The Tower Page 4

  Little said, ‘What was McIver doing up there by himself?’

  ‘He works on instinct,’ Troy said carefully. ‘I’d say he was just trying to get a feel for what one of the floors was like with no one else on it.’

  ‘A feel.’

  ‘He’s one of the best homicide cops we have. He would have joined the search a few minutes later. He just got unlucky.’

  The thing was to minimise discussion of McIver’s erratic behaviour, because eventually it would raise questions about whether he’d been drinking.

  It was a typical McIver situation. Normally the sergeant thrived on confusion, or at least did better than most people. He’d once told Troy he’d discovered chaos theory before the scientists. But now, lying in hospital, probably facing an official reprimand, the odds had turned on him. If the two men up top had been cornered by the police search teams, they might have surrendered peacefully. No one else would have died and the killers—if that’s who they were—would be undergoing interviews right now.

  Returning to reality, Troy told Little what had happened when he’d found McIver. ‘A big question is why the Indians needed a lift pass if they’d been able to go up in the lift earlier, with the woman.’

  Little said, ‘We found a pass on the floor on thirty-one. You didn’t know?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It had been stopped on the system. My guess is Bazzi gave them the pass to go up and then cancelled it for some reason. They must have chucked it when they found out it was stuffed.’

  Troy thought about this. It fitted with the idea that Bazzi had been involved in providing access but not in the killing. He’d been told the woman had landed on the car outside, become upset and cancelled the pass while he thought about what to do. Wondered if he wanted to be an accessory to murder. Then the place was flooded with police and Randall arrived so he couldn’t reverse the stop on the card even if he’d wanted to. McIver got shot, and he decided to vanish.

  It wasn’t strong enough to be a theory, but it was something for Troy’s subconscious to work on. You didn’t want to start to fi rm up ideas too early in an investigation, before you had enough facts. But you couldn’t help wondering how the few pieces you had fitted together. It was a compulsion, even if at times it had to be resisted. It was why you were a detective.

  He said, ‘Is Randall any good?’

  ‘As far as I know,’ Little said. ‘I dealt with him once when some stuff was being nicked. He seems pretty straight. Smart enough, for an engineer.’

  Seeing Harmer’s face through the window of the security office, Troy walked across the floor and climbed the steel stairs again, Little behind him. He opened the door and went into the crowded room. Randall was talking into a microphone on the desk. He nodded to Troy but it was Harmer who spoke.

  ‘We’ve completed our search of the first forty storeys. The part of the building above that is sealed at the stairwells. We’re now doing the area below ground, starting with the retail mall and the loading dock level, and working our way down the nine car park levels. The man with the gun is still down there somewhere.’ She looked at Randall, who had finished with the microphone, and he nodded.

  ‘He can’t get out,’ he said. ‘You want to be very careful.’

  There were building plans spread on the table next to him, and he began to examine them intently.

  Harmer was flipping through her notebook, and after a bit she added, ‘We’ve circulated Peter Bazzi as a person of interest. The locals are going to his house in Leichhardt.’

  Troy nodded. Harmer might sound like a training manual, but she was doing well. The police response had unfolded like a minor military operation, and he knew this was quite an achievement in the circumstances.

  ‘And now,’ she said, ‘I want you in the atrium—people you need to talk with will be here soon. If you disobey this time, I’ll send you back to the fucking station.’

  Most police swore; he swore a lot himself. It happened so much you tended not to notice it. But for some reason, coming from Harmer it grabbed his attention.

  ‘Ma’am,’ he said.

  Little and he had just reached the door when there was a burst of excited chatter through several radios in the room. No one was paying attention to Troy anymore, so he stopped. He couldn’t hear what was being said because of the static, but from Harmer’s replies he gathered that the search team had found someone. In fact, they’d found more than one man—they’d found a number of people.

  ‘Twenty of them,’ Randall said. ‘Did I hear you correctly?’ He looked around in surprise and saw Troy. ‘They’ve found a sort of camp down in car park nine. Beds and lights and stuff.’ His voice had risen in disbelief. ‘Men, they say they’re workers. Indians, probably illegals.’ There was excited talk in the room now. Randall shook his head slowly and Troy heard him say, to no one in particular, ‘Holy shite. This is not possible.’

  Troy led Little out of the office and they banged down the steel stairs. Feeling suddenly hot, he unzipped the heavy coat. Police and guards were standing around on the concrete floor below, talking in loud voices. News of the discovery must have spread already.

  ‘I want to go down there,’ Troy said.

  Little stared at him, excitement fighting caution. It was not every day you had the chance to be part of something like this. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I’ve got a pass. I did a job here, they never asked for it back—and I bet they forgot to cancel it.’

  ‘So we know their security’s pretty tight.’

  Little shrugged and reached into his pocket. ‘You want to go downstairs or not?’

  He took them down to the retail floor, which was brightly lit and broader than the atrium above, although its ceiling was not nearly as high. ‘This is where the bloke with the gun got off,’ Little said. ‘I thought you should see it before we go below.’ Troy nodded and Little led him out. ‘Upmarket food court in the middle here,’ he said, pointing, as they crossed an expanse of concrete. ‘There’ll be eighty boutique stores too, around the perimeter.’

