Dead Girl Sing

by Tony Cavanaugh

Genres: Mystery; Hard-Boiled; International Crime & Mystery; Private Investigators; Traditional Mysteries; Noir; Thrillers; Crime Fiction; Psychological Thrillers; Suspense

Synopsis

'One of the most complex and uncompromising heroes since Harry Bosch' - Weekend Australian World-class crime writing from a brilliant Australian author. Darian Richards knew he should have let the phone keep ringing. But more than two decades as a cop leaves you with a certain outlook on life. No matter how much he tried to walk away, something, or someone, kept bringing him back to his gun. One phone call. Two dead girls in a shallow water grave. And a missing cop to deal with. Something bad is happening on the Gold Coast glitter strip. Amongst the thousands of schoolies and the usual suspects, someone is preying on beautiful young women. No one has noticed. No one knows why. Darian looked into the eyes of those two dead girls. The last person to do that was their killer. He can't walk away. He will find out why. Tony Cavanaugh is an Australian writer and producer of film and television with over thirty years' experience in the industry. Dead Girl Sing is his second book featuring former cop Darian Richards and follows on from the acclaimed crime thriller Promise. The Darian Richards Series Promise Dead Girl Sing The Soft Touch (Short Story) The Train Rider Kingdom of the Strong

Release date: February 26, 2013

Publisher: Hachette Australia

Print pages: 238

Sample

MAYBE SHE WAS TWELVE.

All we’d been told was that a girl had been stuffed into a plastic wheelie bin, one of the large ones. Olive green with a
bright yellow lid. The lid hadn’t been properly closed. That’s because plastic wheelie bins aren’t made to hold people.


It was the 1980s and metal rubbish bins were starting to be phased out; plastic and recycling bins were new. Only a few councils
had begun to introduce them. People didn’t get the recycling thing, me included, but I knew they weren’t meant for throwing
out human bodies.


It was my first body. Until then I’d been running down petty crims, attending domestic disputes and too many drunken fights
in aimless streets of ruined houses built by a generous postwar government in the suburb of Springvale, far from the heart
of Melbourne, a flat, sprawling city just north of the Antarctic. Down behind a small, seedy shopping plaza that advertised
a sex shop, a noodle bar and a discount chemist was a gravel lane. A yellow neon strip at the back of the sex shop spilt a
dirty light into the gloom of night. Beyond its reach, a seemingly endless carpet of low and flat suburban streets, spreading
across to a distant ocean. I could hear the low rumble of the highway, six lanes that led to the heart of the city an hour away. It was cold and late. It was a Thursday.


A fat guy – the guy who owned the sex shop and who’d called it in – was bouncing on his toes as we walked towards the girl.
At first he looked suspicious. Then he looked impatient. He was waving at us.


‘Down here,’ he shouted.

We’d parked at the end of the lane and got out to walk the distance. My partner, Eric, an old cop, liked to walk and slowly
observe as he entered a crime scene.


I could see part of her body sticking out of the bin.

The cold made the gravel harder. The sounds of our feet crunching down the lane carried like sharp echoes.

‘Kid?’ said Eric.

I hated being called ‘kid’.

‘Yeah?’ I replied.

‘How long you been in uniform?’

‘Four months.’ I was nineteen.

‘Ever seen a DB?’

‘What’s a DB?’ I asked as we drew closer. Crunch, crunch.

‘Dead body.’

Cops love shorthand.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Not people, that is,’ I added, as if the clarification might be helpful.

‘Don’t look ’em in the eye,’ he instructed.

The sex shop owner was already talking before we got to him. ‘So I come outta the shop, you know, to go home, it’s late, you
know, and pow, there she is. I mean, what fucking loony goes and shoves a kid in a bin? I mean, you know, what the fuck?’


What the fuck indeed.

Eric was old school, a walking police department. He’d done it all, seen it all. Forensics, traffic, CIB, community liaison,
missing persons – each of these areas has its own department now, but back then they were just an everyday part of the job.
The two-way was in the car, at the mouth of the narrow lane. Mobile phones were something I’d seen in a Lethal Weapon movie and they were the size of a small suitcase.


‘Let’s check her out,’ he said. ‘Lie the bin down, kid.’

