No one said anything after the DI stalked out. Alexa heard Sergeant Atkins’s nasal breathing, a pull and then a wheezy release. Maybe the nose ring was obstructing her airflow.
“Who knew about the weapons?” Bruce asked.
Constable Gavin patted his cowlick. “The team. The OCU lads. Maybe Lynn Lockhart? Maybe the Cobbs? We had a graveyard shift officer out there patrolling.”
“Lot of good it did,” Sergeant Atkins said.
Alexa looked to Constable Cooper to see her reaction. She was impassive as a carving.
Bruce stood. “Let’s create a timeline of the case while DI Steele sorts things out. It will help Constable Cooper and me get the big picture.” He wrote HQ last seen by wife on the board and waited.
“First of April, sir,” Sergeant Atkins said.
“When did he arrive in New Zealand?”
“I’ve been working on that, see?” Constable Gavin said. “He wasn’t on any passenger manifests in Auckland? Don’t know when or how he arrived.”
Bruce’s eyes darkened. “A billionaire probably has a private jet. Have you checked the smaller airports?”
“Good idea, sir.”
DI Steele rushed in. “The weapons are gone.” She turned to Alexa. “Get your kit. You’ll ride with me to Black Reef.”
They left the station quickly and pulled out onto Eastbourne Street West. DI Steele gunned the Volvo through a yellow light. “I’m fucking toast.”
Alexa gripped the seat, glad the Sunday morning traffic was sparse. She tried to think who would steal the weapons, but came up blank.
“I should have removed them last night instead of waiting for the OCU to get their asses out there.”
Alexa silently agreed.
The DI leaned forward in the driver’s seat, her sharp chin inches from the wheel, as if that would get them to their destination quicker. “It’s my first big case. Eyes are on me, waiting for me to fuck up. Now this. Guns stolen under the nose of Hastings’s new female detective inspector. You know how it is, eh?” She looked Alexa’s way. “A woman in a male-dominated field?”
Alexa’s forensics program at NC State had comprised seventy percent women, but DI Steele didn’t give her a chance to respond.
“All this, plus what’s going on with Joe.” She braked for a turning car. “I got home past eleven last night. Kersten was asleep. Went to check on the boys. They bunk together. Joe was gone.” She exited a roundabout. “He came home at three a.m. We had a row. His hand was bloody. Wouldn’t say what happened or let me look.”
Alexa had no idea what she would do in the DI’s place.
“I can’t handle him. Do you have children? How do you do it?”
“No kids,” Alexa said. “I have two nephews. Benny and Noah.”
DI Steele banked a curve, thrusting Alexa into the passenger door. “That’s me, six months ago. Two nephews, no kids of my own, not that Kersten and I aren’t trying. Sperm donation, two failed intrauterine inseminations. You know.”
Alexa did not know.
“We’ve stopped all that now, since the boys. If it weren’t for Kersten, I’d have turned in my badge.”
Alexa had never juggled family life with work. “What happened to their mother?”
DI Steele didn’t answer until they were on the outskirts of Hastings. “My kid sister, Nora?” Her hands tightened on the wheel. She pressed the gas pedal and overtook a farm truck. “Died of an overdose a year ago. Chronic pain from a car accident got her started on opioids and then her partner, Frank, turned her on to the other stuff. Heroin cut with Apache. King Ivory. Murder 8. ”
Alexa knew those were street names for fentanyl. “I’m sorry.”
“Frank did a runner. It’s devo, sure, especially for the boys. Joe is angry, and Adam, well, he wants to please everyone to make up for Joe’s behavior. He’s always tidying their room or doing the wash up. He’s deathly afraid we’ll leave him too.”
The story sat in Alexa’s throat, large and raw. She couldn’t swallow.
“Last I checked, Frank is in jail. Joe expects he’ll be back any day, wants him back. That’s normal, I know, but Frank supplied Nora. Sold everything they had for drugs. Neglected the boys. As far as I’m concerned, he killed Nora. Kersten and I quake at the thought of him getting out and turning up. It’s a mess.”
Alexa shifted in the seat. She’d been judging the DI without knowing what she was going through. They passed a sheep pasture and then turned onto the long winding drive to Black Reef.
There were two cars and a police cruiser where they parked. The driver’s door of the cruiser opened and a uniformed man got out.
DI Steele muttered under her breath as she marched toward him. “Constable Karu. Tell me about your night.”
Alexa wrestled the crime kit onto her shoulder and followed.
Constable Karu pulled a notebook out of his pocket. “My shift started at ten p.m., eh? At twenty-two forty, I heard voices on the porch of the cottage.” He pointed as if they might not know where the cottage was. “Ms. Lockhart was speaking to a man on the porch.” He hitched his pants up and kept reading. “At twenty-two forty-five, the man got into a silver Range Rover and drove off.”
