Stone Cold (21 page)

‘It is too late for that.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Your husband has betrayed you.’

Sheila froze in her seat and she momentarily stopped breathing as an image of Dale flashed into the field of her awareness once more.

‘What do you mean?’

‘We told him that you would die if he went to the police,’
the voice growled.
‘He is working with the police now.’

Bastard
. Sheila knew enough to be sure that Dale was, to all intents and purposes, one of the most selfish, self–serving, chauvinistic men she had ever met. If it wasn’t about Dale then it wasn’t important at all. Of course, he had only revealed this less palatable side to his personality
after
they had married. Prior to that fateful day he had been the man she had long dreamed of: professional career man, devoted fiancé, attentive lover.

Within a year of their marriage she had developed the first suspicions that he had been cheating on her. The absences, the feminine scents wafting from him in their house that did not match any perfume she wore. Of course, Dale was a handsome man and spent his working life surrounded by young air hostesses who were hired based on their attractiveness. It wasn’t hard to put two and two together and figure out that he was having an affair.

Sheila steeled herself.

‘I don’t doubt it,’ she spat angrily.

There was a moment’s pause as Sheila detected a change in the atmosphere, a tension.

‘What do you mean?’

The voice, still deep and growling, was nonetheless robbed of some of its menace by the tiny undercurrent of surprise that rippled through it. Sheila managed to remember not to smile for although she could not see, she knew that she could be seen.

‘The bastard’s having an affair,’ Sheila snapped. ‘I don’t doubt that he’s gone to the police.’

Another long silence before the voice spoke again.
‘How long have you known about this?’

Sheila blinked in surprise. ‘What the hell does that matter?’

There was a brief movement and then the voice roared in her ear with a volume and intensity that sent a lance of fear bolting up and down her body.

‘Answer the fucking question!’

‘I don’t know,’ Sheila cried out in response. ‘Maybe a few months? I suspected something but there was never any real evidence.’

‘Why have you not confronted him about the affair?’

Sheila’s heart raced and her chest heaved as she sucked in air.

‘I didn’t want to rock the boat,’ she replied, and realised instantly how pathetic the excuse sounded. How pathetic
she
sounded. ‘We have a good life. I didn’t want it to end.’

The voice returned to its original volume and position.

‘You know the woman in question?’

Sheila shook her head. ‘No.’

There was a long silence and then Sheila heard her abductor stand.

‘Don’t leave.’ No reply came back to her. ‘Don’t leave me alone here again, I’ll give you anything!’

The voice growled at her from directly in front of her face as her bonds were suddenly yanked tight again under her jaw.

‘If he does not come up with the money, then you’ll die here.’

Sheila choked on her fear as sobs burst from within her chest, but she snarled her response.

‘He’s not going to come up with any money, you asshole!’ she shouted. ‘He’s gone to the police because he hopes that you’ll kill me. He wants my money, nothing more! That’s all he’s ever wanted! It’s all men ever want from…’

The gag was pulled tight again, cutting her words off into a stream of strangled cries that degenerated into sobs.

The voice spoke one last time into her ear, leaning close to her.

‘Then you’re better off dead, because your time is up.’

As her captor leaned over her, Sheila smelled a carnival of odours that flashed images through her mind. Long ago she had read an article about human pheromones, of how men and women could subliminally detect all manner of physiological and even psychological dispositions just from the natural body odour of other people.

Sheila McKenzie had a sudden, vivid flare of realisation as she smelled the scent of her captor on their shirt, and in an instant she realised not just their sex but recognised the unique scent of
them
.

Then the ear plugs were shoved back into place. Sheila heard the shutters doors open and close again and the silence of her world returned to consume her.

But this time, she feared it no longer. Sheila McKenzie knew exactly who her abductor was, and her only thought now was a burning desire for vengeance.

She relaxed her burning right wrist. She had clenched her fist tightly and angled it slightly upwards when the bonds were fastened in order to create a small gap between her wrist and the arm of the recliner. Now, although her bonds had been yanked supremely tight, she could just about move her right hand.

