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call saying, ‘Your cunt of a father is in the ground and you’re next.’ This was traced back to a prison phone, linked to inmate Rob Institoris, husband of Terry’s daughter Linda. She, like her mother, Liz, had been in bitter conflict with Terry. The police learned that Liz had feared for her safety once Terry got out of jail, and had been keen to turn the criminal world against him, telling people he was a police informer.
    Now Jubelin and Evers spoke with her often. To do this they drove out to Dubbo on a number of occasions, timing the trip for Sunday afternoon so they could listen to the football in the car. Evers was as deeply committed to the case as Jubelin. His theory was that you had to ‘find the passion’ in an investigation, the element that made you want to try that extra bit harder. Often it was the innocence and vulnerability of the victim. In this case—Terry Falconer had been no innocent, although he hadn’t deserved to die—it was the fact that the crime had obviously involved at least three brazen criminals (the abductors), and possibly more: locking them up would be doing the world a favour.
    In the end they got nowhere much with Liz Falconer: they played the role of concerned detectives dealing with a grieving widow, but always suspected she knew more than she was saying. She did show them a document she’d found in her husband’s papers. It was a ‘running sheet’, a sort of formal note, prepared by police who’d interviewed him when he was arrested for manufacturing meth. They noted that he’d refused to tell them anything about other criminals but had said he might do so later, depending on how things went for him. In particular, he said he might be prepared to give them information about the Dubbo Rebels and drug dealing. It was a fairly standard comment by an experienced crook in his situation, hoping to persuade the police to go a little easier on him now in the faint hope of future information. The document had become part of the Crown’s brief of evidence for Falconer’s prosecution and was given to his lawyer, which is how Falconer came to have a copy among his papers. After Liz found it, and the conflict over property began, she used it to support her claim that he was an informer, and showed it to a number of people.
    The detectives had already identified several main groups of suspects. One consisted of the people of interest from the killing of Anthony and Frances Perish back in 1993. As we have seen, there was a current reinvestigation of those murders, Strike Force Seabrook, and Falconer had been spoken to by its detectives not long before his death. Maybe he’d been killed because he’d murdered the old couple—or because others had done it, and they suspected he was about to give evidence against them at a forthcoming coronial inquest. These were only theories—at the moment, all Tuno had were dozens ofsuch possibilities, hypotheses and hunches that needed to be worked through and tested.
    The next and biggest group of suspects consisted of criminals who might have feared Falconer was informing against them, either because of what Liz Falconer was telling people or because they’d somehow discovered that Falconer, as Tuno learned, had indeed been talking not just to the police but also to other law inforcement agencies. Another category of suspects comprised other criminals who Falconer might have upset during his career as a drug manufacturer and dealer. It was quite possible he’d committed acts of violence to protect his operation, and had made some serious enemies. Altogether, it was a rich assortment of possibilities.
    Tuno was hampered right from the start by the reluctance of criminal informants, so essential to solving many crimes, to come forward. That Falconer had possibly been killed because he was an informant himself had sent out a clear message to even the slowest crook. This