Devil's Lair

by Sarah Barrie

  That was satisfying. She silently thanked Paisley for that victory.

  Not ready to go inside, she wandered down the trail to the river and stood, absorbing the sights and sounds of the morning, watching the sun glance off the rippling water as it broke through the mist. Ducks paddled by, dipping their heads in and out of the reeds in search of breakfast. Long willow branches swayed and whispered in a hint of breeze that twirled the mist into pretty spirals.

  A deep sadness welled in Callie’s chest as she allowed her thoughts to return to Paisley, the sister she hadn’t known she’d had, in her life for such a short time. So many emotions swirled inside her. How was she supposed to feel about the woman who’d destroyed so many lives, then died to defend hers? Three days had passed since that terrible night and she still couldn’t decide whether to allow herself to grieve for her or not. But she could grieve Dale now, in a way she hadn’t been able to before. He had loved her, and though his fate had been sealed long before either of them knew it, she could be grateful for the time she’d had with him. And that knowledge brought with it a sense of peace.

  She swiped at her face briskly as twin tears fell. A branch snapped behind her and she spun.

  ‘Only me,’ Connor said, coming down to join her. ‘Was that Indy in the drive?’

  ‘Yeah, just catching me up with a few things. She had to go again.’

  ‘I’ll see her tonight.’ He breathed in deeply, released it slowly. ‘It’s a beautiful morning.’

  She smiled a little wistfully, turned back to the river, and felt his arms come around her from behind. ‘It is.’

  ‘Thinking about Paisley?’

  The tears threatened again. ‘She could have been so much more, Connor. But she never really had a chance, did she? She had a mental illness, but lots of people live with mental illness. The childhood she had—it was so cruel and twisted. A selfish mother, an absent father and a purely evil sociopath who put her in a horrible situation. But again, kids grow up and, somehow, they deal. And she seemed to for so long, didn’t she? All the time she worked with me and Dale, and I never would have guessed what she’d been through.’ She paused. ‘What she was doing.’

  He rested his chin on the top of her head as he stared out over the river with her. ‘We can’t know how much she witnessed, can only imagine the psychological damage that sort of evil could cause to a child. At least Jonah will get some help now, a chance. The foster family seem very nice.’

  ‘They are, and I’ll be keeping in close touch with them. He’s my nephew. I’m going to make sure he gets whatever he needs.’

  ‘It was too late for Paisley, but maybe not for him.’

  ‘I know what she did was terrible, and I don’t think I can ever fully forgive her for letting Adam kill Dale, but I can’t hate her. Is that wrong?’

  ‘No, of course not. Indy thought she was pretending to care about you because she resented you. But she was wrong. Your sister loved you, and in her own twisted way, was protecting you.’

  ‘I know. I hope she’s found peace. Somehow.’

  ‘So do I. I hope they all have.’

  She crouched in front of the memorial stone, where the rosebush flourished with new growth, and touched its cold surface. She’d add a new plaque, for Paisley. After a moment Connor gently pulled her back to her feet and hugged her, then pressed his lips gently to hers.

  ‘So … do I call you Callie or Ava?’

  ‘I haven’t been Ava since I was dropped in the water over there by a sociopath. I’ll stick with Callie.’

  ‘I guess you’ve got a lot to learn about your family.’

  ‘I’m not sure I’m ready to tackle it yet.’

  ‘Understandable. It’s a hell of a lot to take in. Give it time.’

  ‘And Ned, he’d have information, but I’ll never speak to him again. He could have stopped all this. He knew.’

  ‘And Indy’s busily adding whatever she can to his charges.’

  Callie nodded and looked up at the tower of the house, just visible above the trees. ‘What am I going to do with this place? Run it on my own? I don’t think I can.’

  ‘You’re the most incredible person I’ve ever met,’ he told her, his hands sliding up and down her arms affectionately. ‘If anyone can do it on their own, it’s you. But you don’t have to do it solo. Unless you want to.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘It might have slipped your attention,’ he said, turning her to face him, ‘but you have me.’

  Her lips curved up into a warm smile. ‘Do I?’

