Darkening Skies (29 page)

While Jenn worked through the photos, creating a spreadsheet of dates, initials and other details, Mark made lists, laying the names out in groups – everyone who might have been involved in the accident and its aftermath, police, medical, legal, each name notated with position titles, current whereabouts and other notes. Bill Franklin topped the list of police, Will Cooper the list of paramedics. Where he didn’t know names, he noted positions, such as Deputy Coroner, nurses at the hospital, other patients.

When he finished with those lists, he started a new one: Flanagan associates and friends. People who worked for Flanagan. People who worked with him – other graziers, suppliers, business people who didn’t seem to mind the company. People who attended his Christmas drinks, usually reported in the social page of the Birraga
Gazette
.

Gerard McCarty topped that list. Mark added Larry Dolan from the
Gazette
. There had certainly been more advertising of Flanagan’s transport and irrigation operations in the
Gazette
after Clem Lockrey’s retirement as managing editor.

And all the time he made notes, Jenn worked at the other end of the table, every now and again glancing up, making a comment. But she didn’t recognise anyone else in the photographs. ‘Whoever took these photos was either very cautious,’ she commented, ‘or just not interested in faces.’

Steve
returned in the late afternoon, and brought Mark’s laptop with him. ‘Forensics have finished at your place, and I thought you might need this.’

‘Thanks. Any news?’

‘Good news is, there are prints on the tape on the explosives. The bad news is, they’re not Flanagan’s. Forensics will run them overnight and maybe we’ll get an answer in the morning if they’re on file. In the meantime, you’re staying here tonight. Haddad and the Feds want you protected.’

‘Here?’ Mark hesitated. ‘I could go to the pub.’

‘Nope. Not secure enough, and there’s no-one spare to stand guard. Kris says you can have the guest bed. Apparently Gil will be down later – no prizes for guessing where he’s sleeping – and I’m going to crash on the couch. In a police station with the three of us and your dogs outside, you should be safe enough for tonight.’

The continued inactivity and restriction on his movements grated, making him uneasy, and he had to consciously stop himself from pacing around the rooms of Kris’s small residence. Patience. Focus. Work. Research.

At least with his laptop returned he had something to do with his restless mind. He booted it up and connected to the internet via Kris’s wireless. First task: check his email. He scrolled the lists of messages in the Marrayin and his personal accounts. Still nothing from his parents.
Damn it
. If they’d been flooded in to the village by heavy rains it might be days before they received his messages.

Second task: he typed ‘Gerard McCarty’ into the search engine. Too many results, with many professional, presumably
respectable men filling the top few pages – but no bankers. He narrowed the search terms to New South Wales, then on a whim added Queensland. On the second page of results, the summary sentence of a news report caught his eye: Gerard McCarty, wanted for questioning on suspicion of rape and murder. He opened the link, and the report – dated four years ago – included an image. As the image slowly loaded, he found himself looking into the cold, smirking eyes of the man photographed with Dan Flanagan eighteen years ago.

She was
well outnumbered, three against one. She would have argued, held her ground – but the trouble was, they were right.

She rubbed Rosie’s ears. ‘Guess I’ll be staying here tonight, Rosie girl,’ she murmured. ‘It does make more sense than being alone in the hotel.’

So much for peace and quiet and space to think without a horde of others around. So much for time to sort through some ragged, confusing-as-hell emotions.

The screen door squeaked. Steve, not Mark. He sat on the back step beside her and launched straight into round two of ordering her about.

‘Listen, Jenn. McCarty’s been on the run for four years and you can bet he’s in this up to his bloody neck. He might have a chance of beating one accusation of rape and murder, but if he knows that you – we – have the photos, and if we can get Caroline and the other women to testify, he’s looking at life.
You’re potentially as big a target as Mark. And I don’t want to have to identify your remains, so stop being a stubborn idiot and use your brain.’

‘Are you always this much of a bossy bastard or are you making a special effort to impress me?’ She aimed for a mocking tone but in truth she wasn’t feeling it, and the edge of teasing showed.

He glanced sideways at her, that playboy grin not far away. ‘Sweetheart, if I thought I had any chance this side of hell of making that kind of impression on you, you’d know about it. But I don’t do lost causes.’

A lost cause? Well, yes, as far as Steve was concerned, she was. She’d come to like the guy and his mildly flirtatious ways and to respect the serious dedication beneath it, but the flutter in her heartbeat, the awareness of him, the tingle on her skin and catch in her breath? No, none of that had happened. Wasn’t going to happen. Not with Steve. A part of her wished it would because that might be a whole lot less complicated than … No, she wouldn’t even
think
that. Not Mark. Nothing but a little nostalgia with Mark.

She decided against trying to respond to Steve’s bait and flipped back to the real issue. ‘I was just telling Rosie here that I’d be staying the night. I wasn’t so much suffering from a bout of stupidity as a mild oh-shit-oh-shit-oh-shit attack. So, don’t go thinking it was your persuasive charm that made me agree, okay? Rosie’s my witness.’

‘And probably more intelligent than half the witnesses I see on the stand,’ he said. ‘But now, can I persuade you to come inside? That scrub out there has hidden snipers before.’

With the
vision of Wolfgang bleeding to death still fresh in her mind, she didn’t need further convincing.

Afternoon darkened into evening. All of them continued to work, think, research; Steve and Kris in the police station, Jenn and Mark in the marginally more spacious kitchen. She finished indexing the date and initial codes of the photos and started trying to match Birraga or Dungirri names to the faceless or blindfolded women. There was one that might have been Marta – MS – a woman bound in a chair and flinching, the antithesis of Wolfgang’s reverent work.

