The Mak Collection (43 page)

His heart lifted at the sound of her voice.

I like that woman,
he thought.
She’s a good woman. Tony never deserved her.

As soon as the thoughts came into his head, he felt a stab of guilt, but not for Tony Morgan. His life partner, Jane, was gone now, but he couldn’t help but think of her watching over him. A partnership like that came along once in a lifetime, he believed, so was he doomed to be a lonely widower now that she was gone?

What would she want for him?

A second chance?

Makedde woke with her heart pounding in her chest and the sound of an alarm drilling loudly in her brain.

Okay, okay, I’m awake already! I’m awake!

She sat up straight in bed, grabbed her tin alarm clock off the bedside table and fumbled for the “Off” switch on the back. The small retro-style clock, which was round and stood on two legs, decided to protest by leaping out of her hands and falling onto the floor with a crash, increasing the dent on its right side while continuing to buzz with annoying insistence.

Oh, will you just shut up!

Irritably, she snatched the dented clock up off the floor and managed to flick the switch. Through bleary eyes, she read the silver hands. It was already 7.00 am. That depressing fact confirmed Makedde’s suspicions that somehow not all sixty-minute time frames were of the same duration. The hours between midnight and 4.00 am had crept past at an excruciatingly slow pace, whereas the last three hours could only have slipped by
in a heartbeat or two—three heartbeats at the most. She felt like she had blinked rather than slept.

Makedde distantly remembered her life as “a morning person”—day after day of waking up fresh, all sweetness and light after another pleasant and effortless sleep. Where had those days gone? Where had that Makedde Vanderwall disappeared to? Luckily, there was no one around to see her in the morning these days, as she’d be quite a sight. But then again, perhaps she’d be in a better mood if she had company?

To o long. It’s been too long without someone to hold me while I dream…

Such thoughts should really have been far from her mind. There was no one on the horizon, but still, her mind drifted back to the times in her life when she did not sleep alone. She thought of all the lovers in the world, and how she was not one of them.

Mak crushed the saccharine sentimentality as soon as it surfaced.

Foolishness.

Automatically, she reached beside her and pulled open the drawer of her bedside table. She took out a small arty-looking notebook she had bought at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art gift shop, and flipped it open to September 22. She slid the miniature pencil out of the side, and wrote:

Three hours sleep. 4.00 am until 7.00 am. I had a nightmare about Andy chasing
me through the woods. (Damn him for coming back into my dreams!) He was wielding a scalpel and I was wearing my father’s police uniform again. I couldn’t run fast enough. I woke up before he caught me. No devil this time.

She went to close the book and then opened it again and scribbled one last comment:

I feel like hell.

She flipped it closed and rubbed her eyes.

Damn. I really do feel like hell. How much longer can this go on?

In Makedde’s research on sleep disorders she had discovered that one common recommendation was to keep a diary of sleeping patterns, and so each morning for the past week, Mak had dutifully scribbled down details of her sleep, or lack of it. Looking at it now, it made depressing reading. As she sat in bed contemplating her nightmares, she wondered sceptically whether a psychiatrist could really shed any new light on her problems. How? What would Ann make of her diary? Mak was well aware that her nightmares were the abstract manifestations of the trauma she had experienced in her recent past. But so what? It seemed unlikely that there would be any benefit in having a qualified expert point out the obvious.

Mak swung her legs out of bed and hopped up. She shook herself from head to toe in a half-hearted attempt to shake off the bad night, then slipped on a pair of fuzzy bed slippers and wrapped a thick white robe around her naked body. Her preference for sleeping in her birthday suit had little to do with Marilyn Monroe’s famous comments, and everything to do with Makedde’s own tendency to be an overactive sleeper, twisting PJ’s, slips, boxer shorts, or whatever else she happened to be wearing around her while she slept. That is, when she did sleep. On more than one occasion she had woken up struggling for air with a T-shirt wrapped tightly around her neck and the bedsheets and duvet tossed on the floor on opposite sides of the room.

