The Chase

by Candice Fox

  He watched the prison slowly growing, the minimum, medium and maximum security sections at first appearing as one grey mass against the huge walls, then dividing like cells. In the back of the truck, Keeps still lolled, unconscious, bleeding from the nose onto a seat that was covered in desert dust. Slanter, who had done little in the way of talking on their journey back to the prison, pulled the truck over and stopped it a few miles out from the facility.

  ‘I’m going to make a phone call,’ she said, and took out her cell phone. As the device came out of her pocket, Kradle watched a thin stream of sand trail onto the bench seat between them. Grace noticed him looking and shrugged.

  ‘I’ve been out in the wilds for a day or two,’ she said.

  ‘Okay.’ Kradle nodded. He watched the prison in the distance, the little cars and vans and helicopters assembled beyond the parking lot, and listened to Grace make a call to the press, telling them she was bringing a prisoner in and to get their cameras ready for her arrival. When she hung up the phone, Kradle met her eyes, and the old warden gave an embarrassed kind of smile.

  ‘I really need this,’ she said.

  ‘I bet,’ Kradle answered.

  ‘I’m going to pull up the truck outside the gates and walk you in,’ she said. ‘Try to look . . . you know. Defeated.’

  ‘Shouldn’t be hard,’ Kradle said.

  The warden smiled. Kradle smiled back. She started the engine and pulled back onto the road.

  The gold-rimmed glasses with the chain were just exactly Axe’s prescription. Lucky thing, he thought. He put them on so he could read a little plaque set into a sandstone block at the edge of the marina. Marina del Rey, it told him, was the largest man-made small-craft harbour in North America. Axe didn’t think that was a very impressive claim, but as he straightened and scanned the harbour he guessed there were probably a thousand or so boats in view of where he was standing, which wasn’t bad. He picked up his bag, pushing down a velcro flap that was hanging loose and slapping in the sea breeze, and walked down the harbour, reading boat names as he went. The Adventurer. Explorer. Distant Sunsets. Flying Free. The people on the boats didn’t much look like they’d ever not been free, Axe thought. He passed a forty-footer that was crowded on the back deck with people in white shorts and long socks drinking orange juice from wine glasses and picking at platters of sliced ham. On another boat, a pair of kids were hanging upside down from a rail, trailing their fingertips in the water, as a bronze-tanned woman in a long yellow dress rushed down from the upper cabin to scold them, reel them in. Axe was heading nowhere in particular, thinking he might stop at the end of one of the piers and look through the bag, when he passed a guy hauling one of those waterproof trunks with the flip-latches on the sides down a short gangway towards the deck of a big white yacht. Axe watched him reach the bottom of the gangway and curse himself, try to shift the heavy trunk up onto his knee so that he could unclip a small chain at waist height that secured the deck. The guy flipped a lank fringe out of his eyes, glanced around and saw Axe standing there.

  ‘Hey, fella!’ the guy said, and threw Axe the smile of a dumbass who should have thought ahead before he started on the path to loading the boat. ‘Lend us a hand?’

  ‘Sure,’ Axe said.

  Axe made sure his German passport was zippered up in his little under-shirt bag, thinking to himself that if it fell into the water it would be a real disaster. He waited for the guy holding the trunk to back up, then went down the gangplank and unlatched the chain. There was nowhere for Axe to go but onto the boat itself to let the guy through. He stood there, holding his bag and feeling mildly pleased with his usefulness, as the guy heaved the trunk onto a table and gave a huge sigh of relief.

  ‘Thanks, buddy,’ the guy said. ‘You’re a real champ. Stupid me. I put the chain across again, not thinking.’

  ‘You headin’ out today?’ Axe asked.

  ‘Yeah.’ The guy brushed sea salt that had rubbed off the trunk from his polo shirt. He proudly put a hand on top of the trunk. ‘Koh Samui, baby. Should take me a couple of weeks. This is the last box of supplies right here. Now I’m all set to go.’

  Axe smiled and set his bag down on the deck.

