Crystal Coffin (7 page)

‘Bloody tourists!' Scotty Nolan shouted, jumping out of the way. He stood beside the industrial rubbish bin, punching his fist in the air. ‘You nearly hit me, you dumb runt!'

But then he realised that was no tourist. He'd seen that Mercedes before.

Detective Burkett imitated the gesture of a wanker under his desk, while Sergeant Underwood continued to prattle. He'd been going on for half an hour and still managed to avoid explaining how the Dumakis girl had escaped his custody.

Burkett already knew the layout of the murder scene. He'd been to the Dumakis-Fletcher mansion at Lavender Bay four times earlier that month, but that was over a matter of stolen paintings. No apparent connection. Aaron Fletcher was the victim's second husband and he'd been chasing a police report so he could process an insurance claim for their little art gallery while his wife had been away on business in her role as Minister for the Arts.

Now the woman was dead, her left lung speared through with the crystal spire of an ornamental church and her bleeding body left to die on the living-room rug like a Pro Hart tomato sauce painting from a carpet commercial.

‘So where's the girl?' Burkett asked again and Underwood wiped his forehead dry with the back of his hand.

‘It's complicated, sir,' he stalled and Burkett fought the impulse to roll his eyes. Outside, he could hear hookers. Noisy. Laughing. Most of them still high.

‘Ooh, yeah. Work it for me baby,' Burkett heard one say, then he realised she was talking about the truncheon that was hustling her towards the lockup.

They all laughed at that, even a few cops, but Burkett's forehead flattened into a frown for the endless loop that many of their lives had fallen into. Nothing seemed to change. They were always prosecuting the drunks and never the slack publicans. Always the hookers, never the pimps. Pushers, not traffickers. Car thieves, not ring leaders. Always the little people and never the brains.

Burkett wished he could change that. That's what the job was supposed to be about, he thought, making a difference. But most of the time it just bogged down in paperwork.

Burkett saw a balding detective from the Central Investigation Bureau walking down the hall beside his lieutenant and realised that it could have been worse if he'd taken a job at CIB. At least at Sydney HQ he got to wear a Kevlar vest and carry a sidearm for more than just decoration. CIB detectives, from what he'd seen, could be safe behind plastic lunch-wrap for all the dirty work they did. What they all needed, he realised, was someone who had some real power to take action. But what he didn't know was that he was looking at him.

Senior Detective Parry came in with his belly hanging out of his dark suit and nodding with a stern look on his face while Lieutenant Charlston introduced them.

‘So you're the hotshot,' Parry said, shaking hands with Burkett. ‘Gold medallist in the Queens Shoot, two service medals for bravery and an arrest record longer than a hooker's client list.'

‘This is him,' Lieutenant Charlston said, slapping Burkett on the back below his blond ponytail. ‘Fan club meets in the lunch room at noon.'

Parry let go of Burkett's hand but held his eyes, wondering if he really was a damn good cop or just a marionette for whichever crime syndicate pulled his strings. It wouldn't be the first time that organised criminals had burned their traitors or rivals to a cop just to get him promoted to a position where they could better use him. And Parry wished he could just ask the kid and get a straight answer. But he knew that wouldn't be smart. Reputable cop or a rogue, Parry wouldn't really be able to tell if Burkett was crooked until he turned his back and got a bullet in it — and he had no intention of doing that.

‘I'll leave you gentlemen to it then,' Lieutenant Charlston said, backing out.

‘Leave us to what?' Burkett asked, holding his hand up to stop Underwood from going too. ‘I'm in the middle of something.'

‘The Dumakis murder,' Parry said. ‘That's why I'm here.' After forty-seven months chasing down a smuggling ring from Sydney to Rome, he'd been kept busier than a pig with two mudholes, but the gruesome murder of the Arts Minister promised to liven things up even more. It almost made him smile — almost. But his smiles were reserved for the rare occasions when he achieved a successful jail conviction after a court hearing, when he could curl up on his dead daughter's oversized beanbag with a solitary glass of scotch and whisper to her photo that he'd bagged another bad guy. But it had been three years, seven months and four days since his last smile, and his wife had given up waiting.

‘I have reason to believe,' he added, guarding his words carefully, ‘that her husband Mr Fletcher may be involved in another case that I'm working on.'

‘The smuggling scandal?' Burkett guessed. ‘I'm surprised politicians haven't been coming out of the woodwork, telling you to go sit in your corner like a good little blue heeler until after the next election. That's what happened to me when I tried to follow up on a few missing paintings from the Dumakis Art Gallery last month.'

‘Who said they haven't?' Parry said. ‘Renée Dumakis was being groomed as the next Prime Minister, and you know politicians. They'd order us to back off a Port Arthur gunman if he was married to someone who could stop them from losing the next election for them. But the lady's dead now, and if you read the papers you know there are plenty of people out there who want to know why.'

‘You don't think that includes her husband?' Underwood asked, tugging his collar away from his thick neck and coughing. ‘I was the one who interviewed him while they were taking her body away and he seemed pretty convincing to me. And let's not forget,' he added, looking at Burkett, ‘that those three paintings they had on loan from the vaults of the Vatican did eventually turn up. They were mistakenly packed into storage by some air-headed artist instead of being shipped off with the rest of the exhibition to the next museum on Mr Fletcher's tour.'

