Unhappily Ever After Bk. 01 Ch. 06-07

"I think we should let sleeping dogs lie," Tony said. "We've already got enough to have this whole thing thrown out of court. He won't fall for that a second time. Let's keep this one to ourselves and hold it as a wild card, just in case it's needed in the future."

"Okay," I agreed. His logic was sound. "But I want you to keep a tight rein on whoever goes into the master bedroom. The cube I set up overlooks the bed from the side. It gives a ninety-degree view across the front of the safe, which is how I could count the number of discs they removed that day. The copies I took of the discs before they accessed the safe and that data card are part of my deadman's switch.

"Brad has been instructed to release those and several other files to the media and stick them on the Internet if anything happens to me. Some of their content has already been released to certain people who are investigating my wife's law firm and other matters."

Leaving my copy of the search warrant with Tony, I adopted a hangdog posture and walked over to Moyston and Buchanan.

"Would one of you please retrieve my keys from my pocket?" I asked. "It appears I have no alternative but to comply with the search warrant."

Moyston looked over at Constable Buchanan, indicating that she should do it.

"Well, I'm not going to dig around in another bloke's pockets," he said when she looked back at him. "You never know what you're going to find."

As Kate - well, you can't refer to a woman who is going to dig around in your trousers, Constable Buchanan - stepped forward, I indicated that she'd find them in my right-hand pocket. Despite the incongruity of the situation, I felt my penis begin to chub up as she rubbed her hand against it.

I heard a sharp intake of breath as she realised what was happening. With her back to her superior, she smiled at me as she handed me the keyring. It was a smile filled with promise.

As I walked towards the gate, Detective Sergeant Fuchs stepped in front of me and stretched out his hand. He mistakenly believed I was going to surrender the keys to him.

"Fuck off, Bargearse," I said. The warrant demands that I give you access to my house. It says nothing about surrendering my keys or giving you access to any other part of my property.

Before unlocking the gate, I turned to face the assembled bevy of police and media people. I hoped the TV crews had their cameras at the ready.

"Ladies and gentlemen," I said in the parade ground voice I had only used once since leaving the army. "I have been served with a warrant that entitles these police officers to enter my property and search my home. Apparently, they hope to find my place awash with drugs. This is their second attempt to fit me up on such a charge. It appears I can't stop this intrusion, but I can assure you that any drugs found on my property will not be mine. I do not dabble in such filth.

"Sadly, the same cannot be said of my soon-to-be-former wife and her lovers at Moreton City Law, all of whom use a variety of drugs to enhance their orgies...."

At that point, I was flattened by three large drug squad detectives, which brought an end to my speechifying. I was surprised it had taken them so long to react.

They grabbed the keys from my hand and attempted to open the gate. They failed. I'd had a couple of extra steps programmed into the gate's remote to prevent just such a thing from happening.

"You've only got three chances," I said from where I lay with my face pressed into the gravel of my property entrance. "If you waste them, you'll have to wait twenty-four hours before you get another chance. You've already wasted one."

I was talking complete bullshit, of course. But none of them seemed overly bright. If they had been, they would have simply cut the fences and bypassed the gate altogether.

My warning must have struck a chord because I was dragged to my feet and frog-marched over to the gate. It beggared belief that they felt they could get away with treating a suspect the way they were treating me; especially with the media in attendance.

While standing in front of the lock, I saw that they had been trying to open the gate without unlocking the chains. Even if they'd managed to get the lock to work, the gate would have jammed.

What they didn't know - and I wasn't about to tell them - was that, when fitted, the two chains-locks electronically synched with the gate lock. Each system component had to be unlocked in the correct order before the gate lock would function. Without indicating any particular sequence, I first unlocked the chain at the gate's hinge end, ensuring that the lock was closed on the hanging chain before moving over to the latch end of the gate.

I then repeated the process with the chain at that end before activating the gate lock itself. The gate swung open and locked back into a socket, preventing it from closing until the remote opener was activated a second time.

