Gladiatrix (6 page)

Cooper tried a few more screens. ‘Nope,' he shook his head. ‘I was afraid of that. This case is one of our paper files still waiting in Parramatta to be put onto the database.'

Des took that personally. ‘What!'

‘Central Command wants all files on computer asap, and we had to send anything older than ten years in to be processed. I'm sorry, Des, but if you could go over the details with me?'

Des was disgusted but too eager to get things moving to let the filing situation rattle him. ‘Okay,' he said. ‘Twenty years ago, Kannon was brought into Lithgow Hospital by a bushwalker from Kanangra-Boyd National Park …'

Cooper looked at me. ‘So you'd have been … how old?'

‘The hospital staff thought I was between two and three. Probably closer to two.'

Cooper's eyebrows shot up.

‘No,' I answered his unspoken question, ‘I was never identified. I still don't know my background.'

‘She'd been left to die,' said Des. ‘The bushwalker resuscitated her and brought her here.'

‘The bushwalker?' Cooper found a laminated map of the park and spread it across the desk. ‘Now where exactly was she found?'

We both knew why Cooper was asking. He'd automatically assume whoever found me in the middle of a wilderness area would've been involved somehow. Which is what everyone had assumed at the start. Yuki'd had to run the gamut of police questioning.

We all stood and bent over the map. Kanangra-Boyd National Park is about eighteen miles south of Lithgow and spread over 168,000 acres of mountains, gorges and wilderness. The place is full of limestone deposits, which means caves. Lots of caves.

‘You see here.' Des ran his finger along the map. ‘That's the main road that runs up from the Jenolan Caves, along the Boyd Plateau and into the centre of the park.' He tapped the very end of the road. ‘Here's the set of cliffs known as The Walls.' He checked Cooper's face. ‘Do you know the area at all?'

Cooper said, without apology, ‘I've been to the Kanangra Walls and looked at the view across to Mt Cloudmaker like everyone else. But that's about it.'

Des was puzzled, as though he was trying to work out why you wouldn't spend every spare minute ‘out there' in the bush. He shut that expression down, and said, ‘You know the car park at the very end of the road, just before all the walking trails start?' Cooper nodded. ‘You take the walking track from there and turn immediately right, across the front of the Dance Floor cave …'

‘That's where they used to hold the …'

‘Yep,' Des nodded, ‘that cave is on an old stock route and the settlers used to meet there. Kannon was found about ten minutes' hike further down.' He tapped the place, ‘Here.'

‘Okay. What about the bushwalker? How did they check out?'

‘Look,' Des showed him the position of the cave again. ‘Kannon wasn't found in the middle of nowhere. It's close enough to the car park for anyone to come in by car, and carry her down there. And it was a weekday in the middle of winter, so there was hardly anyone around. The woman who found her was a Japanese tourist. She'd just arrived, and was doing the sights. No possible connection there.'

Cooper pursed his lips. ‘A little unusual for a Japanese woman to be off by herself? Even that close to the road.' He wasn't buying it. ‘Most of them seem convinced they're going to be attacked by snakes. What was she doing in that particular cave anyway?'

Des and I exchanged a glance. Yuki had no fear. One look from her and the snake would've turned tail.

‘The Japanese tourist checked out okay,' Des snapped. ‘Believe me, I know. She was trying to find
some cave paintings. They were actually in the next cave down.'

‘Okay, okay.' Cooper wasn't convinced, but said, ‘Well, what other leads did you follow up?'

We all sat down again.

‘That was the big problem. We had a child too ill to speak, and no physical evidence that took us anywhere useful. The cave floor had been swept clean with a tree branch. So there were no tracks. And whoever did that job knew what they were doing. The rope and wire used to bind Kannon were generic. And no-one had seen anyone near the cave. So no witnesses.' He shrugged. ‘In the end, all we could do was use the media to circulate Kannon's photo and her story. But no-one of use ever came forward.'

Des leant forward, face bright. ‘But I now have an explanation for why this was the case.' He slapped his thigh, a little too pleased with himself.

