Ellie’s gaze locked on Lozza’s. Her jaw tightened and her eyes turned feverish beneath the bandage on her brow. “I hope you don’t find him. And if you do, I hope he’s dead and that he suffered.”
Silence slammed into the room.
Lozza took in a deep, slow breath. She heard Gregg making notes in his notepad.
“Why do you say this, Ellie?”
“Because . . . I hate him.”
She waited. Ellie offered nothing more.
“Do you hate him because you found out that he was having an affair? Or because you felt he married you for your money?”
Something in Ellie’s eyes shuttered. Her hands fisted the sheets. “I need you to leave. Now,” she said through clenched teeth. “I . . . I’m tired. I’m going to be sick. I—”
Quickly, before Ellie could reach for her buzzer and summon medical personnel, Lozza said, “Can we at least try and go back to the last point you do remember, Ellie? Do you recall meeting me on the beach? We swam together with my daughter.”
“Yes,” Ellie whispered. “I remember.”
Lozza cleared her throat. “And then while we were in the water, you saw Martin up on the beach.”
She nodded.
“You looked terrified.”
“I . . . He wasn’t supposed to be home. He’d been on a business trip to Sydney. I wasn’t expecting him home for several days.”
“And this frightened you?”
She looked puzzled, as if she really was trying to remember something.
“What happened after Maya and I left you and Martin in the dunes?”
“I . . . We . . .” She appeared confused again and trailed off.
“Take your time,” Lozza said softly.
“I was afraid, but I don’t remember why.”
“Martin had brought an esky and wineglasses to the beach. You had a sundowner after I left, maybe?” Lozza said.
“Maybe.”
“What did Martin bring to drink for this sundowner?” Gregg asked.
“White wine, I think.”
Gregg made more notes. “How did you feel after the wine?” he asked.
“Um . . . buzzy, I suppose. I . . . I was very stressed. Perhaps . . . I had a bit more than I should have. To . . . to take the edge off.”
“Why did you need to take the edge off?” Lozza asked. “Why did you feel so stressed that day?”
Ellie moistened her lips again and closed her eyes. Tears leaked out from under her lashes. Very quietly, her jaw tight, she said, “I. Can’t. Recall. Things.”
“Can you recall packing your suitcases?”
“Nothing. I can’t remember . . . what happened before.” Ellie suddenly lunged for the call button and pressed it to summon a nurse.
“Ellie, please, quickly, think, just one more time—do you have any idea where Martin might have gone?”
“No,” she said, eyes still closed.
A nurse entered the room. She took one look at Ellie and said, “Okay, you guys need to leave. Now.”
THEN
LOZZA
“She’s lying,” Gregg said to Lozza as she drove them to the Puggo to interview Rabz. “That retrograde-amnesia thing is suspiciously convenient.”
“I agree—she’s holding something back,” Lozza said, turning into the street that led to the pub. She pulled into a parking space right outside the Puggo and switched off the engine. Gregg unbuckled his seat belt.
“Even if some of her memory does return,” he said, “how do we know if she’s going to share anything she’s recalled? And we have no way of knowing for certain just how far back—or how selective—this ‘retrograde’ thing is, either.” He got out of the vehicle. Lozza followed suit and slammed her door shut.
“Plus, there’s the weird shit with the Corolla you said you heard bolting from their house.”
“Yeah.” Lozza glanced up at the CCTV camera as they passed under it.
And the bikie with the drug package, and the Queensland plates.
Rabz sat behind her desk in her office and twisted the strings of her apron. Her complexion was bloodless, her eyes puffy. Lozza and Gregg sat facing her on the other side of her desk.
“Yes,” she said, “I’ve been seeing Martin.”
“How long?” Lozza asked.
“Is this relevant? I understand you need whatever help you can get to find him, but—”
Lozz leaned forward. “The more comprehensive a profile of a missing person is, the more we can know about his or her state of mind, motivation, recent movements—it gives us more tools with which to find the person.”
