A Flare Of Heat (H.E.A.T. Book 1)

by Claire, Nicola

  I laughed, it was strained. "There's not that many. Cawfield tops it."

  Silence again. This time uncomfortable.

  "Look," Pierce said. "Go back over the evidence. There's bound to be another connection, something that makes this line up."

  What else was there to do?

  "And you?" I asked, wanting to return the conversation to a more normal one.

  Pierce harrumphed. A disgruntled sound that was conveyed quite convincingly despite the use of a phone.

  "I'm neck deep in sorting out this fucking King spill-over case."

  "You're still going over Carl's notes? Doesn't this take priority?" I asked.

  "Fucked if I know, Keen. Just been getting hounded by Hart to sort it out, who is obviously being hounded by the Crown Law Office to get this done. Something has set the Solicitor-General off over this and it's trickled down to us in CIB. But for the life of me, I don't know what it is I'm supposed to be looking for. Carl's notes, as you know, are incomplete."

  "I wonder if he copied them somewhere else," I mused aloud.

  "If anyone knows Carl Forrester's habits, it'd be you, Keen," Pierce said. "Shame you're neck deep in a murder case that looks like a hired kill case targeted on your own sweet arse."

  "Thanks," I mumbled, unsure what else to say to all of that. "I'll get on with saving my own sweet arse then."

  Pierce chuckled. "You do that. Let me know how it goes." Then the line clicked dead.

  Damon let a long breath of air out and uncrossed his arms. I hadn't noticed that he'd had them over his chest until then.

  "Do you really think...?"

  I cut him off. "I'm not prepared to rule anything out right now." We both looked back at the whiteboard. "But it sure as hell looks like it, huh?"

  "Lara," Damon started. I held up my hand.

  "Let's take a look at the video footage of Tyrone Anderson at the Quay Street McDonald’s. I saw it in his folder, wanna get it out and I'll go grab my laptop from the office."

  I got up and retreated to the privacy of my small workspace, taking the opportunity to sit on my desk chair as soon as I arrived. My legs were far more shaky than I had realised.

  I'd already considered the two last informants trying to kill me a pretty good indication of where this was all going. But it wasn't until it was all laid out on a whiteboard, lined up and connected and written in black, that it really began to sink in.

  The informants had been hired, paid in cash. Two of them had tried to kill me. And the killer was murdering them before they could.

  Stalker or guardian angel?

  I think I had my answer. I just didn't know what it meant.

  Chapter 29

  "You go to bed each night and do what you gotta do to get up the next morning and do it all over again. Don't think about it, just do it. Know yourself and you'll get through it in the end."

  By the time I came back out to the dining area Damon had located the DVD of the camera footage and placed it out for us to view. But he wasn't sitting at the table waiting, he was instead in the kitchen, peering into the fridge.

  "Want a bite to eat first?" he asked, not bothering to look up when he heard me place the laptop down on the table's surface.

  "Yeah, might as well. Computer forensics went over this footage already and couldn't come up with anything. It's probably a waste of time."

  "How about an early lunch?" Damon asked, pulling out ingredients; looked like for an omelet. "You chop the tomatoes, I'll grate the cheese," he suggested.

  We settled into our respective tasks without any further words. I was grateful he wasn't fussing over me. I could tell the revelations of the past few minutes had thrown him, but Damon was doing his level best to let me come to him, instead of him chasing me down. I'd said it earlier, I'm not a talker. Maybe that's because I was raised by a cop, and cops tend to keep things close to their chests.

  My father did anyway. He'd come home from a particularly bad shift, one you knew had an effect on him, yet he'd brush it aside. File it, as he later told me. Put it all in a mental locked drawer and throw away the key. It's the state of our Emergency Services, I think. Do your job. Suck it up. Get on with it.

  My father was definitely a do your job, suck it up, get on with it kind of man.

