Pip stared at the screen of images before her and tried to work out what she was seeing.
In a series of photographs that looked as though they’d been taken in quick succession under surveillance, she saw Lenny Knight on a private yacht, dining with another man. The two seemed to be relaxed in each other’s company as they drank and ate and appeared to be in deep conversation.
Pip leaned closer to the computer and felt her heart rate quicken as she recognised the second man. Karl Butterworth. The politician, lawyer and former minister for police and emergency services who had recently been promoted to attorney-general.
As she pondered the possibilities of what these photos might suggest, she opened the first of several document files.
It was a list of names. None of them had appeared in any previous connection with Lenny Knight in her research or anything the police had followed up on. Many of the names weren’t familiar, but one practically leapt from the page: Karl Butterworth.
As she opened the rest of the document files, she discovered a detailed list of dates and meeting times along with a comprehensive report on favours Lenny Knight had requested of Karl Butterworth. The document looked to Pip like something created as protection for Knight should he need to call in more favours later. Had Knight been blackmailing the new attorney-general with this list? The list now on a hard drive in Pip’s possession?
Pip collapsed back against the headboard an hour later, stunned. It made more sense now why someone might be searching for her hard drive. Maybe Knight hadn’t been behind the break-ins. What if it were someone with even more to lose … someone like Karl Butterworth?
If he knew Pip had the file, there wasn’t much he wouldn’t do to destroy it before she could use it. She had no idea how they found out about it—which alarmed her. The information on that hard drive wasn’t public knowledge. The only person besides Tony who’d known about it was The Warlock, and he wouldn’t tell anyone—his business, not to mention his life, depended on strict anonymity.
She clicked back to the photos on the screen and went through them again. How had information been leaked? She’d kept the hard drive with her at all times; she’d been alone at the house; she’d taken it with her the night Rosevale was ransacked.
She paused on one of the photos of the two politicians shaking hands in farewell. There was a man leaning against a car to the side of the photo. She enlarged it on the screen and her blood turned to ice in her veins. She grabbed her camera and enlarged the photo she’d taken earlier today and compared the two. It was the same man. The guy Chris had been talking to in the car.
She’d been alone at the house … except for the weekend Chris stayed. Chris had been in her house, and she had spent the night in his. He had access to the hard drive—he could even have copied it onto a similar one. He’d also met with a man who had connections to the two men in the photos, and she’d watched him hand over something that had looked suspiciously like a hard drive. She felt her whole body deflate like a tired balloon as the facts started to pile up despite everything inside her screaming that it wasn’t true.
Chris was part of this whole thing. Whatever this thing was.
After a brief hesitation, Pip slammed the laptop shut and stuffed it back into its bag, hurriedly gathering the hard drive, her phone and the camera and dropping them on the table in a pile as she got dressed.
She cast a swift glance around the room to make sure she hadn’t forgotten anything then dumped it all into the car outside her room and left. She had no idea where she was going—only that she had to make sure she was well away and ahead of anyone who might be looking for her.
None of this made any sense. Why would Chris be mixed up with criminals from a different state? How had he become involved? And how had he ended up investigating a fluke discovery of old bones in a dam that led straight to her?
Headlights passed her as she drove through the night. She couldn’t go back to Uncle Nev’s place; Chris would look for her there. She couldn’t go back to her apartment; he had his mate in the federal police watching it. She thought about heading to Melbourne—it was big enough to blend in, but it was also Chris’s old stomping ground and he’d no doubt have plenty of contacts he could call in favours from and have her found.
All she did know was that she couldn’t just sit there and wait to be found. She had to keep moving.
As morning broke, Pip was still undecided as to how to proceed. Sitting in the carpark of a supermarket, she sipped a takeaway coffee and nibbled on a toasted cheese sandwich. Who could she trust now?
Part of her wanted to give Chris a chance to explain, but that risked putting herself in danger if her gamble with her stupid heart instead of her head proved wrong.
She still had a key to his house. Maybe there was something that linked Chris to everything somewhere inside. It was a crazy idea—and dangerous if Chris was involved in all this as the evidence against him beginning to stack up suggested.
