The Police Doctor’s Secret
Marion Lennox
A light plane has crashed near isolated Dolphin Cove. The pilot's dead, and passengers are missing. But when Dr. Alistair Benn asks for help, they send Dr. Sarah Rose. Alistair held Sarah responsible for a tragedy in his past. He has never forgiven her… or forgotten her.
Marion Lennox
The Police Doctor’s Secret
A book in the Police Surgeons series, 2004
Dear Reader,
The Australian northern coastline is wild and fraught with danger. No one goes there unless they have good reason-or unless they’re desperate!
Last year I went on a crocodile spotting expedition at night along one of our northern rivers. I watched the yellow eyes of a crocodile watching me. (Romance writer makes tasty snack?) I gazed out at the dense mangrove swamps (romance writer sinks, never to be seen again?) and thought of all the desperate people who’d tried to make this place home.
Off I went again. Instead of obliging the crocodile, I retreated to my nice safe office and started The Police Doctor’s Secret.
I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did dreaming it up.
Marion Lennox
CHAPTER ONE
FORENSIC pathologists weren’t supposed to be cute.
Nor were they supposed to be Sarah.
Dr Alistair Benn stared at the crimson and white vision bouncing across the tarmac towards him and felt like leaving town. Now.
Leaving. Ha! As Dolphin Cove’s only doctor, Alistair was responsible for the health of the entire community. As well as that, there were the unknown passengers of a light plane found crashed just south of town. People were missing, and the signs were that they were badly hurt. To leave was impossible.
But Sarah…
Sarah was here?
He’d requested extra police, trackers and medical back-up. Real help. It hadn’t been forthcoming. There’d be someone sent from the aviation authority to check the crash site, he’d been told, but a request for additional assistance had been refused. The authorities had decided there was no evidence to justify sending such expensive help.
The decision had left him angry. He couldn’t understand why the pilot had died. He was sure the blood in the cargo area wasn’t the pilot’s. He’d asked again, with more force.
And they’d sent Sarah.
‘Hi.’ She was beaming, as if she was really pleased to see him. That concept was crazy-but she was certainly beaming. She smiled brightly at him, and then she smiled at the pilot of the plane that had brought her here. She smiled her gorgeous wide smile at the luggage carrier and he smiled right back.
She beamed at everyone and they were all totally trans-fixed.
Well, why wouldn’t they be? She was just the same as she always had been. Sarah. Five feet two in her stockinged feet and petite in every aspect.
Sarah’s diminutive appearance had never stopped her making an impact. Her auburn hair floated around her shoulders in a riot of curls. Her perpetually twinkling green eyes were huge. Her rosebud mouth complemented a cute snub nose with just the perfect amount of freckles. She wore-she’d always worn-short, short skirts and shiny, frivolous shoes. Gorgeous shoes. The spotted and high-heeled footwear she wore now was bright crimson to match her neat little business suit.
She might be wearing a business suit but she didn’t look corporate. Not in the least. She looked…
She looked like Sarah.
Alistair felt his gut clench in disbelief. And something else. Something he didn’t want to examine.
‘Aren’t you going to say hi?’ She was grasping his hand as if nothing lay between them. No history at all. Her smile said that maybe they were even old friends. His fingers automatically curved around her small soft hand and then, catching his breath in incredulity that this could possibly be happening, he released her and took an instinctive step back.
‘What do you think you’re doing here?’ As a greeting it needed some finesse, he conceded, but if he was poleaxed he might as well sound poleaxed.
‘I’m on the police force. I’m the forensic pathologist you requested.’ She was still smiling. Maybe he was imagining it, but he thought suddenly, Her smile is forced. She’s as shocked as I am.
She couldn’t be. Sarah was never shocked. She was a woman in charge of her world. She danced through life as if it was hers for the taking, leaving a wave of destruction behind her.
‘You’re supposed to be a paediatrician,’ he told her-which was also a stupid and definitely ungracious thing to say, but Sarah’s smile stayed determinedly fixed.
‘You haven’t seen me for six years, Alistair. I’ve changed direction.’
‘From paediatrics to forensic pathology?’
‘It’s a quieter life.’
‘Quieter? In the police force?’
‘Believe it or not, yes.’
He tried to think that through. Paediatrics was emotionally demanding, but police work would be anything but peaceful. And anyway, it didn’t make sense. ‘I can’t imagine you ever wanting a quiet life,’ he told her.
‘People change, Alistair.’ Her smile faded then, just a little, and the look she gave him was almost challenging. Then she seemed to regroup, bracing her shoulders and refixing that gorgeous smile. ‘Now, what have you got for me?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Your accident victim,’ she told him with exaggerated patience. ‘The pilot? I assume you haven’t hauled me out to this back-of-beyond place for nothing?’
‘No.’ He took a deep breath and fought for control. ‘You are the police pathologist?’
‘I am. The report says you have a dead body, a crashed plane and a mystery. The local police officer sounds out of his depth and you lack the necessary expertise.’
Ouch. He felt his face tighten and he knew that she saw it.
‘I mean you lack the necessary expertise in forensic medicine,’ she amended, and he thought, Yeah, stick the knife in and twist. Hadn’t that always been the way? Sarah and Grant, looking down their noses at the hick country doctor.
