The Turin Shroud Secret (7 page)

‘Hey, hold up.’

She turns on the steps and sees Fish Face behind her, door keys in hand.

‘You want a lift? I go right past your place.’

Normally she’d say no. Most nights she’d be too shy to accept. Tonight she’s exhausted and needs the company. ‘That’d be great.
Thanks.’

He smiles and finishes locking the door.

Maybe spilling coffee on him wasn’t such a bad thing after all.

GARDENA, LOS ANGELES

Away from the snarl of rush-hour traffic, Emma’s boss takes Harbor Freeway south until the Gardena junction then the western
slip to Artesia Boulevard. She doesn’t say much and neither does he. Mostly they listen to the radio channels he keeps switching
between.

She breaks one of several awkward silences. ‘You like to listen to the news and talk stations?’

‘Sometimes. Good to know what’s happening in the world.’

‘Bad stuff. That’s all you hear on the news.’

He almost argues the point but instead hits search on the radio again. It rolls off the news and parks in the middle of a
talk show.

‘KKLA 99.5. This is a Christian station.’ There’s a laugh in her voice. ‘I come across it sometimes. You’ll find this funny,
but late at night, when I find it, I leave it on. It’s just nice to hear folk talking kindly to each other rather than shoutin’
and swearin’ like shock jocks.’

‘You just like the station or are you Christian as well?’

‘I’m not sure how to answer that.’ She gives him a quizzical look. ‘Suppose I am. Let’s put it this way, I ain’t a Muslim
or Jew, so I guess I must be Christian.’ She points through the windshield. ‘You need to pull a right here, straight after
the warehouse store on the corner.’

He flicks on the indicators and turns the Explorer into South Normandie Avenue.

‘You can drop me here, if you like. I’m only a couple of blocks down.’

‘It’s not a problem.’ He smiles at her. ‘Would be unchristian not to take you to your door.’

She smiles back. ‘Thanks, it’s West 169th. You’ll see it coming up on your left.’

There’s a line of working trucks, old motor homes and
campers parked out on the blacktop, early signs of the kind of neighbourhood he’s driving into. She’s obviously dirt poor
and from dirt-poor stock. These days it’s tough to own anything but clapboard unless someone’s given you a headstart up the
ladder.

‘I’m just after the telegraph pole.’

He slows and pulls over outside a wooden throw-up that’s more shack than house. A scrub of weeds and bald lawn lie in shame
behind a tiny fence of rotting, bare wood.

Emma can read his face. ‘Not much but it’s still home. I rent it. No point spending money on what’s not yours, right?’

‘Right. Mine’s the same. Needs paint and money that I haven’t got.’

She unbuckles and grabs her bag from beneath her feet. ‘Thanks for the ride …’ She almost calls him Fish Face ‘… Mr James.
You wanna come in?’

Instinctively he scans the street. Out of sight, somewhere else, he can hear the siren of an LAPD cruiser.

A bad sign.

‘Not tonight, maybe some other time?’

Emma is disappointed. He seems a nice guy. Would be good to have a friend at work, especially one who’s your boss. ‘Then thanks
again. See you tomorrow.’ She leaves him with a smile and swings the door closed.

‘Sleep well,’ he says to her retreating back.

He watches her through the gate and smiles when she looks back and waves at him. The houses around are all
jammed in tight – there must be a hundred windows for people to watch from. She’s safe here.

For now.

77TH STREET STATION, LOS ANGELES

By 11 p.m. the Homicide and Robbery squad room is close to deserted. Only the dregs remain. Nightshift rookies working their
way up and weathered old wasters who’ve fallen so far down they’re stuck in the sediment of the system.

Nic Karakandez is stuck too. Stuck in front of footage from the security camera at Manhattan Beach. It’s his turn at the monitors.
Not much of an ordeal really. He’d rather be here than home alone with the memories that won’t go away.

He drinks cold coffee and watches the speeded-up images as noise boils in the corridors around him. Women’s voices. Coarse.
Shouting. Swearing. Hookers pulled in by vice being milked before being processed then cut loose to start all over again.
He’s seen it all during his time here – the girls get arrested and fined then returned to the streets where they have to turn
tricks to earn the money to pay off the fines. The proverbial vice circle. He heard someone once worked out that if the women
all got handouts of
$500 a week, they wouldn’t need to sell themselves, could avoid pimps and the state of California would be more than a million
dollars a year better off. He doesn’t know if it’s true or not but he wouldn’t be too surprised to find out that it was.