Corrupt police. Corrupt politicians. Corrupt businessmen. She was sick and tired of the lot of them. She wanted her life back, and that wasn’t going to happen if she continued to cower and run away whenever she got scared. The realisation settled inside her and began to unfold and expand until it filled her chest completely.
If she wanted things to change then she would need to be the one to do something.
Somehow she had to either clear Chris and find a logical explanation for everything or find the proof that linked him to Butterworth or Knight … or both.
Pip parked around the corner from Chris’s house and made her way on foot with a healthy dose of caution and a touch of terror reminding her that these men Chris was involved with killed people who got in their way.
She checked that his car wasn’t in the driveway then moved quietly across to the front door. She unlocked it, stepped into the house and then closed and locked the door behind her softly. Once again she was overcome by the quiet. Shaking off her rising anxiety, she headed to the bedroom.
She pushed aside the memories of their night together and how happy she’d been feeling before it all started to unravel. She had to keep her head in the game. She focused instead on the very good chance that Chris had been playing her this whole time. Fortified by righteous anger once more, Pip set to work.
She crossed to the bedside table where she found only loose change and a phone charger. Her pulse began to thrum as she kept an ear out for the slightest sound to suggest Chris had returned. She moved to the tallboy and opened its drawers, fighting a bout of guilt as she sifted through neatly folded clothing before heading to the walk-in wardrobe. His work suits, shirts and trousers hung above shoes on the floor, while in the next section, jeans and T-shirts were folded and stored in cubed shelves.
Pip surveyed the contents of the wardrobe, silently contemplating. Something had been bothering her ever since she’d spent the night here. She understood Chris was a bachelor, and he was a guy of simple tastes and needs, but for someone who’d not long moved in, there was a decided lack of personal belongings and no boxes laying around, yet to be unpacked. It felt like an Airbnb or a motel.
His wardrobe looked like someone had unpacked only the bare essentials. Where were his winter clothes? The things stored away off-season? The keepsakes? The photographs?
On the very top shelf, above where his clothes hung, she spotted three large plastic storage tubs. She looked about for something to stand on to lift them down, then headed out to the kitchen to grab a small stepladder from the pantry. She froze when she heard footsteps approaching the front door from outside and a key in the lock.
She hurried into the nearby front bedroom and closed the door, hoping to God that Chris had no reason to come in here. It had the same sparseness as the master bedroom. Nothing to indicate it was inhabited by a teenage girl.
She heard his key turn in the lock and then his boots tread with long, purposeful strides to the rear of the house—all the while her heart pounding painfully against her chest. What if he found her here? What would he do?
Her already frayed nerves almost snapped when she heard a knock at the front door. The footsteps sounded again, walking past the door she was standing behind. There was a hesitation before Chris opened the door, and when he spoke it was coldly brutal.
‘What the fuck are you doing at my house?’
‘There’s no need to be so defensive, detective.’ The other man’s voice sounded decidedly jovial in comparison. ‘I just thought I’d pay you a visit and see how you’re progressing.’
Pip double-checked her phone was still on silent and took a deep breath before easing the door open a fraction. The men were standing halfway between the foyer and the lounge room, but Pip couldn’t open the door any wider without risking being seen, so she put her phone to the crack and started to video the exchange.
‘I told you I’d get the hard drive—and I did.’
‘Yes, but that was only half the job, wasn’t it?’
‘I’ve still got to make an appearance at work.’
‘Not my problem. You promised us the woman. We don’t know for sure if she’s opened the encryption yet—or who she has working on it—and until we do, we have to assume she’s still very much a threat. Tell me at least you know where she is?’
A sudden light-headed sensation swept through her. They were talking about her—she was the threat.
‘I’ll find her,’ Chris said in a tone that chilled her to the bone. This was not the Chris she thought she knew. What an idiot she’d been, thinking she’d found something special.
‘You better hope you do—and fast,’ the other man said, suddenly stepping out from behind the wall he’d been partially hidden behind, and Pip’s eyes widened. It was the man Chris met in the car. ‘I don’t want to have to drop by and pay you another visit, detective.’
Chris’s face was a stony mask, devoid of any of the warmth he had shown her.
