Murder Most Fancy, page 13
Searing examined the typed card, front and back. He ran his finger gently across the surface of the typed word ‘shaft’ and then the word ‘bleached’.
‘You didn’t know about the deceased’s hair being coloured until you spoke with the barber?’ he checked.
‘No. Who dyes their hair white? I mean, apart from people who want to go blonde. Or platinum. Or …’ there were so many shades of blonde you could dye your hair. I started over. ‘What kind of man dyes his hair white when he is lucky enough to still be Clooney salt and pepper?’
‘A man who wants to change his appearance. Be less recognisable,’ Searing said.
Oh. Why hadn’t I thought of that?
‘The bigger question,’ he went on, ‘is who uses the words “shaft” and “bleached” when expressing that? I’m not that familiar with the whole hair dyeing thing but wouldn’t you just say, “dyed hair white”?’
He was right. It was an odd way of expressing it.
‘From what you’ve told me about last night—’ he raised an eyebrow, as if he suspected this might have been an edited version of the truth, ‘—I don’t think you’re being followed. It would’ve been virtually impossible to follow you into the hotel and then into the barber and the manicurist unseen. Plus, you two were alone with the barber, right?’
Esmerelda sat silently, eating waffles and playing on her phone. She probably tuned out somewhere around Clooney.
‘Yes,’ I agreed.
‘If someone was following you, they’d likely be trying to get information from you. Or to intimidate you,’ he said matter-of-factly.
He made good points. I could see how he passed muster as a real-life detective despite his ridiculous good looks and stature.
He handed the card and envelope back to me. ‘Could someone from inside the investigation be trying to help you?’
That would mean that someone from inside the investigation knew about our investigation. Only Dame Elizabeth and Grandmother knew about our poking around and neither of them would want the police knowing. If the man in the lilies was Max, Dame Elizabeth would not want it publicised that he was found dead, with a hat line head wound, whatever that was, in her tyrannical tycoon neighbour and friend’s backyard. That would be bad. The rich did not enjoy scandals. And even if Dame Elizabeth had asked someone inside the investigation to help us, which was unlikely, the police were not exactly on the former-double-homicide-and-arsonist-suspect-Indigo cheer squad. I doubted they would oblige. That brought me back full circle.
‘I don’t think so,’ I said, pouring myself tea and sitting in the cream club chair.
‘I think it’s unlikely too,’ Searing said, pulling up a chair. He paused and breathed deeply. There was more to say. ‘You might be bugged though.’
‘Excuse me?’ I faltered, sloshing tea all over my saucer.
Esmerelda stopped eating. ‘What now?’
Searing exhaled again. ‘I don’t think you’re being followed. But … you might be bugged.’
‘You think Rope and Winters know we’re snooping around?’
‘No.’
‘What the hell then?’ Esmerelda demanded.
‘Yes,’ I said, pointing at Esmerelda. ‘What she said.’
He exhaled again and put his hands flat on the table. ‘Okay. Here goes.’ He pulled out his phone, switched on some classical music and placed it by the closet. He walked back to us and began.
‘What I tried to tell you last week at your grandmother’s,’ he said as he slid me a private look, his sculpted golden-brown cheeks colouring slightly, ‘was that …’ He paused. ‘It’s just that …’ He paused again. And then exhaled.
‘Dude!’ Esmerelda barked. She looked like she might punch him.
‘Okay, okay. I’ll have to start at the beginning. When I ran the faces from the Mediterranean Men’s Club USB last summer, I had to use a contact at the AFP to access INTERPOL’s facial recognition database. To ID them.’
Esmerelda and I nodded. This we knew.
‘Then you and I,’ he pointed to me, ‘had our conversation about the USB, the night you left for Phi Phi. You said you wanted to be a confidential confidential informant.’
‘What?’ Esmerelda quizzed.
‘Indigo didn’t want to be named as the CI who provided the USB,’ he explained.
‘You’re a CI?’ Esmerelda asked in a tone that was as close to surprise as I had ever heard from her. Well, at least equal to the time we accidentally found a yeti. Long story.
