to a woman called Salena Kosovov. Salena owned and managed an ‘exclusive’ gym, Apricot, in Herne Bay, Auckland. From googled photos of the couple at charity and media events it was obvious both made use of the gym. Justin was pumped and polished and Salena had augmented the toned, bronzed body with expensive teeth, Botox and a boob job, which had miraculously failed to completely destroy her natural beauty.
I tracked back to find earlier photos of Justin. In the twelve months following Karen’s sentencing, Justin pumped himself up to body builder size, met and married Salena and sired another son they called Neo. In the past couple of years Justin had deflated back down again to a more normal size, so maybe men do lose their bodies when they have kids after all. He was still a big guy, but nothing like what he was six years earlier. On his Facebook page he listed fourteen-year-old Sunny and five-year-old Neo as family members. Salena made no such ‘family’ claim to Sunny, not even the unfriendly sounding ‘stepdaughter’.
Neo had the high cheekboned beauty of his mother, but not the same discipline with calories. A computer boy rather than a gym boy was my guess. A couple more minutes’ searching and I found a photo of the whole family outside Salena’s gym the first morning it opened. Sunny was in school uniform, which made it a simple enough match to search. Within five minutes I had the address of the private school she attended in St Mary’s Bay and a quick click to the white pages gave the family’s listed home address. The internet makes tracking people frighteningly easy.
I threw a Frisbee down the back yard for Wolf and thought about all this. Even allowing for the fact that Karen had only just got out of prison, where she’d been for the last seven years, she could probably have found this information herself. It occurred to me that Karen might not have hired me to find her daughter or even to check she was okay, but to make the first contact for her. It would be pretty hard to turn up unannounced on your teenage daughter’s doorstep seven years after you tried to kill her; seven years after you’d successfully murdered her little brother.
As much as I wanted to convince myself it was okay to contact Sunny directly, I knew it wasn’t. Plus I was pretty sure the police, who I liked to keep vaguely on the right side of, wouldn’t think so either. I’d have to approach Justin first and hope he’d let me talk to his daughter. Nothing in the papers Karen gave me or anything I’d found on the net suggested Justin had been blamed for Karen’s actions. No one had questioned his right or suitability to take over Sunny’s custody either — not publicly, anyway. Given how closely the authorities must have investigated him, if Justin was using he must have been very good at hiding it. Or he had successfully stopped at the time of his son’s death. It was possible, of course, that he’d never used — possible, but unlikely. I wondered if giving up drugs was what kicked the body building into action. Maybe they’d dealt with their guilt in parallel ways: Karen found sanctuary in the church and Justin had taken on the whole ‘my body is a temple’ number.
Wolf gave me what I swear was an ironic look as he dropped the Frisbee at my feet. He was bored with this game and knew my attention was elsewhere. With commitment this time, I hurled the Frisbee down the path again. Two things happened at once: a voice yelled in high-pitched outrage, and Wolf, barking and slavering with the kind of enthusiasm only a bored, one-eyed, overprotective ex-police dog can muster, launched himself at a besuited man, clutching his head with one hand and my Frisbee with the other.
Two cups of tea and a dripping packet of frozen peas later, Jason Baker had finally stopped shaking. But his mouth was still going strong. According to him, my reckless behaviour with the Frisbee had given him concussion and my dangerous dog should preferably be destroyed or, at the very least, be chained up at all times. Oh, please. I thought real-estate agents were made of tougher stuff. When he finally finished with the complaining I threw the peas back into the freezer, took Wolf into the office with me, closed the door and left Jason to