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Once we signed the required paperwork, I dropped Carmine back home.
He made coffee, and we sat in silence for a while—nothing to say, really.
I made sure he had my number if he needed me for anything, and he reassured me he would be fine alone.
I drove to the hotel in a fugue.
I woke up the next morning feeling as if I hadn’t slept. I didn’t remember climbing the stairs to my room, or going in, or collapsing onto the bed. I remembered a dream about McCaskill, about the police taking him in.
He was taken in, wasn’t he? He was. I got him. He killed George.
I saw the head and the familiar wavy hairline, sticking out of the wet concrete.
What did George do to McCaskill?
I couldn’t make a connection. I flicked through useless, illegible mental notes.
I still wore the stained clothes from the day before, and smelled terrible. I staggered into the bathroom, peeled my clothes off, ran the shower, and looked in the mirror. Tiny cuts and scratches decorated my face at crazy angles. Dirt stained the bandage over my nose and the tape unfurled at the edges. I started to shake and feel anxious. I was alive, and lucky to be so—probably shock catching up with me. I stepped into the shower, let the water wash over my head, and tried to wake up, jolting when the water turned cold.
Outside the shower, I peeled off the gauze over my nose, gingerly shaved around the cuts, and applied new gauze with fresh tape. Once completed, a wave of exhaustion washed over me, and I had to lie down.
When I awoke, the motel clock said 11:17 AM. I called Zio Fausto and told him everything that had happened the previous night.
He sounded suitably upset, his voice croaking. He may have been drinking.
I told him I couldn’t be certain McCaskill was responsible for his sons’ murders, but the homicide squad were investigating his property. I promised to still look into things too.
He told me to be safe, and he hoped everything went well with the police. He coughed thickly as he hung up.
I needed to run a few things past Constable Hunter, and I needed some air, so I walked to the station. Clouds had taken the warmth away, and a hard wind had picked up, dropping the temperature a few degrees. It was a few minutes shy of 2:00 by the time I strode into the police station.
A deathly quiet permeated the small office, and a young probationary constable I hadn’t seen before sat at the front desk typing away at the PC. He looked up briefly and returned to his work. ‘I’ll be with you in just a moment, sir.’
I didn’t wait.
***
Constable Sue Hunter was waiting at the café when I arrived. She wore gym wear, black tights and a pink tank top, her hair tied in a relaxed ponytail. When she saw me, I nodded and joined her at the table.
‘It’s supposed to be my RDO tomorrow,’ she said, ‘but thanks to you it looks like I’ll be filing papers all day. The sergeant called in some reinforcements last night from Nowra to help us out.’
I adopted a humbled expression and shrugged. ‘Thanks for taking my call. I really appreciate it after the night you had last night. I was wondering if we could go over things.’
She looked at me evenly as her jaw went to work. ‘I was at that crash scene until one in the morning,’ she said. ‘I have a stack of incident reports to file, and Sergeant Green is with the homicide detectives. I’m beat, Matt.’
‘Is McCaskill conscious? Did he talk?’
‘He’s in a coma.’
I slammed my hand on the table and the cups shook. ‘Sorry, I’m a bit wired. I thought I had this.’
A waitress appeared, and we ordered coffee. Sue requested an extra shot in hers.
Once the waitress left, Sue continued. ‘I’ve just come off seven days straight, and I need a pick me up. I struggled at the gym this morning. Oh, by the way, homicide found your business card in George’s wallet. As you’ve only been in town three days, and local eyewitnesses saw you with George at the RSL the day before he was killed, the Chief Inspector is going to want to talk to you.’
‘Thanks for the heads up. I’ll anticipate his call.’
‘I don’t necessarily agree with your methods. This cavalier, cowboy crap is so outdated. And before you say it gets results—’
‘It gets results.’
She clenched her mouth and chewed the inside of her cheek. ‘You always have to take the piss, don’t you?’
‘It’s the Kowalski sense of humour. I can’t take authority too seriously.’
