Teeth of the Wolf

Teeth of the Wolf ebook-11

CHAPTER 6

- Pandora -

Penny cracks the window and lifts her face to the stream of warm air. But even with the window down, the aroma in the vehicle is enough to make her gag. She wipes a wisp of hair from her face and breathes through her mouth. It’s no use; she still feels queasy and it’s not the waft of foul air off the mudflats or the mega-musk of Craig’s cologne that are responsible.

It’s the stench of expectation.

She thumbs the button and opens the window all the way.

This is Mum’s fault—her bloody-minded insistence on match-making Penny with Craig. She’d even implied that they’d been making woo eyes at each other. Woo eyes! Penny had nearly died of embarrassment. So not true. It’s not. At least, not on Penny’s side. If it’d been an option, she would’ve crawled into the nearest vent shaft, but of course it wasn’t. And now, thanks to Mum’s meddling, the air between the pair of them is charged with unspoken things, like a nasty rumour whispered over morning coffee that’s all over town by the end of the day.

Of course, Dad’s behaviour wasn’t much better. He isn’t as blatant as Mum—no one could be as outrageously blatant as Mum—but he wasn’t exactly pushing back either. Wasn’t he the one who brought Craig to the hospital? And on a family matter? OK, so technically Craig brought Dad, since this is Craig’s car, but do they really expect her to believe that not one vehicle in the entire Yee fleet was available? Penny shakes her head. Mum’s the worst, but Dad is definitely complicit. No question.

Whatever. She isn’t going to stand by and let her parents thrust her into Craig’s lap. If they think he’s such a catch, let them marry him. It’s not as if this is about ensuring Penny’s happiness, or a burning desire to have grandchildren or anything. This is all about the bottom line, because Craig has an in with the Transport Minister. For some unfathomable reason, her parents think cosying up to the man will grease the wheels—literally—for the Yee family business.

Do I look like I have the words ‘bargaining chip’ tattooed on my forehead?

Penny steals a glance at Craig. His lips tight, he’s clenching and unclenching his fingers on the steering wheel. She frowns. If he has the warm-fuzzies for her, shouldn’t he be happy they’re finally alone? Could he be feeling the pressure, too? Mum and Dad can be pretty intimidating, even for a slick operator like Craig. Has she been reading him wrong?

She wraps her arms around her satchel. Best if she says nothing in case he hasn’t made up his mind yet. She wouldn’t want him to get the wrong idea. He might think she’s encouraging his attention, when all this is, is a ride to work.

Just a few more minutes: we’re almost in Karaka.

Turning back to the window, Penny gazes across the swamp marsh, the early afternoon sun blinking off the waxy mangroves. Decades ago, all this area used to be estuary, the picturesque inlet lined with swanky mansions owned by the nouveau riche. The mansions and the sprawling walled gardens are still there, although the waterways have all but gone. Now, after years of eutrophication, the mud flats are choked with vegetation, discarded Coke cans and soggy chip packets washing in and out on the tide.

They’ve nearly made it to the turn off when Craig decides to open the conversation. “So Pandora…”

Penny squirms on the polished white leather seat. Damn. So close. “It’s Penny.”

His eyes on the road, Craig’s mouth turns up. A smirk? Her hackles rise. “What’s so funny? Something wrong with my name?”

“No, no, nothing. It’s kind of cute, actually. Suits you. It’s your baby name, right? I’m pretty sure I’ve heard Matiu call you that.”

She clutches the satchel to her chest. “No. Well yes, Matiu does call me that, but—”

Taking a hand off the wheel, Craig holds up his palm. “Penny, seriously, you don’t have to explain. Anyway, it’s not the worst name. You should hear what my brother calls me.”

“What?”

“Nah.” He lifts his shoulders and shivers in mock disgust.

“Craig. You can’t do that. You can’t say ‘you should hear’, and then not let me hear.”

He squeezes his lips together and shakes his head.

She shrugs. “OK, suit yourself.”

He puffs. “It’s Kit, OK? There, I said it.”

Penny frowns. “I don’t get it. What’s so bad about Kit?”

