by A. M Surtees
I felt like an arrow had pierced my heart when he fought back tears to tell me his mother had just passed away. Now I may not hold my own mother very highly, simply put, she was a massive let down who put her men before her children, no matter what those men did to her children, but I could understand that some women were actually good mothers worthy of the heartache and pain that their children would feel upon their passing. Judging by the sight before me, Daniel’s mother must have been one of those special women.
Not knowing what else to do, I held out my arms to him and he folded into me like a baby to their favourite blanket. This kind of emotional bonding was foreign to me, like I said, pitiful excuse for a mother, but I seemed to be doing ok at simply ‘winging it’, at least that was my generalized assumption based on the thirty year old man weeping in my arms at the sudden passing of his caregiver. If it were my mother there wouldn’t be no sadness or crippling despair, to be honest I’d probably throw a party and then when the celebrations were over, I would hunt down my piece of garbage step father and send him to hell right behind her.
Once Daniel had composed himself enough to form the words needed, he sat up, gratefully accepting a much needed glass of wine and dropping it in one gulp before holding his glass out to me, gesturing for a second as he wiped his baby blues and proceeded to tell me what had happened.
His mother had been on her way home when she was hit head on by a semi-trailer going in the wrong direction. The police at the scene explained that the truck driver had taken some tablets to help him stay awake during the long journey from Adelaide to Brisbane and made the mistake of adding a couple of beers at a truck stop just west of Sydney to the mix, which ended up countering the effects of the pills and causing him to fall asleep at the wheel.
He went on to explain that it was his birthday next week and his mother had gone out that side of town to pick up a present for him that she had special ordered. So ultimately he decided to blame himself. Male logic, I don’t get it either. I got the whole if it wasn’t to get something for him then she wouldn’t be where she was when she was, but at the same time, if anyone was to blame for this, it was the semi trailer driver who would have known full well not to mix stimulant meds with alcohol which is known to be considered a relaxant, but chose to do it anyway. That would be like me carrying a gun on me and leaving it on auto then looking stupid when someone got shot at random from my thigh holster. It was common sense.
I told him that it was nowhere near his fault and that if anyone was to blame, it was the truck driver but he wouldn’t have any of it. He was determined to hold himself accountable, claiming that if he wasn’t such a difficult person to buy for she wouldn’t have had to special order his gift and wouldn’t have been there. There’s that male logic again.
Coming to the conclusion that he wasn’t going to let up on his self-induced pity party, I traded the bottle of wine for something a hell of a lot stronger. A bottle of Jack Daniel’s silver select. This stuff was top shelf, two hundred dollars or more a bottle and the taste was in a class of its own. If you are a bit of an avid whiskey drinker, think of regular Jack Daniel’s as being like your first kiss. This stuff was like your first orgasm in comparison. It is absolutely amazing and when it comes to whiskey, I buy nothing less than the best and in times like this, I was grateful for that fact. So was he.
I didn’t even have enough time to open the bottle of coke to pour into the drinks before Daniel picked his up off the table and shot it, I guess he prefers it on the rocks, although the stress of his current situation may also have had something to do with it.
After several more drinks – his on the rocks, mine mixed with coke, not really one for doing shots of hard liquor. Each to their own I guess. Then again, in his shoes, I’d probably be wanting to get very drunk very fast to numb the pain too – he started to loosen up a bit more, drawing me into him and kissing me the same way he did in the shower after our first time together; soft, sensual and not at all sexual. He was showing me his gratitude I suppose.
We had only technically slept together once even though we had been getting a lot closer since I discovered he was actually innocent after all, with a few stolen kisses here and there while at work but between meltdowns, case developments and the need to actually sleep at some point, we hadn’t actually been alone together for long enough to do anything significant. We had just been trying to get to know one another and he really was a sweet guy who was completely besotted with me and was determined to break down my walls until they were small enough for him to step over.
He thanked me for being an ear to listen and for jumping outside of my comfort zone to be a shoulder for him to cry on. He wasn’t wrong there, being the support person for those who are hurting, it’s not really a trait you would see on my personality resume. You can be a cold hearted killer, or you could have a heart and empathise with the weak, never both. Yet, here I was, slowly getting closer and closer to the person who killed Marcy by day, and holding a grown man that I hated to admit I was falling for, by night. Some might say I was evolving, I’d say I was simply losing the plot.
Losing it or not, I cared about him and he was hurting so I would be there for him. It was that simple. I placed my head on his chest and felt all my stresses slip away. Wrapped up in his arms I felt safe, I felt confident that we would catch the bad guy and as I listened to the sound of his heart beating against his chest, I was lulled off into a deep sleep.
Chapter twenty-one
When the morning sun woke me, I reached my arm out blindly to find the other side of my bed empty. Daniel was already gone. The feeling that came over me was one I hadn’t experienced before in this context. I felt, disappointed and believe it or not, for the first time in my life, my own company wasn’t enough. I felt, lonely.
Walking into the kitchen to prepare myself some breakfast, I found a piece of paper on the bench. It was from Daniel.
