Cold Deception

by D. B. Tait

  Hot, searing, fury blasted through her. If she had any means to obliterate him now she would. But she stilled herself, took in a deep breath and smiled at him.

  “That would be great.”

  He sipped his glass of champagne then set it down. “Come on then, I’ll show you the rest of the place. I don’t think you’ve ever seen it have you?”

  She smiled grimly as he crossed to open the door to the rest of the flat. No, she hadn’t. Drugs and sex were something he’d reserved for his office. She’d never seen or needed to see the rest of his flat. They proceeded down a small hallway with several doorways leading to bedrooms.

  “The first manager of the hotel had one of those big nineteenth century families, so the flat was built to accommodate him, while the owner stayed in opulence in the main hotel. But I find I like this better. More privacy. None of the guests know I’m here.” He stopped and opened a door to a perfectly furnished bedroom in what she assumed was the style of the late nineteenth century. Not that she had a clue. A brass bed with a sumptuous quilt. A big, dark wardrobe and old fashioned dressing table. She stood, wide-eyed, taking in the luxury.

  “This can be your room. When I renovated I made sure each room had their own ensuite bathrooms so you’ll have everything you need.” He paused and glanced at her body. “Got any money?”

  She shook her head.

  Extracting a wallet, he pulled out several fifties and handed then to her. “Get yourself some clothes and whatever else you need.”

  She’d done this hundreds of times. Sex in exchange for money. That’s how she’d stayed alive in the brief times she was on the outside in the last ten years. But now something in her shrivelled and died in the act of taking the notes.

  No. She would not let shame and fear rule her again. This man had hurt her and hurt her badly. He would pay and with more than just money.

  “Thanks,” she said, smiling at him. “Appreciate it.”

  “I’m sure you do,” he murmured. He lifted his hand to push a curl off her face and she had to steel herself not to flinch. “Perhaps you could show me how.”

  This was it. This was the point where she would have to toughen up and remember her goal.

  He moved his hand to the zipper of her hoody and slid it down. His eyes glittered at the sight of her black lace camisole. In a swift, rough movement, he ripped the cheap material apart baring her breasts to his gaze. Smiling, he placed his hands on her shoulders and pushed her to her knees.

  “You know what to do.”

  She did.

  *

  Nessa woke up when the light hit her eyelids. She didn’t open her eyes, thinking if she could just stay in bed, cocooned and warm, everything she had to face, everything complicated and messy, would just drift away into nothingness.

  But gradually her full bladder and the stiff and sore muscles of her body made her open her eyes and sit up. She winced as the ache between her legs intensified. The sensation wasn’t entirely unpleasant. O’Reardon had worked her hard. Once upon a time her drug-induced haze would’ve allowed her to join in without feeling anything much. No more. Every thrust, every hard kiss and bite was etched on her brain as well as her body.

  Some part of her mind registered he was good. All the ribald talk about him from the other girls inside was true. He was a ram and he liked to fuck. Somehow that made it worse. At one point when she knew she was about to climax, she could feel panic and shame flowing through her. Thankfully, her brain gave a distinct click and she drifted off into another place, just as she did with the pills. Maybe her brain was a lot more sensible than she realized, able to protect her when she needed it.

  She threw the covers off the bed then padded into the bathroom. After a pee and a blessed hot shower where she scrubbed every inch of her body and washed her hair, she stared at herself in the mirror.

  She was fine. Fine. The craving was back but she could deal with it. She had to deal with it.

  Opening the bathroom cabinet, she reached for the moisturizer she had spied on the shelf yesterday. Instead her hand landed on an all-too familiar packet of Valium. She was sure it hadn’t been there last night.

  The packet was smooth under her fingers. Breaking the seal she slid out a foil strip and stood staring at it, the craving a screaming, demanding entity in her mind.

  Take them, just take them. Do what you need to do.

  She pushed the strip back in the packet with jerky hands and shoved it back on the shelf.

  So that was his game. She thought his sudden acceptance of her newly achieved drug-free state was strange. He wanted her to start using again.

  Hot, bitter rage slammed into her. She would not succumb. She would not.

  On the other hand…

  She picked up the packet of pills and popped out three. They sat in her hand staring up at her. With a quick jerk, she threw them into the toilet then placed the packet back in the cabinet.

  Staring at herself in the mirror, she made her eyes go out of focus. If she kept her hair messy and unkempt, he might be fooled.

  Two could play at this game.

  And it was better this way. She still had no clear idea of what she wanted to do with Angus. She could kill him. That would be easy. Just get a knife from somewhere and do the job. But that was too easy, too predictable. She wanted to hurt him. Oh yes, the craving for that particular pleasure was as strong as her craving for pills.

  Her brain whirred with plans, always coming back to his trafficking into jail. She could go to the police and tell them everything she knew. And have them laugh in her face. Her credibility with the cops was zero. She was pretty certain he’d have some paid flunky still in uniform who’d report back to him if she told the cops anything, so that wasn’t any good.

  She turned away from the mirror, crossed back to what was now her bedroom then quickly dressed. The money Angus had given her the night before was still in her bag. She shrugged. May as well get something out of this nightmare.