  ‘I don’t want to pressure you about relationships and the future, not when you’ve just been through all this and when you’re still working out your past. And I know you’re less than keen to think about ever getting married—’

  She stopped him by pressing her lips to his and kissing him until the emotions, good and bad, seeped out of her and were replaced simply with him. ‘Yes,’ she whispered against his lips. ‘When you get around to asking, it’ll be yes.’

  His lips spread into a smile. ‘I’ve been getting around to it long enough. Consider your yes a binding contract.’

  It crossed her mind, as he kissed her again, that there were many kinds of new beginnings, many paths in life that twist and turn and intertwine. She wondered at how many tragic ones could possibly have led her here, on a route to somewhere bright and full of promise.

  ‘Did Indy talk to you about dinner?’ Connor asked when he eventually lifted his head.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And … you actually want to come this time?’

  She bumped him playfully. ‘We’ll see.’

  They started up the trail, hand in hand. And as their words, happy words, loving words, floated away from them, the first delicate petals of a solitary rosebud opened to embrace the new day.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Thank you to my readers, for your constant support and lovely correspondence. Special thanks to Tony Jones, Tangil and Fred Kinch, and Ange D’Bras who assisted with the criminal elements of the story. To my amazing critique partners Tea Cooper and Ann B Harrison, thank you once again for all your hard work. To Kathryn Coughran, who never runs out of time to help, and Shelley Jones for all that extra running around, I couldn’t do it without you. As always, thank you to the whole sensational team at Harlequin. With a special thanks to Jo Mackay and Annabel Blay, to editors Alex Craig and Kylie Mason, and my agent, Clare Forster. And finally thank you to my family, for way too many reasons to list.

  Please enjoy this exclusive extract from

  CHAPTER

  1

  Crack! The explosion of pain radiated from her closed fist to her shoulder, reverberated down her spine. ‘Damn it!’ she hissed from between clenched teeth. Shooting the tattooed teen with the bad attitude would have been overkill, but it would have hurt a lot less than the punch.

  ‘Mummy!’

  Detective Indiana O’Meara swung around, pulling her gun out and settling it into its correct grip as she assessed the scene. Squeezed between a tattered lounge chair and a television cabinet at the far end of the lounge room, Matthew Davies huddled on the floor, tiny arms wrapped around knobbly knees as another perp dragged the boy’s mother towards the shattered, floor-to-ceiling second-storey window.

  Strung out on whatever it was that had him scratching and sweating, the guy holding onto Matthew’s mother was in no rational state of mind. Desperation was pouring from him; his Metallica T-shirt was soaked with sweat. He pulled the near-hysterical young woman more tightly against him, the four-inch-long blade of his pocket knife against her throat.

  Indy flicked a glance to the door. Where the hell was her backup? She’d walked in on the scene accidentally—had stopped by to talk to Sasha Davies, a nineteen-year-old junkie with a murdered boyfriend, and had heard the commotion from the street. She’d called it in before entering the flat to find the two perps messing the place up and terrorising Sasha and her young son.

  Dealers, she’d quickly su
rmised. Sasha must owe them money.

  ‘Let her go,’ Indy ordered, her gaze steady, ‘and we’ll sort this out.’

  ‘You’ll shoot me!’ He dragged Sasha back another step until there was no space for more, and took a nervous glance down. ‘I’ll take her out with me!’

  ‘No! Please!’ Sasha’s voice broke. Tears trickled down her face as she almost collapsed with fear. Indy uselessly willed her to be calm.

  ‘I’m not going to shoot you. I’m putting my gun away. See?’ She made a show of replacing it in the holster. ‘I just want to talk.’

  ‘About what? How you’re gonna lock me up?’

  ‘I’m not interested in you. Not yet. That changes if you make any bad decisions in the next few seconds. Understand?’

  ‘What do you want?’ He swiped at a trickle of perspiration on his face with his shoulder, pressing the knife against Sasha’s throat. Sasha flinched. Indy noted the thin trickle of blood that ran from the blade and her heart rate kicked up another notch.

  ‘I want us all to walk out of here in one piece. I want to know who you’re working for. You let her go, you tell me that, you walk away.’

