Already Dead (30 page)

Something shimmered in Deanne's eyes – tears and … hesitation. Maybe she was deciding whether to debate it. Jax didn't wait to find out. She swiped through Brendan's screens, checking the icons for something obvious. There were the standard apps for making calls and sending texts, taking and storing photos, access to email and internet, jotting down notes, and a calendar. Plus a few extras: a torch, a fitness schedule, Skype and rugby league scores. Aside from the sport and running, it looked a lot like her own set of icons.

Jax tapped the one for his texts, ran her eyes down the list of recent senders. Kate's name was at the top. Hugh's was there, too. Also ‘Marty' – the Marty he knew from the army? None from Dominic Escott. None from Nina Torrence.

‘No unopened messages from Kate,' Jax told Deanne, taking her silence for curiosity, if not support. ‘So sometime between Sunday morning and Monday when he – or someone – put the phone in a post bag, Brendan saw Kate's texts.'

‘Does that mean something?'

‘That he had enough reception and battery power to receive them. That he was accessing his phone. That he
wasn't texting Kate back.' Jax shook her head. ‘I suppose he could've given the phone to someone else and they were checking his messages. I don't know – except that if I wanted to leave someone a message on my own phone, I'd probably write it and leave it as a draft.'

She touched Kate's name on the screen. A series of texts in cartoon speech bubbles came up. The last one first, Kate to Brendan:
Try again. Pls. Or txt. Pls. Miss u XXX
. Even in texting shorthand, there was an edge of desperation.

Jax scrolled through, finding a dozen more from Kate before there were any by Brendan. The last time he texted his wife was early on Saturday morning:
Shld b home by 5. Talk to u then.
Jax pointed to it. ‘He drove up from Melbourne on Saturday – he must have sent this before he left.'

Deanne watched her a second, more hesitation, maybe realising just how much Jax knew. ‘No drafts?'

‘No. Let's try emails.' Swiping and tapping at the screen, she said, ‘He might have sent it to himself if he thought Kate would have access through his phone.' Except all she got was a request for a password. ‘I'll text Kate again.' She picked up her own mobile and held Brendan's out to Deanne. ‘You try his notes.'

Deanne snatched her hands away. ‘I'm not putting my fingerprints on it.'

She had a point. ‘Okay.' Jax swapped the phones around. ‘You be me and write a text asking for an email password. I'll check his notes.'

As Deanne typed, Jax found Brendan's app for notes, touched the screen, touched it again on the first note in the list – and the chill of an ugly memory scuttled through her.

‘Whoa,' she whispered.

Deanne hit send, glanced across. ‘What the hell?'

The notes application was designed to look like a page from an exercise book. The one Jax had opened was pale blue with fine dark lines. There were about twenty on the screen and each one had the same words written on it:
I didn't know
.

She scrolled the page up – the mantra continued for a few lines more. She swallowed, rolled her lips together. ‘He said that in the car. Over and over. Just sobbing and saying he didn't know.'

‘He was crying?'

‘I thought he was going to shoot himself but he just hung his head and cried.'

‘What didn't he know?'

Jax lifted her shoulders and let them drop. ‘He thought there was something stuck in his head. When he was crying, I wondered if it was something he knew or saw, maybe something he did that wouldn't stop going around and around.' She thought of Nina Torrence – stabbing a woman and hefting her over a cliff would stick in your head.

‘Maybe that's the message for his wife. That he didn't know,' Deanne suggested.

‘I hope not because it makes no sense. Not on its own.'

Jax found the index for his saved notes, saw they were sorted by time, with the most recent at the top. She brought up the next one. It was the same but different.
I didn't know
was repeated for half a page but the words were messed up: spaces in the wrong places, apostrophes replaced with quote marks or just missing, as though he was mis-hitting keys. Twice, the sentence wasn't finished.

‘Maybe he was in a hurry when he wrote this one,' Jax said. ‘Or panicking and trying to get it down as fast as he could.'

‘Or losing touch with reality.'

‘He wrote it again without mistakes.'

‘You think that makes a difference?'

‘Okay, but it started somewhere. It meant something.' She tapped on the next note. Lots of repetitions, different words – and they made Jax feel like her stomach was trying to rise up through her throat.
Nina Torrence
. Over and over. Like a nano spider breeding in his head.

‘Nina Torrence? What the hell?' Deanne said.

