Blood Work

by L.J. Hayward

  Chapter 29

  Erin went back to the office feeling a little lightheaded. She’d wondered right at the start if it had been a daughter or son Hawkins had ‘stolen’ from Veilchen, but she hadn’t really believed it. Maybe it was time to contemplate even the scary prospects. They said Ted Bundy was charming, too.

  “Scored,” Ivan announced when she walked in. “Got the drummer from Nasty Kitten. She’s agreed to meet us for a late lunch.”

  The mere suggestion of food turned Erin’s stomach. She didn’t know whether it was the lingering effects of Veilchen or the thought Hawkins might be a kidnapper. Didn’t really know which was better.

  “Okay, let’s go.”

  Ivan stood. “You all right?”

  Erin nodded. “Just a bit nauseous.”

  “You’re not pregnant, are you?”

  “You’ve got to have sex for that.” She snatched up her shoulder rig, gun and coat. “Come on.”

  They met Kelly Unwin at a café in Toowong where she worked as a chef. She sat them at a private table in a courtyard behind the café and helped Ivan decide what he wanted off the gourmet menu. Erin had a mineral water and Panadol for her growing headache. Kelly brought out Ivan’s spinach and ricotta ravioli herself and sat down with them.

  “You’re looking for Mercy, are you?” Kelly tugged her long brown hair out of its braid and shook it out. “I haven’t seen or heard from her in, wow, must be over two years now.”

  “We’re not actually looking for Mercy, but a man she was sighted with last night.”

  Kelly sat forward. “She was seen last night? I thought she’d left town ages ago. No one at all has seen her, and she used to be very popular. Not someone you could just forget in a couple of years.”

  Erin could believe that. She could still see the footage of Mercy on stage, entrancing her audience. “Can you tell me about her? How you met, what she was like, why you parted ways?”

  “It will help you find this man she was with?”

  “It will. Please, anything you think might be important.”

  Kelly played with a glass of chilled water. “Me and three other girls had decided to form a band, just for fun. I could drum, Mel could play rhythm and Delia could learn anything like that.” She snapped her fingers. “So she took up base. Mel’s cousin, Katrina, or Kat as she wanted to be known, claimed she could sing. Didn’t take us long to work out she couldn’t. She could hold a tune, sure, but there wasn’t anything special about her voice, you know. But she was all we had. And we got a few gigs playing school dances and fetes. Then somehow we ended up in this little shit hole… sorry, dive, playing to a room of people who looked like they’d rather shove knives in our instruments than listen to us play.”

  Ivan waved his fork knowingly, almost losing a piece of ravioli. “Been to a place like that. Lovely atmosphere. Never run so fast in my entire life as I did getting out of there.”

  Kelly grinned. “Yeah. Anyway, part way through the first set, Kat decides she can’t sing for this mob of homicidal drunks anymore and storms off stage. Leaves us behind looking like idiots. I was all for running, too. Forget the expensive equipment. Then this girl appears out of the crowd. I thought she was a school kid at first. Short, skinny, dressed in this preppy little outfit with all these black curls just bouncing around her face. Not at all what you’d expect from this place, trust me. Leather jackets, torn jeans, studded collars were the dress code. So, she clambers up on the stage, grabs the mike and asks if we know Pleasure and Pain by the Divinyls.”

  Erin nodded. “We saw a clip of it on YouTube.”

  “That was taken about a year later, when Mercy had really found her groove. This first night, in that pub, she was awesome, don’t get me wrong, but she only got better and better. About halfway through that first song, Mel and Delia are looking at me and we all just knew. This girl was our singer.”

  “And history was made,” Ivan said.

  “What about Mercy’s past?” Erin asked. “Where did she come from? Did she have family?”

  “Her family was back in Western Australia. She’d come out here to get away from a pretty dominating father. Very Catholic family. Mercy isn’t a conformist soul. She didn’t really fit in. Things got bad when, after paying for her singing lessons, he decided she needed to go into classical or opera, something he liked. Mercy didn’t want that, so she ran away. Spent years travelling around with various bands and finally wound up in Brisbane, walking past that shit hole when we were playing.”

  “Did you try to reach her family after you lost contact with her? To see if she’d gone home?”

