Already Dead (31 page)

Jax saw Brendan: wild-eyed, panic-stricken, desperate and with a gun in his hand. It was in her mind but she was already backed up against the driver's door when the figure lowered itself into her passenger seat.

‘What the fuck? You scared the shit out of me!'

Hugh Talbotson smiled. ‘Sorry. Thought it'd be cooler in here.'

Her heart pounded against the hand she held to her chest. ‘I was carjacked four days ago. That's not an appropriate entrance.'

His smile turned apologetic. ‘I figured you saw me.'

Turning away, she swallowed at the dryness in her mouth, held tight to the steering wheel while she waited for her pulse to simmer down. Two cyclists rode bikes across the parking area, standing up on the pedals, working hard on the incline, reminding Jax what she'd heard hadn't been a car. He'd walked?

She frowned. ‘Where's Kate?'

His smile didn't waver but his hazel irises flattened to hard discs.

‘Hugh? Where's Kate?'

‘Give me the phone, Miranda.'

Her body stilled as something inside her rolled and pitched like a ball in a bowl. Brendan was in her head again. Not the words from the motorway but ones he'd written to Kate.
I knew. I knew … I KNEW.

Four days ago, when Brendan got in her car with a gun, Jax had wasted minutes in stunned incomprehension. Not today. Her flight instinct was primed. She swung around, grabbed for the door handle, was throwing herself sideways when a vice closed around her forearm.

Hugh's hand was large and solid and strong. It yanked her from the door, hauled her body around to face him, squeezing her arm as though he wanted to crush the bones. His voice when he spoke was calm, passive. ‘Not yet, Miranda. Give me his phone.'

She watched him on the other side of the arm lock, trying not to wince, panic rising in her lungs. ‘Then you'll let me go?'

His lips did a brief downward curl. ‘Sure.'

The phone didn't matter, she told herself. Everything important was saved and photographed and in internet storage. And she didn't have a choice. ‘It's in my handbag at your feet.'

‘Nice try. I saw it in your hand five seconds ago.'

How long had he watched her? And from where? ‘That was my phone. Brendan's is in my bag.'

‘I'll have yours, too. Pass it over.'

She'd dropped it when the door opened. He kept hold of her forearm as she twisted in her seat to find it, maintained the painful grip as he lifted her bag from the floor and searched it one-handed.

He took a second to eye off the two mobiles. ‘Who were you texting?'

‘I wasn't.'

His fingers tightened on her arm.

‘I was reading a text.'

‘Who from?'

If she told him it was a cop, would he still let her go? ‘From a friend.'

‘What do they want?'

She hesitated, struggling to think fast around her fear. ‘Lunch next week.'

Hugh watched her a moment, eyes narrowing. Watched her phone a moment more, maybe deciding whether to turn it off or keep track of her messages. He pushed both mobiles into the back pockets of his jeans. ‘Okay. Start the car.'

‘You said you'd let me go.'

He quirked an amused eyebrow. ‘You believed that?' Reaching around his waist, he came back with a handgun – bigger than Brendan's, black all over, with another lethal hole pointed right at her. Hugh laid it on his thigh, index finger resting on the trigger guard. ‘I release your arm, you start the car and drive. You attempt to get out and I shoot you.'

Her vision fixed on the gun. Her brain said,
Here?
The two cyclists had propped their bikes and were enjoying the view from the grass. Close enough for hearing damage if there was a gunshot – and she'd be a bleeding body in the driver's seat. His escape would mean getting out of the car and running past them.

Maybe he saw her doubt or maybe he'd just paused for impact, but when he spoke, his voice was ice. ‘And then I find your kid and slice up her face. Do you understand me?'

Jax's lungs seized as Zoe's freckles flashed in her mind. Nina Torrence had been stabbed through the heart with a single thrust. Her killer knew what he was doing with a knife. Jax lifted her gaze, looked into Hugh's flat eyes. She'd thought Aiden might have done it, figured he'd need to be an emotionless sociopath to pull off the last few days of earnest conversation and sympathy. She wasn't sure yet what Hugh had done, but he'd smiled at her over coffee, expressed regret and sadness, and now he was holding a gun on her and threatening to hurt her daughter. In this moment, she had no problem imagining him wielding a blade. And he was waiting for an answer.

She clenched her teeth, found voice. ‘Yes. I understand.'

‘Start the car.'

She turned the key in the ignition.

He moved her other hand to the steering wheel, released his grip. ‘Drive.'

Again? Seriously?

Anger flared as she hauled the seatbelt over her shoulder and shoved it into its clasp. Slamming the stick into reverse, she backed across the parking bay and steered to the entry, lips tight as she turned to him for instructions.

