The Killer of Oz

by Chelsea Field

  Dad blew out a breath. “Well, maybe he’s come good in the past four decades, but still, without being there to see for myself, I’d feel a whole lot better if you’d keep an eye on the situation for me. Make sure he doesn’t have an opportunity to get her alone or pressure her in any way. You could get that man of yours to help back you up.”

  It seemed like overkill to me, but Dad wasn’t the jealous type, and Mum had a history of seeing the good in people, sometimes even when it wasn’t there.

  “All right, Dad. I promise I’ll keep an eye on things between them. But I have to go now and finish my dessert before the cane toad race starts.”

  I hung up and returned to the table just in time to hear Kirk Bauer say, “Great, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  I slumped down into my chair, thinking my dreamed-of peaceful holiday might end up sucking me dry. Like that leech had tried to do.

  The best part of a long, exhausting day is getting into bed at the end of it. Especially when that bed contains your boyfriend’s naked chest to snuggle into.

  I was, however, feeling a tad unsettled by Dad’s words about Kirk Bauer and my subsequent promise to look after Mum without her knowing about it. I’d enlisted Connor’s help, but I was divided between my parent’s contrasting opinions and wasn’t sure what to make of Kirk myself. “What did you think?” I asked Connor.

  He kissed the top of my head and found the bare skin where my T-shirt ended and my undies began. “I think you should stop thinking about other men.”

  I smirked. “It’s insights like that which make you such a great investigator.”

  A delicious while later, I drifted to sleep in a cloud of contentment. And woke to the sound of Herbert bleating.

  It took several seconds to remember I was in Australia visiting my family and hence a crying goat wasn’t unusual. It took several more to remember we were in a posh hotel where a crying goat was highly unusual.

  Damn.

  I pushed myself upright and swiped for the bedside lamp. Then stumbled for the door leading to the shared living area where Herbert was supposed to be sleeping.

  Reaching it, I slipped through and shut it behind me in the hopes Connor could sleep through the noise.

  “Hey, Herbie,” I crooned. “What’s wrong?”

  Someone had beaten me out there. A flashlight was waving around on the other side of the room.

  I smiled sleepily in their direction. “Couldn’t find the light switch either?” I patted the wall in an attempt to do just that.

  Herbert maaed a quiet greeting and, based on the pitter-patter of his hooves on the tiles, was trotting over to say hello.

  The owner of the flashlight said nothing.

  The hair on the back of my neck prickled, and I searched more urgently for the light switch. I also regretted forgoing my pajamas in favor of a T-shirt and undies in concession to the tropical heat.

  Undies which happened to be covered in cartoon koalas, I might add.

  Herbert head-butted my knee just as I found the light switch. I yelped. But not because of the goat.

  Standing on the other side of the living area was a figure clad head to toe in black. The clothing was loose enough that I couldn’t tell whether the intruder was male or female, and a balaclava hid everything but a pair of blue eyes. Those eyes darted away from me and landed on Amy’s satchel in the now illuminated room.

  Uh-oh.

  The person strode three quick steps and snatched up the satchel with a gloved hand.

  “Stop,” I said, finding my voice at last. My bravery probably had something to do with the realization they were wielding nothing more than the flashlight.

  Unfortunately, my bravery didn’t help much.

  The burglar glanced at me and started for the exit. Since they were small, unarmed, and the lines around those blue eyes suggested they were in their senior years, I ran after them.

  Herbert ran too. But I liked to think I was more intimidating.

  The thief sped up.

  Strategies to take them down when I intercepted them rushed through my mind. Regrettably, self-defense training didn’t cover how to attack a fleeing target.

  Given they were intent on fleeing, I zeroed in on the satchel. My outstretched fingers brushed the leather at the same moment Herbert thumped into my trailing leg.

  I went down. Hard.

  Herbert skidded along the floor but kept his feet.

  A door opened and slammed.

  I craned my neck to confirm my suspicion. The intruder was gone.