‘Brendan did some work for Nina –'

‘And what? He heard what happened to her and wrote her name over and over? And you thought he wasn't losing touch.'

‘Did Russell tell you about the photo?'

‘Yeah. He said you didn't know if it was him.'

‘I lied. It
was
Brendan. Which means he was with Nina on Saturday night.'

‘Jesus, Jax. He might have killed her.'

‘Yeah.' Saying it out loud made her mouth go dry. ‘Something happened between Saturday evening and Monday afternoon when he got in my car. Something that made him go a little crazy.'

‘A
little
crazy. She was stabbed and tossed off a cliff, for God's sake. If he did this, he was more than a little crazy. And you're bloody lucky he didn't just kill you and dump your body by the motorway.'

‘He didn't, though. He didn't hurt me at all.'

‘Have you heard the latest on Nina?' Deanne's question sounded like a reprimand.

‘No, what?'

‘I don't know the source and possibly it's bullshit but I heard she was pregnant.'

Jax's eyebrows lifted as though they were on strings.

Deanne nodded. ‘Only ten weeks.'

Which meant if Brendan killed Nina, he'd killed her baby, too. ‘Oh, God.' Jax lifted a hand to her mouth. Brendan had been Nina's bodyguard at Christmas parties. Weeks ago. How many weeks? Had he killed his own baby?

‘What?'

‘I thought Brendan might have slept with Nina. If the baby was his and someone found out about it, he might have …' What?

‘Killed her and run?'

‘Why kill her? Why not just run?'

‘You've seen what he wrote. Pretty sure he wasn't thinking logically.'

‘Yes, but …' Jax didn't continue. She opened the next note.

It was a single line:
17 Walker St, Woollahra
.

The next one:
Nina Torrence. 7 pm pick-up. Home address
.

Jax went back to the previous one. ‘Is that Nina's address?'

‘No. Her house is in Bronte. Been reading about it all week.'

Jax checked the time code on the address. ‘This note was created at 22.06 on Saturday. Ten pm, presumably when Nina was at the party and he was working for her. Being a bodyguard or chauffeur. What does that mean?'

‘Someone gave him an address and he wrote it down?'

Jax thought about complicated arrangements for a rendezvous. ‘Maybe Nina gave him the address. Can you look it up on the laptop? I'm going to check his phone log.'

Deanne didn't move.

‘What?' Jax asked.

‘I thought you were just looking for a message to Kate and downloading photos.'

Jax hesitated, said it anyway. ‘Don't you want to know?'

‘Well, I do now, no thanks to you. But …' Deanne twisted her lips – maybe-it's-a-bad-idea.

‘I've already opened a dozen files.'

‘With Kate's permission.'

‘Does that make a difference?'

Deanne shrugged. ‘No idea.'

‘Will the police know if I've looked at logs?'

‘Still no idea.'

Jax checked the time. It was 12.28. She'd told Kate she'd be an hour or two with the phone. It was fifty minutes since she'd dropped her off and the photo download could take a while. ‘All right, I'll set up the internet storage and get the photos moving, then I'll check the log and you can leave the room if you want.'

‘If you're going to do it, I'm staying to read over your shoulder.'

‘Good. In the meantime, you look up that address.'

Brendan had several hundred photos in his gallery, but he hadn't taken one for three weeks. The last one was a selfie of him and Scotty, squinting and grinning, their hair wet, both their noses covered in white zinc, the surf behind them on a glorious day. Maybe the last time he was in Newcastle. He didn't look like a man who was having an affair – or who could kill a pregnant woman. Didn't look anything like he had in Jax's car, either.

She scrolled further, looking for pictures of Nina Torrence. If he was having an affair, it didn't mean he was smart enough not to take photos. Jax knew two people who'd found evidence of ‘the other woman' on a phone and another who'd been caught out. But no pictures of Nina leapt out as she whizzed through.

Jax set up an internet storage account, using her own email address and assigning a password that she'd give to Kate later – something anxious and uneasy gathering in her chest as she tapped at the keyboard. ‘I wish Nick was here to tell me where to look,' she finally said out loud. ‘He'd know how to make sense of this. I haven't made sense of anything since …' Nick was gone. She glanced at Brendan's phone. Maybe it was right there and she didn't know how to find it. Maybe she couldn't without …

‘Nick was hopeless with this kind of thing,' Deanne said.

‘What do you mean? It was his job.'

