Hindsight (44 page)

‘Feels like you just dodged a brick, right? But done in earnest, I could have knocked you senseless — or out cold under the perfect circumstances. That’s ten years with orphans and crazies,’ she reminded him. ‘I know how to defend myself.’

He chuckled nervously. ‘Okay, so maybe I have been underestimating you — but let’s see if we can’t wreck Greppia’s day without testing any of those skills.’

Matron Sanchez sat alone at her desk, working by lamp light. She’d closed her drapes, ensuring her privacy, but couldn’t help feeling a little paranoid about secrecy now that she knew Fredarick was keeping his eyes
and
ears trained on her every move — and especially on those moves she hadn’t made yet.

She kept her voice low for hours while cold-calling every hospital and mortuary within four hours’ drive on the mainland, trying to catch news of how and where Mira’s body might be processed, if at all. But just as Freddie had prophesied, she’d turned up no trace of her.

Now her last hope of unravelling the truth about Mira’s fate seemed to lay in the slim set of pages that she’d stolen from his manuscript while he’d been out indulging the many needs of his more outgoing and egocentric personalities, Freddie, Ricky and Darick.

So far the pages had read a lot like a crime novel with Ben, Mira and the soldier called Lockman as the three main characters — until she reached the most recent page, which nearly sent her cross-eyed as she read it again:

Sanchez gulped, reading the Braille by sight now as well as by fingertips to ensure she didn’t miss anything, but there was no mistaking it. Fredarick had anticipated every word, every thought and every action inside her office — aside from her gulp, and the laptop computer, which sat open with its cursor blinking in anticipation of her need for taking notes. He’d even foretold her desire to read it again — word for word perfect — until the last line of the page where ‘the phone rang’.

Sanchez let it ring, and flung open her drapes long enough to check her reflection, and sure enough, she appeared to be dead and distorted, as she always did whenever Fredarick was rewriting her future. Fear made her heart beat faster, knowing that whatever she did or said now could result in her death instead of dodging it.

She reached for the phone with a trembling hand.

‘Sorry to call so late,’ said a woman who introduced herself as Willow Springs. ‘I’m a registered nurse from the Royal Hospital in Brisbane and I’m afraid to say, there seems to be something strange going on with one of your patients.’

‘Mira Chambers? You’ve got her?’

‘Oh …? I was rather hoping that
you
did. We’ve turned the place upside down here, and it looks as if she’s disappeared.’

‘You’ve lost her body?’

‘Oh, she’s not dead. At least she wasn’t when she came in to emergency with mild shock and a few scratches.’

‘When? Tell me everything.’ Sanchez leaned forward in her leather chair, while Springs reported the details of Mira’s collection from a boat ramp on the river.

‘If she was any other patient,’ Springs explained, ‘I’d simply assume she’d changed her mind and walked out. It’s not uncommon for such women, I’m afraid. The process of checking for evidence can be as traumatic as the crime itself.’

‘Oh, dear. What did she do?’

‘How typical to assume the victim … or didn’t you know? Sorry, I just assumed you did. The national park ranger who brought her in reported that she may have been raped, but they both vanished before the doctor had a chance to speak to either of them.’

‘Park ranger? What was his name?’

‘A young woman, actually. She provided Miss Chambers with a clean change of clothes and attended her scratches en route, but the bag she provided with the damaged clothes is now also missing. So if your girl had been sexually assaulted, I’m afraid the evidence has vanished with her … as I was saying, I would have assumed she’d left of her own accord, except I noticed her address had changed since her last admittance, so I checked the previous record and found that she’d been logged in as one of your high security patients — eye surgery a fortnight ago with Dr Zhou. That’s where the mystery deepened. There’s no other record of the procedure being completed or of him working at this hospital before or since, so I thought you might need to know that something very strange has been going on.’

‘Zhou’s one of ours,’ Sanchez said, rather than explaining any involvement with military scientists. ‘How bad were her scratches? Could she walk?’

‘Oh yes. She had one slight but lengthy gash on the side of her face, near her ear, but most were only superficial on her hands and chest. Last time I saw anything like it was on a kid who’d tried to baptise his cat in a toilet. Only from the distance between marks on your girl, she must have taken on a full-grown tiger.’

‘And the park ranger, did she give a name?’

‘Sounded foreign to me — French, I think. It’s been entered on the system as G. Bitch — a typo apparently. The logo on her shirt suggested she was stationed on North Stradbroke Island, but I’ve gone through the phone book for Straddie and there are no Bitches over there.’

Sanchez held her tongue. Having organised Mira’s guardianship papers with Ben’s mother, she could think of at least one. In fact, her main worry in releasing Mira to Ben’s care and Mel’s secret guardianship was whether or not Mel and Mira would ever get along. ‘Was there no man with her at all?’ she asked. ‘Should have been a rather solid, handsome-looking fellow with deep olive skin and dark hair.’ For the life of her, she couldn’t remember if Ben still had his goatee the last time she’d seen him. ‘He’s about six-two and strikes most people as a gentle giant.’