Robe-wrapped and vertical, Mak shuffled over to her computer.

“Welcome to AOL Canada,” came the chirpy greeting as she logged on. “You have mail.” Her saturnine mood lifted slightly, and the corners of her mouth curled into a sleepy grin. She had checked her mail a couple of times the night before but there was nothing there. Well, at least nothing interesting. She was kind of hoping to discover a little email from a certain young man.

Hmmm…Word of the Day. Some mail from the Forensic Psychology list.
Aha…What’s this?
An email from one “BlakeR”. Subject line: “A question”.

Bingo!

Hi Makedde,

It was nice meeting you today. I found the conference interesting, but of course you were a highlight. I won’t be able to go tomorrow…

Damn.

But I was wondering if we could perhaps catch up for dinner afterwards?

Yes!

I hope you don’t think me too forward. Send me an email, or better yet, give me a call.

She re-read his email. Twice. He must have sent it after she logged off at 1.00 am. Perhaps he was a night owl as well? She checked the time logged on the correspondence. Yup, 1.16 in the morning. That’s pretty late.

Roy Blake.

Yes, she was intrigued. But a fully-fledged date? It would have been better if he was just coming to the conference and they could chat a bit without any of the “date” formality. She hadn’t been on a proper date in how long? A year? Well, not counting that disaster with Henry. But that didn’t really qualify. She had left before the appetiser arrived.

She went to the kitchen and put on a pot of water, and then distractedly went about making a cup of coffee.

Mak found herself smiling as she considered her reply. She sat down at the desk, and sipped her drink. She was actually contemplating seeing Roy. Which was weird. But how to go about it?

Hi Roy,

Thanks for your message. It was nice meeting you, too. I must thank you for saving me from Professor Gosper and my bubblegum. :-) Thanks for your offer. Perhaps we could meet up for a quick coffee or a drink instead? Around eight would probably work for me, otherwise we could catch up sometime on the weekend. Give me a call.

She typed in her number, and was about to press “send” when a feeling of doubt overtook her.
This guy is a stranger, Mak. Do you really want to give him your number? Do you really want to meet him somewhere alone?

Makedde recognised that her fear was a little irrational. She wouldn’t be alone at all. She would be on familiar territory if she chose the bar or café, and she could excuse herself after a single beverage if need be. It was safe. Besides, he was a security guard…
well, not that that really meant anything, but he did work on campus at least. Mak pressed “send” before she scared herself out of it, and then it was gone, despatched into cyberspace.

At ten minutes to nine, Makedde arrived at the Graduate Center Ballroom at UBC and glanced around the gathering crowd. No Roy, just as he’d said in his email.

Good. No distractions,
she told herself.

Professor Gosper was nowhere in sight, so she could relax. Makedde noticed there were considerably fewer people attending the second day of the conference. Either that or they were all late. Dr Hare had pulled a huge crowd of curious university students that first day, but only the more hard-core attendees had stayed on. There would probably be more people in the afternoon for the talk from the FBI agent on crime scene analysis and how that relates to the clinical construct of psychopathy. It sounded like an interesting lecture, and Mak was sure that any mention of the FBI would result in a standing room only situation. That was the
X-Files
for you.

The thought of the FBI steered Mak back to Quantico and to Andy Flynn, again. Since his call she’d had trouble getting him out of her head.

Should I try to call him back?

After what had happened in Sydney, whether she liked it or not, Andy Flynn was a part of her life. She didn’t love him—or at least that was what she kept telling herself—but the experience they’d shared had forged a difficult bond between them, and like the branding of a red-hot poker, the events had marked them forever. But that wasn’t love. That wasn’t any reason to regret that he was so far away.

No, I won’t try to track him down,
Makedde decided.

Let it be. Move on, Makedde. Move on.

A bitter lump formed in her throat, and she ignored it. She had a big day ahead of her.

