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  “Jax Gotten is in the wind,” Whitt was saying. “There’s nothing we can do about that now. But I want to clamp down on Mallally while we can. The guy’s life is in ruins. If he’s connected to Jax Gotten, if he knows anything at all about what happened to Tonya and the baby, he’ll be worried about what Jax is going to say when police catch up to him. We need to get into Mallally’s house and find that second phone.”

  Tox said nothing. He stared back at the automatic doors to the emergency room.

  “I’ve tried to get a warrant and so has Nigel. We’re coming up empty. The judge likes Jax alone for the murder, and Mallally’s probably got him in his pocket anyway. Tox, if you have any ideas about how we can get into Mallally’s place without—”

  Someone tapped Tox on the shoulder. He hung up on Whitt and looked down. A familiar face. Pretty, wide-set eyes and a small mouth. One of the nurses. Tox couldn’t remember her name. He knew she’d been the one to sneak him mini bottles of Jim Beam when she started her shift every night.

  “Hey, handsome,” she smiled. “Something I can do for you?”

  “There certainly is,” Tox said.

  Chapter 88

  TERRY LANCER WAS smaller than I’d imagined. Wiry and toned, where most of the guards at Johnsonborough were jacked into broad, bulky giants by spare hours spent in the staff gym. He was sitting in his car in the parking lot of the McDonald’s just outside Sydney Airport, watching dirty brown ibises picking through the trash. I came alongside the car and put my cup on the roof, tapped the window, holding the paper bag in front of my chest so he wouldn’t notice that I wasn’t wearing the uniform. The McDonald’s hat I’d bought from a teenager arriving for work was pulled low over my brow. Lancer rolled down the window.

  “Sir, your breakfast,” I said.

  Lancer reached for the bag of trash as I’d hoped he would. When he turned to set it on the passenger seat I reached in and grabbed the keys from the ignition of the car and put them in my pocket.

  “Hey, what—”

  I took the McDonald’s coffee cup from the top of the car, held it over his lap, my elbows and forearms resting on the windowsill.

  “This cup is full of boiling water,” I said, easing off the plastic lid. “I can feel how hot it is, even through this special cardboard liner. It’s hurting my fingers. The staff behind the counter will give you a cup of boiling water for free. Did you know that? It’s so nice. Anyway, you’re going to answer some questions for me or I’m going to dump it right in your lap.”

  Lancer stared at me, open-mouthed. He looked at the cup in my hand, then his lap below it.

  “Think carefully,” I warned. “Don’t try to grab the cup. I’ll hurl it in your face. If you try to shift sideways and get out the passenger door I’ll toss it on you, too. And don’t think I’m bluffing. You’ll actually be one of more than a dozen people I’ve grievously burned this week. I’m on a bit of a streak.”

  “Just take my money.” Lancer’s hands were gripping the knees of his uniform trousers. “My wallet is in my back pocket. I can get it. You can take the whole car.”

  “I’m not mugging you,” I said. “I’m here to talk about your girlfriend, Bernadette Goldman.”

  Chapter 89

  LANCER WAS YOUNG in the eyes, desperate-looking. He glanced around me at the parking lot, the big stalking ibises and the morning commuters pulling in, pulling out. To anyone else, we probably seemed like two people having a friendly morning chat through the car window. The water in my hands was so hot it was steaming the windscreen, adding to the sweat at Lancer’s temples.

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “I’m Harriet Blue.” I extended a pinkie finger carefully from around the cup. Without knowing what else to do, Lancer reached up and shook it delicately, grimacing as the water moved in the cup. “I’m actually a former Johnsonborough resident.”

  “Of course,” he sighed shakily.

  “We haven’t got a lot of time before the real waitress comes out with your meal,” I said. “And I want my answers before the water cools down. So let’s get moving, all right?”

  “OK.”

  “I’m investigating Goldie’s murder,” I said. “I know you two were in a secret relationship in the prison. Rumor had it that she was seeing an inmate, Anna Regent, but that’s bullshit. People saw Goldie giggling and laughing on the phone in her office and they saw her unusually empathetic approach to someone as horrendously violent as Anna Regent and they did the math. But actually her secret squeeze was you. Secret, because it’s frowned upon for prison staff to be in a relationship with each other.”