‘Nick was good with stats and systems and hard data. He was hopeless about people. Without a trail, he just assumed everyone would make the same decisions he would. This,' she pointed at the mobile, ‘is about people and that's what you know.'

‘Then I've been out of it too long because Brendan is not what I thought he was.'

‘What did you think he was?'

‘A good guy.'

‘He held a gun to your head.'

‘I know. He was desperate, he loved his wife and child and he wanted to protect them. He wanted to protect me, too.'

‘He tried to drag you into the traffic.'

She closed her eyes, remembered Brendan hauling on her arms, wrenching her towards the road, the cops careering in behind them.
Come on. We can still make it from here.
‘Not to hurt me. He thought he was saving me.' She hit the key to start the download, walked to the windows and stared into the courtyard.

Was he good and bad?

‘The Woollahra address is a townhouse complex,' Deanne said. ‘Very nice townhouses, according to Google Earth. Gardens, pool, security gate, looks like underground parking.'

Jax thought about it, turned around. ‘Is that where Dominic Escott lives?'

‘Escott in a townhouse? Are you kidding? He's got a gobsmacking mansion in Vaucluse.' Deanne paused, frowned. ‘Jax, no. If that's where this is going, you've got to stop now. Give the phone to Kate and back away.'

Deanne didn't need to explain. The Escotts were big fish – the high-profile politician father, one son the head of a multi-million dollar business with friends of questionable repute, the other recently making headlines when fraud charges were unexpectedly dropped.

Jax chewed her lip. Nina was having an affair with Dominic Escott. Nina was dead. So was Brendan.

She leaned on the window. Brendan was with Nina the night she died. He thought people were after him. Nina's ‘people' were the Escotts – or at least Dominic. Were they after him? If Brendan killed Nina, then yes, it was possible one or more of the family might want vengeance.

Brendan made tea and toast for Nina and she told him things. Personal things about being unhappy and wanting to marry her lover. Had she told him other things, about
the Escotts? It was likely they all had secrets. Brendan had signed a confidentiality agreement; Nina felt she could talk freely. Except it wasn't only Nina who'd wanted her secrets kept safe. Dominic Escott had insisted on the document.

Kate said Brendan felt sorry for Nina. Brendan died attempting to protect Kate and Scotty. What if Brendan hadn't killed Nina? What if he'd filled a page with her name because …

‘Jax? Did you hear me?'

‘Yes.' She pushed herself off the glass. ‘I'll give the phone to Kate as soon as the download finishes. I just want to check the call log.'

Deanne huffed a sigh, pursed her lips, didn't say anything until Jax reached for Brendan's mobile on the table. ‘That's yours.'

Looking at the twin phones side-by-side, she heard Brendan in her head again.
How the fuck did you get this?
‘I should take the cover off mine so I can tell the difference.' She picked it up, started to push at the rubber, and stopped. Dropped her eyes to the one still on the table.

Brendan's. Sent to Scotty, not Kate. A seven-year-old. Who took toys apart. Not only toys.
He takes everything apart
, Kate had said.

Jax put her phone down, picked up Brendan's, fingers fumbling at the rubber. The covers were meant to be a snug fit so they didn't come off easily – and this one was doing its job, holding on like a claw. She got a thumbnail under a top corner, stretched it up and over, dragged at the other side, peeled it back, looked inside … and adrenaline tingled in the tips of her fingers.

Stark against the black rubber was a slip of white paper.

Jax dragged the phone cover all the way off, saw the paper was a shop receipt, folded in half with the printing on the outside, thin enough for her to see the bleed of blue ink from something written on the inside.

Picking it up with fingertips, Jax opened it out. The receipt was from a post office: long and wide, lots of information she didn't need – time and date, tax, terms and … It was for a padded bag and postage. Handling it carefully, heart hammering in her throat, Jax turned it over. The other side was covered with the scrawl of tiny handwriting, crammed tight with letters and abbreviations as though the author knew from the start there was a lot to get down in limited space. Jax held it closer, squinted. It wasn't the repetitions on Brendan's phone – and it started with,
I fucked up, Katey
…

Jax slid her eyes to the bottom right corner. The final words were squashed together as the space ran out:
I love u, B x

‘It's from him.' Jax's voice was hoarse around the lump in her throat.

Deanne was at her shoulder. ‘Should we read it?'

