by Anita Bell
‘Thanks, Janet,’ he added, already seeing Knox Pox chasing after him with the sirens blaring. ‘You’re a peach. And don’t forget now, shhhhh.’
She nodded, mimicking him with a finger over her lips as he left. But he didn’t see her other hand, the one behind her back, which was already reaching for the telephone.
Locklin gripped the girl’s wrist, put his hand around her waist and hefted her up into the cabin of the Bedford like a sack full of chicken feed. It almost made him smile — the look on her face and the way she pulled her hand away — as if he had hurt more than just her pride.
She was pretty enough in a delicate, crushed flower kind of way. And her body — well, no complaints there either. But coming here with a name like Fletcher was like waving a red flag in his face. She had to know what she was getting herself into, and none of it, until now, was his fault.
He slammed her door closed twice. The catch wouldn’t stick the first time. Then he bounded around the bullbar to wrench open the driver’s door and hoist himself up behind the steering wheel.
One of her sleeves had caught on a tear in the vinyl seat and she was still trying to unhook it when he slid onto the seat beside her. From the look on her face, she wanted to sort it out by herself and that suited him. She deserved it, if she was stupid enough to wear clothes like that in November heat.
She fussed over it carefully while he clicked over the ignition.
Nothing.
He worked the key again and heard her grumble as the Bedford backfired and jolted to life. From the corner of his eye, he saw her sleeve pull free from its catch. He glanced over and thought he saw something else, but the ice-princess look on her face told him to mind his own business.
Locklin shook his head a second later, realising that he’d been staring at her for much longer than he’d realised. His mind had shot back to Timor, to another girl and another place that he’d much rather forget. He could only see her face now, slim like a chocolate elfin, and he wondered what it was about the Fletcher girl that made him remember the first girl, lying dead in her village.
The wrists maybe, he thought. They both had skinny wrists.
He sat there for another second, staring at his lap with the motor idling.
‘Well?’ the Fletcher girl said, as the stallion stamped restlessly in the back.
‘It has to warm up,’ he lied, shaking his head again to chase the village girl’s ghost from his mind. He turned the Bedford into Main Street heading north, but he was still thinking about her as the truck grumbled its way up past St Joseph’s.
It was done. The black Mercedes chimed obediently to life, emerging from behind a modest church to spin about in the unfinished roadworks and make its own billowing dust trail out of town.
‘Bloody tourists!’ Scotty Nolan shouted, jumping out of the way. He stood beside the industrial rubbish bin, punching his fist in the air. ‘You nearly hit me, you dumb runt!’
But then he realised that was no tourist. He’d seen that Mercedes before.
Detective Burkett imitated the gesture of a wanker under his desk, while Sergeant Underwood continued to prattle. He’d been going on for half an hour and still managed to avoid explaining how the Dumakis girl had escaped his custody.
Burkett already knew the layout of the murder scene. He’d been to the Dumakis-Fletcher mansion at Lavender Bay four times earlier that month, but that was over a matter of stolen paintings. No apparent connection. Aaron Fletcher was the victim’s second husband and he’d been chasing a police report so he could process an insurance claim for their little art gallery while his wife had been away on business in her role as Minister for the Arts.
Now the woman was dead, her left lung speared through with the crystal spire of an ornamental church and her bleeding body left to die on the living-room rug like a Pro Hart tomato sauce painting from a carpet commercial.
‘So where’s the girl?’ Burkett asked again and Underwood wiped his forehead dry with the back of his hand.
‘It’s complicated, sir,’ he stalled and Burkett fought the impulse to roll his eyes. Outside, he could hear hookers. Noisy. Laughing. Most of them still high.
‘Ooh, yeah. Work it for me baby,’ Burkett heard one say, then he realised she was talking about the truncheon that was hustling her towards the lockup.
