A Madness of Sunshine

by Nalini Singh

  Anahera shrugged. “I guess people figure friends aren’t supposed to poach from friends.”

  Expression cooling, Daniel slid his own hands into the pockets of his dark gray suit pants. His shirt was a vivid aqua, his watch a Patek Philippe Anahera vaguely recognized from a catalog the highly respected watch company had sent to Edward.

  The watch was probably worth more than the Lamborghini.

  It wasn’t a surprise that Daniel enjoyed fine watches. But it was something to note.

  “It takes two to tango,” he said in response to her sally. “And Nikau wasn’t exactly interested in dancing with his wife. He was too puffed up with his own importance, always away at a conference or in ‘office hours’ with nineteen-year-olds who thought he was a god. Not my fault if she decided to seek greener pastures.”

  “That’s why I’m talking to you.” Anahera wondered if Daniel still drew. He’d once given her a pen drawing of a kea, showing the rabble-rousing native parrot in the midst of one of its favorite activities: destroying the rubber seal around a car’s window.

  She could see no signs of that whimsical boy in this sharply dressed man.

  “Like you said,” she added, “the entire mess involved three people, not just you.” She didn’t think Nikau had cheated on his wife as Daniel was implying; Nikau had always been obsessed with Keira, far too obsessed to play outside the marriage bed.

  But, unlike Nikau, she wasn’t about to turn Daniel into a black-hearted villain who’d lured Keira away. Whatever strange emptiness she had inside her, Keira was no one’s puppet. “Not that you’re exactly an innocent party, Dan. You made the decision to be with Keira while she was still married to another man.” Separated wasn’t the same as divorced. “You had to know what was coming.”

  “Trust you to cut right to the heart of it.” Daniel’s wry smile struck her with a bolt of memory, a reminder of his charm when they’d been teenagers.

  Anahera had not only been hopelessly gawky back then, she’d dressed in hand-me-downs and cheap fabrics that her mother made into shorts and dresses. She could never hope to compete with the glossy private-school girls Daniel had favored. But the rich, pretty, popular boy had still spoken to her and they’d still played together on the beach.

  Once, he’d even paid for her movie ticket so she could see the superhero movie everyone was talking about. He’d also come into the cabin and eaten jam sandwiches together with her for lunch, never once commenting on the poverty in which Anahera and her mother existed.

  Daniel might be arrogant, but he’d never been an ass to Anahera personally.

  “I was sorry to hear about your husband.” It seemed a sincere statement. “You were never meant for a town this small, Ana. I was glad for you when you got out.”

  That was the Daniel who’d challenged her to barefoot races on the beach and who’d bought her a movie ticket. But there had always been another Daniel that she’d sensed even as a girl, well before he’d manipulated his way into the scholarship meant for Nikau: that ruthless Daniel who would do anything to get what he wanted.

  “What’re you doing in town?” She couldn’t respond to the condolence today, not without betraying the icy, hard anger that lived in her.

  “Just want to grab a coffee from Josie.” He slid off his sunglasses to reveal eyes as dark as she remembered—like chips of black granite. “I’m driving to Greymouth—have a meeting with a developer.”

  “Don’t you have a helicopter for that?”

  “Why have a gorgeous fucking machine like the Lambo if I never drive it?” His smile didn’t reach those opaque eyes. “Has there been any other news on the missing girl?”

  Anahera shook her head. “Do you know her well?”

  It was Daniel’s turn to shrug. “Like I know most people in this town.”

  Considering the watch on his wrist, Anahera decided to chance another comment. “I only really knew her when she was small.”

  “She sold me Girl Guide cookies once,” Daniel said suddenly. “Came to our door dressed in that uniform they wear. I guess she must’ve been about seven or eight. I was nineteen and home for the holidays.”

  He slid his sunglasses back on. “I bought a whole bunch of cookies off her, and she smiled this great big smile at me, and I thought: The world’s going to crush you.” No smile now, just ruthless cold. “That’s what it does to fragile, beautiful things.”

  He moved past her the next second.

  Anahera watched after him until he disappeared into the warmth of Josie’s café; that had been a distinctly odd story to share, but it could be just Daniel playing games. He’d had a way of doing that even as a boy, of manipulating people for his own enjoyment—or sometimes for no reason at all.

  Anahera had always thought he hadn’t tried it on her as a child because she was so far beneath him in terms of power and wealth or even family. She could never do anything to hurt or to help him. So he’d put down the knife, stopped the power plays.

  Looked like that no longer applied.

  35

  Will hadn’t been sure Anahera would turn up this morning, so when she pushed open the door to the station, he turned from the filing cabinet with a quiet inhale. He was struck once again by how contained she was; he wondered if anyone, even Josie, truly knew her. Maybe Nikau had an idea—the two seemed close, but if they’d ever had a romantic relationship they’d left it behind long ago.

  The entire time that Will had known Nikau, the other man had been obsessed with his ex-wife: Keira seemed to be the only woman Nik noticed—and had noticed for years. Though Will couldn’t forget that night in the bar and the way Nikau had talked about Miriama.

