The Mak Collection

by Tara Moss

  Mak swung her legs out of bed and hopped up. She shook herself from head to toe in a half-hearted attempt to shake off the bad night, then slipped on a pair of fuzzy bed slippers and wrapped a thick white robe around her naked body. Her preference for sleeping in her birthday suit had little to do with Marilyn Monroe’s famous comments, and everything to do with Makedde’s own tendency to be an overactive sleeper, twisting PJ’s, slips, boxer shorts, or whatever else she happened to be wearing around her while she slept. That is, when she did sleep. On more than one occasion she had woken up struggling for air with a T-shirt wrapped tightly around her neck and the bedsheets and duvet tossed on the floor on opposite sides of the room.

  Robe-wrapped and vertical, Mak shuffled over to her computer.

  “Welcome to AOL Canada,” came the chirpy greeting as she logged on. “You have mail.” Her saturnine mood lifted slightly, and the corners of her mouth curled into a sleepy grin. She had checked her mail a couple of times the night before but there was nothing there. Well, at least nothing interesting. She was kind of hoping to discover a little email from a certain young man.

  Hmmm…Word of the Day. Some mail from the Forensic Psychology list. Aha…What’s this? An email from one “BlakeR”. Subject line: “A question”.

  Bingo!

  Hi Makedde,

  It was nice meeting you today. I found the conference interesting, but of course you were a highlight. I won’t be able to go tomorrow…

  Damn.

  But I was wondering if we could perhaps catch up for dinner afterwards?

  Yes!

  I hope you don’t think me too forward. Send me an email, or better yet, give me a call.

  She re-read his email. Twice. He must have sent it after she logged off at 1.00 am. Perhaps he was a night owl as well? She checked the time logged on the correspondence. Yup, 1.16 in the morning. That’s pretty late.

  Roy Blake.

  Yes, she was intrigued. But a fully-fledged date? It would have been better if he was just coming to the conference and they could chat a bit without any of the “date” formality. She hadn’t been on a proper date in how long? A year? Well, not counting that disaster with Henry. But that didn’t really qualify. She had left before the appetiser arrived.

  She went to the kitchen and put on a pot of water, and then distractedly went about making a cup of coffee.

  Mak found herself smiling as she considered her reply. She sat down at the desk, and sipped her drink. She was actually contemplating seeing Roy. Which was weird. But how to go about it?

  Hi Roy,

  Thanks for your message. It was nice meeting you, too. I must thank you for saving me from Professor Gosper and my bubblegum. :-) Thanks for your offer. Perhaps we could meet up for a quick coffee or a drink instead? Around eight would probably work for me, otherwise we could catch up sometime on the weekend. Give me a call.

  She typed in her number, and was about to press “send” when a feeling of doubt overtook her. This guy is a stranger, Mak. Do you really want to give him your number? Do you really want to meet him somewhere alone?

  Makedde recognised that her fear was a little irrational. She wouldn’t be alone at all. She would be on familiar territory if she chose the bar or café, and she could excuse herself after a single beverage if need be. It was safe. Besides, he was a security guard… well, not that that really meant anything, but he did work on campus at least. Mak pressed “send” before she scared herself out of it, and then it was gone, despatched into cyberspace.

  At ten minutes to nine, Makedde arrived at the Graduate Center Ballroom at UBC and glanced around the gathering crowd. No Roy, just as he’d said in his email.

  Good. No distractions, she told herself.

  Professor Gosper was nowhere in sight, so she could relax. Makedde noticed there were considerably fewer people attending the second day of the conference. Either that or they were all late. Dr Hare had pulled a huge crowd of curious university students that first day, but only the more hard-core attendees had stayed on. There would probably be more people in the afternoon for the talk from the FBI agent on crime scene analysis and how that relates to the clinical construct of psychopathy. It sounded like an interesting lecture, and Mak was sure that any mention of the FBI would result in a standing room only situation. That was the X-Files for you.

  The thought of the FBI steered Mak back to Quantico and to Andy Flynn, again. Since his call she’d had trouble getting him out of her head.

  Should I try to call him back?

  After what had happened in Sydney, whether she liked it or not, Andy Flynn was a part of her life. She didn’t love him—or at least that was what she kept telling herself—but the experience they’d shared had forged a difficult bond between them, and like the branding of a red-hot poker, the events had marked them forever. But that wasn’t love. That wasn’t any reason to regret that he was so far away.

  No, I won’t try to track him down, Makedde decided.

  Let it be. Move on, Makedde. Move on.

  A bitter lump formed in her throat, and she ignored it. She had a big day ahead of her.

  CHAPTER 18

  Andy Flynn arrived at the sprawling UBC campus just before 9.00 am. He parked his rental sedan, placed the ticket on the dash and began his walk to Crescent Road and the building that housed the Graduate Center Ballroom. He had left Dr Bob Harris at the hotel to recover from the flight the night before. Although the Profiler needed to catch up on lost sleep, he would most likely have launched straight into work mode the moment he woke up, looking over the files the RCMP had given him the night before.

