Poison Bay (32 page)

Callie turned her head away.

Jack had more that he needed to say. “If I’d helped him to hope that he could go home, do his time for Sharon’s death, and then start again… maybe the despair wouldn’t have overcome him.”

“You might need to forgive yourself for that,” Erica said.

“Yeah. But that’s the hardest one of all to do.”

55

Peter fought to keep the frustration out of his voice. “Every hour matters for the diabetic. We could retrieve her as much as six hours sooner if you send it tonight.”

“You can’t be sure she’s there, and we can’t risk a gunman taking potshots in the dark. But we’ll have it there at 5.00 a.m.”

Peter resisted the urge to slam the phone down. It made sense. They couldn’t risk several lives on the off-chance of saving one. Even if that one belonged to someone who’d become important to him.

***

He found Ellen sitting in the hotel lounge listening to the pianist, a half empty glass mug on the coffee table in front of her. Hot chocolate, at an educated guess. Her posture in the enfolding armchair was supple and relaxed. But from only one week’s acquaintance he was certain there was an iron discipline forcing her to release the tension in the muscle fibers, distract the brain synapses from the endless circuit of worry worry worry.

When he entered her peripheral vision he saw her detect him instantly, sitting forward in the chair, alert and focused, shedding the air of relaxation like an unwanted overcoat. “Peter.”

“Ellen.” He nodded in greeting, and took the chair at right angles to hers. He didn’t toy with her by using euphemisms or empty encouragement, but he wanted to start on a positive note. “We may have a result in the morning. I’d like you to be ready.”

“Of course.” She nodded, and waited.

“Two more bodies were found today, both male. We believe the relative location of those bodies has shown us the direction the group was heading. If they’ve taken the better option, they may have reached the lake this evening, at a point where there is a backcountry hut they could have taken shelter in.”

She considered this a moment. “How certain can you be of their direction?”

“Not certain. But we’ve narrowed it down to two valleys of the hundreds out there, which is very positive. We’ll start at that hut first thing in the morning, and we’ve been able to secure a medivac helicopter, with a specialist doctor and paramedic on board, due to arrive here about five in the morning.”

Ellen’s eyebrows went up. “So you really do think she’s alive?”

“At this stage, I have nothing to indicate otherwise.”

“It’s just that your body language is telling me some negative things. I was wondering what you’re hiding from me.” It wasn’t stated as a verbal challenge; she was just puzzled.

His face split in a grin. “Tell me, if I put a paper bag over your head so you couldn’t see me, would it help you to believe what I say?”

She laughed, a spontaneous lightening of her heavy mood, a fleeting relief. “It might work. Or you could put it over your own head.”

“Probably the better solution.” He became serious again. “One of the men we found today had been shot, and I don’t know what that means.”

“Shot?” She was shocked, and it showed.

“Yes, it was a shock for us too. How do they come to have a gun, and how do we interpret it in light of the fact that they had a locator beacon and didn’t switch it on? It’s different to the smothering of Sharon Healy—that could have been simply an opportunistic killing, based on her ‘drag’ on the team if she wasn’t well. This looks more deliberate. Planned. I don’t know if they’re being marched at gunpoint. Or if they’ve turned into an outlaw gang. I don’t know if they’re trying to be found, or hiding out from us. Or even lying in wait for us. It’s a puzzle, whatever way you look at it.”

“Do you know if any of them owned a gun?”

“Bryan owned both a rifle and a small handgun. We couldn’t find either one at his house.” He shouldn’t be telling this woman everything about his investigation, but with Tom off the team he needed the sounding board, and there was no point shutting the stable door at this late stage. That particular horse had bolted days ago, and probably joined the circus by now.

“So it’s probably Bryan’s gun. But who’d be using it, now that he’s dead? Who would he have given it to?” Light dawned. “Kain Vindico, I suppose.”

“Perhaps. We can’t be sure. Since Bryan had Tom as backup out here, he may well have had another plant in the group itself. And Vindico is now dead, unfortunately.”

“Oh! How awful.” She stared at him. “But not the one who was shot?”

“No. Probably a fall. Perhaps Vindico shot the other man, and then the others pushed him off a cliff. Who knows? I’m hoping for post mortem results by morning.”

