A Lick Of Heat: H.E.A.T. Book Four

by Claire, Nicola

  Damon turned to look at me from where he’d been standing soaking in the sense of freedom being on this side of the doors felt like.

  “I don’t know, love. But he’s far more dangerous than we realised.”

  Which was saying something. Because he had Carole and he’d manipulated Eagle, and he was blackmailing Hennessey, and he’d played a part in Dave the street worker’s death. Not to mention his hold over Cawfield, and Angelo Berti’s explosive murder, and the various other arsons he’d performed along with the multitude of suspected assaults and blackmails he’d been tagged with since he’d come to our attention.

  This man was more than just dangerous. Rhys Kyle Weston was a one-man force of war.

  We now knew how he was doing it. We had a possible lead on what made him choose his abduction victims. If I could have asked Hennessey to profile him right now, I was sure the Department shrink would have said Weston derived pleasure out of torturing people. He chose his victims from a place of rage he couldn’t express like normal people would. Something about the finance industry set him off. It was a key piece to the puzzle.

  Did he owe money? Did he come from a poor background? Had he been done over by a money lender? What was it?

  Whatever it was Damon had been caught up in the fallout and by extension so had I and CIB.

  Even if this was all about his rage and something that had caused it within the finance industry, Weston was muddying the waters with revenge on Damon.

  Rage. Money. Revenge.

  Abduction. Blackmail. Manipulation.

  Means. Motive. Opportunity.

  I had a lot, and I had nothing. Because I still had no idea where to find the man and he still had Carole Michaels.

  Chapter Twelve

  “Even The Absence Of Something Can Mean Everything.”

  There was a black SUV parked at the rear of the Pitt Street Fire Station. A Porsche Cayenne and therefore completely out of place among with the Fords and Toyotas and Mitsubishis. I stared at the vehicle and took a quick look around the carpark, spotting two Rescue members as they patrolled the permitter of the station property.

  Damon started heading toward the stairs up into HEAT itself after locking his vehicle, but I took off tangentially across the carpark towards the Rescue members. One was Andrew McIntyre, aka Stretch. I’d had dealings with Stretch. I also knew that he’d had a storage shed burned down by the then aptly named HEAT Arsonist.

  We all knew who that was now.

  Or did we?

  I needed to check into Weston’s background more thoroughly. He had one, but we’d missed something. The finance angle should have been picked up already, and it hadn’t been.

  Damon noticed I wasn’t behind him when he reached the station building proper. He spotted me instantly and changed his direction, approaching Stretch and his counterpart a few seconds after me.

  “Hey,” I said as I made their position, offering the ubiquitous chin-lift that would set them at ease. I got two back in return immediately. “All quiet?”

  “Yeah,” Stretch said, chin-lifting to Damon as soon as he arrived at my side. “Nothing to report.”

  “And the black SUV?” I asked.

  They both looked over, spotted it, and scowled.

  “Didn’t see it arrive,” Stretch admitted slowly.

  That’s what you got for hiring amateurs.

  “So, you don’t know when it turned up, then?” I pressed.

  “We’ve just completed a circuit,” Stretch said. “And it wasn’t there last time we came ‘round this way. So, it had to have arrived in the past ten minutes, I’d say.”

  There was a distinct flaw in our security plan. I wanted the guys to stick to their patrolling pairs for safety, but we needed to make sure we covered every entrance and exit.

  “OK,” I said, “We’ll adjust our strategy. Stay within line of sight of each other, but always have one covering the back and one covering the front of the property.” Because of the shape of the grounds the station was on, that was possible. It wouldn’t be comfortable; no one to talk to as you stood out here. But it was doable. And it meant I didn’t have to double up on the shifts.

  “Yeah, OK,” Stretch said reluctantly.

  “Don’t feel too bad,” I said, turning away. “The guy that drives that beast is a sneaky bastard.”

  Damon fell into step beside me.

  “Who’s is it?” he asked.

