Crystal Coffin (32 page)

‘No!' Locklin pleaded. ‘Whatever you do, please don't talk to Knox yet. Give me one day at least.'

‘Why?' Thorna persisted.

‘Look,' he said, seriously. ‘I've
got
to go. You've lived nextdoor to my father since before I was born. You know me. Do you trust me to do what's right or not?'

She nodded and he put his hand on her shoulder, thanking her. Then she watched him bolt away as Janet started her next song. There was an extra beat coming from under the stage now, but being so close to the loudspeaker, no-one seemed to notice.

Sergeant Knox signed off for his shift and went out the back door, swearing when he saw the size of the crowd that had turned up to the carnival this year.

‘Hey, Jody,' he called, grinning at the tiny constable as he poked his head back inside. ‘I think I'll hang around for a while.'

‘No need,' Constable Davenport said as she typed out an incident report. ‘Mick and Craig have things under control. You go.'

The bell chimed at reception and they both looked up. The chipboard on the wall for procedure leaflets, maps and notices had overflowed onto the frosted glass panel that stood between their workstations and the front counter and they couldn't see how many people had walked in. But they knew it was at least one.

‘I thought you locked that door, Jody?'

‘I thought Robyn did it when she left at five.'

‘Stay there,' Knox said. ‘I'll get it.'

Davenport grinned. ‘Sucker for punishment, you are.'

Knox rounded the corner and saw the senior detective's badge that was being held up for him by a short man in a suit. He went through the next door past reception and meet him in the foyer.

‘G'day,' he said, offering a handshake. ‘Graham Knox.'

‘Dean Parry,' Parry said, accepting the shake and pocketing his ID. ‘Sydney CIB. Looks like you've got quite a party going on next door.'

‘Yeah,' Knox said. ‘All that's missing is the fireworks. You're a long way from home,' he added, cutting through the small talk. ‘What can we do for you?'

‘I've got a suspect up this way,' Parry said, pushing his fists into his pockets. ‘He flew into Brisbane late this afternoon with half a dozen friends that I wasn't expecting. I was hoping to borrow someone from here to hitch a ride out with me as backup while I take a look, but it seems like you've got your hands full already.'

‘On a Friday night at the best of times, yes. I could ring Ipswich and see if they've got anyone around, but their resources are usually nudged over the limit on a Friday too. Who are we talking about here?'

‘The name's Fletcher, Aaron Fletcher,' Parry said, deciding it was highly unlikely that Fletcher could have cops on his payroll this far north.

Knox scratched the grey streak above his ear. ‘Well, the name sounds familiar. Can't place it, though.'

‘He's an art dealer, big on the international scene, manages a string of galleries all over the world and he used to be married to …'

‘Renée Dumakis? The Arts Minister who got smeared over her living-room rug? I saw that on the news. I thought you got the daughter for that?'

Parry shook his head in a way that gave Knox the picture.

‘Oh, okay,' Knox said, crossing his arms. ‘So what's your Mr Fletcher doing in our neck of the woods with a six-pack of nasties?'

‘That's exactly what I want to know. The only thing I can think of that would interest him around here is his stepdaughter. She got a job up here recently on one of the local farms, Maitland's I think, Eric and Thorna.'

Knox let his eyes ask if Parry was pulling his proverbial leg. ‘Hey, Jody!' he called around the corner. ‘What was the name of that company that took over the MacLeod's place? The one Helen MacLeod was up here complaining had swindled her dad out of their farm before he died.'

‘Fletcher Corp, I think,' Jody called back. ‘Why?'

‘Bingo,' Knox said. His eyebrows arched at an opportunity to get Federal assistance to investigate a couple of local cases that had been bugging him. ‘I'm going out there,' he called to Davenport. Then he smiled at Parry.

‘Your car or mine?'

Kirk drove Farran slowly past the ostrich farm twice to take a look. The old house was a weatherboard, set on a small hobby farm about the size of two football fields, only it was fenced off into smaller ostrich paddocks that pushed the house up into weedy cottage gardens at the front corner. A storage shed out the back was bigger than the house and a rambling chest-height picket fence across the front looked barely strong enough to hold the daisies in. The nearest house was about a third of a kilometre away and there didn't seem to be any dogs, which made a great combination for easy pickings. They could get in fast and move around without being seen easily by the neighbours or from the road. They could even park their car in the shade of a giant fig tree that sucked the life out of the grass on the footpath.

‘Boss wants this nice and clean,' Farran said, undoing the top button of the shirt that strangled his thick neck. ‘Turn round up ahead at the culvert and we'll go back and get this done. I'll go in the front and see if we can convince her to come out nice and quiet. You go round the back in case they try an' run for it and if she don't come out quiet, well, I guess I'll start a ruckus and you can come in and join the party.'

‘What if she's out?'

‘If she's not here, we either wait, or pack anyone we find in the car and go and get her. Can't be too many people living in a joint like this. Or if I whistle, it means I can't find her but I reckon I got 'em distracted enough for you to go in and swipe the computer's hard drive — that's the box with all the buttons on it. Sometimes it's under a screen and sometimes it's under a desk. Don't matter about cords and keyboards and screens an' crap, just the box. That's the brains. Got it?'

