Unfinished Business...
I WOULD’VE bet good money that the last place on Earth you’d ever find me again was Evans’s office. But there I was the next morning, in his waiting room and champing at the bit. McDowell was with me, plus the ubiquitous Heckle, whose only business being there was keeping an eye on me. Sandra was there, too, showing no signs of her recent privations. She looked like she’d stepped off the cover of Vogue.
It was all right for her; she hadn’t spent the entire night in a cell trying to snatch a few winks in between grillings by McDowell. No, she’d exercised her right to speak to a lawyer, and the entire Channel Nine legal team descended on the station en masse. She was out of there inside ten minutes.
Me? I was held on suspicion of misappropriating evidence, or some equally specious charge. Which was OK by me because I had a deal to make with McDowell.
I have to admit that my tape of Smith incriminating himself was reluctant to leave daddy’s hand. It was the only proof that Smith had killed Connie, and I felt naked without it. But I had to start trusting someone sooner or later, and the queue was just one person long. I coughed both tapes up and put my fate in McDowell’s integrity.
We spoke in shifts, just he and I. We’d question each other closely, and then he would dash off to confirm what I’d said. When he got back, we’d continue. It was daylight when we finished, and then I exercised my right to a phone call. I called Sandra.
Which was why, three hours later, Commissioner Evans agreed to meet with the anchorwoman of “A Current Affair”. He’d been initially reluctant, claiming that “investigations were proceeding” and that “to make a statement now would be premature and possibly prejudicial” - the usual police brush-off. That didn’t wash with Sandra. She told him she didn’t want a TV interview, she wanted an explanation of how she and her daughter had become involved in what looked like some sort of police conspiracy, and his story had better be pretty good or she damn well would go public. It was an offer he couldn’t refuse. He even agreed to another of Sandra’s conditions – that I be present.
We’d been told to cool our heels outside his office, and we soon learned why. There was a blazing argument going on inside. We couldn’t make out what was being said, but I could make out Evans and one other going at it hammer and tongs. After a few minutes, a truce must have been called because the raging stopped.
I drew my chair closer to Sandra. I’m no Einstein but I could work out that my time was running short. I took her hand and told her I loved her. I didn’t give a damn who overheard. I just had to say it. I also had to ask, “How is the moppet?”
“She’s just fine.” Sandra said. “Wants to know when you’re coming to visit again.”
So did I. If ever. I felt my heart shrivel with sadness. With my usual courage, I ran from the pain. “How are you going with the lawyer?”
“I’m meeting him tonight, just to sign everything. Although, if all this turns out OK, I’ll have to change it again.” She smiled her wonderful smile. “Have you been giving Angela’s offer some thought?”
My heartache burned. All I could do was pretend. “Some.”
“And..?”
“It’s up to her mother.”
Before she could respond, Neilsen walked out of the office. For a bloke who’d been having a slanging match with his commander, he was remarkably composed, walking ramrod straight, his expression in neutral. He nodded at McDowell and accorded him a gruff “Gordon”. Then, and I admit I was surprised, he did the same to me. He even smiled at Sandra.
What the hell happened in there?
Evans appeared and invited us inside. His poisonous glare showed I was about as welcome as a nudist at a nuns’ picnic, but there was nothing he could do about it. He sat us in chairs fronting his desk, then resumed his own. He interlaced his fingers, rested his chin on them and fixed his milky blues on Sandra.
“I invited you here on two conditions. First, this is not a media interview. Second, what you’re told here, in confidence, is simply because you’ve become....ah, personally involved. Is that a fair summation?”
If he thought the size of his desk and a chair taller than anyone else’s gave him some tactical advantage, he was immediately disabused. Sandra put her handbag on the corner of the desk and glared.
“Personally involved! Is that what you call being kidnapped by rogue police?”
Evans realised his opening shot had fallen way short. He became conciliatory. “On behalf of the police force, I apologise to you, Ms Pastor.” He sat back and effected a frown. “You are quite right. There is a disaffected element within the force, a group of malcontents who believe they know better than anyone else how to run it. But they would rather use blackmail than reason to advance their cause. That’s why they wanted the videotape.”