  “You’ll see,” I mumbled as I took the stairs up to HEAT at a determined pace.

  The place was fairly full, but some of the guys had clearly taken to the sleeping quarters down the hall by Damon’s office. Marc or Flack had arranged shifts to ensure they all got downtime, I guessed.

  I spotted the Porsche Prick as soon as we entered. He was sitting at the table, drinking coffee and eating a donut hole, with none other than Ryan Pierce beside him. Pierce’s police-issued sedan had not been out in the carpark, and I realised now why Nick Anscombe was here.

  Cover.

  Weston might have already been aware of ASI and its connection to CIB. But it wasn’t a given, and it was the best Pierce could manage considering. Plus Inspector Hart had said we’d communicate through Anscombe Securities and Investigations, and Pierce was nothing if not a good little soldier following his superior’s orders to the letter.

  When had I become the rebel in that analogy?

  “Sarge,” I said in greeting, taking a seat. “Anscombe,” I added; spoken in a decidedly cooler tone of voice.

  “Quite a set-up you’ve got here, Detective,” Anscombe said. “Busy little worker bees.”

  I said nothing, just offered a cool stare back.

  “Damon,” Nick said in greeting, possibly recognising the threat as Damon loomed over the table, directly at my back, staring daggers at him.

  He soon returned his attention to me, however.

  “You have a hole in your security,” he said.

  “It’s been rectified,” I told him.

  “I’m sure it has. I’d expect nothing less.” I wasn’t certain if that was a compliment or Anscombe’s version of sarcasm.

  I ignored it.

  “Why are you here?” I asked Pierce.

  “Hart wants an update.”

  “Not much to tell,” I told him as Marc placed a cup of coffee down in front of me and handed one to Damon with a look that spoke volumes. Damon finally took the hint and sat down.

  I reached out and took one of Daisy’s donut holes and stuffed it in my mouth. Deciding it went well with the coffee Marc had just given me, I ate another one before giving Pierce and by extension Anscombe a rundown.

  Every single man in the room watched me eat my donut holes with varying looks of bemusement on their faces. Clearly, they’d not worked with Ryan Pierce for any length of time. Sooner or later you caved to the donut holes.

  Or to Daisy Pierce.

  “Finance is the motive,” I said into the expectant silence; starting with the least likely to get me laughed at. Then I took a deep breath and added, “and hypnosis is the means.”

  Anscombe arched his brow at me, but Pierce just scowled, thinking it all through. He absently reached out for a donut hole and chewed on it thoughtfully.

  “Makes sense,” he finally said. “The hypnosis part.” Someone snorted in the background. I didn’t bother to check out who it might be; Pierce’s quick acceptance of my suspicions was not something I took lightly.

  “Hypnosis?” Anscombe, though, said incredulously. I hadn’t expected him to agree to anything I said, so I wasn’t surprised by his reaction.

  “Mansfield has never once mentioned Weston,” I explained. “And although unhelpful to the extreme, he knew exactly who I was talking about and exhibited subliminal signs of agreement. And when he tried to push back against the mind manipulation Weston had used on him, he seized.”

  “Seized?” Pierce said, looking up sharply from where he’d been contemplating, head down, what I’d said.

  “Full on g
rand mal for approximately a minute. He didn’t regain consciousness while we were there, but that’s not entirely unexpected with a grand mal seizure.”

  “That is not good news,” Pierce said and made the fatal mistake of glancing at Damon.

  Damon had been drinking his coffee and had even lowered his guard to the point that he’d picked up a donut hole and was about to shove it in his mouth. The coffee met the table with a thump, and the donut hole fell to the floor of the common room.

  “You think Carole could end up like Mansfield?” he asked.

  Damon was one of the most intelligent people I had ever met, but where his sister was concerned, he had a blind spot. He had woken up to some hard truths recently. After the Irreverent Inferno, he’d had no choice but to realise that to a certain extent Carole had chosen the path she walked on. Weston was largely to blame for some of her more outlandish behaviours, and he’d certainly taken advantage of her drug addictions. But we all came to believe that Carole had chosen him of her own volition in the beginning.

