Free Death Delights by Gabrielle Lord Page B

lived across the road from him. I remembered the case because our lab had worked on the physical evidence. I remembered that the girl’s body had been flung from the roadside down a steeply wooded mountain slope miles away from anywhere and accidentally found caught in the branches of a tree by two timber workers clearing below the road. I also recalled that Carmody was described as a ‘family’ man, with young daughters of his own. His blank eyes stared out of the mug shot at me. Most of us have children, I thought. But when it comes to the men who murder children, it doesn’t seem to make any difference that they have kids of their own.
    I rang Ron Herring to thank him for his trouble. ‘He’s going to live with a sister at Camperdown when he gets out,’ said Ron, in response to my question. ‘She’s his only visitor. Nice old bird, they told me, who sees him once a month. The staff at the Bay think she’s a bit eccentric because she’s always lecturing them on her brother’s innocence.’ I remembered the saying that there are no guilty people in prison. No rich people either.
    ‘Carmody told the duty officer he doesn’t want anyone to know that he’s getting out,’ Ron Herring was saying. I recalled the terrible stripped gashes between the legs of the other two men and found that very easy to understand. I thanked Ron, and rang off.
    Then I rang Staro and asked him if he’d like to earn some honest money. It was about half standard rates, but he jumped at the chance. It’s not so much the money or the work that he likes, or doing something that’s a bit more legit than selling Eccies or Rowies, but I know he likes the feeling of working for me. He looks up to me. I wish he didn’t, but he does.
    ‘There’s a crim,’ I said, ‘due to be released from the Bay in a few days. I want to keep an eye on him. And I could do with a bit of help.’
    ‘Sure,’ said Staro. ‘Why do you want to watch him?’ I could hear the excitement in his voice. There are a lot of people like Staro who find this sort of fringe dealing with the law irresistible. Murderers even bring themselves undone because of it. They are usually people with no power of their own and it’s as if they need to rub up against those whom they perceive as having it in order to get a piece of it for themselves.
    ‘That’s confidential,’ I said, and Staro was hooked.
    Frank Carmody had the trifecta that had proved fatal to two others: he was a convict, a sex offender and due for release. And if a Corrective Services officer had noticed Frank Carmody’s release was coming up, someone else surely had. And that someone, as we already knew, was very handy with a knife.
    Later that morning, I went into the city and spent hours going through archived newspaper files. I read up everything I could on the murdered men, Gumley and Nesbitt. I noticed that their respective sentences had caused a lot of outcry and were considered far too lenient by both journalists and letter-writers to the papers. On a hunch, I looked up the references to Frank Carmody. Sure enough, the same thing appeared in the several stories around him. In fact, as I checked further, I found that Gumley, Nesbitt, Carmody and someone called Anton Francini, whose story I didn’t remember, were the four cases always trotted out whenever a story about leniency in sentencing appeared. Further checking revealed that Anton Francini had raped and killed a young girl and been sentenced to nine years with a non-parole period of five years, because he’d been drinking at the time of the killing, and was otherwise ‘of good character’. While I was making a note of Carmody’s details, the heading of another news item underneath the convicted men’s stories caught my eye.
    ‘ I will never forget ,’ I read, ‘No matter how long or how short his sentence, I will never forget. He will pay for this,’ father of murder victim Suzette Carter said today. ‘And when he gets