Darkening Skies Part 11

At least the nurse who'd been on duty last night recognised her and directed Gary to take her to the cubicle furthest from the bed where Jim had died. Mark took a seat by her side instead of following instructions to take the next bed. Dishevelled and grimy with dust and ash, his eyes reddened with irritation, blood drying on his neck and shirt a he had to be feeling as s.h.i.tty as she did, but even in boyhood he'd put others first. Put her first.

A rare man, Mark Strelitz, and she should be thanking him for saving her life, for getting her out of the inferno, for staying with her ... yet the words were sucked in to the whirlpool of her emotional overload and she hated her own inadequacies, her failure at something so simple.

He waited until the nurse left them before he asked in a low voice, 'Do you want to tell me what you've found?'

Facts. She could deal with facts. Grasping the distraction, grateful for it, she wriggled up to a sitting position, the pain in her ankle sharp but bearable, her breath only catching slightly with the movement. Much better, being upright, rather than the disturbing vulnerability of lying flat on her back, helpless.

She unzipped her bag, sending a quick thanks to the universe that it and the evidence it held remained intact. If they'd made it as far as the office, if she'd put the drive into Mark's computer before the blast, chances were it would have been lost.

She had her fingers on the printed newspaper pages when the nurse a Mark called her Rhonda a returned, pushing a small trolley with monitors. Jenn zipped her bag closed again.

Rhonda checked their details with friendly efficiency and ran through standard observations for blood pressure, pulse, oxygen levels and responsiveness.

'Both of you put those masks back on for a little while,' she instructed. 'Doc Cameron's on her way in. Would you like me to pull these curtains closed?'

'No, please don't,' Jenn said quickly. Just the thought of being shut into a small s.p.a.ce, even by fabric, almost had the panic chemicals surging in her head again. s.p.a.ce and clear view versus privacy a tonight she'd take the s.p.a.ce. Particularly since there were no other patients around at present; the Sat.u.r.day-night drunks mustn't have got around to damaging anyone yet.

Rhonda left them alone, walking out of the main emergency room to the kitchen beyond, and only when she was out of sight did Jenn open her bag again. She took out the copy of the Gazette's front-page article, double-checking as she did that Wolfgang's USB drive was still safe.

She pa.s.sed the page to Mark. 'Take a good look at the photo.'

He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, studying the page. Like her, his gaze gravitated to the corner of the image where the tarpaulin covered the front of the car. Where Paula had died. His eyebrows tightened and she saw him swallow.

'Not there,' she said gently. 'The back of the car.'

He stared at it for several seconds before he noticed what had caught her eye. 'That's an odd place to put the inset picture, isn't it?'

'Yes. It's very amateur a not aligned with anything, not centred. It's almost covering the back tyre. Except ...'

He finished the sentence for her. 'Except that's where there should be the edge of the tyre, you can't see it.'

'That's right. It could just be the quality of the photo a night scene, zoom lens. But the emergency spotlights seem to light that area well, and the wheel arch is sharply in focus.' So sharp that Wolfgang might have intentionally centred the camera's focus on that exact spot.

Mark thought it through aloud. 'The tyre could've been flat. Or if I'd swerved sharply, perhaps run over something, it might have buckled.'

She'd gone through the same ideas herself. 'Yes, either of those possibilities could explain it. But they don't explain why the inset image is positioned to obscure it, or why Larry Dolan at the Gazette became very cagey when I asked him about it. Or why Wolfgang Schmidt warned me to be careful when he slipped me a USB drive with the images he took at the accident site. That's what we need to look at. There has to be something there. Something that somebody wanted covered up.'

She fell silent as the door swished open again. Be careful. Oh, yes, she'd be careful. People had died. Others were frightened. And someone who had convinced a man like Wolfgang to stay silent all these years had to be a significant threat.

The ring of lights in the CT scanner whirred around his head, a bright reflection of the infinitely circling concerns occupying his mind. The head injury was the least of his worries. The throbbing and nausea were dissipating now the toxic smoke was clearing his system and he doubted that the scan would find any skull damage or internal bleeding.

He couldn't find any pattern, any logic to the events. A Molotov c.o.c.ktail thrown at his ute had more in common with the graffiti a an expression of anger a than with the more specific search for papers in his office at Marrayin, or the murder of Doc Russell.