  “It’s not just frowned upon,” Lancer said, eyes on the cup like it was a gun. “It’s a fireable offense. You sign a contract when you’re hired at Johnsonborough that you’ll disclose any intimate relationships with other staff members.”

  “That so?” I said.

  “Yeah. It’s a safety thing.” He eased a breath in and out slowly. “They don’t want couples breaking policy and trying to keep each other safe when a major incident goes down. If an inmate takes your loved one hostage, you’re going to do what the inmate wants to free them, right?”

  “But you and Goldie broke policy,” I said.

  He sighed, gripped his knees. He was on the edge, stressed at the trap I’d set for him, and bottled-up grief was rising quickly onto his features. “I loved her,” he said. He bit his lips and looked away from me. I saw a waitress with a bag and a coffee cup in a tray heading directly for us.

  I made a decision. I stepped away and dumped the boiling water on the ground. Lancer looked up and saw that he was free from my trap, but didn’t have time to react before the teenage girl was thrusting his breakfast through the window.

  “Your breakfast, sir,” she said. Lancer looked at me, and I waited for him to scream for help. But instead he just took the bag and coffee and thanked the girl. I crossed the front of the car and got into the passenger seat beside him.

  We sat in silence, watching the birds. Seagulls were mingling between the ibises, padding over the asphalt in search of stray chips.

  “I cared about her too,” I said. “Doctor Goldman was kind to me. She didn’t have to be.”

  Lancer wiped the sweat from his brow with the sleeve of his shirt.

  “You can eat your breakfast,” I said.

  “You want some?” He opened the bag shakily. “I don’t usually have much room for the hash brown.” He reached into the bag and offered it to me.

  I snorted. “You don’t have to give me half your breakfast. I just threatened to boil your balls.”

  “It’s all right,” he shrugged. “Your reasons were, like, noble.”

  I took the hash brown and we ate in silence for a while.

  “You could have just asked me,” he said. “Without the cup.”

  “I haven’t found Johnsonborough staff very accommodating to my inquiries thus far.”

  “I’m not mad. I get worse threats at the prison every other day.” He smiled to himself. I could see why Goldie had fallen for Lancer. He was gentle, forgiving, sweet. I sat sideways in the passenger seat and sipped his coffee now and then.

  “How long had you and Goldie been going out?” I asked.

  “Oh, maybe six months.” He looked at me. “An inmate threw a chair at my head and the doctor in my section was at lunch so I went in to her surgery to get a couple of stitches. I’d never met her before. I work over in male housing. We kind of knew from the start that we had a thing for each other.” He smiled sadly to himself, remembering.

  “She must have had ten years on you,” I said.

  “Twelve.” He laughed. “She called herself my cougar.”

  “No one at the prison knew about your relationship?”

  “No.” Lancer looked at me. “At least I didn’t think so. But you said you were an inmate there.”

  “I only found out about you two yesterday,” I said.

  “Where from? From inside the prison? I need
this job, man. I…” he sighed. “I can’t have people knowing.”

  “No one at the prison knows,” I said. “I heard a message from you on Goldie’s voicemail. You sounded familiar with each other. Intimate. Beyond work buddies. You didn’t say your name but you mentioned a Toyota Corolla so I went to the prison this morning at about 3 a.m., caused a distraction, and nabbed the manifest from the car-park guard booth. Security’s not huge on the prison parking lot. There were only three Corollas. Two owned by married men. I thought I’d try you first. Called in a favor to run your plate and followed you from home this morning.”

  “Jesus. You’re really serious about this,” Lancer said. “You’re not just a former inmate trying to find out who killed her friend, are you?”

  “No, I’m not. I’m a cop. Well, sort of.”

  “Sort of?”

  “It’s a long story. Look, Bernadette was researching sexual guidelines between doctors and patients on her home computer,” I said. “Was there anything to her relationship with Anna Regent? Anything more than a keen interest in Anna’s rehabilitation?”