With the gate opened, the entourage - led by my lawyer - charged towards the house like a herd of shoppers through the department store doors on sale day. Before being bundled back into Moyston and Buchanan's car, I called over a television news reporter from the public broadcaster and invited her and her crew to follow us in.

"Tell the others you will be their pool representative," I told her. "And when you get back to the office, tell the Focus producers that this is part of the story they're currently working on. Do your job well, and you might pick up a Walkley Award.

The two uniformed officers left to guard the gate raised an eyebrow at Senior Constable Moyston.

"Mr Bourke has invited them onto his property," he said to them. "As far as I know, it hasn't been declared a crime scene, which means he's free to invite whoever he pleases onto the place."

On the way down the driveway, I told Moyston and Buchanan about my fears that Fuchs would plant evidence. I asked them to keep an eye on the activities of his people during the search. I also explained that the warrant only covered the house and not the detached outbuildings.

"I've got nothing to hide," I said. "But I'm not about to make his life easy."

When we arrived at the house, my lawyer was standing with his back to the door, holding back the intruders like Moses held back the Red Sea. A couple of hefty uniformed constables were preparing to bash the door down. Fuchs was standing toe-to-toe with Tony, trying to bulldoze his way past him, but my lawyer wasn't giving him an inch.

Sam was standing among the group waiting on the porch. She looked as though her whole world had collapsed; which, of course, it had.

As soon as I opened the door, Fuchs pushed me inside. He then dragged me through the foyer and dumped me into one of my reclining armchairs in the living room. In an attempt to immobilise me, he tipped the chair back into the reclined position.

As the crowd bustled through the foyer, I heard a loud shattering sound as the second of my fake Ching Dynasty vases crashed onto the tiled floor. Almost immediately afterwards, Sam was herded into the living room, where she was assisted to a sitting position on the settee. She was probably pissed off to find that the vase she thought had been destroyed by Charlie a couple of nights earlier was still intact and decided to rectify that situation. If I needed proof that I was being set up, that was it.

The sad, dejected look I had seen earlier had been an act. As she sat facing me, her self-satisfied smirk told me she was part of the set-up. Without words, she was saying, "Gotcha, you bastard!". She thought she was playing a winning hand.

Her confident grin faded a little when I smiled back at her, however. I believe that was when she finally realised that, rather than having a compliant wittol by the balls, she and Kingston had latched onto the tail of a very angry tiger.

Not long after Sam had settled onto the settee, Tony Marino entered the room. He was patting his pocket. I hoped that meant he had obtained video footage of the deliberate destruction of what, in Sam's mind, might have been a million-dollar artifact. He didn't stay but went looking for the search crews.

In the end, it was all for nothing. The drug squad people weren't novices at planting evidence. They found fifty grams of methamphetamine hidden under some folded clothing in the back of my walk-in wardrobe. They found nothing tying Sam to drugs.

During their search, they also found a small surveillance cube in the master bedroom, which they confiscated under the 'Chance Discovery Rule'. The records relating to the search later tendered to the court would indicate that the recording device contained no data card.

Detective Sergeant Fuchs took great delight in outlining the charges that would be laid against me.

"You will be charged with being in possession of a large quantity of a proscribed substance for sale and distribution purposes," he said, a self-satisfied smirk spreading across his face. When I glanced over at her, I saw that same smirk pasted on Sam's face.

"I remind you that you are still under caution," Fuchs said as he handed me over to one of his uniformed minions, who he instructed to load me into a car for transportation to the watchhouse.

"And make sure it's a car with all the bells and whistles," he instructed the young constable. "I want those media clowns out there to see what a drug lord looks like.

"Now," he said, "let's see what we can find out in your garage."

"I'm afraid that's not going to happen, Detective Sergeant," Tony said. "The conditions of your warrant limit your search to my client's house and nothing else. Were you to enter any of the outbuildings, you would be in breach of the parameters set out in your current warrant, thus voiding your whole search and tainting your evidence."

