by Tara Moss
He pulled out his phone. Dialled. ‘Headed your way,’ Perkins said. He leaned a shoulder against the side of the grubby building and flicked a spent cigarette on the ground, crushed it with his heel.
‘He’s still alone?’ the sergeant asked down the line.
‘Alone,’ Perkins confirmed, watching the man’s back as he walked, the swinging plastic bag shifting back and forth.
If the sergeant was disappointed, he didn’t let on. ‘Hold your post,’ was all he said and hung up. Perkins pocketed his phone and pulled out his Benson & Hedges. He lit another cigarette and took a long, slow drag. Next to him, a man opened the door for an attractive woman, the chatter of the restaurant spilling onto the street. The woman stepped onto the street right next to him, laughing at something her companion had said. She threw an arm around his neck and leaned in for a kiss, the back of her jacket riding up to reveal a line of flesh across her hips.
Senior Constable Perkins squinted at their embrace, took another drag and looked away.
He was part of a six-person surveillance team watching the every move of one John Allan Dayle, a person of interest in a recent homicide. Perkins had been on a number of major operations and though this was his first day on this particular gig, thus far, he was not impressed. Firstly, the guy looked pretty damn ordinary. He did not look like a serial killer. Secondly, his house was in a very difficult location for surveillance from a vehicle because an unfamiliar car would stand out on Davoren Lane like dog’s balls on a bird. They didn’t have a pole camera installed, weren’t sure when they’d get one, and until STIB, the Special Technical Investigations Branch, got a plant inside — which could take weeks knowing their backlog and all the bullshit with the warrants — it would mean a hell of a lot of standing around for Perkins and the rest of the team. Perkins didn’t like it. The team leader, his sergeant, had hoped a neighbour would assist by letting the team set up in a room of their house, but so far they’d been knocked back. Fucking Surry Hills.
But the third and most important reason Perkins did not like this new job was simple. It was because of the feds. It was the feds who had decided on this guy, Dayle, he’d heard. A couple of federal agents from Canberra had been called in to consult on the case. ‘Profilers’. They had fingered this Dayle guy, recommended this surveillance be done.
Perkins knew a thing or two about profiling.
He’d read the latest research debunking so-called ‘behavioural science’ as nonsense. Science. Fuck me. He’d seen Malcolm Gladwell’s piece in The New Yorker and he didn’t have much time for profiler voodoo bullshit. These people weren’t cops. They hadn’t done a day of police work in their lives. They didn’t know shit, as far as he was concerned.
Perkins finished his cigarette and flicked it on the ground.
Fucking profilers.
CHAPTER 22
The Edmund Barton building consumed a full Barton city block, framed by flat tracts of asphalt car park on two sides, hemmed in by evenly spaced government regulation trees. The building’s early 1970s Seidler architecture was imposing and strange. A bunker for an alien race.
Makedde drifted past in her stolen Holden, taking in the familiar architecture of the Australian Federal Police Canberra headquarters. The bunker-like shell had vehicular access points barred by large, cylindrical posts which slid silently into the ground for all those with clearance to pass, tunnelling down into hidden subterranean parking chambers. The grid of roads surrounding the building was dotted with red AFP cars. Metal detectors were visible through the glass of the main entrance. Surveillance cameras were mounted everywhere. The open courtyard was incongruous: though it had been designed for public access, the outdoor area had been fairly unwelcoming since the AFP moved in. It possessed all the sense of freedom of a prison exercise yard, despite the presence of a small eating area with blue café umbrellas, currently closed. Makedde had sipped coffee there on occasion, under the gaze of the six storeys of interior windows, when she and Andy had first moved to Canberra together. He’d wanted to show her off. At first.
Mak knew she was being filmed, but she cared very little. She doubted anyone would recognise her or bother to check the tape and so notice the plates of a stolen car. She was a dead girl from Canada. A nonentity. The feds had better things to do. Like nail Jack Cavanagh and his corrupt colleagues. She’d come here on emotional instinct. It was well after dark, but she half expected to see his red Honda sitting outside. He’d pulled a lot of night shifts towards the end of their relationship. She doubted that had changed. But no, his car could not be seen.