  CHAPTER 47

  Celine Osbourne heard the shunting sound of the toaster lever being kicked down as she rounded the corner of the row. The woodsmoke travelling down from cell eleven was thinner this time. John Kradle was putting the finishing touches on the ‘t’ in ‘feet’ when she arrived at his cell. She rested her forearms on the crossbar, her hands hanging near his face as he bent over the slab of wood on his little desk.

  She watched him blow gently on the seared letter, then sit back to appreciate his work.

  ‘Please wipe your feet,’ she read.

  ‘There’s room for a punctuation mark,’ Kradle noted, pointing with the makeshift soldering iron at the end of the piece of wood. ‘A period, maybe.’

  ‘Seems a bit final, doesn’t it?’ Celine asked.

  ‘What?’ Kradle said. ‘Like you might want to add more?’

  ‘Please wipe your feet before entering.’

  ‘Who’s going to wipe their feet after entering?’ Kradle asked.

  ‘Urgh.’ Celine massaged her brow. ‘Why do I do this? Why do I talk to you?’

  She knew the answer. In the six weeks since John Kradle had returned from the outside world, Celine had done a lot of talking to him. Part of it was wanting to reassure him on his journey to being released.

  It had taken a week for police to take Walter Keeper’s statement over in county jail, where he admitted to killing Gary Mullins before being apprehended by Kradle. Another day for them to come to Pronghorn and confirm Grace Slanter’s story, that she had witnessed Walter Keeper murder the man in the desert while Kradle stood helplessly by. It had taken two weeks for Celine to get an appointment to enter into the official record all that she knew about the Kradle Family murders, about Gary Mullins and what she had learned from the unnamed man in the motel room. While Kradle’s lawyer worked tirelessly, another week had passed before Dr Martin Stinway was quizzed by police about his forensic evidence on the Kradle case and Shelley Frapport had given her statement in full about her late husband and his actions around the time of the murders.

  While the case had been assembled, and a time arranged to present the findings to an appellate judge, Kradle and Celine had existed as they had before the breakout: him behind the bars and her walking the halls, now and then stopping to reprimand him about his towel hanging on the rail or him drinking backwards from his coffee mug. But there was no heat, no hatred, in the banter. Celine took a chair from the breakroom and positioned it in front of the bars, and every night, long into the night, the two talked, Kradle sitting on his bunk with his back against the wall and Celine resting her boots up on the bars. Death row was half as full as it had been, and while three cells on either side of Kradle’s still stood empty, their whispering and laughing drew complaints from inmates further down the hall who were trying to get some sleep. Particularly vocal about their noise was Anthony Reiter, who took some time to recover from his treatment at the hands of Schmitz and his crew. The killer had needed to recover physically from the ordeal, but emotionally as well, from the disappointment that his victimhood at the hands of Schmitz’s crew had not afforded him some kind of pardon from the killing of his girlfriend in the backyard of their home.

  Some of what caused Celine and Kradle amusement long into those evening talks was Celine’s updates on the public life of US Marshal Trinity Parker. Footage of her stooping to one knee, raising her gun and shooting Burke David Schmitz before he could open fire on another crowd of innocent civilians had swept the world, as had the news that Parker was less than twenty-four hours into her recovery from being shot in the neck by one of Schmitz’s snipers at the time. Celine noted that nowhere in Trinity’s many interviews with journalists did she mention that the wound to her neck had been caused by shrapnel, not a bullet.

  Celine
watched Kradle working now, drawing out the last moments he would remain as she had always known him, as she had always been comfortable with him. A man behind bars.

  Then she closed her eyes, drew a deep breath, and slipped her key into the lock.

  Kradle looked up from the sign he had made. Celine smiled and nodded.

  ‘It’s through?’ he asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Just got the call a minute ago. They’ve stamped the vacation of your charge. You’re free to go.’

  Kradle put the sign down, lay the soldering iron beside it. He stood and picked up the box of items he had packed and set on the end of the bed. As he walked through the doorway, something changed in his face, and he turned back and grabbed a stack of envelopes sitting, bound with an elastic band, on the shelf.