Sarah and Grant…
There was that twist of the gut again. The pain. Would it ever go away?
He didn’t know. It was surely with him still. But for now he could only move forward, and he needed to do that now. He was stuck with Sarah, therefore the sooner they got rid of this mess the sooner he could be shot of her.
‘Let’s collect your luggage and get out of here,’ he said brusquely, and she cast him an odd look and then smiled again.
‘Fine by me. Let’s go.’
Alistair Benn was not on Sarah’s list of people she wished to work with. Or be with. Ever.
Like his twin brother, Alistair was almost stunningly good-looking. He was tall, dark and tanned, with crinkly brown eyes that spoke of constant laughter, a wide, white smile and a body to die for. Once upon a time Sarah had fallen deeply in love with this smile, with this body. But now… If Sarah could have named all the people she’d least like to see, then Alistair was right on top of her list.
I can’t imagine you ever wanting a quiet life…
Alistair’s words rang in her ears as she sat in the passenger side of his big four-wheel drive Land Cruiser and headed into town. She risked a glance across at him. His face was set and stern. Judgemental.
He’d always been judgemental, she thought. ‘A moralising prig,’ Grant had called him, and it had only been when Grant’s excesses became painfully obvious that she’d thought: maybe Alistair had his reasons.
But he’d been so harsh.
The last time she’d seen him had been at Grant’s funeral. Alistair’s twin brother. She’d just been released from hospital that mo
rning, and there’d been no time to see Grant’s family before the service. Even if she had, there would have been no words to explain the unexplainable. So she’d simply appeared. She’d been distraught, aching with grief for a wasted life, desperately uncertain about the path she’d taken, and racked with guilt. Alistair had been there-of course-supporting his parents, who were so grief-stricken they’d barely been able to stand.
She’d started to approach them, moving awkwardly on crutches. She’d got within five or six feet of where they’d been grouped around the open grave, and Alistair’s words had cut through her grief like a lash against raw skin.
‘We don’t wish to see you, Sarah. Can you leave my parents alone?’
He’d blamed her. They all had. Those six eyes, staring at her, with the loss of their loved son and brother etched hard in their faces. She’d stared at Alistair and she’d seen Grant-and the pain had threatened to overwhelm her. Alistair and Grant were identical twins. Had been identical twins. But now one was dead and one was left to haunt her for ever. She’d almost collapsed right then, but somehow she’d held on. She’d maintained her dignity-just-but she’d stumbled away as if physically struck.
She hadn’t seen them since.
‘Do you know what’s happened here?’
Alistair was speaking to her. She flinched at the harshness in his voice, but somehow she managed to haul herself back to the present. It was a mile’s drive into the township. Alistair’s face was set in lines of shock and anger, and she knew he was finding this forced intimacy as impossible as she was. He was staring at the road ahead-not at her.
It was late afternoon and the sun was casting long and eerie shadows along the track. The sun’s rays were deflected by the spindly gums that lined the road. A rock wallaby appeared suddenly from the undergrowth. The tiny creature stared down Alistair’s vehicle until Alistair slowed; the wallaby gazed at him a moment longer, as if revelling in its moment of power, and then it hopped away.
This was an amazing place, and in a different situation Sarah might well have been mesmerised by its beauty. Dolphin Cove was a tiny settlement hundreds of miles from anywhere. In Australia’s barren north, it had a reputation for a soft beauty that made it famous, but it was too far from civilisation for tourists to venture. It was too far for anyone to venture.
So why was Alistair here?
Alistair. He’d asked her a question. She needed to concentrate. What had he asked? Did she know what had happened? She did. Or part of it.
‘I’ve read a brief report. I was told that there was a plane crash here yesterday.’
‘That’s it.’ He still wasn’t looking at her, but concentrating instead on the track, as if he feared more wallabies. Which was probably reasonable. But it certainly augmented the tension.
‘So what do you know?’ Sarah probed, and despite the atmosphere there was no choice for him but to answer. The only way through this was to be businesslike.
‘A Cessna took off from Cairns yesterday afternoon,’ he told her. ‘The pilot lodged a flight plan that was pretty vague. As far as the authorities have figured the plane made an un-scheduled stop somewhere north of Cairns-no one’s quite sure where-and then came on over to this side of the peninsula. The plane crashed into the rocks on the beach just south of the town. One of the local fishing crews saw it go down, but if they hadn’t seen it then it might well never have been discovered. It’s wild country out here. But they were seen. The local police sergeant took a team out-including me-and we found the pilot. Dead.’
She nodded. ‘You reported that he probably wasn’t killed by the crash?’
‘That’s the odd thing.’ He shrugged, still carefully not looking at her. ‘Oh, sure, he’s been knocked about a bit, but it seems he tried to make a crash landing on the beach and he darn near succeeded. There’s a rock sticking out from the sand that he couldn’t have seen from the air. The plane’s wing caught and spun the whole thing into the cliff. So the aircraft is a bit smashed up, but not completely. He must have slowed almost to a stop before he hit.’
‘He’s lucky it didn’t burst into flames.’