  When I first started working with Carl I'd asked a lot of questions. How did he sleep at night after seeing a child beaten half to death? How did he not vomit at the smell of burned flesh? How did he go from the scene of a road-rage car accident to a sexual assault of a minor, then to an elderly lady having been burgled, and switch off from one to the next? Did he drown the images in alcohol after his shift? Did he numb them with other pursuits? Should I? I was interested to know if he operated like Ethan Keen.

  My home life was all I knew of the Police Force. My grandfather much like my father and no help balancing the scales there. So, when I left the beat and crossed to CIB, just like my father and his father before him, I decided I'd investigate the nature of the beast.

  Carl had answered the first few questions and then abruptly asked one of his own.

  "Are you a doer or a thinker, Keen?"

  "I'm a doer," I'd replied instantly.

  "Then there's your answer," he'd shot back, not making any sense at all.

  "What answer?" That was no answer, I'd thought.

  "You just do it," he'd qualified. "You go to bed each night and do what you gotta do to get up the next morning and do it all over again. Don't think about it, just do it. Know yourself and you'll get through it in the end."

  Know yourself and you'll get through it in the end.

  I connect the dots in my head. I ask questions to elicit the correct answers. I observe, I follow the clues, and I cross reference the evidence to catch the criminal in the end. There's thinking in there, but most of it is doing. I am constantly doing.

  Carl had been right when he'd asked me that question. I'd been trying to think my way through the problem. Six weeks working CIB next to Carl Forrester and doing my job, and I had my answer.

  My father came home and filed his days away in a mental locked drawer, never to be spoken of again.

  I hardly ever came home at all.

  Avoidance. Funny how Hennessey hadn't picked up on that one yet. My father and I both avoided the hell out of our issues, but his made him look somewhat normal. While mine was hard to hide.

  I watched as Damon flipped the omelet in the frying pan and then pushed off from my lean-to against the kitchen bench and poured us glasses of juice to go with the meal. By the time I was done, he'd halved the dish onto two plates and was bringing them across to the table where I'd placed the drinks. We shoved the file folders and reports out of the way and sat down, eating in silence.

  It was good. Damon knew how to cook eggs. Not too rubbery, not too salty, not too watery. Just right.

  I decided that was enough avoidance for now.

  "I have no idea why I'm being targeted," I said into the silence, the only sound was our cutlery against china as we ate.

  Damon chewed his last mouthful thoughtfully.

  "Maybe you were on to something when you first started the case," he suggested, once he'd swallowed.

  "What was that?" I asked, finishing up and feeling a hell of a lot better for it. Or maybe that was because I'd opened up.

  "What cases have you used all four informants on in the past?"

  Good point. I leaned back in my chair, sipping the last of my juice and thought about it. Off the top of my head it wasn't foolproof, I'd have to research it a little further by going back through my personal notes over the last four months. Or longer, who knew how far back this went.

  "That's hard to say. Maybe one before the DFSA case."

  "And before that?"

  "They were all Carl's informants. Not mine."

  "So, maybe it's that one case prior to the sex club that ties it all together."

  "Maybe," I agreed, trying to recall details from memory and coming up blank. I scr
ubbed at my face, stimulating blood flow, but still nothing jumped out and slapped me. "I'll look into it, once we've gone over this lot with that fine tooth comb I mentioned earlier."

  "First things first, eh?"

  "I'm methodical. Sue me."

  He smiled. "You have an ordered mind."

  "No, Damon. I'm a product of my upbringing mixed with a little PTSD."

  He held my gaze, realising I'd admitted more than I'd intended. I waited for him to pounce. He didn't. He just looked at me patiently until I was the one to glance away.

  Damon tended to put up brick walls. I just got busy.

  I reached for the DVD and slipped it into my laptop, which I'd booted up prior to our omelet.

  "Let's see what Tank had for dinner," I suggested, picking up the written report from computer forensics while the video loaded. "Quarter Pounder and fries, with a chocolate shake. What a last meal to have," I added morosely.

  "He didn't meet anyone?" Damon asked, taking our empty plates and moving them to the sink.

