by Lee Winter
“What are you talking about?”
“Well, I wouldn’t have thought an assassin would make a call to emergency services reporting Viktor Raven’s daughter was still alive in a wrecked car, but you did.”
“That would be an unlikely thing for an assassin to do.”
“Yes, it would,” Ryan agreed. “Oh the voice was disguised, but I thought about it last night. The timing of when you left and where it happened, the voice being female; it had to be you.”
“You’re imagining a great deal.” Natalya folded her arms and glared. “In fact, you’re just making up things now.”
“Can’t you just be honest with me for one minute?” Ryan said with an annoyed frown. “Give me one minute of truth?”
“You’re a cop, Alison,” Natalya said. “And that’s not changing any time soon.”
“I’m not even here, though, remember? Nothing that happens here or is said here will see the light of day. I was never here.”
Natalya shook her head. “I can’t trust that. Trust leads to betrayal. I know that more than most.”
The vision of Lola’s gun stroking her hand slipped into her brain and she tried not to shudder.
“Oh? What’s happened?” Ryan asked, sounding concerned. She leaned forward.
Natalya shook her head incredulously. “Seriously, do you really not understand? We’re not friends. We could never be. Do you not get what this dynamic is?” she said, waving her fingers between them. “We’re hunter and prey.”
Ryan stared back at her evenly. “And which of us is which?” she asked coolly.
For the longest moment they just looked at each other. The silence grew awkward.
“Right, so, the third reason why I’m here,” Ryan said, finally breaking the standoff, “is because you could have killed me on Monday when the three-week deadline was up. And you didn’t. So that gets you my personal thanks. That’s the other reason for you getting a free pass from me today.”
Natalya’s mind went into overdrive. How could she have known? How long had she?
“I know you were hired to kill me,” Ryan clarified.
Another beat passed as they stared at each other.
“How?” Natalya eventually ground out, her brain reeling. Who the hell had talked? Surely not Lola?
Ryan gave her a coy smile and laced her fingers across her stomach. “I know because of who it was who put the hit out on me.”
For once Natalya couldn’t disguise her shock. “Who was it?”
“That’s quite a story.”
Natalya spoke with a deadly softness. “It turns out I’ve got the time.”
Chapter 18
Alison ordered her thoughts, casting her mind back to the day her world upended itself. The day, two years ago, she’d been at work, minding her own business on her usual cold cases when the report came through that a drug runner had died. His body had been found in the middle of the dusty, red desert at Mundi Mundi. The preliminary report said he’d drowned.
Drowned.
She listened in on the conversations of the other detectives as they laughed about the strangest case that had ever crossed their desks.
When her colleagues had gone home that night, she’d shoved aside her cold case and called up the file. The man, Beattie, had been a drug runner for High Street. One of Santos’s men. His body soon would be sent to Melbourne for an autopsy, but the Broken Hill police officer who’d attended the scene had jumped to a fairly obvious conclusion.
Stapled to the man’s chest had been a four-kilogram, empty, plastic frozen-ice bag. Given Beattie was found clutching his throat, the officer had speculated its contents had been forced down it in such vast quantities that he’d either drowned or choked on it.
Alison stared at the report in disbelief. This wasn’t a killing so much as a mockery. Someone was making a statement.
She flicked back to the first page to look up which drugs he ran. Crystal meth. Alison stared. He ran ice. And he’d been stuffed full of ice. A different sort, but still.
She printed out the report and sat at her desk, gazing at it. From that moment on, everything changed.
Her curiosity was piqued. She wondered if there’d ever been a similar case like this. A murder as pointed as this didn’t happen in isolation, surely? And the perpetrator seemed too assured and mocking not to have killed before.
She went back through her computer, looking at every murder in recent years. No other reports of a killer using ice came up. No other poetic justice-style killings, either.
What about the other files, though? The ones she never got to see? The gangland cases? Clearly the man was linked to one of the families. She glanced at her watch. It was still early. She had no one around to tell her no.
Alison changed the parameters of her search back to when the underworld killings started in 1998. Every gangland-associated murder, solved and unsolved, within Victoria, where the method of death was not by knife, gun, or choking.
After a few minutes her screen filled with the results. The list went for pages.
She groaned. She stretched her neck, cracked her knuckles, then hit enter on the first killing: January 4, 1998.
It’s not like she didn’t have plenty of time. Or a life.
* * *
Over the next year, Alison had become the department’s secret resident expert on the gangland wars. She dug into them mainly in her own time, given Moore’s insistence that she stick to cases the public and the politicians cared about. And the masses could not care less if the underworld’s most vicious criminals cannibalised themselves.
She understood that. She did. But there was also something compelling about picking apart the structures of the warring crime families and piecing together the patterns no one else could see.
Like a beehive, she had come to see the order within the chaos. In the impersonal typed reports, in the photos of men with dull eyes and scarred faces, she found something to get out of bed for. It had taken a long time for her to be this interested in work again since her first dream had ended in tatters.