“Lozz is right,” Gregg said. “If Martin has had an accident out at sea, or if he washed up somewhere, a good profile—knowing his state of mind—will give us ideas of how he might react, where he might go, what he might do.”
Rabz looked down at her hands. “We’ve been seeing each other for a while.”
“How long is ‘a while’?” asked Lozza, watching Rabz’s eyes carefully.
The woman’s face reddened. “Before his wife arrived here.”
Lozza said, “His wife’s name is Ellie.”
Rabz swallowed, nodded. “Before Ellie arrived in Jarrawarra.”
“How long before Ellie moved to Jarra?” Gregg asked.
Silence.
“Rabz?”
A tear slid down the side of her face. She quickly swiped it away. “Since October last year. We met when Martin first came to look for land up at Agnes.”
Lozza frowned, recalling Willow’s words about the Vegas wedding. “I thought the Cresswell-Smiths were more recently married? Like in May this year.”
Rabz hesitated, shot a nervous glance at the door as if desperate to escape, then said, “Martin and I started seeing each other before he even met Ellie. He met her in early January this year. In Vancouver.”
Lozza exchanged a quick glance with Gregg. Her pulse quickened.
“Just to get this clear,” she said, “you and Martin were dating before Martin met Ellie? And then you and Martin continued seeing each other long distance throughout their courtship and marriage? Then after they moved here, you and Martin continued the affair?”
She nodded.
A dark, inky thought that dovetailed with Willow’s comments bled into Lozza’s brain. “Did Martin marry Ellie for her money, Rabz? Is that what this is about? He loves you, but she’s bankrolling your lives?”
“It’s not like that.”
“What’s it like, then?” asked Gregg.
“Why don’t you guys bloody well find him and then you can ask him yourself!”
Lozza and Gregg said nothing. They waited.
Rabz pushed a tangle of hair back from her face and said, “I’m sorry. I’m just wired—I’m so scared he’s dead or something and I . . . I’ve had no one I could talk to, or share my worry with. We were in Sydney together and then he got a sudden call from her. She informed him that it was urgent that he come home right away. He flew back early.”
“By ‘her’ you mean Ellie, his wife?” Lozza asked.
“Yes,” Rabz snapped. “Ellie. He said he was going to leave her. We’d bought tickets to . . . we were going to go away together. Live abroad, travel the world. I don’t know what was so important that he had to rush back for.”
Quietly, Lozza said, “Here’s the thing I’m not understanding. You and Martin start an affair around the time he develops an interest in a big expensive development in New South Wales. You’re single, he’s single—why not just make it official?”
She looked down, said nothing.
“And then he meets Ellie, who we’ve learned is some Canadian heiress—her father is one of the wealthiest men in the country. And Martin marries her very quickly, supposedly on a trip to Las Vegas, while you two carry on your secret affair. He and his rich wife form a partnership with funds from her daddy, and Martin Cresswell-Smith is suddenly flush with funds to proceed with the development. Yet he’s planning to leave her and r
un away with you?” Lozza paused.
Gregg watched Rabz closely. “Looks to me like he’s a gold digger, Rabz, and you knew it.”
“He’s wealthy in his own right,” Rabz countered. “He’d made a mistake with Ellie, that’s all. A terrible mistake. He’d realized it after she’d moved here. She was not what he thought she was. He was winding things up and selling his half of Agnes Holdings, and he was going to leave her before she freaked out and tried to harm him or something. She’d get high on drugs and hurl things at him. She stabbed him on the boat—a whole lot of people witnessed what she was like that day. Martin said he saw something truly frightening in Ellie that day. She tried to strike him with a cast-iron frying pan later. I . . . And now, with you guys here, with no sight of him, yet she returned from the fishing outing? I’m worried she might have done something to him. He’d never have taken her out fishing again. I know he wouldn’t have. It made no sense that they went out in the boat again. Just after she called him home urgently. She must have lured or coerced him to do it or something.”
Lozza thought of what Willow had said—that she too felt it unlikely her friend Ellie would go out in the boat with Martin again. Things were not adding up here.
