Poison Bay Read online

  He grinned. “I’ve been trying to teach Tom that rules were made to be our servants, not our masters, but it doesn’t seem to have taken.” He pushed down on the armrests and levered himself out of the canvas chair.

  “How long have you been trying?”

  “Nearly eight years now.” He indicated the other chair for her, but she remained standing.

  “What will you be having for your dinner?” she asked, her head tilted.

  After a brief verbal scuffle covering stress, the nutritional value of wine, and the proper functioning of the human body, he found himself in the kitchen toasting slices of bread excavated from the freezer. Beside him, Ellen was cooking up some kind of omelet involving several not-too-ancient eggs, grated cheese also from the freezer, and the contents of some cans she had evaluated and found acceptable from the motley collection in his cupboard. There had been no time for shopping since he returned from leave. Her domestic activity in his home was rather wonderful, but he forced himself to pull his thoughts back. She’s a relative, Peter old son, that’s what she is.

  They ate in companionable silence on the veranda, unembarrassed by the crunching of toast and the scraping of cutlery. The egg creation was surprisingly fragrant and delicious. Ellen took a sip from her glass of wine, and Peter saw her eyebrows go up.

  “What did you expect?” he teased. “Battery acid?”

  She smiled. “Don’t take this the wrong way, Peter, but I’m getting the impression more and more that you’re not the typical small-town cop.”

  He thought about what he might say to that, and opted for the truth. “I used to be a city detective in Christchurch till my marriage went south and I decided to get out of Dodge. It wasn’t that much fun hanging around watching some bloke cut me out of my daughter’s life.” He said it without self-pity.

  “Isn’t it harder, though, now you’re not able to see her regularly?”

  “I think it’s actually better for both of us this way. I was getting a bit aggro with him, and that wasn’t good for my relationship with Tahlia. I’ve been doing all the work to keep in touch with her, but she’s legally an adult now, so hopefully she’ll start to reciprocate soon.”

  “And if she doesn’t?”

  “Then I’ll keep on keeping in touch.”

  “Do you miss the city work? It must be very different here.”

  “Everyone up there seems to be drinking caramel lattes and shoving drugs up their nose. Down here it’s more community policing. You feel part of something. It was just a place to recover at the beginning, but now I actually prefer it.”

  “Well I’m glad you’re on this case. It’s turning out to be more complicated than anyone would have thought. Those photos in Bryan’s house, and the fact you’ve had so much trouble finding fingerprints…” She shook her head, remembering. “If there’s been a crime here, it makes him look more and more like the perpetrator instead of the victim. When you put it together with the will you received today, it creates a very strange picture.”

  He glanced at her from under his eyebrows. “How do you know about the will?” Some things were discussed openly in the search room, and some were not.

  “Um...” She smiled sheepishly. “I might have read it on your desk when I went in to give you those printouts.”

  He stared at her. “So, you can read upside down? I’ll have to remember that.”

  “It was just an automatic reaction, I’m afraid, when I saw those lines highlighted in yellow.” She looked uncertain. “Am I in trouble? Are you going to ban me? If you need to do so for the sake of the investigation, you should, but for the sake of my sanity I’m hoping you won’t.”

  He frowned, thoughtful. “I won’t ban you just yet, but I may need to. Do you think it’s helpful for you to be talking about all these things?”

  “Yes, it is. It makes me feel like I’m doing something about it. Relieves some of the psychological pressure. I did the same thing when my husband was dying. I investigated treatments and doctors, assessed options. For some people that would make it even more stressful, but it helped me to cope.”

  “When did he die?”

  “A little over a year ago now. Melanoma.” She sighed. “Twelve months from freckle to funeral.” The words were flippant, but the tone was not.

  “That sucks.”

  “Yes. It really, really does.”

  He changed the subject. “Like a quick coffee before I go back to work?”

  She smiled. “Can you do a caramel latte? I hear they’re very nice.”

  He grinned. “Sorry, we’re all out. But it’s not instant, at least.”

  A couple of minutes later he was pouring from the coffee plunger. “If you feel able to talk about it,” he said, “I’d be interested in your perspective on what’s going on with Bryan Smithton.”

  “Well, to be honest I’d like to get some of the thoughts outside my head. It’s getting crowded in there. I’ve obviously thought a lot about that visit to his house today. Bryan was clearly suffering some form of mental illness, and the death of Liana had become his focus. The arrangement of those photos on the cupboard door makes that clear. The death of his parents might be influential too, given the ‘happy childhood’ circle he’d placed around her, but Liana is the trigger for whatever it is that he’s set out to do. The eight photos at the bottom represent everyone who was in that room the night Liana shot herself. And the big black crosses through the photos look like… well, the impression I received from the whole arrangement was that he thought they should all be punished for what happened to Liana. Eliminated, even, if that’s not being too dramatic.”

  “Would he have any reason to think it was their fault?” He knew he was on dangerous ground asking such a thing, when one of the “guilty” was her own daughter. But she seemed able to discuss it, he needed to know, and she was his best available witness.

