'Yep,' said Gabriel, chewing.
Jill leaned back in her chair. The sprawling gardens, although now overgrown, had obviously been professionally maintained at some stage in the past. The drone of a leaf blower on a neighbouring property couldn't drown out the manic activity of bees in the blossoms around her. She licked at a burgeoning cold sore on her lip. It thrummed under the skin – all that was left of her cold.
At one o'clock, they decided they could not let Joss and Isobel sleep any longer. Last had already called twice, wanting to know if they'd recorded the interview yet. Gabriel set his equipment up in one of the formal lounges on the lower floor. It was unorthodox to do the interview outside a police station, but Jill had not wanted Charlie to be moved around unnecessarily.
By six p.m., Jill was making her way home, exhausted. Joss and Isobel had given them the same story. They'd woken to a sound outside their bedroom, and then the fire alarm had sounded. Joss had gone out with a baseball bat to investigate, and had encountered a man with a knife. The alarm must have allowed Joss to approach the offender undetected, and he'd managed to wrestle the man to the ground, turning his knife against him. He'd rushed back to the bedroom and found the second offender, caved his head in with the bat. Isobel had rescued Charlie. Before they went out to the roof, the couple had removed the mask of the man in the bedroom, and had identified an Asian male, mid-thirties, with spider tattoos on his neck.
As they'd stood out the front of the quiet home in Mosman before leaving, Jill had noted the stress signals she'd detected while the couple were speaking. Gabriel had been non-committal. They were both in shock, and the cues could be confusing at such times, he pointed out.
Jill wound her windows down while driving towards the ocean. She let the early evening breeze play through the car, tangling her hair.
Thank God, she thought, driving past the surf club at Maroubra Beach. Cutter's dead.
Now he understood what it felt like.
Constable Andrew Montgomery sat dripping from his shower in the small gym beneath Liverpool police station. He towelled off the top half of his body and reached for his mobile, tried Chloe's number again. If he got this many missed call messages from a girl this early in a relationship, it set off a wacko alarm, and he began putting as much space between him and her as possible. Problem was, he'd never felt this way about a girl before Chloe, and now he kind of understood the compulsion to ring again and again.
Nothing. No answer.
He stood from the bench and finished drying himself, made his way to his locker and reached for his uniform. He'd finished half of his double shift, and had another hour's break before signing back on for the nightshift. Most of his mates were pissed off with the extended hours. Ordinarily, Andrew would have been more than happy – the overtime pay got him closer to his US-Canada skiing holiday. Two years' planning and saving, the trip had been the first thing on his mind every morning until he'd met Chloe Farrell. He smiled at himself in the mirror, straightening his collar, thinking of her.
The smile faltered. He wondered again why she hadn't called. He knew he wanted to see her every day, and he thought she'd felt the same. He'd let Sunday pass, certain each call he received would be from her. He'd never waited for a call from a girl before and he somehow liked the anxious anticipation of having to wait for something he really wanted. By Monday morning, though, he was over the game and ready to concede defeat. He called her. He'd been trying every couple of hours since, and now here he was, Tuesday night. No word.
All of the possible explanations sucked. He couldn't figure out whether it would hurt more that she just didn't care enough to have returned the call, or whether she'd got what she wanted from him for now and didn't need him at the moment. Actually, that would be worse, he thought – that Chloe had deliberately targeted him only to glean some information on the home invasion case.
He took his shoes over to the bench again and sat, leaned his face into his hands and rubbed at his temples. He felt stupid for giving her the little information he had; he'd never done anything like that before. He mentally chewed through their conversations again. All he'd really told her was that there'd been an apparently important anonymous phone call and that the caller had identified someone called Henry. It had just been a tease. Nothing she could actually use – just some-thing to attract her interest, make those eyes light up. She couldn't actually do anything with those details, could she? He'd scanned the news the last couple of days and there was no sign that she'd reported the scraps of information.
Another possibility for Chloe's silence nagged at him and again he pushed it away as ridiculous. Chloe couldn't actually have used that information to try to find Henry herself, could she? I mean, we couldn't even find Nguyen, he reasoned with himself. How would she have had a hope when she didn't know his address or even his surname?
Andrew Montgomery decided he'd sign on early. He grabbed his holster and notebook from his locker and made his way towards the stairs. At the doorway, he suddenly paused and reached into his top pocket.
He chewed at the skin around his thumb and pressed the phone against his ear.
33
JILL TOOK THE call while dressing for work. 'Tonight?' she said into the phone. 'Why tonight?'
'Your sister's going away on another shoot,' her mother replied. 'As usual, she waited until the last minute to tell us. She's going to Italy this time and thinks it may be one of the last big overseas shoots she does. She thinks they're about to send her out to pasture.' Jill knew Cassie was paranoid about her age: thought she was lucky to still be modelling at thirty.
'Okay, I guess I can come,' said Jill, holding the handset under her chin and trying to towel off at the same time. 'Where are we going?'
'East Ocean in Chinatown.'
'Yum. That's a bit a hike for you guys, isn't it?'
'Actually, it's quite exciting. You'll never believe what your father's done now.'
'What?' asked Jill. Her father wasn't big on spontaneity or surprises.
'He's booked us a suite at the casino. We're going there after dinner.'
'Wow. What's the occasion?' Jill nervously ran through a checklist of anniversary dates and birthdays – nothing she could think of.
'No reason. Can you believe it? Last night I told him about the dinner plans and he said he'd arrange for us to stay in the city.' Frances sounded thrilled.
Jill smiled widely. It was great to see her parents relaxing a little. Even though she'd been only twelve, and traumatised, when she had returned home after the abduction, she had recognised the changes in her parents. There had been times early on when it seemed they went weeks without even speaking to one another. Sitting on her bed now, holding the phone, Jill felt another subtle adjustment in her tension levels, as if another piece of ice had sloughed away from the glacier that had been her heart for so many years. Her family seemed to be healing, finally.
'That's great, Ma. So, who's coming?'
'Tim and Robyn, Avery and Lily.' Jill hadn't seen her brother and his family for a month or so, and she was pleased to hear their names. 'Cassie, of course,' her mum continued, 'and she's bringing her new friend. They've been seeing each other for quite a while, apparently, so that should be interesting.'
After the call, Jill hurriedly finished getting dressed for work. She figured that the pressure on the case would lessen with the news that two of the offenders were dead. Police and community relief would be massive when they announced that one of the deceased was the ringleader – Cutter. Still, she didn't want to be late to the taskforce meeting today. There could be word back from the coroner, more details from the crime scene, or word on whether Joss would have to face formal charges. And there were still two offenders in the wind.