“You won’t be on the job,” he’d said. “You cannot be asking any questions as a police detective.”
What did he think my father and I talked about? The job. Cases. Or nothing at all… for six long years.
I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t go there and be someone I’m not. But I didn’t know who I was anymore.
What would Carl have said?
I stared at the phone waiting for it to ring. It didn’t.
My hand reached out and touched the space on the wall where Carl’s plague had been. He wasn’t here. Not even in spirit. Hell, he may well have never come here at all. It was just my imagination and the remnants of a license plate number sprayed on the wall.
The Crown Prosecutor’s license plate number. The last man my former partner had killed.
A humourless laugh burst out of my mouth. And I wanted to use Carl as an anchor?
It didn’t make sense. Nothing did. Not a murder across from a private club, nor the activities that went on around the back.
Where was Carole? Where was Eagle? Who the fuck were these hooded men?
I let a slow breath of air out and pocketed my cellphone, taking one last look at the empty spot on the wall, I turned around, my eyes meeting the dark brown of Damon’s.
My heart stopped. Oxygen, though, no longer depleted. Despite the lack of a pulse right then, I could breathe.
I closed my eyes, sure I was seeing things. But when I opened them again he was still there. A few feet away, leaning against a post that marked this section of the cemetery.
He looked tired. Worried. The wind caught little curls of his hair and danced them across the skin at the back of his neck. His lush lips were pressed in a thin line, his hands deep within the pockets of his long coat. He was dressed like I’d last seen him. Jeans, long sleeved Henley, thick soled boots.
It might have been the very same clothes he’d worn last night, which meant he hadn’t been home since he left me naked in my bed. He hadn’t been home since leaving Sweet Hell. He hadn’t been home since he passed the second circle of hell and entered into the third.
Maybe he was a glutton for punishment.
I crossed my arms over my chest and walked toward him. My posture could have been attributed to the chill wind, but we both knew it wasn’t.
“Congratulations,” I said softly, my words floating away, but he’d heard. “How did you convince Marcroft?”
His eyes never left mine. His posture never changed. He was guarded, I realised. Holding himself taut as if he would break.
“Have you found out anything more about where Carole might be?” he asked, and I felt the air I’d so easily been breathing, since I’d spotted him standing right there, disappear.
I shook my head, reaching up to pull strands of my wayward hair behind an ear.
“The jury’s still out on the Irreverent Inferno connection,” I admitted.
“And yet, Pierce has told me I can go back in.”
I shrugged. “It would be a wasted opportunity to not do so.”
“What aren’t you saying, Lara?”
I stared at him.
“How did you convince Marcroft you passed?”
“How do you think?”
“Was he watching my house?”
“No.”
“Then how… Oh. You recorded it.” I shook my head, struggling for breath. “Camera as well as mic?”
“I faced the camera lens to the wall. There were only shadows.” Like the shadows on my headboard. Hooded figures in between twisted trees. But those shadows had been my imagination. Nathaniel Marcroft would have seen shadows of me.
“How could you?” I whispered.
He took a step toward me, but I held up my hand to ward him off.
“If I’d asked you to help me would you have?” he whispered back.
My eyes flicked up to his. Searching for an answer he wasn’t going to give me.
“Do I have to say it?” I said. “Do I need to?”
“Your job always came first, so there was a chance that you’d agree,” he admitted. “But you’re also very private about that sort of thing, very black and white about what’s right. About what’s wrong. And I needed ASI’s system to view it and get a copy of it, before handing it to Marcroft this morning.”
“Who saw it?” I demanded.
“Just Nick Anscombe. He cleared the control room.”
My head still shook. Utterly blindsided by this development.
“So, you chose to use me instead,” I said, but the words seemed so very distant.
“I had no choice.”
“Oh, no, Damon. There is always a choice.”
“Bullshit, Lara! I had until dawn to pass the test. Who the hell would I have passed it with, if not you?”
“But not telling me!” I yelled back. “God! Damon! They heard me…” I couldn’t say it. I couldn’t say the word. I could barely think it. Come. Orgasm. Climax. Pant. Scream. Fucking beg!
I started walking back towards my car.
“It’s Carole,” he said behind me, as if those two words made it all better.
I spun back and crossed the distance between us, my finger slamming into his chest.
“Yeah, and you know what?” I snarled, and I was picking it wasn’t pretty. “It’s always been Carole, Damon. For you Carole is your work.” Like Carl and CIB had been mine.
His eyes flicked all over my face, looking for something, I don’t know what. He would have seen my anger. My embarrassment. My rage.
But he chose to say, “You sounded beautiful.”
I wanted to laugh. But nothing about this was funny. We were a train wreck. And if we were a train wreck, what did that make my life?
“I can’t do this,” I said, staring at the ground, at the trees, at the tombstones. Anywhere but at him.
“I need you,” he replied.
My head shook. “You need whatever is necessary to find your sister and I just happen to be a fucking cop.”
“Love…”
“Don’t call me that! You lost the right to call me anything other than Detective Keen when you taped us having sex and shared the recording with other people.”
“So, it’s the sharing that worries you? Neither men kept copies.”
