THE STRIKE FORCE Satyr incident room had been established at the back of the Gladesville police station, less than a kilometre from the two scenes. An image of Marguerite Dunlop in school uniform now had centre place on the main wall, among portraits of Lena Chatfield and Jill Sheridan. Pictures of victims motivated investigators, especially these victims—dead young white females had the media salivating, politicians sharking in, and even the hardened cops sitting up straighter. There were banks of computers, whiteboards, photos of the bodies and the kill rooms, timelines, victimology lists, maps. In Homicide, visuals helped a great deal.
At her desk, Riley was waiting for O’Neil and Farquhar. She checked the time on her screen: 7.10 a.m. Saturday, New Year’s Eve. Riley would take no part in the celebration and be glad when it was over—she found the crowds and the mandated bonhomie and the fireworks spectacularly stupid. The drink with Bowman had lit something in her brain and kept her from sleep. Her mind had circled around and around the case until she had been delirious. She didn’t like pills, they fuzzed her edge, so at two a.m. she’d got up and spent ten minutes slugging down Jack Daniels in front of the TV.
She pushed two Panadol from a sleeve and swallowed them dry. The strike force had grown by one: they’d hooked a detective constable from Parramatta who had attended the scene on Thursday night. ‘Got a pressie for you,’ was how the Super had put it to O’Neil last night. ‘Smart, young, tidy. Turning into Charlie’s Angels, your mob.’ There were now fifteen detective constables with Satyr: from Homicide, Sex Crimes, Ryde, Gladesville, Chatswood, Parramatta, and a couple of ring-ins from Gangs. Then Annie Tran with Riley under O’Neil. Plus Farquhar, a team of six analysts … and a journo riding shotgun.
The new constable, the Parramatta detective, was first in, sitting at the end of the row of desks with a laptop. Riley had noted her at the school on Thursday and again yesterday and liked what she saw: diligence and intelligence.
O’Neil and Farquhar came through the door with takeaway cups.
‘Sleep well?’ O’Neil said.
‘Don’t start,’ Riley said.
‘Green tea and boxing, you should give it a try.’ He gave her a coffee and looked about. There was no one, save for the new girl down the room. O’Neil considered her for a moment, his head at a tilt. ‘Oi,’ he called.
Startled, the Parramatta constable looked up, eyes wide. O’Neil beckoned. She stood, crow-black hair in a ponytail. She was twenty-eight, tops. Riley watched O’Neil avert his gaze as she walked over.
‘Patel, right?’ he said.
‘Sir.’
‘First name?’
‘Priya.’
‘You seen the note from Crime Scene? Point of entry?’
Priya Patel glanced back at her desk. ‘I was just reading it.’
‘Okay.’ O’Neil gestured. ‘This is Doctor Farquhar, Detective Sergeant Riley. Pull up a chair.’
Riley grabbed her laptop and the four of them sat at a round table towards the back of the room. ‘Righto,’ O’Neil said. ‘One thing before we get started. The plastic wrapping the body, they found a small amount of an organic brown substance on it. Slightly moist. Results soon.’
‘Soil?’ Riley said.
‘Wait and see.’
‘There’s been no rain,’ Riley said. ‘They think it got wet when he washed her?’
‘Yeah, they think he washed the whole package after he wrapped her. Now, preliminary forensics on the Dunlop place, let’s go.’
They went through the briefing note. The house was covered in fingerprints and mixed DNA from the family and visitors. But the techs liked the unlatched pantry window as point of entry. No prints had been found on the window frame, inside or out: it had been wiped clean. But the bench along the wall in the pantry had yielded the prints of four fingertips and a thumb. It was where a hand might be put out for balance by someone coming through the window.
‘It feels a bit neat,’ O’Neil said.
‘It could be about timing,’ Riley said. ‘He doesn’t clean up as he gains access, he does it later, maybe under stress. He remembers the obvious—to wipe down the window frame, but he forgets the bench.’
‘Good,’ O’Neil said. ‘Priya?’