“Obviously.” Sandra was caustic. “But who are they? How many of them are there?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “Smith was almost certainly the ringleader, but he’s dead and the two men who abducted you aren’t saying anything, apart from claiming they were just following orders. Unless they talk...” He shrugged.
These half-truths Sandra already knew. I’d passed them on to her when I called, relaying what McDowell had imparted to me throughout the night. Neilsen had coolly denied complicity in anything, putting the total blame on Smith and his “gang of zealots”. With Smith dead and his two lieutenants not talking, he knew nobody else was likely to talk – we police have a refined instinct for self-preservation. When McDowell had asked him to account for my ‘unusual’ meeting with him, he dismissed it as “the fevered imaginings of someone desperate to hang on to his job”. The smug bastard had practically challenged McDowell to prove my story, knowing he couldn’t.
“Are you telling me that’s it?” Sandra demanded. “That’s as far as your investigation goes?”
Evans looked pained. “We are combing Smith’s files, decrypting his computer, trying to backtrack his movements - that sort of thing. But unless he’s been careless...” He repeated his shrug. “Certainly if we find anything, you...”
“I’ll be the first to know,” Sandra finished, her skepticism undisguised. “Now I’ll have my videotape back, please.”
It was worth a try. Evans merely smiled. “Yours? A tape found by police while investigating a murder? I don’t think so. In any...”
“Then who has it?”
Good question. The last I’d seen it, I’d handed it to McDowell, who said he was obliged to give it to Evans.
“As I was about to say,” Evans continued, “it doesn’t exist any more.”
I believed him. The tape was no longer a weapon for him; it was an embarrassment. It was probably what he and Neilsen had been having words over.
But McDowell was suddenly on his feet. “I hope you’re joking, sir. That tape is evidence.”
Evans scowled. Plainly he was not used to McDowell being anything other than a yes-man.
“I’m aware of that, McDowell, but inasmuch as Smith is dead, I hardly think we’ll be mounting a prosecution, do you?”
That was enough biting my tongue for me.
“We’ll be mounting a prosecution, alright,” I snapped. “Of whoever killed Aston.”
Evans glared, then turned to Sandra. “Is this why you wanted him here? To make ludicrous threats?”
I leaned forward. “I know Smith killed Connie. I also know he didn’t kill Jodie Aston.”
The glare remained, but I fancy it was leavened by a touch of alarm. He folded his arms defiantly. “I’m listening.”
I told him what I’d confided to McDowell; that I knew McDowell had paid Aston a visit on the night she was killed. He threw an alarmed glance at his staff officer but McDowell had resumed his seat, and his impassivity.
“He didn’t kill her,” I went on. “He was back here an hour before she died. What’s interesting is what he was doing there. He tells me he was trying to persuade her to cough up the tape. On your orders.”
Evans’s mouth was a rigid straight line. I don’t know what he was thinking but it wasn’t tender thoughts of me. Then, as if to unburden himself, he nodded. “And do you want to know why? It was because Jodie was working for me. Undercover. To expose the renegade group.” He waved a dismissive hand, forestalling my question. “I needed names, facts. I put Aston out as bait. Put her in a sensitive unit and waited. I was betting they’d recruit her. After what I’d allegedly done to her father, they’d see her as a godsend.”
“And they bit, didn’t they?”
“With indecent haste.”
“And?”
“She was assigned to Onslow. But apparently she couldn’t resist trying to bring him down and make a few dollars at the same time. Onslow reported it to me.”
“Why?” I jumped in. “Why would Onslow admit to being in the pay of the Romanos? That would be cutting his own throat.”
Evans was clearly caught short.
“Unless,” I went on, “he knew you would be...ah, sympathetic, shall we say, if the price was right. What did he offer you if you got the tape back? Another term of office?”
Evans flushed. His arms unfolded and his hands became fists. If he was feigning outrage, he was doing a pretty fair job of it.
I kept boring in. “Were you disappointed with McDowell’s failure to talk Aston around? In your position, I would’ve been. I mean, missing out on another five years in this cushy job. So what did you do about it?” I let him stew for about five seconds. It gave him time to survey the four pairs of accusing eyes. Then I went for the throat. “Who did you go to see when you left this office about half an hour before Jodie Aston was killed?”