  Troy followed him down a wide corridor lined with the shells of future shops. Some were already half fitted out, with shelves and internal wall lining. A few even had goods on the shelves, as though someone wanted to judge the effect. Little explained that the retail precinct was due to open in a month or two, before the top floors even had their windows fitted. The building’s owners needed to start making some income as soon as they could. During the week, this level was crowded with shop designers and tradesmen.

  As they walked, Troy asked who owned The Tower now.

  ‘Some massive Hong Kong insurance company. They took it over when Tony Teresi went bust.’

  Troy remembered. Teresi was the entrepreneur who’d devised The Tower and put the project together after a decade of planning and other difficulties. It had been a heroic effort but it had ruined him. He’d died of a heart attack soon after he sold up.

  Little continued his quick tour of the floor. Troy knew the building had polarised opinion in the city, for all sorts of reasons. A city mayor had had to resign when it was found he’d taken secret campaign donations from Teresi, and other aspects of the planning process had been investigated by the Independent Commission Against Corruption. A community group had been formed to fight it. There were predictions it would take twenty years before it was fully leased.

  Then there was the size of the thing, which many people thought out of proportion to the rest of the city. Anna hated it because of its bulk, and she was not alone. Troy hadn’t formed a strong view either way, but he figured you either liked concrete or you didn’t. Now, inside the thing for the first time, he found it hard not to be impressed by the will and energy embodied in the structure. It was like being inside a vast, multidimensional jigsaw puzzle.

  He thought of the men below. ‘How could people be living here without anyone knowing?’

  ‘This place is like a small city,’ Little said, taking them down another broad corridor. ‘
Hundreds of subcontractors, a thousand workers some days, a hundred and twenty floors above ground and eleven below. The car parks were finished over a year ago, but only the first six are being used. They park vans down there, store materials. All the major contractors have compounds where they keep their stuff. There’s toilets, lunch rooms, lockers. But the bottom three levels are closed off.’

  They came to a boarded-up opening in the wall, and Little explained it was the entrance to a subway that went under Elizabeth Street to Hyde Park. There was a door and Troy shook the handle. It was locked.

  ‘There’s one of these subways on each side,’ Little said. ‘This one, one at St James Station, two more to other buildings. But they’re all boarded up like this.’

  ‘Someone could get through if they had the key?’

  ‘I looked into that when I was doing a robbery here last year. Stuff had gone missing from some of the compounds. The keys are secure, they’re kept in safes off-site. And even if you got through this door,’ he banged on the wood in front of them, ‘you couldn’t get through the other end, because that key belongs to someone else. In this case the City Council. And no one here has a copy.’

  He walked back to the goods lift and took them down to the lowest car park. During the ride, Troy wondered if McIver had woken up yet. He should call the hospital.

  When they got out of the lift, the first thing Troy noticed was that the ceiling was a lot lower again. A large number of people were standing about a hundred metres away, gathered around an opening in a wooden wall that closed off a section of the car park. The two detectives walked towards the crowd, and found a group of men sitting on the floor, guarded by a ring of excited police. Vella was there, and when he saw Troy he came over. There was no news of McIver, he said. As they spoke, Little drifted away, over to his colleagues. Troy asked what the other Homicide detectives were doing, and Vella said they were interviewing the security guards.

  ‘I’ve got a few more coming, they’ll be canvassing the area, getting CCTV and stuff. But tomorrow they all have to be somewhere else. Three of us are on a morning plane to Bourke.’

  Troy grunted sympathetically. ‘Where’s Kelly?’

  ‘Still at City Central. The man who runs the company that owns this place has turned up, he’s trying to stop us closing down the site.’ He shook his head and looked at his mobile, which was not picking up a signal. ‘I don’t rate his chances. I’ve got to get back up top.’

  Harmer appeared through the door in the wall. ‘Senior Constable Troy. You decided to join us anyway.’ She didn’t sound too upset. ‘So, which one’s your man?’

  Some of the uniformed cops stood aside and Troy took a few steps forward until he was only a metre away from the closest man on the floor. All of them were Indian or Pakistani.

  ‘Curry munchers,’ murmured Little, who had rejoined him.

  Troy looked closely at the men, aware that he was being watched by all the cops standing around. The men on the ground were wearing cheap work clothes dirty with concrete dust. Their hair was matted with grime and the smell of stale sweat rose from them, like the odour of despair. Some were talking among themselves, while others were silent, dismay in their eyes. Their faces and bodies were grey where the harsh lights from the car park roof hit them, surrounded by deep shadows. There was something unreal about the scene.

  ‘And this is Australia,’ was Little’s next piece of commentary. But it wasn’t just Australia, Troy knew, it was the world. Little added, ‘A few years back, the unions’d never allowed this sort of thing.’

  Wishing the other detective wasn’t standing so close to his shoulder, Troy nodded. The construction union was still powerful. One question was why they hadn’t prevented what he was now looking at. Maybe it was unstoppable, he thought, looking at the hunched figures sitting there. Maybe no one could stop it.