“Damon,” I said, exasperated. “Can’t you see it was wrong? You should have told me.”
“And what? Have you deny me my only chance of getting back in that door and maybe finding my sister before she overdoses again.”
Oh, God. This was awful. Wretched. A quagmire of utter emotional crap. I scratched at my face with both hands, trying to pry the ugliness of it all off my skin.
“I would have said yes,” I finally whispered.
Silence.
I looked up over my hands and stared at him. He looked completely devastated.
“I don’t believe you,” he whispered back, swallowing thickly. “I can’t,” he added and then turned away, giving me his back.
His shoulders heaved; I could hear his ragged breaths above the wind in the nearby trees.
“How can you not believe?” I said to his back.
He didn’t answer. He just stood there staring at the ground sucking in oxygen which had only seconds ago been mine to take.
“Say something,” I urged.
His head came up as though he was looking for an answer in the clouds.
But no words came out of his mouth.
I stood there, looking at a man I thought I knew. I thought knew me. And I realised there was nothing more to say.
Turning around and walking away was the hardest thing I’d ever done. I wanted to stop. I wanted to turn back and rail at him. Yell at him. Make him say something, anything, to make this right.
But Damon was just as lost and alone as me. His sister had done this to him. Again and again she’d crashed into his ordered world and fucked it all up. And again and again he’d tried to save her. It was ingrained in him now.
Just like Carl was ingrained i
n me.
I stopped as I reached my car, a type of understanding settling in my soul. Was this how we’d always be? Moments of connection, disconnecting when our weaknesses interfered.
My weakness was Carl. His was Carole.
We all need someone to lean on, Sport. That’s why God gave us broad shoulders and strong arms.
I was moving before I even realised it. Taking the same path back to the memorial wall, desperate to see him. I had no idea what I’d say when I got there, but something needed to be said, and one of us needed to be the first to say it.
I’d do it. I’d open up and let him in. I’d lay my heart on the ground before him and take the chance. We were both fucked up, both twisting free on an unwanted breeze. Both lost, but maybe not alone. I needed him. He said he needed me.
What more was there?
I knew my limitations. I knew just how far I could go before I cracked. The fissures had started when Carl disappeared. They’d become chasms when I found out he was a murderer. One more disaster in my life would turn the cracks into canyons, and there’d be no hope of bridging the gaps.
My one more disaster had arrived. I wasn’t blind. I could see the writing on the wall. My childhood come back to haunt me. My father. This case. I’d reached my limit. I could take no more.
And the only way I could see to make it to the other side was Damon. And if that meant taking on Carole as well, then so be it.
I came out by the memorial plaque wall and found it abandoned. He’d not been on the path I’d taken so his car must have been parked in one of the other parking areas in the cemetery grounds. I started in the direction of the largest when something caught my attention out of the corner of my eye. I instinctively slipped in behind a tall statue of an angel.
And watched as fucking Joe Cawfield crept along behind Damon towards his car.
A rush of air left my lungs and my hands fisted. All manner of questions roared inside my head.
It was clear my colleague was following Damon as surreptitiously as he could. Lurking in the shadows, maintaining a suitable distance, using a fucking high powered lens to keep an eye on his mark.
“What are you up to, Peacock?” I murmured under my breath.
Both men moved far enough ahead to be lost from my sight. I crossed the open ground before me in a dead run, body crouched, eyes peeled for further flashes of clothing indicating Cawfield wasn’t doing this surveillance trick on his own. But none eventuated, and I made the corner of the path undetected, then peered around the side of a flowering cherry tree to a large carpark.
Damon was slipping into his HEAT vehicle, Cawfield was harder to spot. But I found him, though. Hiding. Watching. Taking pictures with that bloody high powered lens.
My stomach cramped. Just what images had he capture? And why?
Damon’s truck started up and then he was moving out of the carpark, between a surprising number of cemetery visitor cars. Once he’d made the winding drive that led to the front gates of Purewa, Cawfield wove through the throng of vehicles and unlocked his own car. An unmarked Holden Commodore. There’s a reason why the Police Service uses this car as its vehicle of choice. There were at least two others in the carpark alone, and there’d be dozens more out on the main road.
Damon wouldn’t think twice if he saw it in his rear vision mirror.
Cawfield slowly followed the way Damon had gone, close enough to see his vehicle up ahead, but not so close as to cause alarm.
I knew I’d lose them. My car was parked on the other side of the cemetery. For a moment I considered my options. And then I was running. Back down the path, passed the flowering cherry tree, through the angel statues, around the memorial wall, cellphone out in hand, thumb dialling. My voice was a panted breath of over exertion when the call connected.
“Anscombe Securities & Investigations,” a woman said in my ear.
“Nick Anscombe. Now!” I shouted down the line, my car unlocking with a press of a remote key, the jubilant beep almost drowning out the woman on the other end of the phone.
“And who exactly may I say is calling?” the woman asked, no small measure of sass entering her tone.
“Detective Lara Keen, Auckland CIB,” I said, slipping into my car and starting it up. “Put him on the phone now.”
Silence. But not the silence of a phone call being connected. I could hear the woman breathing down the line.
