Floored (41 page)

“Bidwell was a shell. A real business hiding a sophisticated electronic identity theft racket.”

That was like an acid based injection of humiliation. “How did I miss that?” How could she not have known, looked harder, fought harder not to be made such a fool.

Her voice broadcast distress and Sean reacted by pulled her up onto his chest so he could look at her. “You couldn’t have known. He was clever. Malware, keylogging, identity harvesting. If you hadn’t taken the money. If we hadn’t met. If he hadn’t seen you at Bold Park, we could’ve dismantled Wacker’s whole network and never found Justin.”

Still, still, it stung so badly. “Why was he at the park that night?”

“We’re not sure.”

“That’s why you thought I set you up?”

He nodded, ruefully. “We had to test the possibility. None of us believed it for a second.”

“I get it. It’s what you do. Why—”

He put his hand over her mouth, then chased it with his lips, cancelling the rest of her sentence. For a while there was just that, kisses that made the world condense to the mussed up bed and Sean’s hold on her.

“There’s more. Your father.” She held her breath. “Stud looked into it. The two officers involved in your dad’s arrest were both charged with crimes by the police corruption commission, specifically bribery and falsifying evidence. There’s a good chance your dad was set up, that he was innocent.”

She closed her eyes against the burn behind them. When she opened them, tears for the father falsely accused by the police and resented by his own daughter wet her cheeks and Sean’s chest. He stroked her hair and gave her shelter against the flood of old memories and wounds.

“It’s not an extenuating circumstance, but it helps explain why you didn’t go to the police. There’s more. The blonde. Detective Carolyn Martin. She’s missing. As is her cash. We assume she’s hit the road, which sure works for me as an admission of guilt, and that is a mitigating factor.”

“What’s going to happen to me?” It came out on a sob.

“Ah, Caity. I’m a frontline cop, a grunt in the scheme of things. I’m a long way from the kind of deal you’ll be offered, but it’s a first offense.”

“An only offense.”

He rubbed his knuckles over her cheekbone. “What you did in the park and helping Stud’s forensic team on the ledgers, plus your payments to Victims of Crime, all that will be taken into account.” He smiled. “I don’t think I’ll need to visit you at Silverwater.” He flipped them so she was on her back and he was braced over her. “But if I do, I’ll be there every visiting day.”

“That wouldn’t be a good career move.”

“It’d be the right life move. You surrendered, remember. You’re not getting away from me now.”

She tested a smile. He was backlit in the yellow glow from the table lamp. He had the devil in his deep blue eyes and a hand inside her thigh. “Are you tired, Caity?”

She was wrung inside out, but insatiable had nothing on Sean. “You’re kidding me?”

His hand shifted and stroked, fingers probing. “Does that feel like I’m kidding?”

It felt like too much. “Oh God.” She put a hand over his, to pull it away, to hold it there. He waited to see, a soft chuckle, a shift of his weight. She was so drained, but he could take all that away. She pressed his hand to urge him on, arching her back.

“Not too tired then,” he said, against the side of her neck.

She wasn’t, not then and not a few hours later when they drove to the vet clinic, found Blue made it through the night and was fit to travel, and not when she boarded a small jet with Sean and Blue, bound for Adelaide. But she did doze during the hour and a half flight. Then again on the flight to Sydney, she lay her head on Sean’s shoulder awash in the knowledge she’d found the deepest truths.

44: Fishing

They’d been pouring over the two ledgers Caitlyn had taken from the safe for the whole morning and it was still a meaningless spread of numbers and hieroglyphics. This was the third day she’d worked with the crime squad’s forensic accountant, Maria Cosovich. So far for her food, accommodation and around the clock protection she’d delivered a big fat zero in return.

Maria was too nice to say anything. She brought homemade shortbread biscuits when she arrived the second day. Stud said outright it was okay. It didn’t feel okay, and she didn’t know Stud well enough to know if his pacing, and the rate at which he accepted another cup of tea and gulped it down without waiting for it to cool, was his usual approach to life or not.

Sean was no help. At least not on this. He had other work to do that kept him away from the house during the day and once Stud and Maria left, she was alone, rambling around the three bedroom suburban house with her doubts for company.