Tamikah,
I’m really sorry for imposing last night and I’m sorry that I didn’t wait for you to wake up but I needed to get out and clear my head. I will see you in the office later. Thank you for letting me talk to you about my mother. It means more than you will ever know.
Daniel
Staring at the note, I could hear his voice in my mind as if he were reading the letter to me himself, which made me warm and sad to equal measure. He was in so much pain at the loss of his mother and the first one he came to, was me. The realization riddled me with guilt at the fact that only a few short weeks ago, I was ready to kill him under the suspicion of him being behind everything.
Last night had been a strange development in the life of Tamikah Gray, it was the first time I’d shared my bed with anyone in a very long time and it was the first time ever that I’d shared my bed with someone and not slept with them. The thought scared me as I looked back on the night before.
He said that he wasn’t in the right frame of mind for sex given what had happened and I was more than ok with that. I wasn’t going to jump his bones and demand it after finding out about his mum like that. Do I look like Charlie Harper? Didn’t think so. I may be a lot of things, but I respect a person’s right to say no.
Once he realised I had fallen asleep on him in the living room, he carried me to the bed which woke me up when he placed me down on the covers. Instead of ripping into one another like rabid dogs, we’d just lay together and talk the hours away, curled up with my head resting on his chest, listening to the strained beating of his fractured heart as his hand clenched to my side as if letting go meant he would lose me the way he lost his mother and I couldn’t help but feel like I would do anything to make the pain go away, like a doctor caring for the ailments of their patients, a vet caring for a sick animal, a mother caring for her feverish child. It must have been woman’s instinct or something because he seemed to be calmed by my touch. Never has my touch been used to soothe someone, it’s usually quite the opposite.
I was experiencing so many new emotions and he i
nvoked such strange new reactions within me. When this case was finally finished with, a part of me wanted to pack him into my suitcase and take him home with me so I’d never have to let him go. I did not like that thought at all but I was slowly coming to terms with the notion that I was falling for him. That Jackson and Penelope were right. He was the one who could break down my walls against all resistance on my part and I was actually starting to let him.
Chapter twenty-two
Barely having time to sit down at my desk, the phone rang. It was James. He’d been babysitting Penelope at her apartment for close to a month now and between you and me; I think he was getting the urge to finish the job her attacker started. They weren’t exactly the best of friends and she wasn’t very fond of having him around, watching everything she did. Understandable I suppose but it was for her own safety so she had to accept it whether she liked it or not.
She definitely didn’t like it and had taken off. She and James had got into an argument about him taking up her space and giving her no privacy but when he tried to explain – and by explain, I mean give her a huge lecture and call her a variety of less than pleasant names – that it was for her own good, she smashed him over the head with a vase before fleeing from the apartment.
Regardless of my history with Penelope, I was with James on this one. Someone tried to make a claim on her life and she was throwing tantrums like a spoiled toddler on time out. It wasn’t like her and it definitely wasn’t acceptable.
Safe to say I was furious so when I saw her storming her way passed the window of my office, I leaped out of the chair and barely managed to open the door before I was screaming at her to “get her ass into my office immediately!”
Her voice raising as she made a pointless attempt to justify her actions and pleading with me to allow her room to breathe because James was suffocating her, complaining that the only time she had privacy was when she was either in the shower or on the toilet. For twenty minutes all I heard from her was complaints about James and quite frankly, it was really starting to irritate me.
She was the reason we came out here in the first place. If she had done a better job at keeping her staff in check, she wouldn’t have had someone try to hack her system right under her nose, she wouldn’t have been attacked and Marcy wouldn’t be dead. I didn’t hold back when it came to telling her exactly that.
With nothing to retaliate with, she stormed out but not before shouting at me that she didn’t need our help, that we should just pack our things and go back to Melbourne where we belonged, to which she added her own version of an exclamation as she slammed the door on her way out.
Well, I was in a reasonably good mood when I came in here but less than thirty minutes with a perfectly healthy, fully recovered Penelope hell bent on being an overgrown child, was all it took to completely ruin it. I struggled to believe that this was the same woman that basically raised me and taught me a great deal of what I know now. It was as if her attack had fried her brain and gave birth to someone totally different.
Regardless of her desire for us to go back to Melbourne, a desire I shared if I’m honest, I was over this place, the only thing worth my time being my intensifying relationship with Daniel. But we had orders from someone higher up the food chain than her, so we were stuck here until we had a name, a face and a prisoner to cart back with us. So, like it or not, she had no choice but to continue tolerating our presence.
Chapter twenty-three
After Penelope’s not so eloquent little outburst yesterday, I made the decision to pay a little more attention to her. As much as I wasn’t fond of the concept, I couldn’t help but to wonder if her outburst could have come from the fear that we were getting too close to catching the person responsible, that person being either her, one of her girls – and if I had to guess which of them, I would probably lean more towards Camille considering her lack of eye contact at the bar – or maybe even both. Just last week I had jokingly considered the possibility of Penelope being the front runner of this scheme and the attack on her being nothing more than a way to cover her own ass, but now I wasn’t laughing. The way she has been behaving makes me hesitant to rule anything out at this point, no matter how crazy it seems.