Burkett pushed his fists into his pockets, frowning. He was young, but he wasn't naive. He'd checked that Dumakis Gallery throughly and then the paintings had very conveniently been found the moment he'd started investigating the case as if it was an insurance fraud. That was about the same time that politicians had bolted to the newspapers to shout that Renée Dumakis and her family were ‘clean'.

‘Well,' Parry said, pushing his fists into his pockets to mimic Kalin Burkett. ‘I've just been granted permission straight from Parliament to make sure, and I'm recruiting my friend here with the ponytail to help.'

Oh great, Burkett thought, already imagining himself wrapped up in lunch-wrap. I've been promoted to the plastic police.

Nikki shifted around on the truck seat trying to avoid the jaggard collection of slashes in the sun-ravaged vinyl. The Bedford was fitted with a bench seat, one long innerspring that looked older than the truck itself. The back was split so the driver's could be folded down separately from the rest and every bump in the road reminded her she was sitting beside a stranger.

Jolt. Lurch. Another pothole.

She felt Locklin's weight shift in the seat beside her, felt his body bounce in time with the truck's suspension and she floated on the reverberations like a cork bobbing, on pond ripples.

She tried not to look at him. Instead, she studied his reflection in the dusty glass to her left.

He wasn't like any of the guys she'd known in Sydney — not that she'd dated more than a handful and none of them had lasted more than a term at school anyway. She'd always had her head buried in the art gallery accounts or stuck in assignments to finish her senior year and guys never seemed to appreciate that. Not the ones that she knew. They were all sons of politicians or lawyers or stockbrokers and they got their allowances without having to work for it like she did. They were sweet, considerate and polite when their parents were around and into smokes, booze and shooting up as soon as they turned their backs.

This guy was an alien by comparison. He didn't hide his cigarette packet. He was older. His eyes were colder, grey like steel. And the muscles down his arms looked like they'd been carved out of granite, not pumped up on hormones in a gymnasium.

And she could smell him — salty, like the sands of Bondi on a windy day or the sea foam carried in on the Sydney breeze. She seemed to feel his touch even though he was an arm's length away. And the goosebumps spreading on her skin stood up like tiny soldiers pointing hairs like bayonets and screamed ‘stay away from me'.

Her mutinous eyes refused to pull away from his reflection. She followed the strong line of his jaw and the curve of his lips, and it took her another long moment before she realised that she too was being studied.

His hand shifted the outside mirror on his door until she saw his eyes in it and she stared at him harder, then gave in and looked away.

She endured a heavy silence, but it didn't last long.

‘How old are you?' he asked. ‘Nineteen? Twenty?'

‘Twenty-one,' she lied, preferring to end the conversation. ‘Girls are always twenty-one. Didn't anyone tell you?'

‘Only after the first time,' he said, raising an eyebrow. ‘Have you ever had a first time?'

‘Excuse me,' she said flatly. ‘Do you have any influence whatsoever in who the Maitlands choose to work for them?'

He shook his head, surprised by the change of subject.

‘Are you going to be my supervisor, or do I have to work with you in any way?'

‘Not that I'm aware of,' he said. ‘I don't think so.'

‘Good, then,' she said. ‘Mind your own business.'

He was silent for a second then he looked at her again as she wiped off the sweat that was streaming down her face. ‘So what kind of work are you going to do for Eric Maitland?' he persisted. ‘Secretarial, or are you some kind of model for him to paint?'

Nikki stared out her window without answering. If he wanted the last word, she'd let him have it. She twiddled the charm on her necklace, checking his reflection again in her dusty window.

He was staring at her again with those cold warrior eyes, making her stomach churn. She pushed her finger to her temple to stop it from throbbing in the heat and tried to stare through his reflection to the fleeting farmlands outside.

Eucalypts lined the road like refugees from barren paddocks, stretching their thirsty branches to beg rain from a merciless sky. Her eyes fixed blankly on their tragic parade, and soon Locklin's cold eyes were replaced by the even colder eyes of her stepfather accusing her of murder. She rubbed him from her tired eyes but he was there again in the darkness, clawing at every thought. She needed to scream, to chase him from her head, but the Bedford jolted over corrugations in the road and the ripples through the vinyl reminded her that she wasn't alone.

Instead of screaming, she sat in tortured silence. But it wasn't her silence that distracted Locklin from asking her another question. It was the talisman of an angel that she was wearing around her neck.

The Mercedes turned left at the Warrego crossroads and the stalker stamped the accelerator to the floor. His butt ached for a fast flight home after a night in the rented car, but he had another hour's drive to get to Brisbane airport. Still, he thought, it had been worth it.

There was only one Nikola Renee Dumakis and she was working for him now, whether she wanted to or not. She danced sweetly to his tune even now, when she couldn't hear the music.

Ironic, he thought, that to rid himself of the last heir to the Dumakis fortune he had to first make sure she was safe for a while. But his plan was working. After two years of careful spinning, his four hundred billion dollar web was almost complete, and now, with all his annoying little flies in one place, he could finish what he'd begun.

Aaron Fletcher smiled at that thought. Then he reached for his cell phone and dialled.