  Many of the men were staring at the ground and he walked among them, telling them to raise their heads so he could examine them. None of the faces meant anything. He walked around once more, but none of them seemed familiar.

  ‘I realise this is not what you want to be told,’ he said to Harmer, ‘but he’s not here.’

  She stared at him. ‘We’ve searched every level,’ she said carefully, as if explaining something to a slow child. ‘This is the bottom.’ Troy shrugged. ‘Would you recognise him?’ she said, searching for the right words. ‘I mean—’

  ‘My wife’s Indian, I’ve travelled there,’ he said. ‘They don’t all look the same to me. So yes, I’d recognise him.’

  ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to be offensive.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘These are Indians?’

  ‘They’re Pakistanis, I think.’

  Harmer looked from Troy to the men on the ground.

  ‘Shit,’ she said at last.

  He shrugged, feeling he’d let her down because he couldn’t spot the man. Which was stupid.

  Harmer pointed across the carpark. ‘Why don’t you have a look through there.’

  Behind the wooden wall the air was stale. Troy stood near the entrance, looking at a mass of camp beds and personal belongings, primitive cooking and toilet arrangements. There were officers everywhere, a camera flashing in one corner. A uniform came by with some documents in a plastic evidence bag. Other uniforms were searching through all the stuff on the floor. Troy realised they were looking for McIver’s gun.

  He walked around the space, staring at the suitcases on the ground, at the clothes and other belongings spilling out of them. Randall was standing there, looking blank. Troy realised he’d probably lose his job over this.

  ‘No gun?’ Troy said.

  ‘No. Your colleagues searched the men. It could be anywhere.’

  Little came up and said, ‘Let’s get out of this stink.’

  He kicked a book that was lying on the ground and walked out.

  Harmer took Little and Troy aside, away from the men on guard and all the police activity. ‘They’re not saying anything, but here’s my best guess: they’re illegals working for one of the contractors, who’s been paying Bazzi to make it possible. There must be other guards in on it as well. We’re familiar with the employment side of it, the use of illegals on city building sites. But the living arrangements here are a first.’ She shook her head in a moment of bewilderment. ‘Randall thinks the contractor who’s pouring the concrete floors is the best bet as their employer.’

  ‘It seems like a pretty elaborate set-up,’ Troy said.

  ‘This bloke is being paid on the basis of award wages plus overtime, which is pretty good. This is a huge job, so if he pays the illegals half the going rate, that leaves maybe a million dollars to be split between him and the smuggler who brought them to Australia.’

  ‘Minus what they’re paying Bazzi.’

  Harmer nodded. ‘I’ve just had a call from level thirty-one. Internal Affairs are here for you. You’re sure you don’t recognise the man you saw up there?’

  Troy shook his head. Over the inspector’s shoulder he saw a uniformed officer coming towards them, holding an object in an exhibit bag.

  ‘Ma’am,’ he said, pointing.

  It was a gun. Troy took a step towards him but Harmer grabbed his sleeve.

  ‘Level thirty-one,’ she said. ‘That’s an order.’

  Five

  Upstairs, the floor had been transformed. There were screens blocking much of the wind, and bright lights illuminated the dead man on the ground and the area nearby, where McIver’s blood stained the concrete. Crime scene officers were moving around methodically as they had moved in the enclosure down below, photographing and measuring, collecting evidence. Troy stood for a moment, taking it in, and shivered. He zipped up the coat and put his hands in his pockets. Almost immediately, two men appeared from the darkness. The senior one was Inspector Malcolm Ferris. Troy took his right hand from the pocket of the jacket and extended it to Ferris, who shook his head.

  ‘We’ll get you swabbe
d in a moment,’ he said. ‘Then you can clean up. We’ll need your clothes, too.’

  It took a moment to sink in. Troy realised he needed to flip the situation around: see himself as a suspect. That was what these men were doing.

  As he finished running through his story for the first time, one of the lifts opened and Helen Kelly emerged. The commander was a tall woman with medium-length dark hair, and attractive. Some of the officers considered her glamorous, although standards were not all that high in the police force. But she dressed well and was thin. In fact, Troy didn’t recognise her at first when she came out of the lift, because she was wearing one of Randall’s bulky jackets. Now she came over to him and took him by the arm, her eyes full of concern. There was kindness there but calculation too: she wanted to know if he was going to fall to pieces. He told her he was all right, and he thought he was. His mood hadn’t shifted at all since he’d last thought about it. Maybe this was as bad as it would get.

  He hadn’t had the chance to form a strong opinion of Kelly yet. She’d been with the squad only two months, coming over from Sex Crimes, which she’d run for several years. Married, early fifties, no children. McIver said she did everything by the book. In Troy’s opinion this was not necessarily a failing, provided you knew the book backwards. He suspected she did.

  The way she was talking to Ferris now, he could tell they’d met before. When they’d finished she came over and put a hand on his arm, said to Ferris, ‘If I could just have a word with Nick, see how he is,’ then led him away. When they were out of earshot she said, ‘How are you? Really?’

  ‘I’m okay.’

  She looked at him. She had a nice smile that rarely made it to her eyes, but he didn’t think she was insincere.

  ‘It’s a homicide?’