Now her fingers tingled with each new piece of the puzzle she fitted together. On the days she made a breakthrough, there was no other sensation like it in the world.
After years of feeling mired in tar, just going through the motions, she finally felt a sense of purpose. She was doing something important. It made her feel 100 feet tall and unstoppable. On those days she felt immortal.
Well, until she went home.
Chapter 19
After eighteen months, Alison had uncovered over a dozen underworld deaths that she was sure were linked to the same killer, and a further six that were not gangland hits but were possibly also the same person, where an unaligned criminal had died. With her research folder bulging, a colourful flowchart and a chronology mapped out, she decided it was time to present her facts to her boss.
She’d planned it carefully. She’d do it on the weekend, while on a visit to catch up with her sister Susan and Hailey. Away from the office, Barry Moore was less likely to make his disdain for her a team sport with the other detectives. She might even get a good hearing. And even if the asshole hated her, Moore might still keep an open mind about this. Business was business, after all.
She sat beside Moore on an outdoor chair in his grassed back yard and gave Charlotte a fond stroke behind the ears as her old dog sat at her side. Finally sucking up the courage, Alison passed her boss the folder. Then she nervously and painstakingly explained her theory.
“One person,” she said as she finished, “I really believe one person did all of these.”
“Serial killers don’t change their MOs so much,” he grunted at her, cracking the bottle top and passing her a beer. “And if it’s an assassin, they’d never be hired by all four rival crime families. So I don’t buy it.”
Alison took the beer, listening politely. She hated beer—a fact her brother-in-law knew all too well. She sipped it. Nope, still as bad as she remembered. She pla
ced it on the grass beside her. Moore leaned back in his canvas chair, his ample stomach stretching his purple Melbourne Storm T-shirt.
“Look,” he continued, “these families are loyal to their own. They’d never use the same assassin that killed one of theirs. There’s a code. No way in hell. It’s tribal with them.”
It was a good point. She’d already considered that. But the facts didn’t lie.
“I understand that’s the usual way,” Alison said carefully. “But I also believe this is a rare circumstance, where one person has gained the business of all of them by being neutral, by being extremely good—able to kill even the hardest-to-get-to person—and critically, by doing it in a unique way, with a signature.
“I think half the reason the families like indulging in these revenge killings is for that reason. The ‘screw-you’ message. It’s all about egos to them.”
Susan came out and joined them, scooping up Alison’s discarded beer and replacing it with a diet cola. Alison shot her a grateful smile.
“These assholes do like their revenge,” Moore agreed with a grunt. “But I just can’t see them crossing family lines to do it. It’s unheard of.”
“Until now.”
“Says you.”
“Says my dozens of cross-matched crime scene reports.”
“Industrious little thing, aren’t you? How do I know you didn’t just make all this up to be the hero?”
“Barry,” Susan admonished gently, “Em would never do that. You know that.”
Moore scratched his gut, ignored the interruption, and took another swig of beer.
“I don’t know anything,” he said, but he wasn’t sounding too disagreeable. Just arguing with his wife because he could. As usual. “That’s quite a conspiracy theory you’ve cooked up there.”
“It’s not cooked,” Alison said tightly. “I’d like to show you my work so you can see the patterns I’ve found. All the knots match on the seven hogtied victims. Here…” She reached for another folder but he held up a hand.
“No.” He glanced at his watch. “My game’s about to start. Is that it?”
“Well, I have one more theory. Um, I really think the killer’s a woman.”
The dismayed look on Susan’s face told her everything she needed to know. Her brother-in-law was a knuckle dragger. But she hadn’t been entirely sure how much his sexism was just for show at the boys’ club at work. Susan’s reaction was depressing.
“Ryan, is this some new feminazi crap of yours? Women need to be the greatest villains ever or something? What next? Jackie the Ripper did it all along?”
“No,” Alison frowned. “I don’t care which gender the killer is. I just want the truth.”
“The truth? These killings are cold blooded. You can feel the testosterone dripping down the walls. Besides, you really can’t see that they’d never, ever, allow some girl to do the deed for them? That’s like cutting off their own dicks. And you have no proof.”
“I have the vibe I get when I study all these crime scenes. The deaths are pointed and subtle, detail-oriented and clever. Sometimes they’re even poetic. It feels female.”
“Can you even hear yourself? Vibe? Poetic? Feels? I told you the sorry day you landed in my department that you weren’t suited to this job. Soft as a day-old kitten. Anyway, enough of this shit. I think that’s the last time I need to hear your conspiracy theories. Got it?”
He didn’t wait for an answer. Just grabbed his beer, shot her a disgusted look, and went inside.
Alison exhaled. Well. So much for her powers of persuasion.
“Sorry, sis,” Susan murmured. “You know what he’s like when he thinks he’s right.”
Alison sipped her drink morosely.
“Maybe you should just let it go,” Susan continued. “He’s never going to change his mind.”
“I’m not wrong about this,” Alison said adamantly. “I’m not. I can feel it.”
“He won’t thank you even if you’re right.”