  But at least my accidental dive maneuver had yanked the satchel from the burglar’s grasp.

  I allowed myself a quiet whimper and rolled to get my weight off my smarting hip bone. Which meant I was pretty much spread-eagled on the tiles in my undies and T-shirt when Connor, Etta, Mum, and Lily emerged from their rooms, one after the other. They must have been delayed by the dignity of putting on the provided hotel robes.

  Mum pulled hers tighter given the extra company. “What on earth is going on out here?”

  Herbert pranced over and nibbled a piece of my hair.

  I groaned and lowered my head back to the tiles. The cold hard floor wasn’t anywhere near as comfortable as my bed.

  9

  By the time I’d explained enough of what had happened for Connor to run after the intruder, there was no sign of them to find. We made hot chocolates for everyone, reassured Mum and Lily, who were especially shaken by the night’s events, and then all returned to bed.

  It hadn’t escaped my attention that I’d somehow survived the crocodiles, the leech, and the cane toads only to be taken down by the one cute little critter we’d brought with us. I didn’t point that out to Mum.

  The next morning, Connor and I searched the satchel again. But we found nothing more than we had on the first inspection: a bunch of vials—some cracked, a waterlogged mobile phone, and a generous helping of mud.

  What had the thief been after? One of the Taste Society’s secret substances? The phone they didn’t know was dead? Some kind of evidence that had been washed away with the river? It was impossible to guess. But it did go a long way in convincing us that Amy Cooley’s death, however innocent it appeared, wasn’t an accident.

  Unfortunately, it wasn’t something we could share with the police without explaining why we were in possession of the satchel in the first place.

  It also wasn’t clear why—if someone had arranged Amy’s death to obtain the satchel’s contents—they hadn’t done it in a way that kept those contents safe. Were we dealing with more than one party here? Was the thief after the satchel just an opportunist? Or had Amy’s death not gone according to plan?

  Regardless, we didn’t want to leave the satchel unattended for the thief to try again. So we gave it a makeover. I was grateful the whole thing was leather so we could wipe away both the mud and the related smell. The rest of its contents we left untouched.

  That done, we joined everyone in the living area, and Lily invited me for a pre-breakfast swim. My friend did a lot of swimming because it was a good form of exercise for her arthritic joints. But water and I didn’t get along so well. Actually, morning and I weren’t on the best of terms either. So I suppressed a groan and negotiated her down to a pre-breakfast float.

  My bathers showed off the purple bruise on my hip—compliments of Herbert.

  Floating in the pool with the help of a pool noodle, I kicked a couple of times to face my friend. After several decades of friendship, she was the closest thing to a sister I’d ever had, and we talked about everything. Which meant it’d been hard being unable confide in her about my new career. A silver lining of having to move countries was that it made that job requirement a touch easier. But even so, Lily had made me promise that when we were old and about to kick the bucket in some nursing home, I’d tell her everything. My normally oversensitive conscience was completely okay with this breach of my Taste Society contract.

  On this trip, however, we’d had littl
e chance to talk privately. And Lily was facing something equally monumental. “How are you doing?”

  She drifted to float on her back, her flat belly showing no sign of the tiny being threatening to upheave her life. “I don’t know.”

  I listened to the gentle lapping of the water for a minute. Lily didn’t elaborate.

  “C’mon, talk to me. Who’s the father?”

  Lily sighed. “Just a guy I went out with a few times. I haven’t told him. I don’t think I want to be tied to him for the rest of my life through some fluke of a pregnancy.” She lifted a hand and watched the water trickle down her fingers. “But he’s not the problem. I’ve hardly given him a second thought.”

  “So what is? What are you most afraid of?”

  “Honestly?” She repositioned her own pool noodle so she could sit, floating with minimal effort so she could concentrate on her words. “I’ve been thinking about that, and it’s not about the money. I mean, I think I’d be okay on that front. My firm likes me enough that I reckon they’d let me work from home some of the time, and Mum has offered to babysit whenever I need a break. I know she means that. Maybe she’d even like it. And it obviously wasn’t anywhere on my ten-year plan, but even that I could come to terms with. No one’s life ever goes to plan, and there are plenty of worse curveballs the universe can throw at you. I mean, you’re proof of that…”

  “Hey!”

