Bronze: A Romantic Suspense Novel (Blackwood Elements Book 8) Read online

“Clarke always did like his food. And speaking of food…”

  “Breakfast will be here any…” A knock sounded. “Minute.”

  I took a step towards the door, then hesitated as an irrational fear took hold. The logical part of me knew it was only room service. But my inner conspiracy theorist saw Michael or Owen or Shane, the three people I was sure were mixed up in all this.

  “Want me to get it?” Russell offered. He was surprisingly perceptive when he took his face out of his computer.

  “No, it’s fine.”

  I forced myself to walk. To reach out, unlock the door, and turn the handle. And yes, it was only a waiter with a cart, and how many bloody dishes had Russell ordered?

  One of everything, it seemed, and he remembered to thank the waiter too.

  “I hope half of this is for you,” I said once the waiter closed the door.

  “No, I rarely eat breakfast.”

  My eyes rolled all of their own accord. “Then why did you order so much?”

  “I wasn’t sure what you’d want, so I asked them to bring a selection. I’m sure Leyton’ll help you to finish it if you’re not that hungry. He’s on his way.”

  “How do you know? Are you tracking his phone?”

  “His assistant called to tell me.”

  Oh.

  Fortunately, when Leyton turned up ten minutes later, he’d brought a friend, a petite brunette he introduced as Mimi Tran, also with Blackwood. She didn’t look like a native—coupled with her surname, I guessed she had some Vietnamese blood in her. Her age? I had no idea. She had one of those faces that could have been anywhere from eighteen to thirty-five. An undercover officer’s dream. Put her in a school uniform, and she’d pass for a student. Give her a business suit, and she’d be equally at home in a boardroom. She came with a fat notepad and a serious expression, but at least she took a danish.

  Leyton was younger than I expected—in his early thirties at a guess, with dark brown hair and dark eyes at odds with his bright smile. Those teeth could have launched their own toothpaste range. I half expected a cartoon twinkle and a ping every time he opened his mouth.

  “I got the basics from Emmy, but it always helps to hear a client tell the story in their own words,” he said. “Would you mind?”

  I hated talking about that time. Hated to even think about it, but I nodded anyway.

  “It started exactly a week after my twenty-third birthday. I remember because the previous Thursday, I was sitting in a Chinese restaurant with Michael and the rest of my friends, eating crispy wontons until I was stuffed. Do you know what my fortune cookie said? Your high-minded principles spell success. Which turned out to be utter bullshit. Sorry, I shouldn’t swear.”

  “Go right ahead. I’m used to it from Mimi.”

  Really? Mimi looked too sweet to curse. Like a china doll, pale apart from a deep red slash of lipstick.

  “Anyhow, that Thursday, I was supposed to meet a CI. A covert informant.”

  He nodded because of course he knew what a CI was. It was me who was stupid. Still, Russell looked as if he appreciated the explanation, which made me feel a little better.

  “I’d been a cop for five years at that point. It was all I’d ever wanted to do, and I joined the QPS right after my eighteenth birthday. I was still a constable when everything fell apart, but I’d got my dream transfer a year previously, to Task Force Titan in the Tactical Crime Squad. Michael ran it, and his solve rate was second to none. Still is, probably, because he doesn’t play by the rules.”

  “In what way?”

  “This is all hindsight, and I don’t have any definitive proof, but I’m ninety-nine percent certain I’m right.”

  “Tell us what you think.”

  “I think he accepted bribes from a group of drug dealers.”

  “To look the other way?”

  “And also to take out the competition. They gave him the information to do so, and that’s why he made so many busts. All the little things make sense now—the way he dismissed some tips and acted on others, how evidence dropped into his lap, the extra money he always seemed to have. He had a boat, did you know that? He told everyone he bought it with a life insurance settlement from his dad, but I don’t think his dad’s even dead. I’m sure I heard them talking on the phone once.”

  Leyton nodded, and Mimi took notes in neat handwriting. She still hadn’t said a word, other than a thank-you for the pastry.