‘It’s interesting you should say that. I had a security guard check over the tapes on every exit, and apparently there was a man seen with her on another floor soon after she disappeared from emergency — a little taller than six-two but pale skin, which could have been from lighting. Police officer. We have tape of him entering the building, but not leaving. Strangely, he seems to be gone now, too. So I sent a runner down to the boat ramp where the ambulance picked her up, and as you’ve probably guessed already, no sign of a boat anywhere.’

Sanchez tapped her thigh nervously. She’d only had time to visit Ben in hospital four times since he’d been shot, and during three of those she’d noticed a traffic cop supplying coffee to Mel while she remained stationed at his bedside.

‘I have a hunch,’ Sanchez said. ‘Can you check, please, if there’s a nurse on duty tonight in your geriatrics unit by the name of Mellow Chiron?’

‘I know Mel,’ Springs said, sounding taken aback. ‘She’s in the ICU — near the last place where your girl was seen with the officer and park ranger.’

‘Excellent. Can you transfer the call please?’

‘You misunderstand, Matron. She’s
in
the ICU — as a patient. Critical, I’m afraid, but stabilised. Unfortunately, that’s more than I should say, since the staff over there are still trying to contact her next of kin.’

Sanchez gulped, worried now for all of them. ‘But if you know Mel, you should know that Ben is her next of kin. He’s the gentle giant I mentioned; the one who should’ve been with Mira Chambers.’

‘No sign of him, sorry.’

‘Okay, well if you do manage to contact him, do me a favour and let me know?’

‘Sure, I will if you will,’ Springs replied, and they exchanged additional contact numbers.

Sanchez tried Ben’s phone at home next, unsurprised when his answering machine responded as it had done for the past few hours, then his mobile phone responded in the same manner, with a service network message that his mobile was either switched off or not in a serviceable network area.

Scratching her chin, she considered her options, then dialled again.

‘Sergeant Delaney,’ said the woman who answered. ‘What’s the emergency?’

‘It’s me again,’ Sanchez replied, having called once already that night trying to report Ben and Mira as missing. ‘Is there any chance I can get you to drive out to the Chiron place
before
enough time has elapsed to make them officially missing? There has to be something wrong out there. Ben’s mother is in the ICU at the PA Hospital and they’re looking for him now too.’

‘Be glad to,’ Delaney replied, stifling a yawn, ‘but as I just told a nurse at the hospital, I can’t go anywhere until I get my wheels back.’

‘Oh? How long will
that
take?’

‘Five, maybe six hours. We’re talking dawn, plus another twenty minutes for me to drive up there. Could have been sooner, but the officer who has my car didn’t think fit to switch on the two-way. I’ll grill him over that as soon as he checks in — which could be any time soon by the way, so if he’s up that way already, rest assured I’ll send him to look in on them.’

Sanchez thanked her but hung up, fuming. She needed to avoid any more interference from Freddie — now more than ever — so she moved as silently as she could manage, polluting the past with as few echoes as possible, and transferred all calls to her mobile phone, then collected her car keys. She held no doubts that she’d missed the last ferry to North Stradbroke Island for the night, but she felt determined to find some way or other to get over there, if she had to strip down and swim with the sharks.

General Garland leaned beside the communications console inside her airborne command centre, awaiting the latest situation report from her various field units. Across five monitors, she also conducted a meeting with several ministers, environmental interest groups and a team of lawyers, defending her recent military activities interstate and on land that was subject to an injunction while in dispute of redevelopment issues. Then a sixth monitor blinked on, and she excused herself from the meeting, momentarily putting them all on hold with a screensaver that scrolled through an assortment of military vehicles in action, from an F16 breaking the sound barrier in cold air to a Ulysses class submarine breaching the surface almost vertically.

On the sixth screen, she saw the visual feed from the visor of a sergeant wearing a set of prototype night-owls, and saw through a thicket of scrubby trees to a yacht that was beached in a small, placid lagoon.

‘Good to see you, Sergeant,’ said Airman Lasso, who was also monitoring the screen. ‘For a while there, we thought we had a man down.’

‘Lost my com-set in the fire,’ Patterson reported.

‘And the care package?’

‘Lost in transit. Have attempted to reacquire line-of-sight surveillance at the suspected destination, but she’s not here. Family members are equally stumped — seems she vanished leaving only two strips of lace and a fifty dollar note.’

Infuriated, Garland shouldered aside two young male communications officers and grabbed the mike from Airman Lasso, as if her life depended on it. ‘You’ve lost her
again
?’ she asked Patterson, dumbfounded. ‘Or did they terminate her?’

‘Unclear. The yacht’s here on the lagoon side of the house, as you can see. Looks abandoned. We searched it. Found blood and a few buttons, but she’s gone. Do you wish to check replay?’

‘Hold,’ she ordered, then turned to her senior communications officer. ‘What news from sat-obs, Airman?’

Lasso shook his head. ‘I’m checking all satellite feeds again myself, but so far all imaging confirms delivery into family hands, followed by plain sailing east to Stradbroke Island.’

Garland punched the wall. Off-air, she muttered, ‘I don’t believe this!’ Then tossing the mike back to Lasso, she issued orders for another team to be sent in to relieve them. ‘I want eyes on that house at all times, and I want Echo Papa’s unit to back track to those co-ords where you lost her signal and widen the search area. Send in one of the fishing trawlers to pick them up. Then fire a scud into sat-obs. I want to know why they seem blinder than our care package.’