  She smirked. “What? I’m not the one who chased after a thief and tripped over a goat last night. And don’t get me started on stupid Stevo…”

  She was referring to my self-serving man swine of an ex-husband.

  I huffed. “All right. Can we get back to the point now?”

  Her humor vanished. “My childhood was rubbish, Iz. My parents didn’t want to hang out with me. Maybe they loved me in their own ways, but they didn’t like me. They prioritized their jobs, their social lives, the things that gave them pleasure, over being there for me. There were plenty of times I would’ve traded all my toys for a few hours of their attention… I’m worried I’m too much like them. I like being independent. I like my job. But a lot of days I barely like people, and a big part of the reason I never hold on to a boyfriend is I can’t be bothered with all that relationship stuff. I’m selfish, and I’ve been okay with that until now. But I don’t want to put a kid through what I went through. I can’t. Even if that’s only because it would make me hate myself.”

  Wow. Of all the things I thought she might say, that wasn’t one. “Lily, you’re nothing like them. It’s true you don’t let many people into your life. But the few that you do, you make room for. You’ve always been there for me. Who helped me clean up after Donny Rich shoved a mud pie in my face and then made sure he never did it again? Who slept over and swapped shifts with me when I rescued random baby birds that needed feeding every hour? And whose couch did I sleep on after Steve kicked me out? You’ve always been there for me when I’ve needed you. You’ve always shown up. Not only when it was fun or convenient for you either. You’ve taken holiday leave to hang with me, and yet just yesterday you volunteered to stay home and look after the menagerie so Mum and I could spend time together.” I waved my hand for emphasis and almost fell off my pool noodle. “I don’t know, Lily. I can’t say whether you’d enjoy being a parent, but I do know, if you decide to go ahead with this, you’d sure as hell be there for your kid.”

  Lily stopped floating and stood as if my words were too heavy and she needed to be planted on the ground to digest them. “You really think so?” she asked quietly.

  “I do.”

  Three shouting kids chose that moment to dive-bomb into the pool, splashing us and drenching a little girl who’d been reading on a deck chair a few yards away.

  Lily wiped her face. “Brats,” she muttered darkly.

  I dislodged my pool noodle on purpose this time and pasted on a smile. “Well, I guess that’s our cue to leave.”

  We retrieved our hotel-provided towels and headed for the gated exit. The poor kid in the deck chair was trying to dry her glasses on her wet T-shirt.

  Lily handed her towel. “Here, take this. I’m about to go have a shower anyway.”

  I made no comment.

  It was a two-hour drive to the small town of Kullaroy where Amy Cooley had resided and worked. Or at least it was a two-hour drive when taking the detour required by the flooded crossing. The roads were largely deserted as we traveled farther inland, with only the occasional caravan or utility vehicle and one tractor crawling along a narrow lane and hogging most of its width. The landscape changed from the lush tropics around Port Douglas to something drier, with plenty of gum trees and grass but not much else. The dirt changed hues too—from a rich brown to a pale ocher or sometimes vibrant red. I was drifting toward a nap when Connor’s phone rang shrilly through the car’s speakers. He answered it and went through the usual ID process with his Taste Society handler.

  “I have the coroner’s findings on the autopsy for you,” the man said.

  Connor’s eyebrow went up a fraction. “That was fast.”

  “Yes.”

  I took that to mean the Taste Society had pulled strings to make it fast.

  And that they’d found enough of Amy’s body in the crocodile’s digestive system to perform an autopsy on.

  I swallowed.

  “Cause of death?” Connor asked.

  “Drowning. But the preliminary tox screen found recreational levels of opiates and benzodiazepines in her system.”

  “So she might have had help drowning.”

  “Yes.”

