The Mak Collection

by Tara Moss

  Almost too late. Almost too late. Almost…

  ‘Stop!’ she called out, trying to raise her weapon. ‘Put it down! Don’t do it!’

  There it was.

  She saw IT—that dark, malevolent thing lingering like a dense shadow in the room, a shadow made up of tiny fragments of hate, the very embodiment of utter evil. IT was holding her mother down on a bed—Makedde’s own mother.

  IT had a blade in its hand. A scalpel.

  Makedde tried to lift her gun to shoot but her father’s police uniform held her arm down, the sleeves too heavy to bear, too tough to lift. The gun turned to pure lead—heavy, so heavy—and it too could not be lifted. Her arm stayed at her side, useless, pointless, the gun too much for her. Helplessly, she watched the blade of the scalpel come down in a swift arc, the faceless demon laughing at her feeble efforts to prevent the death of her mother.

  Makedde’s feet were glued in place, the floor sticky with red fluid. She tried to leap forward to stop the blade as it swung down, but it was no use. She could only watch.

  ‘Noooo!’

  She was too late. Again.

  The scalpel continued its arc, the room turning crimson, everything now deep red—everyone; the shadow was red, her mother was red, and the stench of death was overpowering. The shadow laughed at her, revelling in her horror, revelling in the crimson—crimson everywhere, covering everything, covering her eyes. Beneath the red she saw tall grasses swaying in the wind. She smelled salty sea air. There was death in the air and on the wind. The grasses began to turn and as they did, blade by blade, they turned the red colour of freshly spilled blood.

  Mak cried out.

  ‘Are you okay?’ a voice said.

  The shadowy creature was laughing, the sound filling her heart with horrible heaviness. She felt like she was dying…

  ‘Mak!’

  A voice broke through the fragments of her murky thoughts. Someone was drawing her out of that horrible scene, her failed attempt to save her mother, the terrifyingly sadistic torture and abduction, Catherine’s torn body; Mak’s heart filling with darkness; the shadowy demon, faceless and terrible, laughing at her failure; the overwhelming blood and death.

  ‘Mak—wake up! Wake up! You’re having a nightmare.’

  Andy was shaking her gently by the shoulders, and Makedde found that she was already sitting up in bed.

  Oh God. I’ve had another bad dream.

  ‘Mak, are you okay? What was it about, the nightmare?’ he asked.

  ‘I was dreaming, wasn’t I?’ she said, disoriented, but already knowing it was a dream, and a familiar one.

  Makedde was in their dark bedroom. Moonlight crept in through the half-open blinds, casting faint light in odd shapes across the bed covers. As her eyes adjusted she could make out Andy’s face; she reached out to him and stroked it with one hand. Her fingertips felt stubble.

  ‘You’re here…’

  ‘What was your nightmare about?’ he asked. He had both hands on her shoulders, gripping her softly.

  ‘I can’t quite remember,’ she mumbled, searching for the dream that was slipping away on waking.

  ‘Look at you,’ he said. In the faint light she could see that he was shaking his head.

  Mak put her hands to her face and neck and realised that her skin was glistening with sweat. Her pillow felt damp. It had been a very vivid dream; they always were.

  ‘Are you okay? You seemed pretty scared. Was it that same dream?’

  She squinted and rubbed her forehead. ‘Yes. But…it was a little different this time. I should get my dream diary. Where did I put it?’

  Mak had suffered nightmares and insomnia on and off for the five years, since her abduction by a sadistic criminal who had tied her to a bed in a cabin out in the woods—before this man who now lay beside her, Detective Andy Flynn, had intervened, saving her life. Her father’s girlfriend, Dr Ann Morgan, had recommended that Mak start a dream diary to record her sleeping habits and the details of her dreams. She had not made an entry for some time. She had, in fact, thought her sleeping was back to normal—but now, in her dreams at least, it felt like some terrible thing had returned to her life. The dark thing that had haunted her was back.

  ‘You can do that in the morning,’ Andy said of her dream diary. ‘Don’t think about it any more, okay? Come here.’ He pulled her into his arms, and she pressed her face against his soft chest hair.

