And she was feeling ridiculously horny.
She hadn’t stopped thinking about Neil Lachlan. She hadn’t been attracted to a man in this way for a long time, so why now? The timing sucked.
There was something about his strong but laid-back command of things. And that partly raffish, partly amiable smile that offered a glimpse of another side.
She got up, padded through to the kitchen to pour a cool drink, and then stepped out onto the back balcony. Insomnia wasn’t new to her and when she couldn’t sleep, for whatever reason, this was her routine.
She was still in her negligee.
Lachlan was supposed to have retired to the guest room.
But he was also on the balcony, unable to sleep, sitting in the easy wicker chair and watching the stars.
Jennifer was startled when she saw him. ‘Oh…I…’ She blushed.
‘Sorry. I’m not supposed to be out here.’
‘I guess you couldn’t sleep either.’
‘No.’
‘Head full of the case?’
‘Yes.’ Actually, that was a lie. His head was full of her but he kept that point private.
They made small talk for a while, and then Jennifer turned to leave. ‘I know I said this before, but I really do appreciate your staying over tonight and the personal interest you’ve taken in the case. So, you know what, I’m going to let you have the balcony for as long as you need it, and I’ll head back in.’
‘No-’
‘No, really Neil, it’s absolutely fine. Try and get some rest, after all, you have your guys stationed outside…’
He realized, sheepishly, that he was staring at her curves through the flimsy cotton of her negligee, and she’d noticed. ‘Sorry, I’m…’
She made light of it. ‘It’s okay. Actually, I’m flattered.’
‘You are?’
Their eyes locked on one another. And that was the exact moment when everything changed, when something electrifying passed between them.
Lachlan rose. ‘Your balcony, all yours. I’m going to hit the bed again, see if I can get at least a few hours, big day again tomorrow.’
She eased back as he squeezed by.
Her heart thudded at the closeness of him. Once again their eyes fixed on each other’s, and then, impulsively, Lachlan leaned in and gave her a light kiss on the lips.
She didn’t kiss him back. Contained herself. The old restraints kicking in.
He pulled away. ‘Sorry…that was unprofessional.’
‘I’m not complaining.’ She felt herself opening up, allowing her bottled-up emotions to run free.
She placed her hand to the back of his neck, eased in closer and returned the kiss.
There was a sudden thundering crash and the two of them pulled apart and whipped their heads around in alarm, Lachlan positioning himself into a protective stance in front of her.
The next-door cat had leapt from the fence onto the fibreglass roof of the balcony. It ambled along and then jumped down onto the opposite fence.
Jennifer laughed nervously. ‘Talk about tension.’
Lachlan followed her back into the house. She locked the back door behind them and then they headed to their rooms.
Outside the door to her room she said, ‘Thanks.’
‘Try and get some sleep.’ Lachlan turned toward the guest room.
There are moments in all our lives, Jennifer conceded to herself later, when we throw aside our inhibitions and act in the heat of the moment.
She reached out, took Lachlan’s arm and turned him back toward her. ‘Permission granted to stop being so damn professional,’ she said.
Lachlan’s head told him to turn away. He was a detective on the job. But for once he threw all caution to the wind and responded to the ache that he felt for this beautiful woman.
Their mouths came together, exploring.
Lachlan didn’t even recall slipping the negligee from her body as he cast his shirt aside.
The next thing her knew he was in her room, the door pushed shut behind them, both naked now, clinging to one another as they eased onto the bed. Everything about her was soft and sweet and intoxicating and under her caresses he felt every inch of his body exploding with new life.
Jennifer tingled and shivered from head to foot at the natural, husky aroma of him. His tongue and his fingers traced her neck and her breasts, moving lower, and she felt a liberating freedom and an ecstasy that she hadn’t felt for a long, long time.
Later, in the afterglow, they lay on the bed facing one another, fingers entwined.
‘You can go and start being professional again,’ Jennifer said, grinning.
‘Yes. I think I should.’
