by Candice Fox
‘Well, that’s all we know,’ Lydia huffed.
‘The murder weapon was found at the scene of the crime,’ Celine said. ‘It was too badly burned to be identifiable. Did you ever see guns at the Kradle house?’
‘Certainly not.’
‘What about that day?’ Celine said. ‘He’s supposed to have returned from a job only minutes after the gunshots were heard. If that story is correct, he must have missed being killed himself by only seconds. Did you see him driving around the neighbourhood that afternoon?’
‘No.’
‘Ever see him fight with Christine? Or his son?’
‘That man was as gentle as a lamb,’ Lydia said. ‘And very tolerant. We knew the family well, even before Christine did her disappearing act. She was what you’d call an eccentric. But not a genuine one, either. The kind who wants to be thought of as eccentric. She would get drunk at the barbecues and start talking about spirits and auras and all kinds of rubbish. Reading people’s heads. It was embarrassing.’
‘Kradle didn’t mind all the theatrics?’
‘He laughed it off. He was a plain kind of guy. Real. Reliable. Solid. Like a house brick,’ Lydia said. ‘Some people are fairy princesses, and some people are just house bricks. And two of the same in a relationship gets a bit tiresome, I think.’
‘Okay,’ Celine said. ‘What about after Christine left?’
‘Oh, he handled that with so much dignity,’ Lydia sighed. ‘He raised that boy really well. I’d see them at the local hardware store together sometimes, buying supplies. I’m ashamed to say I hid once or twice so as not to run into them. The whole thing was just so strange. I didn’t know what to say about her running off on him like that. I mean, what do you say?’
‘I don’t know,’ Celine admitted.
‘Whatever happened in that house that day, it’s got to do with her,’ Lydia said. ‘I can tell you that much. Christine was trouble. She was always talking about evil, and what happened was evil. I say she brought it home with her. That’s my take on it all.’
‘Okay,’ Celine said. ‘Look, Mrs Scott, I have to go.’
‘Will you use that quote, about the fairies and the bricks?’ Lydia asked. ‘I think it’s quite clever. I just came up with it.’
Celine hung up and crossed the Scotts off her list. The car door popped open and Keeps, wearing only boxer shorts, slipped into the driver’s seat, slung a wrist over the steering wheel.
‘The king is dead,’ Keeps said.
‘What’s that mean?’
‘It means somebody stabbed Elvis Presley dead last night in Vegas,’ Keeps said. ‘He’s left the building.’
‘That’ll have them crying in the chapel.’
‘You ever hear of an inmate named Ira Kingsley?’
‘I have, actually.’ Celine’s eyes widened as she realised. ‘I knew Ira back when I worked over in medium. Oh, no. He—’
‘He did it.’ Keeps nodded. ‘He always said if he ever got out he was gonna go back there and make the guy perform the whole thing again. The Elvis wedding. Make him apologise about the moustache thing.’
‘It was a pretty stupid moustache,’ Celine said. ‘I’m with Elvis. That was too much moustache for just one face.’
‘Yeah, well, now Ira’s dead too.’
‘Elvis kill him?’
‘No. The woman broke her binds and ran away, got help. Police came and shot Ira.’
Celine sighed. She hadn’t had enough coffee to deal with everything she was being exposed to this morning: death, evil, innocent incarcerated men, celebrity impersonations. When Keeps reached over and stroked her knee she closed her eyes and tried to access the warmth and anticipation she’d felt only hours earlier. But all she felt was dread.
‘What are you doing sitting here in the car?’ he asked.
‘I didn’t want to wake you. I’ve been making calls from Kradle’s list.’ She opened her eyes and showed him the pages. ‘I’ve spoken to two sets of neighbours, the owner of a gun shop and a couple who had Christine clear their shed of a malevolent spirit about a month before the murders.’
‘And what did they say?’
‘The neighbours and the couple said Christine was a weirdo and Kradle was the long-suffering but gentle husband.’ Celine heard the exhaustion in her own voice. ‘The gun shop owner says he never sold a gun to John Kradle. And he said Detective Frapport never asked about anybody else. It was just, “Did you sell this guy a gun?” and showing a picture of Kradle.’
