Leopard Dreaming (15 page)

‘Try it,’ he warned. ‘She stays with me.’

‘No, wait! Two dead feds is the last thing I need.’ She sighed heavily. ‘If I agree to assist you unofficially, would you brief me with everything you know first?’

‘Unofficially, as in just between us?’ Symes asked. ‘Or will General Garland still need a report on the case when we’re done here?’

‘Off the books completely,’ Lockman said, keeping his arm outstretched and steady. ‘General Garland doesn’t ever need to know we were here.’

‘Now I really am curious.’ Symes chuckled and made the sounds of holstering his sidearm. Moser did too, and Mira felt Lockman relax a little, although he didn’t move to return his Glock to its holster under his armpit. ‘If there’s trouble at home-camp with Mama Bear, son, you’d both be welcome in our tent. Just call me Papa. I’m not even going to take offence at being held at gunpoint this morning.’

‘You drew first,’ Lockman argued.

‘You drew fastest,’ Symes countered. ‘That by itself is worthy of a memo to Garland. I’m sure she’d be thrilled to hear that your skills are still of use to you outside the service, and in public too, no less. Makes me wonder if you’re licensed to carry such a pretty piece without it being dismantled according to law for safety in transit? And maybe we should search her shoulder bag or your luggage rack, in case you’re concealing more weapons?’

Lockman took the hint and stashed his sidearm.

‘Don’t tell Garland
anything
,’ Mira warned, ‘or the only cooperation you’ll get from me is if you ask me to spit on you.’

‘Ask her for a direct line of communication,’ Moser whispered.

‘Hey, weren’t you listening?’ Mira complained. ‘You can talk to me directly, Detective. Quit grunting and whispering around me as if I’m some kind of freak.’

‘That’s your fault, actually,’ Symes said in a tone that was both friendly and defensive. ‘Last time I saw him like that was during the Queen’s visit. He’s gone all gobsmacked.’

‘I’ll smack him in the gob, all right. He was downright rude to me last time.’

‘Ah, but then you cured him as a cynic. Blew him away with your accuracy, and I must admit I’d never had such success with a psychic either. It’s a wonder we’d never heard of you before you hooked up with the military.’

‘Oh, really?’ Mira cocked an ear at him suspiciously. ‘So why did he just ask for a direct line of communication? We’re talking now, aren’t we?’

‘He means your phone number. We’d love to have it on our speed dial. You can’t imagine the stack of unsolved cases on our desks.’

Mira laughed. ‘I don’t have a speed dial. I don’t even have a phone.’

‘Don’t look at me,’ Lockman said. ‘She has to stay off the grid.’

‘Take my card anyway,’ Symes said. ‘If ever you need help, just call if you can, okay? We’d dearly value the chance to establish a more regular dialogue.’

Mira’s frown darkened. ‘With strings attached, obviously. No thanks.’

‘No, no, no, no. No strings. Quite the opposite. We’d rather know you’re out on your own than fallen in with a crime lord. Imagine how much extra work that would make for us. With a talent like yours, you could steal any password, identify all our informants …’

Mira opened her mouth to argue, but couldn’t.

‘Now we’re on the same page,’ Lockman agreed. ‘Let’s get this over with.’

‘How dearly would you value it?’ Mira asked. She wouldn’t mind helping the cops, so long as they could offer some kind of guarantee they wouldn’t invite General Garland to get in her way. Neither deliberately nor accidentally. ‘In cash I mean. What’s it really worth to work together on this?’

‘Without your general?’

‘She’s not my general!’ Mira’s fists clenched automatically. ‘She’s not my anything any more, so just answer the question. How much have you got on you?’

Lockman turned sharply, but she caught him again by the shoulder. ‘It’s okay, Lieutenant. I can’t afford to pay you unless I get paid first myself, right?’

‘I don’t need —’

‘To let the man answer me? You must be a little interested too, surely?’

‘Trust me, they can’t afford you.’

‘Is twelve hundred enough to start?’ Symes asked. ‘If that’s not enough for a few hours today, I can get more when we get back to the mainland.’

‘Twelve hundred?’ Lockman echoed. ‘You carry that much around in cash?’

‘We investigate fraud, son. We know how rife it really is, and cash is safer.’

‘Deal.’ Mira patted Lockman’s shoulder before he could argue any more. ‘Pay my secretary up front, please. He loves to count money.’

