The Kristina Melina Omnibus: First Kill, Second Cut, Third Victim Page 17

  ‘All right,’ he sighed, ‘what do you want me to do?’

  I crossed back to the lounge room, his glass refilled with ice and water. ‘Get her out of your apartment until we find out what’s going on.’

  He shook his head. ‘It’s not that easy, Melina. What do I tell her? What reason do I give her.’

  ‘Tell her you’re confused, you don’t think you love her or something. You made a mistake, you need more time, God, I don’t know. Use your imagination.’

  He stared at me blankly. ‘Jesus, Melina, I care about the girl. I can’t just treat her like shit. It’s not like I made this whole thing up.’

  I sat next to him and moved my head forward. ‘I know you care about her, but you’re not the only person in the world who’s fallen in love.’ I didn’t believe he had, but who was I to say.

  ‘What would you know about love?’

  ‘Frank,’ I protested, ‘don’t. You don’t have to judge my life every time we’re having a disagreement.’

  He hesitated and said, ‘Wouldn’t it be better to leave her in my apartment? If what you told me is true, I’ve got a better chance of finding out the truth by being close to her.’

  ‘No, Frank, because the truth is going to hurt you like nothing else in the world can.’

  ‘I can take it.’

  ‘No, you can’t. You can’t even take it now. You don’t even know how to handle this. I don’t want you to get hurt, Frank. I care a lot about you.’ My hands reached for his. ‘Don’t do this to yourself. This is difficult for the both of us.’ I reached out for him.

  He remained with his head down for a little while, his hands tucked in mine.

  Suddenly he looked up and said, ‘Tell me something, but you’ve got to promise me an honest answer. Okay?’

  I knew what was coming, and I was unsure if I was ready for it. ‘Okay. What is it?’

  ‘Do you love me, Melina?’

  I swallowed and, without hesitation, said, ‘No, I don’t. I really care about you, but I’m not in love with you.’

  I had known that for a long time, but hearing it out loud felt kind of strange. I’d never expressed it so firmly before, not to myself, nor to anyone else. I guessed he must have thought the same thing, because a look of despair crossed his face.

  Clearly upset, he retrieved his hands from mine. ‘I don’t understand you, Melina. It’s very difficult for me to make sense of what’s going on. You know how I feel about you.’

  ‘I know, and you don’t have to say anything.’

  ‘And now you make me wonder if Teresa is just an excuse because I can’t have you.’

  ‘Don’t be so impatient. You don’t know what the future holds.’

  ‘Impatient? Christ, Melina, I’ve known you for five years. How patient am I supposed to be? Do you know how long five years is when you have to work with someone everyday? I make myself sick every night, wondering if you’re suddenly going to find someone else, and then I’d lose you forever. I hope everyday might be the right day to tell you how I feel. I took it slowly for fear of losing you. I’ve never forced myself on you. Never.’

  ‘I know you haven’t, Frank. And I appreciate that.’

  ‘I respect you, you know. That’s why I never made a pass at you. I didn’t want you to think I was that kind of man.’

  ‘I know you’re not,’ I assured him, but I was uncertain what he meant. How many ways was there to let someone know you cared about them, apart from being obvious?

  I’d known he liked me from the first time we met, but I never guessed he was in love with me, although it seemed pretty obvious now. Men had a bad habit of falling in love too easily. Did he really want to spend the rest of his life listening to me telling him how to dress, how to think, how to be careful every time he stepped outside?

  I felt bad for him, but it was impossible to fall in love with a man I wasn’t attracted to.

  He emptied his glass of water and said, ‘This is a hell of a lot of stuff to take in for one day. I’d like to spend some time on my own, if you don’t mind.’

  I understood how he felt, because I had been feeling like that for the past two weeks.

  ‘It’s okay, Frank. You go and do what you have to do. But don’t you do anything silly now. You know I’m on your side, no matter what. Friends, remember?’

  He nodded with an awkward smile. ‘If I wanted friends, I’d go to summer camp.’