‘He’s not there to kill her,’ Patel said. ‘But it goes south.’
O’Neil’s fingers steepled. ‘Go on.’
‘He uses the window to gain access. He’s not worried about prints at that stage, or DNA, because he’s just there to look. He thinks the place is empty, he’s prowling, looking through her stuff. Then it blows up. She comes home from Coles and he’s in the house—in her room—and she confronts him. He lashes out, kills her.’
‘And?’ O’Neil said.
Patel glanced at Riley. ‘And now he’s got a lot on,’ Patel said. ‘He’s got to move her, he’s got to wash her, he’s got to dump her. And he needs to cover his tracks.’
‘He goes to where he came in,’ O’Neil said, ‘wipes down the window frames?’
‘Yes. As Sarge says—he wipes where he can remember. But this might be after he’s dealt with the body. It could be hours later. He forgets the bench.’
O’Neil sat back. Patel glanced again at Riley. The girl had instincts and rapport, a good combination. O’Neil was clicking his tongue. Riley sent a signal—sisterly, imperceptible—to Patel: Watch this. O’Neil’s eyes were on Farquhar. A decision had been made.
‘We’re going to take it on, bring Marguerite into Satyr,’ O’Neil said. ‘I want to look at all possible links between Gladesville and the school.’
Riley sat still. The ruling ran counter to Farquhar’s reading of the scene. Marguerite Dunlop’s death bore no real resemblance to Gladesville. Gladesville was around domination, subjugation, ritual, possession, control. That wasn’t what had happened at the school. Riley thought O’Neil was going along with the psychiatrist, that he was preparing to decouple and push the Dunlop girl elsewhere. Something in the forensic evidence from the house had swayed him.
Farquhar closed his eyes and O’Neil flashed with annoyance at the passive disapproval. O’Neil didn’t do passive, it made him aggressive. The psychiatrist was agile in his thinking, but he could get stuck in a groove and stubborn with his ideas, like anyone else. O’Neil was forever on the lookout for such shortcomings, in himself and others: tunnel vision, blind alleys, wombat holes. O’Neil was paranoid about wombat holes.
‘Let me just state some facts,’ Farquhar said, eyes still shut, ‘and then you tell me what’s on your mind.’
O’Neil folded his arms.
‘Gladesville,’ Farquhar said. ‘Organised psychopath and sadist. Extreme form of antisocial personality disorder. Not mad—bad. No empathy, no moral boundaries. I’ve never seen one before, and neither have you.’ He opened his eyes on O’Neil. ‘The scene at the school just doesn’t—’
‘I want to wind back,’ O’Neil said.
Farquhar blinked.
‘You’ve got all our analysts’—O’Neil waved to the banks of computers now filling with officers—‘combing through old cases in Ryde, Gladesville, Hunters Hill, Huntleys Point, looking for weird break-ins.’
‘Fetish burglaries.’
‘Priya here is new to us.’ O’Neil nodded at Patel. ‘She hasn’t heard your theories, but she makes an interesting point. You heard her: she said Marguerite Dunlop’s death started as a break-in. Maybe by a pervert with a fetish.’
‘You think he’s going backwards?’ Farquhar said. ‘Deescalating, trying to stop?’
‘I’m saying we might have found something you’ve had us looking for.’
Farquhar’s eyes shifted, considering. Yep, Riley thought, have a suck on that.
Geography. The psychiatrist was obsessed with it, and for good reason. They had no DNA, Gladesville was cleaning up like he’d been trained in a lab or—Christ, please no—as a cop. Forensic sophistication, Farquhar called it. And without forensic evidence, the next best strategy was to find the offender’s early forays and build a geographic profile: where he lived or where he worked. Farquhar believed he lived near the scenes, a marauder swinging around his anchor point, his home. O’Neil saw a commuter. He argued the killer worked near the scenes, probably on the river—a fisherman, filleting his catch.
‘If they build the school into the geographic model and we’re wrong, it’ll skew the profile,’ Farquhar said.
