by Tara Moss
Mak.
Since her unexpected visit, sleep had alluded him. Her words had haunted him all night. I woke to find myself in a cellar on a mattress, with a chain around my ankle …
There came a gentle knock, and he looked up to see that a familiar face had arrived at his open door. ‘You wanted me?’
Nicolas Joseph. Andy had called for him.
‘Please take a seat,’ Andy told him, motioning to a chair.
Joseph was perhaps ten years Andy’s junior and had a good, technical mind. Andy had got to know him over the previous eight or nine months. Since Makedde’s appearance at his house the night before, Andy had been debating what to do with the laptop she’d given him. She’d clearly risked a lot to bring it to Australia and put it directly in his hands; it made sense that the computer of her would-be killer was of great value.
He drummed his fingers on the laptop case. It was the only evidence that she’d been there, in his bedroom, in the middle of the night. She’d appeared like an apparition and left as one.
‘Agent Flynn?’
‘I need this examined,’ Andy said. ‘We have reason to believe it holds evidence of criminal activity.’ He gestured to the laptop bag.
‘Cool,’ Joseph said. ‘What am I looking for?’
‘For evidence of a link to the Cavanaghs.’
Joseph’s eyebrows raised in almost cartoonish surprise. His relaxed demeanour evaporated. ‘You have a warrant for this, I presume.’
‘It doesn’t belong to the Cavanaghs.’
Andy watched with amusement as his colleague relaxed a touch. No one wanted to be in the firing line of the Cavanaghs’ lawyers.
‘It belongs to someone they were allegedly associated with. An Australian criminal who went by the name of Luther Hand,’ he explained. ‘The man is now deceased.’ If Mak was correct. And he had little doubt she was.
Joseph did not look a lot more relaxed with this added information. ‘Where did you get it?’
‘A trusted source who will testify if required.’
God, I hope she’ll testify.
‘First let’s see what we have,’ Andy suggested. ‘But there is a catch. I don’t want anyone knowing about it until you have it … what is it? Locked down. Saved on the system.’
Nicolas Joseph tilted his head. He licked his lips nervously. ‘You are worried about —’
‘Just don’t worry about my worries for the moment. Put it in your system as soon as you can. Save it. I know you can do that. And don’t attach it to a case until I say so. I want to know there is something on here worth …’ Worth taking heat for.
Joseph nodded uncertainly.
‘I take responsibility. The paperwork is all there,’ Andy assured him. He stood and put a hand on the younger man’s shoulder.
‘All right.’ The man took the laptop case reluctantly.
‘I take full responsibility, Nic. Full responsibility.’
‘Have you opened it?’ he asked.
‘No.’
‘Good. And it was off?’ He put the strap over his shoulder.
‘I haven’t done anything to it. You won’t even find my fingerprints on it.’
As with anything else, it was easy to tamper with electronic evidence and destroy its value. At the Electronic Evidence Branch, Joseph would pull the hard drive out and create a ‘forensic image’ of what was there, in a forensically sound write-protected environment, using write blockers to acquire information from the hard drive without altering or damaging anything. Andy hoped what he found proved as valuable as Mak thought it would. There was no point in getting worried about the chain of evidence yet. A good QC could argue that the evidence had not been properly procured, that they could not be sure it was legit, or hadn’t been tampered with.
But for intelligence purposes, it could be worth its weight in gold.
CHAPTER 24
‘It’s a four-speed sports automatic. Six-cylinder engine. Less than two hundred thou on the clock. In perfect nick.’
‘Not perfect nick,’ she corrected him.
Makedde Vanderwall stood her ground in front of the frazzled car salesman. He was repeating himself now. His hair was sparse and oily, and he was as thin as the tacky wind-dancer that towered over the used-car lot, bobbing up and down, smiling maniacally and whipping its arms around. She’d started to make him uncomfortable, she could see, but she just didn’t have the energy to pretend that he was doing a good job of selling her on it. She knew about the car and what she intended to pay and that was that. The standoff was over a five-year-old white Ford Falcon. No car with two hundred thousand kilometres on it was truly reliable, but it was a decent enough vehicle and most importantly it did not stand out at all. It was a terribly average car, which was just what Mak needed, and she intended to buy the thing for less than the price advertised in orange digits across its windshield.
