The Mak Collection (104 page)

‘Meaghan Wallace. My mum calls me Meg.’

‘Good. And who brought you to the party tonight, Meaghan?’

‘Uh…my boss, Robert Groobelaar. He’s asleep in the living room.’

He touched her knee with one hand. His fingertips felt nice. ‘And what do you do for Mr Groobelaar?’

‘I’m his PA,’ she said, feeling so happy to be able to be there, talking with this handsome man who was so nice.

‘Lucky Robert. See, we’re all friends here. We can be honest with one another. Now, tell me what you remember.’

She fell silent. There was something she didn’t want to talk about, something that was bad, but the roads drifted past in beautiful soft tones, the car was warm and lovely, and she felt good. Meaghan had been drugged and she knew it, but for some reason it didn’t bother her. Nothing bothered her.

‘Come on now. Just between friends,’ he continued. ‘What do you think you saw?’ He
patted her knee again as he kept driving. When she looked over at him he flashed her the most handsome smile. A friendly smile.

‘There was a…dead girl back in that room,’ she said, smiling because everything seemed okay now. ‘She was like twelve or something, and she was wearing make-up and everything, and I think she was dead.’ Meaghan felt no fear or inhibition. It was all right to say it.

He shook his head. ‘No, no, no. I don’t know where you got that idea. You did not see a dead girl. Don’t be crazy. There was just a little accident, that’s all, but everyone is fine.’

She nodded. ‘Okay.’

‘Good girl. You just had a bit too much to drink, so I have to drive you home, that’s all.’

She looked out the car window and could see familiar streets. He was driving in the right direction to take her home. They were turning onto her street.

‘It’s that one,’ she blurted.

‘Which one?’ he asked.

‘That one, with the pink paint.’

‘Okay.’ He pulled up right out the front. ‘I’ll walk you up to make sure you get home safely,’ he said.

Meaghan opened the door before he could get around to her side of the car, and she fell out clumsily onto the pavement, grazing her knee. Strangely it didn’t hurt, though she could see that the rough concrete had drawn blood. She stayed
on all fours for a while, laughing at her own inability to walk. It seemed terribly amusing.

‘Oopsy daisy. Let me help you,’ the man said, assisting her to stand.

Meaghan realised that she could not control her body, could not get her limbs to hold her up, but it didn’t seem so bad. The nice man picked her up in a fireman’s lift and carried her, and she felt calm and relaxed in his arms. Her heartbeat was slowing, things were turning vague. She felt sleep approaching like a cool and welcome blanket of darkness, moving over her from the toes up. Now the blanket of sleep moved higher, slowing her organs as it passed over her torso with its cold quiet. Higher now and covering her face until she couldn’t see, and all the sounds around her faded into a quiet buzzing.

‘Get some beauty sleep, babe,’ a distant voice said, and Meaghan Wallace drifted away.

At seven o’clock on Thursday evening, Makedde Vanderwall stood in the kitchen of the terrace house she shared with her Australian boyfriend, holding a freshly minted celebrity cookbook in her hand and trying not to feel out of place.

Dammit, I suck at this.

Attempts at domesticity were awkward for the Canadian. Makedde—or Mak, as her friends called her—knew her way around a cookbook and a kitchen like Archbishop George Pell knew his way around the annual Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras—which is to say, not at all. Her total lack of culinary skills was a source of great amusement for her friends, and buying cookbooks for her had become a running gag:
The Australian Women’s Weekly Cookbook
, the
Donna Hay
cookbooks,
Cooking for Idiots.
Mak’s friend Detective Karen Mahoney had recently purchased this latest one for her, and Mak was determined to prepare the pasta dish on page 135 to surprise her live-in lover. It was only pasta, after all. How hard could it be?

With something short of confidence, Mak watched the potful of pre-prepared pasta sauce bubble on the stove. The empty jar she’d poured it from sat upturned on the counter nearby, a smear of red sauce oozing out. The penne should be ready by now, she figured. She wrapped her hand loosely in a tea towel and grabbed the handle of the boiling pot on the stove.

‘Ouch! Dammit!’

In a flash she had pulled her hand back and licked the pad of her index finger. A burn. She nursed her finger, and gingerly poured the penne into the sieve with her unburned hand, cursing.