"It doesn't matter," Fuchs responded. "I've already got enough to send him away for a long time. Based on what I already have, I won't have a hard time getting an expanded warrant. We'll come back and continue our search tomorrow if necessary. But I can't see any point in wasting our time with such niceties. I'm sure a judge will approve our expansion of the existing crime scene in light of what we have already found. You can fight out the technicalities in court."

While the search crew was packing their gear in preparation for a change of locations, Tony came over to tell me he'd be right behind me. I reached out of the car's open window to shake his hand as we talked. I passed him my keys in the process. In a whispered voice, I told him the lockup sequences for the house and the gate.

I then asked him to get onto Brad and ask him to let Tommy know what was going on. That reminded me to pass over my two burner phones for safekeeping. I also gave him my personal phone. It was the one I'd used to record my arrest - or non-arrest - and I didn't want the evidence of that interaction with DS Fuchs erased or deleted.

"I'd like you to get a copy of that recording to Detective Chief Superintendent Alan McGregor ASAP, I said, giving him my phone's PIN code. "Take a copy for your and Brad's records, too, if you don't mind.

"I know I sound paranoid, but it now appears I've got three groups out for my blood, and I'm becoming a little concerned for my safety. When you talk to Brad, tell him to stay where he is. If they find him, they'll use him to get to me."

The final jobs I gave him to do were to let my new head of security know that I'd been detained and probably wouldn't be back to pick up my car tonight. And to let my PA know that she would have to represent me at the break-up party tomorrow.

I also asked him to inform my neighbours of the police raid, just in case they twigged to their address error and decided to raid them.

With what I hoped were all my bases covered, I settled back into the seat of the police car to wait for the trip back to town. I'd just closed my eyes to think everything through when my door was opened, and I was helped to my feet.

"We've just come over to retrieve Constable Buchanan's handcuffs, Mitch Moyston said in his official senior constable tone. The young female constable reached forward and took my hands in hers as he spoke. She had a concerned look in her eyes.

"I wouldn't be too worried," Mitch said quietly. "I've already spoken to the boss about what has happened, and he's instructed us to follow you into town. We'll have eyes on you for the whole trip, just in case anyone has something other than a simple arrest planned."

Just then, the constable responsible for driving me into town came around to supervise the exchange of handcuffs. As she removed her set of restraints, I felt her drop something into my hand.

"Just in case," she whispered.

I immediately had a coughing fit and raised my hand to cover my mouth. When I lowered it, my hand was empty. The driver replaced my cuffs with his own and pushed me back into the rear of his car.

"He certainly had me fooled," Senior Constable Moyston said to his partner as they walked away. "I really thought he was one of the good guys." Constable Buchanan nodded her head in agreement.

"Yeah, me too," she said, glancing back over her shoulder and giving me a wink.

Ten minutes later, one of Fuchs' detectives came out of the house and told the constable to take me back into police headquarters and have me processed and sitting in an interview room by the time they got back after finishing up out here.

---oooBJSooo---

That's exactly where I was when Fuchs and his squad returned to police headquarters two hours later.

Not that the interview room's allocation to a drug squad case didn't cause considerable inconvenience. The period leading up to Christmas is apparently a very busy time on the police calendar, so the interview rooms were in constant use.

But it wasn't just the commandeering of a valuable resource such as an interview room that caused problems. Those started as soon as I arrived, and the constable steered me towards the charge room. The main issue was that the constable hadn't been given any information about the charges I was facing. When the custody sergeant asked me about them, all I could do was shrug and tell him that I had apparently offended Detective Sergeant Fucks' sensitive nature when I'd suggested he could lose a bit of weight.

As the constable had not mentioned them, I left the subject of drugs alone.

"So, was Mr Bourke formally arrested?" the custody officer asked the constable.

"I have no idea, Sergeant," the constable answered. "I was just told to bring him in and have him processed and sitting in an interview room when Detective Sergeant Fuchs returned."

The custody officer then turned his attention back to me.

"Were you arrested, Mr Bourke?" he asked.

"Not as far as I'm aware," I answered truthfully. "To the best of my knowledge, I was invited to assist the police with their enquiries."

"So why are you here in the custody of a gormless newly-minted constable wearing handcuffs?" he asked.