  “We can check into that. Any idea where his family live?”

  “He grew up in Cairns, but he never talked much about his childhood. He told me his mum died of cancer when he was a teenager, but I’m not certain that’s true either.”

  “Brothers? Sisters?”

  “He never mentioned any. This sounds awful, doesn’t it? That I dated the man for seven months and barely knew him.”

  “It happens. Last month, we had a case where a wife wanted to know why her husband of eight years came home smelling of perfume once or twice. Turned out he had a whole other family. A kid and everything. She was a smart lady, a doctor, but he was a good liar.”

  “And Michael was a police officer,” Russell said. “They’re supposed to be trustworthy.”

  It was sweet of them to try and make me feel better, but I still wanted to kick myself. I’d hoped to be a detective, for crying out loud, and I’d missed the snake slithering right under my own nose.

  “Well, they’re not. They set me up. As I said, I was supposed to be meeting a CI, but he didn’t show. I figured he’d just got cold feet, but he was dead. They killed him in his house and made it look like I did it.”

  “They?”

  “Michael and his buddies.”

  “What were you meant to meet the CI about?” Leyton asked. “And where?”

  “The usual place—a park near his home—but I don’t know what about. He just called me and said he had some information I needed to hear.”

  “Is that normal?” Russell asked.

  “More normal than you’d think. If the information’s good, the CIs get paid for it. Whenever they’re short of cash, they come up with something worth selling.”

  Leyton took another pastry, thank goodness. Otherwise I might have been tempted to take up comfort eating.

  “Who found the body?” he asked.

  “The police. Someone called triple zero before I got there. A woman. She said she was walking her dog outside and heard a gunshot.”

  “Did you go to the scene?”

  “I would have. I was on my way, but there was an incident three blocks in the other direction, and I got sent there instead.”

  “Any connection?”

  “I don’t think so. The incident was DV-related. Domestic violence,” I added for Russell’s benefit. “A guy slapped his girlfriend for talking back to him, except she was making dinner at the time, and it got real messy.”

  “What did she do?” Leyton asked. “Go after him with a carving knife?”

  “No, she emptied a pan of minestrone over his head, but she took it right off the stove, so it was hot, and…” My nose wrinkled as I recalled the way his skin had blistered. The way soup splashed across the floor like vomit. “I only eat gazpacho now.”

  “Guess I can understand that. So…” Leyton paused for a moment as he worked up to the big question. The sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, except that night had cost me everything. “So, why would the police think you killed a guy? How did Michael set you up?”

  CHAPTER 3 - KYLIE

  HOW DID MICHAEL set me up? With careful planning, calculation, and a mean streak far longer than his dick.

  “He planted evidence at the scene. A long blonde hair on the body and another near the sink, plus my coffee cup in the trash. Then there was the circumstantial evidence—I’d told a couple of people I was going to meet a CI in that area.”

  “It’s hardly damning, is it? If you’d been at the scene, you could easily have explained the forensics away as carelessness.”

  “
Michael was the one who made sure I wasn’t at the scene. He sent me to the soup incident. And the coffee cup? The last time I got coffee from that place, I was with Owen.”

  “Owen being…?” Russell asked.

  “Senior Constable Owen Mills. He and Shane Chapman—Constable Chapman—were tight with Michael. And Owen must’ve kept my cup.”

  “Are you sure the cup and the hair were yours?”

  “The cup had my name written on it.”

  “There’re plenty of Kylies in Australia.”

  “It also had my shade of lipstick on the rim. And I knew. I just knew. Call it gut or intuition or whatever, but I just knew.”

  “A good lawyer could’ve got you off. Why run?”

  “Because of the gun. Not only did Michael rig the scene, he hid the bloody murder weapon in my kitchen.”

  “Okay, that’s a whole other level. How did you find it?”