They all laughed at that, even a few cops, but Burkett’s forehead flattened into a frown for the endless loop that many of their lives had fallen into. Nothing seemed to change. They were always prosecuting the drunks and never the slack publicans. Always the hookers, never the pimps. Pushers, not traffickers. Car thieves, not ring leaders. Always the little people and never the brains.
Burkett wished he could change that. That’s what the job was supposed to be about, he thought, making a difference. But most of the time it just bogged down in paperwork.
Burkett saw a balding detective from the Central Investigation Bureau walking down the hall beside his lieutenant and realised that it could have been worse if he’d taken a job at CIB. At least at Sydney HQ he got to wear a Kevlar vest and carry a sidearm for more than just decoration. CIB detectives, from what he’d seen, could be safe behind plastic lunch-wrap for all the dirty work they did. What they all needed, he realised, was someone who had some real power to take action. But what he didn’t know was that he was looking at him.
Senior Detective Parry came in with his belly hanging out of his dark suit and nodding with a stern look on his face while Lieutenant Charlston introduced them.
‘So you’re the hotshot,’ Parry said, shaking hands with Burkett. ‘Gold medallist in the Queens Shoot, two service medals for bravery and an arrest record longer than a hooker’s client list.’
‘This is him,’ Lieutenant Charlston said, slapping Burkett on the back below his blond ponytail. ‘Fan club meets in the lunch room at noon.’
Parry let go of Burkett’s hand but held his eyes, wondering if he really was a damn good cop or just a marionette for whichever crime syndicate pulled his strings. It wouldn’t be the first time that organised criminals had burned their traitors or rivals to a cop just to get him promoted to a position where they could better use him. And Parry wished he could just ask the kid and get a straight answer. But he knew that wouldn’t be smart. Reputable cop or a rogue, Parry wouldn’t really be able to tell if Burkett was crooked until he turned his back and got a bullet in it — and he had no intention of doing that.
‘I’ll leave you gentlemen to it then,’ Lieutenant Charlston said, backing out.
‘Leave us to what?’ Burkett asked, holding his hand up to stop Underwood from going too. ‘I’m in the middle of something.’
‘The Dumakis murder,’ Parry said. ‘That’s why I’m here.’ After forty-seven months chasing down a smuggling ring from Sydney to Rome, he’d been kept busier than a pig with two mudholes, but the gruesome murder of the Arts Minister promised to liven things up even more. It almost made him smile — almost. But his smiles were reserved for the rare occasions when he achieved a successful jail conviction after a court hearing, when he could curl up on his dead daughter’s oversized beanbag with a solitary glass of scotch and whisper to her photo that he’d bagged another bad guy. But it had been three years, seven months and four days since his last smile, and his wife had given up waiting.
‘I have reason to believe,’ he added, guarding his words carefully, ‘that her husband Mr Fletcher may be involved in another case that I’m working on.’
‘The smuggling scandal?’ Burkett guessed. ‘I’m surprised politicians haven’t been coming out of the woodwork, telling you to go sit in your corner like a good little blue heeler until after the next election. That’s what happened to me when I tried to follow up on a few missing paintings from the Dumakis Art Gallery last month.’
‘Who said they haven’t?’ Parry said. ‘Renée Dumakis was being groomed as the next Prime Minister, and you know politicians. They’d order us to back off a Port Arthur gunman if he was married to
someone who could stop them from losing the next election for them. But the lady’s dead now, and if you read the papers you know there are plenty of people out there who want to know why.’
‘You don’t think that includes her husband?’ Underwood asked, tugging his collar away from his thick neck and coughing. ‘I was the one who interviewed him while they were taking her body away and he seemed pretty convincing to me. And let’s not forget,’ he added, looking at Burkett, ‘that those three paintings they had on loan from the vaults of the Vatican did eventually turn up. They were mistakenly packed into storage by some air-headed artist instead of being shipped off with the rest of the exhibition to the next museum on Mr Fletcher’s tour.’