‘I do have one favour to ask, though,’ Jennifer added. ‘I don’t want to be stuck here, a prisoner in my own home, until this killer is caught. There’s something in particular I want to do.’
‘I’m listening,’ Lachlan said.
Jennifer was pleased that Lachlan agreed to the idea and accompanied her the following morning to the home of Thomas Brayson. She spent an hour with the old man whose daughter had been missing eighteen years, the two of them exchanging their memories of the loved ones they’d lost.
Lachlan marvelled at the depth of compassion with which Jennifer reached out to the old man, and her commitment to keep in touch, to look in on him on a regular basis.
That was the moment he knew he was in love with Jennifer Parkes.
TWENTY EIGHT
Earlier that morning, at 3 a.m., the bomb exploded at the far end of Shaft Number Twelve. The force of the blast pulverized tonnes of coal, sending it drifting in clouds of black dust through the tunnels and galleries of the mine. The dust, mixing with the air, caused a second, even greater explosion that was heard throughout the entire Southern Star complex and into the townships beyond.
The blinding, deafening detonation sent a fireball screaming through hundreds of metres of tunnel. Everything in its path was incinerated.
In the shed at the entrance to the shaft, four men played cards and drank Tooheys beer. On any other night they wouldn’t have been there. Tonight was an exception.
These four men were about to take a couple of days leave for a fishing trip. At the end of their shift, they’d decided to celebrate and relax with a few drinks and a game of poker. Three hours later their impromptu get-together showed no sign of ending. They were merry with the beer, loud, jovial, and enjoying their game.
The instant the fireball leapt from the mouth of the shaft, like the fiery breath of some mythical dragon, the shed and its four occupants were blown to pieces. In the days that followed pieces of their bodies, meshed with metal and timber, were found in an area of up to three hundred metres away.
The resulting fires spread quickly to the cluster of buildings centred around the adjoining mineshafts.
Southern Star’s rescue and maintenance teams were on the site within ten minutes. They worked furiously to seal the shaft and fight the fires breaking out all over the complex, but they were driven back repeatedly by heat and fumes and exploding chemicals.
By 4.30 a.m. an eighty-strong group of firemen, local police, miners and rescue professionals joined the operation.
Arriving on the scene, Mines Manager, David Hansen, was confronted by an eerie, otherworldly landscape.
Piles of twisted metal, falling rods, intense heat and clouds of carbon monoxide, illuminated by the angry red glow of the flames.
On the perimeter of the disaster area, news vans rolled to a halt and crewmen set up their equipment. And as the first light of dawn crept over the horizon, the TV news helicopters swept overhead.
At 5 a.m. several men working for Fred Hargreaves phoned the news desks of every major metropolitan newspaper and television station across the east coast of Australia, claiming responsibility for the bomb. They identified themselves as members of a new activist group called AVO (Asbestos Victims Organisation).
The mission to sabotage the sale of South
ern Star Mining was complete.
News of the disaster coincided with the publication, that same morning, of the People Power edition with its exposé of Henry Kaplan, the man, and his corporation.
Rory McConnell expected to attract attention to his journalistic talents with the article. He’d arranged to send copies of the article to the editors of the major papers and websites. Whatever attention the article might have generated was now increased tenfold. His phone didn’t stop ringing. One editor after another asked for Rory’s input regarding Kaplan’s knowledge of the asbestos issue. The current affairs TV programs lined up to interview him.
At 9.15 that morning Conrad Becker called an urgent meeting with his senior advisors. He fumed with anger that Southern Star Mining had been the target of terrorist attacks by an activist group. All were alarmed by the inference that Kaplan had used his influence to stop the asbestos inquiry.
During the first hour of trading that morning on the Australian Stock Exchange the value of Southern Star shares dived by a whopping forty percent.