‘Absolutely.' Jax picked up her phone first, though, wrote a text to Kate:
I found something u should see. I'll b at yr place in 15.
Then she sat at the table with Deanne and squinted at the paper.

Jax's eyes were filled with tears by the time she finished reading. Anger and sadness, realisation and regret. Brendan's words were disjointed, rambling, and he'd assumed Kate knew who he was talking about. Maybe he'd thought he'd already told her, maybe he'd wanted to, maybe it's what the calls to her were about. Whatever the
reason, there was no doubt he was talking about Nina Torrence – the ‘covert op', ‘looking for a cliff', the news of her suicide followed by reports she'd been stabbed.

In her mind, Jax saw Brendan in a post office – crumpled shirt, tense and agitated. Not like he was in her car. Not that desperate yet. Together enough to form a plan and make some sense: buy the bag, pay for postage, find someone to write on the envelope, use the receipt for a message to Kate in case he didn't make it to her. He could have left his car by then and had nothing else to write on. Possibly he thought he could risk only one brief stop.

Jax remembered the package was posted hours before he got in her car. Did something happen after that to make him confused and out-of-control? Or did panic and ugly memories eat away at him?

‘He didn't kill Nina,' Deanne said. ‘You were right. He was the good guy.'

‘Yeah.' It was what he'd wanted Jax to tell Kate. There
were
people after him, he
did
have something stuck in his head, he didn't know what was going to happen to Nina when he left her.

There was a very real reason he was desperate enough to get in Jax's car and point a gun at her. The phone, the knives and guns, being called Already Dead – it all made sense. Freaking out over the radio?

‘Was Nina's murder still running on radio news last Monday afternoon?'

It was a few months since Deanne had read a bulletin but she listened every hour with a news hound's interest. ‘It's January, quietest month of the year. Nina was lead story right up until you were.'

Jax rubbed a hand around the back of her neck as reality started to filter into her thoughts. ‘Kate told me Nina was having an affair with Dominic Escott.'

‘That's been around the traps.'

‘She said it'd been going on for years, that Nina was holding out for the ring, that she wanted to be Mrs Escott.'

‘I've met the real Mrs Escott. I imagine she wouldn't go without a fortune.'

‘Okay, right. But Nina was his lawyer as well as his lover. She knew stuff – about him, about his business, maybe about his father and brother. So if she was pregnant after all these years …' Jax paused a moment, waiting to see if Deanne was on the same track. ‘Nina told Brendan she was holding all the cards. Maybe she had something more than a baby to hold over Dominic's head. Maybe the baby was her reason to use it. Or threaten to use it if he was hesitating about leaving his wife.'

‘I … don't know.' It sounded like she didn't want to.

‘Kate said Dominic hired Nina's bodyguards. Which makes him “the boss”. Right?'

Deanne pointed at Brendan's note. ‘You have to give this to the police.'

‘Brendan doesn't say who “he” is.' She picked up his phone again, lit the screen, tapped until she got his call register. ‘He had a lot of calls – Kate, a few from his friend Marty. A bunch from unsaved and blocked numbers.' She found Deanne's eyes. ‘Someone, maybe more than one person, being cautious about leaving a trail?'

‘Jax –'

‘Whoever “he” is, Nina knew him. At least well enough to go with him.'

‘She defended some bad people.'

‘She knew cops, too.'

Deanne frowned. ‘You think a cop is involved?'

‘Why not? The Escotts are rich and powerful. Dominic's brother had his fraud charges dropped, there were calls then for an ICAC inquiry.' It wasn't the first time the government's Independent Commission Against Corruption had been urged to look at David Escott, the father.

‘Can you take it to the cop you kissed?' Deanne asked.

Jax pushed a hand through her hair, not wanting to explain that the cop she kissed might be the cop who'd been after Brendan. She swallowed hard as the next thought took hold … that possibly Aiden was the man who'd turned up for ‘the drop'. Who'd stabbed Nina through the heart and thrown her from a cliff.

Could he have done that? Jax wiped sweat-damp hands on her trousers. He'd played nice with Jax for days, shared drinks, showed concern, kissed her like he meant it. He was a good actor but it would take more than acting to kill Nina then pull that off. He'd have to be a goddamn emotionless sociopath. She jumped as her phone buzzed.

‘A text from Kate,' Deanne told her.

Jax grabbed it up:
Don't come to the house. Don't want Scotty to be around when I see it. Meet me at Strzelecki Lookout.