‘Obviously.’
The waitress appeared with our coffees.
Sue stirred her cappuccino and licked the spoon. ‘Do you think McCaskill’s responsible?’
‘Everything points to him at the moment, but I can’t draw a direct line between him and Rob or George. And McCaskill doesn’t come across as someone methodical and well organised. I also think the killer knew of George’s activities and place of work, and was very opportunistic. McCaskill seems more like a thug than someone with any patience or any real fortitude.’
‘Hopefully with McCaskill out of the picture, his silent partner might weasel his way out of the wood work.’
‘Depends where his head is.’
Sue sipped her coffee. ‘I was thinking about what you said the other night, about your assault at the warehouse. Sounds like a couple of cowboys I know.’
‘What do you mean?’
She took another sip of her coffee, and I did the same.
She said, ‘Going over some testimonies from some of the people we bring in, they claim they’d been set upon at one time or another by two unidentified males in balaclavas who beat up and target the so called ‘riff raff’ in the community. I’ve had, at a guess, a hundred reports of these cowboys who intimidate and assault low-level criminals, scare them off. There are men in this town who take it upon themselves to make sure the riff raff stay far away. Drug dealers.’
‘This place has a group of vigilantes?’
‘Not ‘groups’. I said ‘two’.’
‘Any suspects?’
She shrugged. ‘I have theories, nothing substantial. Not every assault is reported to the police, for one reason or another. I think it’s a pair of nihilistic arseholes suffering major mid-life crises. They get off on instilling fear. They’re organised and are able to stay under the radar, which means they know the area very well. That leads me to think they’re local. They keep to themselves, and no one’s brave enough to talk about them, to expose them. They’ve ingrained themselves into the consciousness of this community. If the over-sixties used to feel scared, they don’t anymore with these guys taking care of things.’
‘Have you interviewed anybody new?’
‘Word gets around fast down here but, despite that, no. No one has come forward with anything. I did manage to look into that warehouse on Tom Thumb close. It’s part owned by Sin Lum Nguyen, otherwise known as Rosie McCaskill, Stuart McCaskill’s wife. Looks like attorneys became involved when the finances went haywire, until some Vietnamese money revitalised it. Do you have a description, or do you recall any identifying features of these assailants of yours?’
‘One of them was McCaskill. The other guy was average height and medium build, blue eyes. They’re the only discernible things I can go on. It can’t be a coincidence that I find George’s body on McCaskill’s property. They must be linked, but I don’t know how. I’d just be making assumptions.’
Sue shook her head. ‘You look like shit. Take some time off. Let the professionals take over. Spend some time with your lady friend.’
I looked at her. ‘I can’t let it go.’
She shook her head again.
As we finished up, she told me she’d be on the night shift covering for Sergeant Green. She waved from the door of the café on the way out, and I gave a nod.
I needed to shake the feeling of loose ends, and a bit of time to turn my attention to something else. I’d been thinking about Rob almost every minute of every day, and needed a distraction. I called Annette to see if she’d like to meet for a coffee, and lucky for me she did.
She suggested a place called Piccolos, a coffee house in Nowra, and we agreed to meet in half an hour.
I found it easily—a plain stucco building with basic chairs and tables, and little pictures of the leaning tower of Pisa and the Roman Colosseum on the walls. They seemed to be going for a European minimalist approach.
Annette showed up wearing a black dress, linen jacket, and medium heels. When she saw my face, she stopped mid stride and stared.
I coaxed her over with a nonchalant wave.
She sat in the chair opposite and put a hand on my elbow. ‘I thought you just spied on people—you know, from a distance, no contact, that sort of thing.’
‘I do... most of the time.’
‘But sometimes it gets physical?’
‘From time to time.’
I assured her the scratches and cuts would heal, and the nose should reset just fine. After a few minutes, she relaxed, and we talked about the events from the previous night.
I kept things sketchy so as not to worry her too much, and looked around. ‘Nice place.’
