Release (The Submerged Sun, #3)

by Garden,Vanessa

  Marko grinned and raised his brows, “I like you blonde.” Before I could smack him in the arm he added, “But I like you as a brunette most.”

  “You’d better, because I’ll be changing it back as soon as I return.” I started to smile but then it vanished as a dark thought speared through my mind. When I returned, I would know if Lauren was dead or not. There would be no denying the truth, whatever it turned out to be. My heart sped up as I contemplated this, but then it almost flat-lined when I thought of the bracelet. There was no denying Lauren’s bracelet.

  Tears bit the backs of my eyes and I quickly turned away from the mirror and unrolled some toilet paper before stuffing my face into it and blowing my nose. I couldn’t let myself break-down just yet. Not until I saw with my own eyes that Lauren was dead. I wouldn’t give up on her until I was absolutely sure. My sister deserved my hope. And I deserved it too.

  Marko handed me an envelope which I knew contained my eTicket that he’d arranged and had printed, along with various forms of fake ID he’d managed to organise for me.

  “Wow. You really do know the right people,” I said as he wrapped his arms around me from behind, allowing me to rest my weight into his strong embrace.

  “We Tollins’ have connections,” he said, smiling at my reflection in the mirror. “Now open the envelope.”

  I tore the seal open with my thumb and spied an eTicket among other papers and cards. I spun around in Marko’s arms.

  “I’m Nada Jir-a-vic. Jiravic? Am I even saying it right?” I tried the name again.

  Marko grinned when I finally got it right. “It was my grandmother’s maiden name.”

  I stood on my toes and planted a soft kiss on Marko’s lips. “I love it. It’ll make it feel like you’re there with me.”

  “There are other forms of ID in the travel wallet, just in case the police become suspicious and you need to switch. And I’ve booked three return tickets for tomorrow. Two of which are booked under the other false names I’ve provided, again, just in case. Everything you need is there, along with credit cards, which are in my name.” He shrugged. “There are only so many strings I can pull in twenty-four hours, and credit cards with your fake identity on them wasn’t possible.”

  He sighed and tucked a stray strand of hair behind my ear. “You’ve also enough money in that envelope to last you well over a week, but let’s hope you can return on the next day flight, with good news.”

  I nodded.

  We stepped outside, the screen door banging shut behind us, and I paused to take in the breathtaking view before me.

  The ocean shimmered beneath the setting sun. It looked golden, glittery and magical. Marko came behind me and put his arms around my waist.

  “There are some who look to the ocean for omens. Sailors, pirates and such.”

  The water continued to shimmer beneath the blazing sun, painting me a picture of hope.

  “If that’s true, then Lauren must be okay. And her baby must be too.”

  Marko tightened his arms around me and then rested his chin on my shoulder.

  We both watched until the sun disappeared behind the ocean, leaving it black and devoid of promise. The sudden darkness made me shiver and I turned away, burying myself against Marko’s chest, whispering over and over again, “Please be alive, Lauren, please, please, be alive.”

  * * *

  The public phone at the airport was the first place I headed after I landed in Sydney. There was no way I was going to use my own phone. I figured I’d try the anonymous phone-call first up, to suss out whether or not people could just walk into a police station and ask to see a dead body, or at least photos of the dead, for identification purposes. I found myself wishing I’d watched more episodes of Criminal Minds with Nana and Pop. Maybe I’d have learned something useful.

  With shaking fingers, I dialled the number, the one they’d included in the newspaper article for people wanting to come forward with any information on missing persons who may fit the victim’s description.

  After being switched around and put through to the reception of three different stations, I finally ended up on the phone with a lady who had a soft, breathy voice, the kind of understanding voice that makes you want to blubber up and cry to, but I swallowed down my tears and explained how my friend had been missing for a while and that she owned a bracelet just like the one on her ankle and that it had “Lauren” engraved on it.

