‘How’s the recovery going?’ she asked as she led him to her office, trying to keep matter-of-fact, trying not to remember the horror of him broken and battered, close to dying.
‘I had a very good surgeon, and my arm’s better than they thought it would be.’
And he still didn’t move quite as easily as he had, she noticed, as they sat down in her office. But given the extent of his injuries, that wasn’t surprising, at only two months down the track.
She left her door open, out of habit, but there were others around, passing in the corridor, and it didn’t seem the right moment to close the door and get … well, personal with him.
‘Liam and Jeanie and Megan – are they okay?’ he asked, glancing out the door himself, keeping things neutral. ‘I only got the very basics out of the Feds.’
At least she could reassure him, and despite her frustration at not being able to touch him, maybe it was better to update him on developments and news before they dealt with the personal. ‘Everyone’s fine. Jeanie’s staying out with Delphi at present. Deb’s fine. Liam’s made a full recovery, and so has Megan.’ She paused, not quite sure how he’d take this next bit. ‘She asks every time I see her if there’s been any news of you.’
He looked away, swallowed, but he didn’t make any comment. She didn’t push him.
‘So, I gather the Feds think there’s no more danger for you?’
‘They’ve got more evidence than they need. They don’t need me as a witness. So I told them I was leaving.’ He rubbed at his left hand. ‘I read in the newspapers that there’s been a number of arrests around here, lately.’
‘Yes. There’s been a team working on it. Sean Barrett provided enough information about this end of the Russos’ distribution network for us to raid another property and the business office, and arrest and charge Brian and Kevin Flanagan and a number of others on trafficking, money laundering and extortion charges. Flanagan Agricultural Company has been placed in the hands of administrators, pending the outcome of the case.’
‘And Dan?’
She knew he’d ask. ‘Apparently, he officially retired from the company’s board a couple of years ago, and declares he has no knowledge of any crimes. We haven’t been able to find enough evidence to charge him, yet. But his power is broken, Gil, especially with his sons arrested. He’s put his house in Birraga up for sale – it wasn’t a company asset – and is on the Gold Coast, where the Feds are watching him.’
Gil rose, paced to the window. ‘Do you think …’ He paused, took a moment to continue. ‘Sean, the Flanagan brothers – I imagine I’m not their favourite person, and they’ll still have connections outside. Too many people were hurt because of me, Blue. I don’t want that to happen again.’
She didn’t dismiss the fear. It explained his hesitation, the holding back from her, in spite of the signals she’d given him. He’d been through hell, almost losing the people he cared about; no wonder he was cautious.
‘Gil, I can’t promise you that nothing will happen. But I can tell you that I believe the risk is low. Sean pleaded guilty at his committal hearing. I believe there’s genuine remorse there. As for the Flanagans – their influence is gone. Once they were exposed, it made a big difference – here in Birraga, and in Dungirri. A lot of information poured in. We can’t use all of it, but the point is that people are standing together, against them.’
‘So, if I were to stick around here for a bit, Jim Barrett’s not likely to stalk me in a dark alley?’
If I were to stick around here for a bit … Her heartbeat gave a little skip. Oh, she definitely liked the sounds of those words.
‘Jim’s not going to stalk you, unless it’s to apologise,’ she assured him quietly. ‘He and Paul were shattered by what Sean did. I think their disgust and disappointment played a part in Sean’s remorse.’
Gil leaned against the window sill, hands in his pockets, dark eyes honest and direct. ‘I’m not sure I can forgive him yet, Blue.’
She saw again the image of him surrounded by paramedics, remembered her choking fear as they’d battled to keep him alive. ‘I don’t think I can, yet, either,’ she confessed, holding his gaze. ‘So I understand that you can’t. However, since neither of us is into vengeance, Sean’s safe enough, and we can move on with our lives.’
She glanced at her watch. ‘Speaking of lives, since it’s six-thirty, I’m now officially off-duty for four days. I can offer you a lift to Dungirri, if you’d like it.’ She grinned, let her expression convey the extent of her invitation.
He gave a slow smile in return. ‘I would like that. Thanks.’
She kept the mood light and teasing, although her heart raced and underneath the lightness she wondered, slightly desperately, where the nearest private place might be.
‘Good. We might even make it in time for dinner at the pub, where there is temporarily a really good chef, who is waiting for her business partner to reappear. Her cooking is definitely better than mine.’
His eyes danced. ‘Why does this not surprise me?’
She switched off her computer, picked up her keys. ‘About the chef, or my cooking? On second thoughts,’ she added, ‘don’t answer that.’
‘I suppose there’s a temporary barman, too?’ he asked.
‘Yes. They were between jobs, and Nancy Butler offered them the work. They’ve been doing a great job.’
She didn’t tell him about the business options Liam and the town were exploring. There’d be time enough for Gil to consider them, to see what would be workable, to decide for himself whether he wanted to invest – financially or emotionally – in Dungirri.
Tonight, at the pub, he would discover how the tide of the community’s attitude towards him was already turning. It might help to convince him.
‘Megan will be pleased to see you,’ she said. ‘She’s very keen to get to know her father.’