"You'll have to ask Detective Sergeant Fucks about that," I answered. "But if you want my opinion, it's what bullies do when their victims don't surrender to their demands. You'll have known him longer than I have. What do you think?

"I think you're probably right," he muttered, more to himself than to the world at large.

"As you don't appear to be under arrest, I can't process you," the sergeant said. He then instructed the constable to take me to a vacant interview room. Once you've got him settled, remove the cuffs and get him something to eat and drink.

"If Detective Sergeant Fucks ...sorry, Fuchs is true to form, he'll make him wait for a couple of hours before interviewing him.

"Oh, and see if you can rustle up a newspaper for Mr Bourke to read while he's waiting. He could be there for a while. You'd best let him have a toilet break while waiting for a room to become vacant."

While the custody charade was playing out, I'd seen Moyston and Buchanan enter the room. As I was being pushed out, I stumbled against Constable Buchanan, passing her key back to her.

"Sorry about the slobber," I mumbled as I disentangled myself from her.

"Sorry, Miss," I said more loudly as I righted myself. "Gammy leg. Old war wound, doncha know."

"It was my pleasure," Kate mumbled back at me as I was led away. I wasn't sure if she was talking about lending me her key or my bumping into her.

After my toilet break, I was led to a wide hallway, which was lined with interview rooms along one side and a long, wooden bench along the other. I recognised a few of the faces of some of my fellow perps. They were those of my wife's co-workers. Some were partners - both senior and junior - and some were paralegals. I particularly recognised the face of Sam's friend and fellow gang-banger, 'Hell-on-Wheels'.

"If this were a movie," I said to myself but loud enough for everyone to hear, "we'd be wanting to know who had 'grassed' on us. In such cases, the finger would be pointed at those who were most conspicuous by their absence."

"Shut the fuck up," a voice ordered from the other end of the hallway. "No talking."

"Sorry, Sir," I responded. "But I was just sayin'."

I don't know how long the others had been waiting, but it appeared I had priority. I was steered into the next available room. To my great delight, it was at the opposite end of the hallway from where I'd been seated. The glares of those sitting on the bench as I walked down the hallway were met by my Cheshire cat-like smile as my constable led me to the room. I wanted them to know - or at least suspect - that I'd had something to do with their downfall.

It must have irked them to see my constable wandering in and out of my room with newspapers and bottled water while awaiting the arrival of my interviewers. It would have really pissed them off to see him enter the room carrying a large McDonalds bag and a cup tray upon which were perched two large coffees.

As I sat in my room waiting for Detective Sergeant Fuchs and his sidekick to return from turning over my home, I surmised that the length of time they were taking indicated that they had gone beyond the brief of the warrant and had conducted a search of my garage and other outbuildings.

It didn't really matter. I was confident they wouldn't find my armoury. And I already knew the drugs they 'found' were what the legal fraternity referred to as 'fruit of the poisonous tree'.

'The really amazing thing,' I thought as I sat meditating in my solitary interview room, 'is that, for the second time in as many days, I've been taken into custody without my personal possessions being taken from me.' I was half regretting that I hadn't kept my personal phone; but only half. I knew that once I was formally arrested - which I fully expected would happen - they would be legally entitled to access it.

The interview, when it eventually happened, went as expected. Fuchs and his number two came charging in like a cyclone out of the Coral Sea and attempted to bulldoze me into a confession. I refused to contribute to the conversation until after speaking to my lawyer. Fuchs and his minion packed up their gear and left. It was another hour before Tony was shown into the room.

This was all part of the game, of course. But I wouldn't have been a half-decent sniper if I was an impatient man. The same cannot be said for my lawyer, however. As soon as he walked into the room, I could tell he was seething.

After ensuring that our conversation wasn't being recorded - before leaving the farm, I'd asked Tony to bring Charlie's magic wand in with him - I brought him up to date with what was going on and what it was all about. I left the mechanics of my response out of my story, as I would have done if I were talking to Brad. I'm sure he managed to get the gist of things, though.