A waiter came by at that moment, asking Peter if he’d like coffee. He looked at Peter’s police uniform with the open curiosity of a seasonal worker who doesn’t need to keep his job for long. In this little town, you had to be dead or senile not to know about the big search that was underway.

Peter was going to refuse, but Ellen gave him what could be termed “an old-fashioned look”. “You might as well,” she said. “Have you eaten tonight, by the way?”

“As a matter of fact, I have.” He felt a need to be scrupulously honest, and added, “Thanks only to Hemi, of course.” And to the waiter, “Can you do a caramel latte?” He kept his face deadpan.

As the waiter withdrew with the order, Ellen spoke, a smile in her voice. “I wonder if you’ll regret that, once you taste it.”

“The worst thing would be if I found out I liked it, and had to order it all the time.”

She smiled and got back on topic. “So, what if there’s an ambush waiting for you at that hut?”

“That’s one of the questions on my mind, and one that you’ll need to make a decision about too. The invitation is there for you to be on my chopper in the morning, but you have to know the risks. The medical crew will follow us up there. They’ll keep their distance until we’ve established it’s safe to land. I’d have a difficult time wangling a seat for a member of the public on the medical chopper, but there’s a spare chair in mine. Once you’re up there, it’s a different matter to persuade them to give you a seat on the chopper taking your daughter to Invercargill. You’re just a member of the public right now, but once Rachel is their patient, you become a relative.”

She pondered a moment, and he could sense her desire to resist a hasty decision. “I’d like to go. My feeling is that we won’t get shot at, and I’d like to be there for Rachel, either way.”

“You need to be ready for the fact they may not even be there. We could be wrong about the whole thing. We could be wrong about lots of things.” He didn’t need to say: your daughter could be dead after all.

“I understand that. You are making no guarantees. I appreciate you sticking your neck out for me and my daughter in this situation, and I won’t be taking that privilege lightly, no matter how it all works out in the end.”

***

Despite the depths of sleep, he was awake before the second ring, grabbing for the phone in the dark. It must be the post mortem results. “Peter Hubble.”

“It’s Hemi.” Peter’s brain backpedaled, rearranged itself for different news. “There was a tiny metal pin in that beacon, mate. I reckon someone put it in there deliberately to stop it activating. It would have stopped the switch sliding. It’s sheared off—probably in the fall.”

“Wouldn’t they have seen it?”

“Nah. Especially not if they hadn’t seen a PLB before. They wouldn’t know what it was meant to look like, would they? And it was a strong little pin. You’d need to belt it with a hammer to try to break it. It’s not the sort of thing you could do with bare hands, especially if you didn’t know what was wrong.”

He thought a moment. “Would Bryan Smithton have been able to figure out how to do this?”

“Too right, mate. Real geek he was, always getting into the works of things.”

So that accounted for the beacon. Sabotaged by the owner. But it still didn’t explain the gunshot wound.

***

When the phone rang the next time, it was harder for Peter to fight his way up from unconsciousness. Disorientated, he fumbled around for the phone in the dark and stabbed at the illuminated answer button, but the beeping continued. He rose and headed towards the doorway, tripped heavily on his discarded shoes, swore liberally, stumbled into the wall and finally found the light switch.

It was his wake-up alarm that was beeping. And the call was live. So the caller had heard the whole charade. He only hoped it wasn’t Invercargill.

“Peter Hubble.”

“Nice to hear New Zealand’s finest are on top of their game as usual.” It was Jonesy the pathologist, appallingly chipper for four o’clock in the morning. “I hate to interrupt your beauty sleep. I know you need it more than most.”

“Very funny. How many energy drinks have you had tonight?”

“I never have more than four in one night,” he said, his tone prim.
 

“So, what did you find?”

“Contestant Number One, Adam Andersson. Died of a gunshot wound to the head around forty-eight to sixty hours ago. Small caliber. A lot of general bruising around the time of death, and some significant compression bruising to the right side of the body caused after death.”

“We found his body next to a landslide.”

“A lot of the injuries are not inconsistent with being crushed in a landslide.”

“Could any of the bruising be punches, or being belted over the head with a log, that sort of thing?”

