Wyatt - 03 - Death Deal Read Online Free PDF

was always a
bureaucracy somewhere that had what he needed.

    He liked the hunt, but he also liked
the hidden benefits. A bit of the old in-out with female clients whod gone
over budget; blow-jobs from sixteen-year-olds whod run off with boyfriends;
hush money from embezzlers who didnt want to be found.

    Stolle liked to get inside the skin
of the people he was hired to find. He knew that a stranger in town didnt
attract curiosity anymore, the nation being so mobile, so what Stolle did was
not look for someone who was new to a place but look for that same person in a
different guise. More often than not the people he was looking for tried to be
the exact opposite of their former selves. Take his last case: a solicitor had
done a bunk with money from his trust fund. He had exchanged his Porsche for a fishing
boat and a Holden ute, his DB suit for jeans and thongs, his South Yarra
townhouse for a fibro beach shack, his smooth cheeks for a beard and sunburn.
What he hadnt changed were his basic tastes and habits. The man liked to play
tennis, bet on the horses, borrow music videos, subscribe to yachting
magazines. The stupid prick had even given himself a name similar to his real
one: Ross Wilson, Ray Wilkes. Stolle wouldnt have been surprised if Wilson had
eventually contacted his family or hung around outside his kids school.

    Missing teenagers, mostly girls. If
they hadnt been murdered and their bodies dumped in the bush, they were the
easiest to find. More often than not the clients were exclusive boarding
schools or wealthy executives who didnt want the police brought in. Stolle
started with friends and relatives. If the girl wasnt shacked up with her
boyfriend or she hadnt convinced an elderly aunt that she was taking an
extended semester break, he checked railway stations, squats, refuges, the
morgue. When that failed, he went straight to St Kilda or Kings Cross. Once,
accompanied by a father, hed dragged a fifteen-year-old PLC girl from a
brothel and been attacked by pimps armed with fireaxes and knives. The girl was
doped to the eyeballs and HIV-positive. Stolle and the girls father went back
a week later and torched the place to the ground. It was the least Stolle could
do for the poor bastard. The girl? Stolle guessed she was dead by now.

    Since the big-paying jobs were
scarce, and the money always found its way into the pockets of the bookmakers,
Stolles bread-and-butter income came from process serving and debt collection.
He worked 12 to 14-hour days sometimes, six or seven days a week. The car
became a mobile office and he was on the phone every few minutes, to his
snouts, his answering service, his staff. He flashed his ID twenty times a day.
He wasnt a cop but often people thought he was. It was in the words he used: Im
licensed by the State of Victoria as an investigator

    Sure, it was obsessive, but it made
him feel connected to the street, in control of the flow of information, free
for a while from that permanent hunger that made him want to chance all he had
on the fall of the cards, the roll of the dice.

    Stolle had one advantage over his
competitors: he drank with a sergeant in the protective security group, the
crowd responsible for Victorias witness protection program. They supplied
anything from intermittent surveillance, around-the-clock guard and 008
hotline, to relocation under a new identity. Stolle had learned a lot that way;
the sergeant enjoyed explaining the job. Apparently the easiest people to hide
were the natural mimics. They knew how to fit their appearance, body language,
speech and manner to a new place, a new name, a new job, a personal history
saturated with solid information: passport, bank account, educational
qualifications, birth and marriage certificates, employment record, club
membership, Medicare and tax file numbers, drivers licence, photograph album, old
letters and Christmas cards. Everything was recorded on computer, every file
protected by an inbuilt code to prevent