Crystal Coffin (24 page)

‘The church was a jewel box,' Nikki told Parry. She glanced nervously through the bougainvillea, wondering how much longer it would be before Thorna came looking for her, and she looked up at the top floor window in time to see the drapes pulled aside and a face looking out.

‘Actually, the church was a cabinet for a jewellery box,' she continued quickly. ‘The front opened on a hinge and the jewellery box sat inside it.' She pulled her necklace out of her blouse and showed Parry the charm of an angel. ‘This was part of the set,' she said. ‘Mum was holding this one when I found her. There's also a pair of earrings, but I don't know where they are.'

‘And this jewellery box,' Burkett asked, taking notes, ‘it was, what? A musical thing with a dancing ballerina?'

Nikki looked at Parry, rolling her eyes. ‘Where'd you get
him
from?'

‘He's young,' Parry defended. ‘No daughters to teach him the ropes.'

‘Oh,' she said, liking the old guy even more. ‘Those music boxes are for little kids,' she explained. ‘This one was a coffin — a crystal coffin.'

Burkett's eyes widened. ‘That's a bit morbid, isn't it?'

‘No way!' Nikki said, her feelings hurt. ‘It's really … well … sweet. I mean, when you know what happened.'

‘And what was that?' Burkett asked, unprepared for her reaction.

Her face turned blood red. She didn't have time for this, and yet her story wanted to come out — now, after years of failed therapy and talking about it until she was blue in the face with falsely encouraging therapists. ‘It's not on your files?' she asked, hoping to extinguish the fuse that had been lit for her time bomb.

‘Nowhere that I've seen,' Burkett said.

‘Please tell us,' Parry said in that fatherly tone that dredged fond memories from her belly. She slumped against the tree, her eyes fixed on the grass, but looking inwards.

‘My dad and my brothers,' she said, as if reading it from a plaque that had been burned behind her eyes. ‘I saw them die. We were driving round, helping Mum run for council one time and Dad swerved to miss a cow. We crashed down this gully. Mum and I were thrown clear, but the others got trapped, and then the fuel tank blew. I saw them, Mr Parry. I saw their hair on fire.'

‘I'm sorry,' Burkett said, meaning it. He had read that in the files. Not the details, just that most of her family had been killed in a car accident. That was common knowledge anyway. A strong sympathy vote was one of the main reasons her mother had been elected the first time round.

‘Yeah, everyone said they were sorry,' Nikki said. ‘I was only five, but I remember a church attendant say he was sorry, then joke to another guy that they were burying empty boxes. There was nothing left of the bodies, and he thought that was funny.'

Parry scrunched his fists inside his pockets, remembering the reference to Nikki's mental instability in his homicide report. ‘Your mum took you to psychiatrists after that?'

Nikki glanced to the window again, almost hoping to be interrupted. ‘Wouldn't you? I mean, a kid who ducks off down the garden in all weather to pick bugs out of cobwebs and bury them in matchboxes isn't exactly all together, hey?'

‘So your mum had the coffin and angels made to bring you in out of the cold?' Parry said.

Nikki nodded. From the look on Burkett's face, he didn't understand, although Parry seemed to have a fair idea.

‘This is my dad,' she said, rolling the tall angel charm on her necklace between her fingers. ‘And the earrings were my brothers. It works, you know, laying them to rest each night. Or it did until
he
found out about them.'

‘By
he
, you mean Aaron Fletcher?' Parry asked. ‘Your stepfather?'

She nodded, preferring not to taste his name on her tongue again.

‘Hang on,' Burkett said. ‘You were already using it? I thought I read that you claimed it was a birthday present. Your birthday's not for another fortnight, is it?'

‘Yeah,' she said. ‘But Mum was keen to see if it helped. She gave it to me as soon as she got it. She was taking photos of it for insurance the night she … the night she …'

‘Earned the wings of an angel,' Parry suggested.

‘Yeah,' Nikki said, smiling with red eyes. ‘Thanks.'

‘Insurance photos, yes!' Burkett said to Parry. ‘Fletcher had them devoloped the day after his wife died, remember?'

Parry nodded. ‘He said he took them before he gave it to her for their anniversary.'

‘That's a lie!' Nikki spat. ‘Their wedding anniversary isn't for another month. Mum had them made for me! He suspected she'd been sneaking around organising something and he just thought it was for him. Mum tried to tell him she'd only spent it out of the inheritance that Dad left for me, but he wanted to control it all. He got madder than I've ever seen him. He said Mum had wasted a fortune on me and started throwing things. Mum sent me to my room and then I heard her scream.'

‘Did she know if he was trying to defraud her art gallery's insurance company over the paintings that went missing for a short time a few months ago?'

‘I don't think so. Mum was always careful of doing everything the right way. Her party was even thinking of endorsing her to run for PM next election, you know because she was so clean.'

‘Just as I thought,' Burkett told Parry. ‘Her party closed ranks around her when they smelled insurance fraud. They wanted to keep her clean.'

‘The first I heard about fraud was when you mentioned it,' Nikki said. ‘But I wouldn't put it past him. Aaron was always ducking out at weird hours, paranoid about his privacy, that sort of thing. He told us it was because Mum led such a public life that he liked to keep to himself, but he always managed to mingle with the other ministers whenever they came over.'

‘He's been careful, all right,' Burkett said. ‘We haven't been able to pin a single thing on him yet.'

Or maybe you haven't wanted to, Parry thought still unsure if Burkett was the dirty cop.

Burkett looked at Nikki unaware of Parry's accusing stare. ‘What did your mother ever see in him?' he asked.