  “Rachel discussed it with us in great detail in the days afterwards. Liana gave a very nasty little speech before she pulled the trigger, blaming them all for failing to support her in her desire for an abortion. Rachel took it very much to heart, and we had to spend a lot of time talking it all through with her. She struggled with guilt over things she could have said or done differently. Any sensible person would, if a friend committed suicide, even without the direct accusation. We finally helped her understand that while we can always be better friends than we are, suicide is ultimately a choice. No one forces it on another person.”

  “You don’t believe there was any kind of conspiracy?”

  “Absolutely not. There was no organization about it. Some of them didn’t even know she was pregnant till that night, and the ones that did hadn’t discussed it with each other. Even Rachel and Callie, who were best friends, hadn’t discussed it. At a different time of year, I’m certain that they would have done, but they were so busy with final exams that all their normal routines were in uproar.”

  “Do you know how it affected Bryan?”

  “I do know he was visibly distressed at her funeral, which they all were, and yet Bryan was never given to displays of emotion, so that made it all the more upsetting to watch. I recall discussing with Roger our concerns that Bryan might not work through it the way he needed to. He was inclined to bottle things up.”

  “You don’t know if he talked it over with his parents?”

  “His parents were overseas when it happened. They weren’t at the funeral, and as far as I know, they didn’t see him for several months.” There was something steely about her expression as she said it.

  “You didn’t approve?”

  She paused a moment and sighed. “I was a little judgmental, I suppose. It’s so easy to criticize someone else’s choices when you don’t really know what’s going on, isn’t it? But I always thought they shouldn’t have had a child if they had no time for him. You must remember that this happened at the end of high school, just after graduation, so they weren’t even present for that milestone in their son’s life.” />
  “They weren’t interested in him?”

  “Oh, they were interested. Like you’d be interested in a long-term experiment that you checked on from time to time. They wanted to see what they’d made.”

  “But did they make a murderer?” He stared at the lake, ruminating.

  She apparently recognized that the question did not require an answer. “The will doesn’t make any sense, does it? Why leave your wealth divided between seven people you hate, the very people you blame for your girlfriend’s death?”

  Peter glanced at her. He probably shouldn’t tell her. It would upset her. But he wanted her analysis. “They have to survive Bryan for thirty days in order to inherit, which probably means he doesn’t expect them to do so. And the will you saw on my desk is not the one we found at Bryan’s house. That one left everything to the aunt, and appears to have been a deliberate decoy. I asked for the Australian police to search Kain Vindico’s home because he made multiple phone calls to Bryan in recent weeks, some of them quite long. They found that copy of the will there.”

  She stared at him and the pause stretched. He could almost hear her mind making connections and rearranging previous assumptions. “So whatever Bryan was up to, Kain was in on it.”

  “You may be aware, since you have such good radar, that I was never quite convinced Bryan’s death was an accident, although previously I’d been inclined to see him as the victim not the criminal. It was just a hunch before today, but the strangeness of that will and the extraordinary fact that it was in Kain’s possession has given me some leverage both with my own superiors and the police across the Tasman. They’re hacking Kain’s laptop right now to see if they can find any emails or other evidence, and they’re also checking the computer of Erica Bonkowski, who made a couple of international calls to Bryan. There was nothing suspicious found in her home, so I’m not sure if she was complicit, but it was more contact than the rest of the group had.” He shrugged. “She might just be sociable.”

  “What a tangled web Bryan has woven.”

  “Indeed.” He knew he really should stop now, but he didn’t. “I’ve got a lot of options chasing themselves around my head about Bryan’s death. Did Kain push him in the drink to activate his inheritance, or did the group discover what Bryan was up to and overpower him?”

  “There’s another option. Don’t forget that Bryan had put a big black cross through himself. He blames himself as well as them.” She drew a long ragged breath, and made a visible effort to center herself. “He could have killed the others, then jumped.”

  Peter stared at her. She clearly wanted his feedback so much that she could vocalize the unspeakable, so he honored her determination by continuing the discussion. “It’s possible. But the second will seems to indicate he expected them to outlive him a little. He could have been relying on the wilderness to kill them, perhaps involving Kain to help that plan along.”

  She nodded slowly, staring at the lake, and then shook her head. “But there was a cross through Kain as well.”

  He absolutely shouldn’t tell her this part. “That puzzled me too, until I found out that Bryan’s Dunedin lawyer has another will, signed ten days later, that Kain probably doesn’t know anything about.”

  “Another one! What’s in it?”

  “I don’t know. The lawyer won’t release it. His orders were to withhold it for thirty days after Bryan’s death is declared.”

  She latched onto one word. “Declared. So that explains why he made it so hard to formally identify his body. No fingerprints, no DNA traces.”

  “Of course! Why didn’t I think of that? He’s a ‘clean skin’—he’s never been in trouble with the police, so we have no fingerprints or DNA on record. And if he did jump in the ocean… he’d know that the sea rarely gives up its dead out there. It’s a freakish thing that we found his body at all. An unusual combination of winds and currents, apparently.”