“Must have been Mr. Gupta,” DI Steele said to Alexa. “He stayed long enough to have more than one drink.”
“I spoke to the lady in the cottage, let her know I was on the grounds.” He was young, early twenties, and maybe Pacific Islander or Māori. “Didn’t want her to think she was all alone, like.” He stood straighter. “She was grateful. Made me a cuppa.”
“Did you enter the cottage for a tea party?”
“No, Senior. I wouldn’t have done that.”
“What next?” DI Steele asked.
“Did my rounds.”
“Which were?”
“A big circle. Up by the bunker, around the shed and that metal tree, down the far side, along the back of the big house and the cottage along the sea, to here again, and so forth. Nothing but bush sounds. Crashing of the waves. Birds screeching.” He rubbed his eyes. “A couple times dogs barked. Never a sound of a motor after that man left.”
“Did you fall asleep?”
“No, on my honor, Senior.” He looked past them, to the woods. “They must have tramped through bush, on foot like.”
“And tiptoed back with all the weapons? Can’t see how that happened. When did you discover the break-in?”
He looked sheepish. “I didn’t. It was the Organized Crime Unit fellas. They got here an hour ago. They discovered it.”
“Go home, Constable.”
Give him a tail to tuck between his legs, Alexa thought, as the constable got in his cruiser and drove away.
Alexa and DI Steele suited up quickly and silently, ducked under the caution tape, and clanked down the stairs of the main entrance. The outer and inner doors were open. The foul odor lingered.
A bald man in a mask and booties stood guard by the vault room. He looked up from a sheet of paper he was holding as DI Steele squared her shoulders and marched toward him. “OCU Festinger, what do you have?” she asked.
A gold police crest was on the breast of his polo. “According to your inventory here, all that’s left is a Taser, one ax, and a canister of capsicum spray.”
Another man stuck his head out the vault door. A scraggly beard draped below his mask. “Your dead bloke had an AK-47 in his bolt-hole, and you left it unsecured? After Christchurch? What kind of fucktard policing is that?”
He was referring to the terrorist massacre at the mosques that happened a few years before Alexa arrived in New Zealand.
“I had an officer on the grounds overnight.” DI Steele lifted her pointy chin. “I called OCU as soon as I found the stash. Where were you?”
“We were engaged,” the other guy, OCU Festinger, said. “Hundreds of gang members are gathering in the area for the tangi of a senior member.”
Steele’s eyes widened. “We’ve got a dead billionaire and now a gang funeral? The force is going to be stretched to the limit.”
OCU Festinger consulted his paper. “I just talked with a clerk at the California Registry of Firearms Transactions. The deceased had two registered guns: a Glock G19 and a Ket-Tec Sub-2000 semiautomatic rifle. The Glock is listed on this inventory, but not the Ket-Tec.”
“Did he have permission to bring the Glock into New Zealand?” Alexa blurted.
“Who are you?”
“I’m Alexa Glock, the…”
“Glock?” Scraggly Beard said.
“Like the gun. I’m the forensic investigator.”
Scraggly Beard shook his head. “A Glock asking about a Glock.”
“I need to process the room,” she said.
His hands flew up. “I stood right here, didn’t touch a thing.” He stepped closer to an empty shelf. “Looky here.”
Alexa leaned in. Three dime-sized blotches—dark brown at the periphery and crimson in the middle—jump-started her heart. She backed up and searched the floor for more droplets. It looked clean. She scanned the hallway. No blood trail.
“What was there?” Scraggly Beard asked.
Alexa retrieved her camera and scrolled for the right picture. She held the camera so the Organized Crime Unit guys could see the shelf of knives.
“Quite the collection,” OCU Festinger said. “The stiletto is a bad boy, designed to reduce friction. Cuts clean.”
DI Steele snorted. “Idiot thief probably cut himself.”
Alexa took a swab from one droplet as they watched.
“To answer your question, Quinn didn’t have a visitor’s firearm license or an import permit,” OCU Festinger said. “As for all these other weapons,” he shook the paper, “he probably had a local source. We know who that is.”
The other guy barked like a dog.
Alexa eyed Scraggly Beard warily.
He noticed her reaction. “The Curs. That’s their signal. They bark.”
The hair on the back of her neck stood. Alexa recalled hearing a dog bark while staying at the cottage.
Had it been canine or human?
“You think there’s a connection between Quinn and the Curs?” DI Steele asked.
“How else would he have furnished this room?” OCU Festinger asked.
The OCU duo and DI Steele left Alexa to process the scene. She readied her camera and stood in the threshold of the vault. She didn’t look for what was missing; that had already been done. Instead she zoomed in on what was left behind: the droplets, possible fingerprints, dirt, a hair or fiber or wrapper. Her eyes landed on a small pink object—maybe a jelly bean?—left on the shelf. She crossed the vault and leaned in.
It wasn’t a jelly bean.