‘Feds can’t just lash out with cash like that,’ Lockman argued anyway. ‘I know enough about working for the government to know their petty cash can’t be splashed around without all the accompanying paperwork. It’ll set off alarm bells.’

‘It’s not petty cash, son. It’s my personal rent money.’ Mira heard a rip of Velcro, as if Symes was already opening his wallet. ‘I don’t need to pay my landlord until tomorrow, though, and this case deserves far more attention than an ordinary missing person.’

‘No, wait,’ Lockman said. ‘This doesn’t make it any safer for her. If you’re coughing up your own cash there has to be a catch — a big one!’

Mira frowned. ‘I knew it.’

‘Seriously, no catch,’ Symes assured her. ‘You’re worth it to us and more if you can shine a light on this case. Another dozen like you on our side and there’d be no more crime in the world. Look, take it or don’t, but don’t mess with our time, please. Seconds count on this one. We want her back alive and unharmed.’

‘I won’t argue with that,’ Mira conceded. ‘No funny stuff, though. Just hand it over so we can get down to business.’

Symes grinned to himself. She reminded him a lot of his niece. Smart, gutsy and not afraid to say what she thought.

‘I don’t trust him,’ persisted her bodyguard. A fine lad, despite a shadowy look about him that warned he’d done things on the other side of the law. ‘If he’s risking his own roof, he’s got more motives at work here than he’s telling us.’

‘Smack me naked. You’ve nailed me,’ Symes confessed. He winked at the lad since he suspected the lass was virtually blind. ‘I’m a wolf in sheep’s clothing; a creepy little detective in last year’s Armani. Suspect me all you like, son, but if you really are a friend of a friend of Madonna Sanchez, you should see straight through me. Through Moser too, actually. In our dark little corner of the world, it’s rare to come across a victim of crime who wears a genuine halo. There’s usually a history of unwise decisions, uncommon behaviour or unlawful alliances.’ He shook his head. ‘Not with Sanchez. Do you have any idea how much she’s had to overcome in her own life, and still managed to help others along the way? She’s a candidate for sainthood if ever I saw one.’

‘God-given angel,’ Moser said, backing him up. Yet Symes noticed the girl wince, as if stung by guilt.

‘I suppose you must think me a mercenary then,’ she said, defensively, ‘but I promise this money will bounce right back at you if you play nice and keep your mouths shut about me.’

‘We get it,’ Symes said, keen to keep the road smooth between them. ‘You have trust issues. So take the lot as an extra incentive.’ He opened his wallet and played the tune of polymer notes exchanging hands for her. ‘If it helps find the matron before she’s hurt it’ll be worth every cent.’

‘Keep a hundred,’ Lockman said, no less suspicious. ‘We wouldn’t want anyone accusing us of turning you into vagrants.’

Symes chuckled, since the thought had crossed his mind out of habit. He backed up a step, making his car door click shut as he leaned against it. ‘Will here do to talk, or shall we go straight up to the matron’s office?’ He knew enough about the girl to guess what her answer would be, and pulled out a toothpick from his coat pocket to chew on. It seemed like such a filthy
habit, but a whole lot cleaner than the cigarettes that had claimed part of his lung.

‘You look comfortable right there,’ Lockman sneered. ‘Go ahead. You first.’

Symes nodded and signalled Moser to keep watch for unexpected visitors. He knew the practice of awarding patients with platinum gate passes had been temporarily suspended since the matron disappeared. Rewards for that level of safe behaviour were rare at Serenity anyway, but visitors could return to their vehicles at any time and he didn’t want to risk being overheard considering the ace he was holding up his sleeve. If he’d been a gambling man and the girl had been a suspect, he would have called it a trump card on her.

‘Local police responded to the initial call,’ he explained, starting easy on her. ‘At first, it was only an old male patient who’d gone missing. Never tried to escape before, but disappeared from his straitjacket and rubber room between six-thirty and midnight. By then, staff had already conducted their own thorough search pattern, by the book, but they needed the matron’s authorisation to widen the search outside the fence to the bay and mainland. And that’s when the situation escalated. She lives on site, above her office, and yet her car was gone with no record of her passing through the gate. That was last Thursday and, if you recall, the weather that night was downright feral.’

‘Last Thursday?’ Miss X reeled. ‘That’s a week ago! We only heard about it yesterday morning, at dawn.’ She slapped Lockman with a scowl, making it clear she blamed him for the misinformation.

