The Killing Hour

The guy behind the counter stands around two metres and has large flabby arms covered in White Power tattoos. He wears a black leather vest with a black T-shirt beneath it. The T-shirt says Guns don’t kill people. Grenades do. His head is shaved and he has a long grey beard. A name badge attached to his vest says ‘Floyd’ and it looks out of place on his huge chest. He tells me the knife is called a K-bar.

I put the knife aside and keep looking. I find some fatigue gear. It’s new, not like most of the stuff in here. I wonder if anybody died in any of these uniforms. I pick up a vest with lots of pockets and a pair of compact 8 x 20 binoculars that can fit in one of them.

I put them with the knife then look through a small display of Swiss Army knives. I point to one that looks like it could do everything from repairing sunglasses to gutting a fish. He pulls it out and puts it next to the K-bar and the binoculars. I pull out my wallet. Floyd says nothing as he looks me up and down. He looks like he could break every bone in my body so I smile at him and make no conversation as I pay for the gear. He gives me my change and I ask him where I can buy a gun without a permit. He laughs at me without any humour at all and tells me that’s illegal. So I hand him five hundred bucks and ask him again. This time he gives me a name, tells me to go and see this guy tomorrow. He puts my purchases into a plastic supermarket bag. I thank him and leave.

I drive out to the airport and pull into medium-term parking. The walls of the rental agency I choose are painted bright orange with blue racing stripes around the middle. The windows and glass sliding doors are covered in stickers and decals. I step inside and an assistant high on caffeine goes through the paperwork with me as I hire a late-model Holden, the same brand but nothing like the Holden I saw outside the bank, which is the whole point. I don’t want to start driving around in my own car because Cyris knows it well. I sign the credit-card form and the guy tells me to keep the pen. I add the car key to my others.

The Holden is a much nicer drive than my Honda but it doesn’t make the situation seem any better. Just more comfortable. I throw my free pen in the glovebox where it sits next to a map and a box of tissues. Back home I charge the cellphone. I plug in the answering machine and leave a message with my new phone number.

Why didn’t Cyris take his two victims into the middle of nowhere? The answer comes when I’m in the kitchen fixing something to eat. He wanted their bodies found. What’s more, he wanted them found quickly. But not at home. He wanted them found side by side in a paddock by a common motorway. He would have left the stolen van there. The cops would have found the missing women’s DNA in it. They would have searched the area. This way the motivation for the abductions and murders looks obvious – it looks like a sick bastard doing what he enjoys most. Had he taken them somewhere more private they might never have been found. He didn’t want that and he didn’t want them discovered at home because then the suspect pool would be narrowed down to the husbands.

Suddenly I realise what didn’t fit well with the newspaper article I read yesterday. It said Kathy’s body was found by her neighbour, but Kathy had told me her cheating husband Frank would be home before the morning to get fresh clothes. If she was right, why didn’t he call the police? Why would he lie?

I drag this chain of thought around the kitchen. Is it reasonable to think her husband came home expecting to find her missing, and not dead? Just because he was due home and never called the police? It’s possible, but it’s equally possible he never made it home, that he stayed where he was and cheated some more on Kathy. But combined with the lack of forced entry, the fact Cyris wants money and the original location where the victims were meant to be found, it’s starting to stack up against Frank. I think he knew his wife was going to die that night. I think he came home prepared to call the police that she was missing, and when he found her sliced up in the master bedroom he didn’t know what to do. So he ran.

I think back to what I told Landry about Cyris putting himself into a role to kill the two women. The police come along, they find the hammer and stake, and they think madman. They don’t think cheating husband. They think psychopath.



At six-thirty I dress in my new fatigue gear. What I see in the mirror scares me. I slip the cellular into one of the many pockets, the binoculars and K-bar and Swiss Army knife into others. The sun is low, its casual slide into the night almost complete. It’s now just a bright blurry orange blob. Dressed like I’m about to go to war, and feeling it too, I walk to my car, pull down the sun visor and head towards the battlefield.





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