  But as I sat there and tried to piece the timeline together, I had to acknowledge that it was possible Weston had introduced her to Class A narcotics in the first place. If finance was the key to Weston’s targets, then she hadn’t been chosen because she was part of the druggie scene.

  Chicken and egg. Which came first?

  I flicked open the case file I’d brought back with me pertaining to Mansfield and scanned it. Then I reached out and opened several others we’d created from the information dump I’d done on the Wanganui before leaving CIB. If Pierce was surprised to see the files when they shouldn’t have been outside of CIB, he didn’t comment.

  In fact, no one was talking as I lined them all up on the HEAT kitchen table and stared at the dates on the top of each sheet.

  Weston had been doing this for some time. Longer than Carole had been addicted to drugs. Mansfield’s case was four years old. But there were others dating back to ten years. Outside of Auckland but meeting the criteria.

  I pulled the file we had on Weston closer and looked at the meagre information it presented. It listed date of birth, place of birth, parents and known family members. All had checked out and were squeaky clean. The list was perfunctory. It did what it was meant to do. It told us a story we expected to see.

  At least, we expected to see this story with innocent people.

  Weston was not innocent. Not by a long fucking shot.

  Which meant…

  “His background is false,” I said aloud.

  “What do you mean?” Anscombe asked.

  I tapped Weston’s Query sheet. “We tried to track down some of these people and only managed to get in touch with two. His parents are supposedly dead. His brother is overseas and only spoke to us over a telephone line. His cousin, who we did find here in Auckland, agreed to everything and offered no further insight.” I looked up at Ryan and said, “Query Person him again.”

  He pulled his cellphone out and said, “Why?”

  “Just do it. In particular his places of employment over the past ten years.”

  Pierce looked at me for a moment and then placed the cellphone to his ear. I heard the North Comm dispatcher answer the call and then shunt Pierce off to one of the support staff in Dispatch. It took several minutes, but by the time Pierce hung up, another piece to the puzzle had been located.

  Weston’s cousin worked in finance. And interestingly, had separated from his wife twelve months ago when, and this was quoted in the divorce proceedings, his behaviour had changed dramatically.

  “I don’t get it,” Flack admitted, from where he’d been leaning against the kitchen bench listening.

  “Weston got to him,” I said. “Everything the man has said confirming Weston’s background and history can’t be taken as credible.”

  “There’s a chance he’s been hypnotised too,” Pierce concluded.

  “Jesus,” Flack said, stunned. “Weston created a false background.”

  “Because we were on to him,” I said. It was about a year ago that things went to shit for Carole and Damon started working on getting her out of the relationship with Weston and into rehab.

  “So, who is he?” Anscombe asked.

  “That’s the million dollar question, isn’t it?” I said. We had several aliases for the man, and I was betting; not one of them was his actual birth name.

  “Motherfucker,” Pierce muttered. “He’s had us chasing our tails the entire time.”

  “Probably laughing at us,” Nick agreed. “Arsehole,” he added for good measure.

  “Fuckhead,” Pierce grumbled.

  “What about Carole?” Damon said, interrupting the extraordinary show of machismo.

  “We’re getting closer,” I said and regretted it immediately.

  “Don’t,” Damon snapped, standing up from the table abruptly. “Not you, Lara. Don’t. Don’t give me platitudes.”

  I watched him for a moment and then stood up to face him.

  “All right,” I said. “She might have a trigger. Say she does, then what would it likely be? Mansfield’s had been finding a loophole in the hypnosis instructions. Defying Weston. Carole isn’t defying Weston, is she?”

  “And when we find her?” he demanded. I was pleased he was still using ‘when’ and not ‘if.’

  “When we find her, we have medical staff on standby, prepared to deal with any potential trigger fallout. And we tread very carefully.”

  I’m sure he was relieved to hear about the medical staff being on standby, but I thought it was my promise of treading carefully that really broke through Damon’s panic.

