The Darkest Hour (23 page)

He put down the pen. ‘We had this big argument last night.’ He rubbed his eyes. ‘She reckons you and me have something going on.’

Lauren choked out a snort.

‘She says if I really do love her, I’ll transfer west. She says the wedding can stay when we planned it originally, and nothing else changes; I’m just not working here.’

‘With me,’ Lauren said.

‘She said it’s a small price to pay for her peace of mind.’

The many things Lauren wanted to say welled up inside her, fought against each other to get out.

Joe said, ‘It’s probably just pre-wedding nerves.’

‘But it’s still months away.’

Joe looked down at the page. ‘I love her.’

Lauren wanted so badly to say
But do you? Really?
She felt that this was one of those moments when you teetered on the edge of momentous change. Did she dare to put her hand on his arm and tell him exactly how she felt?

She started to reach out, but then he said, ‘I love her, and she’s right. Besides, marriage is about compromise, right?’ and picked up the pen.

Lauren’s hand fell. Black anger and jealousy rose up in her chest, and underneath it despair lay like a stinking swamp.

‘Wh–’ Her throat got tight and she had to cough and try again. ‘When will you go?’

‘It’ll probably take a couple of weeks to come through.’ He hesitated. ‘But she wants me to take leave until then.’

‘She doesn’t trust us for even one more shift?’

‘She gets these . . . premonitions. She said last night she thinks something bad’s going to happen.’

Lauren made a scornful noise. ‘Bad like what? A busy night shift? A flat tyre? Somebody’s going to hurl all through the ambulance?’

‘She was serious. She was crying.’

Oh, there’s a surprise.
‘She’ll say anything to stop you working with me.’

‘I’m just telling you what she said.’

Lauren wanted to get up and storm away. ‘Fine. So this is your last shift, is it? You’re on leave from tomorrow?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I told her I’d compromise. I’m not taking leave, and I’m staying until this thing is over.’

‘This thing . . .’

‘With Werner.’

‘Because of her premonition?’

‘It just seems best,’ he said. ‘Don’t you think?’

All choked up, Lauren didn’t know where to look.

C
owley Road was long and they came into it at the wrong end. Ella yawned as she watched the numbers fall. ‘Fifteen,’ she said. ‘Eleven. There.’

The Rioses’ house was two storeys of blond brick. A concrete driveway led up to a double garage. There were shrubs in the front yard, a small area of trimmed lawn, and white curtains in the white-framed windows on the upper storey. There were a million houses just like it right across suburbia; hell, there were a hundred in Cowley Road alone.

The front door was behind a locked security screen. Ella pressed the doorbell and listened to it chime inside the house.

Footsteps approached, the deadbolt turned and the door was pulled open. ‘Yes?’

Ella and Murray held out their badges. ‘Are you Mrs Sal Rios?’

‘I’m his sister, Nona,’ she said. ‘Is he okay?’

‘So he’s not home?’

The woman shook her head. She was in her late thirties, Ella guessed, with dark hair in a bob and bright red lipstick. She wore jeans and a white shirt and sandals. Around her neck hung a gold chain and pendant. It looked expensive, even through the screen. ‘And I don’t know when he’ll be back, sorry.’

‘Your family owns a club in the city, is that right?’ Ella said.

‘My dad’s part of a company that owns a few clubs and things like that,’ she said. ‘I don’t know which clubs though.’

‘Have you ever been to one called Rosie’s, in the Cross?’

‘Never.’

‘But Sal works there?’

‘I believe so,’ she said.

‘So he lives here, and you live here too?’

She nodded. ‘And our father and brother. I moved back about eight months ago, after my marriage broke up.’

‘Does your other brother work in the clubs?’

‘He has cancer,’ she said. ‘That’s partly why I came back, to help out with his care. Before he got sick he worked in sales. That’s where I worked too, in jewellery.’ She touched the gold pendant. ‘Now I’m a full-time mother.’

Ella got out her card and wrote her mobile number on it. ‘Could you have Sal call me, please, when he gets in?’

Nona unlocked the screen to take the card. ‘Can I tell him what it’s about?’

‘We’re trying to trace a phone call that was made from Rosie’s,’ Murray said. ‘We’re talking to everyone who was there on that particular evening.’

Nona nodded.

‘One more thing,’ Ella said, taking out the airport photo of Thomas Werner. ‘Do you recognise this man?’

Nona shook her head. ‘I don’t. Sorry.’

‘No problem,’ Ella said. ‘Thanks for your time.’

Ella found a note on her desk when they got back to the office.
Call Wayne Rhodes.
She remembered her mobile battery was flat, and dug out the charger she kept in her desk drawer and plugged the phone in before calling him back.