  Will had to be careful not to let his friendship with Nikau cloud his judgment. Because Nik fit all the parameters of someone Miriama would’ve trusted even if she’d run into him in an isolated spot—he was a local who knew her aunt and was considered a good man, a man who’d step in and help if you needed it.

  Will had once spotted Nikau slipping a twenty into the hand of an elderly woman who’d been struggling after the death of her husband.

  Nikau also spent considerable time hiking the various trails around Golden Cove, both for work and for pleasure, so Miriama wouldn’t have found it unusual to see him along her route. She’d probably run into him multiple times over the two years since he’d moved back to the Cove.

  All of that was why Will had quietly checked the search map to make sure Nikau alone had never searched a particular area.

  His relief at seeing multiple initials on all squares bearing Nik’s own initials had been an easing of muscles he hadn’t realized were knotted. The map didn’t totally clear Nik, however. If he’d hurt Miriama, the ocean would’ve been the natural dumping ground for a man who knew this landscape so intimately.

  “Done your rounds?” Anahera asked, her wavy hair down around a face that gave nothing away and that had the hard edge of knocks taken and survived.

  “Yes, no major damage.” He’d started on the cusp of dawn, been out for four hours. “I had to return Julia Lee’s dog—Cupcake the bulldog took shelter in Christine Tierney’s house, after apparently managing to dig his way out from under Julia’s fence and becoming caught in the storm. And I righted a trampoline over at Tania Meikle’s, but that was the extent of the excitement.”

  No smile on Anahera’s face. Her expression was difficult to read, but he could guess that she remained conflicted about working with Will behind her friends’ backs.

  “So,” she said, “we’re ready to go?”

  “You sure you want to be seen getting into my vehicle?”

  “Twenty seconds before I walked in here, I ran into Evelyn, made sure to mention that I needed to get some supplies from Christchurch and was catching a lift with you because my car was playing up.” She shoved her hands into the pockets of her anorak. “That’s one thing I don’t mi
ss about living in a small town—having everyone’s nose in my business.”

  Grabbing his navy jacket but not putting it on over the finely pinstriped gray of his shirt, Will stepped outside the station, Anahera preceding him out. He locked up before leading her to his SUV. It wasn’t until they were inside and he’d thrown his jacket on the backseat that he said, “But you did miss some things about it?” Pulling away from the curb, he made automatic note of the cars on the street, the people on the sidewalks.

  “You’ve seen the best of us in this hunt for Miriama,” Anahera said softly. “Rich or poor, wild or civilized, asshole or saint, when bad things happen, we come together.”

  Will thought about that. And then he thought about the dark side of such closeness. “In a town this small,” he said, “there’s a tendency to imagine that you know everything about your neighbors. But everyone has secrets.”

  Anahera’s laugh was cynical. “Is that your way of telling me you dug deeper into my sordid family history? You won’t exactly find any surprises.”

  “No. But I did run a background check on you the day after you came into town. I had to see if you’d brought trouble with you.”

  “What did you find?”

  Will concentrated on the road in front of them, the trees that shadowed it so thickly canopied that they nearly shut out the sun. “That you had a reason to leave,” he said as they passed the spot where Peter Jacobs and his brother were in the midst of towing Vincent’s crashed Mercedes.

  Will didn’t stop; he’d already been out here just before he returned to the station.

  “I was sorry to read about the circumstances of your mother’s death.” Just because they both knew he had the information didn’t mean the words didn’t need to be spoken.

  “Everyone was sorry.” Flat tone, her eyes fixed on the windscreen. “Just like everyone was sorry when my father hit her every night. Just like everyone was sorry when they glimpsed her bruises. And everyone was so sorry when she was found dead in the cabin they couldn’t be bothered to visit. But no one did anything to the man who caused it all.”

  Will had read the case files, knew what she was talking about—and it wasn’t just the abuse. “There’s no reason to think your mother’s death was anything but an accident. Her injuries were consistent with a fall from a ladder.” That ladder had been found next to her, as had a smashed photo frame.

  An empty picture hook on the wall had stood silent witness.

  “I’ve done my reading, too.” Harsher words now. “So I know that cops and forensics people can’t always distinguish between a fall and someone pushing you off so that you fall and break bones, crack your skull.”

  Will couldn’t argue with her; he’d witnessed a number of high-profile cases where the question of whether a fall had been accidental or not had never been answered. “Why didn’t your mother ever press charges against your father?” The lack of any such report had meant the outside investigators had no reason to consider foul play.

  Anahera’s head swung toward him. “Are you saying it was my mother’s fault?”

  “No.” Will kept his tone even by sheer strength of will. “Abuse is the abuser’s fault.” It was what he’d always believed, what had led him to promise a little boy named Alfie that he’d be safe, that the monster wouldn’t get to him. “I just don’t understand her choice.” As he hadn’t understood the fatal choice made by Alfie Hart’s mother.

  “From everything I read in the file, your mother was a strong woman.” Haeata Rawiri had run her own small dressmaking business throughout the marriage, was spoken of as a valued member of the community. Yet she’d stayed with her violent husband. And she hadn’t reported his violence. Not even when her husband hit their child.

  Will’s hands squeezed the steering wheel.

