Assassin

by Tara Moss

  Les Vanderwall was a retired Canadian detective inspector. His thirty-year-old daughter, Makedde, had flown to Paris pursuing an Australian private investigation case and had not been seen since. It had been nearly two months, and he and Flynn feared the worst. Mak and Andy had been in an intimate relationship. She’d moved to Canberra and lived with him for seven months in the house he still lived in now and, though she had left Andy a couple of weeks before departing for Paris and he’d had nothing to do with her decision to go, he felt somehow responsible. Les Vanderwall felt Andy was responsible, too. You didn’t have to be a profiler to pick that up.

  ‘But you know what’s going on,’ Les insisted. He was making his daughter’s whereabouts Andy’s problem, though Mak, even when she was in love with Andy, would not be influenced by him on even the most minor issue. She was her own woman. Had been from the moment he met her.

  ‘I stay across things as best I can,’ Andy replied reluctantly. ‘But there’s not much to stay across at the moment.’ He didn’t want to say the trail was cold, though clearly it was. They needed something fresh to resuscitate the case and lord knew there were many who didn’t want it resuscitated at all. It didn’t help that she wasn’t an Australian citizen and that she’d last been seen on French soil.

  The line was quiet for a while, and Andy wondered what was on the older man’s mind.

  ‘And you’d tell me if you heard anything from her. No matter what.’

  ‘Yes. You know that,’ Andy snapped. ‘You don’t even need to ask, do you?’ His temper flared like kindling.

  God, I wish I had heard from her. Heard anything. Even a ‘Fuck you, Andy’.

  There was a long pause and the line came up in static again while both men considered what next to say.

  The past several months had been some of Andy’s worst. When he’d returned from a stint of training at the FBI Academy in Quantico to find that his live-in girlfriend had made good on her plainly stated promise to leave, he’d not been in the best frame of mind. Mak hadn’t left a note. She hadn’t wanted him to pursue her, or even talk to her, not until they’d had some ‘time to heal’. But of course he’d come straight to Sydney once he’d found the house empty. His efforts amounted to too little, too late, their intense relationship damaged by his constant absences, and now that she was out there somewhere, presumably in Paris, alive or dead, it hardly surprised him that she would not contact him — especially as it seemed another young man had flown out to join her there. He’d come to accept that. It had been hard. But he’d accepted it. Mak and this young man with whom she’d become involved had both fallen off the radar after hitting Paris, which led credence to the idea that Mak simply didn’t want to be found.

  But her employer, Marian Wendell, had not heard from her since she broke the missing person’s case she was in Europe to solve. The subject of her investigation, Adam Hart, had been returned safely to his worried mother’s arms in Australia. Mak had personally seen him off at Charles de Gaulle airport. The Mak Andy knew, the woman who had been pushing so hard to get her career off the ground, would have felt it prudent to accept the new cases that were coming in on the back of that success. It was an opportunity to establish herself in the industry. Instead, according to Marian Wendell, the work had been pouring in for her and she had to keep telling her clients that Mak was on leave. And most telling of all, Mak’s father, Leslie, had not heard from her. Their relationship had always been a strong one. Mak loved her father deeply. She’d lost her mother to cancer and her widowed father was the only parent she had. Now even Mr Vanderwall had taken to calling Andy to find out what had happened to his own daughter, and Andy had precisely nothing to offer.

  It was eating away at him from the inside. A cancer of a different kind.

  ‘What about that family?’ Les Vanderwall said, deliberately not mentioning their name.

  Les was referring to the wealthy and influential Cavanagh family. A year or so earlier the body of a Thai national had been found callously disposed of in a dumpster in Sydney. The girl had been young: no older than fifteen. The victim was tied back to Damien Cavanagh, the sole heir to the Cavanagh billions, after a mobile-phone video surfaced that allegedly showed him with the girl in a bedroom around the time of or shortly after her fatal overdose. Damien, who at thirty was at least twice the age of the victim, appeared to have paid to have sex with her, and then caused her death, possibly by accident. Yet his identification in the grainy video was called into question and the case against him stalled. It was not so easy to nail the sole heir to one of Australia’s biggest fortunes.