Stud had been more specific about her ‘deal’. She did need a lawyer, but there was no hurry. Sean’s sister Bridie was tracking a recommendation. It was unlikely she’d need to worry about a prison sentence, but she did need to worry about demonstrating her value in the quest to bring Justin undone. So far that’d been limited to turning the jug on, jiggling tea bags, pouring milk and washing mugs.

Like Carolyn Martin, Justin had gone to ground. He was off the grid: not seeking medical treatment, accessing a bank or using credit cards, or his passport, and not returning to the apartment or the business. There was deliberately no arrest warrant out for him and so no ostensible reason for him to be missing in action. Cait knew he’d be running scared. Justin liked order and control in his life. Getting beaten up in a police sting would not have been his idea of a good time. Stud had activated an informer network to get a bead on him. He was pretty sure a cash incentive would eventually reveal the GPS co-ordinates for the last place Justin sneezed. Bidwell meanwhile traded on in the hope that he might surface again once he felt the heat was off.

Unlike Justin, Wacker was back in business, he’d even done an interview with
The Telegraph
on police brutality, as if he was primping for businessman of the year, and Stud said he was waiting for a legal suit to follow. It sent Sean spare.

The bright spot was Blue. And since the safe house was a suburban red brick with a backyard and the Sydney vet had cleared her to leave the clinic, Blue would be coming home tomorrow.

If Blue was the bright, Sean was the deep warm glow. He came back to the house each night bringing groceries and news of the day. They ate a meal together and hung out in front of the TV or listening to music as though they were a normal couple. A normal couple who were potential targets of gang violence.

Inside the house it was easy to forget that. Inside the curl of Sean’s arms even more so. When they’d arrived he’d surveyed the house, checking every window, every vantage point, then asked if he could move in with her—but not as part of her protection detail. He wanted to move in as her boyfriend. He’d laughed when he said the word and it was almost the occasion of a fight, until he explained he thought the description was inadequate, but since there was nowhere on the official paperwork to declare himself her fully fledged white knight, she’d have to make do.

Making do with Sean meant opening herself up to a world she’d never experienced. For a start, he talked. He grumbled, he griped, he bitched, he repeated bits of conversation from his day, he asked her opinion, he expected her interest. He sang. He made her laugh. And he wanted her time, even if it was only to have her beside him while he chopped vegetables. His attention was heady. She was essentially under house arrest, her movement restricted to an eight hundred square metre block, but she walked around with an idiot grin on her face because he was showing her a different way to live. One where she counted as more than a colleague you slept with or a business partner you duped.

She stopped thinking about the fact this was playing house and set aside the worry of how she was going to pay for a lawyer, find a job and earn enough to pay rent on another flat, because hearing Sean come in the front door was the best sound even when he was cursing about ‘frigging paper cuts’ being the only bit of police action he was seeing.

“More tea?” she said to Stud, as he came in from the backyard, juggling his phone and an empty mug.

Stud focused on Maria—a flick of his chin that got her to say, “Nothing new.”

Then he said, “Let’s look at it again tomorrow. See if Sean’s idea of ranking Fetch’s delivery instructions against the notations leads anywhere.”

Maria said, “Got it,” and powered down her laptop. She left the ledgers and a pile of subpoenaed bank records stacked neatly on the table.

Stud held his mug out and Cait poured. She thought he’d leave with Maria but he sat after they waved her off.

He sipped. He sat back in the kitchen chair as though this was going to be a casual chat, but though he exuded laid-back in his jeans, t-shirt and every which way thick grey hair, he was anything but.

“I’ve got a proposition for you. Our boy’s not going to like it. So I’m going to ask you not to tell him.”

Cait dropped her head; she traced her finger over a whorl in the pine table. That wasn’t fair, but it’s not like she had much choice. “Why wouldn’t he like it?”

Stud snorted. She got a whiff of his tea breath. “Last time we put you in the field he assaulted a superior officer. This time he might put me in hospital. I’ve got a thing against hospitals, just so you know.”

What was it with these tough guys and hospitals? “You want to put me in the field? What does that mean?”