‘That’s the last time her phone sent a text,’ Symes explained. ‘From somewhere in the bay. We have the coordinates from the phone company’s satellite, but equally significant is the call that was made to police shortly beforehand by an anonymous male, reporting
the death of a young gang leader who’d been suspected of a number of high profile ram raids on banks and other businesses. Before that, the matron had failed to answer her phone.’

‘So what took you two so long to get here?’ she demanded.

‘This is our fourth day, actually. It wasn’t until we noticed the name of the missing patient in our inter-office memos that we recognised the potential for a bigger case than the local boys could handle.’

‘Client,’ she snapped, as if he’d stung her personally.

‘Client,’ he conceded with a grim smile. ‘Before that, they were only missing.’

‘And since then?’ Lockman asked. His eyes narrowed, as if he suspected the bad news Symes was preparing to deliver.

‘Since then, we’ve had time to go through the matron’s phone records more thoroughly. Mobile phones are easy, but the one in her office is connected through an old switchboard. Older than me. It took a while longer to isolate the call she took in her office at 11:37 p.m. that night … from the emergency unit at the Royal Brisbane Hospital. Apparently, the nurse there had attended a young woman suffering a mild trauma.’ He paused and saw her gulp. ‘Nurse Willow Springs. Excellent memory for details. A good thing too, since she recognised the young woman as a patient who’d escaped Serenity in the past, but when she attempted to cross-check and verify her identity, all her records on every system unexpectedly vanished. The girl did too, so now we have two missing clients and one matron.’

Mira chewed on her lip, making Symes worry if she might try to run again.

‘Imagine our surprise,’ he said kindly, ‘when Nurse Springs provided an identikit likeness of you, Miss X. Or shall we whisper your name from now on as Mira Chambers?’

‘Mira Chambers is dead!’ she flared. ‘And you have no idea who you’re really up against. Freddie Kitching may be old enough to be my grandfather, but he’s every bit the Colonel’s brother and more, so don’t you dare think of him as just a patient or client here. He calls himself the Leopard now, and he’s your worst nightmare.’

‘You think he’d want to hurt Matron Sanchez?’

‘No,’ she said, rubbing her temples as if the idea itself was painful. ‘But he’d definitely kill to protect her.’

‘Oh, great. One of those,’ Moser muttered.

‘Luckily, he’s deaf,’ Symes said. ‘So he’ll be easy enough for her to fool and escape when she gets a chance. Or for us to surround and capture.’

Mira laughed, surprising him. ‘You’d be a fool to underestimate him,’ she assured them. ‘He’s deaf by birth but dumb by choice, and he has seven different personalities. All of them dangerous.’

Her head jerked towards the gate, as if she’d heard something. Or seen it, if her vision was better with those new Ray-Bans.

‘Time to go,’ she said, confirming it with a pat to Lockman’s shoulder. ‘Buckle up, Detectives. The trail just got hot … and it goes that way, back down the road to the mainland.’

Over the bridge to the mainland, Mira kept her eyes on the matron’s ghostly Volkswagen as it raced through the night with lights on high beam.

Strange to feel a warm sun on her back at the same time, real time, but it helped Mira to keep the two timelines straight in her mind. Mid morning real time, and midnight-ish last Thursday, she guessed.

Hovering at speed behind invisible Lockman didn’t faze her any more either. With her hands splayed across his chest and stomach, hearing the bike and
feeling the movement of every muscle as he followed her instructions so precisely made her feel as if she’d taken control of the machine directly; without all the bother of watching their speedo, fuel and whatever else he had to keep an eye on.

Behind her, she also heard the detectives racing to keep pace, their vehicle jolting loudly over the widest ruts and potholes. The matron’s old car also took its fair share of poundings and shuddering, while Mira and Lockman merely dodged the roughest patches, having the advantage of only one slim set of wheels beneath them.

Even so, the matron’s face had been set hard with determination as she’d come through the gate. So focused on another worry, apparently, that she’d barely hesitated when she’d discovered the night guard asleep at his post. She hadn’t even taken time to sign out in the register, she’d just reached out to open the boom herself and drove through.

Passing streetlights lit up her car, making her shapely silhouette and stylish spiked hair unmistakable. She seemed to be alone in the car as there was no sign of Freddie, but it seemed likely he might be hiding down on the floor behind her.