  But Makedde wouldn’t let it go.

  She got hold of the video and managed to identify a rare Brett Whiteley painting in the footage, a painting the Cavanagh family was known to own. Thanks to her dogged efforts, including crashing Damien Cavanagh’s thirtieth-birthday celebrations to find the room where the painting had been hung, DNA material relevant to the case was found at the family’s Point Piper mansion. Had it been anyone else, charges would have been laid. But Damien Cavanagh had his family to protect him, and protect him they did.

  And then more bodies started turning up.

  The girl responsible for taking the grainy video of Damien Cavanagh happened to get herself murdered in a supposedly unrelated incident. And another girl who’d seen the video died of a drug overdose. A close friend of Damien’s turned up dead around the same time that blame for the Thai girl’s death was focused on him. An alleged suicide. He’d been a party boy. An easy scapegoat for the unfolding scandal, Andy figured.

  The Cavanaghs, via their impressive legal team, denied any knowledge of the Thai girl, despite the video that allegedly showed Damien with her and the very solid DNA linking her death to a room in the Cavanagh house. No, it was all Simon Aston, Damien’s friend, now conveniently dead. He was to blame. He’d brought her there. He was the one in the video — though it did not look like him at all. He’d accidentally administered the fatal dose and his alleged suicide was the result of remorse for what he’d done. The Thai girl’s presence in Australia was linked back to a grim, underage sex-trafficking racket, but before further investigation could be done, the couple responsible for her arrival in Australia also turned up dead. Not suicide this time. Those two were hacked to pieces. The Cavanaghs had since been tentatively linked with an organised-crime ring out of Queensland, but as far as Andy knew, that trail had also gone cold.

  In all the mess Makedde had ended up at the top of the Cavanaghs’ hate list for her ongoing role in trying to bring justice for the girl and the victims of the subsequent cover-up. And now she had gone missing. Those who crossed the Cavanaghs had a habit of turning up dead, and Andy hoped to hell Mak had not already joined that growing list. Damien Cavanagh, and his father, stank of some kind of involvement in her disappearance, but it was not something anyone could yet prove. And not a lot of people were keen to connect those dots either. It was professionally and politically dangerous territory. Andy wanted to believe they would be brought down eventually, but it would take time and a lot of very careful investigation and political manoeuvring. None of which Andy was personally in a position to perform. And none of which was related to his job here in Canberra with the new SVCP unit.

  ‘Mr Vanderwall,’ Andy began patiently, ‘you know I’m not involved —’

  ‘Of course I bloody well know you aren’t involved in the case. But you know. What are their chances? Is there any traction? I mean, are they bringing Jack in for questioning at least?’

  Jack Cavanagh. The patriarch.

  It was not a small thing to bring Jack Cavanagh into the station for questioning. Not a small thing at all. He was one of Australia’s wealthiest and most high-profile business people. He had friends in high places. The press would be all over it. And he would crush the homicide squad if they made even the most tentative move on him. Crush them. Careers would be ended. No, Andy doubted very much that was on the cards any time soon.

  ‘It doesn’
t look good. They are doing the best they can, but there is a lot of pressure to abandon the case against him.’

  Corruption. Perverting the course of justice. Murder. If they could just get him on something. Something he couldn’t weasel his way out of.

  ‘I wish I had something to tell you. She seems to have disappeared without a trace. They’ve been dealing with the French police. You know what the French police are like. Can you imagine? But as I understand it, there’s nothing. She left the hotel and wasn’t seen again. No sign of a struggle there. She just walked out and didn’t return …’

  This simple fact was killing Andy. It was killing both of them.

  He looked at the closed drawer and imagined the bottle in his hands again. Just another little sip.

  ‘They sent us the belongings they found in her room,’ Les finally said.

  That’s what this was about then. It meant the police were finished with them.

  ‘There’s not much there. She didn’t leave her purse or passport behind, or her camera, unfortunately. She left clothes, toiletries and her suitcase, though. Things I doubt she would just discard.’