‘The plot is thickening,’ Wayne said. ‘Mrs Veronique Nolan, widow of Adrian who fell from the train, is a lovely woman. Yesterday afternoon she made me tea, fed me orange cake, and then proceeded to tell me that she thinks her husband has more money than he should have.’

‘Now there’s a statement I’ve never heard before,’ Ella said.

‘She said that Adrian always looked after the money, both for the warehouse and the household. Now she’s having to do it, and fold up the warehouse besides, and she’s found that while their accounts are more than healthy, the business was not, and she can’t tell where the money came from.’

‘Maybe they’ve got a really canny accountant,’ Ella said. ‘That’s what we’re looking into for our guy.’ She told him what Rebecca Kanowski had learned about James Kennedy’s bank accounts. ‘You get yourself a whizz-bang accountant – especially in Nolan’s case, with his own business – and who knows what you can end up with.’

‘No, I reckon there’s something weird going on,’ Wayne said.

‘Weird like what?’

‘I’ll tell you when I find out,’ he said. ‘Meantime, I’ve got an idea. Got a pen?’

He recited a mobile number and Ella jotted it down. ‘Whose is that?’

‘It’s my guy’s,’ he said. ‘I’m working on a hunch. I want you to run it through your guy’s phone records and see what comes up. You got your guy’s number there?’

‘Are you checking because they died on the same day?’ Ella said. ‘Because Lauren went to both of them? And by the way, did I tell you I talked to her about the Nolan job? Perfectly straightforward, she said. Well, as much as it can be when a man falls from a train during a police pursuit.’

‘Humour me,’ he said. ‘Tell me your guy’s number.’

She found it and read it out with a sigh.

There was a moment’s silence, then Wayne said, ‘I should’ve made a bet with you on it.’

‘You’re joking.’

‘Look at your guy’s record,’ he said. ‘Look up the day they died. Four fifty in the afternoon.’

She found the entry. ‘That’s Adrian Nolan?’

‘That’s him. It was Nolan’s last call.’

Goose bumps rose on her arms. Kennedy had made one more call after that, then the log ended.

Dead men make no calls.

‘Your guy rang mine the day before that as well,’ Wayne said. Ella heard him shuffle through pages. ‘And twice on the previous Thursday. This is too much to be just talking about courier stuff, and we haven’t even gone all the way through yet.’

It was time to talk to their bosses, but before she hung up she read out the mobile number that was Kennedy’s last call. ‘See that anywhere on your list?’

‘Not on a quick glance, but I’ll keep my eye out,’ he said. ‘And do you agree now that it wasn’t such a bad idea?’

‘Only grudgingly. Talk to you later.’

She put the phone down and sat there for a moment, enjoying the feeling of a good clue cracked. The process of getting information through the phone companies was so time-consuming: first you requested the lists of incoming and outgoing numbers, then you looked for repeated ones, or calls at specific times, then you sent in another request for information on who owned the numbers and where they lived. They’d got the Rosie’s number because they had a specific time and date and Detective Graeme Strong called in a favour from a mate in the phone company, but the lists they’d sent for the frequent callers for Kennedy’s mobile would take a few more days at least. It had indeed been a good idea of Wayne’s, if one that came from left field.

Ella looked around the office. Strong was out, so she couldn’t ask him to ring his mate about Kennedy’s final call. Jason Lambert was leaning against the doorframe talking to the poor long-suffering HR chick. Nobody was in earshot.

She grabbed the phone and dialled.

There was a moment of silence, then a woman’s voice said, ‘The mobile you are calling is turned off or out of range.’

So much for that.

Sal kicked at the screen. His fingers were going numb. He heard Nona coming, not in any big hurry, and he kicked the screen again.

‘Okay! Jesus.’ She unlocked it and yanked it open. ‘You don’t always have to bring it all in at once.’

‘When you get the groceries, you can carry them in any way you like.’ He lumbered to the kitchen and heaved the bags onto the bench. Something cracked.

‘If that’s my caviar you’re going straight back out.’

He ignored her, shoving packets of cheese and sausages and a bag of apples into the fridge. She hunted through the shopping for the jar, pulled it out and ran her fingers over the bottom. ‘Lucky.’

He didn’t bother unpacking the bag of tinned goods and pasta packets, just shoved it full into the cupboard.

‘It’d take you two minutes to unpack that,’ Nona said.

‘It’d take you the same.’

He couldn’t believe he’d been involved in killing a guy for her. He must have rocks in his head.

She tossed the jar from hand to hand. ‘A cop came looking for you.’

‘Sure.’

‘You think I’m making it up?’ She shrugged. ‘Okay. Don’t call her back then.’ She took a card from her pocket and waved it in his face.

