Heart breaker, p.34
Heart Breaker, page 34
Harmony, though, was different. So different. She was complicated, she was fascinating, she was sexy; in a way, she was easygoing. There was no pressure to talk about their future, no effort to pick out china together. Hell, she still hadn’t gotten around to moving her furniture out of the house at Rodd Point. She was fun, and she was frustrating, and instead of wanting to back away after a one-night sleepover, he wanted to go back to her. Again, and again, and again. He wanted to hold her, be with her.
And she wasn’t a confidential informant on the books. She wasn’t someone in direct contact with the target of their investigation. Still, the censure he’d received when his involvement with Marianne had come to light had been awkward, if not downright painful. Everything he’d said and done with her had been put under a microscope, and he’d had to justify every damn action, every word spoken. It had been hell.
He’d almost been suspended, and it had taken a while to claw back some credibility within the force. He’d had to work harder, longer and better than the rest of his team to try to compensate for his past. He’d held himself, and had been held, to a higher standard. There had been no time, and no inclination, for a relationship ... until Harmony Talbot. He should tell them. He should come clean, and accept any discipline that came his way.
But what if they told him to stop seeing her? Any other woman, and he’d consider it. Harmony, though, made him think of long conversations, family barbecues, and maybe—oh, hell—children. He swallowed. That was a first.
He walked over to Preston and the assistant commissioner, bracing himself.
Preston nodded. ‘How did you go with that drug our killer is using. Flu ... something.’
‘Flumazenil,’ Bern supplied, then shook his head. ‘It’s a bust. NSW Ambulance have done a stocktake, and every vial is accounted for. Chandler Pharmaceuticals, the manufacturer, have strict security measures. They’ve also done a stocktake, and they’re not missing anything, either. I even checked their security logs and their access records. Everything checks out.’
‘So how the hell is he getting his hands on it?’ Spalding muttered. ‘Where is it coming from?’
Bern shook his head. ‘We don’t know yet. I’ve asked NSW Ambulance to check their audit reports and follow up on cases where the drug was administered, but we’re talking about the first choice of treatment for the presentation of a prescribed drug overdose. There are thousands of cases. Chandler are the only manufacturers in Australia, and this isn’t something you can just whip up in a backyard kitchen. I’ve asked Customs to check their records for the last two and half years to track any imports, but so far there haven’t been any into New South Wales. These medicines are transported under strict protocols, and private individuals can’t import it. I’ve checked with all the state hospitals, both private and public, and even their inventory checks out, so I’ve asked for all names of hospital, ambulance and the manufacturer’s staff to be sent through to intel.’ Josh was going to gripe.
Preston sighed. ‘Okay. Well, we’ll just keep checking to see if there are any connections. In the meantime, forensics are finishing up at Richardson’s house, so I want you to start tracking down that meal. Try wedding venues—halls, hotels, restaurants. I’ll put Collins with you. If this guy is living out a wedding fantasy, that meal had to come from somewhere.’
Bern nodded, then raised his eyebrows. ‘Is that it, sir?’
Spalding frowned. ‘Should there be more? I know cold calls to wedding venues aren’t glamorous, but it’s part of the job, Knight.’
‘No, that’s fine, I just thought—’ Bern shook his head. ‘Never mind. Collins and I will get right on it.’ Yeah, he’d tell them about Harmony another time.
He walked back to his desk, but stopped when Duncan McCormack called out to him.
‘How are you doing?’ his friend asked.
Bern gestured to the room at large. ‘It’s a big case, Dunc. This is like nothing I’ve ever seen before.’
Duncan nodded. ‘How are you coping with it?’ Bern knew his friend wasn’t just making conversation. Always the shrink.
‘The case? Well, I won’t deny it, there are some things that are hard to shake in this one.’ Those women ... god. He knew a lot of the officers working on the case would be affected by it, by what had been done to those women.
‘Are you getting some down time? How many hours are you putting in?’
Bern smiled, grateful for his friend’s concern for his well-being. ‘I’m okay. When we catch this guy, I’ll be much better.’