  The woman’s voice got all high-pitched and extra breathy and she quickly transferred me to another number. I hated the excitement in her voice because it meant the bracelet on the body must have had my sister’s name engraved on it.

  “Detective Graham Lewis, speaking.”

  I nearly lost my nerve. He sounded so sharp and controlled, like it would take him half a second to see through my home dye kit. But I just couldn’t leave Sydney without knowing, so I repeated what I’d said to the Marilyn Monroe lady and waited for him to respond.

  “Can you come into the station, with photo ID?” he snapped back after a short pause and some tapping of computer keys I could hear down the phone line.

  Hoping that the ‘people’ Marko had paid to create my fake ID were good at their handiwork, I quickly said, “Yes. ID. I’ve got it.” I sounded like a dork. But I was just so nervous.

  “How soon can you come in? We have several people wanting to identify the victim.”

  Victim. I closed my eyes and tried to block out visions of slashed legs. Though I knew he was a monster, surely Damir wouldn’t do that to Lauren. Even though I hated the guy’s guts, I couldn’t forget the way he had kissed and touched my sister, with such tenderness, and how he’d looked at her as though she was the sun that orbited his earth.

  How could he have done this to her? Had something gone wrong? Had she lost the baby? I always thought Sylvia would be more of a threat to Lauren, but the slashed legs spoke of Damir loud and clear. It was all so confusing I just couldn’t wrap my head around it.

  “I’ll get there as soon as I can. Right now, I mean. However long it takes from the airport.” Inwardly cursing myself for giving away the fact that I’d flown over, I jotted down the address, my writing barely legible because of my shaking hands, and practically ran out of the airport through the automatic sliding doors.

  A long line of white taxis waited, tapping their steering wheels in boredom.

  The smiling driver of the first taxi I approached raised his brows when I asked him to take me to the police station. He didn’t smile or say much after that and I was glad for it. I couldn’t be bothered making idle chit-chat when I was about to find out whether my sister was dead or alive.

  I closed my eyes as buildings whipped past me, and tried to get a feel for my sister. After my parents had died, I’d spent about six months reading up on life after death and near-death experiences. Most of the books advised the reader to take several deep breaths, clear their mind, and think of their departed loved one, concentrating on the messages or vibrations they were receiving.

  But I couldn’t feel any vibes from my sister at all, good or bad, dead or alive. So I tried my parents.

  Mum and Dad, if Lauren is still alive, give me a sign, please. Show me something that will make me believe it.

  Butterfly wings tickled the edges of my stomach as I opened my eyes and looked around. Nothing happened. The driver turned the radio up but it wasn’t a song I recognised. So that was that.

  Panic made my heart race and my palms clammy. I don’t know what kind of sign I’d been expecting but I suddenly wasn’t sure I could feel Lauren’s presence on earth anymore at all. And now I wasn’t sure that I wanted to see her body.

  Sweat dampened my brow and upper lip and it seemed as though my lungs couldn’t get enough air. I felt all the blood drain from my face and had the sudden urge to be sick.

  The driver took one look at me in his rear-view mirror, which had a plastic, mooning Bart Simpson dangling from it, and slammed the brakes. My body jerked forward and my h
ead hit the back of the passenger seat because the seatbelt was obviously dodgy. I would have complained if I wasn’t about to be thrown out of a taxi in the middle of God knows where.

  He swerved into a bus lane littered with a couple of hamburger boxes and drew to a stop.

  At least the urge to be sick was gone.

  “Get out. It costs me good money to get the stink of vomit out of my seats.”

  He got out of the car and stormed around to my side and yanked opened my door. “I don’t drive druggies or drunks, okay? You can walk the rest of the way.” Before I could reach for it myself, he grabbed my bag and threw it on the pavement.

  People walking down the street slowed their gait to stare. A middle aged woman peered at me through a salon window, frowning, her hair decorated with foils. But she, along with the others who had stopped to stare, turned away after I got out.

