Deadly Deeds (23 page)

I left Chadstone Shopping Centre with a chocolate éclair from Donut King and a head filled with confusion.

Crossing the car park, I knew what my next step would be.

What I wanted now was a confession, and the only way to get it would be to come face to face with her.

I ended up lecturing at Swinburne University on Wednesday afternoon because I felt guilty I’d missed the previous week’s class. The timing was bad, because my heart was not in it. More important things were pressing my mind. But I knew some students in my class would one day solve important homicides, so I had to take my job as a trainer as seriously as I took my job as a forensic investigator.

Although I tried to pay attention to what I was teaching, the importance of collecting evidence and making carefully written observations at a crime scene, half my attention was wandering around the Wilson case.

I concluded if Teresa Wilson was dumb enough to buy a cook’s knife with her own credit card, she had to be dumb enough to have bought a ton of Valium under her name as well.

This case began to look like Swiss cheese, and I knew it would only be a matter of time before everything would blow up in everybody’s face like a time bomb.

As much as I was excited to have gone so far, I began to fear the outcome. If Teresa was such a cruel and heartless person, maybe John Darcy had been right when he told me to watch my back.

I shrugged off the fear, which had slowly crept upon me as the hours went by.

In spite of my wandering mind, I tried hard to concentrate on giving a memorable lecture to my students.

On my way back home, just at the corner of Princes Highway and Alma Road, I tried Frank’s home number again on my mobile phone.

She picked up the call. Her voice sent a chill through my entire body.

‘
Is Frank in?’

‘
No, he’s not. Who’s this?’

I grinded my teeth. It was vital that I sounded relaxed and non-suspicious.

‘It’s Dr Kristin Malina. I met you at the hospital.’

A few seconds silence, and then she said, ‘Oh, hi, Malina. It’s so nice to talk to you. When are you coming around to visit?’

‘Well, actually, I was wondering if Frank was there, so the three of us could go out for dinner.’

‘
I’m afraid Frank is away for the week.’

‘
He didn’t mention where he was going?’

‘
No. Is this some type of emergency?’

‘
Not really. It’s just that he never said he’d be going anywhere.’

‘
Well, that shouldn’t stop us from seeing each other. I really enjoyed your company at the hospital. Why don’t you come over, and I’ll cook something?’

My stomach churned. This was not what I had in mind. I wanted Frank with me in case she decided to insert corn-cob skewers in my eyes and cotton wool down my throat as part of her haute cuisine.

‘I really don’t want to be any trouble,’ I said, my voice losing its confidence.

‘
It’s no trouble at all. I don’t mind. I wasn’t doing anything tonight, anyway. We can watch a video afterwards.’

Damn, she was tempting me, but I knew it was a hell of a risk. I wanted to face her and get to the bottom of this. But not just yet. She took me by surprise. My mind was confused and unprepared.

‘How about breakfast in the city tomorrow? I just remembered I’ve still got to go to the gym today.’

Silence, and she added abruptly, ‘Sure. Breakfast sounds find. You have a good workout. Give me a call in the morning.’

After I hung up, crazy thoughts crossed my mind. To begin, I was uncertain why Teresa seemed so excited and willing to see me. And secondly, it felt extremely abnormal Frank told no one where he was going. Especially me. But then, the way we’ve been getting along lately, it wasn’t all that surprising.

What if she’d already killed him
?

I shivered at the thought.

I had to move on. My choices were few.

While parking behind my apartment, I decided to backtrack any Valium prescriptions she’d taken out in the last six months.

I knew of a long way and short way to find out what prescriptions Teresa Wilson had taken out in the past six months.

The long way was to go to every pharmacy in the area and ask the chemist, who would probably refuse to hand over information without me presenting a warrant of some sort. And I had no way of getting one since I was an unsworn investigator. Basically my powers of search were the same as those of the average citizen.

The other way was to use my laptop and tap into the easily accessible Medicare database. The database held all personal records in relation to anyone’s medical history, including what doctors were attended and when they were attended, as well as the usual name, address and other personal identifying information.

I entered Teresa Wilson’s name into the mainframe, and the computer spilled back her entire history since she acquired a Medicare card in 1981.

I jumped quickly to the last few entries and noted Teresa had attended four doctors in the Port Melbourne area the week prior to the 20th of February. Two weeks before that date, she’d visited four different doctors in the Malvern area in two days. Unfortunately, the Medicare database information was limited. It didn’t tell me why she attended those doctors, and how many prescriptions had been written out for her.

I knew what I had to do next.

I printed a list of the eight doctors and was going to pay them a visit the following day, just after I had breakfast with Teresa.

While the records were being printed on my inkjet printer, something caught my eye. On Friday the 14th of March, Teresa Wilson had visited four doctors in the Richmond area, and on Saturday the 15th of March, four others in the Hawthorn area. My face creased with concern when I realised Frank lived in Richmond, only kilometres away, and she visited those doctors just when he began his week long holidays.

At first I tried to reason her action. I told myself that she’d probably needed something because of the pain she acquired from her wounds and scratches. But I knew this was nonsense. St Patrick’s Hospital was following her progress, and there was no need for her to consult with doctors, especially eight different ones in two days.

