But mainly it was the fact that if I delayed entering the prison facility, Charlie might change his mind. It had already been far harder to get in than I had anticipated. Giving my only chance of entry enough time to second guess his acquiescence was not going to help.
I needed to tick this prisoner off my list. Find the dot and connect it to Weston. Carl, even though a surprise inside the facility itself, was a distraction and nothing else.
I followed behind Damon and Charlie and left the reception area not bothering to look back at my former CIB partner.
Charlie took us to a normal interrogation room after running us through the appropriate security scanners. It wasn’t exactly part of the visitation centre but close enough for it to be in the same large building. This was where I normally met inmates to question. It was familiar territory and considering who else could have been in the visitation area itself; it was a wise move on Charlie’s part.
But coming to this side of the barrier brought back all the feelings of reluctant imprisonment I usually felt when walking the halls of this place. Barred doors clanged shut behind us. Multiple levels of security had to be by-passed the further into the facility we went. It would mean bringing the prisoner to us could be done without logging a visitation. But it also meant getting out of here afterwards was wholly dependent on the correction facility staff.
Charlie, I felt I could trust. I’d worked with him many times and shared a joke or two while we waited for this inmate or that to be brought to the interrogation rooms for questioning. But without my badge, I felt naked. Defenceless. It wasn’t a weapon I needed to feel armed; it was my position as a detective.
Without it, I felt… exposed. It was not a feeling I coped with well.
In fact, I felt like the chemicals in my body were revolting. Or rioting considering where we currently were. Taking up arms against me and making my heart rate increase and my respiration rate skyrocket. Sweat beaded my brow, and a trembling started up in my fingertips. I struggled to count to three inside my head. The room spun. The lock closing on the door as Charlie exited to organise the retrieval of Mansfield for us sounded like a death knell inside my head.
“Lara,” I heard Damon say. “Love, it’s all right. Slow down. You’re breathing too quickly.”
Breathing. Beating. Thinking. Being. All of it was too quick, I thought as I bent over at the waist and tried frantically to still the spinning of the room. I felt off-kilter and adrift. Cut off from the Department and my teammates. CIB was gone. Carl was gone even if he was occasionally present. My badge was gone. Maybe permanently.
Only temporarily, I forcefully corrected myself.
Myself didn’t want to listen.
Intellectually I understood.
Physically and emotionally I was a mess.
My body betrayed my head. Chemicals ran rampant throughout my system. Skin prickled. Muscles twitched. My fight or flight reflexes kicked in, and I crossed to the locked door and attempted to open it.
Damon came up behind me and said in a low voice, not reaching out to hold me in any way, “Cardrona. I think that’s where I want to go on holiday.” Cardrona Alpine Ski Resort in the South Island of New Zealand. I hadn’t known Damon could ski. “The wide, open slopes; far better than Whakapapa’s. Have you skied before?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“I can teach you. You’d be great at it. And if you fall over, the snow on Cardrona is powder soft. We can make snow angels. Build snowmen.”
“Have a snowball fight,” I whispered.
“I’d beat you,” he said, laughing.
“Not a chance,” I replied, turning to face him.
“So, shall we?” he asked. “It’ll be open before we know it. Shall we take some leave and head down country and rent a chalet in Wanaka? Just the two of us.”
No Carl. No Carole. No CIB. No HEAT.
“I’d like that,” I said.
He smiled softly at me, reached up and tucked a loose strand of my hair behind my ear. We stared at each other and then a buzz sounded and the locks disengaged on the door.
Stepping away, we separated. But I felt as though a line connected Damon and me. Even when adrift, he could reach me.
My heart rate started to settle. The tingling eased in my fingertips. I still felt a little lightheaded, but the ground was firmly beneath my feet again.
You’re close to breaking, Lara.
Yeah, maybe I was. But maybe I didn’t need Hennessey’s glue to stay in one piece. I had Damon.
And I had Cardrona.
And I could do this.
I smiled, thinking of wide, open ski slopes and curling up in my lover’s arms in front of an open fire as Gregg Arnold Mansfield swaggered in.
I stared at the man I thought Weston had framed and forgot about too fast heartbeats and tingling extremities and spinning rooms when I felt trapped.
This was what I was good at. Facing a career criminal and digging through their dirt to find a dot.
The dots would connect. I just had to hold it together long enough to connect them.
Trust yourself, Lara. Above all else trust yourself.
I could do this.
Chapter Eleven
“Even Scum Of The Earth Want To Smell Like Roses, Sport. They Might Wear Thorns, They Might Be Buried In A Pile Of Horse Crap, But Deep Down Inside They’re Just A Prize-Winning Flower Wanting To See The Sun.”
Gregg Arnold Mansfield was a nasty piece of work. I was sure his appearance alone convicted him. I pitied the jury members when faced with convicting a man without bias who looked like a natural born axe murderer. One look would have been all it took for the hammer to fall on his fate.
I ignored the rough looking criminal sitting before me, using silence as a sharply honed blade, and studied the dates in the case file I’d printed out earlier trying to piece together a timeline for Weston to have acted.