Andy.
Soon Mak was parked, suburbs away, walking through the pleasant Canberra night air on quiet sneakers. She approached the familiar house, feeling almost playful. It was a three-bedroom dwelling, and she knew the layout intimately — the exits, the floor plan and what she would likely find inside. She recognised the car out the front and as she walked past it she dipped in one smooth movement, attaching the magnetic tracking device to its underside.
Andy Flynn woke with a start. He tensed and sat up. Something had woken him. A noise? As his eyes adjusted, he saw a dark figure standing in his bedroom.
Shit. Where is my sidearm?
Andy leaped out from beneath the sheets and rolled to the floor beside his bed, crouching out of view and out of firing range of the intruder. There was a baseball bat under the bed somewhere …
Where the FUCK did I put my sidearm?
‘Andy.’ The voice was familiar.
The intruder stepped forwards, revealing herself to be a tall woman with a face crowned by darkness. That face. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
He reached up and turned on the bedside lamp. A small, dim pool of light illuminated the room.
It is her.
Mak was standing near the foot of his bed — a bed they’d bought together. She was dressed in head-to-toe black, and she was wearing a hood. No, it was a wig, a dark wig. She looked quite changed, but it was unmistakeably her. As the reality set in, he found he could say nothing for almost a minute. A swell of emotion rose in his throat. He was relieved, overjoyed, confused, angry. He and Mak had tried living together here, a kind of last-ditch effort to make it work after five years of on-and-off dating. She’d moved her life to Canberra in a gesture of commitment after he landed the job of setting up the national profiling unit. But of course the new setting hadn’t fixed their old problems. He’d screwed it up. Of course. When had he not screwed it up? He’d had walls up. He’d had issues. He’d had steam to blow off. This was her, wasn’t it? This wasn’t a dream? A nightmare? But if he wasn’t dreaming this, then what the hell was Makedde Vanderwall doing here, in his bedroom in the middle of the night, unannounced, months after leaving him?
‘You won’t be needing my baseball bat,’ she said calmly.
It was already in his hands. A reflex. He put the bat down on the carpet at his feet and stood up to his full height. He’d been sleeping naked, he now remembered, and in the low light he thought he detected a slight grin on the face of his intruder. The lamp would have him backlit, right at crotch level. Andy took a step towards her and she threw something at him. A pair of his jeans. He held them up in front of himself with one hand. ‘I guess we aren’t on those kinds of terms any more,’ he said and laughed, surprising himself. The grin remained on the woman’s face for a moment, and then faded.
He pulled his jeans on slowly and did up the buttons. This was perhaps the first time Mak had helped him get dressed. ‘It’s good to see you.’ An understatement. ‘I thought …’ He trailed off, unwilling to describe his greatest fear aloud.
I thought you were dead.
He’d lost count of how many messages he’d left for her. ‘Why didn’t you call me back?’ he asked. ‘Why didn’t you leave me some kind of sign? Anything?’
‘Because I’m dead.’ She spoke slowly. The grin was nowhere to be found.
What?
She seemed vastly different from his memory
of her, yet this was Mak. There was no broad, dazzling smile. No rush of warmth or even anger. She looked uncharacteristically pale beneath the dark hair. He didn’t like the changes he saw. Nevertheless, she was still devastatingly beautiful to him. His body was already responding, despite himself. Hers was a face that had filled his thoughts and desires for years and that was not something you could just switch off. Especially now, when he was so thoroughly unprepared for her presence.
‘You won’t be needing this.’ She placed his Glock gently on the end of the bed. ‘I didn’t want you waking up and blowing my head off.’
My sidearm.
He felt his cheeks grow hot. Thank God it was only her and not some real intruder. Was he losing his touch so badly that Mak of all people could come into the house and take his gun without waking him?
‘You kept your key.’