“Ever been fishing, Cait?”

“No.” She said it like she hoped it would prompt a shortcut in the conversation.

“Right, well, stick with me anyway.” No such luck.

“If you want to catch a big fish, first you have to go where the fish is. Then you have to show him something he wants more than he wants to stay hidden. When he sticks his head up, you clobber him.”

“That doesn’t sound like a fishing story.”

“So I mix my metaphors. It’s a strategy. We think Justin is a weak link in Wacker’s organisation. We think if we can get to Justin, we can get to Wacker and if we can get to Wacker, we can get to the rest of them and we can clean up bikie gang crime.”

“You make that sound easy.”

“It’s fucking harder than fishing.”

“I’m not the rod in the story am I?”

“Nope.”

“I’m the bait.”

“Smart girl.”

“God!”

“So you see why I don’t want Sean knowing.”

“I have to tell him, and even if I don’t he’s going to know. He sees through me.”

“Yeah, well, you’re going to have to work on making yourself less transparent.”

She sighed. “I don’t know if I can do that. If I want to.”

Stud leaned forward, his casual shifted to caustic. She had a flashback to the interrogation room in Perth. “Tell me what the advantage of our boy jumping all over this with his objections about your safety would be?”

“Maybe he should. How unsafe will it be?”

“Unsafe enough for you to be free and clear of this mess when it’s all over.”

“What do you mean?”

“You do what I’m asking and you walk away with no charges, no record, no repercussions. You don’t get the licence back but you can have the Statesman and start again.”

Free and clear. No record. A chance to start again. Where was the fine print? “You’re asking me to do something dangerous.”

“I’m asking you to put yourself at risk for a short period of time so we can fix a larger problem for the long haul.”

“And Sean can’t know.”

“You got it, hook, line and sinker. You need to think about it?”

“Can I have the details?”

“Not yet. Need to know. It won’t happen for a little while yet.”

There was only so much mystery she could live with. “I do need to know if I have to see Justin.”

“He’ll have to see you. That’s all. It’ll be a controlled environment—heavily controlled. I wouldn’t ask you to do this if I didn’t think you could pull it off.”

“What if I can’t?” She’d managed to get through the Bold Park sting because she’d had Sean with her, because he’d needed her as cover. Doing something like that again, facing Justin alone, it was a much bigger deal and she didn’t have Sean’s talent for role-playing.

“Ever wanted something badly, Cait?”

Stud would’ve made a great used car salesman. “That’s a trick question.”

“But not hard to answer.”

“Yes.” She’d wanted Sean inexplicably when she thought he was a bad cop and utterly when she learned he wasn’t.

“What?”

She picked at random. “I wanted to be able to run this circuit in the park in under thirty minutes.”

“How far off were you?”

“Six minutes. I didn’t think I’d ever get a whole six minutes off my time.”

“What did you do?”

“A bunch of stuff. What does it matter?”

“It matters.”

“I did sprints. I met a male friend who was much faster than me and I ran against him. I worked at it. I changed my shoes. I adapted my stride.”

“You did it.”

She smiled. “I did. But what does it prove?”

“What it proves is what I already know and you apparently don’t.”

She sighed and put her forehead on the table. The fishing analogy was bad enough, this was torture.

“You don’t give up.”

She shot upright. “It was a run in the park, Stud.”

“It was something you wanted badly enough to work hard for. It was something that made you dig down and find reserves, rethink your patterns, and slog at the problem till you licked it. It proves you’re tenacious. You proved that to me in Perth. You were scared witless, but you knew you could help. You dug down, you thought about it creatively, you didn’t hide from the reality of it, and you did it with opposition from Sean.”

Maybe this was less torture and more being taught.

“You can do this too, Cait. Exactly the same way—but let’s skip the opposition bit for the sake of our collective health.”

“I’d be free?”

“As a sulphur-crested cockatoo.”

“What happens if I rat myself out to Sean?” This was a big problem. Not only did she not want to lie to him, she didn’t think she’d be able to get away with it. He’d always known when she was withholding things from him. The impossible part of this mission wasn’t being the bait, it was keeping the secret.