Burkett pushed his fists into his pockets, frowning. He was young, but he wasn’t naive. He’d checked that Dumakis Gallery throughly and then the paintings had very conveniently been found the moment he’d started investigating the case as if it was an insurance fraud. That was about the same time that politicians had bolted to the newspapers to shout that Renée Dumakis and her family were ‘clean’.
‘Well,’ Parry said, pushing his fists into his pockets to mimic Kalin Burkett. ‘I’ve just been granted permission straight from Parliament to make sure, and I’m recruiting my friend here with the ponytail to help.’
Oh great, Burkett thought, already imagining himself wrapped up in lunch-wrap. I’ve been promoted to the plastic police.
Nikki shifted around on the truck seat trying to avoid the jaggard collection of slashes in the sun-ravaged vinyl. The Bedford was fitted with a bench seat, one long innerspring that looked older than the truck itself. The back was split so the driver’s could be folded down separately from the rest and every bump in the road reminded her she was sitting beside a stranger.
Jolt. Lurch. Another pothole.
She felt Locklin’s weight shift in the seat beside her, felt his body bounce in time with the truck’s suspension and she floated on the reverberations like a cork bobbing, on pond ripples.
She tried not to look at him. Instead, she studied his reflection in the dusty glass to her left.
He wasn’t like any of the guys she’d known in Sydney — not that she’d dated more than a handful and none of them had lasted more than a term at school anyway. She’d always had her head buried in the art gallery accounts or stuck in assignments to finish her senior year and guys never seemed to appreciate that. Not the ones that she knew. They were all sons of politicians or lawyers or stockbrokers and they got their allowances without having to work for it like she did. They were sweet, considerate and polite when their parents were around and into smokes, booze and shooting up as soon as they turned their backs.
This guy was an alien by comparison. He didn’t hide his cigarette packet. He was older. His eyes were colder, grey like steel. And the muscles down his arms looked like they’d been carved out of granite, not pumped up on hormones in a gymnasium.
And she could smell him — salty, like the sands of Bondi on a windy day or the sea foam carried in on the Sydney breeze. She seemed to feel his touch even though he was an arm’s length away. And the goosebumps spreading on her skin stood up like tiny soldiers pointing hairs like bayonets and screamed ‘stay away from me’.
Her mutinous eyes refused to pull away from his reflection. She followed the strong line of his jaw and the curve of his lips, and it took her another long moment before she realised that she too was being studied.
His hand shifted the outside mirror on his door until she saw his eyes in it and she stared at him harder, then gave in and looked away.
She endured a heavy silence, but it didn’t last long.
‘How old are you?’ he asked. ‘Nineteen? Twenty?’
‘Twenty-one,’ she lied, preferring to end the conversation. ‘Girls are always twenty-one. Didn’t anyone tell you?’
‘Only after the first time,’ he said, raising an eyebrow. ‘Have you ever had a first time?’
‘Excuse me,’ she said flatly. ‘Do you have any influence whatsoever in who the Maitlands choose to work for them?’
He shook his head, surprised by the change of subject.
‘Are you going to be my supervisor, or do I have to work with you in any way?’
‘Not that I’m aware of,’ he said. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘Good, then,’ she said. ‘Mind your own business.’
He was silent for a second then he looked at her again as she wiped off the sweat that was streaming down her face. ‘So what kind of work are you going to do for Eric Maitland?’ he persisted. ‘Secretarial, or are you some kind of model for him to paint?’
Nikki stared out her window without answering. If he wanted the last word, she’d let him have it. She twiddled the charm on her necklace, checking his reflection again in her dusty window.
He was staring at her again with those cold warrior eyes, making her stomach churn. She pushed her finger to her temple to stop it from throbbing in the heat and tried to stare through his reflection to the fleeting farmlands outside.
Eucalypts lined the road like refugees from barren paddocks, stretching their thirsty branches to beg rain from a merciless sky. Her eyes fixed blankly on their tragic parade, and soon Locklin’s cold eyes were replaced by the even colder eyes of her stepfather accusing her of murder. She rubbed him from her tired eyes but he was there again in the darkness, clawing at every thought. She needed to scream, to chase him from her head, but the Bedford jolted over corrugations in the road and the ripples through the vinyl reminded her that she wasn’t alone.
