Beet red turned turnip white. ‘I was worried you were gonna say that.’

‘Have you got gloves?’

‘In the car.’ He looked helplessly back up the rocky track.

She rolled her eyes and reached into her jeans pocket for a pair of latex gloves. ‘These are too small for you, must be your lucky day,’ she said, snapping them on.

She wiped her brow with the back of her arm and moved over to the passenger side of the Toyota. ‘Stand back.’ She took a breath, knowing what to expect but still not prepared for the initial shock, the feeling of pebbles in the face as the blowies vacated the car in an angry cloud.

And the smell.

Holding her breath for as long as she could, she leaned across the empty passenger seat and patted the pockets of the dead man. She extracted his wallet and swiftly drew back to fill her lungs. The driver’s licence was visible through a plastic window inside the wallet and she steeled herself for a look at his face, comparing it with the picture. As bloated as the roo she’d passed on the road, he looked barely human, though the greying curly hair did resemble the man’s in the photo, as did the bulbous nose and broad forehead. ‘Miro Kusak, 41 Weir Road Mundaring, DOB 23/10/54,’ she read aloud for the constable’s benefit.

The left side of Kusak’s head was plastered with congealed blood, originating from a two-centimetre entrance hole above his ear. His left hand was empty and there was no sign of a gun on the floor or among the folds of the dirty blanket bunched upon the passenger seat—this was no simple suicide, this was murder.

Her mouth dried as she recalled the fear she’d felt when scrambling down the slope. She turned and peered into the back of the truck to have a closer look at the supplies she’d glimpsed before: a rolled up swag, camping equipment, boxes of food and bottled water. Miro Kusak had presumably been planning on lying low until the search for him had scaled down. The countryside around the weir was dense with forest, one park leading into another. With local knowledge and adequate resources a man could lose himself for months in a place like this.

She took a few short breaths. Even with the door open, the smell in the Toyota was overpowering and she was forced to vacate and gulp long drafts of fresh air. The search would have to be continued by police with breathing masks.

The constable handed her a fistful of tissues and she used them to wipe the body fluids from the outside of the wallet before riffling more thoroughly through the contents. As she searched she told the constable about the camping equipment she’d seen in the back of the van, shaking her head as she talked to clear the air of the hovering flies. Her fingers felt the outline of something solid in one of the wallet’s compartments and she found a newish key. ‘To the pump station you think?’ she said.

When the constable didn’t answer she looked up to find him nowhere in sight, she’d been talking to herself. Frowning, she turned slowly, shaded her eyes from the glare and scanned the surrounding bush.

‘Constable Nagel?’ Only the gentle waters of the weir lapping against the shore answered her call. Flies buzzed, a parrot squawked, but other than that, silence.

Then from the nearby scrub, the painful sound of retching.

Seconds later, the retching morphed into a scream of terror.

Stevie slapped her hip. No gun, shit. A stout stick lay across the track. She picked it up and charged through the bush to a burnt clearing where rubbish had been dumped. She found the constable on the ground beside a pile of empty bottles, one arm thrown protectively over his face and the paws of a giant dog resting on his chest.

‘Oh God, oh God, get it off me,’ he moaned.

Stevie approached cautiously. The dog turned from his busy licking of the constable’s arm, fixed her with spooky yellow eyes and wagged its tail.

Stevie swore, partly from relief and partly from amusement. She grabbed the dog by its collar and hefted it off the stricken man.

‘Are you okay?’ she asked him.

‘Oh, yeah, jeez ma’am, I’m sorry,’ Nagel gasped, ‘the dog came from nowhere, gave me one helluva a shock.’ He struggled to his feet and began to dust himself down.

She took off her belt and threaded it through the dog’s collar, holding him back a lot more successfully than she could her smile. Nagel smiled back sheepishly. ‘He seems quite friendly, but,’ he said.

Stevie ran her hand down the pinky-brown fur, feeling the prickling highway of hair scratching at her palm. ‘Looks like a Rhodesian Ridgeback,’ she said.

‘Must be a stray, lucky he’s not vicious. Wonder where he comes from?’

Stevie thought for a moment. ‘Try the front seat of the car. There was a dirty old blanket on it, covered with dog hair.’ She paused to pat the dog. ‘Constable Nagel, this just might be Miro Kusak’s mysterious passenger.’ She bent to examine the disc on the dog’s collar. ‘Meet Bonza. 41 Weir Rd Mundaring.’

13

The late afternoon sun weighed on the heads of the investigating officers, yet the mood remained buoyant as they combed the area around the crashed Toyota. This prick was no loss, Monty heard one of the SOCO officers say, the killer had saved them all a pile of bother. Another answered that he’d shake the killer’s hand, buy him a beer if he ever ran into him. Fine, he thought, but at this stage, despite the discovery of the dog, he wasn’t discounting the possibility that two men were involved, and who could say which was the nastier piece of work.

Monty was sitting under a tree, filling out an evidence label, when he heard the crunch of approaching footsteps.

‘“Thwackum was for doing justice, and leaving mercy to Heaven.”’

He looked up. ‘What?’ he asked Angus Wong.

‘Henry Fielding, Tom Jones.’ With his Asian looks, his ocker accent and his propensity for producing a literary quote for most occasions, Angus was a maze of incongruities. Monty stared at him for a moment and wondered if he was also a mind reader.

Angus flopped onto the ground next to Monty, reached into one of the folds of his overalls and handed him a bottle of water. A television news chopper slashed through the air above their heads. Monty thanked him, took a long draught and returned to the task of labelling two small paper evidence bags.

‘What’ve you got there?’ Angus asked.

‘A bullet and a shell case; the slug was embedded in a tree at the lookout, the shell case near the rubbish bin.’

‘Beauty, can you tell what they’re from?’

‘Looks like a point 40 S&W cartridge.’

Angus met Monty’s eyes. ‘Semi-automatic pistol? Interesting.’

‘Could be.’

‘Anything else?’

‘They found several of what appear to be Bianca’s short bleached blonde hairs in the Toyota, subject to confirmation of course. Plus a long dark brown hair on the dashboard.’

‘Another victim?’

‘Who knows? The results will be sent to missing persons, there’s always a chance it might match someone in their database.’

They fell silent. Monty put the bags into the top pocket of his overalls.

He spotted the mortuary van bumping along a rough weir-side track. They’d sensibly decided not to come down the steep path. Upon vacating their van, the assistants grappled with the Stokes stretcher while Henry Grebe buzzed around them like a blowfly. At the Toyota, Grebe raised a hand to signify a halt and beckoned his team around him for a briefing.

‘Found anything else of interest?’ Angus asked Monty.

Monty switched his gaze from Grebe and pointed to the red-brick structure at the water’s edge. ‘That’s the old pump station, long since abandoned but with a new padlock. Stevie found the key in Kusak’s wallet.’

‘You think that’s where he kept the girl?’

‘More than likely. Forensics have swept it clean—already sent their samples back to Perth for analysis. There was bedding in there.’