  “No way.” Lancer shook his head. “Sex between prison staff and inmates actually classifies as rape, because at the end of the day they’re the prisoners and we have the keys. It’s a non-consensual act, even if it looks like the prisoner is into it.”

  “You’re saying the only reason Bernadette wouldn’t have gone there is because it was rape?”

  “No, no, she wouldn’t have gone there at all,” Lancer said. “She wasn’t gay. At least, I don’t think so. Because we…you know…” He gestured awkwardly to himself.

  “Tell me about the rest of Goldie’s life. She bumped up her home security system in the weeks before her murder,” I said. “You know anything about that?”

  “Sure,” Lancer said. “Guards had been hassling her about over-ordering her drugs, spreading them around the prison a bit, making some extra cash. No one ever turned up to the house, but someone called her home number once, a few months ago, to discuss it. She didn’t like that. She liked to sleep soundly at night. Didn’t want to worry about unexpected visits.”

  “Were they threatening her, these guards?”

  “No, just being persistent, I think. Asking her over and over. Trying to make her understand how much money they could be making,” Lancer said. “But look, they already found out who killed Bernadette. It was some crackhead inmate.”

  “No,” I said. “The crackhead inmate, as you so tactfully put it, is innocent.”

  “What?” He looked at me.

  “And she’s not a crackhead, she’s a stoner, for the record.”

  “So who did it?”

  “I’m trying to find that out,” I said.

  “Well, I didn’t do it.” He shifted in his seat. “I…Bernie, she was my…”

  “I don’t think it was you,” I said. “You don’t seem the type.”

  Lancer exhaled.

  “But my gut instinct tells me Dolly Quaddich is innocent, too,” I said. “She was there, but she didn’t see what happened. Goldie got a phone call, and then she left the surgery and walked around a corner and was hit. And the camera covering that section of hallway was conveniently malfunctioning.”

  “I don’t know about conveniently,” Lancer said. “The cameras malfunction all the time. The prison’s a million years old. All the electrics are shot. There are power surges. Blackouts. But the phone call right after the alarm, that would have been from me,” Lancer said. “Just what the management were worried about. I heard the level-one alarm go off. It was the second one that morning. The first thing I did was call her to see if she was OK.”

  “Did she say what she was going to do? Why she went up the hall?”

  He stared at the dashboard, thinking. “I’m pretty sure she said she was going to arm herself,” he said.

  A cold chill tingled up the back of my arms. I shifted closer to the young man in the driver’s seat. “What do you mean?”

  “Bernadette wasn’t a guard,” Lancer said. “She wasn’t required to walk around with a weapon on her belt, like we were. But she had the option of having a weapon assigned to her, if she wanted it. She’d been trained with it, of course. It was in the C Block armory.”

  “So you told her to get her gun that day?”

  “I don’t think so. I think it was her idea. But I was going to suggest it. I think I remember she was kind of spooked, because it was the second alarm that morning. She said she was going to get her weapon, just in case, and I said that was a good idea.”

  “Where’s the C Block armory?” I asked, sitting back, trying to think.

  “It’s around the corner from her office,” Lancer said. “Right where she was attacked. But they already checked the armory, straight after the lockdown. Everything was still there, right where it should be.”

  Chapter 90

  IT WAS A crew Tox had used before. Tommy Mercer was driving the ambulance while Tox rode in the back with Mercer’s guys: Ryan, Jelly, and Sticks. The thugs looked strange to him in the paramedic uniforms he had borrowed from the staff lockers. Tattooed and hardened, the crew’s minds were on the job like this was going to be one of the smash-and-grab escapades that had made them infamous. The unshaven faces and scars, and Jelly’s big hairy belly stretching the front of his uniform to its physical limits, made them seem what they were: actors taking on a role. Most great criminals Tox had known were also great showmen, and this lot would need to be convincing, at least initially. The props would help. The nurse who’d helped with the uniforms probably hadn’t banked on him taking one of the ambulances, but he was hoping to have it back in good time.