“I can find absolute proof. Then he’ll have to acknowledge I’m right or miss getting the reflected glory.”
“Or you won’t find proof because maybe he is right: It’s all in your head,” Susan suggested quietly. “Same as Mum and her grand fantasies about how things should be.”
“Don’t compare me to her. We’re nothing alike.”
“No? You both think you’re made for better. Well, guess what: Sometimes you just have to accept that life is what it is—crappy.”
“Like you did?” Alison tilted her head.
Susan was not in a happy marriage, and Alison wished her sister could find some inner strength to take Hailey and leave the bastard. Raising the topic just led to angry denials from her sister about how bad the man really was. But Alison had heard the way he shouted at his wife. It could rattle the rafters.
Sometimes Alison wasn’t sure which Susan was more afraid of: the truth, or that she’d then feel obligated to act on it. Denial was just easier.
“Can’t you just drop it, Emily?” Susan asked. “For once in your life, stop being so damn stubborn! God, you want the other detectives to take you seriously so badly you’ll clutch at straws.”
She held up her hand at Alison’s indignant squawk of protest. “Okay, sorry. Look, even if you are right, you know he’ll take his bad mood out on me. He hates being one-upped by a woman. I’ll hear about nothing else for weeks.”
“That’s not fair,” Alison protested, feeling sick. “Don’t make me choose between justice and you. This is my case of a lifetime. I haven’t felt this good since…” She faded out.
“Since Sydney? And that roommate you don’t like to talk about? And the career you almost had until we forced you home? Are you still mad about that? Look, Em, I’m sorry, but it was the only option. I’m sorry Mum had that spectacular freaking breakdown in the aisles of David Jones when Dad left her. But you know I’d just had Hailey and we were out of other options.
“And how were any of us to know Mum would have that fall just after she got herself back together? It’s not like we knew she’d be immobile for another fourteen damn years. It was only supposed to be temporary. You know that. Don’t blame us. Blame Mum for being stubborn like she always is and refusing home help.”
Alison bit her lip to prevent herself from saying something they’d both regret. She’d heard it all before. Every single rationalisation that her sister gave for why they’d insisted Alison give up her scholarship and do the “right thing.” Every single bullshit reason as to why Susan and Barry couldn’t shoulder Elsie for a few years now so that she could have a break.
“Let it go,” Susan said. “For your own good. It’ll help you to move on. Find someone else. Something else.”
“I’ve already found something else,” Alison pointed out. “And Barry wants to crush that now, too. Well not this time.”
She shot a warning look at her sister and was dismayed to see fear lacing her eyes. Fear of the unknown and of taking a risk. Alison couldn’t become that. Wouldn’t.
But she’d already been halfway there at one time. Alison had gone through a period of wondering what the point was of even having fresh dreams if she couldn’t face the thought of having to stitch her heart back together again if she lost them.
She had only snatches of memories from back then, like small markers on the side of the road. Her sister’s hysterical call about their mother’s breakdown; taking Elsie to psych appointments, buying her pain meds. Her father’s devastation at her stepmother’s funeral a few years later.
But mainly what she remembered was her own pain. Crying, packing up, looking around an empty apartment bedroom and finding her girlfriend’s sad eyes. Knowing that, for all Melissa’s reassurances, she probably wouldn’t see her again. Because Melissa was going to be a renowned flautist some day and her life was firmly in Sydney.
Alison could still remember the faint touch of Melissa’s fingertips against her own as the taxi pulled away.
Lo
ss was a devious little trap, Alison had often thought. It lay in wait to ambush you months or years later, when you thought you’d moved on and dealt with the sadness. She had been unprepared for how her father’s death, a few years after his new wife’s, had brought up everything else. It was like the emotional resonance for every past hurt had flooded her bloodstream in one sudden, shocking hit.
“Morbidity due to alcohol use,” the coroner noted clinically, later. A fancy way of saying that living the champagne lifestyle of her father’s dreams had been incompatible with his thoroughly sauced liver.
Alison’s soul compressed itself into a frozen ball of pain the day he died, and stayed that way.
In the intervening years Elsie regularly punished Alison for not being the husband she wished was there instead of her. Alison’s interest in life slowly faded away with each new cup of tea and reheated meal she ferried down the hall to her demanding mother. Every plumped pillow, every pill bottle handed over, was a reminder that nothing had moved on in her life since.
And then came the day she awoke. The day a body was found at Mundi Mundi.
She hadn’t made the conscious decision to breathe again. It just happened gradually. But bit by bit, Alison noticed she no longer dreaded waking each day. Achingly slowly, she learned to exhale, to take risks, to reach beyond that which she thought she was capable of, and then to excel at it.
It seemed only fitting then, that one day, eighteen months after the Mundi Mundi drug runner met his unfortunate death, she realised she had well and truly found life again.
So, no, she wasn’t going to stand by and let Barry Moore or anyone else take away her reason for living a second time.
Alison was just going to have to prove she was right.
Chapter 20