  Anahera didn’t reply.

  Eventually, Will turned on the radio and the two of them moved through the lonely, beautiful landscape while listening to the cohosts bantering with one another about a rock star who had an addiction to rehab.

  He’d long ago given up on getting an answer when she said, “He saved her once.” Her voice was cold, distant. “My mother was born into an abusive family and my father came along on his motorbike and whisked her away to a life of adventure and exploration. The first three years, she always told me, were wonderful. She was free and she wasn’t afraid and he was her Prince Charming.”

  “What changed?”

  “My father likes to blame everything on losing his job when the big factory out Greymouth way shut down.” Her tone made it clear what she thought of that excuse. “That’s what my mother used to say as well—that he lost his manhood when he couldn’t support his family and we had to rely on her income and on welfare.” She snorted. “All pure bullshit. What kind of manhood is it to pound on your wife and child?”

  Will’s mind blazed with the image of a burning house, flames licking up to the roof and the heat so violent it scalded. “That’s not manhood,” he said as the scarred skin on his back seemed to tighten. “That’s weakness.”

  Anahera went silent again, and the two of them drove on through empty roads surrounded by trees and tangled undergrowth, past a glacier-fed river that glittered arctic blue, and in the shadow of mountains that had stood for thousands of years, their peaks capped with snow.

  They stopped for coffee midway, but neither one of them was hungry for lunch.

  Traffic began to pick up during the second half of their journey, but it was free-flowing, no breakdowns or delays. They’d made excellent time—just over three hours, forty-five minutes—and all too soon were in the heart of civilization and it felt like a bright flashlight shining into the face after the smudged light of Golden Cove.

  Too many cars, too many people, too many noises—from the construction site on the corner to the teenager banging out a rhythm on an outdoor drum set to the driver gesticulating angrily at another.

  “Do you have anything else to do in the city?”

  Anahera stirred. “I need to pick up a new laptop. I ordered it online and they’re holding it for me. I didn’t want to risk it coming via courier.”

  “Let’s pick that up last. Otherwise, you’d have to carry it around or risk leaving it in the vehicle.” He was too pragmatic to imagine that this being a police vehicle would stop thieves from breaking in—some people lived to cross boundaries, the thrill of the act as important as what they might get.

  “That works for me. How many jewelers will we be visiting?”

  “I’ve got a list of ten.” He stopped at a red light. “That doesn’t include the more mass-market jewelers. We’ll head there if we strike out at the specialist jewelers and watchmakers—even if they didn’t make or import it, they might know who did.” New Zealand was a small country and the jewelers were in a niche industry.

  “You sound pretty sure about it being a specialist piece.”

  “I woke before dawn this morning. No use doing the patrol in the dark, so I spent the time online, trying to find watches similar to the one gifted to Miriama. Zero results. My gut says it was custom-made and the ten places I have on my list all do custom jobs.”

  “It’s possible it was purchased internationally.”

  “I found a tiny koru design in the platinum of the band—on the underside, where it locks into the right side of the watch face.” Inspired by the curl of a fern frond, it was a distinctly New Zealand symbol, one that signified new life and creation, growth and change. “That doesn’t rule out an overseas watchmaker, but it lessens the chances.”

  He maneuvered around a large roadwork truck. “If the trail does run cold, I’ll do what you’ve suggested and upload the image to the web, see if someone recognizes the design or workmanship.” But first, he’d search closer to home. Miriama’s lover would—at the time—have had no reason to think anyone would come looking for the origin of the piece.


  The lover had also come across as highly possessive and controlling in the journal entries. A man like that would probably want to direct the design process, possibly even supply his own gemstones. Far easier to do that with a local. “Our first stop is a boutique in the city. According to a friend of mine who works in high-end thefts, the boutique’s known for its discretion as well as the high caliber of its work. You okay to wait on something to eat till after this stop?”

  “I’m not the one who’s been up since before daybreak.”

  “I’ll fill up at lunch.”

  Managing to find a parking space only about five minutes away—a miracle in a city lined with orange cones and construction vehicles—he got out and the two of them began the short walk to the boutique. The midday sunshine was crisp against their faces, the city buzzing with life, but scars from the earthquake that had devastated it years earlier remained impossible to avoid.

  Beside him, Anahera took care not to step on a hairline crack in the pavement that had escaped repair, and he wondered what it must have been like for her to be so far from her friends when news of the quake first broke. “There.” He nodded toward a discreet little shop tucked in between an electronic goods store and a designer clothing boutique. “That’s our first stop.”

  36

  The jeweler didn’t boast a security guard, but Will spotted two video cameras and an automatic metal grille that could be slammed down at a moment’s notice. He’d bet the window glass was bulletproof and that the staff all had access to silent alarms under the counters. He also wouldn’t be surprised if some of the items on display were beautiful fakes, with the real gems kept in locked safes and only brought out for serious buyers.

  Pulling open the heavy door, he walked into the air-conditioned inner sanctum behind Anahera. The woman who looked up from the other side of the pristine glass counter was an expertly groomed brunette in a maroon dress that hugged her body without being too tight. “Hello,” she said with a warmly professional smile. “How may I help you today?”