  “Or she might have been stupid enough to take judgment- and performance-impairing drugs right before driving in hazardous conditions.”

  “Uh-huh. I’ll leave you to figure out which it was.”

  “But what killed the crocodile?” Connor wanted to know.

  “No idea,” he said. “They didn’t perform an autopsy on the crocodile.” Then he hung up.

  Now that was more like my handler.

  Half an hour later, we reached the outskirts of Kullaroy. Perhaps it’s the slower pace of small-town living, or a greater sense of community pride, or even sheer boredom, but small towns have a tendency to embrace any quirk of history or circumstance to differentiate themselves.

  Seven hundred miles to the southeast, the citizens of Banana, thus named after a particularly helpful cow, had erected a statue to memorialize the sweet-tempered bovine. A further two hundred miles on, a Mary Poppins festival was held each year to celebrate the little-known fact that Pamela Travers, the author behind the internationally iconic nanny, was born and bred in Maryborough, Australia. A hundred miles to the southwest, an annual camel-race festival lured three thousand people to the dusty red outback town of Boulia. All over the country, small towns boasted names, sculptures, and festivals that ranged from the lovely to the obscene. No need to mention Mossy Nipple Bend, Mount Buggery, or the unassuming neighborhood of Tittybong.

  But Amy’s hometown had no quirk to call their own. And despite being only a hop, skip, and a jump (at least according to an army of cane toads) from the tourist-drenched coasts of Cairns, none of them cared to visit.

  Kullaroy was pretty enough, but nobody comes to Australia to see cows.

  Even if they are statistically more likely to kill you than crocodiles.

  Which made it a strange place to house a Museum of Venomous Creatures. Nevertheless, that was what had brought us here.

  In the early 1900s, the building had been used by a group of reptile enthusiasts who collected and studied snakes. As public demand for the development of antivenoms skyrocketed, these enthusiasts turned their efforts to supporting such development, and over time, the site had morphed into a serum laboratory and snake exhibit for public education.

  Almost a century on, the museum was free to visit, and locals knew the money came from the laboratory side of the odd union. What they didn’t know was that in addition to producing antivenoms for a variety of Austral
ian snakes and spiders, the lab made other antidotes on behalf of the Taste Society too.

  I wondered how the Taste Society had acquired such an oddity. Then realized hiding in plain sight in this backwater town might offer superior protection from unwanted attention than a schmick secret facility elsewhere. That said, given this had to be just one of many Taste Society labs spread around the world, I suspected many of those other facilities would fall into the “schmick and secret” categories. After all, there was security in numbers and diversity—making it much harder for anyone to cut off the Taste Society’s supply chain.

  This particular museum and laboratory was on the outskirts of the tiny town. Set on an acreage of neatly fenced livestock yards, the building was an amalgamation of old and new, with the original stone structure expanding into COLORBOND steel, timber, glass, and concrete. A large but faded sign told museum guests they’d come to the right place.

  I hoped it would turn out to be the right place for our investigation too.

  Wind chimes tinkled as we pushed through the door, and an elderly man came to greet us. He was wearing well-worn and stained khaki shorts with a matching polo shirt that was equally worn and stained. His white hair was thin and looked long overdue for a cut. And his general demeanor and dark pouches under his eyes suggested he was long overdue for a rest too. But he moved with an energy that belied all that.

  This must be the scientist responsible for making the antidotes: Dr. Pasquel Merlot.

  His short average build and blue eyes made it feasible he was the thief, but there was no perceptible recognition in his gaze. You’d think he’d at least blink if he last saw me running toward him in my koala-print undies.

  “Visitors? How wonderful.” He pushed his hair back, which only served to make it stick up like a wispy cloud.

  “From the Taste Society,” Connor said, flashing identification I didn’t know he had.

  Pasquel’s hand halted in midair for a second, then his smile broadened. “Even better. You have no idea how rare it is to have company I don’t need to be too guarded with. Even Amy didn’t know who she was working for.”