‘Bloody dangerous things, kitchens…’

Though domestically handicapped, Mak had skills in other areas of her life. She had finished her forensic psychology PhD back in her native country a mere eighteen months earlier, scoring very well with her thesis on the variables affecting eyewitness testimony. The topic was something she’d ended up having far too much first-hand experience with, by becoming an intimate witness to the sadistic acts of her friend Catherine’s deranged murderer. At times Mak thought she might never finish her PhD, but she had refused to let her personal dramas stop her just short of her dream. Sure, most of the other students were nearly a decade younger, but she had finally done it.

Then Mak had bitten the bullet and moved to Sydney to be with her boyfriend, Andy, shortly
after. At twenty-nine, it seemed that a more-or-less normal life was finally within her reach. A new country. A new beginning.

Isn’t it an unwritten rule that everyone is supposed to have their life in order before they turn thirty?

Mak still had a chance at it—if she worked fast. Maybe then her father would stop giving her those doubtful looks, and her happily married and once again pregnant sister, Theresa, would stop gloating all the time.

Hmmm.

She inspected the pasta in the sieve; it didn’t look right. Mak glanced at the picture in the book, and then at her efforts, and screwed up her face with disapproval.
Her
meal looked white and soggy, each piece of penne limply oozing against its neighbour. Had she overcooked it? She didn’t know. It was all so much more complicated than instant noodles.

I suck at this.

Mak might never be a chef, but her boss thought she was showing promise at her part-time job. She had stumbled onto a lucrative side-gig working for Marian Wendell, the infamous Sydney private investigator—much to the chagrin of her boyfriend and her father, both of them cops. But Mak needed work. Once she had quit her fifteen-year middle-of-the-road modelling career, she couldn’t just sit on her butt and hope for a windfall. After answering an advertisement for a part-time research job, she had hit it off with
Marian and become intrigued by the work of her investigation agency. At Marian’s urging, Mak had even successfully completed her Certificate III in Investigative Services, the basic licensing requirement for professional investigators.

The work was helping her save up the money she needed to open her own psychology practice, and, what’s more, she was enjoying it. Certainly she found it a lot more engaging than her previous rent-paying job as a fashion model, a career that had taken her on photo shoots around the globe but was ultimately unsatisfying. The jobs Marian put her to were varied: running background checks, checking public records, photographing and conducting basic surveillance, and more. One of her easiest jobs to date had taken place only the evening before, when she had been paid a handsome $500 cheque for a mere ninety minutes of work, to chat up the sleazy husband of one of Marian’s clients and see if he would follow her back to a hotel room for sex if she propositioned him. He had come to the room, all right—only Mak hadn’t been there when he had. His wife had been waiting at the door. The long-suffering spouse got her money’s worth of truth; Mak got paid handsomely to do nothing more than pretend to flirt with a stranger in a bar for an hour and enjoy tax-deductible cocktails; and her employer, Ms Wendell, was impressed once more with the attractive new secret weapon her agency could provide for hire.

Five hundred dollars to chat with some idiot.
That even beat some modelling gigs for pay. Why would she want to stand around a boring studio all day, being told what to wear and how to pose, when she could command decent cash and be right in the thick of it, using her brain and her instincts on her own terms? Besides, she had been hit on by many a sleazebag in her life—at least now she was getting paid for it.

Her wallet lined with a fresh pay cheque, and feeling positive, Mak had sped home from Marian’s office on her motorbike, stopping by the supermarket for supplies first. She had stripped out of her overheated leathers, showered, and changed into a light, easy summer dress in anticipation of dinner with her boyfriend. Her leathers now lay dishevelled in the entry hall and shopping bags were strewn over the kitchen countertop. With the few extra bucks in her pocket she’d even bought a nice Merlot.

Mak looked at the time. It was nearly seven-thirty. He was late. She wasn’t sure what to do with the soggy pasta to keep it warm. Should she microwave it?

At eight-fifteen, Mak heard a car pull up outside.

Footsteps.

A key in the front door.

Andy. Finally.

She hurriedly zapped the pasta in the microwave, laid out the salad and made her way down the hall, pausing to lean in the hallway, attempting to look cool.