He glances at his watch. Another hour and he’ll call it quits. Leave just after midnight, maybe by then he’ll be tired enough
to sleep a little when he gets home. The screen in front of him shows the black of night at the beach, faint ocean waves crashing
unheard on the silent footage. Yellow security lights vaguely illuminate part of the aquarium and marine lab where he and
Mitzi looked around. He watches a few couples walk down the approach and lean against the rails to fool around a little. A
couple of drunks turn up to light a cigarette and one takes a leak in the ocean. The other is so wasted he curls up in the
lab doorway and starts to sleep.

Nic speeds the images up some more, thirty-two times normal speed, then a flash of light on the screen makes him take notice.
He glances at the time log. It’s just after two in the morning – 02.09:15 to be exact.

The hood of a car comes slowly into shot and he feels his heart jump. No way should a vehicle even be down there and the driver
knows it. The headlights aren’t on – the flash Nic saw was of security lighting bouncing off the vehicle. He leans close to
the monitor and watches every pixel as it comes to a halt. He can’t see the front or back plate, nor can he work out the make.
It’s an SUV of some
kind. Not a big one like a Land Cruiser or Range Rover, something smaller.

The security lights are so yellow and the camera lens so poor it’s impossible to guess whether the car is black, blue or green.
The driver’s door opens. A thin shadow of a man slips out. Nic recalls the height of the rails around the pier edge and where
they came up to on him. The driver looks about his size. Six foot, no more. He goes to the back of the car and pops the hatch.

Nic almost bangs his nose against the screen.

The guy leans into the vehicle and lifts something out of the back. The shot’s not close enough or clear enough to see what
he’s carrying in his arms but it’s draped across them and looks long enough to be a body.

What else could it be?

The shadowy figure struggles to the end of the pier and slides his heavy burden into the dark waves of the Pacific.

TUESDAY

Mitzi never makes it to work before Nic. That’s the agreement they have. She takes Amber and Jade to school while he gets
in early and checks what has come in overnight and been thrown in their tray. If something big is going down,
he calls her. Otherwise she usually rolls into the squad room somewhere between nine and nine-thirty. In return, she brings
coffee from Starbucks and on Tuesdays donuts or muffins. Today it’s muffins.

‘So my little night owl,’ she waggles a paper bag from her bandaged hand as she approaches his desk, ‘did you come up with
anything to deserve your treat? I have a choice of stem ginger or skinny blueberry to go with your steaming Venti Americano.’

Nic doesn’t even look up. ‘What I’ve got for you deserves much more than anything you’ve got in that little bag of yours.’
He taps a printout of timecodes and notes made from viewing last night’s footage. ‘We have a lead.’

‘You serious?’ She puts the bag on his desk, slips her jacket and shoulder bag over the corner of her chair. ‘You got lucky?’

Now he turns to her. ‘Luck had nothing to do with it. I watched every damned frame of that footage.’ He cues up the material
on his monitor. ‘This is just before ten past two, the light flash is a car coming into shot. Watch what happens now.’ He
sees her drawn to the screen, hypnotised just as he was by the shadowy figure getting out of the vehicle, going to the rear
and then carrying something heavy to the far side of frame and dropping it over the rails.

‘Yes!’ She slaps the desk with excitement. ‘Play it again.’

He hits rewind and uncaps his coffee.

She watches even closer the second time. ‘Any other footage? Any idea of what make that car is?’

‘It’s a Lexus hybrid. A four-by-four. Security cameras picked it up travelling east towards the pier.’

‘Plate?’

‘Don’t be greedy. These are night-time shots, ma’am. You should be grateful for what I’m giving you.’

‘Women always want more – especially ones my age.’

‘Four-door plus hatch, no sunroof. RX 450h in Argento Ice.’

She frowns. ‘In what?’

‘Argento. I looked it up on the car company’s website. It’s a kind of pearly creamy white that’s really hard to make out beneath
sodiums. Came up clean, though, on some of the wider footage.’

‘How many Lexuses – do you say Lexuses, or Lexi, are there in LA?’

He pulls a face. ‘You’re looking at America’s bestselling luxury crossover in the SUV market. Close to a hundred thousand
a year.’

