by Tara Moss
She didn’t want to explain the whole thing over the phone, and she didn’t have the time to, either. She might be discovered at any moment. ‘Jimmy, I know everyone thinks the Tobias Murphy case is open and shut,’ she said, ‘but there is more to it. And now I have the proof. Meaghan Wallace filmed that video of the Dumpster Girl and sent it to her friend, and then she was killed. And now her friend is missing. Just trust me—this is it. Get a team over here right now. Hunt seems to have the brakes on, but that doesn’t matter now. You can go around him. The Cavanagh son was involved in the death of your Jane Doe, and that girl died right here in the Cavanagh house. Just send police here now to cordon it off. Please, Jimmy. Just trust me.’
His protests became weaker. ‘Skata, Mak. This could be my job. Are you…sure?’
‘Yes.’
There was a long pause. ‘Okay. What’s the address and the location of the room?’
Mak explained the location. ‘Send the nearest patrols. And you’ll want a good crime-scene investigation team in here. Someone has cleaned up the room and moved things around, but if your team is good enough they’ll probably still find plenty of trace evidence.’
‘Mak—’
‘I’ll be waiting here,’ she said firmly and hung up.
Mak closed her eyes and leaned against the wall by the door. Jimmy was a good guy, for all his faults. She could trust him to act on what she’d said. She hoped.
Wait.
A sound.
Dammit. Someone might have heard me.
Mak stood in the dark with her back to the wall, listening for movement outside the door. Someone was definitely in the hall. And approaching. Mak hurled herself behind the nearest leather couch, misjudging the distance and hitting her leg against the arm, right where her bruise was. She stifled her yelp with one hand.
Oh fucking hell, that hurt…
The door opened.
The light came on.
From her position pressed up against the wall behind the couch, Mak could see a man through a gap between the cushions. It was a tall, good-looking man in a dinner suit and trendy T-shirt. He looked familiar.
Oh my God.
Simon Aston.
Standing out starkly against his matinee-idol looks was a row of stitches that ran across his chin and down his neck. They appeared fresh. She’d caught a glimpse of them when he’d come out of his house in Tamarama, but they looked worse up close, the edges of the cut an angry pink.
Maybe that poor girl did it to him, before he and his mate killed her.
Mak realised her mobile phone was on. She hoped to God that Jimmy didn’t call her back. Even taking the battery off the back of it might make enough noise at that distance to alert Simon to her presence. She wasn’t going to move one centimetre. Stifling her breath with one hand, she sat motionless, curled up awkwardly, one leg aching and the other starting to go to sleep.
Mak kept her eyes on him through the thin view between the cushions as he walked over to the coffee table and picked up her half-empty glass of champagne.
Dammit.
It had a smudge of her lipstick on the rim. And just near his feet were her discarded stilettos.
Oh no…
He hadn’t seen them yet, but it was only a matter of time.
And then Mak saw something terrible. She got a cold feeling in her belly at the sight of it.
He retreated to the doorway, brandishing a gun he’d removed from his suit jacket.
Things were out of control. She shouldn’t have risked all this. It was just an investigation, right? Not enough to risk her life over.
‘Where are you? I know you’re in here!’ His voice gave Mak a chill.
Mak had no weapons with her. She could use a pistol well—probably better than this guy could, by the looks of the way he was handling the .22. But Mak didn’t like guns. Guns were terrible things, and she’d had to use them before. She knew what they could do.
Mak was unarmed but she had her mobile phone still in her hand. She took a leaf out of poor Meaghan Wallace’s book and pressed record on the phone’s humble video camera.
The video probably wouldn’t be very clear, but she could give it a try.
CHAPTER 65
‘Hey, you…’
Luther Hand turned.
It was a quarter to midnight, and Luther was on the walkway to the front door of the Cavanagh house, where he had been informed that his priority target, Makedde Vanderwall, had made an entrance. She had not left through the front door of her terrace, where he’d been waiting. It had not even occurred to him that she might leave by any other way. He’d expected to have to lose the cop to get to Mak, but he hadn’t expected to lose Mak herself.