I let a long breath of air out myself, trying to calm the fuck down. I didn’t need this.
“Look,” I said, closing my eyes and pinching the bridge of my nose. “He’s working a case with me and there’s been a development. It’s time sensitive. I need access to his system right now.”
“Don’t get your knickers in a twist, Detective,” the woman announced most unprofessionally. “He’s just walked in the door. Guess it’s your lucky day.”
Hardly.
The phone became muffled, like she’d just put her hand over the mouthpiece, and then Nick Anscombe’s deep voice came down the line.
“You upsetting my receptionist, Detective?” he said.
“Gate keeper more like,” I shot back.
“Carmel has her talents,” he agreed. “What can I do you for?”
I looked out of the windscreen towards the exit. Even if I had a good line of sight from here, I knew I wouldn’t see either Damon’s or Cawfield’s car. They’d be long gone.
But there was one way to catch up.
“Do you still have access to Damon’s GPS signal from his HEAT truck?” I asked.
Silence. Again. These people loved pertinent pauses.
“OK,” he finally said. “You’ve piqued my interest.” Like I needed to in order to get his help. “I’m walking to control right now.”
I put the car in gear and moved toward the exit. Cawfield was following Damon for a reason and I intended to find that reason out.
Chapter Nineteen
“Never a good drop of whisky around when you need it. So always carry a little spare.”
“He’s on Remuera Road, turning into Upland,” Nick said over the open line.
“I’m still back at Purewa Cemetery,” I advised. “Give me a sec.”
Silence. I was getting used to it.
“Comms, AKX3,” I said over the radio in my car.
“Go ahead, AKX3,” came the distorted voice down the line.
“QV, Remuera Road.”
“Receiving.”
I scanned the cars passing me as I sat at the entrance to the cemetery and picked one at random.
“Romeo-oscar-yankie-two-four-eight,” I said as a blue Honda whizzed by travelling too fast.
“Stand-by.”
“What are you up to, Detective?” Nick asked over the still open phone line.
I flicked my beacons on, blasted my foghorn once, twice, and then silently merged into traffic, and overtook a steady line of cars. Making the time taken to reach the corner of Remuera and Upland Roads that much quicker.
“Giving someone something else to focus on.” Cawfield would have seen me with Damon at the memorial wall. He’d also be listening in on the Police radio frequency. But he’d be on the lookout for my car in his rear vision window, as well. I was giving him the impression I was busy, pulling over a vehicle back on Remuera Road. Thereby lowering his guard.
“That vehicle comes back registered to a Jason Marcus Milton. A blue, 1989 Honda Accord,” Northcom advised.
“Copy,” I replied, turning my car onto Upland Road. I switched the beacons off and merged back into normal road traffic.
“Now who would you want to think that, Detective?” Nick asked, amusement in his tone.
“Never you mind, Mr Anscombe,” I shot back. “Where is he now?”
“Still on Upland, skirting the Orakei Basin now.”
I wasn’t far behind. In fact, I spotted Cawfield’s car as it turned at a roundabout up ahead. In the direction that Damon’s was going.
“Gotcha,” I said under my breath. But mod
ern cellphones have great microphones.
“I hope I’m not offering you my advanced technological investigative services just so you can catch up with your boyfriend and have it out with him.”
My turn to offer silence. Nick had seen and heard that recording. He knew more about me in that second than any other man besides Damon.
Oh, and Nathaniel Marcroft.
Anger made my knuckles turn white on the steering wheel. I forcibly relaxed them.
“Crossing over onto Shore Road,” Nick advised. “You do realise that he’s heading towards ASI?” he asked, casually.
Damn. It was getting late. Damon would want to head there and gear up for tonight’s events at Sweet Hell.
I tapped my finger on the steering wheel, trying to decide what to do.
“Pierce has just walked in, Detective,” Nick announced, making it become obvious that they’d arranged to meet at this time and Ryan had not advised me. “He’s listening in,” Nick added, in a show of consideration I hadn’t expected from the man.
“Keen?” Pierce’s voice said. “What have you got?”
The CIB traitor was a problem we were keeping in house. To voice my concerns now, over an unsecured line to ASI, with who knows how many people in the control room along with Nick, was not sound policing practice.
“Just checking something out, Sarge,” I offered, using my abbreviated title for him, to show him it involved work.
“OK,” he said slowly; I could practically hear the cogs turning inside his head.
“Ayr Street,” Nick advised. “He’s getting close, Detective. Make your move now or you’ll be doing it at my back door.”
Anscombe had figured it out. Not exactly what I was doing, but that it didn’t involve Damon directly. The man was more intelligent than I’d feared.
I scanned the road ahead. Cawfield was still doggedly following Damon’s HEAT truck. Several cars behind, but well within sight. If he saw Damon go into ASI’s back parking lot, he’d connect the dots. He’d see Ryan’s car. He’d know Pierce was using ASI to bug Damon. He’d back off.
I couldn’t have him backing off. He was doing this for a reason and if it related to betraying CIB in some way, I needed to know. Hart needed to know.
H.E.A.T. Book Bundle (H.E.A.T. Books 1-3) Page 49
