The Mak Collection

by Tara Moss

  ‘Should I be concerned?’ he asked. ‘What was she doing there?’

  ‘The motorcyclist parked across the street for a time, looking at the house. That was it. She did not approach. We have no reason to believe that there’s anything to be concerned about at this stage, but if it was indeed Vanderwall, then why she would be hanging around your street on her motorcycle, I couldn’t say.’

  Jack remembered her motorcycle crash the year before. He’d have thought she’d have given that up by now. He couldn’t figure the woman out. What did she want from him? He couldn’t figure out how to make her go away, without resorting to the types of decisions he was now struggling with. More of the same. More death.

  ‘This morning Makedde Vanderwall visited the Murphy boy. The one who was released from jail,’ Mr White went on.

  Jack felt his panic rising. ‘I can’t have her snooping around,’ he said, finding a surprising spark of strength in his anger. A minor return to himself. He was frustrated that she could still cause him trouble, frustrated by what she’d forced him to do.

  ‘She won’t. We’ll be keeping an eye on this.’

  ‘Yes,’ Jack said, nodding to himself. ‘We have to. Follow her. You know my concerns about letting this issue grab headlines again.’ There had been a rather embarrassing front page featuring Makedde Vanderwall running barefoot in an evening gown from the Cavanaghs’ palatial home, where his son’s extravagant birthday party was being held. There had been talk that she was running from an attacker, which the family naturally denied by way of their legal counsel.

  But the attacker had been real enough.

  He was a man who went by the name of Luther Hand. Hand had been employed by The American to clean up some messy problems for Jack. He had wisely declined to escalate the situation at his client’s property. Nonetheless, it had got out of control, thanks to the photographs taken by paparazzi as Vanderwall fled. The photographers had been there to snap arriving celebrity guests and dignitaries, and they instead ended up with a surprise front-page story. The whole incident was a disaster. It had taken some time to get things to die down. But they had. Jack had made sure there were no repeats of the dangerous party antics that had started the debacle in the first place. He had done what had to be done, and for a while it looked like things might eventually return to normal. But nothing was normal. Not for Jack, anyway.

  This news of the woman’s return to Sydney was alarming. This was unfinished business.

  ‘Bob, I don’t want any trouble from her,’ Jack reiterated, again finding some minor rekindling of his old spark. ‘What can we do about her?’

  ‘So long as she’s in Australia we’re limited. Anything that happens to her could easily arouse suspicion.’

  Makedde had become publicly linked with the Cavanaghs’ troubles. She was bad publicity for the Cavanaghs and their businesses. It would certainly not look good if something happened to her. It was still too soon after the events, still too high-profile. The American was right.

  ‘No, we can’t have that,’ Jack agreed. ‘What are our options? Can we scare her back to Canada, or out of the state?’

  ‘Leave it with me,’ White said.

  ‘We can’t have any unwanted attention right now, Bob. I thought you said you had a contact in the police force keeping an eye on her?’

  ‘We do. We’ll make sure she stays away,’ White assured him. ‘Jack, we can handle this. We’ll protect against the possibility of any interest in the press.’

  ‘You have my faith, Bob.’

  Jack paid The American an enormous sum to look after his interests, and to protect him from the knowledge of the grim specifics that task sometimes entailed. Legally, the less he knew the better. Over the years and through a number of crises, there had been very few occasions when Jack had been disappointed with The American’s work. He was exceptionally experienced and well connected. Jack knew of no one better qualified.

  ‘I can’t afford to have bad press right now,’ he reiterated. ‘The merger is nearly signed off.’ Mr White would already know this.

  The conversation complete, Jack Cavanagh hung up the receiver and looked out at the blue sky once more. It had not regained any of its wonder in the interim.

  Cobwebs and tar.

  Cobwebs and tar.

  CHAPTER 24

  ‘Marian Wendell and Associates, Marian speaking.’

  Mak smiled. She imagined her boss sitting at her desk, composed, elegant and dealing with files full of sleaziness. What a woman.

  ‘Hey, it’s Mak.’

