Terror Stash Page 9

  “I like Perth.”

  “You’re keeping your languages fresh?” he asked, as if she hadn’t spoken.

  “Of course.”

  “Next year’s postings come out in the new year. Perhaps you’ll be luckier this time.” He picked up his phone and let his hand hover over the keypad. “It’s good of you to drop by, Montana. We don’t really sit down and talk much about these sorts of things. We must do it more often.”

  She got to her feet and forced out a thank you. She shut the door softly behind her, trying to grapple with the speed at which Nelson had shut down the interview. Why had he done that? There really was no good reason to refuse her, after all.

  As she walked back to her office, it hit her. “They’re from the Middle east,” Caden Rawn had said. “That was Arabic he spoke.”

  Rawn. Possibly a killer, definitely a dangerous man, and he was the only one who might believe her.

  Her footsteps slowed until she was barely moving, as she thought it through. Nelson could very well be right about Ghenghis Bob; that was the problem. If Nelson was in intelligence, then he knew way more about this than she did. Who was she to dispute him?

  On the other hand, she knew what she had seen last night and the man’s words still echoed in her head, the Arabic phrases completely undeniable. Why had Nelson shut her down? He’d barely listened to her. He hadn’t even considered her words. She had been dismissed before she stepped through the door.

  She sank into her chair and stared blindly at her computer monitor. What to do? What to do?

  “What would Nicollo have done?” she murmured aloud. She recalled Nicollo’s history, the decisions she had made. Above all, Nicollo had fought to do the right thing, despite absolutely no one with any authority believing her. So, what was the right thing, here and now?

  If she obeyed Nelson and stayed at her desk, a man she genuinely believed to be a terrorist would get away scott free after sending five of his men after an unarmed man. But if she followed her gut instincts and she was wrong, then...what?

  Montana, you know damned well you have to do this. Caden Rawn went out of his way to make sure you were safe last night. He deserves no less in return.

  The thought clarified her decision, but she continued to sit, staring into space. Then she realized why. She was afraid of where this would take her. She had never done anything like this in her life. Whatever she did now would likely bring her face to face with Rawn once more.

  “Gutless wonder!” she railed at herself.

  But...what if she was wrong about Ghenghis Bob?

  Worse...what if she was wrong about Caden Rawn?

  Chapter Eight

  The news of Rabbit’s death reached all the way back around to Caden at about the same time the news of his own re-appearance in Yallingup must have circled back to the police. He knew the times matched, because it was fifteen minutes after that when the patrol car showed up outside the café.

  Australia didn’t run to diners, but they had some great tearooms and cafés and one of the best was on the main street of Yallingup. They served homemade meat pies and something they called Yorkshire pudding but his mother might have called biscuit. The café poured hot gravy over theirs and that suited him fine.

  Everyone there called the kid waiting tables “Roo,” although the logic for the nickname wasn’t apparent. Caden recalled the Australian habit of naming redheaded men “Blue” and let the puzzle go. Australian humour was quirky at best.

  Roo recognized him, even though it had been nearly three years since he’d last stopped by. Roo was just busting to tell someone all the gossip he’d picked up that morning and it was enough to overcome his fear of Caden. As the kid poured Caden’s first cup of tea, he passed along the major headlines and left the pot for him.

  Caden already knew most of the gossip. He’d been a part of it. The rescue of the surfer at The Bommie was fresh news and Caden suspected the woman surfer who’d done the rescuing might have been the woman in the bar last night. She’d been sitting with the surfers before Rabbit had cut his way in.

  Unbidden, an image of her face and her riveting eyes swam into his mind and he frowned. The memory of her was bothering him and that was unusual. He liked to part from both friends and strangers with all business finished and settled. He’d hooked her out of the fight and out of danger because Stewart Connie had clearly considered her not a friend, which meant his minions would have been just as happy to carve her up while they were trying to take care of him.

  But something about those few moments she had spoken to him kept nagging at him. There was unfinished business in there. Something about her kept his thoughts engaged, worrying over it.

  Where had her mind gone for those few seconds when he’d pulled off his shirt? Her gaze had become unfocused, as if her attention had been snagged by a thought or a memory. Whatever it had been, it had been overwhelming. It had taken several seconds to snap her out of the trance-like state, but he’d persisted because the cops had been arriving and she deserved a chance to melt away from the scene just as he’d intended to.

  As he drank his tea, remembering her, his hand tingled—the one he’d rested on her shoulder to help draw her focus back to the moment. Her skin had been soft and feminine, but with well-developed muscles beneath. Clearly, she was a woman used to using her body. Fit and physical.

  His body tightened and he cursed under his breath. Damn, but that was a complication he could do without. He straightened and focused on the customers in the café instead, distracting himself. He tried to catch Roo’s eye. The kid might have more information about the events last night.

  In between serving the other customers, Roo fed him the news about the three murders and the suicide. Caden didn’t have a hard time looking shocked. Encouraged by his reaction, the first he’d given him, Roo nodded and added what else he knew. That was a compilation of every speculation and scrap of story he’d heard, with a handful of facts thrown into the mix for seasoning. Caden would have to sift through it later, but it was all grave news.