‘Agreed,’ O’Neil said. ‘But we could have a second profile running. Just to see what it shows.’
The de-escalation theory was interesting. If it was happening, it was probably unique. Riley flicked at the desk with her pen.
‘Say it’s our boy who’s done Marguerite,’ she said. ‘He kills her, but what’s he left out?’
‘Binding, torture, cutting, necrophilia, nailing.’ Farquhar listed them on his fingers. ‘He remembered to wrap her and wash her. And he was aiming to put her in a creek but he deviated.’
Not just any creek. ‘A tributary of the river,’ she said. ‘He’s where his river rises.’
‘Mm,’ Farquhar said.
Riley clicked on an image on her laptop and turned it to face the others. ‘Priya, have you seen this?’ It was Lena Chatfield’s face on the slab at Lidcombe. Cut into her forehead was the t-shape, the vertical line with its undulating crossbar.
Patel nodded. ‘A calling card?’
‘Right,’ Farquhar said. ‘He carved it on the Sheridan girl too. Same place.’
‘What’s it mean?’ Patel said.
‘Nothing, as far as we can tell,’ Farquhar said. ‘We’ve sent it out to art historians, cryptographers, language scholars from Sanskrit to Old Norse to Pitjantjatjara. We thought it might be religious iconography. We looked at some Jungian stuff. Our best guess is pseudohistory, self-help and the men’s movement—ideas about setting males free from societal strictures that promote excessive deference to women and cause paraphilias.’
‘Paraphilias?’ Patel said.
‘Deviancy,’ Farquhar said. ‘Sexual fetishism. People might fetishise feet—God help them, that’s lumpen enough. Gladesville is extreme.’
‘We think the symbol is his ID,’ Riley said. ‘Part of the game.’
‘Okay,’ Patel said.
‘So’—Riley pointed her pen at Farquhar—‘we know he likes to play games. Maybe Marguerite is part of that? He’s stripped everything out, gone back to zero. It’s part of the game, he’s still talking to us.’
‘Saying what?’ Farquhar said.
‘Saying we’re back at the beginning,’ Riley said. ‘Saying this is how it starts. He’s linking back to the river. The creek is a beginning too, the beginning of the river.’
Farquhar frowned into his beard. In the silence, O’Neil grabbed his elbow to stretch a shoulder. ‘Let’s assume for a moment Rose is on track,’ he said. ‘Is he de-escalating, gearing down to stop? Or are we at the beginning of a new cycle—Marguerite is the first? Are we looking at the start of a second spree?’
At the round table, the meeting broke up as more Satyr analysts and detectives arrived in the room. It was eight a.m. O’Neil had called a full briefing. Riley went to her desk. She never got used to her insomnia, the way it sapped everything else from the day. Panadol wasn’t working. She watched as O’Neil counted heads and clapped. ‘Boys and girls,’ he said.
The hubbub died and O’Neil thanked them and formally introduced Patel. He waited while they settled. The strike force had been running surveillance operations in Gladesville twenty-four hours a day. Officers with night-vision goggles were posted around the area and cameras had been put in place in people’s yards, on streets, in parks and at the wharves. This complemented the data from existing CCTV, red-light cameras and number-plate recognition.
‘Righto.’ O’Neil looked to Annie Tran. ‘Overnight?’
Tran shook her head—there’d been nothing.
‘Okay, so, the Dunlop girl,’ O’Neil said. ‘It looks different, agreed. But there are still some similarities and it’s landed with us and I don’t want to separate it. Let’s see where it leads. And it’s a good opportunity for a poke, to see what Gladesville makes of it.’
He didn’t mention Bowman. Riley would handle the reporter off the books. O’Neil looked at Patel.
‘No leaks, no press,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to read anything about this in the Parramatta Advocate. Very important, understood?’
Patel nodded. She was earnest. If details got out, Riley felt sure they wouldn’t come from her.
