The Ransom (13 page)

“That’s exactly what I wondered. So, I Googled her when I returned to the station,” Jett offered. “She works for the law firm, Breakers. Her bio lists her area of expertise as commercial law and estate planning. She’s never done any criminal work or other litigation. I can hardly imagine how she’d come into contact with the likes of the president of the Redbacks.”

Michael’s frowned darkened. “It’s been a long time since Jovanovic’s last arrest. It’s not like he’s been in the public eye recently. He’s a big time supplier. He has a huge network of dealers. If the AG’s daughter recognized him, you’d nearly have to assume it has something to do with drugs..”

Jett shrugged. “There’s never been anything in the media about a possible drug connection to the AG. It hasn’t even been hinted at and he’s been in the game for a long time. He appears to be squeaky clean. You’d think, if that kind of thing was going on, at some stage someone would have gotten a whiff of it.”

“That’s what’s driving me so damned crazy,” Lane exploded, throwing his arms out wide. “My theory that Dowton is somehow involved in a drug deal gone bad sounds plausible, right down to the part where I look at the AG and his family and realize how ridiculous it is. I mean, they couldn’t have been more helpful. It was the AG who told us about the connection to his daughter and how he thought Brittany had been the target. He gave us access to her and let her speak to us. He even called us when the darn ransom note arrived.” Lane groaned aloud, his frustration evident.

“He didn’t have to do any of that,” he continued. “We’d never have known about the mistaken identity angle if he hadn’t told us. We’d never have known that Dowton’s daughter was the real target. We’d still be in the dark about the Redbacks, about Brittany, about all of it.” He scrubbed at his hair and swore. “And every bloody minute we don’t solve it is another minute we’ll never recover, another minute that poor little girl lives scared to death.”

A second or two passed. Michael broke the silence. “All right, what about Mrs Dowton? Isn’t the AG married?”

Lane nodded. “Yeah. Her name’s Allison. She’s his second wife. I haven’t met her, yet. She’s been away visiting her sister in Queensland. Last I heard, she was waiting for a flight.”

“Do we have any background on her?” Michael asked.

“No. Given that she was interstate when Olivia went missing, we haven’t focused our attention on her.”

Michael nodded. Another moment of silence descended before Lane’s boss drew in a breath, an unwavering look in his eyes. “All right, this is what we’re going to do. I’ll talk to the AFP boys, but we need to tread very carefully. Right now, I want both of you to run some property searches on Vukovic and Jovanovic. I tend to agree with you Lane. Vukovic hasn’t got the brains to pull this off on his own. Someone’s feeding him orders.”

He pursed his lips. “But, it was Vukovic who Brittany identified as the man who snatched Olivia. If he still has her, he must have her hidden somewhere. I’ve spoken to the boys in Organized Crime. They’ve given me a list of names of the other Redbacks’ key players, including a man by the name of Tim Todd. It’s widely believed by the blokes in Organized Crime that Todd is Jovanovic’s right-hand man. Run property checks on all of them, in case Vukovic isn’t the only one involved and track down the location of their clubhouse. I doubt they’d be stupid enough to stow her there, but you never know.”

Lane and Jett nodded grimly and returned to their seats. Lane tugged the keyboard closer and started punching words into the computer. Determination surged through him and he narrowed his eyes at the screen. “Let’s find this asshole’s last known address. It’s time we paid him a little visit.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

Saturday, January 27, 9:25 p.m.

Olivia licked her dry lips and yearned for a drink of water. The room where she was confined was close and hot and it had been hours since her captor had paid her a visit. Not that she wanted him to. His ugly face and mean, squinty eyes frightened her. But she would have given nearly anything for a drink and a visit to the bathroom.

She lay on her side, with her cheek pressed against the dusty floor. It was made up mostly of bare boards. She could also just make out scraps of old linoleum in some pea-green color, stuck in sporadic strips to the floor where it caught the paltry light that escaped under the boarded-up window. Not that any light showed now. She could only assume night had fallen.