She was slumped inside, like she’d folded in on herself. An arm was sticking out. Whoever had put her in had shoved her feet
first. I took the bin and rolled it back towards me. One of the wheels had come off. My mum would have complained to the council.
Guess the fat guy didn’t care; we were out the back of a sex shop where nobody usually bothered to venture.


I tilted it backwards and gently laid it down on the gravel lane. The yellow lid flipped open and her body flopped out. She
had brown hair.


‘Drag her out, kid,’ said Eric.

‘Can I go now?’ asked the fat owner.

‘No,’ said Eric.

I reached in.

The yellow-lid bins are for recycled stuff: paper, bottles, cans. She smelt of cardboard. I gently eased my hands under the
girl’s shoulders and slowly pulled her out, over the lid, onto the gravel.


She was still warm.

As I lay her on the cold, hard ground, her hair fell away from her eyes, and there we were, face to face. I exhaled, and my
breath hung before her in a white mist.


The DB. Eighties shorthand. Now we call them ‘vics’.

Maybe she was twelve, I thought. Not much older than that.

‘What do you think her name is?’ I asked stupidly.

Eric ignored my question.

‘Kid? What did I say to you?’

I looked up at Eric, then back down to her face. Our eyes met and I held her gaze.

Don’t look ’em in the eye, he’d warned. Because, if you do, you’ll connect.

It was good advice from a seasoned cop. Advice designed to help a young rookie survive, advice that I ignored.

You do connect. But not only with the victim. The last person they see alive is the person who kills them, who extinguishes
life. And the next thing their dead eyes see is you.


That’s the common bond between you and the killer. He’s stared into her eyes as the door on her life closes and you pick up
after him. You find him. You close the case. Close her eyes. Put him away. Let her rest. If only there was rest for you. If
only they stopped coming. I was young. Later I’d learn they’d never stop coming.


—

IT WAS ADVICE that I ignored yet again, many years later, as I stared at two sets of eyes belonging to two young bodies, laid out like
patchwork, an entwined mosaic of limbs and a ribbon of hair, floating in the shallows beneath me.


SOMEWHERE A PHONE WAS RINGING. FAR AWAY, BURIED, ITS ring tone an annoying and vaguely familiar song. It stopped. I pretended it hadn’t happened. I continued on with the wise
business of river-staring. For those of you uninitiated, this involves sitting in a comfortable chair or, in my case, a hammock,
staring at the flow of the Noosa River on an incoming tide. Occasionally you may see a plank of wood float past or pelicans
with accusing looks that say, ‘Where’s my food, pal?’ or, every now and then, a boat full of tourists, or one of the local
fishermen who trawl the long river for anything that swims around under its brown, quick-flowing surface.


River-staring is one of my main occupations now. I used to be called ‘the Gun’. People said I was the best homicide investigator
in the country. Used to be. I resigned over two years ago.


The phone rang again – the same annoying pop song – and then, after a brief pause, it started up one more time. The song had
been designated to a girl who was, at the time, in mortal peril of being taken by a serial killer called Winston Promise.


Promise was dead. After a hunt, I caught him, watched as my so-called partner shot him and then buried him in an unmarked
grave that nobody would discover. So it wasn’t him trying to make contact.


I had four phones during the time I was searching for him, all of them with songs specifically designated to potential victims
so I would instantly know, if one of them rang, who was under threat.


It stopped. This was now the third time it had rung. It meant someone wanted my help. It meant someone thought they were in
trouble.


I have little memory of what happened after Maria and I emerged from the dark forest where Promise lies buried next to an
unnamed creek and called it in. An empty killer’s house, no sign of the owner, lots of questions from suspicious cops, but
no charges. I recall coming home in a daze. I recall the walls of my home covered with pictures of Promise’s victims. I recall
tearing them down. I remember staring at the river and waiting for the glow of dawn. I remember it rained. I remember putting
the phones away in a cardboard box. Along with my gun. I’d kept the phones on charge, connected up to a powerboard. Even though
Promise and the threat that he posed to those girls had been erased. Why did I do that?


It rang again.

I walked in through the wide open doors of my old wooden shack on the river and looked up at the roof.