‘I’m not sure I’ll ever get used to the idea. It still scares me.’ Standing there near the doorway, he reached out, his battered fingers crooked, but gentle, as he brushed her cheek with the back of his hand. ‘It’s not the only thing that does.’
His honest words, his touch, broke her thin control, and she no longer gave a damn about protocol.
She closed her hand over his, kicked the door shut, and moved in close. ‘But you came back, anyway.’
His arms wrapped around her, held her tightly. ‘Yeah, Blue,’ he said, his mouth close to hers. ‘I came back.’
INTRODUCING
DEAD HEAT
ALSO BY BRONWYN PARRY
PUBLISHING APRIL 2012
CHAPTER 1
Vermin.
They had to be the worst damned thing about her job. The feral dogs, pigs, cats, goats and horses did enough damage, but the vermin Jo really disliked – the ones responsible for the vandalised camping ground in front of her – were the two-legged, hoon variety.
Five days since the State Minister and her entourage of hangers-on and media had declared the new national park open at this very spot, and already the vermin had left their mark. Not only had they hauled down the information board – the one she’d dug the post-holes for herself because they couldn’t get the mechanical digger repaired in time for the Minister’s media event – they’d cut the posts into pieces with a chainsaw.
The door to the loo hung crookedly on a single hinge, the watertank beside the covered cooking area was riddled with bullet holes, and, judging by the copious amounts of broken glass around the campfire remains, they’d also smashed – or perhaps shot – a fair number of beer bottles. Presumably after drinking the contents.
They sure hadn’t been out here to appreciate the natural environment.
But they weren’t here now. She could see the whole camping area – no cars, no tents, no people.
She reached into the cab of the vehicle for the radio mike and rattled off her boss’s call sign. ‘Are you there, Mal?’
‘Yeah, Jo.’
‘Can you give the p
olice a call? A mob of Homo idiota has been rampaging. The tank’s full of bullet holes, the loo door is cactus and the info board’s down – they took to it with a chainsaw.’
‘Damn it. Are you all right? How many of them are there?’
‘I’m fine, Mal. They’re gone.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes. Brazen louts aren’t likely to be skulking in the bush, afraid of a lone woman.’ Being out in the wilderness alone was a normal part of her job, and if she spooked easily she wouldn’t have lasted long in it, let alone ten years.
‘Okay. Can you wait out there until the cops or I get there? I might be an hour. If the police are available, they’ll probably be at least that long.’
Jo stifled a sigh. She would just have to hang around until the police had taken whatever evidence they needed, before she would be able to start clearing up the mess.
‘No worries. I’ll photograph and document the wreckage.’
Photograph and document – a standard procedure she’d completed too many times, although she’d hoped such deliberate vandalism would be less frequent out here in the north-west of New South Wales than in the parks she’d worked in further east, closer to cities and city hoons.
It would take all of thirty minutes, if that. Then maybe she could map the track to the lookout while she waited, so the morning wouldn’t be a total waste. Checking and updating the maps they’d inherited from State Forests was only one task on the long list of jobs to be done now that the area had officially become a national park.
The sun’s heat already warm on her back, she retrieved her camera from her day pack in the rear of the vehicle. Taking a moment to scan the large camping area, she watched, listened, alert for anything that didn’t belong. The typical morning birdlife filled the air with sound. A flock of corellas, white on the dark branches of a eucalypt near the river, squabbled among themselves. A young magpie, fatter than its parents, squawked on the grass, demanding more food, and a treecreeper hopped up the bark of an iron gum, foraging for insects. At one end of the car park some of the local mob of kangaroos sprawled lazily in the shade, their morning grazing completed.
Nothing out of the ordinary, nothing disturbing the peace. Other than the wildlife, she was alone out here. Exactly the way she liked it: peaceful, without distractions, just her and the natural beauty of the wilderness. A different beauty from the parks she’d worked most of her career in, on the eastern fall of the Great Dividing Range, but this dry, scrubby landscape of the western slopes and plains brought her almost full circle, back to the kind of landscape she’d grown up in.
She drew in a deep breath of warm, dust-dry air. A good decision, moving here, away from the constant reminders of loss and grief, as well as an enjoyable professional challenge, establishing the new park. Definitely plenty to keep her busy.
This vandalism added a few more tasks to her list for the day. Nate Harrison, the lone constable based in Goodabri, might come the twenty or more kilometres out if he was in the area, but the chance of any other police coming the fifty-plus kilometres from Strathnairn, let alone bringing a crime-scene officer, was close to zilch. Yet, just in case, she took care to disturb as little as possible as she photographed the damage and recorded the details in a notebook.
On the edge of the camping ground, among the undergrowth, a family of fairy wrens flittered in the bushes. Two young males, just coming into their adult plumage, chased each other, the half-grown tufts of blue feathers on their heads punk-like.
‘At least you don’t go round wrecking camp sites, boys,’ she murmured, zooming the camera on them.
From this distance, her voice didn’t disturb them, but as she snapped a few shots, they flew off, startled. She turned the camera to the dingo emerging from the low bushes, breakfast in its mouth. She caught its face close-up in the frame, the eyes watching her warily, ears upright, jaws clenched tightly around …
The image in the viewfinder began to shake violently but she snapped the photo, and another. Five fingers. A tattoo winding past the knuckles, up to the stump of the wrist, blood dark against the pale skin.