Swallowing a sigh that was tinged with desperation, she wriggled her body in an effort to reach a strip of the linoleum, hoping it would provide a smidgen more comfort than the bare boards, but after a few attempts to roll over, she gave up, exhausted.

The numbness in her hands had traveled up past her elbows. Her shoulders ached from the unnatural position she’d held for so long. For the thousandth time, she strained against the bindings that held her wrists, but like every other time she’d tried it, they didn’t budge.

A sob rose in the back of her throat and she clenched her jaw tight in an effort to contain it. Crying would get her nowhere. Crying only filled her eyes with tears and her nose with snot and she had no way of wiping away either of them.

She thought of her dad and prayed again that he was on his way to rescue her. He tracked down baddies for a living. He was the best in the business—so she’d heard from some of his work colleagues. Even her stepmother praised his achievements.

Olivia’s chest tightened with anger at the thought of Ellie. If her stepmother had allowed her to buy that stupid bikini, she might never have been taken. She’d be safely home with her brothers, listening to music on her iPod and counting down the days until school started. She couldn’t wait to start the fifth grade with Brittany.

Brittany.
They’d only known each other for a few weeks, but they’d fast become best friends. Boris had smiled with a weird kind of pleasure when he told her a little while ago how he’d shoved Brittany out of the way and she’d hit her head as she’d fallen. He’d left her bleeding in the change rooms and seemed to be proud of it.

At least now Olivia knew her friend hadn’t also been taken. She hoped Brittany was okay.
Surely Ellie would have found her before it was too late?

Thinking of her stepmother again, a twinge of guilt pricked her conscience. It hadn’t all been Ellie’s fault. Olivia didn’t even care that much about getting a bikini. She didn’t know why she’d picked the fight with her stepmother, but it seemed lately that’s all she did. Still, it wasn’t like she did it without provocation. Every time she turned around, Ellie was telling her what to do. Or more importantly, what she couldn’t do. It wasn’t fair. She wasn’t her real mom.

So what if Olivia had been a baby when her real mother died? It didn’t mean her mom had never existed. It didn’t mean she’d never held her or wanted her or loved her. Her real mom had gotten sick and died. It happened to people all the time. Admittedly, they were usually old when that happened, but it still happened.

People didn’t simply forget all about them—forget they’d ever existed—and yet, that’s what Olivia felt was happening to the memory of her mother: That everyone around her wanted to forget that her mother had once been alive.

It was one of the reasons she’d begged her father to enlarge the portrait. She wanted a picture of her mother hanging on her bedroom wall where she could stare at it and tell her things no one else could understand.

For as long as she could remember, everyone had told her that she looked like her mother. The resemblance made her happy. It made her feel close to the woman who’d given birth to her, but whom she’d never known. It made her feel connected to her—like they were one.

The rattle of the key in the lock intruded on her thoughts. A moment later, the door swung open and she tensed in fearful anticipation. Her eyes had become accustomed to the darkness and the bright flashlight that beamed in her direction seared her eyes.

The rancid smell of body odor and stale cigarettes preceded Boris into the room and her nose twitched at the onslaught. She turned her head away and breathed in the dust, by far the better option. A booted foot pressed hard against her side and rolled her over. She stiffened and ducked her head, anticipating a blow.

“Get up, you’re comin’ with me.”

* * *

Zara stared down from her bedroom window at the empty courtyard below. Her father still hadn’t returned. Her thoughts returned to the contents of the bottom drawer of his desk and the dread inside of her increased tenfold.

It had taken her awhile to find it. At first, when she opened the drawer, her shoulders slumped, both in relief and disappointment. There’d been nothing more than a pile of files. Riffling through them, she scanned the contents and found they contained notes and details of various party meetings and memos in relation to proposed policy changes. One file contained notes of a meeting between her father and the State Premier and a couple of other cabinet ministers, discussing the possibility of a threat to the Premier’s leadership.