The house I lived in had been built in the 1920s by a fisherman who was, I’m convinced, either permanently drunk or extremely
eccentric. When the wind blew hard – which it did nearly every day, as the river’s mouth to the ocean was barely a mile away
– the house swayed as if inebriated. The fisherman builder either got bored, ran out of money or decided that a ceiling was
unnecessary. Above me were exposed hardwood beams and sheets of tin metal. When people were polite they said it looked rustic. It didn’t. It looked unfinished, but I didn’t care. When I bought the house all I
wanted was a place to escape. And after my initial reaction – what the fuck is that all about and why did the real estate
agent fail to mention there wasn’t a ceiling? – I stopped looking up and eventually forgot about it. The hardwood beams had
become a useful place to store things. Among which were a number of cardboard boxes, and in one of them, a phone that wouldn’t
stop ringing, a girl in need of my help.


The old fisherman had installed a power point in one of the beams above me. Cords snaked from it to the ceiling fan and an
air conditioning unit that didn’t work and an extension cord, which disappeared into one of the twenty-seven boxes above me.


Why had I kept the phones on charge? Why hadn’t I turned them off? Buried them, like I buried the killer? Now that the danger
had passed, did I really want these girls to stay in touch? In case there was future trouble? All teenage girls have trouble.
Why did I keep the lines of communication open? Was it the buzz? Was my friend Casey right when he handed me the Beretta and
told me I’d never get rid of it, that it was part of me?


I’d retired, left the force, turned my back on the darkness. I’d come out of retirement to cleanse the Sunshine Coast of a
killer, but since then I’d been just dandy, happy sitting at the end of my jetty. Hadn’t I?


—

‘DARIAN, IS THAT YOU?’


I was tempted to say: no, wrong number, sorry, and hang up, but one of the unfortunate by-products of designating ring tones
to certain people was that you could picture them. I knew, as soon as I saw the phone – bright pink – vibrating with some long-forgotten song we’d chosen over a year ago, that it was eighteen-year-old
Ida from Vienna, backpacking her way around Australia. She’d been left on the edge of my lawn by the river one night, naked
and terrified, swathed in a cocoon of about sixty-five layers of cling wrap, a gift from the serial killer to me. Against
her will I’d forced her to leave Noosa and lied about how beautiful the Gold Coast was, how happy she’d be down there, and
dumped her at the Nambour railway station. I did the right thing; she’d been targeted by Mister Promise and he would have
gone back to her cheapo motel room and finished her off just for the fun of taunting me. Had she won the hours-long argument
she would have ended up literally joined to a string of other victims in a macabre and perverse display of his glory.


‘Ida? What’s up?’

Mistake number one: don’t invite a problem. I quickly tried to make up for the error.

‘I’m sitting out by the river. I’m really enjoying not having to be a cop or be involved in any crime. It’s great. I’m catching
a lot of fish,’ I lied.


Didn’t work.

‘Darian, you must come. Only you can help. There are so many bodies–’

And that was it. I thought I heard some sort of swift movement from behind the words, like a person grabbing the phone off
her, but maybe it was my imagination. I looked at the pink phone in my hand and checked its battery level; maybe it had died.
But no, it was still fully charged.


I redialled.

‘Hello, this is Ida, please leave a message.’ And then, ‘Hallo, hier ist Ida. Bitte hinterlasse eine Nachricht,’ which I took a wild stab at being the same, but in German.


I stared at the phone and felt the emptiness at the other end. I tried not to see her, but that was as useless as trying to
stop breathing.


I stared at the river. I stared at the hammock. I stared at a flock of seagulls on my front lawn. I told them to fuck off.
They didn’t move. They never do. You have to run at them, physically intimidate them, otherwise they’ll stand and stare at
you, hoping or expecting that eventually you’ll succumb and feed them a crust or a soggy potato chip.


That’s me, I thought. Like a dumb seagull. Programmed to react and respond in a certain way. Help, she’d said. Only you can help.


No, I thought. I don’t do that anymore. I’ve retired. That’s all behind me, remember, as instinct took over and, without even
thinking, I reached down to the very bottom of the box in which the phones had been tossed. Under them and some old rubbishy
LPs by Deep Purple, as if buried from sight and mind, was the gun.


The Beretta 92. I felt its cold metal, gripped my hand around it and pulled it out, tucked it into the back of my jeans and
rang my colleague in the glass tower.


—

‘I’M BUSY, I cannot talk. What is it you require? I am in the employment of the CIA, temporary, of course. High-level paranoia. Their
remuneration is rather good, I might add, better than yours, dear colleague. What is it you need? I am in your rapture.’