She tilts her eyes to the ceiling. ‘Why God, why us? We’re good people – we just seek to serve.’

‘This is the latest hybrid. There are fewer of those around.’

‘How many fewer?’

‘Lexus shifted ten thousand across the country last year. Figures down badly after the quake and tsunami in Japan snd of course
the recession back home.’

‘Oh, that makes life much simpler,’ she says, sarcastically.

‘Only a couple thou’ in LA and just a few hundred in this spec.’ He glances at his watch. ‘I’ve begged a little extra manpower.’

‘Let me guess, Sandra and Denise in Robbery?’

He smiles. ‘They seem willing.’

‘I’m sure they are.’

‘Listen, with
their
help, come midday we’ll have covered body shops, rentals and insurance claims.’

Mitzi thinks of another angle. ‘You sure it’s not the vic’s own car? Tamara’s second vehicle?’

‘I checked that already. No.’

She rips open the paper bag and hands him the stem ginger muffin. ‘You’re getting good, you deserve this.’ She shifts to her
own desk with her coffee and blueberry muffin. ‘I’m going to finish this shitty low-cal apology of a treat then head back
to the film studio to see the archivist. You wanna come or you gonna need to stay here?’

‘You go.’ His eyes are fixed to data searches coming up on his monitor. ‘I want to finish the Lexus trawl then I’ll catch
you later. Okay?’

‘Fine. Trace that hybrid before our debrief with the captain at the end of the day and you could maybe take Sandra and Denise
for a drink.’

He laughs. ‘We’re going to fall out if you keep this up.’

She raises her palms in surrender and pulls open the cake bag. ‘Just saying, that’s all.’

ANTERONUS FILMS, CULVER CITY

The thirty-seat executive viewing room is the most luxurious cinema Mitzi Fallon has ever been in. The place is bathed in
a perpetual twilight, the temperature is T-shirt warm and it’s so acoustically perfect you feel like you’re wearing noise-cancelling
headphones.

Executive Assistant Sarah Kenny rides a stream of super-soft blue carpet down rows of calfskin leather reclining chairs. Mitzi
caresses the tops of the chairs as she follows. ‘Jeez, this is so plush I could live in here.’ She looks up and halts as the
screen flickers into life. ‘What’s that? They going to show something?’

Everything’s moving backwards. A tape is being rewound in vision. ‘It’s a sequence from
The Shroud.’
Sarah points beyond the screen, to the side of the auditorium. ‘There’s a projection room back there – it’s where we’re headed.
The archivist must be preparing your footage.’

Mitzi dips into a row and with all the enthusiasm of a small child on a party outing takes a seat. ‘Let’s watch a minute.’

The assistant gives her a disapproving look.

‘Just this bit.’ Mitzi sinks down in her recliner and snuggles her head against the top cushion. ‘C’mon. Take the weight off.’

Sarah has no choice. She tucks her stylish white midi dress around her tanned model legs and flips a muting switch on the
end of her armrest. Giant recessed speakers engorge with a torrent of rich sounds – rolling thunder and a crack of lightning
against a pale sky. The camera cuts to a hillside and slowly zooms in to two centurions standing sentry by the rock face.

She rolls the volume knob down to a more comfortable setting and leans close to Mitzi. ‘Remember the take of Joseph of Arimathea
asking for Christ’s body to keep in his family tomb? Well, this is the next scene – at the tomb in Golgotha.’

A male narrator’s voice speaks over her – ‘
When it began to dawn towards the first day of the week, came Mary Magdalene to see the sepulchre.’

‘That’s just a guide track. The words are from Matthew 28,’ whispers Sarah, proud to add the religious insight.

‘And behold there was a great earthquake,’
continues the narrator.
‘For an angel of the Lord descended from heaven, rolled back the stone and sat upon it. His countenance was as lightning and
his raiment as snow. And for fear of him, the guards were struck with terror and became as dead men.
’

The screen fills with fleeing centurions and blinding light. The camera cuts to a close-up of a broken Roman seal lying in
the dirt besides the giant rock and the open entrance of the tomb. Sarah points a perfectly manicured finger at the screen.
‘The seal is significant because it bore the authority of the Emperor of Rome. It was a really big thing back then.
Breaking the seal on the tomb of a crucified felon was showing disrespect to the Emperor and running the risk of execution.’