The sergeant grunted. ‘That accords with our intel. He went off the radar a few weeks ago. Basically, the guy’s a standover merchant, bodyguard and bouncer at a few strip clubs in the Cross, loving husband and father the rest of the time.’
‘He called the woman he accosted “Anita”. Do you know her?’
‘I’m looking at a picture of her even as we speak,’ the sergeant said, ‘front page of the Australian.’
‘So you know who she is.’
‘Anita Sandow-or that was the name she was using, there’s no independent record of anyone, anywhere, with that name-and to answer your next question, one of the partials you found belongs to her.’
‘But why was she red-flagged?’
‘A long story. The short version is, she was offered witness protection by the New South Wales police a couple of years ago.’ He paused. ‘Then she disappeared.’
‘Went feral, you mean. She’s been breaking into houses all over the country, as far as we know.’
‘Yeah, well, we thought she was dead, but it seems she was up to her old tricks.’
‘I’m sorry, sir, but you’re not giving me much information here.’
‘I’m wondering how much to tell you. Who’s your boss?’
‘Inspector Challis,’ said Pam distinctly, ‘and he’s busy and he asked me to track down who left those prints in the bank.’
A long pause. So Pam said: ‘Did you get a chance to look at the video clip?’
‘I did,’ the sergeant said, his voice freighted with meaning.
‘And?’
Another long pause. It was almost 2 p.m. and Murphy felt wired from the coffee and from an investigation that now seemed to be teasing at the edges of something nasty and dark.
‘Sergeant?’ she prompted. ‘I take it he left the other fingerprint, and his name isn’t Towne?’
The major crimes officer made up his mind. ‘His name is Ian Galt. Ex-New South Wales police sergeant, arrested two years ago on corruption charges.’
‘Let me guess: the charges didn’t stick.’
‘I’m embarrassed to say.’
‘What did he do?’
‘Let’s start with what he’s doing now.’
‘Okay.’
‘I think he’s probably on a mission to kill Sandow. She was a registered informant, and Galt was her handler and sometime boyfriend.’
‘She informed on him,’ Pam guessed. ‘You turned her, you promised her witness protection-she got spooked before it went to trial.’
The sergeant didn’t contradict her. ‘It all started when Galt arrested her. She was a cat burglar, very good at it, too. Worked alone, but on the fringes of a few organised networks, so she was useful. Had access to information he could use-money laundering, movement of stolen goods, break-ins, stuff like that.’
‘She was never charged?’
‘Correct. After that, he owned her. He’d supply the intel-security patrol routines, cameras, roadblocks-and she’d go on a spree, break into four or five North Shore houses in the one night. He’d give her a cut.’
‘Galt was already dirty?’
The sergeant’s voice took on a tone of disgust. ‘Galt and his mates had their own thing going long before Anita appeared on the scene. Kickbacks from dealers and brothel owners. You name it. They’d lose evidence, stand up in court and give character references to scumbags. And they had an arrangement with bent officers in Victoria and Queensland. One of your guys-cop in a suburban station or one of the squads, like the armed robbers-would send through word about a payroll, say, and Galt and his mates would make a fast trip over the border, grab the payroll, head home again. The bent locals’d run interference for them. Meanwhile it didn’t occur to the good guys to look for an interstate crew.’
‘What happened? Galt got careless? Greedy?’
‘They all did. We were monitoring their phones, bank accounts and movements by then, and the upshot was, Galt and the others were arrested, and the girlfriend was offered a deaclass="underline" go to jail, or give evidence against them and go into witness protection. Apparently Galt used her as a punching bag sometimes.’
‘But he spooked her, so she ran.’
‘Took the money too, what we heard. Meanwhile he got himself a good lawyer and it turned out our case was a bit leaky…’
‘Now he wants revenge.’
‘Wants it badly,’ the NSW officer said.
Pam thanked him and was hanging up when a probationer appeared at the entrance to the open-plan CIU office. ‘Excuse me, there’s a woman downstairs, got a little girl with her and she needs to speak to someone in CIU.’
‘What about?’
‘People called Newkirk? Some name like that.’
Pam glanced at her watch. Two-fifteen and she needed to contact the New South Wales ethical standards department for more on the man named Galt. But a call like that took patience, tact and determination; she’d do it later when she had a free half hour. She followed the probationer downstairs and stuck her head around the door of the victim suite.
Tayla, the nanny, was holding Natalia on her knee. ‘They lied to you,’ she said. ‘Stuff was stolen.’
58
At that moment, Galt was trying a let’s-talk-this-over approach.
‘Actually, I don’t think I ever knew your real identity, Neet. According to the title deeds for this place-and that was foolish, by the way, storing them in your bank-you’re going by the name Susan Grace, but-’
Grace dived through the sitting room window.
She hadn’t tested this as a means of escape, but she had planned it and spent money on it, knowing that someone like Galt would come for her one day. Hence, shatter-proof glass on all the windows, secured by beading designed to pop out of the frame when pressure was applied.
Like now. ‘Jesus, Neet,’ Galt said, as Grace’s body described a tidy parabola through to the lawn on the other side. In the three or four seconds it took for him to cross the room and fire her own Glock at her through the empty window frame, she was feinting left and right into a thicket of garden trees and bushes.
From there she scuttled around to the back wall where the land sloped down, leaving a gap under the house. A useful space, somewhere to store timber offcuts, a chewed-up surf board, her extension ladder. And her backup gun, which was a Beretta. Grace located the concrete stump that supported the laundry floor, slid her hand in, felt around for the shallow wooden box she’d nailed there, retrieved the little pistol.
She worked a shell into the firing chamber then extended her arm, sighting along it: the left-hand corner of the house, then the right, then the garden trees and finally the back door, trying to anticipate what Galt would do.
He was here to kill her, of course-but he could have done that without chewing her ear off, so he was also here for his money.
Except it wasn’t his. He and his mates had put her to work, but she had succeeded beyond their expectations. By rights, the money was hers. Not that any of it was left. She’d spent the lot: this house, her car, the guns, the fake ID, the clothes, the travel…
The online poker.
Grace exploded away from the wall, ducking and weaving to the neighbour’s fence, clearing it at a run as the next bullet buried itself in the soft pine beside her, missing her thigh by a whisper. A Tuesday afternoon in spring, nobody around, a wind rising from the sea beyond the dunes.
Grace ran along the far side of the neighbour’s house, an old-style dwelling on stilts, and darted across the street. A sizzling sensation, a tiny shock wave, as a bullet singed the air beside her ear. Grace whimpered, ducked, sidestepped down into a ditch.
Was Galt shooting to wing her? He’d won pistol-shooting awards. She’d seen the trophies in his Bondi flat, seen the loving way he handled his guns, and almost been jealous.
Grace doubled back along the drainage channel, towards the caravan park, which was screened from the road by scraggly trees.
She stopped for a while, listening, wondering what Galt would do. He was generally quite direct. She’d asked him once what he wanted, and he’d said, ‘Simple. I want money, I want you.’