We’ve all underestimated her.
‘Hey, you!’ the security guard repeated. ‘Name, please,’ he said, holding up his clipboard.
Luther had no time for bullshit. He tried to walk on but the man unwisely stopped him.
‘I’m talking to you, pal. No one gets in who’s not on the list.’ He put a hand on Luther’s broad chest. No one had done anything like that in a long time.
In a flash Luther moved next to the guard, put an arm around his shoulder and grasped his neck. He did it so fast that for a split second the guard’s eyes got as wide as a satellite dish. Luther squeezed, and the guard—who was big in his own right—simply fell backwards, unconscious. Luther caught him and dragged him behind one of the huge stone sculptures at the front door. He propped him up, seated, against the house. The guard would look like he’d taken a break and fallen asleep. His security buddy—and Luther had been informed there were two guards—was probably on a pee break.
Luther continued on his course through the front door, unmolested.
There were crowds of people inside the house, all of them dressed up. Following his instructions from The American, he found a doorway that would take him to the staircase. He moved down the stairs rapidly, ready for anything. When Luther reached the downstairs hallway, he was just in time to see Simon Aston as he backed out of one of the rooms, waving some kind of gun.
That idiot is going to ruin everything.
Luther pounced, grabbing Simon from behind, and pulling the gun from his hand. In seconds he had Simon up against the wall of the hallway by his neck. Simon’s face was rapidly turning violet as Luther applied pressure to his throat.
‘I can get rid of you, fast,’ Luther whispered gruffly into his ear. ‘And I have permission to do so. So don’t fuck with me.’
Bright red veins popped up in the wide whites of Simon’s bulging eyes. His jaw was slack, mouth quivering. Luther could see that Simon was hearing him.
‘I’ll take another souvenir this time if I feel like it. Perhaps an appendage you value.’ He thrust his fist into Simon’s groin, not quite enough to castrate him, but enough to make his point clear. ‘Your life means nothing.’
Simon cried out in pain, the sound coming out in an animal gurgle, until Luther squeezed his windpipe tighter. He soon went quiet and still. Luther let him drop to the hallway floor with a discreet thud. He didn’t want to kill him in the house. Besides, he was unlikely to be paid anything extra, as he wasn’t on the list. He wasn’t worth it.
‘She’s been here. It’s her. There’s her glass…’ Simon spluttered, holding his neck with one hand and pointing with the other. There was a champagne glass inside the room. It had the stain of a woman’s lipstick on it.
Thump.
They both spun in the direction of the noise. Someone was in the room.
The window.
Luther just caught a glimpse of a slender foot as someone hauled their body out of the ground-floor window, disappearing behind the heavy curtains.
Shit.
Luther lumbered to the window, pulled the curtains back to get a clear shot and held his finger on the trigger of his gun. It was a young woman, the elusive one he had been looking for; the one who had unexpectedly bashed him with her motorcycle helmet and broken his nose; the o
ne who had crashed her motorbike. The one on his list.
He lined up his shot.
CHAPTER 66
Oh God…run…
Makedde found herself in the garden at the front of the Cavanagh house, her knees scraped and covered in dirt, the circular driveway only metres ahead. She could see that the front gate was still open for visitors.
Thank God.
She could never have scaled those stone walls. Mak had to get out of that gate or to Julio’s car.
Barefoot and covered in leaves and dirt, Mak emerged from the bushes in her gown and ran full tilt as best she could out the front gate, barely registering her terrible pain, or that a handful of remaining photographers, still loitering and smoking cigarettes, had spotted her, their flashes lighting up the darkness. She had to get onto the street.
The police should arrive soon, she hoped.