  Julia.

  The last time she needed money Julia had helped her as she always did. She rummaged through her bag and found her make up bag. Unzipping it she pulled everything out and with a sigh of relief, found a ragged slip of paper at the bottom.

  Julia’s phone number. Just before she’d been released, Julia gave it to her and told her if she need anything to call her. Nessa had scolded her, told her she should never give her number to a hopeless junkie. Julia had smiled and hugged her telling her she wasn’t hopeless, had never been hopeless.

  The memory made her eyes blur with tears. She sat on the bed with the scrap of paper in her hands and realized Julia was the only real friend she had left. All through the last ten years, Julia had talked to her, not judged her, but slowly, inch by inch, encouraged her to get real about treatment. It took her the last three years of getting out of jail, going into rehab, busting and back to jail a few times before she got the message, before something fell into place about staying clean.

  But Angus must have threatened Julia. Why else would she be coming out of the hotel with that slime Gary Randle at the wheel? Maybe Julia needed help, maybe they could work out what to do about Angus together.

  She rummaged in her bag again and pulled out her phone. Out of credit as usual, but not for long. With new found determination, she made for the door. It opened just as she reached for the handle.

  Chapter 8

  She was up. And if he wasn’t mistaken had indulged in his little present. A spike of disappointment warred with triumph in his head. He knew it wouldn’t take much for her to start using again but he had to admit a clean and sober Nessa was an interesting experience. Last night had been a revelation. Her body felt different, responded with more tension and resistance than she had in the past.

  Except for the first time, of course.

  He was all too aware she hated him but couldn’t stay away from him. Without drugs, the battle in her mind wrote itself in the set of her muscles, in the bewildered lust on her face. When
she came, her scream was one long agonized release. He liked that. He liked that a lot.

  But he needed to be sure she was bound to him and the drugs ensured that. Theirs was a relationship formed from need and greed. Always had been.

  He wasn’t deluded enough to deny there was something about Nessa, something that clawed its way into his soul all those years ago and wouldn’t let go. After he’d hurt her the first time he knew he was out of control, wasn’t thinking straight. He’d gotten out of the police force with a little medical assistance before Internal Affairs started investigating.

  But he never forgot the first time Nessa turned up on his door step looking for drugs. She knocked on his door late at night, searching for oblivion and prepared to do anything to get there. She didn’t mention what he’d done to her months before and neither did he.

  They’d shared a lot over the years. But until last night they’d never really shared themselves without the props and artifice drugs provided. He was sorry it couldn’t last. He knew without the drugs, hate would start to take precedence in Nessa’s mind. He couldn’t risk that.

  “How are you feeling? Good sleep?”

  She smiled dreamily at him and raised her arms, performing a slightly dazed twirl. “Great,” she said. “Best ever.”

  She stopped and faced him. He wound the mass of her wild blonde curls around his hand and pulled her to him, making her head tip back. Her nipples were tight underneath her T-shirt. He slid his hand under the cloth and pulled on one. Not hard, just enough to make her moan low in her throat. He kissed her as he pulled on her hair.

  Interesting. That tension was still there. She mustn’t have taken much Valium. He could tell she wanted to push him away, but instead she placed her hands on his hips and pulled him against her.

  God, he was rock hard. She undulated against him and kissed him back, her tongue thrusting into his mouth. What was she playing at?

  He pulled away from her. Laughing, she twirled around again. This was the Nessa he knew. Off her face and wanting to party. Disappointment hit him again. Maybe he could ration what she took so she wasn’t always so out of it.

  “Don’t have time for this now, Nessa. Maybe later.”

  Her face crumpled into a moue of protest.

  “Keep off the pills. We can have some coke later.”

  “Okay,” she said, like a kid just promised a Christmas present.

  *

  Dylan stretched his arms up as far as he could, resulting in his chair tipping dangerously backward. Just as it seemed it would topple, he slammed forward and leapt up. It was the most physical activity he’d had in some hours. His neck and back were stiff and he needed coffee. But more than anything else he needed answers.

  The exciting life of a cop. He strolled over to the coffee maker, all the time musing that on some days chasing crims and protecting the community didn’t happen. Some days he was lucky if he got outside at all. Paperwork took up most of the time. Usually it was boring routine stuff, forms to be filled out in triplicate, reports and time sheets of his staff to check, but today was different. He’d gone through Julia Taylor’s files and couldn’t make sense of what he read.

  Any lawyer with a tin pot degree and a bit of common sense could’ve gotten her off or at least a dramatically reduced sentence. The confession of guilt and the DNA evidence certainly indicated she’d killed the priest. But after the committal, where the judge assessed the police brief and concluded that indeed a crime had been committed and that she should stand trial, she’d opted for an immediate sentencing with no trial. None of the evidence had been presented in court other than at the committal hearing.

  Something else nagged at him. The police investigation revealed the whole sorry story of Father Pat and his pedophile activities. Several interviewees, all teenagers, confirmed the priest had raped and molested them often over several years. It also became clear that some of his victims were much younger, which then resulted in a major investigation by the Department of Community Services.

