Challis - 01 - Dragon Man Read Free

constable watched him for a long
moment, then nodded. He put his book away. Fair enough.

    Challis hadnt wanted to be booked,
and telling the constable to follow the rules and book him would have been an
embarrassment and an irritation for both of them, so he said nothing. The
constable turned and made for the van. Challis watched it leave.

    A real prick, that one, a voice
said.

    There was a work-dented Jeep parked
outside the courthouse. The rear doors were open and a man wearing overalls was
unloading air-conditioning vents. Challis glanced at the side of the Jeep: Rhys
Hartnett Air-Conditioning.

    The bastard did me over yesterday.
Hadnt been here five minutes and he booked me for a cracked tail-light.
Shouted in my face, spit flying, like I was some kind of criminal.

    Challis steered the conversation
away from that. Are you working in the police station?

    The man shook his head. The
courthouse.

    He snapped a business card at
Challis. He did it in a way that seemed automatic, and Challis had a vision of
hundreds of people walking around with unwanted cards in their pockets. He
glanced at it. Rhys Hartnett, Air-Conditioning Specialist.

    Well, I wish you were doing the
police station.

    Hartnett seemed to straighten. You
a copper?

    Yes.

    Just my luck. I was wasting my
breath complaining to you about police tactics.

    Not necessarily, Challis said,
turning away and crossing the road.

    * * * *

    The
police station was on two levels. The ground floor was a warren of interview
rooms, offices, holding cells, a squad room, a canteen and a tearoom. The first
floor was quieter: a small gym, lockers, a sick bay. It was also the location
of the DisplanDisaster Planroom, which doubled as the incident room whenever
there was a major investigation.

    A senior sergeant was in overall
charge of the station. He had four sergeants and about twenty other ranks under
him, including a handful of trainees, for Waterloo was a designated training
station. The CIB itself was small, only a sergeant and three detective
constables. There were also two forensic technicianspolice members, and on
call for the whole Peninsulaand a couple of civilian clerks. Given that over
thirty people worked at the station, that shift work applied to most of them,
and that the uniformed and CIB branches generally had little to do with each
other, Challis wasnt surprised that the young constable hadnt recognised him
from his two earlier investigations in Waterloo.

    The tearoom was next to the
photocopy room. Challis crossed to the cluttered sink in the corner, four young
uniformed constables falling silent as he filled a cup with tap water. He
looked at his watch. Time for the briefing.

    He wandered upstairs and found the
CIB detectives and a handful of uniformed sergeants waiting for him in the
Displan room. The morning light streamed in. It was a large, airy room, but he
knew that it would be stuffy by the end of the day. The room had been fitted
with extra phone lines, photocopiers, computers, large-scale wall maps and a
television set. Every incoming telephone call could be automatically timed and
recorded on cassette, and there was a direct line to Telstra so that calls
could be traced.

    Challis nodded as he entered the
room. There were murmured hellos in return and someone said, Heres the dragon
man. He crossed to a desk that sat between a whiteboard and a wall of maps. He
positioned himself behind the desk, leaned both hands on the back of a chair,
and said, without preamble:

    On Sunday night a young woman named
Jane Gideon made an emergency call from a phone box on the Old Peninsula
Highway. She hasnt been seen since, and given that another young woman, Kymbly
Abbott, was found raped and murdered by the side of the highway a week ago, were
treating the circumstances as suspicious.

    He straightened his back and looked
out above their heads. Youre Jane Gideon. You work at the Odeon cinema. You
catch the last train to Frankston from the city, collect