  Mak was glad of his presence, and glad it had just been a dream. She liked the feeling of him against her, and she liked when he was tender like this.

  Her death was not your fault. It wasn’t anyone’s.

  Jane Vanderwall had died of cancer, not at the hands of some demonic creature Mak failed to save her from. Cancer was a horrible disease that had taken not only her mother, but so many other people as well. She was not alone in having lost a parent. It had been five-and-a-half years since her mother, bald and painfully swollen from chemotherapy, had finally lost her brave battle.

  And the world had continued to turn after she was gone. You didn’t think it would.

  During the months when her mother was in hospital suffering through a bone marrow transplant, and the prognosis was bad, Makedde had really wondered if her own heart could keep on beating without the woman who had brought her into the world.

  But it had.

  Jane Vanderwall fell, and the brutal momentum of life just continued.

  ‘You haven’t had nightmares for a while,’ Andy said bluntly, concern in his voice. He was right: she hadn’t. It had seemed like it was a good year or two since it had been a major problem for her. For a time she had felt quite freed of the death that had shadowed her life for too long, but now there was this dream, and these feelings again. She hoped it was not a bad omen. Perhaps it had to do with Andy’s leaving.

  ‘Everything gets so mixed up in my dreams,’ Mak said.

  There was her mother on the bed under that horrible blade—rather than Makedde herself, as it had really been. Mak was always wearing her father’s police uniform in her nightmare, and it never fitted her. It stopped her from moving forwards. And, of course, that nightmare always featured Death, and the cutting scalpel of her attacker. The only thing that really made sense upon waking was her feeling of horror and loss. That feeling was real, even if all the elements were mixed up.

  She looked at the clock. It was 2 a.m.

  Makedde tried to shut off her brain. Thoughts were slippery and unbalanced in half-waking. It was not a good time to try to solve the world’s problems: there was nothing she could do at two in the morning that would make things more clear. Andy would leave, and she would go to Melbourne to visit Loulou and track down Meaghan’s friend Amy. She needed to keep herself busy.

  ‘I’m going to take a shower,’ Makedde said abruptly and threw back the sheet on her side of the bed. ‘I feel all…icky.’

  For fifteen minutes Mak stood under the hot pulsing jets of their cramped en-suite shower, the slippery spiral of thoughts and nightmarish images seeming to fall off her with the water, swirling down the drain at her feet and disappearing—for the moment, at least.

  She shut off the tap and took a deep breath. Her naked body felt refreshed and clean. Beads of water trickled down her skin.

  Mak walked back into the bedroom with a towel wrapped around her. When she returned, Andy was halfway between sleep and waking. Moonlight and shadow played across the light bedsheets, the summer evening warm and the window open.

  ‘Andy,’ she whispered, but then decided she didn’t want to use words.

  Mak knelt on the edge of the bed and let her towel drop. Slowly, she pushed the sheet back. In the low light she could see Andy’s naked masculine form in its entirety. He lay on his back on the bed, his tall frame stretched from pillow to foot, arms above his head. She ran her warm hands across his naked body, and followed her fingertips with gentle kisses, first on his chest, one nipple and then the other, then down his stomach along the thin line of dark hair th
at trailed to his groin. Andy lay still while her hands found him, caressed him, urged him to attention.

  Before long she had crawled on top of him, straddling his hips and pressing her mouth to his. They kissed passionately, as those who have been starved of sexual love do. Tongues darted in and out. He grabbed the back of her head, his fingers in her wet hair, pulling her closer.

  Mak pulled away. ‘I’ll miss this,’ she whispered in his ear, and pushed her hips down on him. It was so good to feel him enter her. They fitted together tightly like puzzle pieces, and began to move in unison. Andy was hard and eager, and his hands were caressing her flesh, moving from one soft place to another, reaching up for her neck, her shoulders, her nipples, her firm breasts, as his pelvis moved and rocked. Her breasts swayed slightly as she leaned over him, her nipples brushing against his chest. She threw her wet hair back, sending a small shower of droplets over them, and he gripped her waist while she rode him, water dripping slowly down her torso.