“You mentioned you and Martin had bought plane tickets?”
“We were going to fly to the Cape Verde islands in just over two weeks. Martin had rented us a house there for a year.”
“And you believe he was winding up his company—this big development project?” Gregg said.
“Well, he said he was off-loading his share of it, and leaving Ellie to handle the rest or sell or whatever.”
“Did Ellie know that her husband was getting on a plane and vanishing in two weeks?” Lozza asked, testing Rabz.
Rabz looked embarrassed. “No . . . I . . . I don’t think so. Why would she?”
“Are you aware that Ellie had hired a PI to follow you and her husband, and that she apparently has compromising photographs of you and Martin?”
Sweat beaded across Rabz’s lip. She wiped it away with a trembling hand. “No,” she whispered.
Lozza placed the CCTV photo of the bald man on Rabz’s desk and pushed it toward her.
“Do you recognize this man, Rabz?”
She studied the photo. “No. Why?”
“This man came into the Puggo with a parcel for Ellie while you were away. He left the parcel here for her to pick up. Had he come in before?”
“I . . . I’ve never seen him. I’d recognize someone like that.” She glanced up. “What’s he got to do with this?”
“Maybe nothing,” Lozza said. Her mobile buzzed. She ignored it and watched Rabz’s face closely as she studied the photo again. Gregg’s phone then buzzed. Gregg checked the caller ID and motioned to Lozza he was stepping out to take the call. She nodded.
“There is something else,” Rabz said quietly as Gregg departed. “It might be important . . . given everything that has happened.” She wavered, wiped her mouth again, then said, “The night before they were seen going out in the Quinnie, Martin called me from his house. He said there’d been a sudden change of plans. He could no longer meet me in Sydney to fly to the Cape Verde islands. He asked if I could join him at a hotel in Kuala Lumpur instead. He said he’d be leaving for KL early and he’d wait for me there—send details. And we’d head to Cape Verde from KL.”
Lozza frowned. “You think he might have bolted to KL?”
“He hasn’t answered his cell. He said he’d text me the hotel details and he never did.”
“Did he say why he was changing plans suddenly?”
“No. All he said was something had come up and he needed to take care of it. Then he hung up. Next morning he goes out in a boat with Ellie and never comes back.”
Lozza considered Rabz in silence.
“Ellie is not what meets the eye, Lozz,” Rabz said. “She might come across all demure and gentle and introverted, but that kind of woman can be the most dangerous when betrayed or wronged, because you least expect it. They can be deadly. Did you know that she stabbed her ex-husband when she caught him having dinner at a restaurant with his mistress? Do you know the police in Hawaii thought she’d drowned her three-year-old daughter in the sea at Waimea Bay?”
Surprise quickened through Lozza. “Her daughter drowned?”
“Ellie took her out into waves that were too big.”
Suddenly Ellie’s odd behavior in the sea took on new meaning. She held Rabz’s gaze, saying nothing, waiting for Rabz to fill the silence again.
“If Ellie knew about our affair . . . I think she could have done something terrible to him.”
“Lozza?” Gregg reappeared in the doorway, an intense look on his face. “I need to speak to you. Now.”
Lozza stepped outside the office.
Gregg kept his voice low. “They found a body. Up at Agnes. Could be him.”
THEN
LOZZA
Thunder clapped above them and Lozza winced. The sound grumbled over the mangrove swamp and rolled toward the sea. The storm had muscled in while she and Gregg had gone up the Agnes River with skipper Mac McGonigle and Barney guiding them to the gruesome find tangled into the lines of Barney’s illegal crab pots.
It was dark now and pouring. And she was pretty sure it was Martin Cresswell-Smith they’d found floating in the little cove without his pants on. The body type and hair were a match. She’d recognized his ring from when she’d swum with Ellie.
Lozza had taken photographs. Gregg had cordoned off the immediate area around the floater in the small cove. They were now waiting for a forensic team, a coroner, and a detective from the murder squad, but the storm was holding them up.