  “So it could have been years before anyone benefited from his death.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So what’s in the third will? Maybe it just transfers the estate back to the aunt. But if that were the case, why hide it? If the second will shows us that Kain was somehow involved in this… ‘crime’, or whatever we’re calling it, it’s quite possible the third one could identify another accomplice.” She swung in her chair to face him fully, her expression intense. “There could be someone out there following them, or even someone working right alongside us in the search room, who stands to gain from the death of seven more people. We need to know who that is. Urgently.”

  Peter sighed and scratched his ear. “I know. I’m trying to get a warrant for the will, but it’s tied up in red tape.”

  Ellen turned again to stare at the lake, and her eyes narrowed in thought.

  33

  “So, what are we going to do?” said Callie. They’d crawled back off the mountain of jungle-rubble, and huddled under the shelter of a large tree fern to regroup. Her legs still felt like they were made of rubber, and Jack looked a bit green. They both needed a nice hot coffee with lots of sugar in it. Callie found herself disappearing into a momentary daydream about the funky pottery mug on her desk at work, souvenir of a Tasmanian holiday, and its texture in her hand, its weight and warmth when it was full of coffee from the barista next to the office…

  Jack’s voice hauled her back to Fiordland. “Well, there’s no doubt we have to tell the others now. And we’ll have to tell them about Sharon.” His face turned bitter. “If we’d told them sooner, would Adam still be alive? I’ve made so many stupid decisions the last few days.” He stared morosely at the river, still leaping with runoff, even though the rain had eased to mere buckets.

  “So it’s somehow your fault that someone pulled out a gun and shot Adam, is it?” She shook her head. “I had no idea you were so wicked. Or so important, for that matter.”

  He rolled his eyes, but his dismal mood did seem to lighten a degree or two. Jack could usually recognize the truth when it was pointed out to him, even in sarcasm. He sighed. “Well, it’s just that Adam had been stalked by crocodiles and stuff and lived. If he’d known there was a threat, he may have been able to avoid it. A bullet in the forehead! He must have walked right into an ambush.” He started scanning the riverbank upstream, and the opposite side of the steep valley. “I wonder if whoever did it is watching us now? And how close do they have to be to do it again?”

  She searched her memory. “I’m almost certain that bullet wound is the kind you get from a small gun, up close. Which would mean, I think, that it isn’t a sniper.”

  “Actually, that would make sense. The best sniper in the world couldn’t have shot him from a distance in that really heavy rain. So maybe we don’t have to watch the hillsides and mountaintops all the time. But I guess it doesn’t necessarily mean the shooter doesn’t have another gun. They might be equipped for both.” He sighed and rubbed his face with both hands.

  Callie went very still. “You know what else it could mean? It could be one of us. A small handgun could easily hide in one of our rucksacks. It’s not as though we unpack them fully in front of each other every day.”

  “I guess so. But why would any of us have come on this hike prepared to kill someone? Why would anyone come at all if they’d known what Bryan was planning? Or they’d need to have a separate agenda to Bryan’s, which seems even more unlikely.”

  “I suppose it doesn’t make much sense.”

  “We’d be foolish to dismiss any possibility, given everything that’s happened.” He thought a bit more. “The other problem would be: where did they get the gun? You can’t bring a gun through customs. So they’d have got it after we arrived in New Zealand. We all arrived on the same plane, except for you and Adam, and then got on the shuttle together, so there wasn’t really an opportunity to meet an accomplice.” He paused again. “Although, I guess we weren’t exactly watching each other every single moment. Who could have had a motive to kill both Adam and Sharon? They l
ive in different states and haven’t even seen each other since high school.”

  “That’s if the same person killed both of them.”

  Jack visibly recoiled, and stared at her. “So there’s two homicidal maniacs on our trail? Are you nuts?”

  Callie gave a lavish shrug. “This whole thing is preposterous from beginning to end. But I was thinking more that one of us could have killed Sharon—because that killer wanted to live, and Bryan or his goon could have killed Adam—because that killer wants us to die.”

  “Oh.” He stared blankly, thinking. “They’re not the same sort of killing, are they? Different methods, and very different victims, tactically speaking—one an asset, and one a liability, putting it bluntly.” He sighed, and buried his head in his hands. “Argh! What a mess!”

  “In any case, I think we’d be wise to keep in mind there might just possibly be a gun among us, and someone who isn’t afraid to use it.”

  Jack nodded. “Watch out for furtive behavior with rucksacks. If there’s a motive we don’t know about, it could have been any of the other three—Kain could have come back from Neverland to do it, Erica actually admits to being nearest to Adam at the time, and even Rachel could have circled round past Erica in that useless visibility.”

  Callie said, “The other three… there’s only five of us now, did you realize that? We started with eight.” She sighed deeply.

  “Yeah. I keep hoping this is a nightmare and I’ll wake up back in Brisbane with the ceiling fan on and Rufus nudging my foot with his tennis ball.”

  “It’s funny what we miss, isn’t it? I was hankering after my pottery coffee mug a minute ago, with a nice steaming latte inside it...”

  Jack smiled. “We can still get through this, if we don’t give up. We really need to believe we’ll be home soon.”