‘So Frapport had his tunnel vision on.’
‘Yes.’
‘Let me have a look at the other gun stores around,’ Keeps said, and took her phone from the dashboard. Celine felt her hands stiffen in her lap.
‘Huh. A passcode,’ Keeps said.
‘Oh, yeah.’ She took the phone and typed in the numbers as casually as she could, then offered the device back. Keeps didn’t take it.
‘There wasn’t a passcode on your phone last night,’ Keeps said. Celine didn’t answer. He continued, his face unreadable. ‘I know, because I used it to order dinner.’
‘My phone prompted me to add one,’ Celine lied. ‘I thought it was probably good practice.’
‘Your phone just randomly prompted you to add one?’ Keeps asked.
‘Yeah.’
‘Did you add one to your laptop, too?’
‘No.’
‘So if I go in there and try to use your laptop right now, it won’t ask me for a password.’ Keeps pointed to the door ahead of them through the windshield. Celine felt her neck burning, threatening sweat. They sat in silence for a while.
‘What the hell happened?’ Keeps turned to her.
‘I was scammed.’
‘What?’
‘The bank called me last night to tell me I’d been scammed. A test payment to Kuala Lumpur.’
‘And you . . .’ Keeps struggled to form the words. A tight, unfriendly smile played about his lips. He touched his chest. ‘Whoa. Whoa, now. You think I’m the one—’
‘No, no, no.’
‘Oh, this is amazing.’ He laughed, slumped back in his seat. ‘This is amazing.’
Celine stared at the dashboard, chewing her lip. That old, protective smile wanted to rise to her lips, but she forbade it. She felt angry, and she deserved the anger, and she wanted to feel it transform her face into an ugly mask.
‘Is it really that amazing?’ she asked suddenly. ‘You’re in my life for what, two days? And suddenly I get scammed? I’ve never been scammed before. Why should it happen now? You scam people for a living, Keeps. It’s what you do.’
Jake the cat wandered alongside the car, from the rear to the front. Celine spotted his tail in the side mirror. The animal leaped soundlessly onto the bonnet, sat and watched them through the glass, seemingly aware of the tension and curious at its source.
‘You know,’ Keeps said carefully, ‘I think this is just about this Kradle guy.’
‘Oh, come on.’
‘You’re starting to believe he might be all right,’ Keeps said. ‘And if he’s all right, that means you don’t know your bad eggs from your good ones. And maybe you never have.’
Celine listened. She knew the words were true. That she was starting to believe that John Kradle might have been a good man all along, and that the same cursed blindness that had prevented her from seeing her grandfather as a potential killer had blinded her to Kradle’s goodness. Was she still blind? Was the same man who had held her and stroked her and gasped in her ear in the dark the night before – who had led her to break every rule she’d ever made about men who she’d kept behind bars – a man who wanted to hurt her?
Keeps opened the driver’s side door and slipped out. He scratched Jake’s ear briefly as he headed back into the house. Celine didn’t leave the car until she heard the front door of the house slam behind him.
CHAPTER 32
Trinity Parker was walking out of the small office outside the front gates of Pronghorn as Celi
ne arrived in her car. The US Marshal had a tactical vest strapped to her chest, black jeans and black combat gloves pulled on, a black cap securing her dark hair. Celine saw for the first time the Trinity Parker she must have known was underneath the managerial facade the whole time; the one who went out into the wilds and hunted men for a living. She opened the door and made to get out of her car, but Trinity waved her back into the vehicle and came around to the passenger side. Celine noticed that, in the corner of the parking lot, a crew of maybe twenty men in the same tactical gear as Trinity were assembling near two big black vans.
‘I’ll ride with you,’ Trinity said as she slipped into the vehicle. ‘I don’t like to head out to a mission with the men. Gives them the idea you’re one of them. And there’s always someone who starts nervously farting.’
‘We’re going on a mission?’
‘We have the pick-up details for Brassen’s money,’ Trinity said. ‘What did you think, I was calling you in so we could head to a salon and get our nails done?’