‘And if we don’t?’ Duncan asked, his head tilted to the side. ‘I spoke with your mother a few days ago. She says she hasn’t heard from you in a while.’
Bern frowned. ‘When were you talking to my mother?’
‘When she came over to my place to tell me she hadn’t heard from you in a while, and asked me to check on you.’
He pursed his lips. This case was all over the news, and his mother knew he wouldn’t discuss it with her, but she must have guessed Duncan would be called in. As a counsellor, his mother knew that different approaches were needed for different people. If she’d asked him directly, he would have lied, and they would have both known it. This way, he could actually talk. The wily woman was managing him. And he loved her for it.
‘Ah, and I thought you were just being a good friend,’ Bern sighed.
‘Call your mother, Bern. She’s invited me over for Sunday lunch, and I don’t want to go and face her unless you’ve spoken with her and I know my job is done. Otherwise I’ll feel guilty, and you know I can’t eat on a guilty stomach.’
‘I’ve never noticed that stopping you before.’
Duncan sighed. ‘Well, I do my best to hide it. Come on, she’s cooking a lamb roast. Call her when you get home tonight.’
‘That’s if he ever gets home,’ Josh whispered as he walked past on his way to the printer. He patted Duncan on the shoulder as he passed. ‘Good to see you again, Duncan.’
Duncan raised an eyebrow, a smile lifting his lips as Bern shot a glare at his so-called friend’s back. There were times when he regretted introducing these guys to each other. ‘Oh, Bernie boy. Are you sleeping over somewhere?’
‘Sort of. Mac’s staying at my place for a while.’
Duncan grimaced. ‘Good grief. Does he still snore? I still have nightmares about that camping trip with your family. Sleep deprivation is the worst.’
Duncan grew up with three sisters, so would hang out at the Knight home at every opportunity for some ‘testosterone time’, as he’d called it. He was around so much Bern’s parents pseudo-adopted him, to the point he accompanied them on family holidays.
Duncan started counting off on his fingers. ‘One, why is he at your place? Two, if it’s a problem, why are you the one staying somewhere else and not in your home, and three, where are you staying and what’s her name?’
‘Who says there’s a her?’
Duncan gave a derisive snort. ‘When is there not? Come on, who is she?’
Bern glanced around. ‘Not here. I’ll tell you later.’
‘Great. You can tell me Sunday at your mum and dad’s,’ Duncan said, hefting his laptop bag onto his shoulder. ‘Or you could bring ... her.’
‘Bring who where?’ Josh asked as he approached them.
‘Bern can bring his lady friend to his parents’ place for Sunday lunch. Are you going to be there?’
Josh grimaced. ‘Probably not. My house is up for auction on the Saturday.’
‘How is that going?’ Duncan inquired.
‘It’s gone. This is the final nail in the coffin. Divorce was done and dusted a while ago, we’re just finalising the property settlement now.’
‘Sounds like we need a debrief at the pub.’
Josh grinned. ‘Count me in.’
Duncan nodded, then looked at Bern. ‘Feel free to join us, buddy, if your new missus lets you out.’ He laughed at Bern’s droll look. ‘I’ll tell your mother to expect you on Sunday.’
Bern shot Josh an exasperated look. ‘I thought we were going to keep this between you and me,’ he muttered.
Josh nodded. ‘Of course. Duncan doesn’t count, though, he’s a psychologist.’
‘How does that work?’
‘Well, he’s kind of like a priest. You know, confidentiality and all that.’
Bern rolled his eyes. ‘Confidentiality only extends to his patients, not his mates, and with his social life, there is no way he’s anything remotely like a priest.’
‘Close enough.’
‘Well, from now on, let’s just keep my personal life between us.’
‘Sure. Nobody else.’ Josh started to walk away, then snapped his fingers as though he’d remembered something. ‘You might want to tell Mac that.’
Bern’s shoulders sagged. ‘Why?’
‘I’m not the one having a giggle over the phone about it with your brother and sisters.’