‘Well, barely a dent,’ the man said. ‘New brakes. Very reliable. It’s a steal for six thousand.’
He’d said the bit about the car’s reliability eight times already. ‘I’ll give you five thousand, cash. Right now. That’s my offer,’ Mak repeated.
He opened his mouth to try again, and responded to the look in her eyes by closing it again. He visibly calculated his commission. ‘Okay,’ he finally said, defeated.
Mak followed the thin man into his cluttered office. She filled out the paperwork using Petra Blackman’s driver’s licence details and placed a packet of cash on the desk. He counted it as she’d imagined he would — mouth tight with concentration and a hot gleam in his eye. Mak had decided against using Blackman’s credit card before stepping onto the lot. She was not exactly cash poor and it would doubtless buy her more time with the ID. She regretted having stolen the woman’s Visa card at all, now. It had been a poor, last-minute decision. When Ms Blackman discovered that both her credit card and her driver’s licence were missing she would deduce that both had been stolen, not lost. But the prospect of a stay in a decent hotel had been simply too much temptation for Mak. She’d booked herself in to the Sheraton on the Park in Sydney and given the card details for incidentals. You just couldn’t check in to a decent hotel these days without plastic. At least the card shouldn’t show up on the system until it was charged.
As long as this Falcon could get her down the highway okay, she would be soaking in a deep bathtub at the Sheraton and watching in-room movies in only two hours. She desperately needed the illusion of comfort, at least for a night.
‘Congratulations, Ms Blackman,’ the salesman said and dropped the keys into Mak’s waiting palm. ‘You won’t be disappointed.’
She drove off the lot and passed the Holden she’d stolen in NSW, its interior clean of fingerprints. She wondered how long it would take before it drew some attention.
Halfway between Canberra and Sydney, Mak had to stop.
Starving.
She spotted the colossal yellow M ahead, and found herself pulling off the highway past a petrol station peopled with truckers and their huge vehicles, and into a McDonald’s parking lot, despite her usual aversion to their fare. She had a hollow belly and stabbing headache. A burger and a cheap coffee chaser — with some Panadol — would get her to Sydney. She did not exactly feel like the picture of health. Food would surely help. She parked and stood in line feeling increasingly off, and exposed, as if someone was following her, which was ridiculous. Regardless, she felt better eating in the car. It was probably tiredness that made her feel almost as if she might burst into tears at any moment — which she of course would not.
There was a lot to adjust to, she supposed. Feeling a bit strange was a reasonable response.
I’m a criminal now. A criminal.
Bogey is dead because of me. And I am living off his murderer’s money. Money his murderer was probably paid to kill me.
Bogey.
She’d been thinking about Bogey a lot. And her father. She wondered what her father would have thought of him.
Snap out o
f it.
Such thoughts were pointless. Mak checked the maps function on the iPhone she had bought using Petra Blackman’s ID. She was less than halfway there. She crumpled up the greasy paper from her spent Big Mac and stuffed it in the brown paper bag. The artificial scent of car interior cleaner, which had been so overwhelming when she’d first taken the vehicle for a test drive, was now thoroughly replaced by the distinctive fast-food smell of saturated beef fat — the special ingredient of the McDonald’s fry. Her stomach churned. Mak stepped out of the car, leaving the door open, and marched to the nearest bin to throw everything out. After airing the car she pulled out of the large parking lot, windows down, passing parked trucks packed with freight, and feeling full though not exactly sated, and certainly no more settled in the stomach. She soon noticed signs for the Belanglo Forest, and felt an uneasy sweat take hold, reminded of the murders of seven backpackers in the early nineties by serial killer Ivan Milat. About two decades later a teenage relative of Milat had killed a seventeen-year-old in the very same forest, using a double-sided axe. Now his life would be spent behind bars. Mak felt a touch of nausea. It was a bad place.