  His reply hurt.

  I walked him to the door and kissed him on the cheek.

  I was restless on Monday night after Frank left. I made myself sick, worrying about how he was going to cope, how he was going to react to having Teresa under his roof now that he knew things she didn’t know he knew.

  Michael called me and asked if he could stay over at Chris’s. I told him okay as long as he kept in touch now and then.

  I got out of bed four or five times during the night and tried to read. My mind floated from one stream of thought to another, making it impossible to sleep concentrate on my Sue Grafton novel.

  I tried to watch television for a while, but it bored me.

  I made myself a mug of hot milk, hoping it would send me to sleep.

  But it was way past 5.00 a.m. when I finally closed my eyes and forgot about everything for a while.

  At 10.34 a.m., the telephone woke me up. The time was glowing in bright red letters on my clock radio, next to my bed.

  I turned to the window and noticed the sky was clear outside.

  The answering machine in the kitchen took the call before I had a chance to answer it from the bedroom.

  I stumbled out of bed and made my way to the kitchen.

  ‘It’s John Darcy from the lab,’ the voice said at the end of the line.

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘I’ve found something interesting you might like to see.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’ll be better if you come.’

  ‘Give me an hour.’

  I hung up and jumped in and out of the shower in ten minutes. I dressed in a yellow skirt with matching jacket and a white blouse.

  Back in the kitchen I washed down a multivitamin with a cup of lukewarm coffee.

  Rushing downstairs, I almost forgot my mobile phone.

  As I wondered what John wanted to show me, I inserted the key into the ignition of my car but instead of the engine roaring, there was a click and nothing.

  I tried again.

  Damn, the battery is dead!

  I opened the bonnet, fiddled with the cables connected to the battery, jumped back in the driver’s seat and tried again.

  Nothing.

  The RACV would take too long to come, so I decided to catch a cab at the corner of Chapel Street and Dandenong Road instead.

  My Indian taxi driver asked too many questions. I told him I had a headache and would appreciate if he kept to himself. He pursed his lips, as if I had just given him the finger. And in a way I had. Just because I hired his car, it didn’t mean I hired him as a psychologist.

  I arrived at the VFSC at 11.37 a.m., three minutes later than anticipated.

  Anxious, I cleared my name with Liaison, and flew straight to the Department of Biology. I entered the lab by pressing my ID card against a black plate next to the door. The door unlocked automatically.

  John Darcy was adjusting his compound microscope. He looked exhausted. His hair looked unkempt as if he had been playing with a nail and a power point. He reminded me of a mad scientist with his white lab coat and surgical gloves.

  He glanced up, and with a hand gesture told me to get closer. ‘Check this out,’ he said.

  I crossed the laboratory and stood next to him, leaning on a galvanised work bench, lined with tens of yellow biological hazard containers.

  ‘How long have you been here?’ I asked.

  ‘Seven a.m.’

  He explained how he had a fight with his wife and needed to escape for a while.

  God, relationships really began to scare me.


  John shifted his swivel chair in front of a comparison microscope, a magnifying instrument with a relatively low range, 5 to 35x, making it possible to view two samples at once.

  The comparison microscope worked by means of a double tube, whose separate images were combined together by a pair of mirrors and a pair of prisms into a comparison eyepiece. This instrument was mainly known to be used for comparison of bullet rifling and cartridge marks in ballistics. However, John had been using it to compare anything from hair, to fibres and tool marks.

  ‘Look in there, and tell me what you see.’

  I moved close to the eyepiece and viewed two dark samples of material placed on the stage. The one on the right was rugged and fibres were pulled out from the edge. The one on the left was perfectly cut.

  ‘So?’ I asked, wondering what he was getting at.

  ‘One of those two samples is from the suede jacket we found at Walter Dunn’s apartment.’ I remembered Frank finding the jacket. ‘The other is also from his jacket, but it’s the one Frank collected from the window frame at the Wilson’s apartment.’

  ‘Which provided us with a point of exit,’ I commented.

