Stevie began to warble along with the song—an old fashioned house and an old fashioned fence didn’t sound too bad at all.

But it was a bit far from the beach.

The crackle of static from the police radio intruded into her fantasy. She turned off Eartha and strained to hear. The male voice sounded young, inexperienced and panicky as he struggled to report the discovery at Mundaring Weir of a dumped four-wheel drive matching the description of Kusak’s.

Through the gabble she caught the code three-thirty-eight—sudden death, repeated several times. She was less than five minutes from the location, so she radioed in to tell the patrolman to stay where he was and wait for her arrival.

The blue and white police car was parked at the lookout next to an overflowing rubbish bin with a halo of flies. The heat wriggled up from the bitumen car park; it was the hottest time of day. She twisted behind to the back seat and reached for her peaked cap and heavy police vest and reluctantly put them on, then started to make her way down.

The track beyond the busted ‘No Vehicular Access’ sign was rough, but wide enough to take a vehicle—indeed, fresh tyre tracks made it clear she was at the right spot. Loose gravel and gumnuts rolled under her feet like ball bearings as she made her way down. The dirt between the bare-knuckle rocks was red from iron oxide, as if the earth had bled into it, the air still and weighted with the scent of eucalypt. It didn’t take long for the sweat to gather into cooling circles under her armpits. The heat sucked at her breath and soon all she could hear was her own laboured breathing.

A rustle from somewhere to her right.

She skidded to a stop.

Pebbles rolled and the humidity pressed.

A twig snapped.

She peered into the surrounding bush, saw nothing, not even the tremble of leaves. Whatever had made the snap was too big for a snake or a goanna. A country girl, Stevie knew the variety of noises the bush could make.

She took another step, slid a foot or two on the loose gravel and was forced to cling to a sapling for support else risk slithering the rest of the way down on her backside.

A scrap of blue and red fabric hanging from a prickle bush at the side of the track caught her attention. It could only have come from a checked shirt, and the bright colour told her it hadn’t been there long. A lucky find? Maybe it was. She teased it into a paper evidence bag and tucked it into one of her vest pockets.

Another sound, this time from the opposite side of the track. She whirled in time to catch the dying shiver of a nearby bush. Just a roo, she told herself as she rubbed the back of her neck, sticky with sweat and dust. Uneasy now, she continued down the track, spinning into sharp turns every now and then to surprise her phantom stalker.

With a sense of relief she rounded the curve at the bottom of the hill and found herself within a few metres of the four-wheel drive. The front end of the vehicle was concertinaed into a tree near the shoreline. The peaceful waters of the weir lapped at the fringe of rocks and sand. To her right she saw the old pumping station standing above the water on concrete pylons. Long abandoned, its small windows were boarded up with planks, though a new padlock glinted on its heavy wooden door.

There was no preamble from the tall, beet-faced constable who rushed over to her. ‘Oh Christ, Jesus,’ he spluttered. ‘Thank God you’re here, ma’am, the last ten minutes seemed like ten hours. Assistance is on its way, but I’m just glad you were so close.’

‘You shouldn’t have radioed in the three-thirty-eight, you use your phone for sudden death, remember?’

‘Shit, I’m sorry, wasn’t thinking.’

The fact that the probationer was alone in the patrol car in the first place was something else his superiors would no doubt be taking up with him. But Stevie had more than police procedure on her mind.

She gave him the barest nod and hurried over to the vehicle. It was an older model Toyota four-wheel drive, a ‘troop carrier’ with bench seats in the back to seat up to ten people. MDG 76X—this was it. Even from where she stood it was obvious to Stevie that the man in the driver’s seat was very dead.

‘You didn’t touch anything?’ she asked the constable.

‘You said to wait. I could see he was dead, nothing I could do. I only quickly checked the back to make sure there was no one else in it.’ The officer ran his palms down his pants and stuttered. ‘Look, you’re going to think I’m crazy, but...’

‘But what?’ she squinted at his nametag, ‘Constable Nagel.’ He looked hardly more than twenty.

‘Well, while I was waiting down here, I got the strangest feeling I was being watched, y’know?’ He gestured to the surrounding bush. ‘And I was wondering,’ he lowered his voice, ‘if this is the guy who dumped the kid’s body, then maybe the other guy is hanging around.’

‘The other guy, meaning the second guy the security guard saw in the vehicle?’

The young man nodded. His shiver spread to her like a yawn and she felt the hairs prickle on the back of her neck. She decided not to tell him about the strange noises she’d heard on her way down. There was no need to get him even more anxious than he was now.

He pointed to the star-shaped hole in the driver’s side window, the brown misting on the glass and what appeared to be flakes of dry tissue clinging to the jagged edges. Keeping his voice low as if someone might be trying to listen, he said, ‘Looks like a bullet hole. I reckon they had a fight in the Toyota, the other guy shot Kusak—if it is Kusak that is...’ He trailed off and looked nervously around with one hand resting on his Glock, the safety clip of his holster already unfastened. ‘And he’s still hanging around.’

Controlling her voice to hide her own concern, Stevie said, ‘I suppose it’s a possibility, Constable, but a long shot all the same. This might even be a simple suicide, he just couldn’t live with what he’d done—hardly surprising, really.’ She nodded to the body in the Toyota and pulled a face. ‘By the looks of him he’s been in there all day at least.’

Nagel cleared his throat as if to rid it of bile, and affected a smile. ‘Yeah, err, slowly cooking.’

In a few years he’d be a master of the black joke, Stevie thought, but he needed more practice on the delivery if he ever aspired to being the stereotypical, fat-bellied, the-job’s-fucked kind of sergeant.

‘Anyway, why would his murderer hang around that long unless he was hurt?’ she said. ‘And if he was badly hurt, he won’t be much of a threat to us, would he?’

Stevie scanned the ground as if they might be lucky enough to spot the bullet or shell casing twinkling in the sun. She saw no sign of it of course; this wasn’t a TV cop show. In her head she worked out the perimeter they would need to tape and search.

She circled the Toyota, taking in the damage. The impact from the tree didn’t seem as bad as it had first looked; and was probably not violent enough to have caused the death of the seat-belted man in the driver’s seat—if he hadn’t been shot dead already. She tried to look through the back windows, but could see little through the grime. Upon opening the back door, she noticed that the rear bench seats had been removed to make room for a mattress and boxes of supplies. She saw no sign of another occupant. A thorough search would be undertaken when the scene of crime officers arrived.

‘How did you find him all the way down here?’ Stevie asked.

‘I stopped at the lookout to take a leak, noticed the smashed barrier and fresh tyre tracks and thought I’d check it out.’

‘When was that?’

The constable looked at his watch, ‘No more than twenty minutes ago. You reckon this really is that Miro Kusak guy?’

‘Who knows, but it’s his vehicle all right. And there’s only one way to find out if it’s him for sure, isn’t there, Nagel?’