‘He’s dead.’
Sarah caught herself. Right. You couldn’t get more dead than dead. Lucky didn’t come into it.
‘I guess.’
‘But maybe someone has been lucky,’ Alistair added, and she nodded again, thinking through the brief fax from the local policeman which she’d read on the way here. The report on the blood found in the back of the plane. The reason for the rush.
‘That’s the bit I don’t understand.’
‘That’s why you’re here. It’s why I called for help and why we’re trying to move fast. The local police sergeant-the police force here consists of exactly one-has called for reinforcements and a team of locals is combing the bushland around the wreck. You see, the cargo hold’s covered in blood. It looks like a massacre took place in there. But there’s no one. When we arrived the plane was still cooling. The pilot was strapped into his seat, dead. Everyone else had disappeared.’
‘Everyone else?’
‘I’d say at least two people have bled in that plane.’ He grimaced. ‘But then what would I know? You’re the expert.’
She hesitated. This was impossible.
If she’d known Alistair would be here then she would have asked a colleague to come in her stead, but she was here now. She had a job to do and she needed this man’s co-operation.
‘Alistair, we need to work together on this one.’
‘We do.’ His face was grim.
‘So can we set aside our…past…and get to work?’
‘I’ve never let anything get in the way of my work.’
‘Well, bully for you,’ she said with a sudden spurt of anger. ‘So let’s just keep it that way and leave the personal innuendos alone. Tell me about the pilot.’
‘I don’t-’
‘Just tell me about the pilot,’ she said, and there was suddenly a wealth of weariness in her voice that couldn’t be disguised. She caught herself, hauling herself tightly together. She’d learned that Alistair Benn was the doctor in charge of the Dolphin Cove hospital only when she’d already been in the plane on her way here, and it had been too late to tell the pilot to turn around and go back. She’d seen his name in the report she was reading, and then had spent the rest of the trip schooling her features in the way she wanted him to see them. She wasn’t about to drop that façade now.
No. He couldn’t see her as she so often felt-so vulnerable she felt raw. She had to turn her weariness to annoyance. ‘You’re not about to slow this investigation down, are you?’ she snapped, and watched his face tighten again.
‘Of course not.’
‘Then tell me everything,’ she said. ‘Now.’
There was another moment of tense silence. He was regrouping, too, she thought. Good. Control was the issue here. Work.
And it seemed he agreed with her as he began to speak.
‘We thought it was a regular plane crash,’ Alistair told her. ‘But, as I said, the pilot wasn’t injured badly enough to explain his death. And the blood in the rear compartment suggested someone-or more than one-had been thrown around and badly injured in the process. The rear’s been set up for storage. There are no seats. No seat belts. If anyone was sitting in the back when it crashed they’ll have been thrown about heavily. But there’s no sign of anyone. We’ve had people searching for almost twenty-four hours now.’
‘And the pilot?’
‘That’s the reason why you in particular have been called in,’ he told her. ‘We carried his body back to the hospital. Because I couldn’t figure out how he died, I ran routine blood tests on him. I sent the samples down to the city with the mail plane last night and this morning the results came back. This guy has a king-sized dose of heroin on board. Huge. He didn’t shoot this amount up unless it was a suicide attempt.’ He told her the figures and Sarah whistled.
‘So maybe someone stuck a needle into him and sho
t him sky-high?’ she said slowly. She frowned. ‘Murder by overdose is common. Can you see any needle stick marks?’
‘I can’t. As I said, he’s a bit battered. An entry may be hidden by injury. But surely no one’s going to stick a needle into a pilot flying a plane, causing it to crash?’
‘So maybe it crashed and then he was murdered?’
‘Right.’
‘You don’t believe it?’ she asked, and watched his face.
‘Well, you’re the expert. But there was no reason for the plane to crash-or not that we can see. The pilot of the mail plane had a look at the crash site before he left last night. Harry knows his stuff. He said the plane was low on fuel, but not so low that it’d crash-the low fuel levels would be the reason it didn’t explode. But everything else seems to be mechanically sound. In fact, Harry reckoned he could probably haul it off the rocks, do a bit of superficial work and have her flying again.’
‘But the injuries…?’
‘A bit of the cliff face came through the windscreen, hitting the pilot. Not badly-just enough to give him cuts and abrasions. Maybe it was enough to make him lose consciousness, but I doubt it. That’s another thing that doesn’t fit with him being murdered. He hasn’t shifted from where he was when the plane hit and there’s nothing that would have stopped him moving. He was securely belted in. The people in the cargo hold, though… As I said, they must have been flying without seat belts.’
‘So where are they? And how many?’
‘We don’t know. We’re hoping you might be able to tell us.’
‘Right.’ Could she? She sat back and thought about it.
Dr Sarah Rose was good at her job. She liked it. Forensic medicine hadn’t been her first choice, but since she’d taken it on she’d found it more and more satisfying. Solving mysteries through medicine. Keeping away from people…
No. Don’t go down that road.
She looked out of the Land Cruiser window at the dying light, but she wasn’t seeing the scenery. Her mind was on injured people lost in the bush. People who were depending on her to solve a mystery.
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