  Even though Andy had heard a lot of his mentor’s presentation material before, he was interested to see the way he handled the crowd, especially a crowd as diverse as this surely would be—students, professors, police officers, security guards, psychologists. Of course, there were other reasons why Andy was interested in who might be in that crowd. Reasons that didn’t pertain to work, exactly.

  It was Andy’s first time at the UBC campus, and he couldn’t help but think of Makedde as he walked across the green lawns and admired the panoramic views. It was a place she had spoken of several times in their brief time together, and to his surprise, it was even more beautiful than she had described it.

  He had quickly decided that Vancouver bore a certain loose resemblance to Sydney. Both cities shared a spectacular harbour and bridge, and the five massive white sails of Canada Place graced the waterfront in a way that reminded him of the famous Opera House back home. But of course the mountain peaks that surrounded the city would always provide a dramatic point of difference to Sydney. Those who grew up near the Rockies, as Makedde did, thought of the Blue Mountains near Andy’s home as the “Blue Hills”. Now he saw why.

  It took a while for Andy to get his bearings and it took him somewhat longer than he had anticipated to find his way to the ballroom. When he finally found the right building, a makeshift cardboard sign saying, “Psychopathy Conference” with a big arrow pointing at the front doors gave him a great sense of relief.

  The room that held the conference was on two levels, with a sign-in area just inside the door and tables with coffee urns, and a spread of muffins, donuts and sweets to the left. To the right was a built-in series of numbered coat racks of the sort that Andy had not seen since his early school days.

  “Hello,” came a chirpy voice as he walked inside. He looked to the sign-in table to find that the voice belonged to an androgynous-looking female with very short-cropped hair, and a ring through her nose. He noticed that she wore a name tag that said, “Billie Looker”. Billie? He raised his eyes from the name tag up to the face again just to check. Yup, she was definitely a she.

  “Hello. I’m Detective Andrew Flynn.”

  “Welcome to the conference,” Billie said in a soft Canadian accent.

  She flipped through her boxes of neatly organised cards and pulled one out with his name printed on it.

  DET. ANDREW FLYNN
>
  “Please keep this on throughout the conference,” she said, and slipped the card into a plastic name tag holder with a safety pin through the back.

  He took the name tag and thanked her, then made his way to the large sunken seating area where the first presentation was already well under way. He slipped the tag into his suit pocket, with no intention of ever wearing it.

  Andy was definitely late. A crowd of a hundred and fifty or so people was watching the speaker intently. Luckily, there were still a number of empty seats left to choose from. He managed to slip quietly into a chair nearest the door, right at the back of the room, and his entrance caused very little disturbance.

  Is Makedde here? he wondered.

  He glanced furtively around the room and his gaze rested momentarily on a blond-haired student up the front, his breath stopping short. However it wasn’t Makedde at all, but a somewhat bohemian-looking man. Men with long hair and women with brush-cuts and names like “Billie”—Andy was starting to feel very unhip and out of touch. Maybe he was getting old. Or maybe it was just a peculiar Canadian thing.

  It wasn’t until ten-thirty that Andy actually saw her.

  A young red-haired woman thanked the speaker—a professor who had presented a lot of slides and graphs that Andy hadn’t found very interesting—before announcing a coffee break. The entire room stood in unison, a mass of bodies moving hungrily towards the refreshment table. A very large man in one of the middle rows stood up with them, and Andy’s eyes were drawn to him. He was at least six foot seven, and probably weighed a good three hundred and fifty, or four hundred pounds.

  When he moved to one side, Andy did a double take.

  Makedde was sitting alone and jotting down notes studiously in her notepad. She had been hidden by the man the whole time. Her hair was long and luxurious as he remembered it, and she was definitely female—not like the other long-haired blond he had been eyeballing earlier. He could see her profile as she wrote on her notepad, her head tilted down and her hair swept to the opposite shoulder.

  She was even more beautiful than he remembered, and that realisation was downright depressing.

  She seemed absorbed in her notes, and she looked so wonderful sitting there with her hair hanging forward on one side, and that full mouth pouting in concentration that he almost didn’t want to disturb her. Almost.

  He took a deep breath, stood up and walked over.

  To his surprise, he managed to make his way right up to her without her noticing him. She didn’t look up from her notepad until the very last minute, and when she finally did, the most amazing expression came over her features. Her jaw dropped open and her blue eyes became perfectly round, showing the whites all around her pupils. The blood drained from her face as if she had seen a ghost, as if he, of all people, was a ghost, and then it took what seemed like an excruciatingly long time before she said anything.

  It wasn’t quite the reaction he had hoped for.

  “Hi,” he said sheepishly. Half of him wanted to crawl under a rock, and the other half wanted to take her into his arms.

  “Andy?” Makedde said. His name still somehow managed to sound sweet on her tongue. “Andy,” she repeated. “Well…” She closed her eyes for a moment and shook her head from side to side a couple of times. The corners of her mouth turned up. A light charcoal was swept across her closed eyelids, and her lashes were long and black with mascara. He noticed that her skin was still absolutely perfect. Andy thought she might have changed her hairstyle slightly, and she was perhaps a little thinner in the face as well. She opened her eyes again and focused them on him. “What on earth brings you to UBC?”