  “I couldn’t sleep from worrying about the rest of the evidence, so I went to get a glass of water in the middle of the night. When I turned on the light, I saw one of the baseboards was loose, and I clipped it back into place. That’s what you do, right? But then I started wondering why it was loose, so I pried it away, and that was when I found the pistol, wrapped in newspaper. Because everyone knows paper’s the best way to preserve forensics.”

  “It was definitely the murder weapon?”

  “I didn’t know for certain at the time, but why else would it have been there? And yes, it was. I read about it online when I was in Honduras.”

  “Nobody else had access to your house?”

  “Not between me going to bed and waking up, and the baseboard was fine when I made dinner. I notice stuff like that.”

  Or at least, I used to before stress turned my brain to mush.

  Now Mimi chipped in for the first time in precise, clipped words. “At that point, why didn’t you take the gun and dispose of it? With the main piece of evidence gone, you could have dealt with Michael later.”

  “Firstly, because if I got caught with the gun on my person, it would’ve been even more damning, and secondly, because whoever murdered Jasper John did a thorough job of it. According to the autopsy, the gunshot killed him, but he also had knife wounds. The knife’s still missing, and coincidentally, so is one of the steak knives from the set my parents gave me for my twentieth birthday.”

  “Your parents gave you steak knives for your birthday?”

  “Mum delegated to Dad, okay?” I wasn’t sure I liked Mimi. She sounded all judgey.

  “What kind of gun was it?”

  “A Smith & Wesson .22 with a silencer attached.”

  “Not yours?”

  “No, but the month before, the four of us were at the gun club—me, Michael, Shane, and Owen—and Shane brought that exact model of gun but without the silencer. I borrowed it, shot a handful of rounds, and put it back in the case myself. My fingerprints were on it.”

  Shane had even wiped it down before he gave it to me, I remembered. Said he’d been eating crisps and wanted to get rid of the greasy finger marks. Stupid me had thought he was just being a gentleman. They must’ve been laughing at me behind my back for weeks.

  “What was Michael’s motive for framing you? If the relationship had gone sour, why not simply split up? One of you could have been reassigned.”

  “I didn’t realise the relationship had gone sour. Looking back, I think he only started dating me so he could keep tabs.” That and the fact he could fuck me whenever he wanted. “But we’d had a few differences of opinion at work. He’d let some tips slide rather than following them up and gone after other people with little to no evidence. That’s why I think he was acting on somebody else’s orders. And after Jasper John’s murder, I heard rumours on the street that John knew of a dirty cop. Of course, everyone thinks that was me, that he’d cooked up a blackmail scheme that led me to kill him, but what if it was Michael? What if the night John asked to meet me, he wanted to turn Michael in?”

  Mimi simply nodded. “You’re right. You’re fucked. I would’ve run too.”

  Gee, thanks for that, lady. Now I was certain I didn’t like her.

  Mimi glared at Leyton, and I wondered if he’d kicked her under the table. I’d have been tempted to do so myself if the table hadn’t been so wide.

  “I’ll agree the evidence against you is fairly compelling,” Leyton said, showing slightly more tact than his colleague. “Is there anything that supports your side of things? Anything at all? Emmy mentioned a phone in a lockbox?”

  “I took Michael’s phone when I left the house. I thought there might be something on it, messages maybe, but he used an app called Ether to talk to Owen and Shane, and at the time, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to access anything useful.”

  Leyton sucked in a breath. “Ether? We can’t do anything with that either. Believe me, we’ve tried.”

  So had every law enforcement agency in the world, all to no avail. Encrypted messages sent via Ether vanished five minutes after they were read, never to be seen again. Try to sidestep the app’s security, and it fried your device. No wonder it had become a firm favourite with terrorists and criminals the world over.

  “That’s where Russell comes in. He can access the messages, but he needs the phone physically in his possession.”

  Now Leyton stared at Russell with newfound respect. “You can break into Ether? How the hell do you manage that?”

  “Trade secret, I’m afraid.”