This was Isosceles, a brilliant computer genius I’d dragged out of court some years ago. I made sure that the charges against
him – about 875 breaches of the telecommunications act – were dropped, then I hired him to be the analyst/computer guy for
all the crews working homicide under my watch on the eighth floor of Victoria Police HQ.


‘I need you to track the location of this number,’ I said as I squinted at the little screen on the mobile phone.

‘Ida from Vienna,’ he said as I heard his fingers tap dancing across his keyboards. ‘The first woman to travel around the
world on her own came from Vienna, did you know that, Darian? Her name was Ida too. Ida Pfeiffer. Tremendous achievement considering
women weren’t even allowed visas in the 1850s. Labrador.’


There was silence on the other end, the sort of silence that says, ‘Done, task over’.

‘Labrador?’

‘Labrador. Not the hound but the town.’ He giggled. Isosceles brought his rather eccentric sense of humour to every murder
investigation he worked on. It didn’t exactly endear him to the homicide crews but usually nobody said anything. The guy was
a genius and routinely supplied information that led to the successful conclusion of an investigation through arrest and conviction.


‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘Can you get me the exact location in Labrador?’

‘Indeed. That will take just a little while longer.’

‘Call me back.’

‘Just a query. Before you go. Does this search for Viennese Ida represent social activity? By which I mean, are you intending
to go visit her? She is very young, too young for you to be engaging in sexual activity, I would have thought. Or are you
in fact coming out of retirement, again? By which I mean is she in peril?’


‘I don’t know.’ I paused. ‘I think she’s in trouble.’

‘Darian?’

‘Yeah?’

‘You cannot retire.’

He hung up before I could respond.

Moments later my mobile buzzed.

‘Yep?’

‘Tell me I’m a genius.’

‘You’re a genius.’

‘I know. The signal from Viennese Ida’s phone has not ceased. It might be turned off but the battery has not been removed,
therefore I can tell you with complete certainty that she is in the Coombabah Lake Nature Reserve, a large forest of dense
bushland on the northern side of the Gold Coast Highway, close – in fact approximately two hundred metres – from Coombabah
Lake itself. She is, in fact, dead smack in the middle – pardon me, Darian, I do apologise – she is smack in the middle of
what was a crab farm, until its closure in 1972. I wonder what happened to the crabs after they shut down the farm? Do you
think they just left them to die? I’ve emailed you the coordinates. It’s not as remote as the Sunshine Coast, but it’s off
what you might call the beaten track.’


I looked at the map. The town of Labrador was on the right-hand edge up near the top of the Gold Coast. I’m not good with
directions, but I do left and right pretty well.


—

THE GOLD COAST is like a brother or a sister to the Sunshine Coast. Each is a resort playground full of tourists and itinerants, a series of towns and villages strung along a magnificent coastline that connects them and seems to never end. Hundreds of
miles of pristine white sand and surf. In the middle of these tourist meccas is the capital city of Queensland, Brisbane,
a town of some two million people. Forty years ago you’d be driving down a Brisbane street and have to stop and give way to
sheep. Now it’s a hot city, cool and groovy. The big difference between the Sunshine Coast and the Gold Coast is that one
has a thousand skyscrapers, numerous 1970s high-rise brick apartment blocks and an angry violent stretch in its heartland
called Surfers Paradise, home to bikie gangs, hookers, Russian mobsters, endless thousands of drunken teenage students and
equally violent and nasty cops armed with tasers and batons. I drove through it once. It reminded me of Tijuana.


The other is a gentle, beautiful – some might call it boring – place where the greenies insist the tallest building can be
no taller than a palm tree. The Sunshine Coast.


The twin playgrounds on the surf are joined by the Bruce Highway. It takes at least two hours to drive from one to the other,
more likely three or four, depending on the urban snarl of Brisbane traffic.


I thought about driving down there, to see if Ida was all right. That was my next mistake: thinking. I should have just relied
on my instinct.


‘I THINK IT’S BEST IF WE DON’T EVER TALK TO EACH OTHER again.’