She laughed, but the sound had no mirth. ‘I don’t even have Loulou’s keys.’ The friend she’d stayed with in Sydney when she’d left him. ‘I don’t have anything any more.’
‘Why?’ he finally asked. ‘What happened over there?’
She walked around the bed and sat on the edge. Her shoulders slumped and he noticed she had something slung over her middle: a slim black case. ‘I am sorry to arrive like this, but I had to talk to you in person,’ she said.
‘You couldn’t have warned me? Let me know you are all right?’ He frowned and sat next to her in the bedroom that had once been theirs.
‘No,’ she replied flatly.
They sat together for a moment, not quite touching.
‘You’re the only person I trust — as it turns out,’ she confessed softly, sounding a little surprised at that truth.
The long fingers of her left hand strayed to his, and he instinctively placed his hand over hers. It felt cool under his fingertips as he traced her knuckles, feeling her smooth skin, the familiarity of a hand he’d held so many times, a hand he’d once wanted to put a ring on. Though she was fully dressed, he was clothed only in his jeans, and with her unexpected proximity and the intimacy of the moment, he felt an urge to kiss her and pull her down onto the bed with him.
He shook his head. ‘Jesus, Mak, what is this? Where have you been? Paris this whole time? What happened?’
‘The Cavanaghs happened.’
‘Tell me.’
For a stretch of time he sat beside her, stunned into silence, holding her hand and listening. He listened to how she’d found Adam Hart in Paris, and sent him back to his worried mother in Australia, seeing him off at the airport. She’d planned to holiday in Paris for a while — that part pained him somewhat because seeing Paris was something he’d always wanted to do with her, but he did not interrupt. And then she told him what had happened with Luther Hand, the man who abducted her. She spoke so steadily, so evenly, it shocked him. It was as if she had practised talking about these horrible things, like she’d read them in a book and it had not really happened to her at all. But when she got to the part about the fire, she shuddered and her words stopped abruptly.
Andy held her hand speechlessly as she stared off towards the dark window. He wondered what she was seeing.
He knew not to push for more information. It was best to address the present for now. ‘You have to tell your father you are alive. This is killing him. He’s called me every week since you went missing,’ he urged her.
‘Dad.’ Tears sprang from her eyes, but she stood up and wiped them away quickly. ‘I know. Trust me, I know. It’s awful. But I can’t contact him. You know how connected he is. The moment he stops agitating to find me they’ll know I’m alive. They’ll know that he knows, and that will put him in danger.’
It was serious then. More serious even than Andy had thought.
‘I can’t tell him yet. Not until more time passes,’ she continued, her throat sounding tight.
He waited for more.
‘Andy, there’s a price on my head. Half a million Euros. God knows how many freelancers are after me for a chance at that kind of cash.’
‘Are you sure? That’s a lot of money.’
She shot him a sobering look.
‘I didn’t mean to say you could be wrong, but —’
‘I know it’s a lot of money, Andy. Jesus, you think I don’t know that? That’s the problem. I know the price because I lived in Luther Hand’s apartment for weeks. I watched his communications. They tried contacting him and when he didn’t, I don’t know, didn’t give the special signal or whatever, they knew he’d failed. They put out another hit and this time it’s not one killer I have to look out for — it’s many. You don’t know what I’ve been through in the past few days …’
She trailed off, then started again. ‘I know I got in too deep. You tried telling me that. You warned me I was getting … obsessed with the Cavanaghs.’ When Mak got a taste of injustice she just couldn’t let it go. ‘You know the investigation you warned me about? The one I wasn’t to get in the way of? Tell me what’s happening. The media has been all but silent about the Cavanaghs recently.’
‘There is pressure on,’ he said.
‘Pressure?’
‘Jack Cavanagh is a heavy hitter,’ he explained uncomfortably.
‘I’ve noticed that.’
