The Mak Collection (90 page)

‘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.

Makedde Vanderwall gazed with quiet excitement out of the window at a new and foreign world.

Hong Kong.

The nine-hour flight from Sydney had been the red-eye dash, and Mak felt gritty and unrested. But it was a shiny new world outside, and she had already begun taking it in while she stretched her legs and circled her wrists to rid herself of what she called the ‘economy cramps’. The remarkably clean and efficient airport express shuttled her towards central Hong Kong at breakneck pace, travelling through a stunning, yet somehow eerie dawn landscape. The city was awash with light morning mist, painting everything in pale watercolour tones. It clung to the expanse of water off the shoreline, and the inland was pierced by grey apartment buildings stretching as far as she could see, like Lego blocks stacked one upon another, and side by side by side by side, each with hundreds of identical square windows and identical square air-conditioning units. Every window held the outlook of another life, yet the only hint of individuality was in the various plants hanging off
the tiny sills and in the infinite variety of trousers, shirts and stockings that hung limply from makeshift clotheslines.

Mak began to get a sense of the lives of the seven million residents of the city of Hong Kong. They clearly did not live with the same sense of space that she knew. Everything was big in North America, she reflected: big cars, big houses, big people—but not here. She looked seawards again, and the mist began to clear. The water was speckled with hundreds of fishing trawlers, cargo ships and the occasional traditional Chinese junk, dwarfed by the modern freighters anchored nearby. An even denser city area was visible in the ghostly distance.

Makedde planned to stay in Hong Kong one week, hopefully a prosperous week, before catching a flight home. If everything went well, she might get more work after the Ely Garner show. She would be rooming in the area called Mid Levels in a models’ apartment organised by her agency. She would pay her modest rent after Tuesday’s catwalk show. That suited her fine. She only hoped there weren’t too many other models there. Models’ apartments were usually cramped, and sometimes uncomfortable, depending on the personalities present.

Makedde had not travelled to Asia before, because for many years there were limited modelling possibilities for very tall models like herself, and now the prospect of exploring its famed gateway was a welcome escape. It distanced her from all that she wished to forget, took her
away from all the death that seemed to stalk her. To every face, she would be a stranger, inconsequential and without scandal. Her eyes would rest on each sight anew, and nothing would remind her of horrors past.

And after a week of being a no-name foreigner Mak would be ready to return to Canada and face the fall-out of what had happened in Sydney. Her father would no doubt still be steaming. She would try to play it down for the sake of his health, but she doubted she could keep anything from him considering his contacts.

Oh Dad, please try and take it easy…

‘Just promise me you’ll try to take it easy.’

Andy stood up immediately, glad to be out of the hot seat.

‘Detective Flynn…’ Dr Fox gave him a raised eyebrow when he didn’t respond.

‘I will. I will take it easy,’ he said.

If he had given in the night before, the outcome of the evaluation would have been less than favourable, he knew. After his pre-trial jitters, there was nothing left to drink in the house, not even mouthwash. And he had successfully tossed away the Jack Daniels he’d bought in Double Bay. That had not been easy, nor had resisting the urge to jump in his car and find the nearest bottle shop. But he’d done it. That was something. That was a step. And here he was, clean for his evaluation, and Dr Fox had no reason to believe the alcohol was a problem any more.

‘And lay off the booze,’ she said. ‘You won’t have any liver in a few years if you don’t cut back.’

He nodded sheepishly.

Dr Louise Fox wasn’t bad, for a shrink. She would do the right thing by Andy, he was sure.
Now Kelley would have to let him take on the case.

‘Promise me you’ll keep tabs on yourself. We can’t have you disappearing on a drinking binge like you did when your wife—’

‘Thank you. I got it.’

‘Don’t underestimate—’

‘I got it, I got it,’ he said. ‘Thank you, Louise. I appreciate it.’

‘No problem,’ she said, and shook her head. She waved a hand in his direction. ‘Go on, get out of here.’

Andy was relieved. Evaluations and counselling were standard procedure after a critical incident or death, but they were always nerve-racking nonetheless. And if the guys found out somehow that you had to go back for another session you never heard the end of it. Jimmy, for one, had never failed to pester the crap out of anyone seeing the police psychologist, making loony faces and constantly quoting lines from
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
…‘If that’s what being crazy is, then I’m senseless, out of it, gone-down-the-road, wacko.’

Jimmy.

Dammit Jimmy.

The best thing Andy could do was throw himself into his job, and for the moment try to forget about Jimmy and Mak. Having work to focus on was a godsend. After all, what else did he have now apart from work? If he stayed clear-headed and used all he’d trained for, Andy could crack the case, and
that’s exactly what he intended to do. He was going to hunt Ed down and bring him in. That was it.

Andy hunkered down at his desk and read for the second time the stack of transcripts of Ed Brown’s mother being interviewed after her son’s escape. Employing what he had learned about statement analysis from his time at the FBI academy at Quantico, Virginia, he went over every word for inconsistencies or unusual phrasing that might reveal that she had been deceptive or was withholding information. So far, he was uninspired. The main things that jumped out from the interview were that Mrs Brown was a woman who hated the police and hated authority, and, most alarmingly, that she was probably more upset that her son was acting without her involvement than she was about the heinous nature of his crimes. But Andy already knew what she was like from the first time he had met her. What he wanted to know now was whether she knew something important that she wasn’t telling them. He could not yet be certain.