Bern swore. Damn it. If Mac was talking, that meant Fianna would be paying him a visit, probably with Laney in tow. His sisters could be incredibly nosey ... and bossy. Well, forewarned is ... he noticed the papers in his friend’s hands. ‘What’s that?’
‘Oh, a cold case. You asked the uniforms to do a doorknock through Richardson’s neighbourhood. We got sightings of a white van, so one of the traffic guys is going through the street cams. We’re also scanning footage from the scrapyard employee’s home to his crime scene. Do you have any idea how many white vans there are in Western Sydney on any given day? My eyes are blurry. My guy’s grabbing licence plate numbers and we’ll cross-reference names with our ever exploding pool of intel.’
‘What’s the case about?’ Bern asked, lifting his chin in the direction of the sheets in Josh’s hand.
‘I got to wondering—what if Jane Doe Number Eight isn’t the first victim? She might just be the first one stored in the scrapyard. So Becker and I did a search, and we’ve found an unsolved murder up in Cessnock. It doesn’t fit with all the elements of our guy, but it’s close.’
‘Like how?’ Bern’s eyes narrowed with curiosity.
‘A waitress was found murdered in her home nearly two and a half years ago. She was cut up pretty badly around the face, and she had four stab wounds in her torso. No rose, no special meal, from what I can see, and I’m not sure if it’s the same kind of weapon, but the cuts and torso wounds popped in our search.’
‘Any suspects?’
‘Well, she had a few ex-boyfriends, and each of them were questioned, but all of them had an alibi for the weekend she was killed.’
‘He left her in her home?’
‘Yeah. She’d apparently just broken up with one of those boyfriends, and the ex dropped around to try to patch things up. Found her on the bed, lying on top of drop sheets that he’d stored there. He’s a painter. Looks like he interrupted something, maybe.’
‘Hmm, interesting.’
‘That’s what I thought. I’m ringing the Cessnock station now to talk to the detective in charge of the case. What are you up to?’
‘Calling wedding venues for menus.’
Josh made a face. ‘Better you than me. You might want to expand it from Sydney to the Central Coast and the Hunter Valley, just in case this waitress is somehow connected.’ Josh gave him a sympathetic look and made his way back to his desk.
Bern sighed as he made his way back to his desk, and Collins looked up in curiosity.
‘Problem?’
‘Not really, just expanding our search criteria. Let’s start making those calls.’ He sagged into his seat and tapped up a browser. He swore at the number of results when he did a cursory search for wedding venues in the Hunter Valley while Collins looked up Sydney. They both sat back for a moment, then glanced at each other. Collins made a face, and Bern shrugged, then they both leaned over to pick up the handsets for their phones. Spalding was right. This part of the job wasn’t glamorous.
‘Damn you,’ Joe exclaimed, and Harmony’s eyebrows rose as she walked into the lair. It was half-past five, and most of the staff had cleared out for the day, including Smiley.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘We have a hot one. Gary Forrester. No matching records in the births, deaths and marriages database. I’ve checked against the high school student records, and there’s no listing for a Gary Forrester, even if I’m generous and give five years either side of the year he says he graduated. No record of him attending UTS, like he says.’
Harmony nodded as she slipped her glasses on to look at his screen. ‘Okay, so what’s the problem?’
‘I can’t track him. The IP is jumping all over the globe.’
Harmony stared at the screen, quickly scrolling through the data. ‘Is he online now?’
‘Yes.’
‘Scoot over.’ She rolled Joe’s seat out of the way and took over his keyboard. ‘He’s being ultra-careful now, after the raid. He’s masking his tracks, probably with a Tor browser, the clever little bastard.’
Tor software bounced communications around the world through a network of proxy servers. She’d used it herself, on occasion, particularly with some of the catfish scams she’d worked on. It enabled the user to disguise their IP address, linking to one, then another, and so on, until it revealed an IP address somewhere on the other side of the world that had nothing to do with the genuine location of the user. It made the user’s address virtually undetectable.
Unless you knew how to hack it.