‘Yes. No. I mean, I am sort of an unnamed confidential informant.’
A small detail I had evidently forgotten to share with her.
Esmerelda dropped her waffle and stood from the table, her eyes narrowing. ‘But, like, aren’t you guys,’ she said, pointing at Searing, ‘supposed to register the names of your CIs with like the intelligence division?’
Searing eyed Esmerelda. ‘How on earth did you know—I mean—I can’t answer that question, specifically, but fundamentally, essentially, that could be construed as somewhat accurate.’
Esmerelda look to me for a translation. ‘That’s a yes,’ I said.
‘But you didn’t?’ Esmerelda pressed.
‘No.’
‘Like, dude, I’m kinda proud of you and all, but you can totally get into deep shit for that,’ she said, striding towards the door. ‘So,’ she said, increasing the volume of her voice, ‘I wanna say I didn’t do anything. I didn’t deliver anything. I don’t know nothing. I’m gonna split. Catch ya.’
And she walked out. Whip, crack. Doors, bedroom and front, closed.
It was my turn. ‘Is Esmerelda right? Have you broken some rule? Are you in trouble with your boss?’
‘Yes. No. A little, but it’s all under control.’
‘Really?’
‘Really.’
‘Okay,’ I said slowly. Searing was a terrible liar, but when he said he had it under control, it felt like he was telling the truth. ‘Go on.’
‘Because I wouldn’t provide the AFP with the name of my CI, they said the source of the USB was unverified and that the Mediterranean Men’s Club wasn’t a “real thing”.’
‘Is it a real thing?’ I asked, amazed.
‘Yes, of course it is.’
I clattered my cup in frustration. ‘What the hell then?’
‘Indigo, please let me finish. Then you can be angry at me.’
‘Fine,’ I huffed, drinking my rapidly cooling tea.
‘The AFP theory is that the Mediterranean Men’s Club are just a group of men …’
I interrupted him. ‘A group of men who are all serious criminals.’
‘Yes, they acknowledged that. But they said the criminals were strangers. Strangers who just happened to have been operated on by one common person. That there is no organised club. That the surgeon or dentist or operator just nicknamed a random group of clients the Mediterranean Men’s Club.’
‘Is that likely?’
‘No. Not at all,’ he said wryly. ‘Well, very, very unlikely.’ He rubbed his eyes. ‘Most plastic surgeons don’t do dental work and hair implants and play stylist, and vice versa; dentists and hair implant clinics don’t perform extensive reconstructive surgery.’
No kidding. Plus, I doubted it was dumb luck that one surgeon just happened to attract so many wanted criminals. ‘So the AFP dropped the whole thing?’
‘They said that without verification of the source of the USB, there was no proof the Mediterranean Men’s Club was an organised group.’
I was aghast. ‘Surely there were other crimes at play?’
He shrugged. ‘No. The actual surgeries weren’t illegal. What plastic or reconstructive surgery a patient decides to have done is entirely up to them. If, theoretically, the surgeon doesn’t know the patient is a wanted criminal, then they haven’t done anything wrong in operating on them. It’s not like Medicare pays for tummy tucks or nose jobs. It’s all privately funded. And it’s not illegal to pay for surgical work in cash.
‘They argued that most of the people on the USB were obscure, high-ranking, international criminals. That the average citizen wouldn’t have a clue who they were. Even if their surgeon did suspect, they can’t provide confidential patient records to the police without the patient’s consent. To access confidential medical records, the police would have to serve the surgeon with a warrant or a subpoena. And they’d need cause outside the doctor’s suspicions to do that.’
He was right on too many counts. The security I’d felt in the investigation into my dead husband’s illicit surgical activities fell away. I felt naked. Exposed. A tiny grain of panic sat at the edge of my throat.
‘What if you had told the AFP where you got the USB from? That it came from me and belonged to Richard?’ I asked.
‘I couldn’t tell them.’ He slid his hand across the surface of the table to mine, our pinkies touching. ‘I promised you I wouldn’t.’
‘What if you did? What if you told them now? Today?’ I pressed.