I printed a list of all the doctors she had seen.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

W
hen I arrived at Terry Bennetts’ Gymnasium on High Street at 9.46 p.m., Ken was doing one-hundred-and-twenty-pound deadlifts.

‘
You look shocking,’ he said as soon as he saw me.

I had to admit he looked as good as ever. I gave him a run down on everything that was going on.

‘I’m sorry to hear you’ve lost your job,’ he said, ‘but hell, you’ll have no trouble finding something else. You’re such an intelligent person.’

‘
I don’t know if I want anything else. Right now, I just want to get my life back.’

‘
Nothing a good workout can’t fix.’

Maybe that was true in his life as a librarian. But my life seemed more complicated than that.

I nodded and began my stretches.

No one else was in the gym, and although Ken had always been friendly to me, I was in no mood to hold a conversation. He must have sensed it because he avoided bothering me during my workout.

After doing forty-pound bench presses, I gulped half the water from my Coca-Cola drink bottle. The temperature in the gym was moderate, but for some reason I was as thirsty as hell.

I worked my biceps, triceps and abs.

At around 11.30 p.m., Ken left the gym.

Even though I was tired, I decided to stay on. Too much energy buzzed in my veins, be it from anger or fear. I kept thinking about the next day when I’d have breakfast with Teresa. God, how was I going to approach the subject?

‘Don’t be too harsh on yourself,’ Ken shouted as he disappeared down the narrow concrete stairs.

Half an hour later, I finished a set of preacher curls, when suddenly I felt the urge to pass water. It must have been all this drinking. I had refilled the bottle twice already.

I went to the women’s room, which happened to be right in the middle of the gymnasium. I guessed the gym was initially designed for men, but when women began pumping iron decades ago, the owner built a separate toilet. With the lack of room, the only place left was in the middle of the gym.

When I came out of the washroom, I nearly had a heart attack.

Teresa Wilson was standing in front of me, dressed in a grey flannel tracksuit with Nike runners and a sports bag by her side. She looked stunning, like one of those girls from the cover of a Cleo magazine.

I felt heat on my cheeks as I wondered what the hell she was doing here.

‘
Couldn’t sleep,’ she said casually. ‘With Frank being away, I kept closing my eyes and having nightmares. Plus I needed the company.’

I nodded but was speechless.

‘You okay?’ she asked, obviously realising I was shocked to see her.

I forced a smile and said, ‘Just tired. I’ve been working out for the last hour.’

‘Don’t mind if I join you?’

‘
Suit yourself, but I’ll be finishing soon. How did you find this place, anyway?’

‘
Frank mentioned you went to the gym. When I asked him which one, he said Terry Bennetts’. I looked it up in the phone book.’

When she stepped under the light, I noticed her facial wounds and bruises had vanished completely with the help of make-up. One could not have guessed she’d been beaten and raped a month ago.

And that was because she never had been, I thought.

‘
Should you be doing exercises in the state you’re in?’ I asked.

‘
I’m easing back into it. Don’t want to start in a year’s time and find my body can’t cope with it. You know what it’s like. You stop working out for two weeks, and it’s like starting from scratch again. I hate that feeling of having to readjust to a new life. You know, it’s a bit like living without Jeremy. Such a shock.’ She said that in a neutral tone, making me wonder if she was poking fun at me for some unknown reason.

I walked to the bench press and felt a cold sweat. What the hell was Teresa really doing here? I wasn’t that great company.

‘Hey, you gonna show me how to do these things?’ Teresa asked, casually following me. ‘You’ve got a great body. You come here often?’

I felt like she was trying to pick me up. ‘Three to four times a week. It helps me sleep.’

I did a set of bench presses, and she said, ‘My turn.’

I took a gulp of water from my Coca-Cola drink bottle and stood behind her while she lowered the forty-pound barbell to her chest twelve times.

‘How’s Frank doing?’ I asked.

She pulled the bar up to the rack and said, ‘He’s fine. Never been better.’

‘You guys really have something going, don’t you?’

‘
I guess we do. Hey, you wouldn’t be trying to take it away from me?’

I was taken back by her comment. ‘What makes you say that?’

‘Just that you were really close, that’s all. I knew he had a crush on you. He told me.’

Great, I thought, now I’m the other woman.

After I finished my second set of bench presses, I felt exhausted. ‘One more set and I’m going home,’ I said. ‘I’m buggered.’

‘
Sure,’ she answered as she began her second set.

I swallowed the rest of my drink bottle.

When Teresa finished her set, I lay on the bench and placed my hands parallel on the barbell. I doubted I would be able to finish the set, but Teresa was watching me, and I hated her thinking I was a wimp.

I pushed the barbell up and lowered it to my chest.

Suddenly, my head began to spin. I pushed hard on the barbell, but it wasn’t moving an inch.

‘
Give me a hand here,’ I commanded to Teresa who was just standing behind me.

No response.

‘Hey, lift the damn bar! It’s getting heavy.’

I rolled my eyes back and saw her smiling. ‘You’re not such a tough little bitch after all,’ she said, injecting her tone with sarcasm. ‘What’s the matter? Not enough iron in your diet?’