Cooper scanned his face with sharp eyes, saying, in a carefully neutral voice, ‘So you have a whole new theory? From this new … er … information you've found?'

I didn't like his tone. He was drawing back from Des already.

‘Yes.' Des pulled out the photo of me and laid it in front of Cooper. ‘This is Kannon the day she was brought in.' He put the photo of Celeste with her dog, next to it. ‘This is Celeste Dupree, a girl kidnapped two weeks before Kannon was found. She's never been found.'

‘Yes.' Cooper picked up both pictures and considered them. ‘I see what you mean. They do look very similar.' He put the photos down. ‘But why does a possible connection to this other girl's kidnapping explain why there were no leads to follow?'

Here was the big leap.

‘Well, no leads here, anyway,' Des qualified. ‘Celeste was kidnapped in the USA. In San Francisco.'

‘San Francisco?' Cooper's expression was pained. ‘And why exactly was Celeste brought to Kanangra-Boyd National Park?'

Des said gingerly, ‘That we don't know. That's why we're here. We need your help to find out more about the Dupree case. Who would've wanted to bring her to Australia, and why.'

Cooper picked the problem immediately, ‘Just to put her in a cave to die?'

‘Look,' I said with exasperation. ‘We know it seems a long shot. That all we have is a facial similarity, and a crossover in timing. But this could also explain why no-one's ever identified me.'

Cooper ignored me to ask Des, ‘So what else can you tell me about the Dupree girl? How did you come across her?'

Des didn't answer. At that moment we both realised how this was going to sound. We should've thought it out more first, come up with a better story. Instead we'd rushed in like amateurs.

Cooper saw the indecision in our faces. He didn't like it.

I jumped in, ‘Celeste Dupree is the daughter of Marshal Victoria Dupree, an NTA marshal. We heard about her kidnapping through a US news program broadcast yesterday.'

Cooper looked embarrassed for us both. I could just imagine what he saw. An old copper desperate to solve his last case before he dies, and a young woman searching for a happy ending to her violent past. And the solution? I'm the long-lost daughter of a US Time Marshal.

Wish fulfilment. It sounded like pure wish fulfilment.

I asked, probably a little too aggressively, ‘Are you going to help us?' If he wasn't, I didn't want to waste any more of my time here.

‘Of course.' He'd clicked into managerial smoothness. ‘We'll certainly look into this.'

Sure. I sat back. Yeah, we'd lost him all right. He'd go through the motions at a snail's pace.

That very thought made me push him. There was nothing to lose now. ‘Okay. So can you at least ring the San Francisco PD today?' I insisted. ‘I don't know the time difference, but they must have a night shift as well. You can get it all started, find out more about the case and any possible Australian connection.'

Des and Cooper exchanged a long look.

Cooper spoke. ‘We're not permitted to contact the US police directly. It'll have to go through channels here first, and then they'll contact Interpol.'

‘Channels?' I needed answers now!

‘We have to make a formal request to the US representative at Interpol to take up our case,' Cooper explained. ‘Then they liaise with whichever US law enforcement body they deem appropriate. It has to work this way for lots of reasons, but one big one is that Australian and US law enforcement are organised very differently. Here the state police have most of the authority, over there it's a circus trying to work out who has jurisdiction: state, city, federal, whatever. So that's why Interpol acts as middleman. To make sure everything is done lawfully and correctly.'

‘But it's simple, we just need to talk to the San Francisco PD.' Cooper was letting my words slide off him like skates on ice so I appealed to Des, ‘We need to find out what happened. To see if I match up or not.'

Des studied Cooper, then said, with resignation, ‘I'm afraid he can't ring them for us, Kannon.'

I wanted to scream. If Cooper would just ring then we'd know whether this was a complete dead end or not. I knew enough about law enforcement to know that if I cold-called the San Francisco PD they'd hang up on me. ‘So how long are we talking here?'

Cooper shrugged. ‘It's hard to tell. It's basically up to them to set the pace. The US Department of Justice will decide who to contact, and then it's up to those people to respond.'

So much bureaucracy! ‘So it could be weeks before we know whether this is even worth pursuing or not?'

