Instead I’d been trapped in a claustrophobic interview room for well over an hour. What I’d expected to be a friendly chat, with maybe a tolerant wrist slap for the uninvited house entry, had instead been an ambush with a double whammy interrogation. The bad cop-bad cop routine had totally unnerved me. Coleman’s silence had been just as intimidating as the CO’s pointed questions. The urge for alcohol was strong, but I fought it. No matter how rattled I felt, it was only ten-thirty in the morning.
As I approached the car, I spotted someone leaning towards the rear window. Sean. He was holding the baby in both hands so that he could see Wolf inside. Actually, it wasn’t a baby so much as a little kid. I did the sum on my fingers. Sean and the pixie’s son must be nearly eighteen months old. Patrick, they’d called him. That was Sean’s dad’s name. I’d loved Patrick. We probably would have named our first child after him. Though I’m not all that familiar with kids, I reckoned at eighteen months old, Patrick was a real person. As opposed to a baby, I mean. He waved a chubby little hand at Wolf. Luckily, I’m not the sort of person who would consider instructing Wolf to bite that little hand off. But I am the sort of person who doesn’t want to play coochie-coo with my ex-husband’s baby son. Fine. Shoot me.
I did a U-turn and sat on the bottom step of a nearby building, fighting off my urge for alcohol and cigarettes and turned my phone back on. First to appear was a three-page text from Jason, telling me the open home had gone really well and that there were two genuine buyers coming for another look at the house tomorrow. He finished with I’m confident your house will be sold within days. Well, yippee.
When I looked up, Sean had gone. He’s really good at that. In the time it took Wolf to stretch his legs and water the parched tree in the corner of the grassy knoll, I had arranged for Robbie to pick him up at the end of his shift and had booked myself a flight back to Auckland. Buying a ticket at such short notice meant paying through the nose, but, hey, what are credit cards for? I hadn’t told the cops Karen had hired me to check on Sunny’s safety; only that she’d hired me to find her. Foolishly, I’d dismissed Karen’s concerns about Sunny, convincing myself she had only wanted me to smooth the way for them to meet. But it was obvious from the way the cops treated me that Karen’s death was no accident. It was a homicide if ever I’d seen one. What if there was a connection between Karen’s murder and her fears for Sunny? What if Sunny was still in danger? I would see the job through, remuneration or no remuneration. I owed it to Karen to finish what she had hired me to do. I owed it to Sunny to make sure she wasn’t in danger. From who or what, I didn’t know, but I was determined to find out.
Somewhere inside, hidden amongst all the other little denials I was an avid collector of, was the tight little nugget of knowledge that my commitment to finishing the job wasn’t entirely altruistic. The surge of relief I felt when my flight was confirmed had as much to do with leaving Wellington as fulfilling my commitment to Karen. The real-estate agent’s confidence that our house would soon be sold had made the acid in my stomach squirt. Every time I thought I’d moved on from Sean, I discovered I hadn’t moved very far at all. Emotionally, I was still looking back over my shoulder at him. And then there was Robbie, asking me to move in with him — there was a lot going on that I needed to not think about for a few days. In short, making sure Sunny was safe was the perfect diversion from my personal life.
On my way to the airport, I decided to drop in and see my old mate Smithy. The fact that he happened to be the pathologist performing the postmortem on Karen was nothing more than a happy coincidence. Well, happy for me, that is; probably not so thrilling for Karen.
Chapter 15
MONDAY 26 NOVEMBER 2012
When I’d last seen Smithy he’d dropped ten kilos and undergone a complete makeover; contact lenses, capped teeth, the