  Andy nodded to himself and swallowed. He didn’t know what to say. No, Mak was not the type to abandon clothes in a hotel room in Paris. Nor was she the type to run off without settling the bill. There were many unconventional things about Mak, but lawlessness was not one of them. She’d been through a lot, more than any woman or man should have to endure, but at heart she was a nice, law-abiding Canadian. The daughter of a cop, no less. Not innocent exactly, but she was nowhere near irresponsible. He didn’t buy for one second that she’d done a runner on a hotel of her own volition.

  Something had happened to her.

  Something terrible.

  CHAPTER 2

  The filthy mattress on the floor of the cellar had been her home for an immeasurable stretch of time, and now she sat on it with an unlit cigarette dangling from her parched lips, her bare ankle straining against a heavy cuff secured to the wall by a chain — an ankle crusted with the dried blood of superficial abrasions.

  From where the metal had cut into her.

  The woman had woken here, on this damp mattress, drugged. It had taken some time to become lucid. She had been held prisoner in this dank prison for days, but how long exactly? With no light, no windows, she could not count the days — the weeks?

  Stale water.

  Cold TV dinners.

  A cat’s water-bowl.

  The metal cuff. Grating.

  And darkness. So many hours of cool, silent darkness.

  The woman did not smoke, but a match, a single match for lighting her cigarette, held her only grim hope for survival. Her captor had given the cigarette to her and was watching now. Watching it in her lips. She looked up into his dark eyes and, as he handed her the tiny box of matches, she said, Thank you.

  Thank.

  You.

  Thank.

  You.

  Yes.

  All thanks for the cigarette, sir.

  A cigarette. The final request before death. And for Makedde Vanderwall, a final chance. She fumbled with the matches.

  I’m lonely.

  Lonely.

  Lonely.

  And then her captor is close, so close, towering over her with his hulking body. So large. Too strong to fight. But close enough to smell is close enough to kill. I want you, she whispered, pulling the clothing from her shoulders, inviting him, licking his ear, running her tongue across the scarred, repulsive cheek of the professional killer who was her captor, her warden, her abductor.

  His belt buckle dragged along the stone floor.

  His hands. On her.

  His rough flesh. Against her.

  His desire. Pressing.

  His sickening penetration.

  But the key and the match — these two things held her freedom. The key and the match. The key … She could do it. If she could just survive this. Do what she had to do. And then, she had it, the key, the match, the flame — blue and nearly invisible at first, then rising in magnificent amber, dancing across the mattress, across his shirt, his hair. A blaze, beautiful, vengeful and horrific.

  Eat fire, fucker.

  Makedde Vanderwall woke to the sound of a single piercing scream. She could smell smoke and burning flesh — the sickening mix of cooking skin and hair, like sulphur and seared meat. She sat up violently and looked around her, blinking, her body a tangle of adrenaline and fear. For a moment she was unsure whether the scream had been her own.

  Yes. You were screaming. Again.

  Though Mak had been sure of the smoke, the air was clean, her lungs clear. There was no fire. She was in bed, the early light coming in past the shutters over the balcony. It was another nightmare. Her subconscious was still in that dank cellar in the French countryside, but the rest of her was in the bedroom of Luther Hand, the hired assassin who had been her captor. The man she had burned alive.

  Mak’s face was slick with sweat and her stomach felt dangerously queasy. She stifled a gag, and quickly realised there was more. No, she thought as she pulled the bed covers off and ran through the spinning dark for the nearby toilet, a hand over her mouth. She had just made it inside the black-tiled cubicle when her stomach emptied itself through her fingers. There wasn’t much there, but she managed to aim what there was at the open toilet. With a ferociousness that surprised her, she gagged and choked until the feeling passed, then sat back on her heels, disgusted. She flushed, closed the lid, wiped her mouth. Cold water felt good on her hands, growing warmer as the pipes woke. She washed her hands and kept the tap running so she could splash her face. Dammit. Face wet and eyes half closed, she stepped across the narrow hallway to the bathroom and flicked the light on. A bottle of spring water sat next to the sink and she used it to rinse her mouth and brush her teeth once, twice. Still, the acid taste remained. Her eyes strayed to the small bottle of Chanel No. 5 on the toiletries shelf. She gave the top two quick squeezes and the air filled with the distinctive, musky floral scent. She brushed her teeth again.