Slowly, carefully, she began trying to work it free.

***

28

Kathryn hurried into the precinct station, one eye always on her watch.

The detectives were consumed by a mad final rush to locate Sheila McKenzie, making calls, scouring data, scratching heads. The deadline was already a couple of hours gone and nobody was making any headway.

‘You got anything on Griffin?’ Olsen asked as she rushed by.

‘He’s not in today, right?’

‘Called in sick. You been to his home?’

Kathryn nodded. ‘He’s not there, nor is his wife. I’d like to think that they’ve made up but…’

‘Yeah,’ Olsen replied. ‘You got any idea where he’s headed?’

Kathryn glanced at Maietta, who was sitting at her desk with a phone pressed to her ear, not looking at them but listening surreptitiously.

‘I think so,’ Kathryn replied. ‘Captain, I need to borrow Detective Maietta.’

‘For what?’

‘Finding Griffin,’ she replied, ‘before, y’know.’

‘It’s too late?’

Kathryn did not reply, letting Olsen’s words hang in the air between them.

‘I’ve got a missed deadline and a missing woman who with every passing hour is more likely to turn up dead, and you want me to send one of my detectives to baby–sit Griffin?’

‘The deadline has passed,’ Kathryn said, ‘and your detectives are up to their necks chasing their tails. Griffin is your best bet, and right now he’s no good to anybody, much less himself. You want me to fix him, you’re going to have to give me some help. If I can get Griffin on his feet, maybe he can solve this abduction for once and for all.’

Olsen stared at Kathryn for a long moment, and then at Maietta, who was off the phone and watching the captain expectantly.

‘How long?’ Olsen snapped.

‘Couple of hours, no more,’ Kathryn said.

Olsen considered the request for a moment longer, and then nodded.

It became a long morning, stretching through lunch and into the mid–afternoon before Kathryn had done what she needed to do. A long, straining, emotional conversation with two people whom she had never before met. Asking them to do something that she had no right to expect them to do, that few people would have the strength and the integrity to do in an age where vengeance and mistrust were the currency of mankind, the nobility of ages past now long lost to society.

The track, when Kathryn found it at the second attempt, turned off the main road and wound its way down toward a river. A handful of old farm buildings lay set back into the woods, Kathryn catching glimpses of rusting machinery entombed in coils of foliage and vines.

The sun was already sinking low behind distant hills, dark grey clouds scudding across a sky splattered with streamers and ribbons of molten metal.

Kathryn drove down to where the track opened out into what had once been a farmstead, maybe for cattle and other grazing animals as there were no crop fields anywhere nearby. It hadn’t been used for decades but there was a car parked off to one side that Kathryn recognised instantly as she pulled in alongside it and killed the engine.

The air was cold as she got out of her car, the wind blustering over the nearby water, but it was otherwise silent this far out of town. The kind of place nobody ever visited unless they had bad business on their mind.

Kathryn walked down toward the farmstead, the wind rumbling through rotting timbers nearby and whispering through lonely trees as she walked up to the front door and peered into the gloomy darkness within.

She was reluctant to enter, as though this place was some kind of shrine to suffering, a place of sanctuary for the doomed where the living were not welcome. Kathryn took a breath and a pace into the interior, smelled the odours of dust and decay and saw the carcass of a dead rat lying on its back in a room to her left, teeth bared in rigor mortis.

She stepped carefully as she moved through the building, the floorboards groaning beneath her. Kathryn stopped, looking at the wall beside her where a handful of bullet holes peppered the cheap plasterboard, old scrawlings from police markers identifying rounds fired by police and by their quarry in that last, terrible shoot out.

She heard movement behind her and tensed, turned to see a strip of old police–scene tape twisting in the cold breeze from a doorway back up the hall.

‘You shouldn’t be here.’

The voice came from nowhere and she almost jumped out of her skin as she searched the gloomy shadows. Her heart leaped and then fluttered as her brain resolved the voice into that of Griffin’s, coming from the darkness somewhere ahead.

