Assassin Read online

  Then, in an area of graffiti-stained stone and increasingly dire-looking shops selling the same tired souvenirs — plastic bulls covered in bright shards of glass, T-shirts with vulgar slogans (SPAIN apparently the acronym of Sex Paella Alcohol Is Needed), red polyester flamenco dresses swaying in the breeze out front — she found the address she’d seen in Luther’s contacts. Before her was a single door and a narrow shop window of dirty glass, lined with gold watches, glass costume jewellery, fake Rolexes and dusty clock radios. Deeper inside were cardboard boxes brimming with what looked to Mak like junk. A show of desperation and broken promises frozen in time and locked behind glass — wedding china, engraved anniversary gifts, vinyl records that once meant something to someone. She checked the address again and shrugged.

  Could this be it?

  She pushed open the door, the edge of which hit a small bell rigged to chime, and she walked over a doorstep that was worn smooth like a river stone from more than a century of use. ‘¿Hola?’

  A strong, swarthy man of about five foot nine emerged from a back room, frowning. His hair was black and curly, his eyes dark. His beard was the result of at least two days’ growth. He wore jeans and an unironed, collared shirt, gold rings on his fat fingers.

  ‘Hola. No parlo el catala,’ Mak told him. Her Catalan needed work.

  ‘Ingles. English,’ he replied in a heavy accent. It was a comment, not a query. He looked her up and down from the tips of her motorcycle boots to the top of her dyed raven hair, eventually settling somewhere in the upper half.

  She nodded, wearing her most good-natured expression, but not a smile. ‘Javier Rafel?’ His dark eyes flickered with recognition. Yes, it’s him. ‘Mr Rafel, you come highly recommended.’

  ‘By whom?’ he replied slowly, with a long gap between the two words, as if his brain was searching for both the right language and the right response for the circumstances. He hadn’t decided yet what he thought of her. He moved behind his cash register, and placed his hands on a broad open book — a ledger.

  Mak removed a thick wad of Euros from her satchel and calmly laid them on the table under her palm, right in the crease of the book. Between her thumb and index finger the number 100 was visible. Javier quickly took the bills from her and slid them under his ledger, then lifted the edge to count all twenty of them. His grubby hands were swift and no one would see the transaction from the street. Yup, this was her guy. He lumbered past her to the door and flipped the sign over to indicate that he was closed. ‘You come,’ he said in a gruff voice and led her to the back room he’d first emerged from. It would have been big enough for perhaps four people to stand comfortably if the space had not been filled with tatty boxes, a wooden chair and an overpoweringly large black safe, much newer and more high tech than the shopfront would lead one to expect. As it was, the two of them could barely fit in the remaining floor space. Mak was immediately on high alert. If something went wrong, there was only one exit, possibly with a time lock or other security device on it that this man could activate if he chose. If he somehow had an idea of the money he could make by capturing her, dead or alive, he would not hesitate to lock her inside.

  No paranoiac. Don’t get paranoid.

  She fought to remain composed as he closed the door, locking the two of them together into the windowless space.

  Luther Hand had trapped her in that dank cellar while she was drugged and unconscious, but she was alert now. She could defend herself. She’d brought Luther’s Glock, a gun she’d practised with every day. It was loaded, but the safety was on. This man could not trap her. She was more likely to kill him here in his shop, out of paranoia, then to end up at his mercy.

  Her gun hand itched, and she rubbed her jeans pocket absent-mindedly.

  ‘How long for a Euro passport?’ she said in a steady voice. ‘It has to be fast.’ She had not seen her Canadian passport since Luther Hand had abducted her. She felt certain it had been burned to cinders in the French farmhouse. She had never made a move abroad without it, but her passport had been in her handbag, along with her mobile phone, all taken by Luther when he’d abducted her. They were doubtless destroyed. She had considered visiting an embassy to apply for another passport, but that would quickly put her back on the grid. Considering the reach and resources of her opponent, such a risk seemed unwise. But acquiring false identification brought its own risks. She’d wrestled with this step.

  ‘You policía or something like this?’ the counterfeiter asked her.