‘I honestly don’t know. Probably not a great idea. I might be charged. I might be promoted. I might be demoted or moved sideways. Maybe nothing at all would happen. The inner workings and politics of the justice system are a bit of a crapshoot.’
It hit me. ‘That is why you lost your position. Why you’re working cold cases instead of being on that AFP joint taskforce thing.’
‘No, no.’ He shook his head emphatically. ‘Cold case is solid. It could be considered a promotion.’
Now he was lying.
‘Are you and Burns still investigating the Mediterranean Men’s Club?’
‘No, not really. Not officially,’ he said solemnly. ‘Maybe just a little. On the side. Just the couple of people who might have operated locally. A few questions. Running a few leads down. Known associates. No rules broken. Just a little stretching.’
‘Anything you would like to share with me?’
‘Oh, uh, no, not really. Nothing solid at the moment.’
‘Are you two working cold cases together too?’ I asked, letting his obviously shaky answer go and dreading his next answer.
‘Oh, yeah, of course. Burns and I are partners. She’s a cop’s cop.’
That was the truth. She was going to kill me for imploding her career. I wondered how she felt about their side hustle of hunting down the local Mediterranean Men’s Club criminals.
I left my pinkie with Searing but spread the fingers of my other hand out and rubbed my head just above my hairline. I tried to process.
‘Why do you think this place,’ I swept my hand around the room, ‘is bugged?’
‘Well, this room is not bugged,’ he said confidently.
‘How could you possibly know that?’
He patted a black-grained leather briefcase with loop handles that bulged suspiciously on both sides. It looked like YSL.
‘I swept it with a non-linear junction detector while you two were having a little closet talk … I had to look it up too.’
‘A non-linear junction detector?’
‘No. That’s a bug detector.’
‘A sybarite?’ I guessed again.
‘Yep,’ he grinned, amused.
‘Should I be insulted?’
‘Not really. You’re a kickass sybarite.’ And he lifted his hands off the table and onto the sides of my face.
I was sure there was a way to resist him, but I didn’t know what it was. The kiss was not the hard-bitten encounter of the butler’s pantry. It was gentle, but also teasing and fraught with suppression. The tenderness simply added to the intensity. Like a tightly wound spring, growing tighter and tighter, pressing down, holding back. Resisting Searing was like trying to hold lust jelly in a sieve. Impossible. I once again found myself on his lap. God, he felt good. I straddled him. This was dangerous. There was a bed in this room. My bed was in this room. If I didn’t move off him soon, I might never separate from him.
My mind had gone over this moment a thousand times in a thousand different ways while I was away. While stretched out in a cabana on the beach. While in a deck chair poolside. While swinging in a white cotton hammock in the private resort gardens. While swimming. While alone.
His hands pulled up at my waist just as I tried to stand up to extricate myself from him, the combined result being I was virtually launched off him.
‘I can’t,’ he said breathlessly.
‘I can’t either,’ I panted back.
I stumbled into the bathroom and clasped the marble countertop. I recklessly threw cold water on my face then patted myself down with a plush towel. I was going to look like the bride of Frankenstein. Perhaps that might help?
It took me a few more minutes to return to normal colour and to cover the kissing marks and splashing streaks with foundation.
‘Right. Okay,’ I heard him say, to me or to himself I wasn’t sure. I walked out of the bathroom. He was standing. He’d reorganised his shirt and pants and re-tied his tie.
‘I need to finish. I need to tell you. I don’t think the AFP believe any of that stuff they told me. They know the Mediterranean Men’s Club is real. They know my CI is real.’
‘Do they know it’s me?’
‘I was the lead detective on Richard and Crystal’s murder investigation. Richard was a highly skilled reconstructive plastic surgeon with an international network of clinics, clients and contacts. The USB turned up during that investigation. I think they strongly suspect it’s you. That’s why … that’s why I was concerned they’d tapped my phones. To find you.’
My eyes and jaw went wide with amazement. ‘Is that why you ghosted me?! You thought the AFP were listening? Waiting to confirm some connection between us?’