‘The message just said Come to Pronghorn,’ Celine said. ‘You know, part of effective personnel management is telling everyone what’s going on.’
‘Here’s what’s going on. We got a message this morning, at five, from someone on the other side. They’ve left a duffel bag of cash for Brassen at the Rancho Salvaje Wildlife Park outside Coyote Springs.’
‘A wildlife park?’ Celine pulled out of the parking lot, heading into the desert.
‘Makes sense. We’ve scoped out the venue. Great place for a sniper to set up shop. The park is in a valley. Lots of rocky hills around, just like Pronghorn. And by this time of day the place will be flooded with early visitors, trying to beat the Christmas rush. Children, families, park workers.’
‘Well, we have to shut the place down,’ Celine said.
‘Not a chance,’ Trinity said.
‘You can’t carry out an operation like this with hundreds of innocent bystanders in the crosshairs,’ Celine said.
‘Are you telling me how to do my job?’ Trinity smirked. ‘Please, carry on. I didn’t know you’d brought down extremely dangerous terrorist organisations before.’
Celine sighed.
‘The park has to run as normal,’ Trinity said. ‘If we shut it down, the first thing that will happen is angry families will take to social media to complain, and the gig will be up that we’re helping Brassen. We’re going to fill the area around the lockers where the bag is with agents dressed as civilians, and we’ll siphon any real civilians who come through the gates away from the danger zone. There won’t be park visitors or staff within five hundred yards of the drop point. That’s the best we can do.’
‘Sounds terrible,’ Celine said. ‘Go on.’
‘We need the contact from The Camp to believe Brassen is on his own, and scared. Best-case scenario is that the target will be lying in wait somewhere near the bag so that he can take Brassen out in close quarters. Shoot him, or stab him maybe.’ Trinity leaned back in her seat and put a big boot up on the dashboard. ‘We should be able to spot that. Anyone hanging around the danger zone who’s not a part of my team will likely be involved, so we’ll just grab him. The second-best-case scenario is the target from The Camp tries to pick off Brassen from afar with a sniper, like they did with the bus driver. If that happens, we’ll have to try to scoop him up with the outer cordon crew. That’ll be harder. It’s a big area.’
‘What if Schmitz’s guy really has just dropped the bag for him to pick up?’ Celine asked. ‘And they trust Brassen to take the money and keep his mouth shut?’
‘That’s the worst-case scenario,’ Trinity said.
The two women rode in silence for a while, the flat earth stretching wide and featureless all around them.
‘I just noticed that your buddy isn’t here.’ Trinity glanced into the back seat. ‘Lover’s tiff?’
‘We’re not lovers.’
‘That hickey on your neck tells me otherwise.’
Celine grabbed the rear-view mirror and turned it towards her, tugged down the collar of her T-shirt. ‘What hickey? There’s no hickey.’
‘No,’ Trinity said. ‘But now I know everything I need to know.’
Celine felt a rush of anger billow up inside her, a painful swelling under her ribs.
‘Like I said,’ Trinity continued. She was tapping away at her phone. ‘I understand the temptation. Point is, you can get confused by criminals. Especially when they’re out there blending in with everybody else like foxes among the dogs. Best thing to do is just stick to your job, Osbourne. Your job is to put them where they’ve been deemed to go. In a cell or in the ground. You’re not a judge, or a jury, or a detective.’
Celine moved as though through a dream, parking the car in a crowded lot under a big sign directing patrons towards the ticket booths. Trinity pulled a jacket over her vest and zipped it to the neck, stuffed her hands in her pockets and nodded towards the side entrance to the park. Celine didn’t see the huge black vans or the rest of the team until she found herself wandering the concrete back halls of the park with Trinity and a very nervous man in a navy-blue suit. They passed one-way viewing windows that looked into lush green enclosures, but they were moving too quickly for Celine to catch a glimpse of any animals. It struck her how like the prison the zoo was, with its swipe-card security doors, motion-sensor cameras and iron gates. There was a smell here, more fetid and primal than the one at Pronghorn, but not by much.