‘There was an investigation launched by the AFP, with talk for a while about a possible link between Cavanagh’s organisation and an international crime ring operating from Queensland, but … it’s gone quiet,’ he regretted to add. That was all Andy had to offer: possible links that seemed to have gone nowhere. Depressing news, yet Mak’s eyes had lit up.
‘Queensland?’ she said. ‘I have something for you.’ She slid the strap from her shoulder and opened the case. It was a small laptop. ‘This belonged to the man the Cavanaghs sent to kill me. Luther Hand is what he called himself — or one of the names, anyway. I believe there may be evidence here to link him back to the Cavanaghs.’
‘What kind of evidence? Where is Luther now?’
‘Dead.’ Her voice was toneless.
He waited for her to explain, but she didn’t.
‘This has to be enough to help prosecutors get a trial over the line,’ she said in a hopeful voice, gesturing to the computer. ‘This man, Hand, was a trained killer and highly paid. Very highly paid. Who else but Jack Cavanagh would pay so much to prevent me from returning to Australia alive?’
Andy frowned. Some very hard proof would be needed to take down Jack Cavanagh.
‘He kept notes on his work,’ Mak continued, ‘and though I haven’t been able to make sense of all of it, a forensic computer expert could. There are numbered sequences and initials that I think identify individuals he worked with, and could identify traceable payments, accounts, that sort of thing. And there are references to me and to the Cavanaghs. I had to give this to you, Andy. I couldn’t trust a courier with it.’
Her blue-green eyes seemed to plead with him. She appeared hopeful that the risks she’d taken to reach him would prove to be worthwhile.
‘Be very careful, Andy,’ she warned. ‘If they know you have this, you could become a target. Be careful whom you trust with this.’
Perhaps Jack Cavanagh had bought some influence in the NSW police force and local government. But could his tentacles really reach as far as Canberra? As far as the AFP? Just how careful would Andy have to be?
‘I’m glad you brought this to me. I’m glad you knew you could trust me, Mak.’ He reached out to her and she let him put his hand on hers again. ‘Now you need to be in witness protection. We can look after you.’
She pulled her hand away. ‘Like hell you can. I’d be a sitting duck.’
‘Whatever this computer has on it will be far more valuable with you as a witness,’ he reasoned. ‘You have to explain what happened and how you obtained it.’
Mak gave him a joyless grin. ‘Really? And say what, that I killed this guy and took his laptop?’
‘Yes. Tell the truth. Tell them what you told me. Tell them what you’v
e been through.’
‘And you really think I’d make it to trial? How long would that be? A year? Longer? There’s no way they’ll let me live that long.’
‘We can protect you. It’s a good system, Mak. It’s totally separate from us, from the state cops, too. No one would know where you were.’
‘You wouldn’t know where I was. Sure. But someone would. And all it takes is that someone wanting something — cash, a promotion, a morsel of power. Jack Cavanagh can give it to them. That’s the way it is, Andy.’
‘There are good cops out there, Mak.’
‘Don’t patronise me, Andy. I know most cops are honest — my own father was one — but it only takes one who isn’t to get me killed.’
He took her shoulders in his hands and was shocked by the way they felt: they were hard with unfamiliar muscle. ‘Don’t give up on us, Mak. We are close to getting him.’
‘Close? Really. You believe that?’
He didn’t know what he believed.
‘My faith is gone. You give this to the guys trying to nail Jack Cavanagh. I hope it helps their cause,’ she said and ran a hand over her hair. ‘I need him to pull back. He has to take the contract off my head, Andy, or I’m done. If they can’t arrest the bastard soon … I’ll … I’ll do anything.’
Mak stood up. She looked restless and he knew she was going to leave, and he couldn’t bear the thought of letting her go again.
‘I wish you’d been here when I got back from Quantico,’ he told her. ‘We could have worked it out.’
Mak looked him in the eye and for a moment he saw the softness there again, the softness he’d once known.
‘Don’t follow me,’ was all she said. ‘I’ll be in touch.’
CHAPTER 23
Andy Flynn sat in his office at AFP headquarters, holding the computer satchel.