Maria was a sergeant at the local police station. She had hooked up with one of my only friends, Casey, and had been my unofficial
partner in the hunt for Winston Promise. She was career-minded and liked to play it by the book. I didn’t. It wasn’t the best
of partnerships. In fact, since she blasted Promise into eternal damnation she’d barely spoken to me. Taking a life, even
that of a serial killer, is a momentous step in a person’s journey. It places you within a rarefied society, in which many
of the inhabitants are evil; it redefines you and makes you – forever – consider who you really are. If you have the propensity
to extinguish life once, for whatever reason, you’ll never stop worrying if you will do it again. Maria didn’t talk about
it but I knew she was shaken to the centre of her identity. As I was the one who contrived for her to take aim and pull the
trigger she had, since, carefully chosen to avoid me, keep me at a faraway distance. Casey still tossed out the dinner invitations
when we spoke on the phone but if I ever said yes I think he’d collapse with shock.


My role in the investigation of serial killer Winston Promise had also caused some excitement with the boys on the hill, especially
Maria’s idiot boss, Fat Adam. I’d broken one cop’s arm and laid out two others in the very public arena of a nearby highway.
I was best avoided if you wanted to climb the ranks at the Noosa station and Maria was ambitious.


I ignored her opening line. After all, she’d taken the call. ‘Do you know anyone stationed on the Gold Coast?’ I asked. ‘I
just had a call from a girl who seems to be in some distress.’


‘Call them yourself,’ was the answer.

‘Thanks, never thought of that. It’s a simple call, it’ll take three minutes of your day.’

Cops are clan-like. As long as you wear the uniform you’re part of the special elite. If I called I’d be put on hold for an
hour and then passed on to some dummy who’d log the report and go back to sleep. I might have been one of the clan two years
ago but now I was a civilian.


‘Please,’ I added, remembering she was a well brought up girl.

‘What’s the distress?’ she asked.

I told her about the call and gave her Isosceles’ coordinates.

‘I’ve got a friend,’ was all she said before she hung up.

I went back to the river.

I wasn’t aware I’d just passed on a death sentence.

‘WHAT THE FUCK HAVE YOU DONE?’ SCREAMED MARIA.

I checked the time. It was five in the morning. I was in the kitchen, on my third black coffee, and she was on the other end
of the line.


‘What are you talking about?’ I asked.

‘Johnston is missing,’ she said.


‘Who’s Johnston?’ I asked.

‘Johnston is the officer I rang, at the Gold Coast. He told me he’d check out your Ida story, told me he’d drive out to have
a look. They’ve been on the phone to me. He’s disappeared and they’re blaming me because that call was his last. It was a
favour, it wasn’t even official, he didn’t log it in and now he’s missing.’


‘Who’s they?’ I asked.

‘Stop asking questions and give me answers.’

‘Answers to what?’ I asked, not very helpfully.

‘What exactly did the girl say to you? What’s there, at that place you said she was calling from? Who is this girl? What’s
she mixed up in that would lead to a cop going missing?’


‘I can answer questions one and three but they’re not going to help; it’s questions two and four that need to be investigated.’

‘What the fuck? Questions two and four? What are you talking about?’

—

A FEW YEARS ago it used to be that thirty thousand people were reported missing in Australia every year. Now it’s thirty-five thousand.
Most are found. About sixteen hundred are not.


One thousand, six hundred people missing. Every year.


They’ve either successfully created a new life having escaped a bad one or they’ve been abducted and killed. Body dumped and
buried somewhere. In ten years that’s over fifteen thousand people, an unknown number of them the victims of killers.


When a person gets reported missing cops react accordingly with reassuring phrases like ‘They’re bound to come home, just
wait’ and a recitation of the stats. It makes sense. No-one wants to spend time, money and resources on a kid who’s out joy-riding,
off the radar for thirty-six hours, only to turn up hung-over and hungry.


If they don’t turn up, though, the cops don’t have another playlist. It’s the same refrain: ‘They’re bound to come home, just
wait.’


Things are a little different if it’s a cop who’s gone missing.

—

I RE-DIALLED IDA’S phone. This time it rang.


‘You Darian, right?’ said a man’s voice. Rough, laconic, European maybe, young.

‘Can I speak to Ida?’

‘Ida. She dead girl sing,’ he said.

Then hung up. The next call went straight to voicemail.

He must have not known to take out the battery of her phone or didn’t care. It was still sending out signals, from the Coombabah
Lake Nature Reserve, from the exact place where, forty years ago, a crab farm had been situated by the side of a dusty road,
now a highway, three hours’ drive away, according to the Navman that rested on the dash of my car.


—

‘IT’S YOUR FAULT,. . .