  "Doesn't appear to have done so in the restaurant, and they saw no one approach him going in or out. Looks like they've placed the various footage from all available cameras in the area on this disc, just edited to show two minutes before he arrived and two minutes after he left."

  "All right, tee it up, let's watch the man eat his last meal," Damon said, sinking into his chair at my side.

  We watched Tank eat, a strange sense of foreboding entering my frame as I saw him staring distractedly into his shake. Not long after these images he would be dead.

  "He'd already fired the .38 at us outside The Cloud by this stage," I commented, looking at the time stamp on the video.

  "Is that guilt on his face?"

  "Nah, indigestion." Damon's lips quirked at the edges. "Honestly though," I added, "he looks a little preoccupied."

  "Shooting at the authorities can do that to a man," Damon deadpanned.

  "Certainly makes you look at your life choices, I suppose."

  I clicked the next video footage which showed Tank arriving at the restaurant and parking his car. We watched as he exited the vehicle, locked it and then walked, head down, towards the bright lights and golden arches. I scanned the surrounding area, but nothing stood out. A good five minutes of footage was provided.

  "Next," Damon declared.

  "Told you this was going to be a waste of time."

  "Dot those Is and cross those Ts, Lara. There's a good detective."

  I sniggered. Damon had decided playful was on the menu to cheer me up about being wanted dead.

  It worked, I could almost ignore the guillotine hanging metaphorically over my head.

  We watched as Tank approached the door of the restaurant on the other side of the glass. He walked out, and back across the carpark to his vehicle. Got in and drove off after a few seconds of attempting to start the thing up. No one neared him. No one called out. He didn't talk to a soul, outside or inside McDonald's. And a few hours later he was dead.

  I went to click the video off when something caught my eye at the very edge. Just a split second of screen time. Not really enough. But I thought...

  "Well, that was a bust," Damon said, standing up with our glasses and returning them to the kitchen bench.

  I replayed the last few seconds.

  There. Blurry, on the upper right corner. But definitely something. The screen went blank before I could determine what.

  "So, what's next?" Damon asked, walking back to the board and staring at my scribbled diagram.

  I replayed the last few seconds again, just to be sure.

  Trench coat, maybe. Definitely something on his head.

  "I suppose we could try to lift fingerprints off that newspaper. I've still got it at home," Damon supplied. "Want me to go get it or is newsprint bad for prints?" He snorted. "Get it? Newsprint bad for prints?"

  I replayed the video once more because I didn't like what I couldn't see.

  "Lara? Have you got something?"

  Nothing. The scene was too short, cut-off before the man turned around. It was a man, wasn't it? Not many women wear trench coats. It was a trench coat, wasn't it? Winter, so I suppose anything goes.

  "Lara."

  "Hmm?"

  "That's the fifth time you've replayed three seconds of footage since I've been watching, and I'd guess you've done it a few times before that."

  "Oh."

  "What did you see?"

  "Nothing." The word was out before I could stop it. It sounded defensive. I pulled my hand back from the laptop and stared at the blank screen.

  "It's called a Freudian slip," Damon offered. "An unintentional error regarded as revealing subconscious feelings."

  I turned slowly in my chair to look up at him.

  "You don't actually think it's nothing. You just want it to be," he clarified further.

  "Why would I not want a further clue?" I asked, my voice a little tremulous.

  "Love," he said with feeling. "Because you already recognise what you've seen."

  No. No, that wasn't true. Because there wasn't enough footage to tell.

  Oh, fuck it. All it would take was a request into computer forensics for more footage from this camera angle and I'd see the answer.

  But I was wrong. It was nothing. A blurred image of a homeless man at the outer edges of the screen. It was nothing.

  A homeless man wearing a fedora hat.

  I turned back and looked at the laptop. Still blank. Still taunting me. My hand actually shook when I lifted it up to press play. At the sight of the tremors, I clenched my fist and stood up abruptly from my chair. I needed to pace.