He fastened his own belt then held her in his sights for a moment, taking in the attitude, making her wait like it was some kind of power play.

She didn't. ‘You want
me
to pick a destination?'

He straightened his gun arm across the space between them, pushed the muzzle into her thigh. ‘Turn left.'

She worked the clutch with gunmetal pushed into her flesh as though it was drilling to her bones. It stole her anger, replaced it with stark reality. This wasn't a carjacking. He wasn't stealing her car or making a getaway or
hitching a ride. This was something entirely different. The man beside her wasn't panic-stricken, he hadn't lost touch with reality. He was cold and planned and trained. He was everything Brendan Walsh had been terrified of.

And Jax felt his fear all over again.

At the bottom of the hill, Hugh said, ‘Straight ahead.'

Passing the beach, more sandy pedestrians slowed her progress. She watched them through the windscreen, willing one to make eye contact and see the terror in hers. Turning her head as they passed near the driver's side, she felt metal press deeper into her thigh.

‘Think about it, Miranda,' Hugh said. ‘I know where your kid lives.'

Nausea swelled into her throat. She locked her jaw, keeping it down, holding back a howl.

‘Take the road up the hill,' he ordered.

It was the way home. Up the hill, left turn at the top. Was he taking her to the house? Did he have Zoe in his plan now? She clamped her hands on the wheel. She wasn't going home. She wasn't letting him near Zoe. Tilda and Deanne were there too. Fuck the gun. She wouldn't do it.

Breathe. Think
. She'd done the what-ifs on this. Had pictured it in her mind. She could hit something. It would have to be close to the road so she didn't lose pace, slew to the left so the passenger side took the impact.

Taking the winding path up the hill, she pictured what was at the top. Past the street on the left was a stretch of bush. No kerb, just tarmac meeting rubble, then grass, shrubs and a grove of gum trees. She'd need to floor the accelerator and hope she didn't get stuck in a ditch before she hit something big enough to stop them. Hope she didn't kill herself. She had airbags; so did Hugh. Right
now, she didn't care who caught the worst of it or her odds of survival – just so long as Hugh couldn't get out and find Zoe.

Almost at the top, Jax shifted down a gear to gather speed. The engine whined. Hugh turned, watched her, said nothing as they approached the crest. Nothing as Tilda's street came into sight. Nothing as it sailed past his window.

Not Zoe. Not Tilda and Deanne. Jax let out a gust of breath as though she'd been punched. Clinging to the wheel as the trees at the summit flew past, she wondered if she should have done it anyway. Crashed the car and finished it.

Now? Before the rocketing fear inside her had settled enough for her brain to make sense of what the fuck was going on? Die or be seriously injured before she'd had a chance to
ask
?

‘Where are we going?' It wasn't the top question on her list but the T-intersection for the Pacific Highway was approaching fast. Right was north and they were five minutes from the centre of Newcastle. Left was south and the possibilities were endless.

‘Turn left.'

She merged into the outside lane, edged up her speed. Sydney was in this direction – about a two-hour drive. Between here and the motorway, the highway wound its way through the suburban outskirts of Newcastle and the eastern shore of Lake Macquarie. It also gave access to long stretches of coastline in one direction; Maitland, Cessnock and the entire Hunter Valley in the other.

Jax glanced across the car. Hugh had a hand hooked over the handle above the door, watching the traffic with
lazy eyes. No hint of stress or decision-making. He wasn't making it up as she drove. They were heading somewhere – she hoped to God it didn't involve coming back without the driver.

‘Where are we going?' she asked again.

‘For a drive.' His voice was flat, no agitation, no urgency. Maybe abducting a woman at gunpoint was easy after Afghanistan.

‘Will it be far?'

He didn't answer. Didn't respond at all. Just viewed the road and the scenery as though she hadn't spoken.

Jax focused on the driving while they passed through outer suburbs – strip shopping, cinemas, a huge mall. Drive-in takeaway joints, petrol stations, high schools. Patches of bush shielded housing from the noise of four lanes of cars and trucks moving in and out of Newcastle at eighty kilometres an hour.

Beside her, Hugh reached into his back pocket, her familiar ring tone flaring as his hand came back with her mobile. ‘It's the cop. Hawke.'

Her gaze flicked to the phone, back to the road. She hadn't called Aiden because she'd trusted the wrong man. She'd seen herself in Kate and Russell in Hugh. Big mistake. ‘I can answer it on speaker.'

‘No.'

Hugh studied the device like it was sending code. Jax listened with breath frozen in her chest. She'd wondered if Aiden and Hugh were working together. Two bad guys trying to figure out what Miranda Jack was up to.

