Monty you drink too much.

Monty you smell like an ashtray.

You’re putting on weight.

You can’t wear that shirt again; you’ve already worn it twice this week.

He hadn’t cared about all that so much, but he’d drawn the line at mandatory condoms on clean sheet nights.

He scowled and headed towards the fridge , ripped off a can from the six-pack of beer and selected a crystal pilsner glass from his cupboard of mostly recycled honey jars. The expensive glass was one of the few souvenirs he’d kept from his marriage, one of a set of six. He’d only taken the one, knowing how a set of five would irritate Michelle. She’d probably tossed the others; she tended to do that with things that weren’t symmetrical, things that didn’t match or fit into her perfectly ordered life.

He poured the beer slowly, lost for the moment in the rising bubbles and the soft fizz, breathing in the scent of hops until he had to tear himself away. It was good to know he could still resist it, but maybe he was taking the control exercise too far. He put the glass down and reached into the fridge for a carton of tomato juice, poured some into an empty honey jar and sprinkled it with ground chillies.

Back on the sofa he lit up, inhaled and tried to blow his bitterness away with the grey cloud. Close eyes, count to ten, open. After a while he was able to turn his attention back to the files on the coffee table.

Kitty Bonilla’s face stared back at him with the complexion of a freshly pulled beetroot—even the tufts of hacked hair resembled wispy roots. He checked her small ears and saw the peppering of empty holes.

He looked carefully at the anterior, posterior and lateral shots of the body, unable to see evidence of anything written on the victim. No Easeful Death on this body.

Turning to the witness section, the gardener’s statement told him little. There was slightly more in the statements of a young couple who’d parked at a lookout near the bench on the night of the murder. They’d claimed that a late model, dark-coloured Commodore had driven past them several times while they were busy finding romance on the back seat of their car. Thinking it was a peeping tom, they’d relocated their horizontal acrobatics to the other side of the park. The police, it seemed, had been unable to go further with this lead.

Two other people had come forward, co-workers of Kitty Bonilla. The women said they had seen Bonilla arguing with a man on a Northbridge street corner on the night of her death and that he’d driven off angrily in an old VW beetle.

Monty paused and rubbed his chin. Easing out of his sofa, he went over to his bookshelf and removed a copy of one of De Vakey’s paperbacks. It didn’t take long to find the index entry he was after and soon his eyes were scanning the print until they locked onto the letters VW.

He read aloud. ‘Statistics recorded in the seventies and eighties show the VW to be the preferred vehicle of the serial killer.’ I’ll bet Volkswagen weren’t too pleased with that news, he thought. He shook his head at the absurdity and settled back onto his sofa to continue his reading.

The girls had wondered why their friend would turn down a customer and when they’d asked, Kitty told them that the man had a badly managed colostomy bag. She’d serviced him before and found him repulsive, didn’t think she could cope again.

Monty wrinkled his nose. Poor guy.

The man was identified as Reece Harper, owner of a VW beetle, later the prime suspect in both murders.

Wondering about Harper’s alibi, Monty turned to the section where it should have been and found two pages missing. Must have been put in the wrong place, he thought, working his way from one file to the other.

The search proved fruitless. He became aware of a cold feeling in his chest. Contaminated evidence was bad enough, but deliberately removed documents? That was something else. Michelle’s allegations of a cover-up were looking more likely by the minute. All he could do now was hope to find the relevant information on the computer database. Once information had been transferred from hard copy to the computer it was almost impossible to erase. The only way it wouldn’t be there was if it had never been entered in the first place.

He pushed aside his glasses for a moment and rubbed his eyes, aware of how tired he’d become. He resolved to go back to the Bonilla file in the morning with fresh eyes.

Unable to call it a night though, he turned to the file of the second victim, twenty-one year old prostitute Lorna Dunn. She was found near the Pioneer Women’s memorial by an old man out for an early morning stroll. She’d been stripped naked and posed provocatively under a tree. She too had been violated post mortem by a bottle and had a large amount of Rohypnol in her system. Her hair had also been hacked. Some hair was found at the site, but no fibres, no prints and no foreign DNA. There was no documented evidence of anything written on her body and no jewellery listed among her personal effects.

Her estranged father was serving ten years in prison for armed robbery and had not been interviewed by police at all. Her alcoholic mother had known very little about her daughter’s lifestyle, but an unnamed streetwalker friend had told police that Lorna Dunn had turned a client down earlier that evening.

Monty paused and sucked his pen. Why wasn’t the friend named? Was this another blunder or a deliberate omission?

He shook his head in exasperation when he saw that the nameless woman had identified Lorna’s rejected client as Reece Harper.

Not having enough evidence to charge Harper, police had instigated round-the-clock surveillance. Reece Harper died in a car accident three months later and the case was officially closed.

The ringing phone broke into his reading and he hauled himself to his feet, swaying with exhaustion. He really should be calling it a night.

‘Monty.’ It was Wayne. ‘Sorry to call so late, but I thought you’d want to know the latest.’

‘Go for it.’

‘I ran a background check on the hobby shop guy, Thompson, like you said. I also spoke to his boss and it looks like we can rely on him.’ Wayne’s voice on the end of the phone was obscured by background noise.

‘Wayne, I can hardly hear you,’ Monty said. ‘Where are you and what the hell’s that racket?’

‘I’m back at Central, sorry, the cleaner’s vacuuming the incident room. Wait a minute, he’s in your office now.’ Monty heard a bang as the door was kicked closed. ‘Is that better?’

‘Much. So I suppose it’s too much to hope that the man paid for the paint with his credit card.’

‘Jeez, aren’t you the optimist.’

‘The guy’s smart, but even the smart ones slip up sometimes,’ Monty said.

‘True. The hobby shop man, Thompson, ended up being very helpful, we went through it again with him, but he hasn’t remembered anything new. I organised a session with the artist and we now have a composite sketch. Problem is, the guy was wearing a baseball cap and dark glasses. Thompson said it was the glasses that made him memorable—it wasn’t exactly sunglass weather.’

‘What about the paint?’

‘He gave me a sample of bronze from the batch he sold to our mystery man. I’ve dropped it to the lab but it’ll be a few days before they can tell us if it’s the same stuff on Linda Royce.’

‘I’ve a hunch it’ll match. I’ve been looking at the KP files; I’m convinced we’re looking at the same perpetrator.’

There was a beat of silence from the other end of the phone. ‘We’ve been told to drop that—you after an early retirement?’

‘If that’s what it takes.’ Monty decided to keep his discovery of the missing documents from Wayne for the moment. He didn’t want to jump to conclusions until he’d checked the computer records for himself.