  I picked up my bag and dusted it down.

  “I’m not a druggy or a drunk,” I muttered beneath my breath while I took in my surroundings, wondering if the police station was close by. At least there were plenty of shops, where I could maybe ask for directions.

  The man snorted. “I’ve heard that too many times to count.”

  Ignoring him, I took out a mini juice container I’d saved from the plane and peeled it open to drink. I needed something to wash away the bitter bile that had crept up my throat.

  “Keep walking that way, for about half a kilometre and you’ll find the police station,” said the driver, his dark eyes shiny with a sudden attack of remorse. He lit up a cigarette and watched me ditch the empty juice container into a nearby bin.

  I rifled through my pack for the envelope which had all my ID and money in it. When I tried to pay him he waved my note away.

  “Ah, keep it. You look like you might need it.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “Just don’t spend it on drugs, okay?”

  Not bothering to argue once again that I wasn’t on drugs, I walked in the direction the taxi driver had motioned towards, not looking back once, and soon came upon a block of ugly, grey buildings, one of them clearly marked with a blue and white chequered police sign.

  When I walked inside, I balked at the size of the police dog sitting beside the receptionist’s desk. He was huge, double the size of me. The love child of a German shepherd and a grizzly bear.

  “He’s big isn’t he?” a large woman with bright blue eyes at the desk said over the hum of the air-conditioning, her voice breathy and sweet like the woman I’d spoken to on the telephone. “But he’s harmless. His name’s Harry. You can pat him. His fur is soft.”

  Normally I would because I loved dogs, but I was so jittery from being inside a police station with fake ID that I feared the dog would somehow know I was phoney and bite my hand off.

  “I’m good, thanks.”

  With a flourish of her hand, she gestured towards a row of seats, some already occupied. There was a guy with long, greasy blond hair jiggling his knee so fast it was practically blurry, a woman and her sleeping toddler, and a middle aged couple with extremely red eyes who kept dabbing at their damp faces with crumpled tissues.

  The first thought that came to my head was that the victim was their daughter and that maybe they’d already identified her. It was a selfish thought, but one that I couldn’t help but hope was true.

  The woman at the front desk cleared her throat, smiled at me and said, “Detective Lewis will see you now. He’s coming to show you to his office.” My identification of the bracelet over the phone had obviously bumped me up in the queue.

  A man with kind, grey eyes poked his head around reception. When I stood up he shook my hand. He seemed warm and friendly, almost grandfatherly, his appearance in no way matching his stern, phone voice, though I did notice his gaze briefly flicker to my hair.

  I tried my best to not show my nerves by scrunching my trembling hands into fists and tucking them behind my back before following the man into a small room.

  “So what’s your missing friend’s name?” His grey eyes shifted from my hair and back to my face again as he took a seat behind his cluttered black desk, in a squeaky chair that swivelled. Now he was making me paranoid I’d missed a spot.

  I sat down in a hard plastic chair on the other side of the desk. It looked like an interrogation chair and had scratch marks running along the arms. I hadn’t thought of a fake name for Lauren. My eyes scanned the room. There were two tatty looking magazines balancing on the edge of another chair in the far corner of the room. Geoffrey Rush raised his brows at me from one of the covers—a film mag.

  “Lauren Rush,” I blurted, feeling prickly heat creep into my cheeks. I’d never been a great liar. My dad had always told me that my every thought showed on my face. I’m pretty sure Marko had once said the same thing.

  He frowned. “Haven’t heard of a Lauren Rush reported missing from WA and I spend most of my time combing through the missing persons list from all over Australia. You’re from WA, aren’t you?” He narrowed his gaze and my heart started going crazy.

  I dug into my backpack and handed over my ID, with trembling fingers, once again praying Marko’s people were good at their job. Though I’d spent most of the flight memorising my fake details, right now I was drawing a blank. Was the fake me from WA?