  His crazed eyes were darting around as though the walls might tell him what to do. ‘I just came to get the money like I was told to.’

  She moved around the room, stepping carefully over the mess the two had made of Sasha’s things, trying to get closer without appearing to.

  ‘Where are you going?’ he demanded, lifting his elbow outwards to make his knife appear more threatening.

  ‘I’m getting out of the way of the door, because you can still leave. I promise you.’

  ‘You swear?’

  ‘I swear.’

  ‘Okay … okay. There’s a guy.’

  ‘What guy?’

  He was shaking, pallid. If he slipped, she was still too far away to help Sasha. ‘Dunno.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Down near the docks—under the Botany Road overpass.’

  She knew that part of Sydney, committed the information to memory. ‘I need a name.’

  ‘I dunno! We pick up the stuff from this guy, pay him cash. Cause we were friends with Chad, he sent us after Sash for what she and Chad owed.’

  The name immediately registered. ‘You’re talking about Chad Garvin, correct? The one found dead in a garbage bag at the dump last week?’

  ‘Yeah—yeah. He said if we mucked him around he’d send Bull after us, too.’

  She inched closer, closer. ‘Who’s Bull?’

  ‘The one that took out Chad.’

  A little closer again. She pushed her luck, took another step. Glass crunched underfoot. ‘When are you supposed to meet the one you deal with?’

  A siren sounded, closed in. His eyes rounded on hers. ‘You lied!’

  ‘I didn’t. I—wait!’

  Panicked, he stepped back into nothing.

  The knife fell from Sasha’s throat as he flung out his arms to reach the wall for balance. Indy lunged, got a hand on Sasha, and twisted and threw what weight she could towards keeping her in the building. The painful, heavy landing on the tiled floor was a relief. There was a scream. When she untangled herself and looked up, he was gone.

  Matthew shot up from his hiding place and threw himself into his mother’s arms, wailing.

  ‘Thank you.’ Sasha’s voice was trembling with emotion. She clung to her son and turned tear-filled eyes up to her. ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you.’

  Indy squeezed Sasha’s arm in reassurance, smoothed a gentle hand over Matthew’s curls. Then she stood up and moved to the broken window. Beneath her the dealer’s body lay staring sightlessly back up at her.

  ‘Damn it!’ she muttered. She’d hoped he might have survived; second-storey falls weren’t always fatal. But he’d landed on concrete, his blood spattering the patio.

  ‘Look out!’ Sasha’s warning had her spinning as the guy she’d thought she’d knocked out launched himself at her. In the scuffle, his forehead crashed against her temple and the smack of his fist into her cheek sent her head reeling, but a well-placed elbow and a strike to the side of the knee dropped him and she got him under her, his hands behind his back, just as the pounding of feet up the stairs told her backup had arrived.

  Senior Constable Patricia Langdon gave Indy a pat on the back. ‘Well done,’ she said, as the surviving perp was assisted from the paddy wagon towards the holding cells of the Sydney police station.

  ‘Thanks, but I don’t feel much like celebrating. I don’t consider it a very good outcome when someone falls out a window.’ She walked into the brightly lit station and down the corridor towards her office.

  Patricia shrugged. ‘A drug dealer took a two-storey dive. You’ll go through the usual rigmarole, debrief. Nothing to worry about.’

  The dead boy’s image flashed into Indy’s mind. The lifeless stare, the blood. For a moment his face blurred into another image; that of her mother and her grandmother, bodies tangled on the kitchen floor with the same, unseeing stare on both their faces. There’d been blood then, too. So much blood. She pulled herself together with difficulty, swallowed back the anger. ‘He had a family. He wasn’t much more than a kid. Someone’s kid, Pat.’

  ‘How’s the mother and the little boy?’

  She took a steadying breath, released it. ‘Together and in one piece. Sasha’s putting herself into rehab.’

  ‘Then there’s your good outcome—focus on that. What’s on tonight?’

  ‘A long soak in a hot bath and an early night.’

  Pat snorted. ‘You’re such a party animal.’