  CHAPTER 20

  On Saturday morning, Mak found herself stretched across the bed with one hand tightly gripping the bedhead. It took her a while to focus. Her eyelids felt heavy.

  ‘Andy?’

  He often got up early. Even while he was in town, he could not be found waking with her. But if he had already gone, it would mean she’d missed him.

  She felt a flash of panic.

  Wait.

  A noise.

  Mak sat up and covered her breasts with the sheet. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hey.’

  Andy sauntered into the bedroom, half-dressed. His white dress shirt was open to show a lean and tan chest. He had a line of hair trailing down into his boxer shorts. She remembered kissing that hair inch by inch. It made her smile.

  ‘Come here,’ she said provocatively.

  ‘I have to go.’

  Her heart sank, though she had known it was coming.

  ‘Come here anyway,’ she dared him.

  ‘When’s your flight to Melbourne?’ he asked, standing his ground near the dresser as he did up his buttons.

  ‘I’ll go in the early afternoon.’ She had to call Marian and check with her first. If the client really wanted such a thorough check done, Mak felt justified in tracking Amy down. Hopefully Amy would be forthcoming, and would know something about Simon Aston.

  ‘Oh,’ Andy said. ‘I thought you were leaving earlier. I agreed to go along with Jimmy to this autopsy from the dumpster case. He’ll drive me straight to the airport.’

  ‘Well, take it easy on breakfast then,’ she quipped, trying to make light of their last minutes together.

  It’s a Saturday. He is going to the morgue on a Saturday before his flight.

  ‘You know, you are going to have to stop holding Jimmy’s hand eventually.’

  Andy’s expression turned dark.

  ‘Sorry,’ she back-pedalled. ‘You know what I mean. But it’s cool. I have something to do before I head out anyway, so I’d better get going myself.’ She was pretending that she hadn’t wanted him to just leap back into bed and make love to her again before he left. ‘Do you need a lift or anything?’ she asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Okay.’ She watched him as he slipped his pants on and his shoes. ‘I love you,’ she said as he tied his laces.

  ‘Ditto.’

  ‘Ditto’ had never quite seemed an adequate reply to Mak, but it was one she was accustomed to hearing.

  Laces tied and ready to go, Andy moved towards her and bent to kiss her gently on the mouth.

  ‘Have a good trip. Kick butt,’ she said, and he smiled.

  She watched him leave, then listened to his footsteps as he went down the stairs and out the front door. When she heard the door slam she pulled the sheet over her head.

  Fuck!

  By 8.59 a.m. Detective Andrew Flynn was sitting in the viewing theatre of the NSW Forensic Institute, packed and ready for his flight, his bags in Jimmy’s car, reviewing the paperwork on the Surry Hills ‘dumpster girl’ case. He’d wanted to crawl back into bed with Makedde, but yet another death called him. And when death called, he always answered. Understanding murder was Andy’s life.

  The seats in the small gallery were elevated, as if overlooking an intimate theatrical performance. He and Detective Jimmy Cassimatis had taken a seat at the back of the six rows.

  The fact that the as-yet-unidentified body of the girl had been found behind a dumpster gave Andy reason to suspect that this was not a murder committed by someone with a great deal of planning or experience. Perhaps the perpetrator had intended to dispose of the body within the deep dumpster itself, but had been unable to lift it high enough on his own, and had had to settle for leaving it behind the dumpster amongst the garbage bags? Andy guessed that the suspect was inexperienced and not very strong.

  The gruesome work of maggots—nature’s natural cleaning helpers—and the presence of certain insects in the victim’s eyes, nose and mouth, as well as gas blisters and early swelling, had led to an estimated time of death as about three days prior. Upon completion of a full medico-legal autopsy, the results would be narrowed down to a more exact time frame, although not nearly as exact as the popular forensic television shows would have the public believe. There were too many variables affecting decomposition to be able to say with any certainty that ‘the victim died at 8.32’. Nonetheless, the life cycles of the insects that aid decomposition are so exact that the forensic entomologists would have a date and a time of day narrowed to perhaps one hour. The days had been warm, so the weather would have accelerated the decomposition process.