“You’re bluffing,” he snapped, but I could see the alarm turning to panic.
I shook my head. “Those Protective Service Officers down in the basement. Very conscientious. Record every vehicle in and out. Even yours.”
Evans chose not to reply. Not immediately. He simply stared poison at me. But he was thinking, and I reckoned I knew what. He was thinking he’d been an idiot to let me into his office and what was he doing answering questions from someone who had absolutely no jurisdiction and it would be in his best interests if he shut up. Except for one last statement.
“I didn’t kill her.”
“Onslow then? I know you rang him after McDowell reported to you.”
Evans gave himself another few seconds of reflection. He stood, and some of his old condescension stood with him. “That’s for people other than you lot to determine. All I’ll say is, if that’s all the so-called evidence you have, you have very little. Now, if you don’t mind...” And he indicated the door.
“We have this interview,” Sandra piped up, “and the lies you’ve told us. I think we have rather a lot.”
Evans grinned. “What a pity you couldn’t record it.”
Sandra grinned back. She tapped her handbag, still sitting on the desk.
Evans’s smugness evaporated. He made a snatch at the bag but Sandra whipped it away.
“You bitch!” Evans fumed. Then he recovered himself. “Illegally obtained evidence. Never be admitted into a court.”
“That’s not where I intend to use it,” she replied. “We’ll see what the public, especially the people who elected Onslow, think about it.”
“If they get to see it.”
I knew what that challenge meant. He’d try for a stop writ, and given the somewhat underhand means we’d used, would probably succeed. But I wasn’t worried. I got up and wandered around to his window. Down below, parked on the far side of the street, was a Channel Nine communications van. It was picking up the signals from Sandra’s minicam and re-transmitting them to the studio where, I imagined, lips were already being licked.
“You probably can stop us using the tape, but I don’t give a stuff,” I told him. “And I don’t give a stuff whether it was you or Onslow who killed Jodie Aston. You were both in it up to your necks, and you’re not going to get away with it.” I returned my gaze to the window. “Right, Des?”
Evans couldn’t resist taking a look. He followed my gaze and saw Des Aston emerge from the Nine vehicle and stare up at him. Even from sixty metres, there was no mistaking Aston’s aggressive stance and his vindictive, nay murderous, expression.
Evans went white. “How…what is he doing there?”
“I put him there. I promised if I ever got a lead on whoever killed his daughter, I’d let him know.”
As the implication sank in, Sandra joined us for a look. “Look at him,” she told Evans. “I’m glad it’s you and not me.”
I’d expected Evans to become a quivering wreck as soon as he realised he was for the high jump, but he didn’t. The bastard snarled, adding fury to his vitriol.
“You two think you’re so fucking smart, don’t you?” And he turned back to his desk.
If I’d been less smug and more alert, I might have twigged what he was up to. By the time I did, it was too late. He opened a drawer and whipped out a police-issue revolver.
I’d have thought he would go for me first, but no, it was Sandra he swung the weapon on to.
I didn’t think about what I did next. There was no debating the wisdom of it, no calculating the odds, no wondering if it was ordained. I just did it. I leapt in front of Sandra., whose eyes were widening in alarm. Strangely, I felt no alarm myself, just an ineffable sadness at what I was about to lose.
Two gunshots roared.
The bullet that ploughed into me went deep, and my heart convulsed. I staggered back against Sandra, who screamed my name.
Analytical to the end, I wondered where the second shot had gone. Then I became aware of Evans staring at me in shock and puzzlement. He still held the gun but seemed to have lost the desire to use it. The small hole in his right temple and the larger one in his left had much to do with it.
“Oh shit!” he said, then collapsed. Having some experience in these matters, I reckon he was dead before he hit the proverbial.
Then Sandra was trying to support my crumpling frame while McDowell came rushing around the desk to help. Both of them paid no heed to poor Heckle, who at last had got the chance to use his weapon and who, like me and Elliott, would have to live with the consequences.
Well, not me, I reckoned.