Andy Flynn arrived at the sprawling UBC campus just before 9.00 am. He parked his rental sedan, placed the ticket on the dash and began his walk to Crescent Road and the building that housed the Graduate Center Ballroom. He had left Dr Bob Harris at the hotel to recover from the flight the night before. Although the Profiler needed to catch up on lost sleep, he would most likely have launched straight into work mode the moment he woke up, looking over the files the RCMP had given him the night before.

Even though Andy had heard a lot of his mentor’s presentation material before, he was interested to see the way he handled the crowd, especially a crowd as diverse as this surely would be—students, professors, police officers, security guards, psychologists. Of course, there were other reasons why Andy was interested in who might be in that crowd. Reasons that didn’t pertain to work, exactly.

It was Andy’s first time at the UBC campus, and he couldn’t help but think of Makedde as he walked across the green lawns and admired the panoramic views. It was a place she had spoken of several times in their brief time together, and to his surprise, it was even more beautiful than she had described it.

He had quickly decided that Vancouver bore a certain loose resemblance to Sydney. Both cities shared a spectacular harbour and bridge, and the five massive white sails of Canada Place graced the waterfront in a way that reminded him of the famous Opera House back home. But of course the mountain peaks that surrounded the city would always provide a dramatic point of difference to Sydney. Those who grew up near the Rockies, as Makedde did, thought of the Blue Mountains near Andy’s home as the “Blue Hills”. Now he saw why.

It took a while for Andy to get his bearings and it took him somewhat longer than he had anticipated to find his way to the ballroom. When he finally found the right building, a makeshift cardboard sign saying, “Psychopathy Conference” with a big arrow pointing at the front doors gave him a great sense of relief.

The room that held the conference was on two levels, with a sign-in area just inside the door and tables with coffee urns, and a spread of muffins, donuts and sweets to the left. To the right was a built-in series of numbered coat racks of the sort that Andy had not seen since his early school days.

“Hello,” came a chirpy voice as he walked inside. He looked to the sign-in table to find that the voice belonged to an androgynous-looking female with very short-cropped hair, and a ring through her nose. He noticed that she wore a name tag that said, “Billie Looker”. Billie? He raised his eyes from the name tag up to the face again just to check. Yup, she was definitely a she.

“Hello. I’m Detective Andrew Flynn.”

“Welcome to the conference,” Billie said in a soft Canadian accent.

She flipped through her boxes of neatly organised cards and pulled one out with his name printed on it.

DET. ANDREW FLYNN

“Please keep this on throughout the conference,” she said, and slipped the card into a plastic name tag holder with a safety pin through the back.

He took the name tag and thanked her, then made his way to the large sunken seating area where the first presentation was already well under way. He slipped the tag into his suit pocket, with no intention of ever wearing it.

Andy was definitely late. A crowd of a hundred and fifty or so people was watching the speaker intently. Luckily, there were still a number of empty seats left to choose from. He managed to slip quietly into a chair nearest the door, right at the back of the room, and his entrance caused very little disturbance.

Is Makedde here?
he wondered.

He glanced furtively around the room and his gaze rested momentarily on a blond-haired student up the front, his breath stopping short. However it wasn’t Makedde at all, but a somewhat bohemian-looking man. Men with long hair and women with brush-cuts and names like “Billie”—Andy was starting to feel very unhip and out of touch. Maybe he was getting old. Or maybe it was just a peculiar Canadian thing.

It wasn’t until ten-thirty that Andy actually saw her.

A young red-haired woman thanked the speaker—a professor who had presented a lot of slides and graphs that Andy hadn’t found very interesting—before announcing a coffee break. The entire room stood in unison, a mass of bodies moving hungrily towards the refreshment table. A very large man in one of the middle rows stood up with them, and Andy’s eyes were drawn to him. He was at least six foot seven, and probably weighed a good three hundred and fifty, or four hundred pounds.