The dingo turned away and she yelled at it, desperate for it to drop its find, but it disappeared back into the undergrowth.
‘Shit, shit, shit, shit.’ Indecision held her motionless while she ran through her options, her heart racing as quickly as her thoughts. Follow it and see what she could find, or radio Mal to report it? She flicked the camera back to the two images she’d taken. No, it wasn’t a joke artificial limb leftover from a Halloween prank. Real flesh, mostly whole, so it had not been lying on the ground for days. Whatever had happened, it had to be recent. Not a minor injury. So where, and in what condition, was the person it belonged to?
She jogged back to her vehicle. With insufficient mobile phone reception for a call, she radioed her boss again. First things first: find out if there was still reason to worry. ‘Mal, have you heard anything about someone being injured out here? Calling an ambulance, yesterday or overnight?’
‘Nothing I know of, Jo. Why?’
She hesitated. No, not information she wanted to broadcast on an open radio channel, with farmers, truckies and others potentially listening in. ‘There’s some signs of a major injury,’ she explained briefly. ‘I haven’t heard anything about an ambulance call out last night, but maybe they left here by car. If you hear anything, let me know.’
Still on edge, she surveyed area, the key questions ringing in her mind: How the hell had someone lost a hand out here? Where were they now, and in what state?
The hoons had felled the posts with a chainsaw, but it would be pretty damned hard to accidentally cut off your own hand with one. Likewise with an axe or a hunting knife. Fingers, easily enough, or a chunk out of a leg or foot, but not your own hand.
That left a much higher probability of foul play than of accident.
If the injured man was out here, the sooner she found him, the better. Aware of the isolation, kilometres from anywhere and anyone, she checked her backpack for the first-aid kit, satellite phone and portable radio and listened again for any indication of company.
Nothing but bird calls, insects and the breeze stirring the leaves.
Not far from where the dingo had trotted back into the scrub, she found drag marks, half a metre or so wide, and a few ants still gathered, here and there, around dark smears in the gravel. Pairs of footprints flanked either side of the drag marks.
Boot prints, not wild pig or dog tracks.
She stared at them, the skin on her arms prickling despite the heat of the sun. No, there couldn’t be any sort of innocent explanation for this.
Wary, making herself breathe slowly and evenly, she followed the drag marks and tracks over the rough, rocky ground among the trees.
Less than forty metres in, she found a pile of broken branches under a tree, glimpses of denim visible through the thin, dry foliage.
She’d done her share of search and rescue over the years, and dealt with more than her share of injury and death. She’d dealt with it before, could do it again.
She steeled herself, and pulled aside one of the branches to check what lay beneath … and then jerked away, gagging, her mind reeling in horror. Not an accident. No way an accident. The man whose body lay semi-hidden had been coldly, brutally, tortured and murdered.
The cow stood in the middle of the narrow dirt road and stared at him. Nick stared back and inched the car forward. The cow didn’t budge.
A second blast from the horn finally had it ambling to the verge, and he put the accelerator down as soon as he was past.
‘Turn left in one hundred metres,’ the female voice of the sat nav intoned.
Down a rough track with a locked gate across it, and an ‘Authorised Vehicles Only’ sign?
‘That’d be another “no”, honey,’ he muttered and turned off the useless system.
An hour since the call had come in, and he still had to travel at least ten kilometres to get there. Assumi
ng his constable’s directions for the ‘shortcut’ route between Strathnairn and the national park were correct. Assuming he hadn’t taken the wrong road. Both the map and the sat nav had proved a waste of space – the scale of the map not large enough to show the minor roads, the sat nav thinking every farm track and fire trail was a public road.
He mentally added decent maps to the list of resources he would request. Only three days into the job and his list was already long. His predecessor in the senior detective position at Strathnairn might have been content to work without adequate resources, but Nick wasn’t. Although, given the large number of open cases Nick had inherited, he wondered if the word work had been in the man’s vocabulary. That made his own posting to the almost-outback command not just a banishment, but a poisoned chalice as well. Detective Garry Coulter, killed in a car accident over a month ago, had apparently been held in high regard by the locals, so raising questions about the man’s competence or integrity would not make Nick popular with his new colleagues.
He would worry about that later. Right now, he had a murder report to investigate – once he reached the crime scene.
The road joined another at a T-junction, and a National Parks sign helpfully pointed to Ghost Gums Camping Ground. After another ten minutes of winding road through dry, rocky bush he descended a hill to the camping ground on the river flats, the parking area already busy with three police cars, an ambulance and two National Parks utilities.
The two paramedics stood beside their ambulance, idly talking, but as Nick got out of his unmarked car, one strolled across.
‘Are you the new detective?’
‘Yes. Nick Matheson.’ He shook hands, unblinkingly meeting the man’s frankly curious and not entirely trusting gaze. So, the gossip had gone beyond his new colleagues in the Local Area Command to other emergency services. So be it. He had a job to do, and he’d do it.
Dark Country (Dungirri) Page 32