She laughed. ‘No, it’s not, but they make the best coffee in Nowra.’
We ordered two short blacks, a plate of biscotti, and a slice of cheesecake each. When it all arrived, I tried the coffee and nodded my appreciation. It was the best I’d tasted so far in the area.
Annette stirred the froth from her latte and added two sachets of Equal.
I spotted a painting on the wall that showed the southern part of Italy, with Calabria highlighted with a red dot. I pointed to it. ‘My mum’s family is from there—Calabria.’
She swiveled in her seat to look at the painting. ‘Ca-la-bria,’ she said. ‘Sounds beautiful. I love Italy. And Italians.’
She stroked the inside of my hand with her fingernail, and the charge took me back to our night together.
‘My grandfather came to Australia in 1955, got a job at the steel works near The Gong. They employed a lot of immigrants then. He made enough to buy a small house, then brought my grandmother, my mum, and her four sisters over here. He did all that without speaking a word of English.’
Annette scooped up a fork full of cheesecake. ‘That’s amazing. We give refugees so much shit these days, and they’re trying to do the same thing.’ She shook her head. ‘Mmm, this is good.’
I scooped up a morsel of the cake and let its richness coat my mouth. ‘My Nonno was a very proud man, and as you know, the fifties were a prosperous time and for Italians, the more children the better.’
Annette smiled and sipped her coffee. ‘And so, who’s Rob to you?’
‘My cousin by marriage. My uncle, Zio Fausto, has a younger brother, Carmine. Rob was his son. George too. They were barely tweens when I clocked twenty, and we moved in different social circles. I saw them at a cousin’s wedding hanging around the foyer in this function centre, with other tweens, trying to bum smokes off adults. They were always polite to me, but Rob possessed a dangerous energy, a restlessness. The only other time I remembered Rob being mentioned was at a dinner at my Zia Valeria’s house. They were stressed to the eyeballs about Rob’s behaviour. He was fourteen and already into girls and pot, and his parents had had enough. Soon after that, his mum dropped dead from an aneurism.’
‘Jesus.’
‘I don’t know how much that exacerbated his behaviour. Was it a catalyst? More than likely. I mean, how it could it not? Teenage boys lose their mum, it’s bound to make an impact. Last thing I heard, Carmine sold up and took his boys down here.’
She ate some more cake and frowned. ‘So, this isn’t just a job for you.’
‘What do you mean?’
She pointed her fork at me. ‘You have a sense of moral gratitude towards your uncle.’
It shocked me, but as I thought about it, she was right. ‘You’ve hit the nail on the head.’
‘Not just a pretty face.’
I ate more cake and sipped some coffee.
‘You look very far away,’ she said.
‘I remember this time when I was nine, maybe ten, just a skinny kid, if you can believe it. Zio owned a property in Appin, and I remember we drove there once. While the adults had coffee, my sister and I went out and explored the property. It was huge, maybe twenty acres, and had these big gumtrees everywhere. Real bushland, you know? I remember finding a rat skeleton in the early stages of decay, and I just stared at it. It was the first time I really thought about death. I wandered off into some scrubland, ended up face-to-face with a huge bull, and just froze to the spot. It stared at me with these big dumb eyes, and I was absolutely petrified. Just as it was about to charge me, Zio Fausto and my stepdad appeared and yelled at it. Zio threw a stick at it and scared it away. It took me the rest of the day to recover.’
She smiled. ‘I can imagine you as a boy.’
‘Really? And what was I like, as a boy?’
‘Gentle, kind, up for adventure.’ She finished her slice of cake and moved the crumbs around on her plate.
I looked at the corners of her mouth. ‘You’ve got a very sexy brain.’
She smiled. ‘It’s not all I’ve got.’
We quickly finished our coffees, and Annette followed me in her car to my motel. We were both eager, but not impatient. Though not as passionate as our first night, we took our time and discovered what pleased each other the most.