He nodded. ‘I’m sorry. I can’t be absolutely sure they are, or were, but I’m pretty certain.’
That was the best excuse I had ever heard for being ghosted. Either this was the most honest and honourable man in the world, or he was such a great actor that he had me convinced he was a terrible actor when he was really a full-blown mastermind liar.
We stood staring at each other. Thinking.
He broke the tension by pulling his briefcase onto the table. He unzipped it and took out a large suction cup-looking device. He attached it, snap, to the end of a black pole coated in heavy plastic. He then locked a black rectangle keypad thing into place in the pole’s midsection. Each component lit up once attached.
‘Do you mind?’ he asked. ‘I didn’t get a chance to scan the closet while the two of you were in there.’
‘Sure,’ I said. What was I supposed to say?
It’s quite difficult to make small talk with a man scanning your closet for listening devices which may or may not have been planted by the federal police. Especially when you’re simultaneously rifling through his briefcase, searching for any information or clues he might have discovered about the secret club of international criminals your dead plastic surgeon husband may or may not have created, but was undoubtably heavily involved with.
‘So, Searing, how, how is your, uh, pet? Do you have a pet?’ I said, pulling my hands out of his bag just long enough to pocket one of his business cards.
I jumped as he stuck his head out of the closet and smiled broadly at me. ‘No, Indigo, I don’t have a pet. Thank you for asking though.’
He strolled back into the closet and began scanning my hanging section. Click-click. ‘I’d like a dog, but I work long hours. It’d be a bit unfair.’
‘But you work cold cases now,’ I said, a pang of guilt spiking up my throat as I dove back into the bag. ‘Those must be shorter hours.’
What the heck did I know? Cold case could have meant investigating the whereabouts of missing pallets of banana Paddle Pops for all I knew.
I stopped foraging when I found a bulging manila folder labelled UP GREENACRE 0101 WEST. Was West one of the Mediterranean Men’s Club people? Was Greenacre? Maybe 0101 meant this was the first Mediterranean Men’s Club person they were investigating. I didn’t recall anyone called West or Greenacre, but I didn’t spend a lot of time examining the USB’s contents.
The fat cream folder was bound with a yawning black and silver bull clip and tied with horizontal and vertical elastics. I could never get it undone without making a complete mess. So I stole a pen and another business card and jotted UP GREENACRE 0101 WEST on the back.
‘Not really,’ he continued, oblivious. ‘Cold cases have all the same elements as homicide, but with mounds of old paperwork. The original leads, plus any new ones, or any that might have been overlooked, all need to be run down. Everyone has to be re-interviewed. Places need to be re-canvassed. Evidence reassessed. DNA tests need to be pushed along. Sometimes cold case forensic evidence sits in a backlog queue, waiting. I’ve asked for a new autopsy on our case, but I seriously doubt I’ll get one approved. I’m not sure how, uh, thorough my cold case victim’s autopsy was, back in the day.’
Wait. I knew an autopsy person. Didn’t I? What exactly does the forensic pathologist do?
‘Who does the autopsy?’ I asked, trying to casually see into the closet to check on him while replacing the overstuffed file into the centre of the briefcase. ‘What’s their title?’ I asked, sticking my hands into the briefcase’s side pocket.
A half a second after my hand had left the pocket (it was empty, save a pen and a blank pad of Post-it notes), Searing suddenly turned around and smiled at me through the open closet door. That was enough foraging. Any more and I might have a stroke.
‘The forensic pathologist,’ he said, moving from my shoes to my beloved handbags.
Bingo. I did know someone. I’d bet a Louis Vuitton steamer case Dr Bailly was exceedingly thorough. I didn’t have a lot of swabbing experience, but I’m guessing not everyone did a full inventory of their equipment at the scene before swabbing began. She used almost as many pieces of equipment from that case as Hung Vanngo did from his make-up box. And while Hung never knew what he was going to do when he walked into a room, Dr Bailly seemed like the exact opposite. She was a woman with a detailed plan. They did have one commonality—they both seemed to assess each body according to its needs.
