Assassin

  Dedication

  For the readers

  Contents

  Cover

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Q&A with Tara Moss

  About the Author

  The Makedde Vanderwall Series

  Copyright

  PROLOGUE

  It’s illuminating to know what you’re worth dead.

  The woman stared at the figure displayed on the computer screen before her, then cast her gaze back to the open balcony, blind for the moment to the domes and spires piercing the dawn Spanish skies, blind to the pigeons flying past, the movement of cloud and light, blind to everything save for the six deadly digits imprinted on her mind. The balcony shutter doors were thrown open to the world, allowing a cool breeze into the sterile, masculine apartment. Carrer de Bertrellans and the gothic quarter beyond were still sleeping. She had an instinct to reach out and close the doors, shut herself in. But that was foolish. Eventually they would find her here.

  500,000 Euros.

  The woman knew death could be cheap. Plenty of assassins would kill for one tenth of that price, and others would — and have — killed for much less. For a car spot. For a pair of sneakers. She should perhaps be flattered by the lofty price tag, but the people who wanted her dead would not be set back by half a million Euros. They could pass off the expense as fuel for their private jet or perhaps the annual budget for the floral arrangements in their city offices and their various extravagant homes. That kind of money was nothing to them, and paying for death was nothing to them either. This was not the first time they had spent large to have her out of their lives. And so here she was, hiding out in the Spartan and heavily secured apartment of a hired killer halfway across the world, seeing her life condensed to a harrowed digital photograph, some vital statistics and that six-figure price.

  This is what my life has come to, she thought.

  No one could plan for this. Not really. She had tried to mentally and physically prepare for this moment for weeks, had in fact monitored communications such as these precisely for this purpose — connecting the dots one by one until she had hacked into the network her would-be killer was connected to, a series of electronic signals and communications exchanged online. In today’s world, if you knew the right people, removing someone was as simple as pressing ‘send’. Money and instructions sent remotely. It was the language of the modern assassin — cold and virtual on one end, and all too bloody and real on the other. Now, just as she’d feared, those who wanted her dead had stopped trying to reach the paid assassin they’d sent for her: they realised he had failed. While her family back home and her former lover in Australia worried about her whereabouts, perhaps assuming she was dead, her pursuers were taking no chances on letting her live. They’d put out a wider net. Killers from all over would hunt her down. These were hard financial times, and there would be plenty of interest in a half-million-Euro score for a mere woman of no political interest and relatively little notoriety. She would be considered easy pickings. An easy kill.

  The reflex of fear was soon replaced with another, more useful emotion.

  Rage.

  The woman looked at the photograph beneath the price. She still bore some resemblance to the image: too much. The photograph of her was around a year old. The original was candid shot, capturing her in a rush of movement, body blurred with action, running barefoot across the lawn of the palatial Cavanagh mansion in an elegant evening gown split daringly to the thigh. In stark focus and blown white by the camera flash, thick blonde hair flew back from her startled face; her eyes were wild. This image had been splashed across the papers at the time. Her presence at Damien Cavanagh’s extravagant thirtieth birthday had been a small scandal. They’d cropped the image. Focused on the face.

  She had been running for her life when that photo was taken.

  She hadn’t stopped since.

  The woman ran a surprisingly steady hand over her long, dyed-brown locks. She turned from the screen and closed the laptop with one hand.

  Deep down, she’d known this day would come.

  CHAPTER 1

  When faced with a homicidal psychopath, particularly an intelligent and sadistic one, standard police work just wasn’t enough.

  Unlike the visionary or mission-oriented mass murderer, the psychopathic serial killer does not end his reign of terror after one horrible, orgiastic spasm of violence, but waits in the shadows for his next victim. He does not turn his weapon on himself. He has no conscience. There will be no regret, no guilty confession. Intelligent psychopaths see to it that they leave no trail — no witnesses, no fingerprints and, increasingly, no DNA traces. The killer isn’t the husband, the boyfriend, the ex, the victim’s loved one, like the sad majority of homicides. There are no informants to mine, no obvious, traceable motives to follow. The serial killer is the violent stranger who doesn’t kill for money, for personal gain, for romantic jealousy, for any normal motive. Without sheer luck, or a mind that understands his, he can’t be traced or predicted or stopped.

  Federal Agent Andrew Flynn tried to remind himself of those facts as he stood before his team of rookie profilers, nursing a mild hangover and a much more vicious and distracting malaise. When he was not neck-deep in the unsavoury details and brain-searingly violent images of fresh cases — sadistic serial rapists, killers who tortured the elderly, the weak, the vulnerable — his days with the Australian Federal Police now concerned training up a small team of people who, like him, would come in to join the dots that good investigative techniques simply didn’t cover. Bright up-and-comers not yet scarred by the field. Young things who still naïvely thought they wanted this job, wanted his job. Banal settings: airless briefing rooms and impersonal hotel rooms and freaked-out country cops wondering how it could have happened to them, how this horror could have visited their nice little town. Cardboard boxes full of horrific crime-scene photographs telling horrific stories he knew could have no happy endings.

