He liked the hunt, but he also liked the hidden benefits. A bit of the old in-out with female clients whod gone over budget; blow-jobs from sixteen-year-olds whod run off with boyfriends; hush money from embezzlers who didnt want to be found.
Stolle liked to get inside the skin of the people he was hired to find. He knew that a stranger in town didnt attract curiosity anymore, the nation being so mobile, so what Stolle did was not look for someone who was new to a place but look for that same person in a different guise. More often than not the people he was looking for tried to be the exact opposite of their former selves. Take his last case: a solicitor had done a bunk with money from his trust fund. He had exchanged his Porsche for a fishing boat and a Holden ute, his DB suit for jeans and thongs, his South Yarra townhouse for a fibro beach shack, his smooth cheeks for a beard and sunburn. What he hadnt changed were his basic tastes and habits. The man liked to play tennis, bet on the horses, borrow music videos, subscribe to yachting magazines. The stupid prick had even given himself a name similar to his real one: Ross Wilson, Ray Wilkes. Stolle wouldnt have been surprised if Wilson had eventually contacted his family or hung around outside his kids school.
Missing teenagers, mostly girls. If they hadnt been murdered and their bodies dumped in the bush, they were the easiest to find. More often than not the clients were exclusive boarding schools or wealthy executives who didnt want the police brought in. Stolle started with friends and relatives. If the girl wasnt shacked up with her boyfriend or she hadnt convinced an elderly aunt that she was taking an extended semester break, he checked railway stations, squats, refuges, the morgue. When that failed, he went straight to St Kilda or Kings Cross. Once, accompanied by a father, hed dragged a fifteen-year-old PLC girl from a brothel and been attacked by pimps armed with fireaxes and knives. The girl was doped to the eyeballs and HIV-positive. Stolle and the girls father went back a week later and torched the place to the ground. It was the least Stolle could do for the poor bastard. The girl? Stolle guessed she was dead by now.
Since the big-paying jobs were scarce, and the money always found its way into the pockets of the bookmakers, Stolles bread-and-butter income came from process serving and debt collection. He worked 12 to 14- hour days sometimes, six or seven days a week. The car became a mobile office and he was on the phone every few minutes, to his snouts, his answering service, his staff. He flashed his ID twenty times a day. He wasnt a cop but often people thought he was. It was in the words he used: Im licensed by the State of Victoria as an investigator
Sure, it was obsessive, but it made him feel connected to the street, in control of the flow of information, free for a while from that permanent hunger that made him want to chance all he had on the fall of the cards, the roll of the dice.
Stolle had one advantage over his competitors: he drank with a sergeant in the protective security group, the crowd responsible for Victorias witness protection program. They supplied anything from intermittent surveillance, around-the-clock guard and 008 hotline, to relocation under a new identity. Stolle had learned a lot that way; the sergeant enjoyed explaining the job. Apparently the easiest people to hide were the natural mimics. They knew how to fit their appearance, body language, speech and manner to a new place, a new name, a new job, a personal history saturated with solid information: passport, bank account, educational qualifications, birth and marriage certificates, employment record, club membership, Medicare and tax file numbers, drivers licence, photograph album, old letters and Christmas cards. Everything was recorded on computer, every file protected by an inbuilt code to prevent printing or copying. One day the sergeant showed a file to Stolle. Stolle wasnt interested in the file. He was interested in the mechanics of identity creation. Once he understood that he could anticipate, intercept or uncover the moves that people made.
The hardest people to find were those who shrank away from their pasts and ordinary human contact. It was as though they no longer existed. They had no-one, wanted no-one, had no ego, didnt want to be seen again. People like that left no paper trail, made no new friends, ended up in paupers graves. They were running away from life or some deep hurt. They were the sad ones.
Then there was Wyatt, in a class of his own.