  ‘I was wondering when you’d check in next,’ Marian responded. ‘Things moving along?’

  At an age when a lot of people were retiring, Marian was working harder than most 25-year-olds. And she had the energy for it. She had probably already combed through paperwork on the current investigations, and called her agents for updates. She liked to keep on top of everything happening in her agency, and she rarely missed a trick.

  ‘Yes. I’ve been busy Face-wasting,’ Mak joked. ‘You can not only poke people, but super-poke them!’

  Nothing. Not even a faint chuckle. And because Marian was a bit of a Luddite, there was a chance she might not even know what Facebook was, let alone Face-wasting, Mak realised.

  ‘There’s a social website called Facebook,’ Mak patiently explained. ‘It’s so popular that it’s already passé. It has a poke game thing. Never mind. Anyway, I found Adam Hart on it, and I’ll try to contact him that way. Perhaps he’ll respond. He’s nineteen after all. A lot of younger people use it.’

  ‘Oh. Good.’ Marian sounded unsure.

  Mak flipped her laptop open and went through her notes, getting more serious. ‘I met with Ms Hart on Monday afternoon,’ Mak told her boss. ‘I had a good look through Adam’s room, but I didn’t find much. I have to say his room seems awfully clean, even for a neat freak. Damn, that is a neat house. His mother said the police didn’t take anything, and she didn’t clean it up, so…well, it was pretty sparse in there and I wonder if perhaps he knew he was leaving. My guts tell me he’s a runaway,’ Mak admitted. ‘He could easily have shimmied down the drainpipe outside his bedroom window. He’s probably been doing that for years before finally taking off.’

  There was a pause. ‘You know, it’s poor form to make up your mind when you don’t have the evidence. It makes for narrow-minded investigating.’

  Ouch.

  Mak knew that. She had been told many times. ‘You’re right.’

  ‘Good girl. What else can you tell me?’

  Good girl.

  Mak shook her head. From anyone else’s lips, it would sound like pure condescension, but she knew that Marian took her on in a way that went beyond the usual expected professional relationship. This was something a motherly figure might say to a favourite child. Mak found she’d missed Marian’s interest in her.

  ‘Well, I found a trick coin in his room, and a poster for the Jim Rose Circus. I believe he may have an interest in magic and performance. I know it’s not much, but I’m checking out the local magic shops to see if he was a member or a regular customer or something.’

  Marian seemed less impressed with that lead. ‘What else?’ she said simply.

  Mak had something more concrete to reveal. She had spoken to Mrs Hart again and determined the identity of the woman Tobias had mentioned. Her name was Patrice, and she had agreed to see Mak.

  ‘Apparently he took off once before, with a girlfriend of the time named Patrice. I’ll be meeting with her later. I’m talking to neighbours. Someone will know something. Also, I could use a little extra cash if anything else comes up in the meantime, Marian. You know, any of those other types of cases I could help out with,’ she said.

  What she meant was domestic cases. With her model looks, Mak was well suited to getting up close and personal with straying husbands. Being hit on in bars had always been something of a regular nuisance for Mak. In the end she tended to avoid bars and clubs as much as possible. It w
as funny that now she’d finally found a way to get paid for being hassled. Marian liked to call her the agency’s ‘Secret Weapon’ because of her unique suitability for closing such cases with one step of her stilettoed foot. Mak had a special red silk designer dress she liked to use for such jobs. Not too revealing, not too obvious, but with just enough leg to give an air of ‘Are you Mr Right Now?’ to a man looking for precisely that. It was just right for the upmarket bars where married businessmen liked to get a few drinks in and try their luck for a one-night stand. She had successfully given her room key to a few husbands—the rule was they had to approach her first—only to have them arrive to be confronted by their wife, and/or their wife’s lawyer. It was ugly stuff, yes. But Mak rationalised that it was best for these enquiring wives to have their suspicions checked out before they broke up with their husbands over nothing, or their spouses came home with something more sinister than lipstick on their collar. Like a paternity suit, or HIV.