  Andrew Flynn stood before a whiteboard covered in bloody images. He closed his eyes for a moment, lids sticking from fatigue. The room smelled of strong drip coffee, disinfectant and sweat. The fluorescent lights hummed. ‘Okay. Worthington case,’ he said, indicating the board. ‘As discussed yesterday. You all studied the file last night. What can you tell me about our killer? Gender?’

  ‘Male,’ Patel answered.

  It was an obvious call, and certainly one America’s NCAVC — National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime — PROFILER ‘robot’ computer program would choose. Serial killers and rap
ists were almost invariably male. Australia had not yet had a known female offender of that type; and worldwide there was only really one woman in recent memory who fit the most narrow description of a serial killer. The US prostitute Aileen Wournos had been quite singular in being a lone multiple killer, unrelated to her victims and, some argued, sexually motivated, though her profession obviously muddied those waters. Most female killers murdered children in their care, or were ‘black widows’ who poisoned husbands for insurance, neither of which patterns matched what had happened to Mr Worthington.

  ‘Our perp needed power to move the body to the dump site,’ Patel concluded.

  ‘Yes,’ Andy confirmed. ‘Strength would be needed to move the body, and yes, statistical likelihood indicates same.’ Profiling was, at times, a matter of maths.

  ‘And the semen found,’ Leighton Gerard said. Gerard was overconfident and disruptive but well trained. Not his favourite member of the new national profiling unit. Andy had agonised over his inclusion.

  ‘Correct. Though it may not belong to the killer. Semen was motile, but that only proves recent sexual activity.’ They could not rule out the possibility that the victim was involved in an intimate homosexual relationship, unknown to his wife. It was too early to rule out any possibility, no matter how remote. ‘Type?’ Andy asked next. There was silence. It was a question not so easily answered.

  ‘Visionary? Mission-oriented? Hedonistic? Power- or control-oriented?’ The four classifications commonly assigned to serial killers. ‘Each of you did review this file last night?’ he asked impatiently, with unnecessary sarcasm and edge to his voice. On hearing his own hostility he realised his head had not stopped throbbing since he’d woken on his couch at six. He slipped a hand into the pocket of his dark blue suit and popped two Panadol from their foil, turned from the group, and chucked the pills back with a sip of coffee that looked — and tasted — like crude oil. Then he asked the question again. ‘Type?’

  Federal Agent Dana Harrison spoke up. ‘Not visionary,’ she said, and Andy thought, Finally. Harrison was a bright and eager member of the team. She was part of a new generation of officers fast-tracked by academic qualifications, having won a scholarship to study Investigative Psychology with David Canter in the UK after graduating with top marks with an MA in Psych and PhD in Forensic Psych. Out of the half-dozen members of this newly formed federal Serial Violent Crime Profiling unit — SVCP — she was the youngest and least experienced, but the most impressively academically qualified and arguably the most switched on. She was also in her late twenties and possessed an unconventional beauty that Andy sometimes found himself distracted by — full mouth, warm chocolate eyes, light brunette hair pulled back into a severe ponytail.

  ‘Good. Why not?’ he asked her for the benefit of the group.

  ‘Visionary killers often see visions or hear voices telling them to kill. This looks like the work of a psychopath, not a psychotic,’ she said. ‘It’s too organised. Also, in relation to the sex of the offender, the victim was strong and physically active so it would have taken some strength to subdue him.’

  ‘Good,’ Andy answered and tore his eyes from her. ‘What’s an example of an organised killer? What makes them different?’ he asked the room.

  ‘Well, the Stiletto Killer,’ someone answered. ‘The case you worked on. He was organised.’

  It was Agent Patel again. He was dark, heavy-set and middle-aged, and at his words a tiny, fragile thing in Andy’s chest fluttered and curled up, wounded. The same fragile thing he’d been drinking to placate most evenings. Andy took a steady sip of coffee to mask the jolt he felt. By the time he put the cup down, he was again empty of emotion.

  Patel was right. The Stiletto Killer had been organised. He’d left a trail of slaughtered women on the streets of Sydney before Flynn had figured him out, pegged his methods, his motives and his identity … and brought him in only minutes before he claimed another victim. That narrow victory was what had put him here, in this room in front of these officers. After years of Andy working his way up, his superiors had recognised his aptitude for this kind of work. He had been sent to hone his skills with the best at the Quantico FBI Academy in Virginia in the USA, where profiling and the infamous behavioural sciences unit were born in the 1970s, and where the term ‘serial killer’ was first coined. Andy’s talent for understanding psychopaths and homicidal madmen was a combination of natural ability, exhaustive study, overseas training and personal experience. Very personal. He’d single-handedly cracked two serious serial sex-crime cases, and most importantly one of Australia’s biggest and most widely known serial murder cases, ‘The Stiletto Murders’.