  She looked him in the eye. ‘No,’ she said. Daughter of a cop, yes. And no, he would not approve. ‘I am not a cop,’ she confirmed, plainly and decisively. ‘I’m someone in need of a service, and I hear you are the best to provide it. Have I been misled?’

  ‘This passport. It is for you, yes?’

  She nodded.

  ‘I don’t know …’ He was obviously fishing for more cash. ‘It is difficult.’

  ‘That’s two thousand I just gave you. I’ll give you another eight when I have that passport in my hands, as long as you can do it quickly. But if I’ve been misled …’ She frowned and put out her hand, palm up. ‘You can just give me my two thousand Euros back now and you won’t see me again.’

  His eyes widened. ‘Let’s see now,’ he protested quietly.

  It was a good starting price. Not crazy enough to make her stand out as a fool, she figured, but good enough to show she meant business.

  ‘Top quality. Fifteen,’ he said. ‘Five now.’

  Her face hardened. Luther’s notes indicated this was his local counterfeit passport contact. From what she’d seen of Luther’s collection of passports, the work was excellent. Or perhaps Javier handled the business end of things and someone else made the goods? Could those fat fingers really produce so exacting a product? Either way, she was sure this was the man, and she needed ID.

  Mak didn’t want to be taken for a pushover. ‘Twelve. Four now, eight later. That’s all.’

  ‘Fifteen is my price.’

  ‘Fine. I’ll have my money back now.’ She turned and moved to leave. She’d stand at his counter until he came round. She didn’t like this airless room.

  Javier touched her elbow and nodded his confirmation. ‘Two days,’ he said. He appeared to think for a moment. ‘Come on Friday around five. The shop will be closed. I will be here.’

  She handed him an envelope containing her unsmiling passport photographs. They wouldn’t let her wear the glasses in the image. She’d not been surprised, though she preferred the morphing effect of the spectacles. Without them she felt she looked just a little bit too much like Makedde Vanderwall.

  ‘Friday,’ she repeated. ‘I’ll bring the rest then.’

  They had a deal.

  Business completed for now, she stepped out onto the dirty street and took a deep breath. Two days was even faster than she’d hoped. Only two days and she would have her own identity. She could travel. She could check in to any hotel. She would be so much more unhampered. Mak wondered what had kept her from taking this step before.

  Two days …

  Javier Rafel could not believe his luck. Grinning at the thought of all the money he would soon make, he picked up the phone and made a call.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Cassimatis family lived in a single-level red-brick home in Merrylands, in Sydney’s west. Every centimetre of the eight-hundred-square-metre lot served a purpose. There was the house itself, fully packed with six family members, the single guest room overflowing with stored toys and rarely used gym equipment. And there was the driveway, bumper to bumper with his-and-hers family cars, and the small yard adorned with a basketball hoop, two bicycles, two tricycles, a leaf-filled inflatable kids’ pool — currently out of use — and several pieces of weather-worn sporting equipment. On any given day the cars and bicycles and footsteps of varying size came and went at regular intervals, and the lights inside burned through half the night.

  Tonight the family was joined around the large, circular
kitchen table by their guest, Agent Andy Flynn, finishing a late dinner of steak, potatoes and peas sautéed in lashings of pepper, salt and garlic. The eldest of the four children, Dominique, was the first to leave the table after clearing his plate, followed closely by the others old enough to walk, and Jimmy, who tactlessly explained that he had to piss.

  Andy found himself at the table alone with Jimmy’s wife, Angie Cassimatis, and the youngest boy, Edmond, who watched the profiler with eyes the colour of dark chocolate, drool wetting his gap-toothed mouth.

  ‘More water?’ Angie offered. She was a tough matriarch in the traditional Greek mould. She ran the household with a firm hand, got the kids to church on time and could often be found — dark cascades of curls piled on her head — cooking and designating chores like a sergeant. Somehow, with four children, she’d also found time to complete her training as a nurse.

  Andy shook his head. ‘Thanks, Angie. That was lovely.’ He hadn’t had a home-cooked meal in a while. He’d forgotten that full, wholesome feeling.

  Angie got up and began to load dirty plates into the dishwasher with one hand while supporting the smallest Cassimatis over her shoulder. Edmond continued mutely to watch Andy from his elevated outlook, mouth open. He was sleepy.