  Perhaps unsurprisingly, the nightmares had become worse since she’d found the order for her death. What would happen if a second of Cavanagh’s hired killers got hold of her? What horrors awaited her? And all because she wanted justice for the things the Cavanaghs had done, the people they’d had killed for their own gain.

  Justice is dead.

  Mak leaned on the rim of the sink with both hands and looked into the mirror, where a slim, naked woman with bone-straight black hair greeted her. The light cast unflattering shadows, accentuating the jut of her collarbone and the contours of new, lean muscle. She’d been exercising using the dumbbells and chin-up bar she’d found in the man’s apartment — push-ups, tricep dips, pull-ups — and her thin arms appeared uncharacteristically ropey and tight. Her breasts were full and round, but beneath them were the first signs of increasingly taut abdominal muscles and the hint of ribs. The soft taper of her hips had been reduced to angles and hipbones, something she had not seen in her mirror since her early days as a fashion model over a decade earlier. She’d dropped a dress size, maybe more. Mak preferred her softer, curvier self, but weight was sliding off her like water. It’s stress, she told herself. She’d have to fight to keep weight on, to stay fit. She needed her strength. Displeased, Mak leaned in, tilted her head down and pressed her clean fingers to the part in her hair. A pale band of dark blonde roots already showed through. In only another week it would be obvious, the part giving the unsettling effect of a bald stripe. She’d need to dye her hair again. She had resisted the urge to give herself a short chop, such was the identifying flag that had been her once blonde mane. But long hair provided some semblance of cover, she had decided; and, after it had been dyed and chemically straightened, she felt it bore no resemblance to her former style. The black hair hung like a curtain, casting new shadows on the angles of her high cheekbones and falling straight and shiny past her freshly muscled shoulders, contrasting with
fair, unblemished skin.

  Unblemished, except in the places where she had scars.

  The thin, raised cicatrices weren’t obvious unless you knew where to look. Unless you knew what they meant.

  That Mak had managed to turn the tables on her would-be assassin might have given her some sense of satisfaction were she in a movie. Instead, it only filled her with numbness. She’d sacrificed a great deal of herself to get him in a vulnerable position down in that cellar out in the remote French countryside, that makeshift prison where she’d been kept for days. She’d sacrificed so much to live. There were things she couldn’t undo, couldn’t un-know. The man named Luther Hand would not be coming back here, would not be coming for her, could never touch her again. But there would be others to take his place. There was no doubt of that. With a half-million-Euro price on her head she didn’t dare stay in one spot for long now. She hoped the contract had been put out to international freelancers only because the Cavanaghs did not know whether she was alive at all. What easier way to tie up the loose ends than demand her dead body for a price? Perhaps she really had successfully disappeared? Perhaps this was a last-ditch effort to wipe the earth clean of her? A desperate move?

  Now that this new price was on her head, it felt like the woman marked for death could not possibly be her, and in some ways the inconveniently living woman they sought to erase was not her, in fact no longer existed at all. She was now a woman without a name, without a life, without a home. She’d tried to imagine starting again. She’d changed her appearance, was learning Spanish from books and CDs, trying to get the accent right. On good days she’d toyed with the idea of a new life, dared to dream of somehow putting all the violence and death behind her. But they wouldn’t allow that.

  Mak? Are you still in there?

  She stared down her own feverishly bright, hollowed-out eyes and barely recognised what she saw. The arrangement of her even features and her tall, feminine build meant she was still beautiful, despite the weight loss, the terrors, but she was visibly haunted as well. She carried a new darkness. Mak had once read about a study where rapists and sex-murderers were given the plain, black-and-white headshots of a number of women. They were asked to choose which ones they would target. Each of the men picked the same ones. Why? It was something in the eyes, they said. A disturbing thought. Mak pondered what it was in her that had made her a psychomagnet for so much of the past five years.