Flanked by aides, Becker stormed into Henry Kaplan’s office. Kaplan, shattered by the news, sat helpless and listened to the tirade of abuse from Becker. The Canadian tycoon made it clear, there was now no chance whatsoever of the sale going through. For Henry Kaplan, it became the final nail in the coffin of his life’s work.
‘Hey, Neil, two visits in one week, I’ve never been so popular.’
‘It’s one of those “can you do me a favour” visits again,’ Lachlan said as he took a seat alongside Teddy Vanda.
‘I’m wounded,’ Vanda deadpanned. ‘And you still haven’t spilled the full story behind your last visit.’
‘You’ll have to put up with my silence on that a little longer.’
‘You’re just no fun anymore.’
‘Maybe I can be. I’m looking for something pretty unusual.’
‘So what else is new?’
‘There’s a link between those missing persons and the recent garrotte killings. But as you know there’s an unexplained gap of eighteen years. I want to establish if this garrotte killer was involved with those disappearances - and where he’s been since.’
‘And here I was thinking you were going to ask something difficult for a change.’
‘I want you to run a search for garrotte murders, or attempted garrotte attacks, Australia wide.’
Teddy grimaced. ‘I suppose you want me to run a check all the way back to the year dot?’
‘Let’s go back twenty years. For starters.’
‘That all? Lucky for you I owe you one, eh?’
‘Lucky.’ Lachlan relaxed and allowed himself a laugh.
The jogger was up early that morning and tuned in to the television. The first newsbreak concerning the bombing went to air at 5.53 a.m. The jogger’s face broke into a self-satisfied grin as he watched the aerial footage of the pandemonium across the fire-ravaged site.
Later, he phoned Fred Hargreaves. ‘You’ve done well,’ he said. ‘So well you’ve given me an idea. I need one of those explosive devices for a project of my own.’
‘No problem,’ came the reply. ‘You deliver the cash, we deliver the product.’
The jogger made the necessary arrangements and then hung up. His aborted attempt on Jennifer Parkes’ life had left him fearful that his plans were falling apart. But he felt much better this morning after watching the scenes of carnage on his TV screen. A new plot was hatching in his mind, one that made far more sense and solved all his remaining problems with one decisive blow.
TWENTY NINE
Earlier, on his way to Police HQ in Parramatta and his visit with Teddy Vanda, Lachlan had listened to the radio news about the Southern Star bombing. Why had this happened now, at the very same time his investigation showed a link between the missing persons and the garrotte killings to a company owned by the Kaplan Corporation? Co-incidence?
After seeing Teddy, Lachlan went to the special unit in the Sydney CBD. ‘I was expecting an update call from you,’ he said tersely to Max Bryant, referring to Bryant contacting the Burbank police in the U.S.
‘Still no luck, Neil. I left a message. No return call as yet so I’ve emailed a request for any info Burbank can give us- or find out quickly- on Lifelines Inc. I’m following that up with repeated calls.’
Ron Aroney had been on the phone. Concluding his call, he approached Lachlan and Bryant. ‘Those council plans arrived first thing this morning. I put them on your desk,’ he said to Lachlan. ‘According to the original design the building had a large basement, with a lift and stairwell access.’
‘No sign of that when I was there,’ Lachlan replied, ‘but that’s not to say they hadn’t been sealed off.’
‘The obvious question then,’ said Bryant, ‘is what the hell is down there that had to be sealed?’
‘And,’ Aroney added, ‘who sealed it?’
The deputy commisioner took the anonymous call at 9.45 AM. ‘Someone on the phone, won’t give his name,’ his P.A said, ‘says he has vital information on the Southern Star bombing.’
It was unusual for Ed Razell to take such a call. Usually he directed something like this to one of his senior detectives. But the nature of this call changed that. He’d already had a call earlier from the Federal Minister for Industrial Affairs, requesting a full enquiry into the allegations of the asbestos cover-up. Although the incident had occurred in Queensland, the HQ of the Kaplan Corporation was in New South Wales and the minister wanted the authorities in both states involved. ‘I’ll take it,’ Razell said.