Others she couldn’t be sure of. Wealthier women, Jeanie had said, and the haircuts, artfully coloured lips and smooth skin in the images confirmed they were women with the time and money to look after their appearance. She concentrated on the time period she remembered best, trying to recall the women featured in the
Gazette
’s social pages, the ones who’d had the money to make regular visits to Vanna’s beauty salon next door.

The mayor’s wife? He’d been a slimy pig but she’d been a sweet if nervy woman. Initials – tick. Body type and hair – yes, probable.

Sally Duncan from the Birraga Boutique? Initials – tick. Body type and long wavy hair – yes.

Sharon Rennie, a daughter of the family who owned the local, long-established department store? Initials – tick. Body type and pageboy hair cut – yes.

‘Bastards.’ She pushed the laptop away, nausea roiling in her gut. At the end of the table Mark looked up from his own work. ‘It wasn’t just your mother, Mark. There’s at least three other prominent women of similar age in there. Maybe more.
Bohème got its dirty claws into at least half the best businesses in town.’

‘Take a break, Jenn. You’ve been at it for ages.’

Take a break and do what? ‘No, I should keep going with this. If you can give me the names of some of the women from grazing families, I can check for them.’

He came to her end of the table, reached over and closed the laptop screen. ‘Take a break. You’ve been staring at the screen too long, and there’s a limit to the amount of horror a person can take in at one time.’

‘Yes, I know. Horror’s part of my business, remember?’ And she crafted it into thirty-second sound bites, two-minute reports, or longer features that kept the hardest-hitting facts for the climax after easing the reader or viewer in. ‘I should be used to this kind of shit. I’ve uncovered enough of it.’

‘Maybe not so close to home. People you know. That’s always worse.’ Standing behind her, he drew her back in her chair and began to massage the tight, hard muscles of her neck and shoulders. ‘Take a break,’ he repeated. ‘This cement means you’ve been working too long.’

She closed her eyes, accepting the gift, letting his firm fingers work gradually, increasingly, into the knots. Maybe he was right. Not just about the cemented muscles. About horror being worse when it was people you knew. She’d seen plenty of evil – corruption that made her cynical, violence that sickened her, poverty that made her despair, and natural disasters that left her feeling powerless, tiny and vulnerable in the face of the planet’s physical forces. But each time, after a few days, after
filing her reports, she could walk away from the strangers whose lives she’d glimpsed for a short while.

The August day when Sally Duncan had been planning her boutique’s spring sale and enquired about advertising rates in the
Gazette
office – had that been before or after she’d gone to the room with the long drapes and the metal chair?

When Caroline had driven to the place where she’d knelt naked on the carpet, what had she worn? The well-cut jeans and tailored shirt she often wore for quick trips to town? The blue linen dress for lunch with her friends? Had Len known where she was going, and why, or had she made up a story, forced to lie? Had she scrubbed her body all over when she got home and then pretended over dinner with her husband and son that everything was fine?

That son’s hands paused on Jenn’s shoulders. ‘You’re tensing up. Is this hurting? Do you want me to stop?’

‘No. It’s okay. I just lost the zen thoughts there for a while. Will your hands hold out for a minute or two more?’ Two minutes wouldn’t make much difference to the state of her neck and shoulders, but she could get herself together in two minutes, defeat the urge to cry, and be ready to face him and pretend that she could deal with everything – including him – without falling apart and taking more from him than a shoulder massage.

Being confined in a four-room house made him edgy. Mark lingered at the printer in Kris’s spare bedroom-cum-study, staring at the pages in his hand without seeing them. He rubbed the rock-hard muscles at the back of his own neck, tense after hours
of being cooped up inside, of considering all the possibilities of the past darkness, of working at the same table as Jenn. His offer to massage her shoulders had been every bit as much for him as for her – to ease her pain, to touch her, and to stand behind her so she couldn’t see how deeply she affected him. All the promise, all the potential she’d had at seventeen flowered now as an adult – her intelligence, her perseverance, the passion for justice that blazed in her eyes.

If things had been different … He cursed the circumstances that had brought her back into his life now, now when he had a cloud over his head, when he was bound here by honour and commitment to help Dungirri – his community – recover from traumatic years and rebuild its shattered identity. Even if he was not charged over Paula’s death, Jenn’s life and career lay elsewhere, and he was not free to be with her.

He’d gripped the pages in his hand so tightly they’d creased in long untidy folds. He wished it was Flanagan’s neck he’d had his hands around.

Did that make him little better than Flanagan? He didn’t know, but the anger and violence within him simmered and he had to deliberately focus to slow his breathing, to open his fists, to smooth out the papers and return to the others – to Jenn – with some semblance of calm.

Gil arrived, bringing with him bread, steaks and salad from the pub kitchen, and he prepared a meal while the rest of them gathered around the table and shared progress and news.

‘Leah’s banging her head against a brick wall trying to get more resources on the ground,’ Steve reported. ‘So, tomorrow I’m officially back on the team. At least if I get shot in the line
of duty tomorrow I’ll be covered by workers’ comp, but we’d better try to avoid the shooting stuff tonight, right?’

‘I’ll second that,’ Mark volunteered, re-joining them at the table. They’d put away computers, reshuffled seats for everyone to fit, and he took the vacant seat next to Jenn. Maybe he should have taken the one furthest away instead of being so close that their thighs were only inches apart and he could almost feel the warmth of her body. Every small move distracted him, and he had to concentrate to follow the discussion. But she was part of it, animated and engaged with the intellectual puzzle, despite her fatigue.

‘Jenn, I passed along your information about the women you’ve possibly identified,’ Steve continued, going through his notes. ‘Leah wants to visit them in the morning, and she wants you to go with her, Kris, as you’re the local sexual assault specialist.’