He grabbed it from her.
Detective Ella Marconi, Homicide.
‘Does Thomas know?’

‘He’s gone to meet Tr–’ She deliberately widened her eyes. ‘Oops.’

Sal hardened his heart. ‘Shut up and tell me.’

‘How can I shut up
and
tell you?’ But she must have seen something in his face then, and she put the jar down. ‘She was asking about a phone call made from Rosie’s, that you were there that night and they wanted to talk to you about it. They also had a photo of Thomas.’

Oh Jesus.
‘What did you tell them?’

‘What do you think?’ she said. ‘You’d better ring her back.’

‘I should check with Thomas first.’

‘He’ll tell you to ring her as well,’ Nona said. ‘The longer you wait, the more chance there is that she’ll just come back.’

Sal could work that out for himself. ‘If I do the wrong thing he’ll go nuts.’

‘Yeah, and how pleased will he be if she’s standing at the front door when he comes home?’

Sal secretly hoped they’d get the chance to find that out.

At that afternoon’s meeting, Kuiper introduced the detectives who were looking for the leak. Bryan Greer was a gangly man, all ears and jaw, his black hair like a bristle brush on his white scalp. Bethany Mendelssohn perched on the side of the table and smoothed her pale linen skirt. Her hair swung in a shiny ponytail over her shoulder.

Ella felt short and greasy.

‘Here’s what we know,’ Bethany Mendelssohn said. ‘Werner knew that Lauren Yates had made the statement that Kennedy identified him as his attacker, and Werner said so in a threatening phone call to her.’

This was indeed what they knew. Ella resisted the urge to roll her eyes.

‘It would appear that the fact of our surveillance and phone tap has also been passed on, as there has been no approach by Werner or anyone else suspicious, in person or by phone, since those strategies were undertaken.

‘The threatening call to Ms Yates has been traced to a mobile,’ Mendelssohn said. ‘We’re currently awaiting the result of a request for the details of the phone’s owner.’

It’d be good, Ella thought, to be able to do with that number what she and Wayne had just done. But where would you crosscheck it? Not with Kennedy’s or Nolan’s numbers. They were well dead by the time Lauren was threatened.

‘We’ve started our investigation with the auxiliary staff.’ Bryan Greer handed out sheets of paper as he spoke. ‘These are the names of the seven non-sworn administrative staff, two computer technicians and one air-conditioning maintenance man who were on these floors last week. We have two theories. Firstly, if it’s a deliberate leak, it’s most likely that it’s down to one or more of these people rather than from one of the officers here now.’ He looked around at them all. ‘Second, if it’s an accidental leak, then it’s equally likely to have come from them or from somebody here.

‘I want you to think about who you’ve talked to regarding this case, what you might have said even in passing. If you have even the slightest concern, you need to see us. Identifying the leak, however it came about, is a solid lead to finding Werner, because somebody at some point in that chain of knowledge knows him.’

The detectives were silent. Ella knew she hadn’t spoken to anybody about it. She looked sideways at Murray, who was studying his list. He’d probably blabbed it all to his dad, but it was hard to imagine ol’ Frank Shakespeare hanging down the local with his homey Thomas.

She looked at her own page. She knew some of these people by their first name, and others she didn’t know at all. Toni Denham-Wilson was Radtke’s assistant; Anna Thomas, Kuiper’s assistant; Tracy Potter and Isabel Loftus job-shared the Human Resources position; Edwina Guilfoyle and Helena Cavendish and Michelle Spriggs were general admin staff; then there were the technicians’ names. Ella couldn’t recall having even seen any of the three men.

‘Our investigation into these people is ongoing, but meantime let us know if you see any of these people – or anyone at all – appearing to take particular interest in the case or asking you for more details.’

Greer sat down. Ella knew there was more he could’ve said about precisely how they were investigating these admin people, but if anybody in the room was close friends with them, or god forbid in cahoots, there was the chance that the information would be passed on. It still might be, but with no specific clues it wasn’t too helpful.

‘Okay,’ Kuiper said. ‘Latest news on Deborah Kennedy is that the local police think they’ve found where she’s been staying – in a ramshackle cabin on an isolated property about twelve kilometres west of Griffith. The owner knew nothing about it until he found fresh tyre tracks and then blankets and food in the building. He’d heard the reports on the radio and called it in, but Mrs Kennedy hasn’t been back so it’s likely she’s moved on.

‘Also, there’s been a report of a suspected meth lab in another industrial area in south Sydney,’ he said. ‘That’s to be raided sometime today, so we’ll hopefully find out later if that’s where Werner was working, if he’s picked up.’