Something about her episode didn’t sit right with me. Looking at it from a different angle, it seemed more like desperation than simply a displeased woman child throwing a tantrum. With that in mind, I pulled the seven remaining files from the satchel that was hung over my wardrobe door and reassessed them again, this time not ruling Penelope out as a suspect.
To keep with the running trend, I came up with nothing I could use to sway my opinion in either direction. Opting to take a break, I left the files spread out on my bed and went into the kitchen to grab a coffee. It wasn’t necessary for me to go into the office for any real reason today so I was making the most of it; including the oh so fashionable look of tracksuit pants and a loose t-shirt. Not at all flattering but definitely comfortable.
Coffee in hand, I sat down on my bed to give the files another once over, opening up my notebook to use while I attempt to assess the seven leftover suspects and group them together based on the things that not only linked them, but also the things that sets them apart. I could feel it in my bones, I was hot on the heels of the person responsible. It was just a case of pulling a single file out and saying ‘yes, there’s your bad guy.’ Easy, right? I wish.
Startled by the sound my phone made as it indicated that I had received an email. It was from the Melbourne office, but not from Jackson, it was from the forensics lab. I went out on a limb and asked them to try and pull a rabbit out of a hat that could potentially cut my search down to a single file by getting them to run a DNA test on the blood but not just against our servers and the police database.
I asked them for one crazy as hell thing and even though they said it was a longshot, that it might not work, they gave it a go anyway and thank heavens that they did because it did work. I asked them to essentially drop a coin in the ocean in order to find the Titanic. They ran a global DNA analysis, against every hospital, police and secret organisation database they could get access to in order to see if the person behind all this had been listed anywhere else in the last twenty years. It was a long shot that’s for sure but it was all we had left and it paid off.
My day was made. Now to call the others into the office so I could fill them in and we could begin to work out our next move, which was to drag their ass back to Melbourne to be held in custody while the heads of the company flew in from around the country, to deal with them accordingly. After everything I’ve had to deal with in this stupid town, I would have loved nothing more than to simply hunt the bastard down and shoot them at point blank, replicating Marcy’s brutal murder. But, I had to follow orders. Curse the whole chain of command. Maybe if I asked real nice, they would let me do it anyway, once they had everything they needed to stop us all from rotting in prison of course.
I took solace in knowing that after everything this miserable excuse for a human being had done, their time of wondering around, free from the justice they so rightfully deserved, was over. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice and you don‘t want to know what I’ll do.
Getting dressed I didn’t even bother with cleaning up and putting away the files before leaving my hotel room for what will probably be the second-to-last time. I didn’t need the files anymore. I had a name. I had motive. I had a photo and I had the alias name that she was working under in Sydney. I had my ticket home.
Chapter twenty-four
Mack and the other three guys were already waiting in my office by the time I arrived. I hadn’t given them any details as to why I needed them there, but they knew it had to be something big given that I told them each that it needed to be said in person. This was the first time we’d all been together at the same time since our premature round of celebratory drinks a couple of weeks ago when we’d been told about the blood sample. This however, was going to make even Dimitri,
jump for joy. This time we could celebrate an actual win.
I told them about the email and of all four of them, James was the one who was the most surprised. He told me that he’d had his conspiracy theories and whatnot, mainly to fill his boredom while babysitting Penelope, but this was not in his realm of possibility. Checking and double checking the image on my phone to be sure I wasn’t yanking his chain before sitting down against my desk, a look of utter disbelief crossing his face.
“Wow” was the only word he could manage, still shaking his head trying to process it.
Mack on the other hand, couldn’t contain her excitement,
“I knew it!” Her elation clearly readable in her voice and I knew exactly what she meant. She’d had a feeling for weeks now, ever since Marcy was killed and safe to say that she was overjoyed to discover that she had been right. She was very good at thinking outside the square though which was one of the things everyone loved about her and it was one of the things that made her exceptionally good at her job.
We had all thought it had to be a tech person and when Maxine came up in our condensed list, it instantly made her one of my headline suspects. But after making a sneaking attempt to get to know her a little better in order to determine her guilt, Mack assured me that it couldn’t possibly have been her. Because, for one, when Marcy was killed, Maxine had been spotted on CCTV with her sister and a few others, walking into a strip club for what appeared to be a hens night. While her alibi meant she didn’t kill Marcy, I had still kept her file just in case.
When Mack had originally came to me with her out of this world, radical theory, I brushed it off, thinking it impossible. It was just too insane to be remotely considerable. Had I thought to check it out, we could have been home weeks ago. I did eventually consider it but I couldn’t find justifiable reason to think it was anything but crazy. Now, looking at the email and thinking back, considering every possibility and trying to paint a picture of guilt in my mind, I was stuck still thinking it was nothing short of insane.