Alex Palmer - The Labyrinth of Drowning

Dropping this shutter in her mind, detaching herself from the possibility of human emotion, she got out of her car and looked for Borghini. He was standing with a group of police, still dressed in the clothes he had worn the night before and drinking a cup of takeaway coffee. Seeing her, he walked over.

‘Morning,’ he said, blinking. ‘Your boss told me you were on your way. Hope you got a good night’s sleep.’

He was clearly angry with her. She ignored the bait. ‘Good morning. Where is she?’

‘In her room. The pathologist is with her. You went and questioned her last night without letting me know or even clearing it with me.’

‘I don’t have to clear anything with you. I’ve already asked my people to forward you the transcript. I’m not keeping you in the dark.’

‘Do we have a team here? Or do you just go and do what you want, when you want?’

‘There wasn’t time for teamwork last night. If I hadn’t spoken to her, she’d still be dead and we wouldn’t have the information we have now.’

‘Do you know who found her?’ he asked. ‘Your people. What were they doing here? Taking her into custody? Did they search the place? Take away something we don’t know about? Is anyone going to tell me about that?’

‘If anything like that happened, you’ll be advised. Now I have to see the body. Let’s get on with it.’

‘What Orion wants, Orion gets. Come on. Scissorhands is waiting for you.’

Lynette’s room was cordoned off behind the blue police ribbons. It was the last unit on the ground floor of a double-storeyed row of motel rooms. Numbers of the other residents were standing on the upstairs veranda watching. The door to Lynette’s unit was open. McMichael and his technicians were at work inside but stopped when Grace appeared. The big man got to his feet, irritated at being interrupted.

‘I hope you’re going to make this quick,’ he said. ‘We’ve got work to do.’

‘So do I,’ she replied. ‘Do we have a time of death?’

‘Before midnight. I’m not prepared to be more precise at this stage. She wasn’t carrying a stopwatch.’

‘Did she die quickly?’

‘Instantaneously. I doubt she knew what hit her.’

‘Small mercies in that case,’ Grace said, looking at him with an angry glint in her eye.

‘If you want to put it that way.’

Lynette was slumped with her back against the wall near the door, shot in the head, the grubby white paint stained behind her. She was dressed exactly as she had been when Grace had seen her last night. The room had been perfunctorily searched. Lynette’s bag was open, its contents scattered around her. A bottle of wine, still with its cork in place, lay smashed on the floor in the middle of the room. There was more broken glass on the table. On the bed was an open suitcase, a few clothes tossed into it.

‘Did she take that bottle to her attacker?’ Grace asked.

‘We think so,’ Borghini said. ‘It looks like she was packing when someone walked in the door. She tried to whack him with a bottle of chardonnay. He managed to get out of the way and shoot her. Fun and games,’ he added grimly.

‘Didn’t anyone hear anything?’ she asked. ‘What about her next-door neighbour? This room doesn’t exactly look soundproof.’

‘Apparently, it wasn’t unusual for her to have company. He heard banging sometime around ten, thought it was business as usual, knocked on the wall and everything went quiet. He didn’t notice anything else, he was watching TV. He said he might have heard a thud after he knocked on the wall. That could have been from a silencer.’

Lynette’s eyes were open. On impact, the terror she had felt had been obliterated; death had been brutal and immediate. Whoever had done this, they’d seen her face looking at them immediately before they fired. It hadn’t mattered to them. Killing was just another job. Grace was caught in the woman’s vacant stare, and, despite her determination to stay detached, went cold with the unexpected horror that someone could do this so easily.

‘Satisfied?’ the pathologist asked.

Perhaps there was something in the way she looked at him that made even the feared McMichael step backward.

‘I’ve seen what I need to see,’ she replied, keeping a grip on herself, unexpectedly feeling the prick of tears at the back of her eyes. She walked out.

Outside, she spoke to Borghini. ‘She was heading for the door. Running for her life, not getting there.’

‘I don’t think this was a planned killing,’ he said. ‘Or at best it wasn’t supposed to happen here. Whoever shot her fired on the kneejerk. Let me tell you something. Lynette phoned Marie Li before she left the brothel and told her she had to close up, she was going home. After that Madam chucked a wobbly. Too much of a wobbly even for her. Did this Lynette have something important in her possession? It’d be one good reason why she’s dead.’

‘If she did, she didn’t give it to me. Where was Kidd when all this was going on?’

‘He was there to see Marie Li losing it. After that, he went to make some phone calls. Then he left. Why? Does this mean there’s something else you haven’t told me?’

‘What you get told is in the hands of my boss.’ Grace looked back at the unit. Nothing was more sordid than violent death. ‘Did she die because I talked to her, because the brothel was raided or was she going to die anyway?’

‘The way things are shaping up,’ Borghini said, ‘she was going to die anyway.’

‘Then maybe Marie Li is in danger too.’

‘The thought had crossed my mind. Do you know who she really is? Narelle Wong of Chipping Norton. Her brother came and bailed her in the small hours of this morning. Let’s hope her family’s not in danger as well.’

In the meeting room at Orion, Clive handed Grace a manila envelope.

‘From the hotel’s strongbox, put there by Jacqueline Ryan,’ he said. ‘Our people recovered it early this morning.’

Grace took out a Thai passport in the name of Jirawan Sanders. Jirawan’s smiling photograph was on the details page. Stamped inside the passport was a permanent resident’s visa for Australia.

‘P amp;J. Peter and Jirawan forever,’ she said. ‘If her husband’s dead, the Peter she wanted to contact could have been a son. Which means he might be okay one way or the other. Immigration didn’t have the right to deport her. Did Kidd know that?’

‘When it’s the right time, we’ll ask him. But that passport is a valuable item. And right now, someone’s missing it.’

‘Whoever really owns the brothel,’ Grace replied. ‘They didn’t trust Marie, the same way they didn’t trust her with the foreign workers. Her role is strictly limited by the look of it.’ ‘To what?’

‘A convenient gaoler. A fantasy for someone to visit. One they’ve spent a lot of money on. They even changed her name.’

‘Who are these exotic workers? Are they illegal?’

‘Not necessarily. I think they’ll be foreign women newly settled in Australia or possibly on bridging visas. But maybe getting a resident’s visa depends on them working at Life’s Pleasures. That’s where Kidd comes in. He’d see a lot of applications. Maybe he’s the talent spotter. He’s senior enough to slow down or speed up the process or maybe just make it impossible to get other family members over here. Maybe all he has to do is make the threat.’

‘The initial judgement of our finance people is that Life’s Pleasures, while turning a very tidy profit of its own, is principally a money-laundering business,’ Clive said. ‘The sums involved are very substantial and it all gets moved offshore. That’s curious psychology, wouldn’t you agree?’

‘What do you mean?’