‘What if I can't get in?'

‘Smash something,' Farran said, getting out of the car as soon as it stopped. ‘We'll make it look like a home invasion.' He tucked his revolver into his belt behind his mobile phone and watched Kirk flick the safety off his Smith and Wesson.

‘Cool,' Kirk said, hunching over like someone had switched him into stealth mode. ‘I haven't done one of them since I was a kid.'

‘I'll get the door, Gran!' Scotty shouted, leaping off the couch.

‘Oh no you won't,' she said, waving him back into the lounge room with her finger as she headed down the hall. ‘Just turn that video down or loosen the bandage off your ears so you can hear it.'

Gran opened the door, squinting into an orange sun that set behind their visitor's head.

‘Hello?' she said and covered her mouth to cough.

‘Yeah, hello,' the burly man said as he flicked his nose. ‘Is there a Helen MacLeod lives hereabouts?'

‘She's not here at the moment. Can I help you?'

‘Oh, I come a long way. I was wonderin', I mean, they told me she's the one to speak to when it come time to buy me some emus.'

‘Not emus. We only have ostriches,' Gran, said, used to the confusion. People often pulled up so their kids could see the big birds, but it never ceased to amaze her how they always assumed they had to be emus just because they lived in Australia. ‘Ostriches are bigger,' she added to help him tell the difference. ‘But they're easier to look after.' She looked over his shoulder and saw the back end of a nice black car on the footpath but she couldn't hear any excited children.

‘Oh yeah, that's good. Well I was wonderin',' he said, stalling to give his mate more time to get round the back. ‘I was thinkin' of maybe, well, you know, since the market's fallen out of ‘em, I was thinkin' of maybe getting one or two of ‘em to run around the place — little ones to fatten up. But I guess if she ain't here …'

‘I can help you,' Gran said, opening the door wider. It had been too long since she'd made a sale and she couldn't afford to be less than friendly to a potential buyer. ‘The birds are mine,' she added, smiling. ‘I can show you through, but if you want to take any now, you'll have to catch them yourself I'm sorry. My grandson's sick.'

‘What if I wait for Ms MacLeod, could she catch 'em for me?'

‘My grand-daughter is in Ipswich,' Gran said, ‘having a baby. But I'm sure I can arrange delivery for you in a few days.'

‘Hooeee,' Farran whistled, loud enough for Kirk to hear it at the back. ‘You sure don't look old enough to be a
great
-grandma.'

Gran MacLeod's wrinkles all went pink at once.

‘Would you like to have a look then?' she said, still blushing.

‘Sounds good to me.'

Gran kicked off her slippers and pulled on her yard shoes as Farran followed her down the steps and along a ferny path. Inside he heard the creak of floorboards right where he expected them to be.

‘You run this whole place by yourself?' he asked loudly so his mate could hear the voices moving down the side.

‘Well, there's my granddaughter and my grandson, but they're both a bit light to be handling the big hens. I have a friend that helps me when I need to do that, but he's up north visiting his mother.'

‘Light? You mean weak?'

‘In the body. Being strong isn't enough. You have to be heavy so the birds can't drag you around. Here we are,' she said, standing at the gate of a long narrow pen that could just as easily have been used to raise greyhound pups.

The chicken mesh was a little above waist height and there was a half-open garden shed at one end for shelter. Behind them, a seven foot clucky hen paced up and down the wires of an old stallion yard. She fluffed out her long white-tipped black wings to look as wide as she was tall and hissed a warning for the humans to stay out of her territory. At the same time she eyed them to see if they'd brought her a feed bucket. In the shorter chick pen, fourteen four-month-old chicks jogged out to investigate the new human. They blinked large bird eyes over the top wire at Farran, but he wasn't looking at them.

Gran turned her head towards the house, wondering what had interested him.

‘Oh, I better close that,' she said, noticing that the back door was ajar. ‘Or I'll have a snake in the kitchen again for sure.'

Corporal Beattie wiped the grin off the guard's face by stamping down on the Bedford's accelerator as soon as the boom gate went up. He left the private standing in a cloud of half-burned diesel, probably wondering why a cattle truck had priority access to a military air base.

Beattie pulled up alongside the operations block, feeling eyes on him everywhere, not only from the line-up of officers who waited for him, but from maintenance staff and other personnel who must have wondered why so many officers were interested in a vehicle that wasn't painted with camouflage.

A young flight lieutenent was sent off to get a bucket of water for the dog that wagged its tail at them from the livestock crate on the back while two groups of officers split off to empty the contents of the tool boxes that were bolted to the undercarriage.

Beattie climbed into the passenger side of the cabin and emptied log books, travel permits and a nine-year-old local street directory out of the glove compartment. He handed everything back to Colonel Chang and the others to inspect while he rifled loose papers from under the seat. He folded the passenger seat down first and found a tyre jack, a tool kit and a short towing chain and behind the driver's seat, he found a rolled up beach towel with a fancy looking jewellery box inside and a large black travel bag. Inside the travel bag was an army eschelon bag and inside that he found clothing, a change into military colours, a first aid kit and a Browning with its holster and three spare clips.