She sped up, and turned the radio on.
Oh God …
No.
Mak hurriedly checked her mirrors, then swerved onto the shoulder and braked hard. She managed to whip her seat belt off and crack open the driver’s door before heaving, car sick, onto the pavement on the side of the highway, losing her modest meal.
CHAPTER 25
‘We have a match,’ Detective Inspector Kelley said.
Agent Andy Flynn was nearly at his front door. He felt wired with uneasy adrenaline, having not been able to rest since Mak’s sudden, shocking arrival. The sun was down and the street lamps outside his house glowed and hummed. He had his keys in one hand and his mobile phone in the other, and as he put the key in the lock he thought, Yes. This was good news from Kelley. A DNA match to the two previous rape cases would solidly connect the crimes, just as Andy had suggested they were linked. They might officially start questioning Dayle’s rape alibi, might see that he had lucked out in being cleared. It wasn’t enough to get a court order for a DNA sample from Dayle — that would be showing their hand too early — but it might just be enough to get a warrant to search his flat, where Andy felt sure they would find evidence of his involvement in Victoria Hempsey’s murder. It was a big step forwards.
‘That’s good news, sir,’ Andy said, turning the lock and entering his dark house. He closed the door and reached around for the light switch. The bulb came on over the centre of the living room, illuminating his empty couch.
‘Not quite,’ Kelley said down the line.
‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s a match to her boyfriend. He was there on the Wednesday afternoon, before going out for dinner.’
Fuck.
Andy shut his eyes. Either the boyfriend was the killer, which Andy still found unlikely — his alibi was corroborated by several people and the crime did not fit — or the killer did not leave semen at the scene, which was out of sync with the pattern of the previous rapes. Andy locked his door and leaned back against it.
‘Do you still like Dayle for it?’ Kelley asked him.
Andy walked into his living room. He took a breath and placed his briefcase on the carpet. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Yeah, I still like him for it.’
‘But there was no semen left by a second person.’
Dayle had avoided leaving traceable DNA at the scene. That had to be the answer. ‘He’s changed his methods,’ Andy argued. ‘He’s become careful.’
But there was doubt.
Agent Andrew Flynn’s house in Canberra was humble and masculine. Three bedrooms. One with a queen-sized bed and small side table and a closet with a few suits and a leather jacket hanging in it, taking up one half. The other half had been empty for over two months. The second bedroom had been converted into a makeshift study he rarely used. In the living room were a curved reading lamp, a worn leather couch and his grandfather’s medals in a small glass case over a wooden cabinet.
After Mak had left him he hadn’t wanted to change anything. She’d taken her things, nothing more, but everything else remained the same. In a sense it was like Andy himself: a functioning object with a big chunk missing.
Makedde.
He could still hardly believe she’d shown up, without warning, in the bedroom they’d once shared. Andy had spent a lot of time trying not to think about her, and when he did he blamed himself for what had gone wrong. The fact was, he’d feared a repeat of his first marriage — he realised that now. Some part of him had feared Mak would become Cassandra. The longer they lived together the more he’d retreated from her. He could see it now. He’d loved her so desperately and he’d fucked it up.
And now look at your lives.
Terrible things had happened to Mak. She was alone and in hiding. And Andy was alone, too, watching his career implode slowly, decaying from the inside out.
She was alive, and still, he couldn’t reach her.