She eased the bedroom door shut and let out a slow breath. When the front door closed, the house was silent once more for a while before Pip heard a loud thump, like the sound of a fist against a wall. It was followed swiftly by a low curse, then footsteps walking back down the hallway. Pip felt her body tense, her muscles rigid as she waited, poised for flight if she had to, expecting at any moment for the bedroom door to burst open, but a few moments later, his heavy footsteps sounded outside in the hallway and she heard the front door open and close again firmly and a car start up outside and drive away.
Pip wasted no time exiting the room. She could feel a cold sweat of fear, clammy and nauseating, clinging to her as she lightly ran through the house and out the back door. She no longer cared about finding evidence on Chris—what she’d discovered overhearing that conversation had been enough. Whoever and whatever Chris was involved with was bad news. There was no question that Chris had been using her. For what she wasn’t entirely sure, but clearly it involved the hard drive, and any remaining hope that she could trust him had just been brutally stripped away.
Pip let herself out of the yard through the side gate and ran back to her car. The sky had turned dark and a band of ominous clouds hung low in the sky. She got inside the car just as fat drops began to hit her windscreen.
In any other situation she would have been overjoyed at the sight of rain, but her hands were still shaking and her stomach remained in a knot of fear. Pip started the car and drove, looking for a safe place to stop well away from Chris and his house. She spotted a playground with an amenities block and parked behind it, hidden from view of the street.
Taking her phone back out, she opened the video she’d taken. Who was this guy and why did he keep popping up? She skimmed across the image and zoomed in on Chris’s face, tracing the familiar contours. It was stupid to miss someone this much after such a short time—but she did. That was the fantasy, the soul-mate lie—the one she didn’t believe in … the one she’d been stupid enough to almost fall for.
Her gaze suddenly fell on something else on the screen and she enlarged the photo some more, focusing on the second man in the image. She fast-forwarded the brief video until she caught one where he was looking face-on for a brief moment and again made the image larger on the screen, this time catching her breath. Down one side of his neck was a tattoo … of a green snake. Her hands shook as they held the phone. She felt the tightness around her throat and saw those eyes watching as the life began to drain from her.
This was the man who’d attacked her in her apartment.
And Chris knew who he was.
Nausea settled heavily in her stomach. It didn’t seem possible, and yet, the proof was right there before her. Deep down she knew it was the same man.
He had tried to kill her once. And now he was back.
The rain didn’t stop. It hadn’t let up since those first few cold drops the day before, and now Pip shivered as she sat huddled in her car trying to figure out her next move. She’d found an old, half-gutted, abandoned house on a dirt road a few hours out of Midgiburra and had parked her car in the derelict shed beside it, grateful for a safe place to hide inside her car. Her gaze kept drifting to her phone, which she had turned off as soon as she’d recognised the man with the green tattoo, paranoid they would track her location and come and find her.
Lexi was the one person Pip knew she could trust, but she didn’t want to drag her friend into this mess and put her in danger—and, Pip suspected, the police might already have Lexi under surveillance.
Maybe Ted? Her boss might know someone—he’d been in the business a long time. He would know what to do, but again, did she want to involve him in all this? If she had to weigh up her choices between Lexi and Ted, unfortunately, Ted was the one she would be most willing to sacrifice. He was a veteran investigative journalist—he’d even done a stint as a war correspondent—and he’d be far more likely to know how to keep himself safe than Lexi would. Decision made, she picked up the phone and turned it on, holding her breath as she waited for it to start up.
Before Pip could even open her contacts, a stream of notifications flew up the screen, lighting up the interior of her car like a damn disco. Then one name caught her attention and she frowned, pausing over the audio message attached. ‘Pip, it’s Tony,’ the shaky, nasally voice informed her. ‘I need your help. We need to meet. It’s urgent. Don’t call me back. Just meet me at the usual place. I’m tossing this phone.’
Tony Vesco. He was alive. And he sounded scared. She checked the time of the call and realised it had been sent in the early hours of the morning. The fear in the man’s voice unsettled her even more.
The ‘usual place’ was a national park further up the coast, remote even from Sydney—from here it would be even further. Was it worth driving all that way to meet him? How long would he wait around? She couldn’t even call him to let him know since he’d got rid of the phone. Pip gnawed the edge of her fingernail as she contemplated what to do.