  ‘Or so someone wanted to make us believe it was,’ John corrected. ‘The material collected from the Wilson’s apartment is not the rugged sample, but the neatly cut one. If the killer had caught his jacket on the window frame, we would be looking at a tear, just like the sample on the right. But instead, the sample is perfectly straight, as if someone cut it with scissors.’

  I looked at John and then back into the eyepiece.

  ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘but we already knew Walter didn’t kill Jeremy Wilson from the autopsy report.’

  ‘Sure, but this indicates something else. Can’t you see?’

  I racked my brain for a few seconds and said, ‘This was premeditated murder. Whoever killed Jeremy Wilson went through the whole trouble of cutting a piece from Walter’s jacket and placing it on the window frame of the Wilson’s apartment. And since we know that Walter was murdered and did not commit suicide, and he died a few days before Jeremy Wilson was killed, then whoever killed Jeremy planned this days ahead, maybe weeks, maybe months.’

  He nodded with a smile.

  I couldn’t see what the funny part was.

  ‘Jesus, John, we’ve got a real psychopath on our hands. The killer didn’t just try to cover up his trail, but created an entire scenario of false evidence to send us in the wrong direction.’

  ‘And you know what that means?’

  I looked at him puzzled.

  He jabbed his forefinger in front of my face. ‘You’d better watch your arse. If the killer knows you’re getting too close to the truth, you could be in for a nasty surprise.’

  I swallowed as I felt my stomach churning. John was right. The killer was still out there and would probably do anything to protect himself.

  ‘This could be someone clever,’ he added. ‘In fact, it could be someone who knows about police work. It could be someone we work with.’

  I thought of Frank straight away, but he was too clever to make so many mistakes.

  I knew I was dealing with someone intelligent, but not as intelligent as he thought himself to be. Someone cunning, cold-blooded, and capable of planning his killings well ahead of time. That person had a deep hatred of Jeremy Wilson and Walter Dunn. Especially Jeremy Wilson. The way he’d been butchered indicated revenge of the worst kind. Intruders killed fast and furious. Whoever had killed Jeremy Wilson took a hell of a lot of time to do it.

  My mind did a juggling act, but came back to the same conclusion.

  As much as I hated to admit it, I was almost certain I knew who that person was.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  After lunch, I cancelled my afternoon class at the Police Academy in Glen Waverley. Instead, I called the RACV to put a new battery in my car.

  Straight after the RACV patrolman left, I changed into a pair of Levis and a white T-shirt.

  With its new battery, the Lancer was roaring with pleasure.

  And so was I.

  I raced straight to St Patrick’s Hospital, making a nuisance of myself on the road, tailgating every car in sight, zigzagging between the traffic as if I was running in the Grand Prix. Cold wind blew in my hair, giving me the sensation of thousands of tiny fingers massaging my scalp.

  No doubt, one day I would get pulled over.

  I needed to talk to Dr Larousse, ask him if he had heard anything suspicious from his staff about Teresa Wilson. Since she’d been there for a few days, surely she must have spoken to someone. And if not, a nurse must have noticed something unusual, something which contradicted her version of the events of the 20th of February.

  Dr Larousse wasn’t expecting me, and when I walked into his office, unannounced, he seemed taken aback. I glanced at his fluorescent green tie, hidden under his white lab coat.

  ‘Dr Melina, did we have an appointment?’ he asked, pushing his rimless glasses up the bridge of his nose. He looked as tired as when I first met him. I wondered if there was anyone left in Melbourne who was getting enough sleep.

  I stood in front of his desk and made eye contact. ‘I’m sorry to interrupt you, but this couldn’t wait. It’s about Teresa Wilson.’

  Dr Larousse stood up, circled the office, shut the door, and sat down again. ‘Actually, I was meaning to talk to you about her. I never got around to calling you.’ He almost whispered, as if he was about to reveal some great conspiracy. ‘You know what it’s like in a hospital. Always running around, shift after shift, and you keep on forgetting those really important phone calls you have to make.’ He presented a brown vinyl chair on the other side of his desk. ‘Please do take a seat.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, partly excited, partly anxious about what he had to tell me. Him wanting to talk to me just when I needed to talk to him was a great coincidence, something I rarely came across in my line of work.