When the tone finally stopped, Hugh said, ‘What does he want?'

No, not working together. ‘I don't know.'

A couple of beeps signalled an incoming message. Hugh checked the screen, read the text. Tapped the glass, tapped again. From the corner of her eye, Jax saw a log of texts, assumed he'd found the ones from Aiden.

‘He's been telling you to call all morning.'

‘Yes.' And if she'd rung from the lookout? Too late for that what-if.

‘Does he know about Walsh's phone?'

‘Not from me.' She remembered the urgent tone of Aiden's phone message, wondered again if he'd spoken to Kate. Or … he'd told her two nights ago he would work it out. She hoped he had – and that he didn't wait to cross all his T's before he did anything about it.

‘What did you find?' Hugh asked.

Jax frowned.

‘You sent a text to Kate saying you found something.'

She glanced at the phone in his hand again. Had he checked her messages to Kate, too? ‘A letter.'

He pulled Brendan's phone from his other pocket. ‘What's the password?'

If he'd just read her text conversation with Kate, he would've seen the passwords that were sent earlier. Hugh must have known Jax found something before he got in her car. He'd asked for Brendan's phone but he wanted what was on it.

She could send him on a scavenger hunt but he was going to find it eventually … probably better if he wasn't ticked off when he did. ‘You don't need it. It's on paper inside the cover.'

He ripped the rubber off, found the receipt, opened it long enough to scan Brendan's handwriting, then tore it in two, wound down the window and tossed it out.

Jax gasped, swinging her head to watch as the pieces were whipped away. It'd been photographed and saved to techno heaven but they were Brendan's last words to his wife. Written by his own hand, lost on the wind. Jax took a second to glare at Hugh before turning her eyes back to the traffic.

He seemed amused by her anger, smiled as he hooked an elbow on the doorframe.

Arsehole
. ‘Don't you want to know what it said?'

‘I saw enough.'

‘And you already know what happened, right?'

His gaze stayed on the road.

‘So you know it didn't implicate you. You've done that all by yourself.'

Hugh turned then, aimed a flat, hard stare in her direction, didn't bother with an answer. He didn't need to. His cold silence said plenty.

And it scared the hell out of her.

They were out of suburban Newcastle and travelling the strip of land that ran between the ocean and Lake Macquarie. Jax caught occasional glimpses of the wide, calm basin of water as they passed boat sales yards, a golf course, pubs, houses. Then Swansea Channel was up ahead: deep green water moving fast as it spilled into the Pacific on an outgoing tide.

Another text beeped. Hugh checked the screen. ‘Are you fucking the cop?'

Jax stiffened, the memory of Aiden's mouth making her face warm, the metal grid of Swansea Bridge humming under her tyres before she answered. ‘No.'

‘You sure about that?'

‘Yes.'

A chuckle. ‘I thought there was a chance you might've spiced things up for me. Widows are always good for a fuck. The fresher, the better.'

Jax stopped for a red light, bile churning in her gut as she remembered the slide of his knuckle across the back of her hand. It wasn't a compliment. It was repulsive. Had he been playing two widows – her and Kate?

The hour she'd spent with him in the cafe ran through her memory like a time-lapse film. His face as it morphed in and out of sternness and compassion. She'd wondered then if he put a mask over his emotions, understood now that the sentiment was an act. He'd sized her up, given her grief, regret, concern, in return for what she knew.

And in his car afterwards? Jax remembered her crawling, irrational panic when Hugh stopped at the intersection and watched her across the car – and she wondered if he'd considered doing this then, with Zoe in the back seat. Jax had thought there was something wrong with
her
– she should have trusted her instincts. Thank God Zoe wasn't with her now. That Deanne had arrived, that Tilda had been home, that she'd done this on her own.

Up ahead, the Pacific Highway veered out of the suburbs and became the link road for the motorway. Dual carriageway, high-speed traffic, the stuff of her nightmares. ‘Where are we going?' she asked, fear adding a tremor to her words this time.

‘Stay on the highway.'

‘Not to the motorway. I don't want to get on the motorway. Not with a fucking gun on me.' The lights turned green. She didn't move.

‘Miranda.' It was an order.

She crawled forward. It wasn't just the motorway that scared her. Someone had killed Nina Torrence; her body was found before she was discovered missing. There were plenty of places along the M1 – even before they got there – to do a better job of hiding a body.

‘Where are we going?' Jax asked again, pitch shifting up an octave.

His eyes moved over her face as though deciding how much she needed to know. ‘We're going to Sydney to see a man. You'll give him the phone and he'll explain why you'll forget you ever saw it.'