‘Bingo,' Chang said, but he wasn't talking about the weapon or anything else from behind the seats. He held up an A4 booklet out of the glove compartment that had Queensland Livestock Movement System stamped across the front with a picture of a cattle truck.

‘These are all filled out for livestock travelling to and from the same property,' he said flipping through the dated carbon copies.

Beattie looked at the address and used the local street directory to find it on a map.

‘How long will it take get here?' Chang asked Squadron Leader Harris, pointing at the map, while Beattie put everything else back into the truck as they had found it.

‘Power-up and flying time? A little under twenty minutes. But that's private land. We're required to contact property owners and warn them we'll be in low, so we don't scare livestock through any fences, and we can't land without their permission unless it's an emergency'

Chang shook his head at the extent of red-tape he had to fight. ‘Excuse me sir,' he said, as if he was making a phone call. ‘I'm ringing to let you know that we'll be sneaking up on you today'

Harris wished he could smile.

‘Ah, sir?' Beattie interrupted. ‘That property adjoins the Wivenhoe Reservoir. I believe that makes it water resources land for a distance of six metres above the high watermark. That makes at least part of it government land.'

‘Can't land an Iroquois on six metres of ground, Colonel.'

‘No,' Chang said, ‘but we can use one to get a bird's eye view to coordinate a ground force.'

‘Agreed,' Harris said. ‘Let's get airborne.'

Locklin looked at the traffic jam on the road ahead and behind him and checked his watch as the hour hand moved another notch towards seven. He swore and jumped the curb, cutting through the primary school teacher's car park to avoid the traffic. He squeezed the accelerator down a little and revved up between the preschool and the grade three block, turned hard right at grade one and hard left at the admin building and burst onto Peace Street doing seventy-five in a forty zone. There was another hard left below the ambulance station that took him straight back into traffic on Main Street. But instead of backing off to turn, he straightened up and squeezed the accelerator a little more. He powered through the town park, skidding round the basketball court and dodging the playground on the other side. He hit the humps below the ladies' toilets and the Magna learned to fly.

The car came down hard at the intersection above the butcher shop and Locklin felt the clunk of something heavy in the boot. A military vehicle with something heavy in the boot. It couldn't be weapons, he realised. There were strict controls on those, so he stored the thought as the road straightened up. Ahead he could see road markers like goalposts on either side of a culvert and he nudged the Magna over the centre line and kicked the accelerator straight to the floor.

Kirk crept quickly past the dining table in the kitchen to the tunnel of a darkened hall. He looked down the hall in the middle of the house to the front door, where the dim light of sunset struggled to illuminate the sunroom. To his right there was a small bathroom and down the hall was a lounge room and three doors.

The first door was open, flashing with the blue-tinged reflection of a nearby television. Engines revved and a crowd roared.

‘Ow! That was a close one,' a commentator shouted.

Kirk peered into the first room and saw a large pink bed smothered by a crocheted rug. A cat slept in a tapestried rocker by the window and beside it on the floor sat a bulging basket of mottled wool that was stabbed with long needles.

He stepped deeper into the hall, treading lightly on worn floral carpet. He steadied his Smith and Wesson and approached the long gap in sunflower wallpaper where a dark green sofa overstretched by a couple of centimetres into the hall. There were two tapestry-clad single sofas on the furthest wall, separated by a coffee table, and Kirk crept further forward to check the darkened room for occupants.

‘Ouch! That's gotta hurt,' the TV commentator called and Kirk's eyes were drawn to the bright screen under the window. The irises in his eyes narrowed to restrict the sudden light and the rest of the room appeared like night. Dazzled briefly, he crept on to the next door.

It was another bedroom. The long rectangular shape under the clothes and the pillow on the floor gave it away. The wardrobe gaped open like a torpedoed sports locker and the engine parts on the chest of drawers made the room look like a garage. There was a small cluttered desk but no computer and he moved on, causing the floor to groan beneath him.

The last door in the hall was another bedroom, tidy except for linen stacked on the bed. He bypassed it too and burst into the sunroom, scanning left and right quickly to find no-one. On one side of the front door was a covered piano and books on shelves from the ceiling to floor. On the other was a sewing corner, with a headless half-clad mannequin that pointed to a desk.

Kirk frowned and scratched the bald spot in the back of his head. No hard drive, no screen, no keyboard. He bent over to look under the desk and heard the floor creak again.

‘Hey!' someone shouted as a shape moved in the hall. ‘Who are you?'

Kirk swung up with his revolver and a face disappeared from the door. He heard running and made it to the hall as the back door flung open. He stopped only long enough to aim and fire.

‘Gran!' a teenager shouted.

Wood splintered into Scotty's shoulder as a bullet exploded the door jam and he fell. He landed on the concrete pad at the bottom of three steps and blood trickled from the bandage near his ear. It dribbled into concrete cracks to feed the weeds and when he looked up, two Smith and Wessons were pointed down at him.