Whilst she didn’t think the subject matter contained in the folders necessarily warranted a locked drawer, she could understand the sensitive nature of the memos and conceded that her father was probably wise to keep them under lock and key.

With a sigh, she’d arranged the files in the order she found them and returned them to the drawer. She was about to close it when a slip of paper snagged in the side of the drawer caught her eye.

Taking care to tug it free without tearing it, she smoothed out the single sheet of notepaper and tried to make sense of her father’s handwriting. It seemed to be a record of a phone conversation. Although there was no date, the word “Draco” was written and underlined twice.

Her heart thumped.
Draco.
It was part of the name Lane had given her when she’d asked about the identity of the man on the line-up, the man she’d seen in her father’s office. According to Lane, Draco was the president of the Redbacks. Written next to the name was an address in the western Sydney suburb of Milperra. Brittany had identified their attacker as a member of the Redbacks. Lane had also told her the Redbacks operated out of western Sydney.

Lane had questioned the contents of the ransom note and its failure to contain any contact or drop details. In fact, he’d expressly stated that it appeared as though her father knew the kidnapper.
Or his whereabouts.

With a growing sense of conviction, Zara tore a sheet off her father’s notepad and copied down the details from the note before returning it to the drawer. With shaking fingers, she locked the drawer again and pressed the key back where she found it.

Her mind whirled then—just like it was doing now, hours later. What if Olivia’s kidnapper wasn’t acting alone? What if the Redbacks’ president was in on it, too? It appeared the address and Draco was connected. Could the address in Milperra be the drop off point? Had the rendezvous point been arranged earlier? Is that why the ransom note didn’t include the kind of details Lane expected—like the meeting point?

Her mind spun with the possibilities.
Could the address in Milperra be the same place where Olivia was being held?
All of a sudden it seemed more than plausible.

She had to call Lane and tell him what she’d discovered. But then, she’d have to tell him how she came about the information and that would mean breaking her father’s confidence and maybe even worse.

Over the intervening hours, she’d become more and more convinced her father was involved, but she couldn’t be the one to point the finger at him. For the first fourteen years of her life, he’d been everything to her—father, mother and best friend. Then he’d met and married Allison and within a short frame of time, Brittany had arrived and the undivided attention Zara had enjoyed up until then had suddenly been vastly diluted.

Not that her father had loved her any less. She wasn’t immature enough to think that. But things had been different. There were others with demands on his time. A new wife took precedence over a daughter and an infant daughter was just plain more fun.

Despite this, Zara had been happy for her father. She’d been pleased he’d found love again and if she’d had an inkling her stepmother had liked her new husband’s daughter, Zara would have been satisfied.

But it hadn’t worked out that way. No matter how hard Zara had tried, Allison hadn’t warmed to her. Then when Brittany arrived, it seemed—as far as Allison was concerned—Zara no longer existed.

It had hurt; of course it had. It still hurt. But she’d learned to brush the hurt aside and focus on the good things in her life. Like her career. Like her sister.
Like her father.

Indecision gnawed at every fiber in her body. Images of Olivia flashed through her mind. They were replaced by images of Zara’s father smiling tenderly, holding his arms out to his firstborn and pulling her in close for a hug. Then there was Brittany. Sweet, little Brittany.

Zara couldn’t destroy her family.
She just couldn’t. But neither could she ignore another little girl’s terror. If there was a possibility Olivia was being held at the address Zara had taken from her father’s desk, she had to look into it. She’d never rest peacefully again if she discovered later that she’d had the information to find the child and had ignored it—out of fear, out of loyalty, even out of love. She couldn’t betray her father, but neither could she have Olivia’s safety or lack of it on her conscience.

Frightened by what she had to do, she turned away from the dark outside her window and stared at the piece of paper she’d stuffed in her pocket.
Thirty-seven Scarborough Road, Milperra
. A totally innocuous street address, in fact, it almost sounded pleasant.