  The detective looked at my fake license, glanced up at me, his eyes drifting to my hair again, then took out my faux passport and did the same all over again.

  “Why do you think this body, this individual, is your friend? Is it just the anklet, or do you have other information, vital information about what may have happened to her, Nadia?”

  He’d mispronounced my fake name, but my lips and throat failed to function when I tried to correct him, causing me to groan instead of speak. My entire body began to tremble as though I had a chill.

  Just let me see her already.

  After a long pause, he stared at me, his eyes soft with sympathy and said, as though he could read my mind, “I can’t actually let you see her, but I can show you photos.”

  His fingers and thumbs worked the keyboard in that odd, clunky way that men type. Nothing at all like my mother’s style of typing. Her fingers used to literally dance across the keys.

  He clicked the mouse and stood up. “You must understand that she was in the water for some days and her face is bloated and distorted. You may not recognise her.”

  “I’d recognise her anywhere,” I said, my voice shaky. Now I wished Marko had come so that I could reach out and squeeze his hand.

  Another officer stepped in, a red-haired guy in his thirties. The detective handed him my licence and passport. I watched a lengthy, whispered exchange between the two officers and had to stop myself from leaping over the desk to snatch my stuff back.

  “Just for photocopies,” the younger officer said, smiling. But I could tell his smile was false and that he was taking my stuff to analyse how fake it was.

  Oh God. What if they kept me behind for questioning? Or arrested me for having fake ID? What if they found out my true identity? Then again, if the body turned out to be Lauren, I’d have to fess up anyway. Damir couldn’t keep murdering women like this. It had to stop. Even if it meant telling the world that Marin, the underwater city, existed.

  “When Officer Dereck returns with your ID, I’ll have you come around the desk and take a look at the images,” he said, folding his hands and resting them on the desk so that he leant forward, like a human barricade, keeping me from the photos of the dead girl.

  He was too close for comfort, even with the desk between us. I could smell coffee and cigarettes on his breath.

  Again, like in the taxi, I felt completely claustrophobic, as though I had no air. A wave of nausea struck and I shuffled my chair back, away from the desk, away from the man’s intrusion, and instead busied my trembling hands with the zipper on my bag, concentrating on regulating my breathing until it felt as though at least twenty minutes had passed. But when I looked at the round silver clock on the wa
ll, I saw that only five minutes had passed at most.

  “I’ll just check on Officer Dereck and see what the problem is,” said the detective. The chair squeaked when he stood and I watched him, my pulse thudding loudly in my ears as he turned left and whistled down the corridor.

  Unable to believe my luck, I got up and stood in the corridor and watched him turn again until he disappeared from view. Wherever he was going, I’d have at least thirty seconds to take a quick peek at the photos.

  I whispered a little thank you to my parents, or even the universe, whomever or whatever was looking out for me, before rushing back into the man’s office.

  But my legs froze halfway across the small room.

  There, behind the desk, in the detective’s leather chair, sat the bear-dog—huge, brown and black, with eyes the size of fifty cent pieces trained on me. With Harry on patrol, no wonder the detective had left the office without a care.

  “Hey, Harry,” I said, in the calmest voice I could manage in front of an animal twice the size of me. “I just need to see some photos on that computer there.”

  With my heart hammering my ribcage, I took a single step towards the desk. The dog didn’t move, but he didn’t take his eyes off me either.

  Progress.

  “It’s okay. It’s okay,” I said over and over again as I reached for the mouse, which was at the very edge of the desk.

  Sweat beaded down my temples and for a second I wondered how a person who didn’t love dogs would stomach this situation.

  My hand curled over the mouse and I swivelled it over the mouse-pad until the screen came to life, before yanking my hand back super-fast.

  Instead of the vicious biting that I imagined, the dog threw back his head and started barking, each bark making me wince and jump at the same time.

  There was no time to shush him. Instead I took a deep breath and edged closer to the desk until I could see the photos on the screen.

  My heart stopped at what I saw.