  He opened the top drawer of his desk and pulled out a cream-coloured manilla folder. A typed label with Teresa Wilson’s name was on it. He opened the folder and pulled out two A4-size colour photographs.

  I tried to analyse the pictures across the desk, but nothing made sense. A composite of fleshy-like tones.

  ‘Take a look at those,’ he finally said, handing over the photographs.

  One picture showed Teresa Wilson’s badly bruised and cut face. The other, obviously more recent, showed a reduction in wounds.

  ‘The first photograph was taken at the preliminary examination. As you know, when Teresa Wilson first came to us, she was in dreadful condition. This is clearly evident in the photograph you’re holding. Our main concern at the time was to identify any life-threatening injuries, making sure the victim was breathing, stopping any major haemorrhage, looking for head and spinal cord damage, surface wounds, chest injuries and so on.

  ‘Like I initially told you, it was obvious to anyone who attended Teresa Wilson’s wounds that she had been cruelly battered and raped. But now, take a look at the second photograph.’

  I placed the first picture alongside the second one.

  Dr Larousse tilted his body forward and pointed to various point on the pictures.

  ‘You see all the bruising and swelling on the photograph taken when she first came to us?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Okay,’ he went on, sounding just as excited as when he first began, ‘now look at this shot. The bruising has diminished dramatically in a small amount of time. This indicates the wounds were superficial in the first place.

  ‘If you take a closer look at the lacerations on Teresa Wilson’s face, it’s much easier to identify them on the second photograph than on the first one.’

  I noticed the scratches on Teresa’s face were unusually well-scattered.

  Dr Larousse stopped for a few seconds, giving me time to absorb his comments. He pushed his glasses back on his nose again and continued, ‘When someone gets assaulted, the scratches are random. But on Tere
sa’s face, most of them seem to concentrate on the left side of her face, something which I had never picked initially in the original photos we took, no thanks to the amount of bruising and blood smear. Also notice how the scratches have somehow missed every sensitive area on her face, including the eyes, the nostrils, the lips and the ears. Do you see what I’m getting at?’

  I opened my mouth to respond, but he went on, ‘But wait, take a look at those.’

  Dr Larousse removed another two A4-size colour photographs from the manilla folder, this time showing scratches on Teresa’s arms.

  ‘Look at the left arm,’ he said, his voice filled with excitement, as if he had just discovered a vaccine for AIDS.

  I looked at the pictures and noticed Teresa’s left arm had ten times more scratches than her right one. All this had never been obvious at the crime scene since there was so much blood and chaos. I also never had the chance to examine Teresa Wilson because she had been whisked straight to the hospital.

  ‘Okay,’ he went on, ‘when a person scratches herself deliberately, she tends to do it more on the side away from the leading hand. Since Teresa Wilson is right handed, the left arm is more scratched than the right one. Let me put it another way: left-handed people injure themselves more on the right side, and vice versa.’

  I nodded as I stared at the pictures, not really surprised about what I was seeing. When I spoke to John Darcy that morning and concluded whoever killed Jeremy Wilson had staged his death, something triggered my mind. I suddenly recalled Teresa Wilson was a set designer. Her job was to make visual impressions. Only she never counted on the forensic evidence she would leave behind.

  I looked at the pictures in front of me and wanted to throw-up, not because of the injuries on her body, but because I had felt so close to this woman for a little while. I’d been naive enough to believe only a man would do something so horrific. I’d never come across someone who had self-inflicted so many injuries just to make it look like she was beaten.

  ‘What about the squash ball in her anus?’ I asked, not because I needed more convincing, but because Dr Larousse seemed to be taking so much pride in his discovery. And also because I appreciated his extra research and good eye for observation.