“Captain Timu sent me.”
“I don’t give a shit.”
Osborne took off his jacket and threw his socks in the garbage chute. The piss may have dried, but his brain was still sticky. Gallagher had a reputation as a tough, ambitious, efficient cop, a guy with a binary, analogue mind—one thing or another, good or bad, rich or poor, dollars, power, results—in other words, a man perfectly adapted to the times he lived in. Osborne had never been able to stand him. There was no reason for that to change.
Gallagher spat out the shreds of matches on the oilcloth. “How long have you been off the force? A year?”
“Ten months.”
Osborne drank a little water straight from the kitchen faucet.
Gallagher was still balancing on the worn chair, and still sizing him up. “We have a case for you,” he said. “A case involving the Maori community.”
“I’m retired, isn’t that obvious?”
Gallagher smiled vaguely at Osborne’s bare feet. The information he had on him wasn’t too promising, but he couldn’t do anything about that. “Malcolm Kirk,” he went on. “That name mean anything to you?”
“No.”
“Kirk was a serial killer. Half a dozen victims to his name. Your friend Fitzgerald was on his trail.”
“That’s his business,” Osborne replied, “not mine.”
“Was his business,” Gallagher corrected him. “Fitzgerald’s dead.”
The shock wave threw him back against the edge of the sink.
Jack Fitzgerald.
Dead.
He’d only ever had one friend, and now that friend was dead.
Osborne said nothing, but they were now as pale as each other.
“Didn’t you know?” Gallagher asked.
“No.”
“Don’t you read the papers?”
“No.”
“Didn’t anyone get in touch with you?”
“I don’t know anyone.”
“But you knew Fitzgerald?”
“I hadn’t heard from him for months.”
“Didn’t he ever try to contact you?”
“I already said no.”
Gallagher stuck another match between his teeth. He still hadn’t taken his keen, dark eyes off Osborne. “Basically,” he said, “the Kirk case was badly handled from the start. Captain Timu can tell you more about that. Fitzgerald may have ended up killing Kirk, but his whole team was decimated during the operation. It was a mess, and we still don’t know all the ins and outs of it. During his last radio message, Fitzgerald mentioned a mass grave in a forest north of Auckland. Among the bodies buried there, there was supposed to be a presumed accomplice of Kirk’s, a man named Zinzan Bee. Know him?”
A former activist and a symbolic figure in Maori society.
“What about him?” Osborne said.
“The thing is, we never found this famous Zinzan Bee’s body. It just vanished into thin air. As for Fitzgerald, he killed himself. The day after the operation.”
“Killed himself?”
“Without leaving any report, any information, anything that could fill us in on Kirk’s motives or what Zinzan Bee’s role was. Strange, don’t you think?
Still balancing on his chair with his legs on the table, Gallagher seemed to be testing him.
Osborne looked doubtful. Fitzgerald killing a former Maori activist, the presumed accomplice of a serial killer, and then killing himself, a suspect’s body spirited away: none of it made any sense. Fitzgerald couldn’t have killed himself, it was impossible. But who knew that, apart from him?
“The funerals of the police officers killed took place this week,” Gallagher went on. “A big occasion, very solemn. As you can imagine, crimes like that came as quite a shock to people in New Zealand, especially as Kirk seems to have gotten away with it for years. Heads have rolled, the whole administration is under the spotlight, and we have a gap to fill. With Fitzgerald gone, there are pieces missing in the puzzle. That’s why we need a specialist in Maori affairs to help us put the pieces together. That’s you, Osborne. You worked with Fitzgerald for six years, you know his informants, his sources, even some of his methods. Captain Timu wants you back on board. He’s taken over Fitzgerald’s job and . . . ”
But Osborne had stopped listening. Through the open window, the kookaburras on the square were shrieking their heads off. He shuddered in spite of himself: the thought of going home was as welcome as a bullet in the back.
Hana . . .
1.