  ‘Ah, my Secret Weapon is back.’ Marian sounded pleased. ‘There’s nothing around at the moment, but you’ll be the first one I call if any stray husbands need getting caught. Things might pick up on Valentine’s Day.’

  Valentine’s Day. Of course. How depressing.

  Now Mak sat up straight and prepared herself for her real news. ‘By the way,’ she added, as casually as she could, ‘you won’t believe this. But Adam Hart’s mother knows Tobias and his family. Isn’t that an interesting coincidence? They live on the same block. Adam and Tobias are more or less friends.’

  There was a pause as Marian absorbed that little bombshell.

  ‘You know,’ Mak continued. ‘Tobias. The street kid who was wrongly arrested for the murder of that PA, Meaghan Wallace, last year? Well, he’s no longer a street kid. He’s out of rehab and living with his father on the same street as our Adam Hart. It’s such a small world, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, I knew the connection,’ her boss admitted. ‘Mrs Hart asked for you, and told me that Tobias’s father had recommended you.’

  Mak smiled. And you hoped I wouldn’t find out…so I wouldn’t start thinking about the Cavanaghs again. Well, it’s too late.

  ‘I met with Tobias, and he was helpful. He’s the one who told me that Adam took off once before, to be with Patrice.’

  ‘You met with Tobias Murphy?’

  ‘I’m canvassing Adam’s friends and neighbours,’ Mak said with confidence.

  ‘Mak…you are going to be sensible, aren’t you?’ Marian said. Her tone was grave.

  ‘When have you known me to be anything but sensible?’

  Her boss did not respond.

  Pete Don, in a lecture in Makedde’s Certificate III course in Investigative Services, had confirmed that ‘new technology and trends’ could be surprisingly helpful tools in an investigator’s arsenal.

  At the time, Mak had thought it funny coming from him.

  Pete was a rather gruff ex-undercover drug squad officer turned private investigator, who’d been beaten so badly in his former post that he had no cartilage left in his nose. It sat in the centre of his face like a formless mound of putty with nostrils. This guy was not someone Mak could imagine slowing down from catching the bad guys, the cheaters and the insurance fraudsters for long enough to even acknowledge the existence of something like a computer. And yet he had stood in front of the class and explained the importance of Twitter, MySpace and Facebook, as if he were a sixteen-year-old emo. And he had been right. It was amazing how many people could be tracked down by something as simple and accessible as a search engine. Once in a while even dead men turned up looking remarkable well, as in the famous case of John Darwin, who faked his ‘death by canoe misadventure’ in 2002, resulting in a massive-scale sea search, and later had his wife, Anne, claim on his life insurance. A member of the public typed ‘John’, ‘Anne’ and ‘Panama’ into Google Images, and found of picture of the couple posing together in a shot taken four years after his passing. They got six years imprisonment for their trouble. It seemed that nearly every person in the Western world now made an imprint somewhere on the web—whether they wanted to or not.

  And so Makedde typed in the name of the person she wanted most to find information about.

  DAMIEN CAVANAGH

  SEARCH

  Incredibly, there were fewer than one thousand search hits for the controversial heir to the Cavanagh business fortune. Or perhaps it wasn’t so incredible. Damien’s father, Jack, wielded great power, and no doubt had done his best to keep his son out of the press, and firmly out of the public eye since the problems with his ‘lifestyle’ had erupted. Parties, drugs, underage prostitutes, murder. It wasn’t pretty. Not that the latter had been publicly proven, but Mak knew better than most. And she was not afraid of the Cavanaghs. The mainstream press were evidently too spooked to write directly about the troubled heir, despite the obviously riveting copy he would make. But internet bloggers could not be controlled, and they seemed to have the most gossip. If their information was correct—and obviously there was no guarantee of that—Damien Cavanagh had returned to Sydney after a six-month sabbatical in Europe and was back to his partying ways, living in his dad’s palatial waterfront mansion, estimated to be worth upwards of twenty million Australian dollars. The palatial mansion she had been seen loitering in front of on her motorcycle.