That was where that poor girl in the video died. I was right. I can’t believe I was right…
CHAPTER 67
Makedde Vanderwall sat in the interrogation room of police headquarters with her arms crossed. She looked tired, but still frustratingly hot, Jimmy thought. Andy was one lucky bastard. Her hair was wilder than usual, giving her the appearance of a warrior lion.
She must have known that he was watching through the two-way mirror, because she flashed a wry smile in his direction and waved.
‘Just answer my question, Miss Vanderwall,’ Detective Matthew Parker pressed.
‘Come on, give me a break,’ she replied and rolled her eyes.
‘Sorry, Mak. You know I—’
‘Yeah, yeah, you have to do this, Matt, I know.’
Mak was sitting in the very room in which Andy had first interviewed her, back when she was a witness and all that was between them was Mak’s rage over the murder of her friend Catherine Gerber and what she saw as the ineptitude of the police in solving it. Back then, Jimmy and Andy had both wished that she’d mind her own business. Now they knew better. If there was anything that the last five years had taught Jimmy, it was that it was pointless to try to get Mak to butt out, and maybe that was a good thing. She had managed to get herself right into that case and she had ended up providing the evidence that no one else had had the foresight or the balls to provide.
Jimmy continued to watch Mak through the large two-way mirror while Detective Parker tried to talk Mak through what had happened at the Cavanagh house, and exactly how she had found herself at the crime scene of the Jane Doe.
Parker had no hope of matching her.
The door opened. Detective Karen Mahoney entered the dark back room behind the glass and sidled up to Jimmy.
‘How’s he doing?’
‘You mean, how’s Mak doing?’ Jimmy replied.
‘No, I mean him. How is Matt holding up?’
Jimmy chuckled.
‘Here,’ Karen said and passed him a cup of coffee. ‘She’s pretty good, huh?’
He nodded. ‘Yeah, I guess she is. She never wanted to be a cop, you think?’
‘I don’t know,’ Karen replied. ‘I don’t know that she could take orders from guys like Hunt.’
Detective Parker was still struggling in the interview room. ‘So tell me once more what you were doing at the Cavanagh house.’
Through the glass they watched as Mak sighed, clearly bored with the game. ‘I was invited to a social gathering at the home,’ she answered into the microphone mounted to the table, as if making a scripted speech. ‘It was only when I happened across the lounge room with the Brett Whiteley painting on the wall that I realised that it might actually be the same painting and the same room as the one in the video that I was anonymously sent. As with the video, I contacted the police immediately about my concerns and made sure that the authorities had all that potentially important evidence.’
Parker ran a hand through his hair, obviously not buying it. But he said nothing.
Mak blinked in response to whatever look he gave her, her expression deadpan. That was her story and she was sticking to it. Smart girl, Jimmy thought.
‘Hunt is going to come in here and ask me all the same questions, isn’t he?’ Mak asked.
‘Um…probably.’
Detective Sergeant Hunt, they’d been told, was busy working on Simon Aston.
‘Do you admit that the GHB found in the four-wheel drive BMW was yours?’ Detective Sergeant Hunt pressed.
Hunt had been interviewing Simon Aston for nearly an hour. He wanted to interview him alone, without the assistance or prying eyes of Detectives Mahoney or Parker.
Simon was spineless. It had taken him little time to confess.
Simon’s story was that his friend Damien Cavanagh had developed a preference for petite Asian girls—young ones—and for nearly a year Simon had procured girls for his friend’s pleasures. Since Operation Paper Tiger in the nineties, Hunt himself had known about the racket that brought girls like the Dumpster Girl into Australia. These girls were in enough demand that they were constantly being trafficked from poorer countries like Thailand and the Philippines, where they would either be coerced into sexual slavery or would happily accept the prospect of prostitution in order to make the money they and their families desperately needed. Some of them were even sold by their own parents, such was the desperation in their villages.