  “I’m here for the conference. I arrived last night from Quantico. I’m here with a colleague, Dr Harris.”

  “Umm,” she said. “Dr Harris, the Profiler. He’s doing a talk this afternoon. What is it, ‘Violent Crime Scene Analysis and the Psychopathic Personality’?”

  He nodded. “That’s right.”

  Mak pursed her lips together and looked down. “I’m sorry I didn’t get back to you,” she said.

  “Oh, that’s fine. It is hard to get calls through at the academy sometimes.”

  Andy knew perfectly well that she hadn’t tried.

  She nodded absently, and they both fell silent.

  It was a novelty to stand next to such a tall woman. In her heeled boots she probably stood close to six foot three, almost as tall as Andy. He liked that.

  “So, um…When did you get here?” she asked.

  “Last night.” He told her again. “I’ll be here for a week at least.”

  He hoped that didn’t sound suggestive. After the words came out he thought he probably should have said it differently, like, “I’m in Vancouver for a week,” or “I’m just here for the conference,” or something similar. He didn’t need to add “at least”, as if to suggest he might stick around if she could persuade him. Of course, saying, “I’m just here for the conference,” wouldn’t have been entirely true either.

  “Oh,” she said. The colour still hadn’t returned to her face. “That’s great. So what do you think of Vancouver so far?” He laughed, trying to sound casual, and said, “More like, ‘What do I think of the airport and the inside of the Renaissance Hotel…” He meant it as a joke but again, he immediately thought it could have sounded suggestive.

  “I mean…I haven’t really seen any of Vancouver yet,” he went on. “I hope to see a few sights, you know, with my colleagues. Is there anything you’d recommend?”

  “Oh, you should try to see Stanley Park, Gas Town, Grouse Mountain. The Capilano Suspension Bridge is kind of cool if you’re out that way. And you really ought to get to Whistler if you can.” She rattled the tourist info off and then stopped short, as if she suddenly remembered who she was talking to and found it all a bit too bizarre. Or maybe he was projecting his own feelings into her actions, he wasn’t sure.

  Makedde met his eyes, and pressed her lips into a tight smile. Her golden complexion had regained its warmth.

  “So…Andy Flynn,” she said and crossed her arms.

  Andy was over-analysing. He had his intense study of body language, Statement Analysis and Scientific Content Analysis at the academy to thank for that habit. Every word and gesture had some probable meaning. One of his instructors had said, “Don’t try this on your friends, or you won’t have any.”

  “So, how’s it all going?” Makedde asked him, arms still folded across her body. “What have you been up to? You know, with the Profiling Unit and everything?”

  “Well, the Police Commissioner finally got the thing a green light and it should be up and running sometime next year. We’re looking to make it the centre for Profiling and tackling major crime through all of Australasia.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “That sounds really exciting.”

  He didn’t want to mention that the Stiletto Murder Case might have been an influencing factor in finally pushing the plans through. There was nothing like a public outcry to suddenly boost political support for a crime-fighting project.

  “It looks like I may have the opportunity to have a high-ranking position. Perhaps even head the unit at some point.”

  “Like I said, that’s great. Congratulations. Well, um…” She looked past him to the gathering of people at the refreshment table. “I guess…”

  And then the redhead was back at the lectern, introducing the next speaker—coffee break over.

  “Now, if everyone could please take their seats, I would like to introduce Professor Rickford from the University of Wales…”

  No time for refreshments.

  Makedde looked back to her seat, and then across to Andy.

  “Are you here alone, or…?”

  “I came alone,” Andy told her. “Dr Harris will be arriving just before lunch.”

  “What time is his presentation?”

  “At one. First up after lunch,” he said.

  “I’d love to meet him,” she said, and motioned
to take her seat.

  He smiled, still standing. “You can join us for lunch if you’d like.”

  “I didn’t mean to invite myself…”

  And then Professor Rickford was at the lectern, starting his speech. It seemed inappropriate to cross the room to his seat, so Andy just sat down on the spot, right where he was, with one chair separating him from Makedde.

  Mak smiled at him and shrugged, taking out her notepad and pen, and gesturing to the speaker. The room was quiet except for the professor, and they didn’t speak again until the lunchbreak at noon.

  Makedde picked up the conversation right where they had left off.

  “I didn’t mean to invite myself to lunch,” she said as the room began to clear.

  “I’m sure Bob won’t mind,” Andy said.

  They both got up from their seats at the same time. The room had erupted into a busy chatter, and people brushed by them to head out for their lunchbreak. They stood awkwardly looking at each other, neither of them motioning to leave.

  “No, honestly. You two will probably want to talk about work—”

  “Not at all,” he assured her. “Not at all.” Perhaps she really didn’t want to go. He didn’t want to force her. “Hey look, the invitation is there for you,” Andy said. Somehow that seemed to end the stand-off, but apparently not in his favour. She had obviously made the decision not to go.