Fingers trembling, she quickly wrote some JavaScript and embedded it into a post. She then loaded it up on her blog. She wiped her hands on her navy trousers. Oh, heck, her palms were sweaty. She could feel the familiar coil of tension gripping her gut, the lump forming in her throat.
She clasped her hands together, watching the screen. ‘Come on, come on,’ she murmured.
Joe sat frozen in his seat, watching the screen over her shoulder. ‘I think I need to pee,’ he whispered.
‘Shh.’ She didn’t want to be distracted by Joe’s chatty discourse on bodily functions, even if she could sympathise. She stared intently at the cursor, the knots in her stomach tightening ...
And then data started to stream rapidly down the screen.
She sagged against Joe, gazing in disbelief. ‘Oh. My. God.’
‘It worked,’ he gasped, and they looked at each other, eyes wide. Then they were both jumping to keyboards as the shock gave way to action, and they started tracing Gary Forrester’s IP address.
‘Macquarie Perk Cafe,’ Joe stated, his hands rising to his head as he stood. ‘He’s at Macquarie Perk Cafe.’
‘That’s only about fifteen minutes away,’ Harmony said, collecting a spare laptop as she hurried to the door.
‘Wait—where are you going?’
‘I’m going to check it out. We don’t want to spook him like the cops did with the raid. This time we’re going to catch this guy.’
‘Harm—’ Joe exclaimed, and she held up a hand in an effort to calm his fears.
‘When I say we, I’m not talking about me, personally. I’m going to see if we can get a clue as to his real identity. I’m not going to approach, Joe. Just watch.’
‘Harm—’ Joe called, and she could hear the concern, the worry in his voice.
‘Don’t worry, Joe, I’ll call you once I get there, and have you on the phone the whole time, okay?’
She jogged out the door, not waiting for his answer, and Joe subsided into his seat.
He rubbed his stomach. ‘Oh, crap. Now I really need to pee.’
CHAPTER
29
Harmony pulled the cap down low over her forehead, tucking a stray curl behind her ear. She’d pulled her hair back into a braid, and wore dark sunglasses as she casually strode into the corner cafe. She quickly slid into a booth, her back to the wall as she surveyed the interior.
The place was full of students and business geeks. The cafe was located not too far from Macquarie University, and there were several software companies just a little further down the road in North Ryde. The cafe offered a free Wi-Fi hotspot, so she could understand its popularity. She placed the laptop on the table and opened it, powering it up.
There were more people in here than she’d expected, though. Finding out which individual was currently posing online as Gary Forrester was going to be a challenge, short of going up and peering at each person’s screen—not the unobtrusive approach she was looking for. She pulled out her phone as a waitress strolled up to the table.
‘Good evening. Can I get you anything?’ the young woman inquired politely. She looked like a part-time uni student.
‘Ah, yes, thanks,’ Harmony said, quickly surveying the menu on the board behind the cashier, and then ordered a large flat white and some banana bread, asking for it to be served as a takeaway, just in case she had to move. Anything to give her a reason to sit for a bit without being interrupted.
‘Are you expecting anyone?’
Harmony shook her head as she turned her attention to the screen in front of her, and the waitress left her to her work. She pulled her phone out of her pocket and connected her earpods and mic, then quickly dialled Joe’s number. She placed the phone on the table next to the laptop.
‘Thank god,’ Joe muttered in greeting.
‘Is he still on?’ she asked quietly, glancing casually around the cafe.
‘No. He disconnected six minutes ago.’
Her jaw dropped, and she blinked. ‘No,’ she wailed softly in disbelief. No, damn it, they were so close. She touched her fingers to her forehead. No, no, no. Defeat, bitter and burning, rose in her throat, and as if on cue, the phone beeped in her ear. Her mother was calling.
‘No.’ She shook her head resolutely, and moved the corded mic closer to her mouth, ignoring the second call alert. ‘Six minutes, you say? He would have had to pack up his gear, pay at the counter, wander out to his car in the car park ... He’s not far.’