  “We’re getting closer,” I repeated, certain he could now hear those words without flipping out on me. “We know he hypnotises. We know he uses triggers. We know the information we have on his background is false.”

  “How does that help us?” Damon pressed, but he was sounding more level headed again.

  “‘Even the absence of something can mean everything.’”

  “A Carlism,” Damon murmured.

  I nodded and took a step closer to him. Closer to this man that meant so much to me. He’d been absent in my life, and I’d barely survived it. He’d threatened to leave again when I’d not been able to show him he was my everything. He’d made me feel when there was only ice to encase me.

  He’d cracked it. He’d freed me.

  This man who reached me when I was adrift and when no one else, not even Carl, could.

  My hand slipped into his, and I stared up into dark brown eyes so rich and deep they called to me; momentarily losing myself in them. I loved him. Completely. And even if I were standing in the middle of HEAT with half a dozen testosterone-fuelled firemen milling about bearing witness, along with a superior officer I had the utmost respect for, and a pain-in-the-arse private dick I wasn’t sure if I despised or secretly admired yet, I stood up on the tip of my toes and cupped his cheek.

  “We will find her,” I promised Damon. “And we will catch Weston or whoever he actually is.”

  It was a promise I of all people knew I shouldn’t make.

  But I couldn’t have not made it to save myself.

  Weston would either fall at my hand, or I’d die trying. Not exactly a sane way to approach a criminal case. But then, I was near breaking according to my shrink.

  I snorted softly to myself and fell back on my heels. Damon followed me down and rested his forehead against mine in a show of intimacy which wasn’t lost on a soul in that room right then.

  Pierce cleared his throat sometime later and said, “Good work, Keen.”

  I wasn’t sure if he was referring to what I’d deduced about Weston or how far I’d come in my personal relationships and self-discovery. For now, I chose not to look too closely at it. Hennessey might have warned I was close to breaking, but Hennessey was being blackmailed.

  For all I knew, I was the sanest person here.

  Tell yourself that, Sport. But we all know different, don’t we?<
br />
  Fuck off, Carl.

  I could hear my old partner laughing inside my head. It was only a memory. But it was a little creepy.

  Carl was always there. And now I had taken to seeing him when I least expected it.

  I pushed that thought away and concentrated on the here and now.

  “There was one thing more,” I said, turning to look at Pierce.

  “What?” he asked succinctly.

  “Just before Mansfield seized, I asked him a question. The only question he bothered to answer.”

  Anscombe sat forward in his seat; Pierce gave me a hurry up signal with his hand. Both men were well and truly sucked into the mystery.

  “I asked him where did they meet?”

  “What was his answer?” Pierce asked.

  “‘I met him here.’”

  We all knew that was impossible. Mansfeld was in a corrections facility and had had no visitors outside of the police and his legal team. There was a possibility Weston had got to his legal team. And what with CIB having a traitor there was a chance Weston had also got to one of the cops who visited Mansfield.

  But in all reality, Mansfield’s answer had to have been a metaphor for something. I just couldn’t work it out.

  I met him here. Here? As in prison? Auckland City? Hell? Where?

  “Well,” Nick Anscombe said softly. “That is creepy.”

  ‘Creepy’ seemed to be occurring a lot more regularly than I would have liked right now.

  ‘Creepy’ made me feel uneasy. Very uneasy.

  Weston was playing us, and I feared it was a game we were woefully ill-prepared for.

  They don’t teach ‘Creepy’ at Police College.

  Just as well I had Carl’s own version of creepiness to guide me.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “It’s Hard To Tell Fact From Fiction, Sport. Never Make The Mistake Of Believing Something Until You Know It’s The Truth.”

  The files before me had started to blur. I jumped slightly when the priority alarm went off across the street at the ambulance station. It had a pitch to it that reached through the darkened hours and made it in through Damon’s closed office window. I dreaded to think what it sounded like for the ambulance crew working the night shift.