Andy did what he always did. He buried himself in his work. Tonight his living-room floor was a kaleidoscope of fresh horrors. A boy of only ten had been murdered in a neighbouring town, strangled with a knotted blue ribbon and left in a drain, almost precisely the same way another boy had been killed and disposed of nine months previous. This was where cases like these ended up. In Andy’s living room. The carpet was decorated in grim images, the small, pale bodies laid out in the final nakedness of death in a series of photographs only a homicide investigator could bear to sit amongst. He scanned the photographs once more, looked at the knots in the ribbon, and his mind drifted back to Ms Hempsey. The news from Inspector Kelley was not good. Kelley had already been worried that the overburdened surveillance team would be pulled, and he’d told Andy as much. The commander wasn’t as confident in Andy’s assessment as Kelley was. Or perhaps it was that there was an immediate threat somewhere else: the team might be pressured to abandon Dayle for another, somehow more dangerous target, though that was hard to imagine.
Andy took another sip of his drink, and placed the tumbler on the carpet again.
No. They had to keep the surveillance on. They have to. Kelley knows that.
Kelley had a lot of pull, but those kinds of decisions were out of Andy’s hands. He’d seen to that by moving here, to this lonely place, to this new challenge with the SVCP unit.
He’d seen to it that he’d end up this way, sitting in his living room alone with the dead.
Mak was at the Sheraton on the Park in Sydney, her new phone in one hand, a bottle of water in the other. She’d crawled in between the sheets, enjoying the sterile comfort and privacy of the hotel room. Even ordered room service, which she ate watching a mind-numbing television program. She’d wanted to feel human again. Safe. The illusion was partially successful. Yet Luther’s Glock was always there, in her peripheral vision.
It was late when Mak pressed the call button and bit her lip. The number was already programmed in. She’d tried a few times before, but this time Andy answered in only three rings.
‘Flynn,’ he said brusquely.
‘Hi.’
Makedde sat up in the bed, pleased he’d finally answered. She uttered that single-word greeting and let it hang for a moment, as if it had been a simple touch and she could feel him, despite the distance.
‘I had to call,’ she continued vaguely. The urge to had seemed irresistible, but she was conflicted. She’d given him the laptop, which was what she’d come to do. She knew it was too early for results. This was something else.
‘Mak.’ The way he said her name gave her a warm shudder. ‘Are you okay?’ he asked. ‘I was so relieved to see you the other night —’
‘But?’
‘But nothing. I was relieved. You wouldn’t fucking believe how relieved,’ he said, the tone of his voice relaying a depth of feeling she had not heard from him in years.
She smiled; she fe
lt a small sliver of her emotional self come back to life after months of deadness.
‘In the morning I could hardly believe it had happened at all, you showing up like that. I hate not being able to contact you. I’ve hated that the most in the past two months, the uncertainty and not being able to contact you, not knowing if you were okay. I’m glad you called. I’ve been worried. More than worried. I thought something terrible had happened —’
‘Something terrible did.’ She felt herself close again.
Luther.
‘Are you still in Canberra? Can I see you?’
‘No,’ she said flatly, almost defensively.
‘If you’re in Sydney, I can get there tonight. I’m consulting on a case for Inspector Kelley — the new unit is consulting on a case,’ he corrected himself. ‘Strictly speaking, my part is over, but …’
Always the cases, Mak thought. The cases Andy worked knew no hours, no boundaries. Violent rapists and murderers. Psychopaths. People who needed to be stopped or they would inevitably kill again and again. She’d fallen in love with a man who shared his life with people like that. The work was hardly nine to five: she’d known that from the start. Her own father was a cop, so she understood better than most what was demanded of him. She’d seen Andy stay up literally all night on caffeine, or fly away to another town at the drop of a hat to try to put gory puzzle pieces together to halt the threat of future violence. Lives were at stake. It didn’t matter if he and Mak had other plans. It didn’t matter if they’d booked a holiday, if they desperately needed time together to reconnect.
There’d always been a part of Andy that Mak couldn’t reach — the part of him that was in his work.
‘I could stay in Sydney for a while. If you’ll have me,’ he said. ‘Under whatever terms you want. I just … need to see you.’
Mak licked her lips. She wasn’t sure about telling him where she was. ‘Is it going well? The unit?’ she asked, shifting her emotions to one side.