  The first time Tox had seen these guys they’d been trying to blow the door off a double-walled iron safe in a gravel quarry in Greystanes. He’d watched them with binoculars as they fought for three hours to make a dent in the thing before he announced his presence. The crew had been grateful for Tox looking the other way, and since then he’d used them for a few minor criminal tasks, always in pursuit of bigger and better collars for himself. The last time he’d hired them, they’d stood guard over a pedophile suspect Tox hadn’t had the legal precedent to question, but whom he’d wanted to get answers out of anyway.

  As the four of them swayed and rocked in the back of the ambulance, Jelly perusing the little drawers all around him for treasures, Ryan spoke.

  “What’s wrong with you?” He jutted his chin at Tox. “You look pissed off.”

  Tox shrugged. “I’m just overworked and underappreciated like every other cop on the planet.”

  “There’s a baby missing,” Sticks said, picking his nose. “Cops hate that. The worst crimes are the ones with babies. Ain’t that right, Barnsie? It’s because they know they gotta find the kid but they’re not sure if they really want to.”

  Tox sighed.

  “It’s not that. It’s a woman.” Ryan sat back, folded his arms. “Face like that? It’s got to be a woman. Don’t worry, Tox, mate. Women are like buses. One goes, and another comes along.”

  “Hey, I like that.” Sticks took his hand away from his face long enough to slap Ryan on the chest. “You heard this one? I like my women like I like my oranges: with the skin peeled off.”

  Everyone looked at Sticks in silence.

  Tommy Mercer leaned back in the driver’s seat. “We’re here.”

  Chapter 91

  THEY CAME THROUGH the front doors, a crowd surging, fanning out, big guys with big voices. Jelly and Sticks shoved the gurney into the foyer. It had rattled angrily from the back of the ambulance, frighteningly close to a yellow Maserati parked in the driveway and through the security gate into the house. Tox followed the noisy brigade and watched as Tommy pushed over a lamp, just to add to the chaos, the heavy porcelain base splitting on the marble floors with a sound like a gunshot.

  Louis and Shania Mallally were in the entryway to the living room, mouths open and faces hard like they’d been arguing. They froze, doe-eyed and lost in
the noise and movement.

  “Where’s the patient? Where’s the patient?”

  “Ma’am, step out of the doorway, please! Give us space!”

  “Get back! Get back!”

  Jelly was making fake reports on a radio on his shoulder, wheeling the gurney with one hand, letting it crash into a big credenza standing against one wall, rattling glasses inside. The scene was like an improvised sketch on a big stage, the Mallallys the only people who didn’t have the script.

  “Unit two, code six, we’ve got the patient sighted,” Jelly said. “Assessing the situation. Stand by for report.”

  “What the—” Shania backed up, hands raised to her head as if to block out the noise bouncing off the walls of the foyer. “What the hell is this?”

  “We’ve received a call saying there is a man at this address acting aggressively, possibly undergoing a psychotic episode, who is experiencing life-threatening cardiovascular symptoms,” Mercer barked at Shania. He backed her into a wall while Ryan and Sticks grabbed Mallally by the arms. “Ma’am, I’ll need you to stay clear and let us work here.”

  “This is—I’m not—I—Jesus Christ! Get your hands off me!” Mallally tried to struggle out of the arms of the men shoving him toward the gurney. “There’s been a mistake!”

  “Ma’am. This is an emergency situation! Is your husband under the influence of any narcotics? Are you yourself under the—”

  Tox turned, glancing back at the tangle of bodies in the living room doorway as he headed for the stairs. He jogged silently to the second floor and headed straight for Mallally’s office. He’d discounted the bedrooms, guest rooms, bathrooms, and children’s rooms immediately. Mallally would want somewhere safe to talk to his girlfriend. Somewhere legitimately off limits to the wife.

  A desk. Papers and folders making crooked staircases toward the ceiling. Boxes labeled with dates, surnames. He shoved boxes aside, pushed books off shelves, ran his hands over the tops of high cabinets and under furniture. There was no point trying to disguise his actions. The paramedic ruse would last mere minutes. It was a smash-and-grab, in a sense. Tox went to the desk and dragged the chair out, searched underneath the seat, dumped drawers of stationery from the desk onto the floor.