  They’d hauled the five injured men from the Pink Galah to the hospital and later two of them had died. At first it was thought that they’d died of their wounds, but the wounds had not been considered life-threatening, or they would have been taken by ambulance or air ambulance to one of the Perth hospitals. Yet two men were dead. The speculators were whispering of foul play. The third, who had sustained a knife wound to the abdomen, had inserted an empty syringe into his artery and injected air. He died of an embolism within seconds. Nurses had found him on the floor beside his bed, about ten minutes later. That bought the body count up to three – two of mysterious circumstances and one by suicide.

  But the more interesting news for Caden was that Rabbit was dead. Murdered and flung into the river. Who had done the deed?

  It was around then, two bites into his Yorkshire pudding, that the police wagon had pulled up outside the café, the lights slowly revolving, and Caden realized that they believed he had done the deed.

  He’d stood up, stretched, and headed for the washroom at the back of the café. Once there, he slipped out onto the back verandah, sliding past the door into the kitchen where two busy cooks were keeping up with orders. He faded over the fence across the road.

  He paused between two houses, head down, trying to figure out which direction would get him out of town the quickest and safest. He dismissed the small notion of going back to Ria’s place for his backpack. The police would probably be staked out there already. He’d never hidden where he stayed when he was in town. He’d never insisted Ria not speak of it, either. He’d told her that morning he intended to have lunch at the café and she must have told the police. It was the only way they could be so confident about pulling up right outside its door.

  It was a pain in the butt to lose the contents of the pack, but he’d live without it. In high summer in the Australian bush, the only danger he really had to concern himself with was dehydration.

&nbs
p; The trouble was, any direction out of town meant crossing Caves Road. The cops would have it well and truly pegged. But he was going across it, rather than down it. If he came at them from an unexpected angle he might well be able to slip over without raising an alarm.

  Still refining his plan and totting up supplies he would have to acquire as creatively as possible, he jogged back to the quiet residential street and headed in the opposite direction, back toward the heart of town.

  * * * * *

  Borelli swore and hung up the phone with a bang. “They bloody well missed him!”

  Steve looked up. So did Chris. “You mean Rawn?” Steve asked.

  “Who else?”

  Who else, indeed. It seemed like the entire station was focused on catching up with the elusive Caden Rawn. Steve shifted in his chair and hefted the file in his hands. “I still don’t see how you figure he did the deed in the hospital Monday night. I saw to the distribution of the guards myself. There was no way anyone could have slipped into those rooms.”

  Borelli threw his pen back on the desk with an impatient snort. “Three apparent suicides in the space of one hour? Coincidence doesn’t stretch that far.”

  “Two apparent, one definite. The guy with the syringe still had his fingers on it. No other fingerprints. He fished the syringe out of the box on the shelf.”

  “And where was the guard while that was going on?” Borelli asked heavily.

  Steve subsided. The guard had chosen that ill-fated moment to take a toilet break. He’d been desperate and didn’t wait for someone to cover for him. He’d also been gone a lousy sixty seconds. It was all the time the injured man had needed. Steve wasn’t going to try to argue the point because Borelli was right—if that guard could turn his back for sixty seconds, so could the others.

  So Steve fumed silently. The problem was the police in this corner of the world were used to busting surfers for weed and commune residents for psychedelics, and breaking up the odd drunken bar brawl. They hadn’t been able to adjust quickly enough to the extreme factors of this case.

  Steve had been caught just as flat-footed. He’d been a little more braced for a possible breakout. He’d posted the guards, anyway. But suicide? Over a bar fight? Even he hadn’t considered it despite his gut telling him to be cautious.

  So he returned to the one sustainable argument he had. “I still don’t get why Rawn would sneak back into the hospital to kill them. Why not get it over and done with at the Galah, when he could at least wave self-defense around as an excuse?”

  “He was hurried,” Chris proposed. “He could hear the sirens and didn’t want to rush the job. So he came back later to do it properly.”

  “Bullshit.” Steve could feel his anger rising again in the face of such outright bias. “He went out of his way to minimize the damage he doled out. Just enough to keep them on the floor and no more. Even the doc made that point.”

  Borelli stirred. “Some people prefer to do their killing in private. Rawn beat Connie to a pulp three years ago. He made sure he had no witnesses then. He didn’t get to pick his turf at the Galah. So he chose his own time later.” He waved his hand in dismissal. “Don’t get your knickers in a twist looking for a conspiracy, Steve. This is little old Margaret River. The case is as straightforward as it looks on the surface, I guarantee it. We find him, we arrest him, we lay the charges. That’s our job.”

  Steve clamped his jaw together, fighting the need to scream a protest. Borelli had made up his mind. From long experience, Steve knew he would not change it now.

  They were gunning for Caden Rawn.

  * * * * *

  “I’m waiting to speak to Ms. Montana Dela Vega,” the man said.

  Montana nodded even though he was on the other end of the phone. “You’re speaking to her. Who is this?”

  There was the slightest pause. “Ah...Ms. Dela Vega, this is Constable Scarborough, at the Margaret River police station. We spoke on Sunday morning, in Yallingup.”