  Kelly snorted. “By that time, I didn’t really care where she was. At the start, we were all just fascinated with ourselves, unable to believe that we’d got that good that fast. We were in hot demand and had our pick of gigs around here and down the coast. Played a blues and roots festival at Byron, a Big Day Out, did a few turns about Sydney. It was really heady stuff. There were rumours of agents prowling around us, producers putting out the feelers. But before any of them could actually contact us, things started going downhill.” She sighed. “I guess it happens to a lot of bands like that. The moment you get a sniff of success, real success, you start to learn a few truths about the people you thought you knew really well.

  “Delia started it. She began making comments about how Mercy was taking all the glory for herself. I mean, lead singers always end up the face of the band. And with a face like Mercy’s, and that voice, it was really hard for any of us three to be noticed. I understood it and I thought Delia and Mel understood it too. Maybe it has something to do with sitting behind a big drum set all the time. You don’t expect to get noticed, so when you aren’t, you don’t miss it.” Kelly shrugged off the memory. “And that was the beginning of the end of Nasty Kitten. Mercy had always been a wild child. She took it to new extremes when Delia began in on her. I think Mercy had issues, you know, about being controlled. She didn’t want Delia telling her what to do. So she set out to make Delia as angry as possible. Began hanging out with people we didn’t really want to be associated with. Getting drunk just about every night. I was never sure, but she may have got into the heavy drugs. Whether or not she had, Mel and I knew that without Mercy, Nasty Kitten was nothing. We tried to talk Mercy around, to get over Delia’s attitude and come back, but she wouldn’t listen. I think she was on the verge of running away again. Couldn’t deal, so she would run. And that was it.”

  “This bad crowd Mercy ended up with,” Erin said. “Was there any one person in particular she was with? Someone who might have drawn her into the crowd and away from the rest of the band?”

  Kelly considered it. “No, I don’t think so. She threw herself in voluntarily.”

  “What about when the band was playing? Was there anyone who had an abnormal interest in her?”

  “Just about every audience member had an abnormal interest in her.” Then Kelly frowned. “But there was this one guy, toward the end. He was at every gig, always at the back of the room. I wouldn’t have noticed him if Mercy hadn’t pointed him out. She joked that she had her own personal stalker. I think she said it to get under Delia’s skin. We all knew that if anyone was to get stalked, it would be Mercy.”

  Erin pushed aside her mineral water. Her stomach still wasn’t feeling great, and getting worse as she listened to Kelly. “Can you describe him?”

  “Average, I guess. I never saw him that much.” She gestured a few drum moves. “Behind the cymbals, remember. But apparently he walked with a cane.”

  Ivan slanted Erin a meaningful look. Erin had been expecting it, though.

  “He didn’t make any threatening moves toward Mercy?” she asked Kelly.

  “Not at all. I think he was just a fan, maybe a little in love, or lust, with Mercy. But there were a lot of people in that situation. It was probably only his walking stick that made him stand out. Is this the guy you’re looking for?”

  “I think he is. Thank you for talking to u
s, Kelly. You’ve helped.”

  Erin and Ivan were almost at the door when Kelly caught them.

  “Not sure if it makes a difference, but Mercy Belique isn’t her real name,” she said. “She took it as a stage name when we started getting regular work.”

  “What’s her real name?” Erin flipped open her notebook.

  “Susan Grayson.”

  Ivan rolled his eyes. “I can see why she’d want to have something flashier for the stage.”

  Erin thanked Kelly again and they left.

  “That was all really interesting but what did it gain us in terms of finding, and keeping a hold of, Matthew Hawkins?” Ivan asked on the drive back to the office.

  “Just more questions, I’m afraid. It looks like Hawkins had an obsession with Nasty Kitten, probably focused on Susan Grayson, aka Mercy Belique. She was with him last night, so something happened to turn that obsession into something more personal.” She swallowed and admitted, “And I think Mercy is what Hawkins stole from Veilchen.”

  “What? Why?”

  She told him her suspicions about Mercy being related to Veilchen, by way of their shared very pale complexions. “If Veilchen is Mercy’s mother, or some sort of relative, then that would explain why she’s intent on finding Hawkins. If there’s been trouble in the family, it’s possible they don’t want the police involved so Mercy, or Susan, can’t tell them why she ran away.”