Mansfield had been incarcerated here for three years. But that didn’t include his time in remand while on trial. So the crimes he was sentenced for happened nearly four years ago. I flicked a glance toward Damon, who sat beside me at the desk, facing off against the grossly over-bearded, scowling, scarred up, prison-tattooed man opposite him as if he were a piece of dirt.
I couldn’t blame Damon for thinking that. Mansfield looked the part perfectly. He also, I was quite sure, had no intention of assisting us willingly. To him, we represented authority. And it was people in positions of authority who had landed him in this mess.
If you believed his continued denials of guilt, that is.
Strangely, I did. But I had to be careful I wasn’t just trying to make this case fit.
Four years ago, Carole Michaels was a lovely, drug-free, outgoing, successful young adult starting her career in the finance sector. Not even on Weston’s radar.
I checked the career details of the victim Mansfield was charged with abducting and found a dot.
Finance. Private sector lending to be precise.
Carole had worked for a mainstream bank; it wasn’t a perfect match, but it was too damn coincidental to ignore.
I stared at Mansfield. He’d worked in money lending too. That’s how he connected to the victim. The victim, a Lisa Devon, had been having a relationship with one of Mansfield’s employees. Her boyfriend had been thoroughly investigated at the time and had come up squeaky clean. I was sure he wasn’t. Weston would have had something on him. But Lisa had even testified that her man had been duped by Mansfield. Not Rhys.
There was no denying that Mansfield was guilty of something, though. But was it manipulation by Weston? Or was it guilty of the entire thing?
“Are you gonna talk?” Mansfield finally asked. “Or are we just gonna stare at each other?”
I said nothing. Damon stared daggers at the man but thankfully took his lead from me.
“I mean, you’re nice on the eyes and all, but you’re clearly a cop. So, you can go fuck yourself, you know?”
“I’m not a
cop,” I said, still watching my quarry.
“Then are you a booty call? ‘Cause I gotta say, it’s slim pickings in here.”
“She identified you,” I finally said. “Pointed a finger across a courtroom full of lawyers and cops and sent you down for a crime you say you didn’t commit. But here’s the thing, your DNA was on her, she fingered you for the crime, the location she escaped from was associated with you even if there was no evidence of you having visited there in the time she had been held captive. Both physical and circumstantial evidence: you didn’t stand a chance. Why deny it?”
He glared at me and said nothing.
“I have a theory,” I said. “You did abduct her. You are guilty of that. But you didn’t hold her captive in that shitty little backroom of your former workplace. You handed her off to someone else.”
A twitch of his right eyebrow but otherwise nothing else. The twitch could have been coincidental; the body betraying him at the wrong moment. Or it could have been a red flag to a raging bull.
“It would be easy to assume you were being blackmailed,” I said. “But you weren’t were you? You’re a loner — no loved ones to hold over your head. Your business was in the black; you were doing OK. But not enough to be blackmailed over it. You’d jumped from position to position over the past ten years prior to your arrest. Your lending company was the third business venture you’d started in a five year period; you weren’t attached to it. Threatening to take it away wouldn’t have made you break the law. You had no priors. The tattoos and beard and scars are all new. You wore slick suits and thin ties; this,” I said indicating his current look, “is new. A reaction to your situation, not an inherent character flaw.”
“I like the way I look.”
“I don’t doubt it. Does it keep you safe in here?”
“What would you know? You said you ain’t a cop.”
“You’re fairly well educated — no gaps in your schooling. You come from a middle to lower class, moderately successful family. This speech pattern is a ruse.”
“You’re a shrink. That’s what you are. Am I being assessed or something?”
The mention of a shrink almost had me stumbling, but I was better than that.
“It’s not blackmail,” I announced. “How did he do it?”
Mansfield stared at me, something flickering in his eyes. Something that looked desperately like hope and then was quashed in an instant. Not once had he mentioned Weston during the trial; or anyone at all who could have taken some of the heat for his crimes. There was a reason why he didn’t, and that reason still existed. But we all want to be seen for who we are, not for what people think we are.
Even scum of the earth want to smell like roses, Sport. They might wear thorns, they might be buried in a pile of horse crap, but deep down inside they’re just a prize-winning flower wanting to see the sun.
Mansfield wanted someone to know he’d been used, manipulated, even if he couldn’t confirm it.
He looked sane, if not a little overdone with the prison chic fashion accessories. He wasn’t drugged. Getting any drugs in here was a hard ask. If he’d been dependent at the time of his incarceration, he would have detoxed by now. And still, he would not mention Weston.
How did he do it?
It couldn’t be brainwashing. The classic military method of mind manipulation required time, separation from the known, a breakdown of beliefs and social structure, and most other forms of cognitive stimulation removed whilst the perpetrator of the mind manipulation enforced their will over the victim, humiliated and isolated their prey, and then rewarded them for good behaviour once their desired cooperation had been ingrained.
It didn’t fit any timeline I could attribute to this man and the crime he did commit.