Kathryn eased her way forward, through the rest of the hall and out into what must once have been a kitchen–diner that overlooked the lake and the brilliant sunset searing the horizon.

Griffin was sitting on a dilapidated old chair in the middle of the kitchen, staring out of the windows toward the west. The glow of the setting sun illuminated his face, scoured it of shadows as though he were laying his guilt out for all to see. In his hand, in a small plastic bag, he held a brass bullet casing that he gently rolled over and over in his fingers.

Kathryn stood silent and still as the cold winter breeze whispered through the lonely old house and spoke of how life had been ripped so cruelly from one little girl and one decent man in the time it had taken to blink.

‘You followed me,’ Griffin said, not looking at her.

‘Jane told me.’

Griffin’s head turned almost imperceptibly toward her. ‘Jane?’

‘She’s worried about you,’ Kathryn said. ‘Everyone is. You keep disappearing and they thought that you might be…’

Griffin’s eye met hers now. ‘What, drinking?’

Kathryn swallowed. ‘Maybe. She figured either you were drinking yourself to death or you were coming up here.’ Kathryn smiled briefly. ‘She tried here first.’

Griffin went back to staring through the gaping windows into the sunset. Kathryn edged her way toward him, folding her arms across her chest to keep warm as the cold air seeped beneath her clothes.

‘What are you thinking?’ she asked.

‘You’re the psychologist,’ Griffin said.

Kathryn looked around at the farmstead and then at the bullet casing Griffin held in his hands. ‘I think that you’re trying to go back to that day, trying to figure out where it all went wrong. Not just the shooting. You’re thinking about everything: your wife, your life, Maietta, the job, trying to understand when and why you stopped being you.’

Griffin looked down at the bullet casing. ‘No,’ he replied. ‘I know when and why I stopped being me.’ He held the casing up to her. ‘This is the one,’ he said. ‘This is what they dug out of what was left of Amy Wheeler’s skull.’

Kathryn tried not to look at the casing, instead keeping her gaze fixed on Griffin. ‘You keep it. Why?’

Griffin shrugged. ‘I don’t know why. I just need it.’

‘No, you don’t,’ Kathryn said. ‘You need to let it go.’

‘Just like that, huh?’ Griffin said.

‘Every journey begins with a single step,’ Kathryn replied. ‘We all have things that we wish we could change but no matter how bad those things are we can never, ever go back. We can only ever go forward, and if we don’t the rest of the world leaves us behind.’

‘Or we leave the world behind,’ Griffin murmured.

Kathryn swallowed again, the primal fear of a nearness of death like something alive in the empty farmstead. She could not see a gun anywhere, but Griffin would likely have brought it with him, concealed in his shoulder holster perhaps.

‘That doesn’t achieve anything,’ she said finally. ‘All you’d leave behind is the same grief you carry now, for others to carry for you.’

‘That’s good,’ Griffin admitted, pointing at her as his lips twisted in a tight smile. ‘I kind of get why they hired you now. You’ve got a way with words, haven’t you? All that quiet exterior, the soft voice and all, it’s just a feint, right? Inside, you really are like stone.’

‘I wish that were true,’ Kathryn said. ‘But it’s not. It’s all bluster to keep you from facing what you already know is true.’

‘Yeah?’ Griffin asked. ‘And what’s that?’

‘That you can’t leave this place because you feel responsible for that girl’s death, and you can’t resolve in your mind how to move on.’

Griffin stared at her, half of his face now cast into deep shadow wherein resided the unspeakable pain that must seethe through his soul. He watched her for a long moment.

‘Maybe I’m tough enough to do that,’ he snapped. ‘I killed her, Kathryn. I
shot
her. I
pulled
the
trigger
of
my
gun, with
my
hand and fired
my
bullet that killed her! There are no words counsellor, not in this world or the next that will ever change that, because just like you said we can never ever go back.’

‘I also said we can go forward,’ Kathryn said.

‘You can,’ Griffin replied softly. ‘I can’t.’

‘I know,’ she replied. ‘And I can’t help you, Scott.’

Griffin frowned, confused. ‘Then why the hell are you here?’