Detective Senior Sergeant Andy Flynn stepped inside the terrace they shared, fussing with his keys, and at first failing to look up and see Mak in her carefully nonchalant stance. Her eyes took him in greedily, nonetheless.

Andy wore his usual plain-clothes uniform of suit and tie. He was older than Mak by a few years, his short-cropped hair still dark and full. He had an unrefined, masculine appeal she had found maddeningly attractive since day one of their tempestuous union—the strong frame, the square jaw, the generous mouth and imperfect features, the scar on his chin—and, of course, that irresistible Aussie accent. It had probably also helped that he always wore a piece and some handcuffs under his jacket—a kind of fetish of Makedde’s.

But though she was pleased to see Andy awake and upright, Mak had to admit that he looked tired. His deep green eyes were underlined with dark circles, his jaw darkened with stubble. Perhaps the years of police work and the inevitable overtime were taking their toll. He was dedicated to his work, so it was hardly surprising that this dinner would be the first they had shared in ages. Despite moving to Australia just over a year earlier to become what the Department of
Immigration, Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs rather unromantically termed a ‘de facto spouse’, she and Andy had not seen nearly enough of each other of late. And, to make things worse, he was about to head overseas for a while.

Now the table was set and the candles lit, the Merlot freshly opened and ready to pour. This was not just some penne: this was a peace offering, albeit a soggy one.

He’ll be so surprised.

‘Andy…’

She gave him a hug, her body grateful for the contact. At six foot four, he was one of the few whom she could literally look up to—a quality she found intoxicating, for although she was just over six foot tall herself, he towered over her barefoot.

She tilted her face up to his. ‘How were things today?’ she asked. Mak couldn’t wait to show him the dining room. He wouldn’t believe it—the candles, the effort.

‘Yeah, good, thanks,’ he muttered. ‘You know…I’m looking forward to getting stuck into it.’ There had always been one hitch or another—a lack of funding, a change of politics, a shift of focus in the Federal Police—but now Andy was finally getting traction with the project he had long pushed for: a top-notch national unit dedicated to solving violent serial crime, Andy’s speciality. It would be based in Canberra, the national capital, and aligned with the US Federal Bureau of Investigation’s
program at their academy in Quantico, Virginia. He would do a three-month stint at the academy in preparation, starting in a few days. Andy would take on major national violent serial crime cases, help train up new profilers and oversee their work in the field. It was a far more exciting and senior position. It was what he had always dreamed of.

‘Well, relax, take your coat off…’ Mak began.

But Andy frowned. ‘There was a shooting at Pyrmont where the old Water Police station used to be,’ he stated abruptly, sounding harried. ‘Sorry, but I gotta run. Just changing my shirt.’

Mak’s smile faltered as her romantic plans came to an abrupt halt. ‘Oh.’ A little knot formed in her stomach.

Andy grabbed his tie in one hand and loosened it. ‘I’ve got crap all over it,’ he said, pulling back his jacket to show brown and red stains along the front of the pale blue shirt. ‘This kid has gone and decapitated himself on a fence, running away from Deller. I can’t believe it.’

‘Oh.’ She took leave of his chest as she realised it was most probably the kid’s blood that had stained the shirt.

Andy’s eyes moved this way and that, recalling something that frustrated him, his mouth caught in a tight frown. ‘He was only wanted for questioning.’

Not any more
, Mak thought darkly.

Retreating a couple of steps down the hall, Mak managed to flick the dining room door
closed with one foot, blocking the view of the candlelit dinner set up inside. She didn’t want him seeing what she had attempted—not like this. Thankfully Andy failed to notice her actions. He was wrestling with his shirt buttons instead.

Beep.

‘What was that?’ he asked.

It was the sound of the microwave finishing in the kitchen. Mak had reheated the pasta for dinner. She thought she’d nuked it for a minute, but maybe she had hit ten…It would be like rubber now.

‘What was what? I didn’t hear anything,’ she lied.

He shook his head. ‘Well, this bloody kid tried to jump a fence or something and caught his neck on some cable. I have to help them sort everything out. I’m sorry, Mak, I won’t be long. Just a couple of more hours.’