‘He was smooth,' she said. ‘Really nice to her face and really foul-tempered as soon as her back was turned, only he didn't even try to be nice to me unless Mum was around. I guess he figured he controlled my inheritance when he controlled Mum's finances.'

‘I knew there had to be a lot of rage involved when I saw the photos of the crime scene,' Burkett said to Parry. ‘We should find at least a few partial prints that are his when they piece the church back together.'

‘You're putting it back together?'

‘We're trying,' Parry answered. ‘It won't be good enough to sit on your dresser again, but it might give us a few clues as to how he held it, when he did it.'

‘Then you really do believe me?' Nikki said, chewing her lip. ‘That other cop — Underpants or something — he wouldn't even listen.'

‘Well, there is a lot of evidence pointing to you,' Burkett said. ‘If it wasn't for Senior Detective Parry here, pulling a few hunches together between his smuggling case, my file on the stolen paintings and your mum's murder, we wouldn't even be here and the church would stay in pieces.'

‘Thanks,' she said, smiling at Parry as Thorna opened the window and leaned out to look around. The scarlet thicket of bougainvillea was still between the men and the house, so Thorna probably hadn't seen them yet, but leaning out the window like that, she couldn't miss seeing the Falcon parked at her back steps.

‘I have to go now,' Nikki said. ‘My boss is looking for me. It won't worry me though, if you don't fix the church. I just want the earrings back.'

Burkett looked at Parry and smiled. ‘I think we can arrange that,' he said, walking with her back towards the house. ‘If you help us find them.'

Parry nodded, knowing he was putting the girl at risk by agreeing to use her as bait. Now that he'd met her, he felt even more uncomfortable about doing it. But, he reminded himself that she'd be in a whole lot more trouble if he didn't find out who the dirty cop was that was keeping Fletcher ahead of him at every stage. And if it was Burkett, he felt certain things would come to a head now that he'd tracked her down.

What he didn't realise, was how soon.

Helen stepped over the power cord that linked her laptop on the dining-room table to the wall socket while it charged and set her cup of coffee down beside two Tim Tarn biscuits. Sitting close to the table was getting more challenging every day. The baby kicked her all the time now, which meant it didn't appreciate the cramped conditions inside her tummy any more than she did.

‘Come out then,' she challenged it, but only playfully, since the birth was still about eight weeks away. She reached for her cup, but an old wrinkled hand whisked it away and dumped it into the sink.

‘Gran, I was drinking that!'

A shrivelled woman with a limp splashed boiling water over a teabag and put it down on the table near Helen's hand. ‘Tea, for two,' she rasped. ‘It's better for the baby. You'll thank me in eight weeks.'

‘I'd thank you right now,' Helen said, ‘if you let me have coffee.' She wasn't really upset, it was just a game, but it was one that Helen wished she could win a round or two in occasionally.

She sipped her tea and watched lines of data scroll down the screen as her Trojan Horse program did all the hard work looking for Fletcher Corporation subsidiaries around the world. Not quite a virus, the program had been accepted as a ‘gift' that allowed her practically full access each time a Fletcher Corp subsidiary came online.

The problem was there were so many sites that had the keyword Fletcher in them. The word was as common on the internet as the surname Smith was in the local phone directory. Her buffer could only handle about fifty at a time, which meant the process of investigating them had become painstaking.

She took a break for a minute and uploaded the images of the crystal coffin and jewellery that she'd taken at the boathouse with her digital camera. Then she double clicked on the icon that filled her screen with the Trojan's progress again. She narrowed her keyword search to limit results to companies that shared different combinations of the words Fletcher, Sydney and Nicole. But she still came up with thousands of choices to check up on.

One of the first to catch her interest was in Italy, a company that she'd looked at and passed over before. They dealt in second-hand light aircraft and had only one reference to Sydney on their site, but it was a link to a second-hand sales agent who also dealt in corporate yachts and Mercedes, and it had been a Mercedes that Scott had said he'd seen leaving the boathouse the day her father had been found dead. By itself, the connection was too weak to make her suspicious the first time round, but when it appeared again as it had the night before, she had included the company in the first batch that she'd emailed her Trojan to.

PEEKABOO I C U responded the server in Italy, and she smiled. It meant the user had just come online — an odd time for Italy, as it was the middle of the night for them.

LIST PASSWORDS, she entered, which sent an instruction to search the Internet Explorer password cache on that company's PC. If any of their staff had ever used the ‘remember my password' query, she'd be able to import the codes and get access to everything. She wouldn't need a password cracker, which she didn't have anyway.

Unlucky this time, she slid a gold-tabbed 120Mb super-disc for data into her A-drive and entered the command LOG KEYSTROKES … A:/KEYSTROKES1/

Now she'd get a record of every keystroke entered by the user as well as details of all the windows they were working in at the time. It wouldn't help her today, but over the next few days, she could log on to get updates on a very clear picture of what they got up to inside their files.

PEEKABOO I C U her screen blipped again as another target company came online. This one was a Sydney florist that she'd been watching for a week, doing a little poking around even before Jayson had asked her to. She felt sorry for this one actually, a woman who struggled hard to keep the business afloat while her husband used a secret email account to keep in touch with other women.

Helen smiled, searching her miscellaneous files and found him the perfect parting gift, a program that would forward copies of all his private emails, incoming as well as outgoing, on to his wife's business email address where she could read them without his knowledge.

Then she entered the command UNINSTALL (D:\Utilities\Peekaboo.exe) and watched the florist's server delete the system administration file that she'd imbedded in their utilities directory eight days earlier when she'd emailed it to them on the back of a dummy greeting card.

UNINSTALL COMPLETE the screen blipped four minutes later, and 122Kb of memory was restored to its owner.