Six
Wyatt reached Melbourne at nine oclock and abandoned his stolen Kingswood in the Spencer Street station car-park. There were advertisements for accommodation on the station concourse. He called a number and at nine-thirty moved into a room at The Abbey, a backpackers hotel near the parklands on Nicholson Street. It was not the best roomonly metres from the tram tracksand now he had little more than eighty dollars to his name.
At ten oclock he walked through the cobbled lanes to a Turkish restaurant on Brunswick Street. He bought a doner kebab and ate it on the move. Something about the excursion unnerved him. It had been a principle of his life that he operated in and cherished his dark solitude at the edge of clamorous cities and people, but now he felt exposed. He didnt dare eat at a restaurant table. That would be inviting troublearrest, a blade in his neck, a bullet at the hairline.
Back at The Abbey he leafed through a telephone directory in the foyer. Mesic. In Melbourne it was a name that meant small-scale racketeering and a vicious brand of muscle. Hed heard that the Mesics lived in a compound in Templestowe, and there it was, Mesic K. and L., on Telegraph Road. Wyatt was obsessed with them. He wanted to hit them hard and get his money back. Tomorrow hed look at the place. That meant another car. He was running close to the edge, stealing a set of wheels every day or so like this. But there was no-one he could go to for help any more.
He tried to sleep, his reflexes dull and velvety, but he could not escape the trams and the mean, barren laughter of young backpackers returning, shouts as people left the nearby pubs and looked for their cars. Whenever he did wake, he supposed that some noise had caused it, but an old heartache seemed to slink away at the edge of his consciousness each time, like a trace of a badly remembered and comfortless dream. It left him tense and sleepless for long stretches of time. He slept through the early trams but at eight oclock there were trams every few minutes and he woke for the day, haunted and distracted.
He needed a car that would not be missed for a while. There was a Mobil service station across the road from The Abbey. He watched it through the morning. It was a busy place with a high and rapid turnover of customers for petrol and simple service and tune-up jobs. What interested Wyatt was that after the mechanics had finished working on each car, they parked it in an adjacent yard and tossed the keys on the floor under the drivers seat. At eleven oclock a Mobil tanker pulled into the forecourt and filled the underground reservoirs. The obscuring bulk of the truck, the distraction, gave Wyatt his chance. He loped across the road, slipped into a nondescript Datsun, and drove quietly away.
This was better. Planning an act, carrying it off successfully, was work, the sorts of things he was good at. Yet the sensation didnt last. He found himself driving the little car with his head down, his shoulders hunched, as though every driver and passenger in the city was primed to spot him and raise the alarm or crack open their windows enough to train a gunsight on him.
Thirty minutes later he stopped at a milk bar on Williamsons Road and ordered takeaway coffee and a cheese sandwich. Four dollars. He asked for directions to Telegraph Road and got back into the Datsun.
Telegraph Road was a broad, self-satisfied ribbon of clean black bitumen and white-grey kerbing. It curved around a gentle slope in the land and the houses were set far back behind thick hedges and red brick walls. The houses were ugly, the bad-taste homes of people whod acquired sudden wealth and nothing else.
He found number eleven. Everything about it suggested that the Mesics hadnt lived in the area for long. Theyd taken a hectare of dirt and turned it into a family compound: raw landscaped terraces, young trees, shiny lockup garage and a couple of blockish cream brick houses with colonnades grinning across the faces of them like stumpy teeth. The grounds were surrounded by a wire and girder perimeter fence three metres high.
The place looked deserted. It looked vulnerable to a hit: the neighbouring houses were concealed by trees, there were plenty of exits, he couldnt see dogs or guards. They had his money in there. The payroll heist in South Australia had gone wrong because someone who owed money to the Mesics had got to it first. Three hundred thousand. That would set him up again, enable him to buy a place, live in comfort while he concentrated on the big jobs again, the way it had been for him before it all went sour.
But it was pointless. He couldnt hit the Mesics alone, even if he did have the time and the funds to bankroll it.