  Damon took my seat and watched the segment I'd tagged. He replayed it, while I paced, and my mind went blank, and my heart thundered in my veins, and my blood pressure sky rocketed. I even started to gnaw of my thumbnail and then thought better of it, clenching my fists at my sides as I managed another pass across the lounge floor.

  "Who do you think it is, Lara?" Damon asked, and his voice was firm, steady, demanding.

  He was pushing. This was Damon forcing me to admit what my subconscious had recognised on that video.

  "We need more footage," I replied, instead of answering the question.

  "Yes, we do. Shall I put the call in?" he asked, knowing they wouldn't release it to him, seeing as he'd been officially removed from the case now.

  "No, I'll do it," I said, feeling all blood leave my head and settle in my throbbing toe. I limped back to the table and swiped up my cellphone, but didn't sit. I couldn't sit. Despite the ache in my sore foot, I kept pacing.

  Pain helped me to focus on anything other than what my brain was insisting I saw.

  "Johnson," came the greeting down the line. I sucked in air. "Comp U forensics," the tech added.

  I cleared my throat, not looking at the laptop. Or Damon.

  "This is Detective Lara Keen." Stick to the facts. "You checked out some security footage at Quay Street for case number five-oh-five dash three-oh-two." I could feel my pulse fluttering at the side of my neck. "Are you able to send me more?"

  "Hold on a tick, Detective. Let me bring that up," Johnson replied. Clicking could be heard down the line as the technician got to work.

  I kept pacing, head down as I limped, heart in my throat.

  I was wrong. This was a coincidence and nothing more.

  My stomach clenched as my gut flared with indignation.

  "Got it. Which view angle?" the technician asked.

  "All of them," I said, my voice shaking. I clenched my free hand into a fist and swallowed repeatedly.

  "That'll make a huge file," he pointed out. "Do you want a hard copy sent over?"

  "Upload it to Central's server. I'll view it in there." Breathe, Lara. Remember to breathe.

  "Did we miss something?" the tech asked.

  "No." My voice was a whisper, my throat was closing with a mixture of fear and heartache.

  I had to be wrong. And even if I wa
s, this was still going to hurt.

  "Oh, OK," he said with obvious relief. "It's all attached to that case file on the secured network now."

  "Thanks," I muttered, hanging up as he started to talk again.

  I didn't have it in me to be polite, to soothe his ruffled feathers. My gut was telling me this was big. Carl's voice was ominously quiet inside my head. Damon hadn't said a word for several long minutes. And all I had to do, to end this farce, was to turn around and walk back to the table, log-on to the Central Police server and locate that file.

  That's all.

  I stood in the middle of the lounge and lifted my head to look out of my front windows. They were bay windows, five artfully angled panes of glass surrounded by natural wood. I looked at them for another minute, not seeing through them, or really seeing them either. Just staring at nothing at all.

  You can do this, Keen. Come on.

  You're a damn good cop, Keen. But stick with me and I'll make you a superstar.

  I turned back and walked the short distance to the table. Damon watched me from where he sat. He still didn't speak a word. What he saw on my face could not have been good. I tried not to notice the worry on his.

  I sat down carefully onto the chair in front of the laptop - which Damon had vacated at some stage - and placed my cellphone on the table, straightening it up, so it was in line with the keyboard on the computer.

  Stalling.

  I swiped the touch pad, bringing the screen back to life, ignoring the trembling in my fingers.

  Breathe.

  Opening up my browser, I located the Auckland Central Police Server bookmark, the cursor hovered for a long moment and then I clicked.

  Breathe.

  I logged in, searched for the case number. Found it. Then, before I could change my mind, opened up the newly attached video file from computer forensics. Going straight to the last video footage of Tank leaving McDonald's carpark, I queued it up and waited for the video to start.

  I'd forgotten to breathe, so I gulped air like a fish out of water while the video began to play.

  Damon moved silently to watch over my shoulder. I waited for him to reach out and touch me, but he kept a decent gap between our bodies. I couldn't even feel his warmth.