The Delta Chain (17 page)

Adam listed attentively, his own curiosity in this matter aroused, but then Kate’s focus on the subject wound down suddenly. She became sullen and listless. Later, at her parents’ home, she‘d broken down and cried in Adam’s arms.

Dead of night. Adam wondered whether he would sleep at all. His mind kept digging up random images: the body of the girl on the beach; the expression on Kate’s face as she received the dreadful news; Greg Kovacs’ body in the swamp; and a ghostly vision of the night his sister had vanished.

He tossed and turned and the night seemed to last forever.

Some memories dim with time, but Adam’s mental images of that tragic day in his childhood were painfully clear.

Thick, dark clouds rolled across the sky with animal speed, blanketing the wooded landscape. The wind a harsh, cold breath that stung his skin. His mother called from the kitchen at the back of the large, ranch-style house. ‘You’ll have to come in now, kids. The storm’s almost here.’

‘Five more minutes, Mummy. Five more minutes.’ Had it been Adam’s own plaintive request? Or Alana’s? That was the one thing Adam couldn’t recall for certain. Perhaps he didn’t want to remember.

‘No longer, then. And stay near the house.’

But they hadn’t.

The property backed onto a wooded strip that sloped down to the sandy shores of the Pacific. Alana went charging into the forest. ‘Hide ‘an seek, Adam. Hide ‘an seek!’

‘Okay, you hide. But don’t go far.’ He covered his eyes, counted out loud to twenty, then shouted: ‘Coming, coming, ready or not, coming to get you with all that I’ve got!’ It was a rhyme the brother and sister always used. Adam, a bright, mischievous boy, had made it up. The rhyme had haunted his dreams for a long time after.

He went searching, looking behind tree trunks and bushes. As he pressed deeper in to the forest he began to worry. Alana shouldn’t have gone this far.

‘Okay, Ally, I give up. Come on out.’

And then the deafening crack of thunder that signalled the change in his life, the point from which there was no turning back. The thunderous boom followed by his mother’s cry: ‘Adam, Alana! Where are you?’

Adam looked back. He’d moved far enough away from the house that it was out of sight, blocked by the lush, green undergrowth. ‘Alana,’ he called hoarsely, ‘stop playing. We have to get back now.’

Still no reply. The rain came suddenly, heavy sheets that fanned the woods in diagonal strokes. Adam felt sick to his stomach, and afraid. ‘Alana! Come out. Now!’

By the time his mother reached him he was hysterical, eyes filling with tears.

‘Oh dear God, Adam. What’s wrong? Where’s Alana?’

‘I can’t find her.’

Joyce Bennett, a pretty, slightly built woman, began calling out her daughter’s name. As she did, lightning ripped across the evening sky.

Adam’s memory of the hours that followed were much less clear, just fragments really. Some of it made sense, some didn’t. He often wondered, years later, how much of the reality was replaced by the fantasy of his nightmares, blending fact and fiction until he couldn’t be certain which was which.

His father’s return. The frantic phone calls from the kitchen. Adam’s mother screaming at him for his disobedience. His father’s harsh words to his mother. Alana’s anguished face, which he imagined bobbing up and down at the window.

When the searchers came there were dozens of them, men and women with determined faces, dressed in storm weather gear, a community bolstered into action.

Adam’s strongest recollection of the search was of the flashlights. Dozens of wide, high intensity beams cutting a swathe through the darkness, illuminating patches of the rain swept woods. He stood on the back porch, with one of the searchers wives, watching the arcs of light. Above the sound of the downpour he thought he heard Alana’s voice on several occasions. ‘Coming, coming, ready or not, coming to get you with all that I’ve got.’ Was Alana still playing the game and searching for
him
now?

Why couldn’t they find her?

Adam woke with a start and wiped a layer of sweat from his forehead. He could hardly believe it. Over seventeen years had passed since he’d had the nightmare with such force, such clarity.

The searchers had found Alana’s shoes and bracelet on the wet sand just a few metres from where the old jetty jutted out from the secluded beach. The Bennett family knew Alana loved to spend time on that old jetty. Sometimes she hid – she was small enough – behind one of the fat timber poles that held the structure in place.