  ‘Let me do that,’ Andy protested and pushed his chair out.

  ‘Sit!’ she demanded, pointing a finger. ‘You are a guest here. I won’t have you clearing the dishes.’

  This was a regular pattern whenever Andy visited, which hadn’t been terribly often since he’d moved interstate. He knew Angie didn’t take kindly to guests trying to help out. In time the toddler began to fuss and Angie abandoned the dishes and excused herself from the kitchen to make her way to the closest couch. ‘Sure I can’t get you anything more? Ice cream, maybe?’ she asked across the room, and in seconds she had undone her top and pulled Edmond to her breast.

  ‘No, I’m fine. Thanks, Angie.’

  A soft smile spread across her face and a kind of peace seemed to settle on the house as the boy fed. Though Angie seemed unbothered by the company, Andy became self-conscious looking in her direction. He began to concentrate on the bottom of his water glass, wondering if he would ever become a father. The responsibility of parenting scared him more than a little. Maybe that was why he kept fucking things up. Despite having been married once, he’d resisted ‘settling down’.

  A toilet flushed and Jimmy returned to stand in the kitchen doorway, leaning his bulk against the frame. He was built like a teddy bear, all stomach and grin. He’d put on a few kilos since Andy had seen him last. If Andy’s Achilles heel was his drink, Jimmy’s was anything deep-fried, or made with chocolate. Or both. Doctors had warned him to cut back for the sake of his health, but he’d obviously been ignoring that advice lately. ‘Mate, wanna go somewhere for a beer?’ Jimmy asked, rubbing his hands together.

  ‘I would, but I’ve got an early morning,’ Andy replied. He pushed his chair out again and started to stand. ‘I’ll help finish the washing up —’

  ‘No, no,’ Angie protested from the living room, though he’d hoped she wouldn’t hear him. ‘Don’t touch a thing. You’re a guest here,’ she said, though when Edmond complained she turned back to murmur sweet nothings and stroke his fine hair.

  ‘A nightcap then,’ Jimmy suggested. Before Andy could protest, Jimmy left him to cross to the liquor cabinet in the living room, where he poured them both a Johnnie Walker. He knew Andy would be unlikely to resist his favourite drop.

  It would be rude to say no, Andy supposed. He hadn’t seen his closest friend in a while.

  ‘Get you anything, hon?’ Jimmy asked his wife as he walked past her, balancing the overfilled drinks. Angie shook her head and continued to run delicate fingers over their youngest child’s hair as Jimmy bent to kiss her on the forehead. Andy watched the exchange with a flicker of sadness. The breakdown of his own brief marriage to Cassandra didn’t have to taint his relationships forever. Some people simply were not suited. He could have tried harder with Mak. He could have been more open. He could have taken a real chance. She wouldn’t have left him then. She wouldn’t have gone to Paris …

  Jimmy returned to the kitchen and closed the door for privacy, clearly relishing the chance to talk. ‘I thought you’d never come by again, you dick. How about my boy?! Beautiful kid, isn’t he? You haven’t seen him since he was, what? Six months?’ Jimmy had sent photos, but Andy hadn’t found time to visit. ‘He just had his first birthday. They grow so fast.’

  ‘You do have a great family,’ Andy told him sincerely.

  ‘Four sons!’ he exclaimed and flexed a flabby bicep. ‘Who’d have thought?’

  They clinked their glasses, brought them to their lips and tipped them back. As ever, the whisky tasted good. Possibly a little too good. Andy felt his shoulders drop. This was a good idea, he decided. He’d been too tightly wound.

  ‘So how are things with the … S-C-V-P?’

  ‘SVCP,’ Andy corrected him.

  Jimmy made a face. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘It’s fine. Unless you factor in that I trained in an area that’s rapidly losing credibility.’

  ‘Skata. Is it that bad?’ He’d obviously heard some recent controversy.

  ‘Depends on who you ask, I guess,’ Andy replied. ‘Criminal profiling has taken a public beating lately. It hasn’t helped my case, that much is certain.’