Craig checks the rear-view mirror, then slides the vehicle into the left lane. “Nothing at all. Perfectly ordinary. Except when your Chinese middle name is Zheng.”

Penny sounds out the words in her head. “Ah.” She can’t help but smile. “Kit-chen tong. That’s so lame.”

Craig flashes her a grin. “Yeah. What can you do? Brothers, eh?”

“Tell me about it.” You know, maybe Craig isn’t so bad. He’s as much a victim of Mum’s manipulation as Penny is, and he didn’t have to bring her all the way out here in the middle of the day.

At the bottom of the ramp, Craig turns to her. “Where exactly are we headed?” he asks.

Penny checks her phone. “That way,” she says, pointing. “Milano Boulevard. It’s on the waterfront.” The light changes and they make a right. Craig gives a low whistle as they turn into Milano.

“Fancy postcode.”

The road is already chock-full of cars: police vehicles, a couple of media vans, an ambulance. Craig pulls up on a grass verge behind the crowd. She’s slipping her phone into her satchel when he touches her gently on the elbow.

“Look, Penny, before you go. What Kiri…what your mother was saying back at the hospital, about the two of us…”

Oh no.

She grapples for the straps of the satchel. “I know, I know,” she gibbers. “Mum really shouldn’t have asked you to drive me. In her defence, I think she’s a bit distraught, you know, about her sister.” Desperate, she yanks at the door handle.

“No, that wasn’t what—”

Penny pretends not to hear. Her fingers slip on the leather armrest. Come on, come on…At last, the door swings open. One hand on the window frame, she scrambles out.

Before she can close the door, Craig leans across the console. “I’ll wait for you. You might need a ride back.”

No, no, no. This isn’t good. If Mum gets wind of it, she’ll have the pair of them engaged before dinner. “Craig, really, I can’t ask you to do that. I could be ages.”

“You didn’t ask: I offered.”

Penny’s heart sinks. She forgot he’s a politician.

“Ms Pandora!” Louder than a megaphone, Tanner’s voice carries over the chatter of the crowd. He beckons from the mangroves’ edge. “Down here.”

Thank heavens.

“Someone get her some waders, will you?” Tanner roars. “And for God’s sake, confiscate that media drone! I don’t want the press leaking images until we’ve got some answers.”

“I’d better go,” Penny says. “Duty calls and all that.” Giving the side of the car a little pat, she throws Craig what she hopes is a wistful moue. “Thanks, Craig. See you later.”

- Matiu -

Matiu climbs from the car and hooks the seat down to let Cerberus out. “Remind me never to own a Porsche and a dog at the same time.” He wipes sweat from his neck.

Erica is hunting through her handbag for the key. “Remind me again how you ended up driving a Porsche, anyway?” she says, acid in her voice.

“Like I said, a friend loaned it to me.” He trails Cerberus to the nearest spindly tree growing on the verge, where the dog relieves himself noisily.

“Of course they did.”

Matiu regards the small townhouse down the narrow driveway. It’s a semi-detached flat, sharing a wall with the place next door, a mirror image of each other with a fence dividing the yards and a tiny carport down the back. The grass is getting long, even in this heatwave. The flat looks normal enough, but the windows are foggy, like they need a good clean. Tugging Cerberus along, he follows Erica down the drive. She walks into the tiny back yard, where the grass is growing up around a weathered outdoor table and a stack of fading resin chairs. A barbeque with a sun-bleached cover is jammed against the wall of the house. A washing line, on a bit of a lean, takes up most of the lawn. In the corner, under a ragged pine tree, is a dilapidated tin shed limned with rust. The whole place could benefit from a once-over with a lawnmower and a weedeater. Nothing out of the ordinary, aside from the way that pine looms over everything, throwing its scattered shadow like clawing fingers. Amazing a tree like that has lasted this long, the way Aucklanders are so keen to carve up their backyards, subdivide, build poky little houses on undersized sections, live looking in each other’s bathroom windows. Matiu ties Cerberus in the shade of the carport and crosses to the back step.