The victimology on Marguerite was still being worked up and O’Neil walked everybody through it: the scouring of her phone, her laptop, her social media, the search for any links to the Gladesville victims. Marguerite had no known boyfriend and there were no suggestive pictures, no dating apps. Her close friends had left town—it was that time of life, the end of Year 12. Satyr detectives were tracking them all down and speaking to them on the phone or in person, listening for any change in tone, any kink in the narrative. Marguerite’s brother, two years older and studying in America, was on a plane home. Her parents’ movements had been triple checked: neither of them had slipped back into Sydney in the days before she was killed.
O’Neil held up a finger. ‘Keep this in mind. Marguerite and her parents were in Fiji from the sixteenth of December till the twenty-third. That was less than a week before. Is that what lured the killer, he thought the house was empty?’
‘Unlikely,’ Tran said. ‘The family came back for Christmas. The killer would have seen that if he was watching. Marguerite was coming and going in her Mazda after the parents left for Noosa.’
True, Riley thought. The girl had been home five days before she was killed.
‘But the trip feels wrong,’ O’Neil said. ‘Who goes to Fiji, comes home and then heads straight to Noosa?’
Lots of people. Riley had seen it with her nephews. Parents taking their kids somewhere special after Year 12, usually to divert them from the parties. And the Dunlops went to Noosa every year—they had a shack in the hinterland, passed down through Beverley Dunlop’s family. O’Neil was thinking like a cop who never had a holiday. She could understand why—two months at the beach and he’d fucking kill someone.
‘Bruce Dunlop’s a chaplain at a private school,’ she said. ‘He’s got nothing to do from early December till late January. Go to church at Christmas—other than that, he’s a free man.’
O’Neil frowned and moved on. Marguerite’s job was at an eco-design shop in Westfield Parramatta: they were talking to her boss, her co-workers, looking at the footage from the shop and the mall. Had she met someone? Had someone followed her?
Riley doodled as she listened. There had to be a pattern in the details. There were precisely one hundred and ninety-seven employees at Prince Albert, across teaching, administration and ancillary: maintenance, grounds, kitchen, laundry and the rest. When the place was up and running with fifteen hundred students, there were seventy-seven staff living onsite.
‘At the moment, that number is down to eight,’ O’Neil said. The Green family of four, two Spratts, Preston. And there was a gardener working through the break, living onsite and single. The bursar was coming and going, but he lived in Carlingford with his wife.
O’Neil took a breath. ‘Where are we with statements, prints, DNA?’
‘Everyone has come forward except one,’ Tran said. ‘The gardener who lives onsite. We door-knocked him but no answer. He worked yesterday morning, but the property manager—Spratt—didn’t see him after about one p.m. He doesn’t have a phone, apparently. Seems to have shot through.’
‘Who did the canvass?’
Riley looked over the room. Patel put up her hand. ‘Sir.’
‘And?’ O’Neil said.
Patel swiped at her tablet. ‘Sir, the name is Kevin Gary Lynch. Emigrated from Ireland in ninety-seven, from Dublin. He’s fifty-two. Craig Spratt said they ran a working with children check before they employed him and came up with nothing. He’s got no record. His driver’s licence is clean, no credit cards, he’s got Medicare, he pays his tax.’
‘And?’ said O’Neil.
‘We’ve got uniforms outside his flat at the school, waiting for him to show,’ Tran said. ‘If we don’t see him soon, we thought we’d invite ourselves in. Grab DNA and prints.’
‘Fuck waiting,’ O’Neil said. ‘We’ve got a crime scene warrant. In and out now. Forensics’—he looked at Patel—‘then you. Spratt should have a key. Whatever they bag, straight to Lidcombe. Priority one. Just tell them it’s Gladesville.’
Patel nodded.
He turned to Tran. ‘Results to me. No Interpol. I’ll send them through to Dublin and the Yard myself.’
‘Sir,’ Tran said.
‘And keep the uniforms at the flat,’ O’Neil said. ‘I want to know if he surfaces.’