartments that Caz spotted a red Subaru Impreza with a spoiler, racks
and customised mag wheels. She swayed, feeling unmoored suddenly. Unwelcome
sensations flooded through her, momentarily flattening her capacity to think. A
year ago, it had been. Schoolies Week last year. She remembered the sounds of
his breathing and her undies ripping, his faintly rotten cocaine and
amphetamine skin, the sand packed in hard ripples beneath her spine, the bile
in her mouth and the knowing stars high above.

Josh, his name was, one long,
rollercoaster night, Josh sweet at first, then the flashes of paranoia, his
eyes looking wildly through her, then the sweetness again. She knew more, now,
about the mood swings associated with ice. And maybe he carried a whole
pharmacy around in his pocket, for the next thing she remembered was feeling
dazed, her limbs sluggish, Josh on top of her in the darkest hours of the
night.

And here he was, back in town again
in his little red car.

Caz Moon closed her eyes and willed
it all away, willing raw anger in its place. She breathed in and out. She
smiled. She set off again in her unreadable way, down along Trevally Street
toward the Villanova Gardens apartments.

A detective watched her and she
watched the detective, a young woman with a clipboard, who suddenly veered away
from knocking fruitlessly on nearby doors to head Caz off, her face with that
cool, blank, unimpressed look they all have.

Hi, the cop said. My names
Detective Constable Pam Murphy. She paused, cocked her head. Ive seen you
around town. You work in the surf shop, right?

Manager, Caz said. She took the
initiative and shot out her hand. Karen Moon. Caz.

Hi, the cop said, shaking her
hand. Listen, were investigating a serious incident in Trevally Street last
night. Mind if I ask you some questions?

Caz glanced past the cop to a beefy
uniformed guy doorknocking on the other side of the street, and beyond him to
one of the apartments, where a slinky guy stood guard, looking bored. Fire
away.

The questions began: Do you live
nearby? Do you regularly use Trevally Street? Did you pass along here late
yesterday evening or in the early hours of the morning? And so on. It didnt
take long. Caz soon established that she hadnt seen or heard anything.

All true. But she did lie. The lie
was in not informing the young detective with the taut body and probing eyes
that shed been raped last November. At night, on one of the beaches. And that
she knew where to find the guy whod committed it.