It was clear the girl had run to the jetty and scrambled into her favourite hiding place. She must have been buffeted by the strong winds, lost her footing, been swept out to sea. That night the ocean had been plagued by hundreds of powerful rips.

As he rolled over and tried to sleep, attempting to force the images from his head, Adam recalled once more how Brian Markham had sat with him on the steps of the back porch, gently breaking the news.

Despite an exhaustive search over the days that followed, Alana Bennett’s tiny body had never been found.

There were many things at which Melanie Cail was very good. One of them was covering her tracks. She did not want the faxes she was about to send to be traced back to Northern Rocks. She drove all the way in to the city of Brisbane, knowing there were still a few libraries and shops that had a fax machine on their premises for use by the general public.

Melanie sent the first half dozen faxes from a library in the city region known as Fortitude Valley, the next half dozen from a store several suburbs away, then another 10 from two instant print shops to the south of the city.

The one page fax – her copy of the single document she’d taken from Stephen Hunter’s study, was sent to the biology professors at five universities, the CEO’s of several Government and private research establishments, including the CSIRO, and to the science editors on a number of daily newspapers.

She knew that the sequence of letters on the page were DNA codes relating to the blood work Stephen was doing. She knew it wasn’t for consumption by the scientific community, as yet, or by the media. This would cause serious ripples – tremors actually – indicating there was an industrial traitor within the Westmeyer Centre. The Institute had a high profile and news of trouble inside would draw huge media interest. As a reporter on the local newspaper, Melanie was in the box seat to file reports for her potential future employers in Brisbane.

She smiled wickedly to herself. It was one of those ideas that struck on the spur of the moment. The delicious thing was that she’d never be suspected – no one knew she’d been seeing Stephen and what possible motive could she have anyway? News of the security leak would appear first in the major city newspapers. It was only then she would enter the fray, simply because she worked locally and was on the spot to follow up.

Now, all she needed was to get Eddie to run her angle on the Jane Doe drowning and she’d be riding the crest of two major and very different breaking stories. With the passage of the past few days behind them, Eddie had already agreed to a follow up article.

She was feeling incredibly horny as she drove back to Northern Rocks at high speed. She called ahead on the cell phone and spoke to Stephen. He confirmed he wasn’t planning to work late at the lab that night. It’s all going my way today, Melanie thought.

When Hunter arrived home at 6.45 that evening Melanie was already waiting in his apartment, stripped down to lacy black underwear and ready to pounce like a cat injected with speed. ‘You don’t want to eat just yet, do you?’ she whispered in his ear, the tip of her tongue touching the side of his neck.

Hunter grinned. ‘What are you on?’

‘Adrenaline.’ Her voice was a purr.

‘You must’ve had a good day.’

‘Great day.’ She undid the buttons on his shirt, sliding it off as their bodies crushed together, her mouth covering his. They crashed down onto the sofa, Hunter slowly positioning his body over hers. Then, as his excitement soared to fever pitch he ripped her panties away from her crotch with a strength he hadn’t possessed just minutes before.

Westmeyer’s home was twenty minutes drive away from the Institute, in an exclusive section at the far northern end of the town. His spacious, two-storey house, with its Mediterranean design, was on a shelf of land that overlooked the ocean. A walkway led down to a private beach with a jetty and the boathouse that stored his small cabin cruiser.

Before Meredith Seals was due to fly home, Westmeyer had arranged for his secretary to call and invite the investment banker to a small dinner party at Westmeyer’s home. She’d agreed and, according to the secretary, sounded flattered – as Westmeyer knew she would.

She’d arrived by taxi at Westmeyer’s home, dressed in a smart, conservative black dinner dress, her make-up a little too heavy. Westmeyer invited her in to the front sitting room and fixed her a cocktail. Then he apologised: the husband and wife neighbours whom he’d also invited to the dinner party had cancelled at the last moment, a problem with one of their children or some such thing. ‘So I’m afraid it’s just you and me and that’s hardly a dinner party…’

‘I understand. It’s quite all right,’ Meredith smiled, trying hard to mask her disappointment.

