The Kristina Melina Omnibus: First Kill, Second Cut, Third Victim

  ‘I’ll be okay.’ I felt a lump in my throat.

  Too much in too little time.

  They joined the queue, and before I had time to fully realised what was going, they had disappeared from view. I stood like a statue for a full minute staring at an empty spot in front of me.

  And then my legs gave in and I collapsed.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  There was a white ceiling about my head, and I could smell disinfectant. For the next few seconds, I tried to figure out where I was and what had happened. I remembered Michael and Frank and the airport lounge. And then I didn’t remember anything.

  The sheets under me felt soft and clean. My fingers rubbed them gently, and then I felt blood rushing through them.

  I tilted my head, but my neck hurt, like if someone’s tried to strangle me. My right shoulder hurt as well. It felt bruised. I must have fallen sideways onto the hard tiled floor at the airport.

  My eyes circled the room. The walls were white washed, and there was a red plastic chair in the top right corner directly in front of my bed. I was alone in the room, and I had no idea how long I’d been here. It was almost a relief. For a little while, I didn’t even want to know who I was. I pretended my current life was something out of my imagination, that it had been a novel I read, or a movie I’d seen recently. My real life was that of someone who had had a mild accident, and who was now resting in hospital, someone who had a loving family waiting for her and a warm house where everything was perfect. I had a little job which brought in enough money to pay my car off and my share of the mortgage. It wasn’t a career job, just something to make a living, a past time that gave me a sense of belonging.

  As I continued to stare at the white ceiling above my bed, the realisation of what my real life was all about began to sink in. There would be no loving family or warm house to come to. Instead, my home was now in the bedroom of a friend’s place in Richmond, and what passed as my family was in Sydney right now. I wondered how Michael was coping. He seemed quite cheerful when I left him at the airport, certainly better that I’d been.

  And then it hit me like a kick in the jaw.

  David.

  The DNA result of the hair strand I took from him at the airport matched the semen found inside Evelyn. He fucked her, and he never told me. He never said he knew her, and yet he had acted perfectly innocent. Disgusted with myself for having been so naive, I recalled how every time I used to come and see him, he’d asked me how the investigation was progressing. No wonder.

  I stood on my bed. The bruising on my right shoulder hurt even more. I had slept with this man, believed everything he told me. I had been happy in his arms for a while. Of course, I kind of expected that the test was going to be a perfect match, but until the result were actually confirmed, there was also some hope at the back of my mind that maybe I was being too paranoid.

  Nothing was ever what it seemed, I should have learned by now.