Erica unlocks the back door and pushes it open. A wave of fetid heat rolls out of the house, smelling of closed rooms, damp carpet, and something rank. The acrid tang of pipes drying out, the air moist and rich, like a greenhouse. Erica steps back, coughing. Matiu holds his breath and steps inside, the hot air crushing him, the smell a sensory assault. Thankfully, it’s not the charnel reek of dead bodies. Count the blessings. It’s a smell that’s weirdly familiar, but which he can’t quite place, not yet. The alarm trills a warning, and Erica hurries to disarm it.

He moves through the small laundry and into an open plan lounge and kitchen, breathing through his mouth. “Wow.”

“Oh my god,” Erica agrees, coming up behind him.

“That’s what the smell is, then. Fertiliser. Like a garden centre. Were these here when you came by last?”

Erica shakes her head. “The planters, maybe, but not the plants. They must’ve been growing from seeds.”

Every windowsill is covered in long, narrow planter boxes, from which grow lush green stems, some over a foot high. Tacked to the tops of the windowsills are black pipes. Something hums, and small jets of water puff from the pipes, sparkling rainbow mist drifting down to moisten the stems. All the windows are covered in fine condensation. Matiu traces the line of black piping, tacked artlessly to the walls, back to the kitchen sink. Several hoses converge there, feeding off a manifold from an electric pump sitting on the bench and hooked up to the tap, plugged into the electrical outlet on the wall through a digital timer.

“Weird,” Matiu mutters, and proceeds slowly around the lounge. “Looks like she’s trying to start her own wheatgrass smoothie shop, like that dodgy place you just took me.”

“I don’t think that’s wheatgrass.”

Matiu finds the remote on the coffee table, half-buried under a bag of fertiliser balls and several dried-out tufts of dead vegetation. He flicks the TV on, navigates to the house network and passes the remote to Erica. “Don’t suppose you know her password?”

“Maybe,” she says, sounding doubtful. She drops onto the couch and uses the remote to open the virtual keyboard, which hovers before her in a pulse of gentle red light, and starts trying different options.

Matiu shakes his head. “I was just being polite.” He swipes his phone to life, taps open an app. Seconds later, the locked screen on the TV vanishes and an options menu appears. “Have a look at what she’s been doing online. I’m going to check out the rest of the flat.”

Erica’s glare is something between outrage and relief. “Those apps are illegal.”

Matiu shrugs. “Isn’t that why you hired me?” He turns to the hallway that leads off the lounge.

“I didn’t hire you, Matiu Yee. You’re not getting paid for this.”

“Might be better not to remind the violent career criminal that you’re blackmailing him, eh?”

She has no response to that, and he drifts into the kitchen, opens the fridge. Besides the milk going sour, a half-empty carton of apple juice, some mouldering cheese and carrots, and several bottles of premix vodka tonic, there’s a whole shelf of medicines in glass vials and jars with names he doesn’t recognise: Gonal-F, Suprefact, Ovidrel, Crinone. Beside these is a plastic container full of hypodermic needles in sterile bags. He snaps photos of the medicine labels and swipes them into a message to Penny with the simple note: Hey sis, what are these? Then he moves into the hallway, towards the bathroom and the bedrooms.

The spare room is filled with boxes and piles of books. Curious, he flips through the stacks that cover the dresser and bed. Well-thumbed paperback romances, those slim, cheap ones you see by the supermarket checkout with ridiculously handsome men on the cover sporting phenomenal abs while sweeping stunned heroines off their feet. “So our girl has a thing for romance novels,” Matiu says to himself. He enters the lived-in bedroom. Thankfully, there’s no overwhelming rush of something awful here, not like he’d felt in Darius Fletcher’s apartment during Penny’s last case. Just the lingering hint of old perfumes, stale sweat on unwashed sheets, and underneath it all, something heady that stirs the blood. The scent of woman. He’s intruding. This is someone’s private place, and he has a way of knowing things, seeing things, that he ought not. Still, a woman is missing, and her disappearance may somehow be connected to the dead body at the park, the one Kingi was interested in. Maybe Matiu can help find her, and keep himself out of prison at the same time. It’s worth a little invasion of privacy.

Someone else’s privacy.