Unless the arsonist knew about the fuel on the back of his ute a fuel that turned the crime from attempting to fire-damage a vehicle to a near-fatal explosion.

Dan Flanagan had seen the fuel containers.

The scanner ceased its whir, and the technician slid him out of the machine. She had barely finished unclipping the head brace when Mark swung his legs over the side of the examination table and stood, more than ready to return to the emergency room and Jenn.

'Whoa, there,' the technician said. 'You'll have to wait for the wheelchair. I'll call for the orderly now.'

The technician had been a few years behind him at high school, and now managed the small department servicing the region. She was highly regarded by her colleagues and Mark trusted her abilities. 'Unless you saw something nasty on the scans, I'll walk back.'

'The radiologist in Newcastle will look at your scans a hopefully tonight,' she said, properly giving nothing away. But she didn't object again to him walking the short distance down the corridor alone, and in that he had an answer. His head was likely fine. Now he just had to make sure Jenn was.

In his absence Steve had arrived, and was waiting restlessly by the nurses' station while Morag Cameron a Mark could hear the doctor's soft burr of an accent a spoke with Jenn behind drawn curtains.

He heard no anxiety in the voices, so with nothing to be done there for the moment, he beckoned Steve into the room they'd talked in last night, closing the door. Outside the window a few late visitors pa.s.sed through the garden on the way to the wards.

Steve dumped his laptop case on the table and dropped into a chair. 'Morag will have my head if you're supposed to be in bed and connected to monitors.'

'I'm okay. I'll do the right thing and stay and do the hourly obs.' More because he wanted Jenn to stay than because he thought he needed it, but he dragged out a chair and was glad to sit rather than stand.

'Good. I'll have someone on protection duty here overnight.'

'Is that really necessary?'

'Yes. Already arranged. Even before the Feds phoned and asked for it.'

'I've resigned from parliament. I'm not their responsibility anymore.'

'Your electoral office was just firebombed. I don't think they're splitting hairs about your resignation date. They're probably sending someone up tomorrow. It's going to be a real party,' he added dryly. 'There's a couple of Ds from Sydney homicide arriving tonight, and a few extra uniforms from around the district. And, as well as the Feds' protection squad, I've had the agent from their drug squad on the phone. She's the one who was here a few months ago, working on the case against the Flanagan brothers.'

'I remember her.' Cool and efficient and a stickler for process. Also, if he wasn't mistaken, with a healthy suspicion of Dan Flanagan and a determination to find reliable evidence to tie him to his sons' criminal activities. With officers from homicide, plus the locals, the investigation would be revved into high gear a and their presence would, he had to hope, deter any further acts of violence. 'The sooner we sort out this mess, the better. I'll write up a statement straightaway. Not that I saw anything useful.'

'Yeah, so you said. Molotov c.o.c.ktail, fuel-laden ute, kaboom. Forensics are on their way too. They'll check if that's all it was.'

If that's all it was. 'I've got no evidence to suggest that the explosion was anything but a combination of circ.u.mstance,' Mark said, weighing his words with care. 'An aggrieved person striking out, unaware of the fuel load. But there were a couple of people who knew about the fuel. Jared at the depot. And I saw Dan Flanagan there, too. We spoke briefly.'

Steve raised his eyebrows. 'How long ago was that?'

'About four o'clock. I went straight to my office afterwards.'

'Did he say anything of interest?'

'You know what he's like. He said nothing that couldn't have been entirely innocent.'

'Hmm. I'll find a reason to have a chat with him, check what he was up to this afternoon.' Tapping his fingers on the table, working things through just as Mark was, Steve asked, 'Do you happen to know what information Jenn Barrett has found?'

'Something that may be odd about the crash site. She has some images on a memory stick. That's why she came to my office a to use my computer to view them.'

'Good. We could do with some leads.' Steve patted his laptop. 'Let's see if she's finished with the doc, and take a look at these images, then.'

When they walked back to her bed, Jenn was sitting upright, her natural, restless energy returning along with some colour to her face.

Morag Cameron glanced up from writing notes at the nurses' station and pointed her pen at him. 'Mark. Oxygen. Now. And leave it on until I've seen consistently improved levels.'

Constrained breathing and unfamiliar weakness still dragging at him, he didn't argue, but he pulled up chairs for himself and Steve beside Jenn's bed before he slid the plastic mask over his face. He needed to be functioning at his best and he'd do what he had to.