As Simon told it, this particular girl was given champagne and cocaine at the party; after sex, when Damien had got up to shower, Simon believed she had drunk from a plain water bottle which contained not water but the colourless and odourless psychoactive substance GHB, or gamma-hydroxybutyrate, otherwise known as Grievous Bodily Harm, the latest drug Simon had introduced Damien to.
When Damien returned and found the girl unconscious and with no perceptible heartbeat, he called for Simon.
‘The GHB in the vehicle was yours?’ Hunt repeated impatiently.
‘Um, yeah. But it was for Damien. He had tried Fantasy and liked it,’ Simon said. Fantasy. GHB. GBH. ‘He’d been having a fling with it for a couple of months, but I warned him that you can’t mix it with other stuff. No alcohol or anything. He was careful. But this girl must have drunk nearly the whole bottle of the stuff. When I came downstairs she was already out cold.’ Simon scratched his head, agitated. ‘I got her a shot of speed. It’s supposed to reverse it.’
‘But it didn’t, did it?’
‘No,’ Simon admitted. He looked ashamed.
‘That’s manslaughter, you know,’ Hunt told him.
Hunt was disgusted. A lot of drug dealers were under the false perception that speed could counteract the effects of GHB. In fact, it only sped up the process of death. The girl’s only hope of living would have been a hospital. If they had got to her in time, they could have saved her life and had her walking around again the next day, almost as if nothing had happened.
This guy was a total idiot. He’d put a lot of people in danger, and he’d embarrassed some very important members of society.
‘She had no pulse. Damien was freaking out. I called Lee…the guy who brings the girls.’
Lee Lin Tan. He and his wife had recently become the unfortunate victims of yet another Vietnamese gang slaying. They’d been killed with hatchets, the trademark of the gangs.
‘I stepped away for two minutes and when I came back this bloody chick is in the hallway watching them. Watching them and the dead girl! She had her phone in her hand and I was afraid she was recording it, so I got the phone off her and drove her home.’
‘That was it? You just took her phone away and drove her home?’
‘Yeah,’ Simon said, but Hunt knew he was lying.
‘I gave her a little something to help her relax,’ Simon admitted.
‘You gave her the GHB.’
‘Yeah. Just a little something to help her sleep.’
‘And then what?’ Hunt asked.
‘That should have been it. But then she couldn’t forget it. She started making waves.’
‘That is when you hired Warwick O’
Connor to kill the girl.’
Simon nodded sheepishly. ‘It wasn’t all my idea or anything.’
‘I understand,’ Hunt lied. ‘Thank you for your cooperation, Mr Aston.’ Hunt stood up. ‘We will have further questions for you. In the meantime, you are free to go. Just don’t leave the state.’
‘Really? I’m free to go?’ He seemed surprised.
Simon Aston failed to notice that the red light of the video recorder had not been on. His statements did not exist, and Sergeant Hunt had made sure no one else heard what he had to say about Damien Cavanagh’s involvement.
As far as he was concerned, Simon had killed the girl and covered it up. And he had acted alone.
CHAPTER 68
Simon Aston drove home to the Tamarama house in a state of numb shock. His senses were overwhelmed, his life turned upside down.
He had cooperated with Detective Hunt. Simon had told him everything he knew, and he had hardly believed his good fortune when he was allowed to go. He would cooperate all the way, and they would see that it wasn’t his fault. He’d had to do the things that he did. He was not the guilty one.
Anyone else would have done the same.
Simon expected that he might not hear from Damien again for a little while. Damien had told Simon that he was being sent away to join his fiancée in Paris for an indefinite amount of time, and that his father had cut him off from his allowance and personal accounts. No money to party with. No money for his vices. Jack Cavanagh would control Damien’s spending and activities, and had threatened to make him work to earn every dollar. For a time, at least. Simon hoped that Damien’s punishment didn’t last long. Perhaps he would get a call—maybe in two weeks, maybe in two months—and then things would return to normal. Simon didn’t know how long he could survive without Damien in his life—without those important connections and his money, he had nothing.