  If the girl had been left inside the dumpster she would probably not have been discovered until the Sunday night garbage rounds. Andy could only guess that her body had been placed there well after the previous garbage pick-up, but mere hours after her actual death. By the time she’d reached that alley, her struggle for life had been well and truly over.

  There was a noise, and they looked up.

  The doors of the autopsy gallery opened and an attendant entered in his scrub suit and shoe covers, pushing a gurney. The small body of the victim lay under a white sheet. Within minutes he had transferred the deceased to the autopsy table and pulled a clear plastic shield down over his face. The pathologist entered, and removed the white sheet.

  Andy was taken aback by her youth. The girl appeared to be no older than thirteen, perhaps younger. Her body was swelling from the gases of decomposition. There was little dignity in nature’s death process.

  So young.

  ‘Skata, she’s just a kid.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  The Dumpster Girl was of Thai descent. She had no identification on her, so they were in the process of running dental records, fingerprints—anything they could—to try to figure out who the young woman had been. Thus far, the only possible clue to her identity was a very large, intricate tattoo across her lower back. That, at least, was one identifying marker that might help the investigation. Although tattoos were commonplace, they were highly unusual on someone her age; most parlours in Australia would not perform work on a minor. The style and age of the tattoo might just lead them to a list of possible tattoo parlours where the work had been done—assuming that she had been born in Australia. Andy was no expert on tattoos; in fact, he was revolted by them, thanks to the large number of criminals who bore them. But the presence of such brandings often aided in identifying both criminals and victims in a variety of cases.

  As with all homicides, the girl’s hands had been covered in paper bags to retain any important evidence, and Andy noticed that the bags had already been removed. The examiners had no doubt worked tirelessly to find any skin under her fingernails, or any substances that might be traced. In many ways it was a saving grace that she had been discovered just behind the dumpster rather than in the thing itself, as the garbage would have contaminated any evidence infinitely more.

  Now the internal examination would begin.

  The head pathologist beg
an with the traditional Y incision extending from shoulder to shoulder, meeting at the breastbone, and finally extending all the way to the pubic bone. Andy was grateful for the panes of glass separating them from the autopsy. He had seen enough autopsies to be used to them, but the smell was something that no one ever fully adapted to. The word autopsy comes from the Greek autopsia, meaning ‘seeing for oneself’. Andy was content to see for himself and leave the smell on the other side of the glass.

  His mobile phone was on vibrate, and it buzzed twice. Andy surreptiously checked the text message.

  I LOVE YOU, SEXY. HAVE A GREAT TRIP.

  It was Mak.

  She’d been so responsive, so eager. The sight of her body laid out on the bed, nude and welcoming, was a vivid memory. Her breasts were soft and full, her waist the perfect size to fit his arm around while they made love. He hadn’t wanted to leave.

  Andy read the message furtively and hid it from Jimmy. He tucked his phone away and looked up just in time to see the young girl’s chest being opened with the surgical equivalent of a large wrench. For a moment the mental image of Makedde’s nakedness and the Dumpster Girl mixed in his head, and he felt sick.

  ‘Sooooo, was that yer girlfriend?’ Jimmy teased, seemingly oblivious to their location. ‘Was it hot make-up sex? Did she spank you or anything?’

  ‘Not now,’ Andy snapped, not wanting to play Jimmy’s little game while he was viewing some poor girl’s organs being taken in one connected block and placed on a stainless steel tray. Andy never understood how Jimmy could talk about things like that while an autopsy was going on in full view a few metres away.

  ‘Come on, mate, don’t be like that. You know I gotta live vicariously through you.’ Jimmy knew Andy wouldn’t answer him, so he got onto business. ‘Okay, I’ve got the guys doing the rounds of the tattoo parlours checking on that ink, like you suggested. They were able to make up a pretty clear shot of it for us.’ He passed an enlarged photo to Andy. It was a good image, certainly clear enough for someone to identify.