Free Challis - 02 - Kittyhawk Down by Garry Disher

for the beginning of classes.
    She paused. 'I don't know if I can hack it any longer. He's got guns, you know.'

CHAPTER ELEVEN

    Challis slept badly and woke early on Tuesday morning. To clear his head he walked for an hour, pumping his arms and striding out in order to stir his sluggish blood. It seemed to work, and by seven-thirty he'd showered and dressed and was drinking coffee on his deck, which faced the healing early sun through leaves on the turn.
    By seven-fifty he was heading for Waterloo, where a temporary office had been allocated to him ten months earlier for the investigation into the disappearance of the Tully child. That case had dragged on and after a time he'd had to attend to more pressing but less interesting homicides—mostly domestics—elsewhere on the Peninsula; but then the Flinders Floater had been found and he'd returned to Waterloo, where the little office was still available. Then that case had gone stale but this time he stayed on, electing to use Waterloo as his base. It was a recent Force Command initiative, allocating a senior Homicide Squad officer to each of the main non-metropolitan regions. The old system of sending a team of Melbourne detectives long distances to remote regions had been inefficient and the cause of local resentment. Challis liked Waterloo. The staff were easygoing and it was close to home.
    He parked the Triumph, entered through the back door and went upstairs to the CIB office, a large, open-plan room with partitioned cubicles along the walls. His office was in one corner and overlooked the carpark. He happened to glance down and saw Ellen Destry park her car and enter the building. No sign of Scobie Sutton's car.
    There were message slips on his desk. A Land Rover had been found. It bore dents and scratches on the passenger-side wing. The owner had reported it stolen at about the time Constable Tankard had found it while on patrol.
    Challis stared at the phone. His hand reached out, collapsed on the desk again. He didn't want to call the prison and see how his wife was doing; he also ought not to use police time and resources. But a call from work would somehow make him feel less intimate and committed than a call from his home.
    He made the call. His wife was back in her cell, on suicide watch. Did the inspector wish to talk to her? It might help her. No, Challis said. Tell her I called.
    Then he went to the poky kitchen and brewed coffee, wondering who'd been at his packet of Lavazza. He'd learnt a long time ago always to provide his own tea and coffee. Police station coffee tended to come in a Maxwell House tin the size of a fuel drum and no one had ever heard of weak tea, let alone peppermint.
    Finally, with a mug of coffee at his elbow, he opened the
Progress
, printed overnight and hot off the press. There was the Meddler's letter, and Tessa's column about the wanker with the ferret, and her sharper, more contentious observations about the asylum seekers and the detention centre. He could practically hear her spitting as she wrote that she'd found it necessary to point out to the worthy citizens of Waterloo that her objection to the local detention centre was not to
that
detention centre on
that
bit of land but to the notion of incarceration of asylum seekers in the first place.
    No doubt she'd lose some advertising now, and the coppers of Waterloo police station would glance at him sideways and wonder about his relationship with the ratbag, leftist, pinko editor of the local rag.
    He threw the newspaper into a bin and took out the Floater file. Not for the first time, he wondered about the thousands who go missing each year, unreported and apparently unloved and untraceable. Surely someone loved them? Surely someone remembered them? Here's a man prosperous enough to own a Rolex watch: surely he left a trace somewhere?
    On an impulse, Challis reached for the local yellow pages and under the heading 'watchmakers' found a young woman who told him that the figures