  ‘I’ll be needing these,’ he said, showing Celine the label marked Marriage.

  ‘Those women are sickos,’ Celine said, smacking the envelopes out of his hand. ‘And they won’t want you, now that they know you’re innocent.’

  The envelopes landed on the floor of the cell. Kradle left them there, and she took his arm and led him, uncuffed, up the hall.

  She dropped him at the administration building to sign his papers. With the front of the building crowded with press, cameras clicking and people yelling, she was certain he hardly heard her goodbyes, and she barely caught his. There wasn’t time for hugging, and he wouldn’t have liked it, with all the people watching, she supposed. But just before she turned to leave, he took her hand and gave it a squeeze, and something about the hard fingers she had felt in the car on the way to Vegas told her everything she needed to know. She watched him walk into the fray and march straight over to where the black dog sat uncertainly in the huddle of humans. Kradle’s lawyer held the leash, grinning, as the ex-con crouched and ruffled the fur of the dog’s head and neck, saying nothing to the journalists that barked all around him.

  It was a long, quiet walk back to the row, her swipe card bleeping through gate after gate, until Celine Osbourne was again where she belonged. The smell of smoke still lingered in the air, but the first man she had ever released from death row was long gone, and Celine knew she would probably never see him again.

  Past Kradle’s empty cell, she saw a hand poking out from one cell, wrist resting idly on the crossbar. Celine wondered if there were more men here who had been deemed guilty by judges and juries, whom she had made it her life’s work to keep from the world, who deserved instead to be out there, walking free.

  She decided then that she had a new mission.

  She was going to find out.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The publication of this novel will mark my millionth word in print. I have no idea which one it was. I hope it was something meaningful and not ordinary (or profane!). Something like ‘tenacity’ or ‘determination’ would have been good, or indeed, ‘hope’.

  My career has been buoyed by a ridiculous amount of hope. I hoped, with every waking moment, to be published. That hope was obsessive, exhausting, soul-destroying. It flew in the face of so much discouragement in my life, in the media, from other authors and from my inner critic. When that hope was finally realised, rather than dissipating, it grew. I hoped from one book to another, from one publication territory to another, and my hope ignited hope in other people. I could never have hoped to have a million words in print when I first decided I wanted to be an author. But here I am, deciding what to hope for next.

  I have dedicated this book to all the aspiring authors. It’s not an easy road. Waiting. Trying. Daydreaming. Being rejected. Having your hopes destroyed and trying to rebuild them. It’s lonely, frustrating and tedious. But whatever you do, my advice is never to let it become hopeless. Only you have control over that.

  When it came to research for this book, I am forever indebted to Michael Duffy and Governor Faith Slatcher, who organised a tour for me of Lithgow Correctional Centre, a maximum security institution in New South Wales. Thank you to all of the staff who answered my questions there, and to the inmates, who, for the most part, behaved themselves. I also consulted extensively with Detective B. Adam Richardson of the Writer’s Detective Bureau, who was so generous with his time and knowledge.

  I am represented in Australia by Gaby Naher, in the US by Lisa Gallagher. My publishers are Bev Cousins, Justin Ractliffe, Kristin Sevick, Thomas Wörtche and a whole host of others across the globe. My main editor is the wonderful Kathryn Knight. I will never be able to repay the kindness, patience and encouragement these people have provided me.

  Never will I reach a point in my successes at which I forget that my ability to write was shaped and developed by my academic studies at the University of the Sunshine Coast and the University of Queensland.

  Thank you Tim for loving, supporting and caring for me. Thank you Violet for being the most beautiful thing in my world. Thank you Noggy for the cuddles.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Hades, Candice Fox’s first novel, won the Ned Kelly Award for best debut in 2014 from the Australian Crime Writers Association. The sequel, Eden, won the Ned Kelly Award for best crime novel in 2015, making Candice only the second author to win these accolades back to back. Her subsequent novels – Fall, Crimson Lake, Redemption Point and Gone by Midnight – were all shortlisted for the Ned Kelly Award.