  So Damien was back. Well, so was Makedde.

  And she was eager to find out just which of his ‘old ways’ he was indulging in. Bad habits were hard to break. She had a few ideas about how to find out just what he had been up to.

  The case. Get to the case you are being paid for.

  Now it was Adam Hart’s turn to have his internet imprint investigated. Mak had already typed Adam’s name in a simple search, and found 125,000 hits from around the world. It was too common a name. When she narrowed it down to Australian hits, she found a link to Facebook, clearly showing the missing boy’s face. It had been easy to find him electronically, but would be more difficult, probably, to get a response from her ‘friend request’, as it was called. If he was indeed alive and well, and able to access the internet, she might get some communication going. To do that, she first had to get him to accept her as a friend. She hoped Tobias could be of help in that regard. It was a bit of a long shot, but if Adam was logging on, he might just reply to her message or accept her Facebook friend request and end up in communication with the very investigator being paid to track him down. In the meantime, though, Mak had access to seventy-five of his Facebook friends whom she could now ask about him. It was virtual door knocking.

  Mak flicked through what she could find on Adam Hart, aware that this process was precisely the same kind of search newspapers and other media routinely did every time some kid turned up dead or disfigured in a hideous, national interest tragi-story. They just looked them up and pulled personal photos of them off the social networking sites to accompany the story.

  She hoped she could find Adam before that profile photo was printed everywhere, with the caption Found Dead: Adam Hart. Photo courtesy of Facebook.

  Beep.

  Beep.

  Mak’s phone rang, and she tensed. She pushed her laptop away and picked up her mobile. It was Karen, calling her already.

  ‘Hello,’ she answered. ‘Thanks for coming over. I’m sorry if—’

  ‘They finally found the guy who did it,’ Karen said abruptly.

  ‘Did what? Who?’

  ‘The guy who killed your Meaghan Wallace. He’s been found, so you can stop looking for him.’

  Mak digested that. They found Meaghan’s killer? ‘The guy Simon Aston said did it? He said it was a hitman, right?’

  ‘A small-time thug, really. He had a few priors. Was known to police. Probably hadn’t done a lot of heavy work before,’ Karen told her, while Mak madly scribbled notes. ‘He must have screwed something up, though. His remains were found in the back of his burned-out car, charred and badly decomposed. And I do mean badly decomposed,’ she said.
‘From the photos, you could hardly tell he was human. There was almost nothing left of him or the vehicle. It was a miracle they could make an ID.’

  Mak locked onto the new information about the case with a rush of adrenaline. ‘His name?’

  ‘Warwick O’Connor. Positive ID.’

  ‘So he was in the back seat of a car. Killed? A car accident? What happened?’

  ‘No,’ Karen explained. ‘He was in the back, as in the boot of the car. The trunk, as you Canadian types call it.’

  If he was in the trunk, that could only mean that someone had quite literally dispatched the dispatcher. She imagined how terrifying it would be to be trapped in the trunk of a car. A burned-out car? Was it burning when he was still alive?

  She shivered.

  ‘When did they get an ID?’ Mak asked, suspicious that Andy had known this key information and not passed it on to her. Before his suicide, Simon Aston had confessed to organising a hit on the witness Meaghan Wallace, and had given a name, but the man he pointed to had disappeared. And now he’d shown up dead in the back of a car. How could anyone ever know if he had really been guilty of anything? Dead bodies could not defend themselves.

  ‘After our convo I had a sniff around. As you know, I was part of the original investigation,’ Karen explained. ‘But it’s a closed case now, and nobody told me about this new detail. Jimmy said he did the death knock yesterday. O’Connor’s wife was none too impressed that it had taken so long to ID him.’

  Mak wondered if Karen’s friendship with her had prevented anyone telling her earlier. She didn’t want to be a reason for her friend to be ostracised.

  ‘Karen, I can’t thank you enough for telling me. I know our conversation got a bit tense…I’m sorry for that.’

  ‘You’re back in Sydney, and I’m so glad,’ Karen said. ‘Just…be careful. You seem on edge.’