Covet (20 page)

‘Do you understand now, darling? Do you see why it’s too dangerous to stay here?’

It was Monday morning, and Ed Brown was buckled into the passenger seat of the Prison Lady’s car, trying his best to explain the reasons to her. He had strained every last ounce of his patience to make it through the night and now here they were on the way to the bank to withdraw the money. It was the first time he had risked leaving the house since he had arrived there on Saturday just after his escape. He was going to get her to withdraw all her money now, and he was driving with her to the bank to see that she did it. Now that he had got this far with her, he didn’t plan on going back to that house for any longer than it took to eliminate the woman and clear out all the valuables. The only way he could get her to empty her bank account was to say that they were going to go travelling together. He had hoped she would be excited by the idea, but she didn’t seem happy at all. He couldn’t figure her out. Weren’t females supposed to find travel romantic?

He was frustrated, his patience nearly spent. He wanted to get rid of this woman as soon as possible.

Think of the money.

‘Darling, don’t be upset,’ he said. Exercising great control, he managed to put a hand on her knee and squeeze it gently, as he had seen couples do on TV.

Don’t put your hand to your mouth. You must clean it first.

They waited at a set of traffic lights. The Prison Lady was at the wheel, gripping it tensely, her thin, mean mouth turned down. She was not looking at him. He could tell she was upset.

‘We’ll just take a little trip until things settle down,’ he said, doing his best to cheer her up.

Kiss her if you must. Do what you have to.

Ed leaned across the seat and kissed her on the cheek. Her skin was rough, and covered in foul-tasting yellowy make-up. Ed wanted so badly to wipe his mouth that it started to twitch. There were disinfectant wipes in the car within his reach. He wanted to grab one. The sight of the package on the dashboard was very distracting. Ed knew he had to wait till she got out of the car. He couldn’t let her see him do it. That would make her even more unhappy.

Calmly now. Do whatever you have to.

Finally the light turned green and the Prison Lady drove them through the intersection. Ed was happy that there was little traffic. The fewer people, the fewer witnesses. He spotted the blue signage of an ANZ bank branch clustered among a handful of shops in an outdoor mall. ‘Is that it?’

She nodded.

‘Pull in here,’ he said, pointing to an available spot in the parking area of a convenience store two shops down from the bank. The Prison Lady did as he said. She turned off the engine.

‘But why must we go, darling?’ she whined. Her face was petulant with disappointment. She wrung her hands in her lap. ‘Why can’t we stay at the house a bit longer? We could have at least a month there before anyone misses Ben. He never does anything! No one would miss him. And if they did they’d just think he went away for a holiday or something.’

Oh, just shut up and get the money!

Ed had never dealt with a woman like this before. He had never had to. Most of his previous interaction with the opposite sex had been limited to his mother, and the girls he had taken off the streets. One female had worked the night shift at the morgue from time to time, but he had managed to stay clear of her. Now Ed had to concentrate hard to think of how to best handle the situation. He thought of the episodes of
The Bold And The Beautiful
that he had studied. For the moment the lines escaped him.

‘Ahh, think of that woman who came to the house yesterday,’ Ed said in a calm, even tone. ‘We can’t have that happening again, can we? She could get the neighbours suspicious. She’s bound to come back, darling. I’m sure you realise that.’

‘Damn Lisa! Damn her! That stupid cunt has ruined everything!’ She slammed her fists against the steering wheel, tears springing from her eyes.

Ed had not seen her angry before. It spooked him even more than her confession about what was in the freezer. He couldn’t have her make a scene like this. Someone might notice. He didn’t know what to do. Why, oh why couldn’t he have found her PIN? Ed thought about giving up, taking her home, slicing her up in the garage and giving a search of the house another try. But even if he found her PIN, he might only be able to take out $500 at a time. Or even less. He had to get the Prison Lady into that bank.

Ed put his hand on her knee again, still trying to placate her. He had come with her specifically to make sure she took out all she had. But she didn’t seem convinced yet.

Two minutes. If she doesn’t do it in two minutes she’s dead.

‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry for my bad language.’ She hung her head, appearing to calm herself. ‘Oh, sweetheart…it’s just that I wanted so badly for that to be our love nest and now it’s all ruined. I dreamed about it for so long. You don’t understand. Now you’re saying that we can’t even stay there!’

‘It’s okay, honey. We’re going to be fine. All I need is
you
,’ he said. ‘And we can come back to the house when things have quietened down. Just take out as much cash as you can right now so we can travel for a little while. Think of it as our honeymoon. We can’t use credit cards because they’ll be traced, so we need cash. Just cash. Once things settle down we will come back and I will repay you. We’ll be a team, like Bonnie and Clyde.’

Ninety seconds and she is dead.

What he said seemed to please her. A broad smile grew across her sagging face. ‘Bonnie and Clyde…’ she murmured. She squeezed Ed’s hand affectionately, undid her seatbelt and stepped out of the car. He watched her walk into the bank.

Now Ed smiled as well. And it was a genuine smile.

Come on, do it. Take it all out. Quickly.

Ed stayed low in the passenger seat. He wore one of the dead guy’s baseball caps that he had found in the poolroom downstairs. It was red and white with ‘Sydney Swans’ written across it, and the brim was long enough that it hid his face fairly well. There were a lot of security cameras near banks and convenience stores. When the police found the Prison Lady dead, they would track her banking transactions and they would eventually look at this footage. But they would not have a clear view of Ed Brown. He would be nothing but a quiet blur of baseball cap. And that would piss off Detective Flynn no end. He would be long gone and Andy Flynn would have failed once more.

‘So, are you on, like, step thirteen?’

‘Excuse me?’

Andy Flynn was walking down Victoria Street, Kings Cross with Senior Constable Karen Mahoney. She had insisted on taking him out for breakfast, knowing that he had been placed on forced leave until his evaluation later in the day.

‘Your AA thing? Is this the thirteenth step?’ Mahoney said. ‘The step where you go back on the booze and forget the first twelve?’

‘Hey,’ he said.
Cocky thing she’s become.
‘I’ll have you know that I have not fallen off the wagon. I didn’t go drinking last night at all.’

‘Really?’

‘Really.’

But he had been close. Too damn close. After one more horrible, beautiful sip of Jack Daniels the truth had hit home. If he went on a drinking binge, his career was over. Ed Brown was out and Andy needed to catch him. He needed to do it for Jimmy, and for Cassandra and for Mak. He needed to do it for himself. If he went for the comfort of the bottle once more, he would be a write-off, his
pride gone forever, and Ed Brown would have won. Andy took the full bottle of whiskey and walked it to the garbage chute near the back stairs of his apartment building, listening with a mix of pain and relief as it plummeted down the metal shaft and shattered into hundreds of pieces in the basement skip. There would be no going back for it now. Or ever.

‘Just a word of advice, keep away from your friend the bottle, or you won’t be passing muster on anything, much less proving yourself to be emotionally stable and mentally sound. The powers that be are watching you pretty carefully.’

‘Thanks for the heads up.’ Andy was determined not to fall into his old patterns. It scared him that he had been so close to sabotaging his career, his future, his chances of catching Ed. ‘I told Kelley that there is no way he can keep me away from this case, especially now that half our good men are in the hospital. I think he saw the wisdom in my view.’
I hope he did.
‘I don’t think he’ll be able to afford to say no.’

‘I don’t think he’ll have any reason to, just so long as you don’t take off on one of your binges. At this point I think he’s just following protocol…’ Her words trailed off.

Andy stopped. ‘What?’

‘Oh shit. Look.’ Karen pointed at the window of the newsagent across the road. Her mouth gaped.

‘Bloody hell,’ he said, forgetting their conversation.

‘Shit, shit, shit…’

They examined with jaded disappointment—but not disbelief—the headline news of the Monday morning paper displayed in the shop window.

M
ODEL
W
ITNESS
F
LEES TO
H
ONG
K
ONG
.

‘Ah, you’ve got to be kidding me,’ Andy mumbled, and ran a nervous hand across his mouth.