The queen-sized bed is unmade and the curtains are drawn. A large TV dominates the wall facing the bed, a built-in wardrobe along the other. Matiu circles the bed. The bedside table on the wardrobe side is more cluttered than the other, suggesting this is where Charlotte sleeps. Matiu eases himself into a sitting position on the edge of the bed, like he might if he was Charlotte, rolling out of bed and about to start her day, and places his palms flat on the sheet.

The images wash over him in a rush, snapping his pulse up a series of notches and catching the breath in his throat. A warmth suffuses his groin at the sudden flood of heat, memories of naked skin and stifled moans, creaking timber. Emotions punch him in the gut, a melange of pleasure and desperation. He’s invading a moment as deeply primal as it is personal, and he knows he should let go, but something holds him there. He glimpses hands wrapped together, fingers tight and tense, two wrists, so close. Two tattoos.

“s**t,” Matiu grunts, pulling himself away from the haunting flashback. He staggers to his feet, crashing into the wardrobe door, stands there, clutching his head.

“Matiu?” Erica appears in the doorway, rushes to his side.

Unspent adrenaline surges through him, the memory of sweaty coitus suffusing his blood, a phantasmal taste of woman in his mouth. He has his hands around Erica before she knows what he’s doing, wrapping her up like a lover, an instinctive reflex to relieve what’s surging through him, his mouth questing for hers.

The triple puts Matiu on the floor in a second: a heel to the toe, forehead to the chin and elbow to the groin. He collapses, curling into a gangly ball of pain.

“What the hell?” Erica stumbles back, flattening herself against the doorframe, while Matiu lies crumpled, breathing hard.

“Thanks,” he says. “I needed that.”

“No s**t? Want a swift kick in the balls as well?”

“It’s not like that. Give me a minute.” He rolls into a sitting position, leaning against the bed. “Nice moves, by the way.”

“You think you’re the first client ever tried it on with me?”

“Wasn’t me,” he says, grimacing. “It was Charlotte’s boyfriend.”

Erica stares at him, slackjawed. “Now would be a good time to start making sense.”

“I,” Matiu stumbles for words, collects some, tries to put them in an order that might not sound completely crazy. Probably fails. “I see things, sometimes. Little curse of mine. I saw your sister in here, and her boyfriend. Getting busy.”

Erica glances about, bewildered. “What the hell do you mean, saw her? And like I told you, she doesn’t have a boyfriend.”

“Not one she’s told you about, is what you said. She sure had someone. And it might be the same guy the cops found dead in the park this morning. The case I took Penny to right after breakfast.”

Erica shakes her head. “You’re so full of shit.”

“He had the same tattoo. And all that gear in the lounge, the grass or whatever. That’s micro-gardening, indoor hydroponics, same as what the Touching the Sun ad is selling. The tattoos are the same. It’s connected, somehow.”

“Could just be a coincidence.”

“Too small a town for coincidences like that. You find anything?”

“You mean apart from a s****l predator in the bedroom? Nothing. Her browsing history’s been erased, along with all her photos and videos, even her Filmtrax account.”

“Shit.” Matiu gets to his feet. He brushes past Erica, maintaining a safe illusion that his urges were entirely a symptom of the neuro-empathic event. Part of him would still like to put his hands on her, feel her surrender under his grip, but that part of him can go piss off. He doesn’t want another elbow to the groin. “Someone else has been here.”

Erica follows him to the lounge, where he sits at the virtual keyboard and swipes into the house network’s security settings. He scans the display, rubbing at the impossible itch under his bandage. “s**t. s**t. s**t. We need to go.”

“Why?”

Matiu waves vaguely at the screen as he gets up and heads for the door. “Whoever came and cleared out the network also put a sniffer on the alarm. As soon as it flagged an activation, or even a deactivation, whoever planted it got notified. They know we’re here, knew that eventually someone would come looking and do exactly what we’ve done. They might be heading this way right now.” Could be one of Kingi’s associates, someone equally dangerous, he thinks, but doesn’t say it out loud. He doesn’t need Erica to panic, or to think he’s talking it up. “Let’s get out of here.”

He rushes from the house and unties Cerberus as Erica locks the door. They jog down the drive and get strapped into the car, just as a black van swings around the corner and accelerates towards them. Matiu hits the gas.