Kittyhawk Down

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

They were in an unmarked car this time, not the divisional van, and in T-shirts and jeans, not their uniforms, a quick change into plain clothes for this library stakeout. But first Pam asked Tank to pull over so that she could check her account balance at the automatic teller machine outside the Commonwealth Bank in Main Street.

Good, the thirty grand from Lister Financial Services had gone into her account. She still didn't quite believe that her application had been approved, but there had been no questions from Carl Lister. 'A member of the police? No problem, girlie.'

Girlie. She was almost thirty, but got 'girlie' a hundred times a day, from work colleagues, civilians, even her father. Maybe when she'd bought her car and no longer took the bus they'd all stop calling her 'girlie'.

Constable Murphy to you, arsehole.

A bit of spending money wouldn't go astray. She keyed in $100 and while the machine counted it out she glanced at her watch. Would she have time to pay for and collect the car later? Maybe tomorrow, Wednesday. But then it would be Thursday and her first loan repayment would be due, and no salary going into her account until Thursday fortnight. She felt the first, faint stirrings of panic and returned to the unmarked police car, John Tankard watching how the seatbelt bisected and defined her breasts inside the Riptide T-shirt as she buckled up. 'Satisfied, Tank?'

'Never,' Tankard said, in his pinkish, dampish, beer-bellied, faintly bovine way. He pulled into the traffic without signalling, drove to the library and parked hard against the box-hedge border.

'I can't open my door,' Pam said.

But he was already crossing to the front steps of the library. She slid across to the driver's seat-it was unpleasantly heated by him; she pictured his hairy arse and shuddered-and got out and locked the car. A breeze was blowing in from the bay. There was a small circus on the foreshore grassland, lingering after the Easter break.

She climbed the steps and entered the library. Clearly the librarians hadn't expected perverts when they'd gone on-line, for they hadn't given much thought to the positioning of the computers or the moral sickness of the local punters. According to Sergeant van Alphen, who briefed them quickly before they went out, someone had downloaded child pornography onto a hard drive. Someone else had left behind a screenful of fellatio thumbnails. It was impossible for the librarians to monitor everyone, so they'd called in the police.

'Sarge, I don't know much about the Internet,' Tankard had complained at the briefing.

'No big deal,' van Alphen said. 'Just sit and read, wander around a bit, browse the shelves, but keep an eye on who logs on and what they're downloading, without being too obvious about it. And leave your radios in the car. Use the library phone if you have to.'

Pam had managed not to smirk: the thought of John Tankard in a library. 'Good exercise for the beer arm, Tank, raising a few hardcovers.'

'That's enough, Constable,' van Alphen had said.

Pam reached the library doors just as they slid open and Tank came hurrying out. He was in the grip of a glittering, mouth-twisting, fist-against-the-palm emotion.

'Case solved,' he said.

'What?'

'It's Brad Pike.'

Pam glanced past his big torso but Pike was concealed by the inner doors, the loans desk and a quarter-acre of shelved books. 'What's he doing?'

'Sitting at a computer.'

'Yes, Tank, but what's he doing?'

'Take a wild guess.'

And so Pam took a reasoned guess, mentally linking Internet pornography with that day, ten months ago, when Bradley Pike, aged twenty-two, unemployed and unemployable, had been babysitting his defacto's two-year-old daughter, Jasmine Tully. It had been a Saturday, and to settle Jasmine for her afternoon nap he'd driven around with her in his car. When she was asleep he slipped into a milk bar for cigarettes. 'I was gone five minutes,' he said. 'No, three minutes. Three minutes tops.' When he got back, the child was missing. He hadn't bothered to lock the car. The car hadn't yielded forensic evidence except what you'd expect from a car shared by people like Bradley Pike and Lisa Tully. They were young, poor, badly educated, neglectful and stupid. Lisa Tully had taken the train to Frankston with her sister Donna that day, and when she got back to Waterloo, smelling of perfume samples and rattling with shoplifted aerosols, and found her child missing, she'd started spitting and screaming. 'You done it, Brad, I know you done it.'

The police were of a similar view and had searched the house and garden. Nothing. They grilled Pike for days on end and search teams had scoured the Peninsula: culverts, rock pools, bracken thickets, rubbish tips and farmland. The child was never found. Pike was never tried.

Like a moron, Pam thought, Pike had stayed on in Waterloo. And just to show how fucked-up some people are, he could still be seen with Lisa from time to time, although the rest of the district would have nothing to do with him.

'You know what it is, don't you?' Tankard demanded. 'No one will fuck him anymore so he gets off on pornography.'

It could be true, Pam thought. The latest in Pike's on-again, off-again relationship with Lisa Tully was the restraining order that Lisa had taken out on him, claiming harassment. Before that she'd had a change of heart and said she no longer believed he'd been behind her daughter's disappearance. Before that she'd been adamant that he had been responsible. Pike was challenging the restraining order-because no one else was stupid enough to fuck him, the town said, and he needed her back again. Pam knew that the restraining order didn't mean much. It kept Lisa and Donna Tully in the public eye, though.

'I'd like to flatten the little cunt,' Tankard said now, clenching his fist.

Pam nodded absently. They'd have to get into the library unobserved and try to see what Pike was doing on the computer. That was their main concern. Unfortunately, Pike knew both their faces. After all, they'd had plenty of contact with him ten months ago. Since then he'd been beaten up a couple of times. And there was the night he'd gone to hospital with minor scorches to his face and hands after siphoning petrol from an abandoned car and using a cigarette lighter for illumination. He'd also come into the police station in an outrage one day because the marijuana plant he'd been cultivating in a pot on his back verandah had been nicked. Then just the other day, when she'd seen him on the street and he'd told her about Venn being the lovers' lane rapist, he'd claimed that he was being stalked. Pam shook her head. Not real bright, our Bradley.

'How are we going to do this?'

'For all we know, he's doing research on his car, not downloading kiddie porn.'

Pike drove an unroadworthy Torana.

'Simple. We just go over and hassle him. I'm looking forward to this. We might get lucky.'

Pam knew all about Tankard's approach to crime: hassle offenders and suspected offenders until they commit a crime, then arrest them. She shrugged. 'Okay go for it.'

They went in, Tankard heading like a bull on heat across the room to a partitioned corner. Pam followed, threading her way around a scattering of tables filled with Year 12 kids doing research projects, elderly men reading the daily papers in armchairs, a photocopy machine, a portable noticeboard displaying breast cancer posters.

She reached the computers in time to see Pike's screen go blank as Tankard grabbed-too late-at Pike's mouse hand. Pike, expressing indignation, began to shout, 'Leave us alone, I'm being stalked, okay? I'm just doing research on stalking, okay?'

'Still on about that, Brad?' Pam said, cocking her head and looking at his emaciated face, sunken chest and unwashed hair worn mullet style. God knew what Lisa Tully had ever seen in him.

Just then a librarian stopped them. 'Excuse me, you're wanted on the telephone,' she said, eyeing Pike with mingled apprehension and glee.

Pam took the call. It was Sergeant Destry, saying drop everything, CIB wanted her and Tank to help with a search of Ian Munro's farm. 'I'll see you at the station in five minutes for a briefing.'

'Yes, Sarge,' Pam said.

'Your lucky day, Bradley,' she told Pike as they left.