Thunder cracked again and rain redoubled in force and volume. The drops struck the black water in the channel with such force they sent up a stream of backsplashes that looked like a shimmering waterfall under the glare of the boat spotlights and intermittent flashes of lightning. There was only room for two under the boat’s targa cover, so she and Gregg sat out in the rain. Water dripped steadily off the bill of her cap. It ran down the back of her neck. Her hair was sodden. She wiped her face and checked her watch. Just over two since she’d called in the floater.
Gregg’s gaze followed her movement. “That gaff in his chest—that’s like a statement.”
She nodded, thinking of Maya. Hoping she was finishing her homework. “Yeah. Personal. Overkill in those puncture wounds.”
“And the missing fingers? Nothing makes sense,” Gregg said. He sat silent for another fifteen minutes, and Lozza said a personal thanks for that. He’d been jabbering nervously since she’d returned to the boat from the abandoned house where she’d seen the pieces of severed finger, ropes, feces, windbreaker from Canada, and pale-blue Nike ball cap.
Lightning flared. Everything turned white silver. The image of the floater shot vividly back into her mind.
White skin against black water, the empty eye sockets, the nose-less face, the open, lipless mouth. Her brain circled back to the words they’d heard from Rabz shortly before they got this call.
“Ellie is not what meets the eye . . . That kind of woman can be the most dangerous when betrayed or wronged, because you least expect it. They can be deadly. Did you know that she stabbed her ex-husband when she caught him having dinner at a restaurant with his mistress?”
Lozza wasn’t sure Ellie Cresswell-Smith could be capable of this. Did she have an accomplice? Had Ellie had a window of opportunity between when witnesses had last seen her and her husband—the victim—heading out in their Quinnie, and when Lozza had found her on the bathroom floor?
As the questions circled around and around in Lozza’s brain, another half hour ticked down. The rain stopped. They heard the sound of a helicopter behind the clouds.
“It’s them,” said Mac.
She checked her watch again. A total of two hours and twenty-three minutes. She got up. The boat rocked. Soon they heard the sound of an engine coming up the channel.
Bright spotlights winked in and out of view behind the tangle of mangrove trees. The radio crackled. Mac responded, guiding the arriving launch into their mooring along the jetty.
Lozza shielded her eyes against the blinding glare of the spotlights as the boat approached in the darkness. She could make out several silhouettes, glimpses of white—crime scene techs had already suited up and were ready to go. The boat moored on the opposite side of the jetty. Lozza climbed out and stood on the dock. Waves slapped and splashed against the pilings.
A man, a black silhouette against the row of spotlights atop the bar of the newly arrived police boat, climbed out. He approached her.
Something in the vestigial caves of Lozza’s subconscious began to stir as the man neared. Something about his movements. Before her brain could interpret the recognition in her body, light fell on his face.
Lozza’s heart stalled. She swallowed. Then swore viciously to herself.
“Lozz,” he said.
“Corneil.” Of all the murder cops from HQ, they had to send this one. Her nemesis. The one detective who’d lobbied hard to have her stripped of her badge after the “incident.” A man who’d been married when she’d had an affair with him. A man she now hated with hot passion.
“Didn’t expect to see you,” he said quietly.
His voice was the same. Flat. Toneless. Like his face. Like his eyes. Unreadable. Expressionless. The homicide detective rarely showed emotion—just those watchful eyes. God knew what she’d ever seen in him. She’d thought she’d needed sex. But mostly Lozza had just needed to be held. It had started in the bathroom stall of a pub on a very drunken night exactly one year to the day after Lozza’s husband’s death. Her husband had been a firefighter, and she’d loved him more than the entire world. They’d been talking of kids. They’d had plans for the future. Then in the blink of an eye he was gone. Killed by a drunk driver.
Then came Corneil.
After Corneil came many rough cases, too many drunken nights, then ultimately a call where Lozza had snapped. A call where a brute had beaten his wife to death in spite of a restraining order she’d had on him. And it had happened while their little girl, just a toddler, had been hiding terrified under their bed.
In the Deep Page 26