  But the cost …

  These officers thought of the case as Andy’s triumph and they generally forgot about the finer details. How one of the victims had been Andy’s ex-wife. How his former girlfriend had been strung up on a bed, sliced by the madman’s scalpel. How he’d very nearly lost her, too. People who knew better wouldn’t bring up memories like that in polite company, not if they were normal. But these people, here in Canberra, were not focused on niceties. They had not been there when Andy had suffered those losses, working that case. The victims were just details in a case file. Names and statistics. It had to be that way or you’d go mad in this line of work. If they knew about the personal connection for Andy, as some of them must, they filed it away somewhere as irrelevant to their task. Andy had grown almost used to discussing the famous case with the emotional distance of a robot. Though there were times, like this morning, when he found himself unprepared.

  ‘Aren’t all psychopaths pretty much classified as “organised”?’ someone added. The words drifted past Andy’s ears as his mind continued to wheel and turn, looking for something to hit on.

  He felt Dana’s eyes on him.

  ‘Not necessarily,’ Andy replied, vaguely but also correctly.

  His mind had wandered to unhelpful places. He locked eyes with Dana. Harrison. The look of curiosity and concern in her large brown eyes brought him back. She was like that. She noticed when he was distracted, when that fragile thing in him ached and writhed. She was empathetic. It was part of what made her suited to profiling, and unsuited as well, he feared.

  ‘So, if this is not the work of a visionary killer, then what is our probable type?’ Andy asked.

  ‘Hedonistic?’ It was Peters.

  Andy nodded. ‘Type unknown, but possibly hedonistic.’ Someone who killed for excitement and arousal. ‘We’ve seen something like this before, with a murder in …’ He looked to the file notes. ‘An unsolved murder in Berrima eighteen months ago that may be linked — details are in your updates files — though the post-mortem wounds are considerably more advanced in the Worthington case. Why does the killer remove the flesh from these areas?’ He pointed to the victim’s cheeks. ‘Ideas?’

  ‘Um, to disfigure —’

  ‘No,’ Andy said, cutting Gerard off. ‘Blunt force disfigures. Fists. Boots. Hammers. It’s fast; it’s passionate. But this is surgical, isn’t it? Precise.’

  ‘To keep as souvenirs?’

  ‘Better,’ Andy said.

  The Stiletto Killer had kept souvenirs. He’d been a shoe fetishist. A foot fetishist. They’d found stiletto shoes in his bedroom in the small apartment he had shared with his elderly mother. They’d also found individual toes and even an entire foot, preserved in formalin, amongst other body parts. But the Stiletto Killer was dead now. It was over. Had been for more than a year. So why had he been on his mind so much lately?

  The answer was obvious. It was because of Makedde Vanderwall. It was because she was still missing.

  Mak.

  Andy’s phone vibrated in his pocket. He slid it out, recognised the number, put it back. His shoulders rose, along with the urge for a drink. Makedde. His every muscle and fibre heavy with an emotional weight he could not unburden, he glanced helplessly at the white, round clock at the end of the room. It was nine-forty-five. Too early to take a br
eak. Too early to deal with all that phone call would stir up.

  Focus.

  Andy’s phone rang again. He felt it vibrate in his pocket for a few seconds before he looked. It was the same international number. ‘I have to get this,’ he finally said, relenting. ‘Harrison, take over.’ She stood and swallowed. ‘Brief the group, please,’ he told her, indicating the file. He left the room. It was better he was out of there, but he regretted that he’d called on Harrison twice. It was foolish.

  He shouldn’t treat her any different from the rest.

  Flynn made his way down the blindingly overlit corridor to his office and closed the door behind him. As swiftly and instinctively as a smoker whips out a cigarette, he opened the bottom drawer of his desk, pulled out a seven-hundred-millilitre Johnnie Walker and sipped a shot straight from the bottle. It felt reassuring in his hands, and the whisky-burn in the back of his throat was both familiar and necessary. It was only one sip. One. He recapped and replaced the bottle, closed the drawer and straightened up. Then he put in a call.

  ‘Mr Vanderwall. I’m sorry I missed you.’

  ‘Have there been any updates?’ Les Vanderwall was straight to the point, his voice punctuated by tiny cries of static across the twelve and a half thousand kilometres between them.

  ‘Not on our end,’ Andy admitted, that small creature in his chest squirming again. They’d had this conversation before. ‘You know I’m not involved with the investigation.’