Color of Blood(77)

A teenage boy and his girlfriend walked into the shop to order take-away. As they flirted at the register, Judy made up her mind.

“Let’s see the reports,” she said.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

Dennis pushed his chair around the small table so that they sat next to each other. He had used a yellow highlighter to box in the dates he wanted her to concentrate on. Methodically he showed her that Phillip had made many calls on both his personal and business mobile phones the day of the famous PowerPoint presentation by Miller.

“What time was the presentation?”

“Umm, let me think. It was ten o’clock. Yes. Ten a.m.”

“How long did it last?”

“About ninety minutes,” she said.

“All right, so here we are at Phillip’s mobile phones starting at eleven thirty a.m.,” he said, pointing with his right forefinger. “To set the scene: the presentation is over, and my guess is some folks at the office are going to lunch and others are back to work, correct?”

“Yes.”

“Now let’s look at Phillip’s outbound calls after eleven thirty on his work line. Do you recognize any of these numbers?”

Judy ran her finger down a list of numbers.

“Ah, here’s one I know. It’s Martin in our office. An investigator: does mostly white-collar crime.”

“Why is Phillip calling him?”

“Oh, Phillip knows half the bloody office. He’s a solicitor in a small town, Dennis. Knows everyone; I’m not surprised. It was awkward at times, but I only had to recuse myself in a handful of cases. You’re not suggesting this is a big clue?”

Dennis ignored her comment. “And these calls, they have the same prefix. Are they going to the AFP office here?”

“Yes,” Judy said. “Ha. That’s going to Stephanie, one of the admins: probably shagging her as well. God. And this one is to Patrick. He’s on the drug squad.”

“What would he talk to them about?” Dennis asked.

“Everything and nothing. It’s just Phillip; he’s always poking around, always looking for business. What can I say? He’s a slick solicitor with the gift of the gab.”

“Now look at his personal mobile number,” Dennis said, moving another sheet to the top of the pile. “Not many calls on this one line, as you can tell. Let’s start looking at calls after eleven thirty a.m. on the same day, OK?”

“Sure.”

“OK, here at two thirty-three p.m. he makes a call to this number. It’s an international number. It lasted for almost five minutes.”

“All right.”

“At three eleven p.m., there is an inbound call from that same international number. And look down here, later, at seven fifty p.m. he makes an outbound call that lasts twenty-two minutes to the same international number.”

“Who is he calling?” Judy asked. “Surely with your vast network of Yank spies and banks of supercomputers you know who he’s calling?”

Dennis smiled for the first time that evening. “The number is listed to a company called Learmouth Importers Pty Ltd., headquartered in Singapore. But that’s it. Singapore records are hard to penetrate—I mean not as bad as the Swiss, but that’s all I could get right now.”

Judy suddenly could not handle sitting in the small shop any longer. “Let’s go for a walk, Dennis,” she said, standing. “I can’t breathe in this place.”

The sun had set, but there was still an ochre glow on the horizon. She led him down the street until they were walking parallel to a beach. The breeze off the ocean was cool, and she let it lift the smell of fried fish off her clothes and skin. Her mind raced as she thought of the phone calls. She did not understand where Dennis was going with this information, but she was worried nevertheless. She did not know why she was agitated, but she was.

Judy found a bench, and they sat facing the darkened beach a hundred yards away. She could smell the thick, sweet ocean air. In the distance she could make out the white foam at the water line and heard the waves thumping the sand, one after another in an endless array.

“OK, I’m waiting,” Judy said, picking out a strand of her hair that had whipped into her mouth. “What’s your theory? I can’t figure it out, if indeed there’s anything to figure out.”

“Here’s what I’m thinking,” Dennis said.

Judy noticed he seemed energized the more he talked about the phone calls and the clues. Now, as he defended his dissertation, he was almost buoyant.

“I don’t think there’s a mole inside the AFP office in WA at all,” he said. “But before I go on, I want you to agree to be open-minded about what I’m going to say.”

“Just proceed,” she said.

“All right. I think Phillip is the mole.”

“Oh God, Dennis,” Judy said, throwing her head back. “Phillip?”

“Just listen. My guess is that Phillip has been informally representing this gang for some time, troubleshooting, making suggestions, and maybe feeding them some information whenever they need it. When you and Daniel investigated the murder of that Asian, the old guy Lynch on your team said there was probably another man in the room that was being warned. My guess is that the guy being warned was Phillip. He must have pissed them off or owed them something. Who knows?”