Morag filed her notes and left the quiet emergency department. Silence settled, only distant sounds from outside drifting in. While Steve booted the laptop, Jenn showed him the image from the newspaper.

'Is this in the police file you have, Mark?' he asked.

'Not that one. The only one in it is taken more from the front of the car, on the other side.' He found it harrowing to look at every time, despite the blurriness, with the low tree branch stabbing through the windscreen, and his imagination filling in the vision his head injury had wiped clean.

'Does it report on the damage to the car?'

'Describes the impact damage at the front, consistent with hitting a tree. No mention of other damage. I emailed a scan of the file to you not long before Jenn arrived at my office.'

'Good. Thanks. I'll go through it tonight.'

Mark doubted that the detective planned to sleep. With homicide detectives arriving shortly, there probably wouldn't be much sleep for any of them.

Jenn had the USB drive ready, and plugged it in as soon as Steve logged on and pa.s.sed the laptop to her.

'There're two folders,' she murmured. '"Strelitz" a that'll be the one.'

Steve leaned forward to view the screen. Mark stood, resting a hip against the bed to look over Jenn's shoulder.

Jenn noticed, and angled the laptop towards both of them. 'There must be twenty or more photos here. Let's see ...'

Image after image filled the screen, the Corolla his parents had given him for his birthday a red splash of colour against the darker, night-lit shades of trees and road around it, the blue tarp covering the pa.s.senger side of the car another stark contrast. Where Paula had died.

'There!' said Jenn, pointing at the screen. 'This is the photo Wolfgang used in the Gazette. Let me just zoom in.'

'Jesus,' Steve muttered under his breath. 'Why the h.e.l.l ...'

The lower portion of the image grew larger and clearer as Jenn zoomed in. There was no rear near-side wheel, only the drum, and a gouge in the half-metre of gravel between the edge of the road and where the drum rested. Mark's thoughts paralleled Steve's: how the h.e.l.l could a front-on collision with a tree impact a rear wheel? Gil had never mentioned anything.

'I'll get on to Gillespie,' Steve said, his jaw tight, quick anger starting to rise. 'He must know something more than he's said.'

'Not necessarily,' Mark said as he lifted his oxygen mask, Gil's words from their conversation last week replaying in his memory: 'I'd got you out of the car and was doing what I could for Paula. I couldn't get to her through her door so I was kneeling in the driver's seat ...' 'Gil said he was on the other side of the car, on the driver's seat when the sergeant arrived. He might never have seen this side of the car.'

The last half-dozen images Jenn clicked through were quickly shot variations of the same angle, with the empty wheel well clear in all of them.

Mark smothered the flicker of hope with logic. 'It doesn't change anything,' he argued. 'I might still have been drinking. I might have run over something on the road and damaged the wheel.'

'Perhaps,' Jenn conceded, 'but why did they go to so much trouble to conceal it? It's not mentioned in the report, not mentioned in Gil's committal hearing. And why did Wolfgang suggest there's risk in knowing about it?'

A good question, and Mark considered it. Wolfgang was a man who kept to himself, so although they lived only a few kilometres apart Mark had little real knowledge or sense of him. Intelligent. Wary. Reserved, under a socially polite, artist facade. Reclusive, in that neither he nor his wife joined community activities, although they donated modest amounts to them. Criminal? Other than the faint odour of marijuana wafting around him, Mark had seen or heard nothing to suggest it.

'This Wolfgang who gave you these a big bloke?' Steve asked. 'Lives outside Dungirri, off the main road and wears leather like a Viking?'

'Yes,' Jenn answered. 'Wolfgang Schmidt. He used to work part-time for the Gazette. Where do you want me to copy these images to?'

Steve began to reach over to take the laptop, then sat back again with noticeable self-restraint. 'Just copy them to the dropbox,' he said. 'That'll back them up to the server later.'

As she copied the folder across, from his view over her shoulder Mark read the name of the second folder: 'Boheme'. The faintest spider-web of a memory brushed the edge of his awareness but vanished before he could grasp it.

'Open the Boheme folder, Jenn.'

'Just about to,' she said.

Most of the files listed were named in some sort of code: six numbers, two or more letters. Dates perhaps a but if so, some related to the 1970s, long before digital photography. More than forty files, all images.