  A secret I was privy to. Ether was Russell’s app. He’d created it for fun at school, hiding behind the name Kaito Nakamura, mostly because he enjoyed the challenge of coding but also as a way to chat to his mates without the teachers finding out. Now he was struggling to deal with the damage it had done. In Virginia, he’d wanted to pull the plug on the whole thing, but it seemed that someone had talked him out of it. I wasn’t sure why.

  “We’ve got another ongoing murder case right now, and we’re sure the suspects communicated over Ether. Can you…?”

  “Get me the phones, and I’ll get you the messages.”

  Leyton glanced at Mimi, and she nodded once.

  “Crikey, this is big. Access to Ether could solve so many crimes. Do the police know you can do this?”

  “Not yet.”

  Not yet? He was planning to tell them? Offer his services? Leyton was right—this was big. Think of all the good that information could do in the right hands—I may have been less than enamoured with the QPS, but there were plenty of other police departments worldwide that weren’t quite so rotten. Still, I couldn’t afford to get distracted by the future—for the moment, I needed to focus on my case.

  “So there’s the phone, and I’m hoping it might be the smoking gun, so to speak. The only other thing in my favour is that the caller who reported the murder said she saw a man running from the scene. No doubt they’ll try to twist it and say I was wearing trousers, but it still casts a little doubt.”

  “Did they ever trace the caller?”

  “No, and we questioned everyone who owned a dog within a half-mile radius.”

  I was the one who’d pushed for that, before the evidence of my guilt began to pile up. Not one dog owner would admit to being in the area. Either they’d walked their pooches in a different direction or they were lying, and I wasn’t sure which. I’d wanted to expand the search, but Superintendent Clarke had vetoed it, citing a lack of resources. I believe his exact words were, “We’re not wasting any more time on a two-bit drug dealer.” Although he’d soon changed his tune once he thought I’d killed the man and a common-or-garden murder threatened to turn into a scandal for the department.

  But as far as I knew, the superintendent’s subsequent efforts had centred around a PR campaign rather than further attempts to find the real culprit, no doubt steered by Michael and his band of merry men.

  “So the key piece of evidence is the phone,” Leyton said. “Where is it?”

  Therein lay the problem. The phone was
the reason I’d had to return to Australia in the first place, the reason I couldn’t just have stayed in Virginia, hiding out in Emmy’s mansion.

  “I needed to put it somewhere safe. If I got arrested at the airport, I was worried it’d conveniently disappear.”

  “And?”

  “It’s in a safe deposit box. I stopped at the bank first thing on the morning I left, took out money to buy a new passport, and left the phone behind.”

  The passport guy was suspicious as hell when I’d turned up with cash—me, a serving police officer. It took twenty minutes to convince him it wasn’t a sting. Then he’d laughed his head off and reinvented me as Tegan Wallace in return for eight thousand dollars and a promise not to arrest him if I ever came back. He didn’t like Michael either, which was probably why he’d kept my secret all these years.

  “You already had a safe deposit box?” Leyton asked.

  “I got it a few years previously to store my grandma’s jewellery.” The salesman at the bank had talked me into signing up for a long-term discounted plan, paid by direct debit each month. “I used to keep it at home, but then I disturbed a burglar in my old apartment, and I didn’t want to take the chance anymore. It was the one thing I couldn’t replace.”

  “You brought the key?”

  “Sort of. It has fingerprint access.” State of the art, according to the brochure. Now, I wished I’d stuck with old-fashioned. “I have to go myself, with ID. And I’d bet my grandma’s gold necklace that Michael’s been to the bank and asked them to call the cops if I ever show up.”

  Russell had already lost most of his tan from Egypt, and now he turned a shade paler. “Is it really wise to continue with this? Perhaps it’d be better for you to go back to America and lie low?”

  I’d had the same thought a hundred times myself, but I was sick of running. Sick of pretending to be someone I wasn’t, and today, for the first time, I had help with my problem.

  “I can’t. I have to try and clear my name.”

  Even if it killed me. Living a lie was no life at all.

  Leyton looked at Mimi, and she shrugged. A woman of few words, it seemed, and those she spoke were generally unpleasant.