Shooting Star

23

‘Jesus Christ,’ said Orlovsky, staring at the large computer monitor. ‘I know this software.’

We were on the sixth floor of Carson House in Exhibition Street, in a huge work area, alone except for two women and a man looking at three-dimensional views of a tower building on a wall-mounted computer monitor.

‘My contact says it’s based on an army program for keeping track of how much the cooks, the clerks and the storepersons are stealing. The Feds are using it.’

Orlovsky made a noise of contempt. ‘Correction, the Feds would be using it if they could work out how to.’

‘Does that mean you know how to?’

He shook his head in pity. ‘Frank, it’s my software. I worked on it for fucking Defence. Two years of my life. This is what I was doing when…anyway, it’s mine. Partly. Largely.’

He concentrated on the screen, loaded and unloaded CDs. ‘Christ there’s a lot of data here,’ he said. ‘Text, program files, image files. Compressed to buggery.’

‘All we want is the Carson kidnap,’ I said.

‘Got the grunt here to run the whole thing.’ He hummed. ‘There’s a lot of sweat gone into this.’

‘It’s a sex substitute for people like you, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘Caress the keyboard, instant response, feelings of power and dominance.’

He didn’t look at me, tapped. ‘Sex add-on,’ he said. ‘For people like you, it could be a healthy substitute. But there’s nothing like real power and dominance is there, Frank? You should talk to Stephanie Chadwick. She’d understand you, your special needs.’

‘Sometimes,’ I said, ‘I think I should’ve left you snivelling in that tropical swamp, wearing your little blue towelling pyjamas and those nice slippers.’

‘Tropical paradise,’ he said. ‘Pure paternalism, Daddy knows best. I was happy there. Free drugs and some intelligent people to talk to. You ripped me away.’ He tapped. ‘We can do this. Yes.’

He looked happier than I’d seen him in years. ‘So what do you want to know? Captain.’

‘What can it tell me?’

‘Depends. Try something.’

I said, ‘See what it’s got under Carson.’

Orlovsky looked at me and shook his head. He tapped and the heading CARSON, ALICE and a date in 1990 came up, followed by menu boxes, dozens of them. ‘Be a bit more specific.’

I was reading the menu over his shoulder. ‘Crime scene.’

He tapped. ‘Stills or video?’

‘Video.’

More tapping. Almost instantly, we were watching film shot by a police camera inside a brightly-lit four-car garage, two cars in it. The camera panned around the space, walls, the floor, went up to the nearest car, a BMW with driver and front passenger doors open, circled it, looked into the driver’s side, into the footwells, along the dashboard, everywhere, came back to the passenger side and did the same. Then the camera left the garage through an open door and went slowly, painfully slowly, down a driveway, filming the brick paving, the verges, around a bend to a gateway with open spear-pointed steel gates. It filmed every square centimetre of the entrance and the pavement and gutter outside.

‘That’ll do,’ I said. ‘Records of interview.’

‘Who do you want?’

‘Alice. And the witnesses. I assume the driver of the car was a witness.’

He tapped again, produced a sketch, a view from behind of the BMW, both front doors open. A man wearing a balaclava was pulling a small schoolgirl out of the passenger side. On the other side, another man, short, also hooded, was pointing an automatic pistol at the driver.

‘Only witness,’ said Mick. ‘Dawn Yates. The nanny.’

He typed in her name. Her driver’s licence picture appeared, a woman in her late twenties, thirtyish, short fair hair, square jaw. She looked like a tennis coach or a gym instructor. Mick scrolled and her biographical details came up, her work history. She had been a nurse and a part-time karate instructor before taking the Carson job. Then a diagram appeared, a complex relationship diagram: Dawn’s family, family friends, their friends, Dawn’s friends, their families, their friends, all annotated with ages and jobs. Of the dozens of names, three were starred.

‘What’s that mean?’ I pointed at a star.

Mick tapped the asterisk on the keyboard. Three driver’s licence pictures appeared, two men and a woman, names, biographical details.

The woman was Dawn’s cousin’s wife. She had worked for an arm of the Carson empire in 1985-86. The men were both Carson employees, one an architect in Sydney, the other an office manager in Brisbane.

‘What about that bloke with the key next to his name?’

Tap, tap. Another face. ‘Did eighteen months in New South Wales for fraud. Her father’s cousin.’

‘Jesus, they shook Dawn’s tree,’ I said. ‘Can you print this stuff?’

‘Gee, that’s a hard one.’

‘Print Alice’s interviews, will you?’

When he’d issued the command, Orlovsky said, ‘That’s it? That’s all you want? They give you a banquet and all you want is a fucking cocktail sausage roll?’

‘I’m tired, Mick. Brilliant inquiries will come to me. Can you get into the system from outside?’

He gave me the kind of look I’d once given him, the look that said, shape up Sunshine, the day’s just beginning, it can only get worse from here, looked away, started fiddling with the computer.

Happy now, in charge, happy as he could be. Who could know how happy that was?

‘First I’ve got to make it hard for anyone else to get into,’ he said.

I went over to the printer, watched the paper being spat into the collating trays, felt the ache growing in my back, the pointmen of pain advancing down my legs.