Westmeyer swirled the liquid in his glass, then took a sip. ‘It’s a bit of a quirk of mine, I tend to get a little lonely, just me in this great big house with a part-time housekeeper and a part-time chef. I often throw these sudden dinners, phoning people up on the spur of the moment. Usually they happen okay, sometimes they don’t.’

‘It’s really quite okay. Surely, though, you don’t get too lonely…?’

‘I know what you’re thinking – doesn’t quite fit. Busy man, running a research centre, lots of overseas trips, lots of acquaintances. But I was never the one to settle down, never married, devoted to science I suppose and…silly as it sounds, I can get quite lonely in the quiet times. And one thing that really relaxes me is straightforward conversations over dinner…’

‘I think it relaxes most of us.’

‘Look, I’ve dragged you out, you’re all dressed up. I’ve sent the chef home, so perhaps I could take you out for a meal. There are some lovely a la carte restaurants in the town.’

‘That would be fine.’

‘What would you like to eat?’

Meredith shrugged. ‘Well…’

‘Italian? There’s a terrific Italian place, they serve the best Veal Florentina on the coast…’

‘Sounds good.’

There had never been any other invitees to Westmeyer’s “dinner”; there was no husband and wife next door – it was simply typical of the many ploys he used, to engineer situations the way he wanted them. He was in the mood for some female company and the reasonably attractive, fortyish banker was just what the mood required.

William had always been one for romancing the ladies. With his lifelong dedication to his Institute and his role as a senior statesman in the biogenetic community, it had suited him to remain single. He enjoyed the freedom and excitement of brief affairs without the greater emotional depth of long-term relationships.

And he had felt that way, without regret, since the loss of the one woman he had truly loved.

The dinner went well. Westmeyer enjoyed the process of coaxing the somewhat wooden Meredith to relax further, to smile, to open up about herself. By the time they left the restaurant Westmeyer was touching her briefly and gently from time to time, on the arm, the shoulder, the hand. He read the tentative signals in her eyes – she had a melancholy side and she was flattered by the attention. The added bonus, to Westmeyer, was in influencing her to agree to the bank’s investment.

He drove her to her hotel room and suggested she stay in town for a few more days. ‘I owe myself a little time off,’ he said, ‘but I need to be in the Institute in the morning. I was thinking of taking my cruiser out tomorrow afternoon.’

The weather turned too blustery the following afternoon and Westmeyer had to turn back to shore earlier than expected. ‘Not to worry. We’ll do it again tomorrow.’

They dined together again that night.

‘You’re obviously an ambitious and driven man,’ Meredith said, ‘but I sense that sometimes, like tonight, there’s another side to you that sneaks out for a breather. You mentioned you get a little lonely…but there’s more to it than that. Something worries you.’

Light, romantic music played in the background, matching the ambience of the restaurant. Westmeyer smiled at his date’s sensitivity. He hadn’t expected that, but he didn’t mind it at all.

There were times when he needed to open up to someone – preferably a woman, and preferably one he wouldn’t be romancing again.

‘You’re very observant. Every now and then – not too often I might add – the scared little boy inside pokes his head out for a look at what his future self became.’

‘Well put. I’m sure we all have that child inside, stepping out from the distant past for just a moment.’

‘
I was a restless, frustrated child, a science prodigy sent to a private, specialist school. My father tried to hide it but I could sense it was a financial struggle for he and my mother. My Dad was the original Mr. Nice Guy. Always trying to do the right thing by others, always putting himself last.’

‘A good man.’

‘Yes, but he was a very frustrated man who never achieved any of the things he really wanted in life. He was also a scientist, with his own hunger for research and development. He was an intelligent, organised, meticulous man, worked as a laboratory manager for a pharmaceutical products firm. He worked for them for thirty years, but never advanced beyond the middle management lab work because of that very reason – he was Mr. Nice Guy. Never pushed, never trod on toes. Never took any chances because he wanted to ensure he provided for my education. Eventually he was forced into retirement and he dropped from a heart attack a week later, the same week I started Uni.’