  “I remember you, Constable.”

  “Steve will do. The ‘Constable Scarborough’ thing is a helluva mouthful. Can I call you Montana? Yours is a mouthful, too.”

  Montana felt herself smiling. It had taken her a good year to get used to the informality of officials in Australia. Everyone used your first name here, regardless of rank or permission. A nickname was leapt upon. Often they’d bestow a colorful nickname whether you wanted it or not. Usually the nickname delivered an observant comment about your appearance or personality. Steve’s delicate request to use her first name was almost a shock to the system.

  “Sure, Steve. No problems. How can I help?”

  Again, the fractional pause. The tiny silence sent a shiver up her back and she gripped the phone harder.

  “I’m just tying up loose ends,” he told her.

  He’s lying. The mental whisper made her cautious. She kept her jaws together and waited him out.

  “We were called into the Pink Galah on Sunday night. I think you know why.”

  There was no point denying she was there. “I had nothing to do with the fight, Steve. I just happened to be caught on the fringes of it, but not for very long.”

  “I know. Caden Rawn made sure you were safely out of it.”

  This time the shiver was more of a shudder, rippling across her back with icy fingers and prickling at her temples. “How did you know that?”

  “I asked about. It’s called interviewing witnesses.”

  “You work long days, Constable.”

  “You have no idea.” She heard him sigh. “I’ve been at this for three solid days, and so has everyone else at the station. Which is the reason I’m calling. I know no one else has bothered to speak to you about it. Have they?”

  “You’re the first.”

  “And probably the last. This will sound odd, but I want you to tell me what you think happened at the Galah. Not the step-by-step actions—I already know that.”

  “What I think happened?”

  “The whys, not the whats. Why people did what they did.”

  She frowned. “You’re asking me for my very subjective opinion about motives?”

  “Motives, reasons, thought processes.” His tone made it sound like he was making a perfectly reasonable request.

  “Steve, aren’t policemen supposed to concern themselves with just the facts?”

  “Normally, uh, yeah.”

  “Then...?”

  “Tell me what you think happened, then I’ll explain why I’m asking.”

  “You don’t want to tell me now because it might color my interpretation, do you?”

  “Exactly.”

  She let her mind flicker back over the fight, the moments that led up to it and Caden Rawn’s actions afterwards. She had been over this ground many times already. “It still doesn’t make sense to me,” she admitted. “I thought I had it figured out on the way home Sunday night. I could have sworn Rawn was not interested in doing any permanent damage to any of them. He went out of his way to avoid it. That’s what he told me, anyway, and that was despite very clearly being set up. There was a man there, Rabbit—”

  “We know about Rabbit,” Steve said. “He and Rawn had a history.”

  “I heard about it. Steve, Caden Rawn barely broke a sweat over the whole thing. It was a minor hiccup that he waved away like a bush fly. I was totally floored when I heard that he’d caught up with Rabbit afterwards and murdered him. That’s the part that doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t match up with his attitude in the bar.”

  This time the silence was a bit longer. “Right,” Steve said at last. “You’re at the consulate. That’s how you know about it.”

  “I’m not that high up on the totem pole. The only reason I know is my boss wanted to bring me down a peg or two by showing me how wrong I was about something else.” She sat up straighter. “Ohmigod....”

  “What?”

  “Steve, did anyone you interviewed at the pub talk about the Arabic man in the corner?”


  “What?”

  She gripped her temples with her free hand. “Why didn’t I think of it before?”

  “You’re going to have to start at the beginning,” Steve said patiently.

  She quickly went over the few facts she had about Ghenghis Bob and his lack of reaction during the fight despite a direct appeal.

  “You speak Arabic?” Steve asked.

  She said in Arabic, “I have always been able to speak Arabic.” She switched back to English. “Ever since I can remember I’ve been able to speak and read Arabic.” She didn’t add that she could only remember back to when she was twelve.

  This time, Steve’s silence was profound.

  “It’s alright,” she said gently. “You don’t have to believe me. No one here does, either. The idea that there’s some sort of international terrorist running around the Margaret River area is hard to swallow.”

  “But you believe it,” Steve said flatly.

  “Yes.” The word emerged as a whisper.

  “What are you doing about it?”

  She could feel her cheeks flaming hot and red. “It’s not that simple. I don’t think you really understand my position here. I have supervisors and managers and....” She pursed her lips together, making herself stop. She was whining, making excuses for the fact that she had been sitting on her ass for the last two days, twiddling her thumbs because she was afraid to do anything. “No, that’s not it at all,” she admitted into the phone. “It’s the fact that the people here who don’t believe me have been working in the world political theater all their lives and they are actually laughing at the sheer idiocy of my idea.”

  “Doesn’t make you wrong,” Steve said softly.

  “I don’t like the odds.”

  Another silence. “What if I were to tell you that we think the three men who died in the hospital Monday night didn’t die of natural causes, or from the nicks that Rawn handed out?”

  “You think they were murdered?”

  Steve’s voice dropped in volume. “Everyone else here thinks Rawn sneaked back into the hospital and finished them off. They’re turning the area upside down looking for him.”