Challis - 02 - Kittyhawk Down Read Free

lookout. There was little local traffic—everyone was down on the coastal flatlands, heading herdlike to or from parties, pubs, restaurants and the cinema on this Easter Saturday evening.
    Just then a Kombi van drove in. It stopped for thirty minutes, there was soft music, and then it clattered away again, leaving behind a trace of marijuana smoke. There were lights upon Port Phillip Bay, and the distant horizon glow of the Melbourne suburbs beyond the black water. Cloud wisps obscured the stars and the moon.
    Ellen's mind drifted. Back at home in Penzance Beach her daughter was having a party. Ellen fretted a little. It was Larrayne's seventeenth birthday and Ellen wanted to celebrate the fact that her daughter was better now. Just over a year ago Larrayne had been abducted by a man who'd already abducted and murdered three other women. She'd been full of adolescent moody rattiness before the abduction, but since then had become quieter, more studious, inclined to stay at home. The party was also meant to mark her jettisoning of the ratbags she'd once hung around with at school and cementing new friendships. They were decent kids, these new friends, but— along with all the other shit that happened at night on the Peninsula lately—there had been instances of gatecrashing that had ended in violence.
    'We could register the party with the police,' Ellen had suggested.
    'Sweetheart,' her husband said, 'we
are
the police.'
    Alan Destry was a uniformed senior constable in Traffic. He was sour about his prospects. He'd failed the sergeants' exam and was married to a detective sergeant on the fast track. Beating her at something, however trivial, made him feel a little better about himself.
    And he was earning brownie points tonight, staying home, watching over a bunch of partying teenagers. Ellen imagined his scowling presence at the door as they arrived, his visual scrutiny, his quick search of jacket pockets, handbags and daypacks for booze and dope.
    There was
some
booze allowed. Not enough to cause Larrayne's friends to waste themselves and turn nasty, though.
    Drugs were another matter. There was evidence that a major network had taken over on the Peninsula: increased arrests for possession and pushing, more overdoses, reports of ecstasy and amphetamines being sold at rave parties. The rave party scene scared Ellen. Admission was cheap, about $15 to cover the hire of a DJ and portaloos, and the parties were often held in out-of-the way factories that lacked basic safety measures like fire sprinklers. Kids heard about them by word of mouth and liked the sense of community encouraged by the music, the drugs, the secrecy, the air of being outside the mainstream. The drugs were also cheap and readily available, with ecstasy selling for $50 a pop and the effect lasting for hours. The kids believed that ecstasy was harmless and loved the boost it gave them, the ability to dance all night and feel invincible. They had a touching faith in the purity of the ecstasy, unaware that it had probably been made by a bikie gang in some backyard garage and contained heroin, speed and the horse-drug ketamine, bound together with glucose or caffeine. They risked poisoning themselves or fusing their brains in the long term, and at the parties they forgot to drink lots of water, got dehydrated, risked death.
    Larrayne had been to one rave party. It had been well managed and publicly advertised, but the pushers were there, she said.
    Ellen looked at her watch. Ten forty-five. Where was Venn? Assuming their rapist
was
Venn, he liked to take a knife from his boot and burst in upon a pair of lovers, demanding money. Then he'd threaten to start slicing pieces of flesh from the woman unless she undressed fully and handcuffed her boyfriend's hands behind his back and performed oral sex on him. Finally he'd insert the handle of the knife inside the woman's vagina and leave after cutting clumps of pubic hair from her and pocketing any cash the couple