  In 2015 Candice began collaborating with James Patterson. Their first novel together, Never Never, set in the vast Australian outback, was a huge bestseller in Australia and went straight to number one on the New York Times bestseller list in the US, and also to the top of the charts in the UK. Their subsequent novels Fifty Fifty, Liar Liar, Hush Hush and The Inn have all been massive bestsellers across the world.

  Bankstown born and bred, Candice lives in Sydney.

  Books by Candice Fox

  Hades

  Eden

  Fall

  Crimson Lake

  Redemption Point

  Gone by Midnight

  Gathering Dark

  The Chase

  With James Patterson

  Never Never

  Fifty Fifty

  Liar Liar

  Hush Hush

  The Inn

  Black & Blue (BookShot novella)

  GATHERING DARK

  Candice Fox

  A convicted killer. A gifted thief. A vicious crime boss. A disillusioned cop.

  Together, they’re a missing girl’s only hope.

  Blair Harbour, once a wealthy, respected surgeon in Los Angeles, is now an ex-con down on her luck. She’s determined to keep her nose clean to win back custody of her son.

  But when her former cellmate, Sneak Lawlor, begs for help to find her missing daughter, Blair is compelled to put her new-found freedom on the line. Joined by LA’s most feared underworld figure, Ada Maverick, the crew of criminals bring outlaw tactics to the search for Dayly.

  Detective Jessica Sanchez has always had a difficult relationship with the LAPD. And her inheritance of a $7 million mansion as a reward for catching a killer has just made her police enemy number one.

  It’s been ten years since Jessica arrested Blair for the coldblooded murder of her neighbour. So when Jessica opens the door to the disgraced doctor and her friends early one morning she expects abuse, maybe even violence.

  What comes instead is a plea for help.

  ‘Candice Fox’s brilliant crime novel set in LA will surely garner her a whole new set of readers . . . It’s that good.’

  SYDNEY MORNING HERALD

  CRIMSON LAKE

  Candice Fox

  Six minutes.

  That’s all it takes to ruin Detective Ted Conkaffey’s life. Accused but not convicted of abducting a teenage girl, he escapes north, to the steamy, croc-infested wetlands of Crimson Lake.

  Amanda Pharrell knows what it’s like to be public enemy number one. Maybe it’s her murderous past that makes her so good as a private investigator, tracking lost souls in the wilderness. Her latest target, missing author
Jake Scully, has a life more shrouded in secrets than her own – so she enlists help from the one person in town more hated than she is: Ted Conkaffey.

  But the residents of Crimson Lake are watching the pair’s every move. And for Ted, a man already at breaking point, this town is offering no place to hide . . .

  ‘One of the best crime thrillers of the year.’

  LEE CHILD

  ‘In her willingness to go to the dark side and turn it upside down, Fox is a daring antipodean original.’

  SYDNEY MORNING HERALD

  REDEMPTION POINT

  Candice Fox

  When former police detective Ted Conkaffey was wrongly accused of abducting thirteen-year-old Claire Bingley, he hoped the Queensland rainforest town of Crimson Lake would be a good place to disappear. But nowhere is safe from Claire’s devastated father.

  Dale Bingley has a brutal revenge plan all worked out – and if Ted doesn’t help find the real abductor, he’ll be its first casualty.

  Meanwhile, in a dark roadside hovel called the Barking Frog Inn, the bodies of two young bartenders lie on the beer-sodden floor. It’s Detective Inspector Pip Sweeney’s first homicide investigation – complicated by the arrival of private detective Amanda Pharrell to ‘assist’ on the case. Amanda’s conviction for murder a decade ago has left her with some odd behavioural traits, top-to-toe tatts – and a keen eye for killers.

  For Ted and Amanda, the hunt for the truth will draw them into a violent dance with evil. Redemption is certainly on the cards – but it may well cost them their lives . . .

  ‘If you like great thrillers, you’ll love Candice Fox.’