Instead of screaming, she sat in tortured silence. But it wasn’t her silence that distracted Locklin from asking her another question. It was the talisman of an angel that she was wearing around her neck.
The Mercedes turned left at the Warrego crossroads and the stalker stamped the accelerator to the floor. His butt ached for a fast flight home after a night in the rented car, but he had another hour’s drive to get to Brisbane airport. Still, he thought, it had been worth it.
There was only one Nikola Renee Dumakis and she was working for him now, whether she wanted to or not. She danced sweetly to his tune even now, when she couldn’t hear the music.
Ironic, he thought, that to rid himself of the last heir to the Dumakis fortune he had to first make sure she was safe for a while. But his plan was working. After two years of careful spinning, his four hundred billion dollar web was almost complete, and now, with all his annoying little flies in one place, he could finish what he’d begun.
Aaron Fletcher smiled at that thought. Then he reached for his cell phone and dialled.
‘Thank goodness you’re home now, Meggie,’ Janet squealed into the phone. ‘I’ve been calling you for ages.’
‘I had to get fuel, babe,’ her sister replied calmly. ‘What’s up?’
‘You’ll never guess who I saw today. Never, never, never. Jayson! You know, Jayson? The guy who —’
‘Dumped me,’ Meggie Slaney finished, answering over the top of her baby sister. ‘You’re delirious, babe. He’s in Timor.’
‘No way!’ Janet said, hopping up and down like she was standing in fire ants. ‘I saw him, heard him mostly,’ she said, twisting her fingers into the phone cord. ‘But I did see him. Well, the top of his hat anyway. He was here!’
‘Where? In the store? Why?’
Janet grinned, dragging a metal stool across the tiles towards her butt. She could think of a few reasons why Jayson Locklin could be back and each theory buzzed inside her head like a mosquito trying to get out. She hooked her skinny hip onto the vinyl cushion and took a breath.
This was going to take a while.
Eric Maitland watched the yacht leave and wondered how he was going to break the bad news to his stepbrother. He walked back to the car scratching his goatee, relieved at least that Singapore and Lowood were pretty much the same in one respect. He could do business in an old sweatshirt like a forty-year-old hippie without anyone taking much notice of him.
He watched an old peasant woman chop the head off a chicken while his driver opened the car door for him, and then his phone rang. He pulled his phone off his belt as he got in and noticed the number that was trying to contact him was the one that he was dreading. He pushed a button to receive the call, and in the split second it took to bounce the signal up to a satellite and get another one back to his ear, his heart had climbed into his throat.
‘Bad news, Aaron,’ he said before hearing the caller’s voice.
‘You didn’t finish the deal?’
‘Yeah, I did,’ Maitland said, hearing muffled street traffic on the other end. ‘The buyers had plenty of merchandise to keep them happy and I watched them transfer the money. I just didn’t have that special item you wanted me to find a home for while I was over here.’
‘Then where is it?’ Fletcher asked, squeezing the steering wheel of his rented Mercedes until the leather squeaked. He knew exactly what item his younger stepbrother was talking about. It was evidence — very expensive evidence that he preferred to sell outside the country for a profit than hand over to court officials who might use it to put him behind bars for his wife’s murder. It was also part of the murder weapon and if it was missing, his brother was about the only person alive with an opportunity and a motive to steal it.
‘I don’t know where it is,’ Maitland said. His hands were shaking but Fletcher couldn’t see that. ‘Maybe I took it out. I don’t remember now.’
You’re a lousy liar, Fletcher thought, wondering if his stepbrother might be planning on blackmailing him with the evidence. He made a fist around his cell phone and turned hard right, cutting off another driver to get onto the freeway. He was tired, which always made him cranky, but this wasn’t the first time that Maitland had let him down.