Jenn clicked on the first file.

's.h.i.t,' said Steve.

Mark shifted slightly so that the glare from the overhead light didn't fall on the dark, under-exposed image. A black-and-white picture of a naked woman lying among cushions on a bed, her arms above her head ... tied? ... her legs spread wide. Nothing subtle or artistic or beautiful. Mark found the implied power of the photographer over the powerlessness of the woman repugnant.

'I don't ...' Jenn shook her head and opened the next file. Then the next, and the next, working her way through the list.

More of the same kind of image, but with different women, different positions, their faces out of shot, some covered by blindfolds. A few included a naked male in the frame a but never a male face a and intercourse occurring. Intercourse a or rape? Mark saw little evidence of pleasure, and his disgust and anger increased with each image.

'I thought this guy was supposed to be some type of artist,' Steve objected. 'This is just p.o.r.n. Bad b.l.o.o.d.y p.o.r.n.'

Mark didn't argue the definition. 'But why did Wolfgang give these images to you, Jenn? Along with the accident photos?' he asked.

'I don't think ... Listen, I've seen some of his work online. I researched erotic art for an article years ago. He does beautiful images, respectful, often in the natural environment, showing reverence for both people and nature. This stuff a it isn't even well framed, or properly in focus. There's no skill in this.'

'You're suggesting someone else took them?' Steve asked.

'Yes.'

Steve's phone burst into an incessant ring, and he swore and excused himself to take the call, answering it with a 'Yes, sir,' as he walked out the emergency-room door.

With a little more s.p.a.ce, Mark pulled up his chair again. Not only could he see the screen better, he could see Jenn's face too. Brows drawn in concentration, she gnawed at her lip as she stared at the file list. The oxygen mask hung around her neck, forgotten. As he'd forgotten his. He didn't put it back on.

'If it's dates a years and months a some of these images are decades old and must have been scanned from originals,' she said. 'There're no clothes to date fashions, but the hairstyles ... see, this one could well be the seventies. Can't really see her face, though, or her make-up. And see the last-modified dates? Looks like the files were created or modified on two consecutive days a July thirteenth and fourteenth a almost five months ago.'

Five months ago. Before Gil Gillespie had returned and the Flanagans' criminal activities had been exposed. Forty years after the first image was taken, if the date codes were correct. The woman in it might be in her sixties now.

'Can we take a look at the accident folder again?' Mark asked. He leaned forward to see more clearly, resting a hand on the bed beside her. He'd become accustomed to the smell of smoke that hung around him a both of them a but he caught another waft of it, and Jenn's hand moving on the track pad still wore the dressing from yesterday. Stark reminders of the dangers they'd survived. Of the dangers she'd faced that all, ultimately, came back to his announcement and the accident with Paula. The accident images and these images, Dan's veiled threats, Wolfgang's caution a he had to ensure her safety from whatever had been unleashed.

Jenn looked up from the screen at him, eyes narrowed by her frown. 'All the accident images were created around the same time as the other folder. July. Why July? Did anything happen then?'

'I can't think of anything significant. It was before Gil returned.'

'July. Five months ... oh, s.h.i.t. Marta died five months ago. Wolfgang's wife. He told me at the pub. They'd been together forever.'

He now remembered skimming the obituary. He'd known Marta only a little better than he'd known the more private Wolfgang. There'd been an exhibition of her work at the Birraga Art Society five or so years ago a the first local recognition of the talent in their midst. From their brief meetings he recalled a shy, self-effacing woman, who'd studied under a master potter in Germany before emigrating decades ago. And in the rubble or whatever remained of his Birraga office he had a set of her coffee mugs, the rich brown decorated with the salt-glaze technique in which she'd specialised.

'So, if Marta's death prompted him to scan the old photos, why?' Jenn thought aloud.

She sat there in the hospital bed, still with irritation reddening her eyes, dust and ash marking her T-shirt, and asked him why a man had delayed taking action on incriminating photographs until the woman he'd loved was gone.

'Perhaps he was protecting her. If these images represent illegal activity, then their existence is a threat to whoever's behind it. Gil was intimidated into pleading guilty because someone threatened to hurt Jeannie. If Marta was threatened, or Wolfgang was afraid they'd get to him through her, that might have kept him quiet.'