Sydney? He was delivering her? Like Nina had been delivered to ‘the boss' before she was tossed off a cliff. Jax glanced across the car, wondering if Nina ever saw Dominic Escott that night – and if Hugh was lying now. How the hell would she know? ‘Not with a gun on me.' She was moving at twenty k's, wasn't sure she could make herself go faster with a lethal weapon jammed into her thigh and the prospect of the motorway in her windscreen.

For three seconds, he didn't move. Then he took the gun away, tucked it into the waistband of his jeans. ‘Happy now?'

‘Ecstatic, you arsehole.'

He grinned. ‘Drive the fucking car.'

She turned out of Swansea, headed away from the suburbs and onto the wide ribbon of the link road, easing the car up to a hundred k's, feeling safer at the speed limit than as an obstacle in the slow lane.

She could do Sydney if Hugh didn't go nuts or try to kill her between here and there.
Just focus on the road
, she told herself. Block out the gun and the hard, cold man beside her and drive. Work out what to do when they got there. Get hold of a phone, bolt on foot, jump in front of a car. There would be options in Sydney.

The highway wound south through bushland, leaving Lake Macquarie's invisible boundary and entering the Central Coast. Traffic was sparse. Hugh was silent. She let half-formed thoughts grow, meld, take shape. Then her phone rang.

Hugh pulled it from its dashboard recess. ‘What the fuck is this cop's problem?'

Uncertainty beat a rhythm in her temple. Would Aiden try to find her? Drive to the house and ask Tilda where she was? Head to Strzelecki and … find an empty car park? Would it ring alarm bells? Or would he go back to work and try again later?

The ring tone stopped. A text message beeped.

‘I need to piss him off,' Hugh said. ‘What happened last night?'

She glanced at the screen in his hand, saw the text log again, remembered the exchange of messages last night:
Drink and questions?
And the one this morning:
Sorry about last night. Can we talk?
‘Nothing,' she said.

‘Bullshit. Why did he apologise?'

Hugh thought it was amusing to fuck widows. She wasn't going to tell him. ‘He stood me up.'

He tapped out a message. It took a while. He hit send and grinned. ‘Dickhead.'

‘What did you say?'

With a droll lift to one eyebrow as he turned her phone off, he said, ‘I suggested he was a fucking loser and asked him nicely to fuck off.'

Jax clenched her teeth. She hadn't questioned the text from Kate telling her to go to Strzelecki, but it must have been sent by Hugh. Would Aiden believe this one? He knew she wanted answers, that she was obsessing about them. Would he know the words weren't hers or would he welcome them? He'd spent days trying to discourage her questions. Maybe he'd see it as good news, decide it was better not to share whatever information he had.

A phone rang. Hugh reached into his shirt pocket, came back with a third mobile and answered it. ‘Yeah.' Listened a moment. ‘We're on the road.' Pause. ‘I'll send confirmation.' He hung up, returned it, set his gaze on the passing bushland.

Jax steered off the Pacific Highway and joined the motorway. She'd passed this intersection on Monday, travelling in the opposite direction with Brendan. She'd been terrified then. She was now – but the answers to the questions Brendan had launched were close. They were right beside her.

He was there for the drop,
Brendan had written,
said the boss was getting paranoid
. Which meant at least two other people knew what happened the night Nina Torrence was murdered. Maybe more than that:
They tried 2 get me 2 come in, they wanted 2 give me money
.

Dominic Escott was Jax's pick for ‘the boss'. The ‘he' killed Nina. Was it Hugh? Or was Hugh a third person, part of ‘they'?

This morning, Kate said Hugh was a personal security advisor. He'd told Jax he had useful civilian contacts, had found jobs for other ex-military colleagues. Maybe one of them murdered Nina and Hugh got called in when Brendan became a loose cannon. Jax didn't have to be sitting in the car with Nina's killer, right?

She wanted to believe that; wanted to believe his job was to deliver her to Sydney to sign her own confidentiality agreement. She wanted to think about other things.

‘
You
were chasing Brendan, weren't you?'

Hugh didn't move, didn't speak, didn't react at all.

‘You didn't see him get in my car, did you? You just knew he'd head to Newcastle and he knew you were close.'

The thick ropes of muscle in Hugh's neck twisted as he turned and settled his eyes on her. He said nothing. He thought he could frighten her into silence. Fuck him. ‘Did you burn his car? Was that a warning?
Look, Brendan, I found you, I'm close
. Maybe to flush him out, make him take a run for Newcastle.'

One side of Hugh's mouth slid slowly upwards. ‘Okay, Miranda. Give it your best shot.'