“Hard to be sure, they’d look much the same.”

“Can you tell how close in time the gunshot and crush injuries were?”

“Very close, some of it. If I were a betting man, I’d say almost simultaneous. The compression bruising took place over several hours.”

“Who shoots a man who’s about to get cleaned up by a landslide?”

“Someone who hasn’t seen the landslide coming.”

Peter paused and thought about that. “Or possibly even someone who had a gun in their hand when they got hit by the same landslide. It could have been a threat that turned into an execution. Okay. And the other one?”

“Contestant Number Two, Kain Vindico. Died about twenty-four to thirty-six hours ago.”

“So he’s more recent.” That meant Hemi’s interpretation of the trampers’ trajectory was correct. It increased the likelihood they’d entered the Altham valley, and Peter’s plan would work.
 

“Fatal injuries consistent with a fall from height. Broken spine, broken neck, broken head—his skull was pretty much flattened on the back. Died almost instantly. The most likely explanation for the injuries I’m seeing is that he fell backwards while wearing a rucksack, and landed arched across the rucksack.”

It was an uncomfortable mental picture, and Peter wriggled his shoulders. “No way to tell if he was pushed, I guess?”

“Nothing obvious like finger marks on the shoulders. But that doesn’t prove anything.”

“No, of course.”

“He also had a belly full of tutu berries.”

“What?!” Peter swore. Another complication. “I hope they haven’t all been eating them. Was it enough to kill him, if he hadn’t fallen?”

“I’d say so. There was a fair bit of the toxin in his bloodstream as well, so he’d been eating them for a while, an hour or more. He’d have been unsteady on his feet if not actually convulsing yet.”

“Could be why he fell.”

“Indeed. And I’ve got more. I checked the gloves in his pack, and they’re an exact match for that fiber we took from Sharon Healy’s nostril.”

“Possible someone else has the same brand, I guess?”

“Yes. Andersson’s gloves weren’t a match. Different color. But it doesn’t prove anything unless we test all the gloves.”

“We’ll sort that out when we find them.”

“Righto. Hard to prove who was wearing them the day the girl died, of course.”

“Can’t you test for DNA in the sweat or something?”

“You watch too much television.”

“Ha. Did you happen to check if he’s fired a gun recently.”

“I did. No residue on his hands, or on the gloves.”

“Okay.”

“There’s something else you’ll want to know about Vindico.”

“Yes?”

“You know how I told you Smithton didn’t have the right blood type to be the father of the suicide girl’s baby? Well, Vindico did.”

56

Sunday, Eight Days Lost

Amber was flustered as she ran up the ramp into the police station. Ten minutes late, all because she couldn’t get her stupid car to start. And Peter couldn’t leave for the airstrip till she relieved him. The whole rescue mission on hold.

“I’m sorry…” she began, but he walked straight past her, urgent, focused.

“Tell me about it later,” he said as the door swung shut behind him. His voice was brisk, but not angry. He would assume there was a good reason she’d let him down on this most important of days, and somehow that just made it worse.

She watched his taillights disappear into the pre-dawn darkness, feeling close to tears, and then pulled herself together and went to check on the prisoner.

“Amber, I’ve got to call Nyree. There’s something wrong with Lily. I can just feel it. She was so sick yesterday. Please, you’ve got to let me call Nyree.”

It was fair enough. Prisoners were allowed to make phone calls. She’d have offered him her cell phone, but the battery was flat. Another stupidity. She’d let him use the office phone. It was only Tom after all.

It happened so quickly she was going to have trouble describing it later. He was so much bigger than her, she didn’t stand a chance. But the result was that within two minutes she heard Tom driving off in her car, running traitorously smooth now, while she rattled uselessly at the door of the cell. From the inside.

All she had for company was a dead mobile phone and the memory of Tom’s words: “I’m sorry Amber. I have to do this.”

Maybe Tom really was just planning on going home to check on his family. Maybe, but she doubted it. There were ways to make contact with them without forcing an escape and putting himself in even more trouble with the law. No, he must be planning something else. She had to warn Peter. She ran to the ventilation strip in the window and began shouting for the neighbors, with every particle of air in her lungs.