He took Lisa Devon. There was no doubt about that. He abducted her, after manipulating her boyfriend in some way to gain access to her. It might not have been a manipulation of the boyfriend’s mind as I suspected Weston had manipulated Mansfield. But it was a manipulation of his character or situation that had allowed Mansfield to abduct the victim.
And then he handed her over to Weston.
Why? Because there was possibly something about the finance industry that called to Rhys Kyle Weston?
I pushed that tendril of thought aside for now and concentrated on the present dilemma.
It wasn’t brainwashing because the timeline didn’t fit. Which meant it couldn’t be conversion or propaganda either. And I didn’t think Weston had a position of power over Mansfield to influence him in that way. Mansfield was his own boss. Successful to a degree. He didn’t answer to anyone, and Weston was not in any way a celebrity, capable of exerting will over another by simply being in a perceived position of power.
It had to be something else; something that could be achieved in a relatively short timeframe but could also have lasting consequences.
We’d always wondered how he’d manipulated Carole and Eagle.
Looking at Gregg Arnold Mansfield now, I thought I might just understand how he did it.
Saying it aloud, however, would make most people fall down laughing at me. And I didn’t have Hennessey to turn to for a professional confirmation of my suspicion to back me up.
But I would bet my chance of returning to CIB on Mansfield having been hypnotised.
There’d be triggers. One would be his incarceration, tied in with his trial and what he was charged with — thereby making any mention of the abduction of Lisa Devon off limits.
How many times had he had this reinforced simply by being in the prison system?
I picked the file up again and flicked through it. He’d had a routine psych evaluation before being incarcerated, but it would have triggered his hypnosis immediately. It would take a skilled psychologist to uncover the truth, something I was not.
Could Hennessey have had some success? Possibly. And maybe that played a part in why Weston struck out at my shrink. Because he was the best shrink in the city, and the first one I would have turned to, to verify my suspicion.
I looked back up at Mansfield.
Even being here, in this interrogation room, sitting in a manner that represented authority over him, would be a trigger.
“Do you want to add anything?” I asked because not trying to reach him was out of the question.
He sat back in his seat, crossed his muscled arms over his broad chest - all hard worked for in the prison gym, I presumed - and smirked.
I wanted to ask him if he lent Weston any money. I wanted to ask him if that was how they met. I wanted to ask him a lot of things, but I knew now that I wouldn’t get any answers in return.
Still. I was here. I could be wrong. I had to try.
“Did he come in and apply for a loan?”
Mansfield continued to smirk.
“Was he investing in your business?”
Mansfield said nothing.
“Did you meet him at the pub?”
I was getting desperate.
“Where did you meet him?” The words were thrown out without thought or care; I was chucking the proverbial stick at the bear in the hopes it would somehow poke him.
“I met him here,” he said and promptly started convulsing.
I pushed back my chair, making it tumble over in my haste, and raced to the panic button on the wall beside the door. A klaxon went off when I hit it, and by the time I’d reached Damon, who was lying Mansfield down in the recovery position on the floor, Charlie and two other guards were storming into the room.
“What happened?” Charlie demanded.
“He started seizing without warning,” I said. “His file doesn’t indicate a history of epilepsy. Is it a new development?”
“Not that I’m aware of,” Charlie said, activating a button on his radio. “Med team to Interrogation Room 1. Medical emergency.”
Mansfield stopped fitting and lay unconscious on the floor. Charlie crouched beside him taking his vitals.
“He’s alive,” he sa
id and looked over his shoulder at me. “What happened?” he repeated, this time a little more firmly.
“He answered a question,” I said levelly. “That’s what happened.”
“A question about his case?”
I nodded, staring at the unconscious form with spittle on its lips and chin.
“Well,” Charlie said, standing up. “That’s more than we’ve ever got out of him.”
“And has he ever seized before?” Damon asked.
“Not on my watch. And if he has at any other time, it would have been flagged in our daily briefing.”
The other guards shook their heads also.
Weston used triggers, then, and when his victims found a loophole in the hypnosis, he had a failsafe switch to call on.
Gregg Mansfield’s failsafe switch had just been flicked to the ‘on’ position.
Did Eagle have one? Did Carole Michaels?
It didn’t bear thinking about. But I had to consider it and the possible ramifications thereof.
It took another three hours to extricate ourselves from Mount Eden Prison. Statements were made. The NZ Fire Service was contacted to confirm Damon’s credentials and the reason why he was here. That was a tricky half hour, but thankfully, the powers that be in the Fire Service had the forethought to contact Flack, Damon’s 2IC, before offering a definitive answer. Flack clearly covered for Damon, and as I was simply a member of the public today, we were finally released from our reluctant imprisonment.
I shuddered as I walked out into the early evening fresh air. Sucking in lungfuls of the glorious stuff, I lifted my hair off my collar and fanned myself, wanting nothing more than to shower the experience of being in a prison, even voluntarily for part of it, away.
Mansfield had become a nasty piece of work, but it was Weston’s influence that really made me feel dirty.
“Who the hell is this man?” I said aloud.
A Lick Of Heat: H.E.A.T. Book Four Page 10