Her jaw tightened. Strzelecki Lookout was on the tip of the headland Jax could see from Tilda's lounge room. It was a long, sheer drop to the ocean below. The view was endless and breathtaking; the breeze on a hot day, one like today, was unbeatable. It was also a launching pad for hang-gliders, often crowded during the winter whale-watching season. And popular for people thinking about jumping.

Was Kate? Was the cliff a stand-by option if she didn't like what Jax found? Or did she just need the wind in her hair and a place to breathe when she looked at Brendan's phone again?
Warn me before you show me
, she'd said an hour ago. But Jax was thinking of another time.

She'd had a stand-by option. She wasn't proud of it, but grief, frustration, desperation, the thought she might never have an answer for Nick, had made the idea of suicide cling to the edges of her thoughts. Not for long. A couple of weeks when Anita Lyneham first played hardball. She didn't return Jax's calls, told her detectives not to speak to her, accused Jax of engineering media stories about the case being mishandled. Then Jax decided there were better things to do than plead and cry and think about what happened if the police didn't figure it out. She'd filled her head with questions and details and there wasn't room for anything else.

But she wasn't Kate Walsh. She hadn't spent years watching her husband struggle with horrific memories. Hadn't thought it was almost over, then blamed herself for his violent and exceedingly public death.

‘I need to show the note to Kate,' Jax said. It was ugly and sad but Brendan
wasn't
the crazy guy on the motorway with a gun. He was the hero trying to save his family.

‘I'll come with you,' Deanne said.

Jax remembered her bad days – a stranger in the midst could make it more difficult. ‘No. It'll be better if it's just me. I'm sorry to leave again. I'll try not to be long.'

‘But …' Deanne stood as though she might insist but just watched as Jax moved fast around the room, collecting her bag, the laptop, pulling her hair into a ponytail. ‘What will you do with the note?'

‘Talk to Kate about it. It's up to her. But I'm taking out insurance first.' She picked up her phone, flicked to the camera, took photos of the note. Both sides, open and folded, close-ups of Brendan's handwriting and the post office receipt. Then she put the paper back in the rubber cover and took another shot of it there. Evidence, if she needed it – automatically saved to her own internet storage account.

Upstairs, Tilda was anxious about Jax leaving again, Zoe hung on her neck, wanting her to stay, and Deanne hovered with indecision, maybe regretting the promise to not stop her. Jax apologised and hugged and left anyway, running down the stairs to the car, more worried about what Kate was thinking. Outside, the heat had cranked up, the air was still and heavy with humidity, the sky a vivid blue – and the view, as she turned onto the downward slope of the hill, was breathtakingly clear and huge. She hoped Kate would be buoyed by it, not shattered.

Passing the surf, she was forced to slow for groups of meandering beach-goers taking their time to cross the road. She tapped her fingers on the steering wheel, registering the buzz of an incoming message, imagining Kate already at Strzelecki. Out of her car, standing above the cliff, texting desperate last words.

Jax pushed at the accelerator as she wound her way up to the headland, hung a right at the top, craning her neck for Kate's car, unable to see into the parking bay above the street until she was there.

She stopped in its centre. The small space was empty. So were the bench seats beyond it. Would Kate have parked at the bottom of the hill and walked in this heat, while there was an empty car park waiting for customers? Jax pulled
into a spot and got out, jogged quickly to the strip of grass that marked the lookout. Not a soul, just the stomach-lurching drop to the ocean.

Back in the car, she wound the windows down, let the afternoon breeze in before digging her mobile from her bag. Not Kate texting. Aiden:
We need to talk. Soon. Call me
. Should she? Before she talked to Kate?

There was also a missed call and a voice message from him. He'd rung from somewhere quiet, his voice low and serious, his words more order than suggestion: ‘Jax, I've got information. We need to talk. Call me.'

Was he crossing another line, wanting to pass on information he shouldn't? Or had he spoken to Kate, knew about the phone and was trying to stop it before it went any further?

Jax heard a noise, raised her head, searched the scene through her windscreen: bush on her right, house to her left, grassy strip in between, and the empty car park. It was quiet, she was alone and a tingle of nerves up her spine felt like hackles rising. A movement in her rear-view mirror made her lift her chin for a better look. Something large and dark loomed on the passenger side of the car. She swung her head, saw a figure. Then the door was yanked open and her heart stopped.