While Trinity and the park manager walked ahead, Celine suddenly looked back and found the tactical team walking behind her, more joining the convoy from side halls as they moved along.
‘I don’t understand why we weren’t given more notice about this,’ the park manager was saying. ‘My park is full of patrons. I’ve got more than a hundred staff on duty today.’
‘Yeah, and I need those staff to keep doing what they’re doing, diverting civilians away from the section I indicated on the map I sent you,’ Trinity said. ‘How’s that going?’
‘Well, I’m losing a lot of merchandise sales,’ the manager said. ‘If I’d had more of a briefing—’
‘I don’t give people notice, Mr Eprice.’ Trinity stopped and put her hand on the guy’s shoulder. ‘What I do is more like a blitzkrieg. I can’t have a hundred park employees, all with cell phones, assembling in a boardroom with coffee and cookies while I lay out the plan with a PowerPoint presentation. There’s no rehearsal dinner. We’re at the wedding and it’s time for the vows.’
‘What do I do?’ Mr Eprice glanced at Celine, the only other person not in tactical gear, but she could only offer him a small smile of mutual confusion.
‘Go have a coffee and a cookie somewhere. We’ll make sure we clean up after we’re done.’ Trinity nodded to two of her team members, who grabbed the park manager and ushered him away. A person dressed in a huge, fluffy zebra costume stepped into the hall from what looked like a staff cafeteria, turned this way and that, surveying the scene, and then backed into the room again and closed the door.
They stopped at a small room full of computers, monitors. Celine noted there was a station of monitors for ‘enclosures’, one for ‘transit’ and one for ‘retail’. Trinity went to the ‘retail’ monitors and stood watching. Celine came up beside her.
‘These are civilians,’ Trinity said, pointing to the screen. Celine saw a bank of turnstiles and ticket booths. She watched as a family paid for entry into the park, pushed through the turnstiles and were immediately intercepted by a man dressed as a tiger who gestured wildly to a place off screen, bouncing on his tiptoes.
‘Where is he taking them?’
‘He’s not taking them, he’s luring them.’ Trinity gave a small smile. ‘We’re giving away cuddly toys, T-shirts and ball caps. Nobody says no to a free ball cap. Once the tourists are through the giveaway area they’re forced down a long path towards the elephant enclosure, which takes them to the complete opposite side of the park.’
‘It’s w
orking,’ Celine conceded, watching a couple with a baby being diverted sideways from the area immediately outside the ticket gates. ‘But what if some of The Camp’s people try to come through and your staff direct them away?’
‘I have a feeling they won’t let themselves be lured with the promise of free gifts.’ Trinity smiled. ‘Come on. We haven’t got much time,’ Trinity said to Celine, beckoning. Two female tactical team members followed close behind them as they took a set of stairs. They emerged into an empty building, a large, sprawling affair with boarded-up windows and display cabinets shrouded in white sheets. Trinity led them to a bare room on the second floor with a balcony that overlooked a sunny square. Celine peered down towards the intersection of wide, clean streets between the buildings.
‘What is this place?’ she asked.
‘Used to be the reptile and insect house.’ Trinity was peering through a shutter at the people below. ‘They’re turning it into a restaurant, I think.’
‘Where’s Brassen?’
Trinity nodded. Celine came to the shutters, looked out over a large paved intersection between storefronts of gift shops and restaurants. Looking to the left of the square, she could just make out the entry turnstiles in the distance. She watched as another costumed mascot scooped up a family for free gifts, while a solitary man bypassed the crowds and made his own way down the avenue towards the square. She realised as he neared that it was Brassen, walking uncertainly, head down, hands in his pockets.
‘The bag, we’re told, is in locker twenty-three,’ Trinity said. Celine followed her gaze. Across the square, under a long green awning festooned with fake tropical plants, a wall of lockers stood. Celine could barely read the big sign displaying the rental prices. She watched a couple in T-shirts and ball caps wander past the lockers and stop by a glass-walled enclosure that held fairy penguins flapping and waddling on white sand. The woman posed by the glass as her partner snapped a picture with his phone.
‘These are all your people?’ Celine asked.
Trinity nodded.
