‘But we need to know where the soft photos have come from. Some shots are of a candid nature, of girls getting dressed in what looks like a change room,’ Tash said calmly.

‘There’s a hotmail address of a photographer,’ Mason said, shoulders slumped, mouth turned down in defeat. ‘We can buy the photos from him and download them from a file sharing site.’

‘How much?’

‘Twenty bucks a hit.’

‘Your habit doesn’t come cheap,’ Tash said.

Mason rested his chin on his hand and thought long and hard. ‘You said if I cooperated, the judge might be more lenient.’

‘We’re going to take you up to our ops room in a minute and you can show our experts as much about this site of yours as you can.’ Stevie flicked him a tight smile. ‘Is there anything else you’d like to add while we’re still down here?’

Mason pressed his fists into his eye sockets and sniffed. ‘Well, these photos I told you about that cost twenty bucks? For forty you can get the personal details of the kids in the art shots. Names, addresses, ages, email, the lot.’

Stevie and Tash exchanged glances. Shit.

Mason narrowed his eyes and glared at Stevie, ‘But I wish I’d seen a genuine photo of Angel12 and not that fake one you sent me.’ He curled his lip. ‘Jesus, that was wishful thinking, eh? You’d never have looked like that in your dreams, baby!’

‘How’s it going?’ Stevie addressed the plump middle-aged constable hunched over her keyboard in the ops room. Clarissa D’Silva, computer nerd extraordinaire, was one of a bunch more than happy to sit behind a screen for eight hours a day, leaving active duty to the likes of the more physically inclined like Tash and herself.

‘It’s like Mason said, this website has a minefield of security measures. I’ve found the hotmail address of the photographer, but its ISP is listed as coming from Turkmenistan, so matters are somewhat complicated.’

‘Terrific,’ Tash sighed.

‘I said it complicates matters, I didn’t say it puts an end to them. I’m going to have to sign up if I want to get further in. What shall I call myself?’

‘How about Peter File?’ Tash suggested.

Clarissa laughed. ‘They’re not paedophiles remember, they merely love children.’ She put on an arch vaudeville accent, in imitation of an elderly rock spider they’d apprehended a few weeks ago. ‘There’s nothing unnatural about what we do. In ancient times it was common practice for older men to go with young girls—and boys. It’s no different to how it was when people got shocked if a woman showed her ankle. Who knows, in one hundred years, it might be considered normal again...’

Tash laughed, ‘Yeah, right, and I’m running off to join a nunnery.’ Stevie laughed too, glad to see that Tash had recovered her humour.

‘What’s the latest on the dead girl from last night?’ Clarissa asked Stevie, back to her normal voice.

‘They traced the rego to a Miro Kusak from Mundaring,’ Stevie told her. ‘When our guys turned up with a warrant for him, all they found was the ex-wife. Separated nearly a year, pending divorce, so she said; claimed she didn’t know where he was living. They pulled the house apart, found enough high tech stuff in his den to launch a space shuttle, but nothing incriminating. His wife said he took his main computer and flash drives with him.’

‘You want me to go and have a talk with her, Stevie?’ Tash asked, jumping down from the desk. Her face clouded when she read the look on Stevie’s face and she pulled her away from Clarissa’s earshot.

‘What’s the matter, don’t you trust me? You think I’m going to take it out on his missus?’

Stevie hesitated. ‘No, of course not. Go on,’ she indicated the door with a tilt of her head. ‘Find out everything you possibly can about Mrs Kusak’s estranged husband.’

9

People in various stages of physical or emotional distress lined the corridors of Royal Perth Hospital. In fact the casualty department wasn’t much different to Central Police Station on a Saturday night, Monty decided. He sat on a bench next to an old man whose chest rattled and wheezed like the water pipes in Stevie’s kitchen, and watched the parade of walking wounded. A bikie in leathers staggered by with blood streaming from his head, another followed with a bunch of reddened tissues to his nose. A couple were screaming abuse at each other near the automatic doors until a security guard came to escort them from the hospital. A listless child was wheeled past on a trolley, his mother crying and wringing her hands by his side.

God, there was no getting away from it.

For the third time in half an hour he checked his mobile phone for messages. He doubted he’d be hearing back yet from the team he’d dispatched to China Town, but his restless hands needed something to do, some kind of distraction from the misery surrounding him. He yawned, wiped tears of exhaustion from his cheeks and massaged his jaw. An intermittent toothache seemed to be flaring up again.

Izzy had shown him how to work one of the games on his phone and he wondered if he could remember her instructions. Even with his glasses on, he had trouble finding the right keys and hit several in error before he was in. Ah yes. He had to get one of the heads with the gaping mouths to devour...

‘Inspector McGuire?’

He gave a start and quickly turned the phone off. A young nurse stood above him with a look of amusement on her face.

‘Doctor Sutcliffe will see you now. Please come with me,’

she said.

He followed her past several cubicles of quivering curtains to the last one. A middle-aged doctor stooped over a trolley, finishing his notes.

‘Good of you to see me, Doc, I appreciate how busy you are,’ Monty said.

The doctor looked over the rims of his glasses. ‘Sorry to keep you waiting, Inspector, a hectic day.’ He pointed to the empty trolley. ‘An infarct right here, a man only about your age, your build, stressful job—chronic smoker of course.’

Monty felt himself being examined. He shifted his feet and cleared his throat. ‘You said you had some luck with my query about an Asian man with kidney necro...’ he struggled to remember the rest of it.

The doctor smiled, ‘Nephropathy.’

‘That’s the one.’

‘You suggested the patient might have been an illegal migrant. Well, you were right in assuming he might have presented here for treatment. We get quite a few at Royal Perth—no Medicare cards, just a wad of sweaty cash, and of course we treat them with no questions asked. I spoke to one of my registrars and she remembers seeing just such a man. She’d talk to you herself only she’s just come off a week of nights. I told her I’d handle it.’

‘Okay, you might start with telling me about this disease, keeping it simple, please,’ Monty said with a smile.

‘The common name for IgA nephropathy is Berger’s disease. It affects three times more men than women, with Asian men at the top of the list. It’s a kidney disease characterised by abnormal deposits of the protein IgA in the kidney’s filtering system and one of the symptoms is blood in the urine—that’s what the man presented with when he checked himself in.’

‘Did he speak English?’

‘A bit.’

‘Name?’

The doctor smiled. ‘Bruce Lee.’

Monty smiled wryly. ‘Of course.’

‘As well as the blood in his urine, he had a history of upper respiratory infection and high blood pressure. My registrar made the preliminary diagnosis and arranged tests to confirm. But when she mentioned the possibility of a kidney biopsy, he jumped off the trolley and became quite aggressive, forcing her to press the emergency button for security assistance. He was eventually escorted from the hospital, having refused treatment altogether.’

‘How sick was he exactly?’

‘Still in the early stages of the disease so he would’ve been able to function relatively normally for a while. Left untreated however, the disease would most likely have slowly progressed to acute renal failure and possibly death.’