  Ivan accepted that. “So our next step?”

  “Contact the Graysons in WA.”

  “Gee, I wonder how many Graysons there are over there,” Ivan mumbled.

  “That’s why I pay you the big bucks, boy.”

  While Ivan trawled through the listings for Graysons in Western Australia, Erin called home and checked on William. He was sleeping and Gavin and Kate were watching a movie. Erin promised them a weekend at any resort they wanted for their trouble, fended off their well-meaning invitations to more social outings and was saved by a second call coming through.

  “It’s that detective,” Ivan announced dryly. “You know, the really charming one.”

  “Thank you. Put him through.” The line clicked over. “Hello, Courey. What did you get me?”

  “Fine thanks, though the sciatica is playing up a bit. Must be the nasty bitch stuck in my back by my boss.”

  “Hey, how are you, Detective Courey? I hear Chinese massage is really good for back pain, and that relieving yourself of all that information you found helps dislodge those nasty bitches.”

  “Keep this up and you might just make it to Mrs Courey number three, girl. So, Jane Doe at the Mentis Institute. She was some real piece of work, apparently. Took out several of their more robust orderlies, dispensed a black eye or five, broke two noses and one of them was her own. Some sort of violent psychosis, apparently.”

  Erin sighed. “You didn’t get the correct name for it?”

  “Darl, this is off the books. No, I didn’t get the technobabble name for it. All it boils down to is she was a pint sized cyclone of trouble for the good folk at the mental ward. They had to keep her sedated, but that wasn’t enough to keep her down, though. Each morning, doped to the eyeballs or not, she went spastic and hid in a closet. Wouldn’t come out all day.”

  Erin stopped writing. “She wouldn’t come out during the day?”

  “That’s what I just said. You might yet be dumb enough to get that marriage proposal.”

  “But not dumb enough to accept, I’m afraid. So, is she still there?”

  “Nope. A family member came and discharged her about three weeks after she was admitted.” There was a triumphant pause. “And here’s the rub. Family member was described as a tall, skinny guy walking with a limp and a cane.”

  Letting out a long sigh, Erin said, “Of course he was. What name did he give?”

  “Let’s see here. It was John Grayson, of Freemantle, WA. Her brother, apparently.”

  “And he IDed her as Susan Grayson, right?”

  “On the mark. You might be too smart.”

  “No, no. I think I’m pretty dumb. I took this case, after all. Listen, Courey, thank you for this. I do appreciate it.”

  He gave a small grunt. “If it finds this guy before he becomes another lump in a body bag, then I guess it’s worth putting up with you.” He hung up.

  Erin put her head down on the desk, covered it with her arms. So, she had an enigmatic man running around with a girl who, after being beaten very badly, shuns sunlight and was a mere pale shade of her old, all too alive, vibrant self. A fight of fantastical proportions that she had witnessed herself. A disturbingly strange face peering out of a van during a drive-by shooting. A kid talking about her man and werewolves in the one sentence.

  Something about that last bit caught her whirling thoughts and anchored them. She sat up and checked the calendar on her computer. It was full moon tonight.

  No. She was crazy for giving the mad thought credence. It was ridiculous. There were no such things as werewolves, or vampires, or narrow, sick faces with sharp pointed teeth. It just wasn’t real.

  Yet, her hand strayed to the intercom.

  “Did you know there are about a million Graysons in—” Ivan began.

  “We don’t care about the Graysons in WA anymore,” she said. “That’s not important now.”

  “We don’t? It isn’t? What did the detective have to say?”

  “That the kid you found online is the one we need to find now. The one talking about Night Call and werewolves. Can you track him down?”

  “I can leave a message but that’s about it. Why?”

  “We can’t wait for a message. I think Hawkins is going to be wherever that kid is tonight. Get me the address for the message he left. I’ll see if Courey can trace him through that.”

  “Right,” Ivan said. “And then you’ll tell me what’s going on?”

  “Just do it, Ivan.” She cut off his reply and spun around to look at the city cast in shadow. The sun was sinking behind her building, throwing long grey fingers over her view.

  It was utterly crazy. She should be carted off to the mental ward just for thinking it. But that didn’t discount it as an honest lead. Like Hawkins had said, some people believed, and that was good enough for her.