She kept her eyes on the road, her pulse picking up. ‘You got stuck in the traffic after the crash that killed Brendan, decided it was pointless trying to get to Newcastle with the cops out in force, headed back to Sydney to check out the reporter who'd given him a ride.' She glanced left. His expression hadn't changed. ‘You couldn't find Brendan for two days and when he turned up, he was with me. I think you were worried he'd been holed up at my place, telling me secrets. I think you broke into my old house and made it look like vandals. I think you wanted to know if he'd left a trail, if something needed to be done to shut the reporter up, too.'

Still no response but the pieces were coming together and it was easier now she knew whose eyes to look through. A part of her brain suggested it might have been wise to stop there, but now she'd started, she had to see it to the end. Obsession was like that.

‘And well, damn, you discovered the stuff at the reporter's house wasn't hers. She'd moved out and hadn't left a forwarding address. What the fuck did that mean? Did she go into hiding with Brendan's information, planning to stay out of sight until she'd finished her tell-all? Or was she under witness protection, the carjacking part of the set-up?

‘The cops didn't lay charges the next day, though, which meant she either didn't have enough on you or she hadn't told them. But where was she? The media said she'd left the scene with police. You didn't know where she went after that.' Jax flicked her eyes at him. ‘I think you watched Kate's house to see what
she
did and bingo, I turned up. The questions then were: What was the reporter talking to Kate about? And how much did they both know?'

Jax took a breath, satisfaction and relief at finding a clear path through it all.

Beside her, Hugh tipped his head, doubtful. ‘You got me in a lot of places, Miranda.'

‘Yeah, I do, don't I?'

It had to be more than Hugh and ‘the boss' cleaning up. It would take more than one person to vandalise a street and break into her old house without being spotted – and it was on the south side of the Harbour Bridge, a long drive from the M1. It wasn't Hugh who chased her, either. Two other men had drawn police attention – maybe they'd stuffed up. Maybe it was why Hugh arrived the next day to play Uncle Nice-Guy. Or maybe he'd needed to put some distance between himself and the detectives in Sydney investigating Nina's murder. Whatever the reason, it wasn't him who'd broken into Tilda's place. He'd been with Jax while she invited him for coffee.

What of that meeting in the cafe? Hugh told her Brendan was a weak, cheating, irresponsible suicide risk. He'd also covered his own arse, claiming remorse for telling Brendan he'd come after him if he didn't do the right thing by Kate. ‘Was everything you told me about Brendan bullshit?' Another glance across the car got her an exaggerated shrug.

‘You're telling this story,' he said.

Arsehole
. Then what? ‘You turned up at Kate's house this morning and she told you Brendan's phone had turned up. That she couldn't bear to deal with it and had given it to me to go through. Maybe she told you I'd found something, or maybe you went through her messages, but you sent me the text from her mobile and waited for me at that nice secluded lookout.' Why wasn't Hugh worried about Kate telling the police this part? She swung her face around. ‘Where's Kate?'

He tipped his head to one side, making a show of thinking about it. ‘I left her at home.'

Safe?
Alive?
If he was trying to cover tracks, Brendan Walsh's wife murdered in her own home wasn't going to do it. Unless … Yesterday, over coffee, he'd said Kate had taken something to sleep. Had he given her more? A lot more?

‘What did you do?'

His answer was a chuckle as he turned his face away – and ice worked cold fingers up Jax's spine. Had he killed Kate?

She drove on in silence, arms aching from the tense grip on the wheel, back stiff from leaning forward, body instinctively braced and ready to flee. She had nowhere to run yet but she had answers. Not all of them and Hugh hadn't confirmed her theories, but she was willing to take his silence to mean she was close.

Four days ago, she'd assumed the man in her passenger seat was either violent or crazy enough to kill her. Today she knew better and – as she glanced at the detached, unconcerned man there now – dread burned in her stomach like acid. She remembered the scratch she'd noticed behind
his ear the day she met him and the reports about Nina's defensive wounds; thought about his threat to slice Zoe's face and the gun jammed so quickly and casually into her thigh.
Gun or knife
, Brendan had said.

‘You killed Nina Torrence, didn't you?'

There was a new expression on Hugh's face when it came around. It wasn't surprise or fear at being found out. Not admission or denial or anger. None of the sentiments she'd thought her question might generate. It said:
And there it is
. Confirmation. Validation. ‘Take the next exit.'

The outskirts of Sydney were an hour away.

She shook her head. ‘You said Sydney.'

‘We're making a stop.'

‘Out here? Where?'

He lifted the gun from his waistband, aimed it at her chest. ‘Take the exit, Miranda.'