‘Who is this?’ he said gruffly.
‘The phone calls to the press from these AVO crazies are fake.’
Razell had heard similar voices on the phone before, handkerchief over the mouth to disguise the voice. The sign of an amateur.
‘There’s no such organisation.’
Razell had expected as much. He already had several men looking for information on any such group. ‘You need to identify yourself,’ Razell demanded. A useless question but one that had to be asked.
‘Consider me a friend. The bombing was organised by someone who had a lot to gain by casting attention on Kaplan today. Have you seen that rag People Power this morning, Razell?’
‘No.’
‘Then go get a copy. Couldn’t have been better timing for the journalist who wrote the exposé on Kaplan.’
There was a click and the line went dead.
It made sense.
Razell had already considered the possibility that AVO might be a smokescreen for someone bombing the mine for a totally different purpose. He pulled out the report he’d received that morning from Lachlan.
Rory McConnell, freelance journo for indie paper People Power, had been added to the list of suspects in the missing persons murders. Razell pondered the fact that these two names kept cropping up. McConnell attacking Kaplan in print, while Kaplan fed information on McConnell’s dubious past to the police. What was it with those two?
Razell marched out of his office. ‘I’m paying Detective Senior Sergeant Lachlan a visit,’ he informed his P.A.
‘I got the shock of my life when I ran the data on aborted violent attacks, with garrotting as the main selection criteria. I expected maybe two or three unrelated attempts over the twenty year period.’
‘And?’ Lachlan was impatient.
Teddy Vanda, recognising the anxiety of the moment, shifted his internal gears effortlessly from light-hearted into deadly serious. ‘The computer came up with twenty-six attempted garrotte killings, all in the north western suburbs of Sydney, at staggered intervals in the mid- 90’s. Some were a few weeks apart. Towards the end of the cycle they were up to six months apart.’
‘Twenty-six attempts,’ Lachlan repeated, stunned.
‘Twenty-six over a period of a couple of years. Then nothing since. And that’s not the interesting part. In each and every attack, the intended victim reported being saved by the intervention of two men.’
&nb
sp; ‘Who?’
‘Unknown. In each reported attack, the victim told an identical story. They had no idea who their attacker was, and no idea who their saviours were.’
‘Were they always the same two men?’
‘Apparently not. Descriptions of the two men varied, Neil. But they were always large, powerful looking characters.’ He allowed himself a light moment. ‘Like me.’
‘The link between these attacks was never noticed,’ Lachlan assumed.
‘The reports were made to different stations, depending on the exact locale of the attack. Local detective Constable Ron Nicholls recognised the pattern and instigated an investigation. It went nowhere and was relegated to the back burner after the attacks stopped.’
‘So, the reason this guy stopped killing was because someone else was stopping him.’
‘In order to be on the spot like that, someone had to undertake twenty-four hour surveillance of the killer, or of his intended victims,’ Teddy suggested. ‘You’d find those skills in security specialists or private detectives. I programmed the computer to compile a list of companies involved in that kind of work.’
‘I knew there was a reason I kept hanging around you,’ said Lachlan.
Teddy raised his right eyebrow appreciatively. This was the Neil Lachlan with whom he’d always had camaraderie. ‘And I ran a cross check of those company names against Winterstone for a possible connection. Nothing. Zero-ville.’ Teddy paused, held up his finger to highlight his next comment. ‘Then I did something I rarely do.’
Lachlan was intrigued but kept his impatience in check. ‘The suspense is killing me.’
‘I left the computer alone, picked up the phone, and did some old fashioned police work called talking to people. You’ve piqued my curiosity. Must have, for me to do stuff like this off my own bat. I may have come up with something.’
‘On Winterstone?’
‘Not exactly. On the parent company. The Kaplan Corporation hired a private investigator, a Swede named Hans Falkstog, back in the 70’s, to watch over Kaplan’s son during a kidnap scare.’
‘You got this from Falkstog?’
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