  ‘Hey—the other guy didn’t exactly come quietly.’ She rolled her shoulder and tried to unlock the kink in her neck.

  ‘Indy—got a minute?’ The tall, suited figure of Detective Ben Bowden stood in the doorway of his office.

  ‘Sure, Ben,’ she said, turning to her friend. ‘I’ll see you later, Pat.’

  ‘Enjoy that bath,’ Pat said with a smile as she walked away.

  Ben stepped into the corridor and closed the door. ‘I heard what happened. You okay?’

  She rubbed her temples against the beginnings of a headache as a fluoro light above them flickered, on, off, on, off. ‘Will be. And I’ve got another lead. I was out there to talk to Sasha about her murdered boyfriend, because in her initial statement to police she revealed he’d been dealing for D’Angelo. When I arrived two minor dealers had already been there awhile, messed the place up. They were there to collect the money Sasha had been too scared to pay back in person. The perp that later died told me if he didn’t get the cash, a guy called Bull would come after him, just like he had Chad.’

  ‘I’ll check it out. See if that tag’s come up anywhere.’

  ‘Bull is obviously D’Angelo’s standover man. And I think the skimming story is just an excuse. Chad Garvin is the sixth low-level dealer to be knocked off since the Drug Squad started on the D’Angelo drug investigation. I’m not saying D’Angelo didn’t want his final payment from Sasha and Chad, but Sasha said Chad never skimmed—that he only owed for the last drop-off and would have paid up if he hadn’t been killed. And I don’t think Chad will be the last one to die. Every time it looks like the entire operation is close to being uncovered, we find out D’Angelo has another source, another supplier. Running an operation on that sort of scale, I’ve got to think D’Angelo is going to be a lot more worried about someone talking than losing a couple of grand in drugs money. I suspect he’s getting nervous—ordering Bull to take out any possible leaks because of the pressure we’re putting on him.’

  ‘It’s a plausible theory, but we still don’t have anything solid.’

  Frustration ate at her. ‘We’ve got a shipping merchant with criminal convictions, caught on surveillance more than once associating with a known crime boss. He has contacts with two trucking companies and a freight-forwarding business, all of which are under investigation for smuggling drugs and tobacco through the Sydney docks over a t
hirty-year period. That’s not nothing.’

  ‘We were brought in on this to investigate several murders linked to him, remember? Let the Drug Squad pin the drug-smuggling operation on him.’

  ‘Someone else has got to know about this “Bull”. That sort of business means lots of connections. I’ve just got to find the one that will talk.’

  He sighed and rubbed his fingers over his forehead. ‘I know you’re not going to like this, but unfortunately, that might have to wait.’

  ‘What are you talking about? Why?’

  ‘Something else has come up.’

  The flare of anger wasn’t helped by the headache. ‘Come up? I’m in the middle of a case!’

  Ben held up a hand to silence her, then continued quietly. ‘You need to hear this. This request is urgent, and it’s come from the top.’

  They stepped aside as two officers walked past. ‘Does this involve you, too?’

  ‘If you say yes, it does. You don’t have to do this, Indy.’

  ‘Do what?’

  He paused with his hand on the handle of his office door. ‘We’ve got company.’

  Interest piqued, she stepped into Ben’s office. Almost immediately an amply built man with an expensive suit and a thin covering of salt-and-pepper hair got to his feet and wiped his brow with his handkerchief. His complexion was red, his expression strained.

  ‘Indy, this is Senator Melville, from Canberra,’ Ben said.

  The senator held out a hand in greeting. His palm was damp, the quick shake was agitated. ‘Hello, Detective O’Meara.’

  ‘Senator.’

  ‘Neil, please.’ He sat back down in his chair, his foot jiggling as he crossed one leg over the other.

  Ben moved around the desk and sat down. Indy found a third chair and sat next to the senator, waited.

  ‘Neil is here because of his daughter’s disappearance,’ Ben said.

  ‘Disappearance?’

  Ben handed her a photograph of a young, attractive woman with lots of brown hair and a big smile. ‘Caroline Melville went missing from a backpacking holiday three weeks ago. Despite a thorough investigation, no leads have come to light.’