  Many of the kids told similar stories. Father Pat had groomed them through their interest in all things related to computers. Apparently he was a whiz with technology and made his top-of-the-line computers available for kids to use, which inevitably meant some time spent alone with him. He always made a point of befriending the kids’ parents, which made a lot of them feel they couldn’t complain.

  The usual depressing story, Dylan thought. People’s lives shattered because of one man’s perverse needs.

  But as he went through the file, he expected to see some analysis of the computers. It was inconceivable that a pedophile as active as Father Pat wouldn’t have some child porn on his computers. He scanned the list of evidence and saw nothing to indicate the computers had been taken into evidence. What happened to them? From the statements of the kids who’d been molested, the priest had at least two, a laptop and a desktop as well as a variety of cameras and video equipment. None of that was on the evidence list.

  He could understand what had happened to some extent. Julia had confessed the day after the body had been discovered, even before all the forensic evidence had been collected. People get sloppy when they know a crime has been neatly tied up. There’s nothing to prove, nothing to dispute. But even so this seemed to him a major gap. It looked as though the computers were removed before the forensic team arrived.

  Very likely. In 2001, the Blue Mountains Area Command had a small team based further down the mountains. The emergency call by the priest’s housekeeper was made at ten o’clock in the morning, the first responders arrived at ten fifteen, but the senior detectives and the forensic team didn’t arrive until twelve thirty that afternoon. Plenty of time to remove the equipment.

  When he saw who the first responders were, it all fell into place. Angus O’Reardon and Gary Randle. Of course.

  He stood sipping his coffee and made a slow perusal of the squad room. Normal day. Everyone was either on the phone or working computers. They were a good team. A mixture of old hands and relative newcomers like him. He spied Norm Grady, a senior constable who was a long-standing Katoomba resident and signalled to him he wanted a word. Norm had been with him the day he’d tried to convince Julia to give him information about O’Reardon. Norm hadn’t asked Dylan anything about Julia which, now that he thought about it, seemed strange.

  “What’s up?” Norm asked as they settled into Dylan’s office.

  Dylan paused before answering. Norm was a bit of an unknown quantity. Did his job without any dramas, seemed pleasant enough. He certainly had a lot of corporate memory and was often sought out by other staff who wanted a potted history of the local crime scene in the upper mountains.

  No one in the LAC knew that Dylan and Pringle were building a case against O’Reardon. Most people in the upper mountains thought O’Reardon was a hero because he’d taken over a crumbling and beloved local landmark and turned it into a thriving tourist mecca. No one thought to ask where a run-of-the-mill sergeant in the police force got the money for such a venture.

  Did someone like Norm wonder? He must have been surprised.

  The problem with investigating police or even ex-police was never knowing who they were still friendly with. If he let Norm know even a part of his suspicions, O’Reardon might be put on the alert. Maybe that wasn’t such a bad idea. Maybe it was time to crank up the heat.

  “Do you remember the murder investigation into the pedophile priest?”

  “Father Pat? Sure do. No one will forget that one in a hurry. That was who you were talking to the other day wasn’t it? Has she done something?”

  Dylan shook his head. “I’m looking at some anomalies about the investigation that have emerged. Do you remember who the first responder was after the emergency call came in?”

  Norm shifted his gaze to the window and frowned, thinking. Dylan saw the precise moment he made the connection. His eyes widened fractionally and he ducked his head, swiping the back of his neck with his hand.

&nbs
p; “Can’t say that I do. It was a long time ago.”

  “The priest had a lot of computer equipment that didn’t make it into evidence. It seems strange that no one noticed at the time.”

  “She confessed, didn’t she? I guess they didn’t see it as important.”

  “But his murder resulted in another major investigation into his pedophile activities. No one seemed concerned about the missing computers.”

  Norm shrugged.

  “Angus O’Reardon was the first one on the scene.”

  Silence. Norm stared at him unblinking.

  “This is the time where you tell me everything you know.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  A fine sheen of sweat appeared on Norm’s upper lip.

  “Come on. He left the force about three weeks after Julia Taylor was arrested. Three weeks after those computers disappeared and she and Vanessa Hunt were assaulted in the cells the night they were taken into custody. Was his assault of people he’d arrested so usual you don’t remember anything about it?”

  “It had nothing to do with me.”

  “So you do remember what happened.”

  Norm leant forward, a look of desperation on his face.

  “You don’t know what it was like, working with someone like that. He’s seriously bad news. Everyone was terrified of him. The day he quit was the best day of my life. No more looking over my shoulder wondering if he had something on me, no more wiping up the blood in cells where he’d gone berserk. There were days when we all worried that going on shift with him meant we’d get pulled into his craziness. Get blamed for something he did.”

  “Why didn’t you tell anyone? Report him?”

  Norm shook his head. “Not with someone like that. The only reason he got out of the force was because of the clean out at head office. He didn’t have his protectors any more. He got a medical retirement organised. Claimed he had post-traumatic stress disorder. He knew he was being looked at by Internal Affairs and thought he’d get out while he could.”

  “And after he left?”