Hades (19 page)

“I can see the headlines now,” someone said as Captain James made his way through the crush of bodies. “Deadly Doctor Winged by Rotund Rent-a-Cop.”

There were a few snickers. These cops had jumped in from the airport station and had no investment in the obvious humiliation of losing the killer when we had him right in our hands. I looked around and saw my own people. None of them was smiling. Chester, who looked like he was bordering on a heart attack, was sitting in the back of an ambulance, sucking gratefully on an oxygen mask.

“I’ve never used my weapon before,” he was blubbering, his voice muffled by the mask. “I . . . I . . . I’ve never used my weapon before.”

“Hey, hey, hey, be careful,” someone else laughed. “He takes jokes about airport security
very seriously
.”

Jason Beck was long gone but the general consensus was that he had taken a bullet. There was blood on the concrete, not all of it mine. The press were arriving at the end of the street where more guards were setting up barricades. A couple of reporters slipped through and began to jog towards us through the spots of lights. One of the paramedics had walked up to where I sat perched on a milk crate and was unclipping my bulletproof vest. In my daze, I hadn’t realized she had worked my jacket off my shoulders.

“Hang on,” I said, coming to my senses. “Hang on a sec.”

“You’ve been clubbed with a crowbar, sir. You’re going to need to come with me.”

The woman pressed a sterile pad against the back of my head. The contact stung. I stood up too fast and tried to push her away. Eden and Eric looked at each other. It seemed that in slow motion they moved, turning at the same time, wandering through the fire door.

“Someone get a photo,” one of the street cops yelled. “I want Frank and the rent-a-cop arm in arm with a caption: My Hero, the Kiss of Life Saves Sydney Detective.”

I groaned and let the paramedic lead me to the ambulance.

T
he crowbar to the head afforded me the rest of the night off, despite my wishes. We had a name and that was enough to light a fire in me, one that drowned out the low-level mockery about Chester trying to give me mouth-to-mouth and the double black eyes that were emerging on my face. I was dropped home to pace my apartment in a near fury. I took a shower and tried to stave off all thoughts about Beck and what approach we should take now that we had a name to put to his face. Sucking on a beer as the sun rose, the circuit of names pounding in my head brought me around to Jake DeLaney.

I still had the newspaper I’d taken from the restaurant with Martina. The nagging sensation that Jake DeLaney meant something to me crawled beneath my skin. At 5
AM
I had rifled back through all my previous cases—I filed the cover sheets under my desk—but found nothing to hint at him. The newspaper reported that Jake, a divorced father of two and casual labor-for-hire man, had gone missing after leaving a bar in Coogee. He had been gone three days, with only his wallet, keys and phone, the clothes on his body and a box of Tic Tacs. Three days wasn’t long by any means, but his lack of activity since the point of disappearance was worrying people. He had placed two bets on a football game and won a total of $63.23 but had never claimed his winnings. His phone and bank accounts had not been activated in the time he’d been gone. He had not been spotted at train stations, bus stops, airports or rental-car lots. No taxis reported picking him up from the bar. The tides were calculated and water searched to no avail. By all accounts Jake DeLaney had waved good-bye to the usual Sunday afternoon crowd on the ground-floor sports bar of the Palace Hotel, walked out the side door onto the street by Coogee beach and disappeared into thin air.

It took me until 7
AM
, lying on my back, staring at the ceiling and wondering how many minutes I had before Eden called me, to realize where I had seen the name.

In Eden’s wallet.

I grabbed a sheet of paper from the notebook beside my bed and a pen from the water glass behind it and wrote down the name Jake DeLaney. I remembered another name, the only other one that hadn’t been crossed off the list, because the man’s last name was the same as a girl I’d dated for two weeks in high school.

I don’t keep a computer at home. Never have. Aside from reporting or looking up databases on inmates or probationaries, which I only do at work, I don’t have much use for one. A short walk from my apartment brought me to the Biz-zip Internet Café, which for two dollars an hour offered me Internet access, free cups of chilled water and a view to the busy highway. Schoolchildren dawdled on their way to the bus stop and construction workers were marking out sections of road to tear up. I took a computer against the window and ordered a double-shot coffee from the lady behind the counter. She looked like she knew as much about making coffee as I did about computers.

As I sat down my phone began to chirp. Eden’s name flashed up on the blue screen. I ignored the call. The sound of the phone had made me jump, like I’d been caught doing something perverse. It felt wrong to be questioning my partner as my mind inevitably began to do, picking around my memories of her that night in search of something about her words or behavior that explained a missing man’s name in her wallet days before he had gone missing. I remembered the furry feel of the edge of the paper, worn soft from months, maybe years, of rubbing and scraping against her jeans. If she had kept his name on some kind of list for so long, why had he only disappeared now? I tried to remember the names before him, those crossed and recrossed by the ink of different pens, but they’d never been fully snapshotted into my mind.

Jake DeLaney had slowly evolved into a working-class hero from days wallowing in the primordial ooze of petty crime. I pulled up his criminal record from the police database and scrolled through a list of assaults that had been recorded—from a mass that probably hadn’t. The man had a short fuse and a shorter reserve of willpower. He had been ordered to undertake six weeks of rehabilitation as a part of his parole for smashing a car into a dress shop window on a coke binge. The more serious of his convictions included attempting to hijack an armored vehicle with two other men outside a Westpac bank in Bankstown, an underestimation of police resources that cost him five years of his freedom.

I wrote down the names of the two other men convicted of the failed hijacking. Richard Mars and Geoff Gould. I put these names into the criminal file search engine and found similar records of low-level mischievousness leading to a catalyst crime. I decided it was possible Eden had worked on their cases at some point, but when I dug deeper into the case files I found that she was not listed anywhere, probably because she had been a baby at the time of their prime achievements. When DeLaney, Mars and Gould were released from Long Bay, Eden would have been four. I sipped my sour coffee and licked it off my teeth, staring at the image of DeLaney’s plump face filling most of the mug shot on the screen.

Mars and Gould. I couldn’t remember whether or not their names had been on Eden’s list. I looked at my watch and realized I had thirty-five minutes before we were due to meet to prepare for the briefing. With a growing sense of guilt, I put Mars’s name into a public search engine.

I knocked over my empty coffee cup when the first article appeared. Mars had gone missing two years earlier in Thailand, the case put down to a murder-robbery or a purposeful disappearing act to escape conviction for a crime the cops had not yet discovered. He had last been seen at the Indigo Pearl Resort in Phuket, walking down the beachfront on his way to the taxi rank. He was reported missing by his girlfriend, who had flown there with him to enjoy some cheap shopping. His loss was lamented by few others. With nervous, aching fingers I minimized the articles I had been reading and renewed the search engine, ready to type Gould’s name.

My phone buzzed in my pocket. The counter attendant looked up as I answered.

“Yeah?”

“You’re late,” Eden said.

“I know,” I rose from the desk. “I just, uh . . . lost track of time.”

“You want me to pick you up?”

“No.” I plonked some coins on the counter and pulled open the sliding door of the café. “I won’t miss the start of the meeting, I promise.”