  Over the years Andy had strongly associated himself with the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit (BSU) and Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU). He’d spent a lot of time in Quantico, learning the FBI methods of profiling pioneered by Robert K Ressler and John Douglas in the seventies. It wasn’t what he’d joined the police force to do, all those years earlier, but it was what unfolded for him, especially after apprehending the Stiletto Killer. Andy proved adept at homing in on the hardest killers to catch — the loners, the ones who killed randomly, who killed strangers, the sadistic ones or the psychopathic ones or the crazy ones who kept on killing until they were stopped. And the FBI program was the most promising. Now, years on, he’d staked his career on it and he could see those foundations crumbling before his eyes. There’d been some damning research released, most notably by a team of psychologists at the University of Liverpool, concluding that the FBI’s celebrated methods were worthless or worse, in some cases actually impeding investigations by sending officers after the wrong suspects. And there’d been a big piece in The New Yorker recently, criticising John Douglas, and James Brussel before him, essentially comparing the famed profilers to astrologers and psychics. Charlatans even.

  Twenty odd years after the FBI’s criminal profiling methods reached critical popularity with The Silence of the Lambs, Andy had finally established himself as Australia’s top profiler exactly when the world decided they didn’t want one. What were the chances?

  ‘Fuck, man, I’m sorry,’ Jimmy said and meant it. ‘It’s not like anyone can fault what you’ve done, however you did it.’ He might not understand Andy’s process, exactly, but he was sincere. Jimmy knew how much his friend had sacrificed, personally and professionally. ‘I mean, you are the one who figured out Ed Brown. And that other fucker. That rapist.’

  ‘At the SVCP we use a combination of profiling methods, but …’ Andy trailed off. But it doesn’t seem to matter. The future of the unit is uncertain.

  My future is uncertain, Andy thought.

  Their conversation paused. They sipped from their drinks. The air felt heavy.

  ‘So what about this murder in Surry Hills?’ Jimmy began. ‘You think it’s a serial? That he’ll do it again?’

  Andy nodded. ‘Given the opportunity, yes.’ That was the fear. Any kind of domestic murder was a tragedy, but with a killing like this there was the very real danger that it would happen again, possibly soon, after a cooling-off period of unknown duration. Crimes like this were rare, and driven by intensely sadistic compulsions, not by the more normal motivations of greed or jealousy. Andy believed the murder of Ms Hempsey wa
s not the result of a personal relationship, and clearly that was Inspector Kelley’s suspicion, otherwise he would not have been called in.

  ‘So what about the husband? The boyfriend? He in the clear?’

  Apparently Victoria Hempsey’s boyfriend hadn’t been on the scene long. He was an IT guy. No record. On the night of the murder he was with five colleagues at a popular restaurant in the city.

  ‘The husband died some time back. So far, Kelley doesn’t like the new boyfriend for it,’ Andy explained. ‘We’ll see. His alibi is good. Kelley did dig up a couple of sexual assaults that might be related. It could give us more to go on, if we’re lucky. Do you remember a rape in Strawberry Hills years ago? The woman who was tied up? It was quite a brutal attack.’

  Jimmy nodded. ‘The one where her shoes were stolen and we all thought it was the Stiletto Killer come back to haunt us?’

  Andy flinched.

  ‘So this might be the same guy who did the rape?’ Jimmy continued, frowning and rubbing his lower lip with the side of one hand.

  ‘Could be. The same guy struck again a year later,’ he said of the Graney assault.

  Jimmy nodded to himself, paused and nursed his drink. ‘Sick bastard. You got DNA?’

  ‘They found semen on the victim. They’re running it for a match to the DNA from the rape cases to see if there is a link,’ Andy explained. ‘Maybe they’ll get their results tomorrow, but it could take a few more days.’

  It wasn’t like CSI, on which you could get DNA and solve a case in thirty minutes, minus commercials.

  ‘Sick fuckers,’ Jimmy said. ‘I’ll never understand where these arseholes come from.’ He tilted his head and finished most of his glass, the ice clicking against his teeth. ‘Another?’ he offered.

  To his own surprise, Andy still found himself resisting. He wanted to be sharp for Inspector Kelley in the morning. And for Dana, he realised. ‘No, thanks,’ he managed, though he knew he sounded weak. His friend raised an eyebrow, then went quiet for a while, rolling his empty tumbler from side to side on the tabletop, making wet crescents.