‘Well, she looks great anyway,’ Mahoney commented, only half seriously. ‘Though she does look a bit like she’s just seen one of those
Nightmare on Elm Street
movies,’ she added. ‘Or been in one.’

Makedde was caught in a blurry photograph prior to boarding her flight for Hong Kong. Karen had warned Andy that the press had managed to track them down at the airport, and there had been a bit of a scuffle. Now, looking at the result, Andy’s heart bled. She had the appearance of a scared animal caught in the headlights: hair wild, eyes wide with panic, her lips held in a surprised ‘oh’. In real life she had never looked so vulnerable, not even when she was laid up in hospital. In that captured frame were all the elements of a glamorous victim.

‘Look at me, though. I’m a shocker,’ Karen said, tilting her head to one side and frowning.

Half of the young senior constable’s face had made it into the shot. She appeared to be yelling obscenities, and her hand was reaching out towards the camera.
It was a shame her hand hadn’t made it all the way to the lens
, Andy thought. It was a bloody shame.

Andy reassessed his disappointment in not going to the airport to see Mak onto her plane. If he had been there, his presence would not have gone unnoticed by the press. The headline would have
been all about the ‘widowed-detective-hero and the model-victim-ex-lover reunited!’, or some such garbage. And some photographer’s lens, and face, would have probably got itself accidentally broken. Andy didn’t need assault charges on top of everything else. Kelley would have been really unhappy then.

Karen made a move towards the door of the newsagency and Andy followed. Inside, he perused the morning’s offerings with a dull feeling of grief, as if they documented a significant loss in his life, which in a way they did. It looked as if every newspaper had some mention of Makedde on the front page, be it large or stamp-sized small, and he noticed that the same photo appeared several times. One of the tabloids had blown up the blurry image to cover the entire front page, along with a small mug shot of Ed grinning eerily in black and white. The accompanying article was penned by none other than Patricia Goodacre.

Andy could imagine the water-cooler talk in offices everywhere: ‘Oh the poor thing! I can’t imagine how she can carry on!’ Mak’s plight, the police force’s apparent ineptitude and the name Ed Brown would be fuelling talkback radio, café gossip and dinner conversation. It was something he knew Mak would hate. In that way, he was glad she was not in Australia to face it.

Karen and Andy each bought a copy of every newspaper, five in total, some from interstate, and headed back onto the street carrying their grim booty.

Ed’s hand reached automatically for the packet of Clean Wipes, snatching it up eagerly for the second time as he waited for the Prison Lady to come out of the bank. He smeared the wet, stinging tissues across his mouth again and again, feeling the relief of cleanliness. Back and forth.
Better. Better now. No germs.
He wiped his hands and discarded the tissue by his feet.

The small television set
, he thought.
The VCR. The stereo. The cappuccino machine. The two sets of golf clubs. Jewellery? Where does she keep her jewellery?

Ed wondered about that. Did she have any valuables that he had not found? Maybe she kept them at her own place, wherever that was. Perhaps he should get her to take him there? Or would that be risky? And he also still wondered about something else—the corpse. The Prison Lady’s story was hard to believe. Had she been thinking that it would impress him? Ed was not interested in male bodies. Never was. Not when he worked as an attendant at the morgue and not now. Did she think he was gay or something? No, he was fairly sure that this woman couldn’t have done that
herself, and now it hardly mattered as she would soon be joining the dead guy in the garage anyway.

Leave her in pieces by the freezer with her freeze-wrapped brother. Flynn will love that. Perhaps I’ll leave a note for him? Dear Detective Flynn, I hope you like my surprise…

Something in Ed’s peripheral vision caught his attention, something that made his heart leap…

It was an image of Makedde’s face.

M
ODEL
W
ITNESS FLEES TO
H
ONG
K
ONG
.

Ed did a double take, and leaned forward to take another look. Yes. It was her. At the entrance to the convenience store just ahead of him, just past where the Prison Lady was now walking back towards the car, a series of little metal racks displayed the morning headlines. And there she was, unmistakable on the front page.

Makedde.

Mother.

Makedde. Mother. Makedde. Makedde. Makedde.

She was right there, just outside the shop.

Looking at him.