‘I'm sorry, Miss Jarratt,' said Cooper. ‘Very likely it will be much longer than that.'

His face told me I could have grey hair before anything useful happened. If it happened at all. Grrrr …

I buttoned down my reaction so we could make it through all the necessary paperwork with Cooper. He escorted us to the station entrance, polite as ever, but promising nothing more than to keep us in the loop.

Outside the heat rose up in waves from the asphalt. When I unlocked the driver's door of the Land Rover a burning wall of metal-heated air rushed out. The thing was older than I was and the lack of air conditioning meant there was no point getting in just yet. So we opened all the doors and waited under a nearby shop awning nursing drinks. Des'd bought a lemon squash, I had a cola.

‘What do you think, Kannon?'

‘I think Cooper got us out of that office as soon as he possibly could.'

Des nodded grimly. ‘That's what I think, too.'

‘I'm going to have to do this myself, Des.'

He thinned his lips. ‘Yes. We're going to do this ourselves.'

 

I'd taken Des home, fed him and left him on his couch, a fan at one end and the cricket on TV at the other. He promised to have a sleep, but he was cursing as I exited. Australia was still losing. Back at the dojo, Antoinette was taking the cadets through their paces, the grunts and thuds as they practised their throws carrying up through the floorboards. There weren't any phone messages about Ledbetter, but at the moment I couldn't have cared less.

I sat in front of my computer and tried to plan my next move. I had to come up with a strategy. Or probably several. Plans A through to Z. Always have a back-up. There was no way I was waiting months, or even weeks, to put this all to rest. I wasn't spending the foreseeable future waiting for someone to tell me that I couldn't possibly be Celeste because she had a birthmark on her left tonsil.

So how did I do this?

I could ring the San Francisco PD, posing as someone. They certainly wouldn't even let me get my story out if I told them the truth. They'd think I was a nutcase at worst, or even if they believed me, they'd refer me back to the Australian police. They wouldn't give details out over the phone to a civilian.

So what if I wasn't a civilian? Could I pull off pretending to be an Australian copper? Yeah, under most circumstances. But if they asked why I hadn't gone through official channels I'd be stuck. If I knew more about those proper channels I could do it. Come up with a good story. I could claim there'd been a paperwork mix-up, and I'd been told to contact them …

Nah. More information needed to lie properly. Keep that as Plan H.

What if I said I was an Australian reporter, would that work?

Nope, not really. They'd shove me off onto their media liaison person. But maybe I could still get some good details that way. I could find out about the case that Victoria Dupree was investigating when Celeste was taken. Okay, make that Plan D.

Hmm. But what about a good Plan A? How could I get the maximum amount of information in the minimum time? Not weeks of sifting through sketchy newspaper accounts and uncontactable people.

I looked over at the mishmash of pictures stuck to my pin board. Under the ones of the digs at Alexandria sat the photo of Celeste and her dog.

Hmm … I pulled the
Linken Fox
recording out of my bag and jogged back to the lounge room. I switched on the TV, set everything up, then grabbed the remote and stood back. Play, then fast forward.

To the shot of Victoria Dupree watching the audience. Yep, cop eyes.

I fast-forwarded to the photo of Victoria holding Celeste. Yes, that mother would never forget.

So that was it. Go straight to the centre of the maze. I had to find Marshal Dupree. She'd know every tiny scrap of information available. That's what happened with the old cops, like Des, they never let go of some cases. And my gut told me Victoria Dupree would have never let go of Celeste.

Victoria.

I had to find out how to get in contact with her. Was she back from the mission? Where was she? And what was the phone number? I went back to the computer, opened the inquiry page, and typed in Marshal
Victoria Dupree, Mission, and Rome. A new list popped up. Most of the headings looked too general to tell if they talked about where she was now. Then my eye hit a title.

And stopped.

I stared at ‘Death rate in NTA marshals has been rising over past decade'. I opened it and scanned the top page. The site was run by StopWatch. Never heard of it. Under the red, white and blue striped banner heading it said, ‘Formed in 1967 in Houston, Texas, to investigate the effect of time travel on the present and the risks that its use involve.' Nope, I'd definitely never heard of it.