And then she laughed a crazy laugh, and I knew I had been right for the last few days. She was a textbook-case psychopath.

‘
Feeling a bit tired?’ she went. ‘Have another drink.’

And she laughed again.

My chest was hurting as I realised she’d spiked my water with Valium. I should have known. She must have spiked my drink bottle while I was in the washroom passing water. Now that I was laying on the bench, I did recall the water tasted kind of salty, but at the time I just shrugged it off.

‘
Get this fuckin’ weight off me,’ I screamed.

My eyes were getting heavier. The thirty-pound barbell began to feel like one-hundred pounds.

Teresa circled the bench and picked up a large circular weight from the floor. Casually she added it to the right side of the barbell, crushing my right breast.

‘
Christ, what are you doing?’ I muttered.

She didn’t say a word, but added another weight on the left side.

‘You killed them, didn’t you?’ I asked, my chest crushing under the weight.

‘
Yes, I did,’ she said, dryly. ‘I killed them both.’

‘
Jesus,’ I said, ‘Why?’

‘
Because all men are bastards. You know that anyway. You told Frank when you left my apartment that night I killed Jeremy. You said men were responsible for all the mess in this world. And you were right.’

What was Frank doing? Screwing her or telling her every minute of his life?

‘Why did you kill them?’

‘
Jeremy cheated on me.’

‘
And you cheated on him.’

‘
But he didn’t know that. Walter told me Jeremy was going to divorce me and marry Claire.’

‘
So what? You didn’t care about him anyway.’ I struggled with the weights.

‘
That’s right. But the bastard had been bleeding our savings and joint accounts to another account without telling me. He was going to dump and leave me penniless.’

‘
What about Walter?’

‘
He was going to dump me, anyway.’

I tried hard to push the weights up. ‘Please, Teresa, take the bar off my chest. This has nothing to do with me.’

‘I agree on that last point. But your actions don’t reflect what you’re telling me.’ She circled the bench again and added more weights on the barbell. ‘You’re a sneaky little bitch. If you’d just dropped everything like you’d been told, all of this would have never happened. In fact we might even have become good friends. I meant it when I said I enjoyed talking to you at the hospital. Cross my heart, I really thought I’d found a friend.’

And so did I for a little while.

I felt contractions in my chest. I could hardly breath.

Teresa went on, ‘Anyway, like I said, Walter was going to dump me. He didn’t say anything, but I could tell by the look in his eyes. The bastards were going to leave me loveless and without a cent to my name. Walter took me to a restaurant one night and told me it was over. I felt miserable. I went to the doctor to get some Valium to O.D. myself.’

‘You went to
eight
doctors,’ I managed to say.

‘
You’ve done you’re homework, I see. Well, you know, some doctors won’t give you what you want on request. So I had to try a few of them until I got the amount of Valium I needed.’ She stood behind me and placed both hands on the barbell. ‘Feeling a little chest congested? Don’t worry, you’ll be asleep any minute now. Won’t feel a thing. Everybody’ll think it was an accident. Dr Malina thought she was Arnold Schwarzenegger.’

‘
And how come you didn’t go ahead with killing yourself?’ I muttered, struggling for some air.

‘
I thought, fuck it, why should I die? They fucked me up, and I’m going to kill myself? Had a change of heart. I planned it two weeks ahead of time.’

‘
How could you do it?’

‘
I don’t know. You know, sometimes you think about killing someone, like some jerk in the car next to you at the traffic light, but you never end up doing it. Well, it started like that, but I went one step further. They fucked me up, so I didn’t have any choice. I killed Walter first. Easy as hell. I never knew it was so easy to kill someone. But you’d know about that. You’d see a lot of dead people in your line of work.’

I tried to answer, but no words came out of my mouth. I knew I wouldn’t last another minute.

‘Then I got Jeremy. Got him to fuck me first to make it look like a rape, spiked his hot chocolate with Valium, and when he tried to take his socks off, down he went to sleep for the last time.’

An image of Jeremy’s decapitated body, wearing bloody socks, came back to mind.

Teresa went on, ‘I messed up the place pretty badly, and it kind of broke my heart, cause I chose all the furniture and decor, being a set-designer, you know, I had an eye for this type of thing. And then I worked on myself. I know it looked really bad when you found me, but I had built myself up to it, and when I did it, it was almost pleasurable, a masochistic experience. And I thought the squash ball was a nice sadistic touch. Would make the whole thing much more credible.’

But you never thought about the forensic evidence, you little shit.

‘You’re right,’ she said, as if she read my mind. ‘I never thought about the forensic stuff. But I’m a set designer. What you see is what you get. I didn’t give a shit whether I’d get caught or not. I just wanted to kill the three of them. Jeremy, Walter and that fuckin’ little bitch, Claire Kendall. That was all I ever wanted. Whatever happened after, I didn’t give a shit.’

She pushed the bar down to my chest, and I felt one of my ribs crack.

The last thing I remembered before passing out was Ken appearing behind Teresa and whacking her on the head with a twenty-five pound dumbbell.