The world’s most exclusive detective agency opens a new office—in Australia!
With the best detectives in the business, cutting edge technology, and offices around the globe, there is no investigation company quite like Private. Now, at a glittering launch party overlooking the iconic Opera House, Private Sydney throws open its doors …
Craig Gisto and his newly formed team have barely raised their glasses, however, when a young Asian man, blood-soaked and bullet-ridden, staggers into the party, and what looks like a botched kidnapping turns out to be a whole lot more.
Within days the agency’s caseload is full. But it is a horrific murder in the wealthy Eastern Suburbs and the desperate search for a motive that stretches the team to the limit. Stacy Friel, friend of the deputy commissioner of NSW Police, isn’t the killer’s first victim—and as the bodies mount up she’s clearly not the last.
A Blackstone Audio production.
Release date:
August 26, 2014
Publisher:
Grand Central Publishing
Print pages:
384
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Whether it was tidy or left smeared with chocolate sauce, whipped cream, and telltale buttmarks on the recliner, fourteen minutes was what she had to clean each room. Start in the bathroom, change the towels, change the bed, clean the cups, dust and vacuum, and then on to the next room.
And though she would never have admitted it to her colleagues at the Marine Bay Plaza, Sunita Kadam took a pride in meeting (and especially beating) that fourteen-minute time limit. In fact, on her housekeeping cart was a stopwatch she carried for that very purpose. She picked it up as she arrived at room number 1121 and knocked smartly—maid’s knock, loud but gentle—then began the stopwatch.
Twenty seconds. No answer. With a deliberate jangle of master keys she let herself in.
“Hello? Housekeeping.”
Again no answer. Good. And what’s more, the room was tidy. Though an evening dress hung from a handle of the closet, the bed looked as if it hadn’t been slept in. Nets at the window billowed beneath a blast of air conditioning, giving the room a clean, aired feel. Six minutes to service this room, thought Sunita. Maybe seven.
Unless, of course, there was a nasty surprise in the bathroom.
From her cart she collected towels and toiletries and went there now, clicking on the light at the same time as she reached for the door handle and pushed.
She came up short. The door would only budge an inch or so. Something on the other side—probably a wet towel that had slipped off a rail—was preventing it from opening.
Inside, the fluorescents struggled, flickering as she pushed the door. With an exasperated sigh she gave it one last shove and there was a splintering sound. Something heavy fell to the floor on the other side and, finally, the lights came on—and Sunita Kadam saw what was inside.
On the tiles lay a woman’s corpse. She wore a white nightshirt and her face was colorless. In contrast, the yellow cotton scarf around her neck was a bright yellow. The marks it had made were a livid red.
Sunita stared at the body. A numbness crept over her. A sense of wanting to run but being rooted to the spot. Later she’d look back and stifle a guilty laugh about this, but her next thought was: How the hell am I going to clean this up in fourteen minutes?
“YOU KILLED THEM, you drunk bastard.”
With a gasp, Santosh Wagh pulled himself from the grip of his nightmare, fingers scrabbling for his spectacles on the nightstand. He pushed them on, squinted at the numbers on his bedside clock and groaned.
4:14 a.m. Drinker’s dawn.
He pulled himself from bed, avoiding his own reflection in the mirror as he lolloped out of the bedroom. Who wanted to see a hungover man at 4:14 in the morning, a craggy, 51-year-old vision of guilt and shame? Not him. Right now what he wanted was a little something to guide him gently into the morning. Something to chase away the headache lurking behind his eyes. Something to banish the residual nightmare image seared into his brain.
His apartment was empty, stale-smelling. On a coffee table in the front room was a half-empty bottle of Johnnie Walker, a glass, and his Glock in its holster. Santosh dropped with a sigh to the couch, leaned forward, fingertipped his Glock out of reach, then drew the bottle and glass toward him.
He stared at the drink in his hand, remembering, casting his mind back to 2006 and the seven Mumbai train bombs. At the time he’d been an agent with RAW, India’s intelligence agency, and the investigations into the bombings had brought him into contact with Jack Morgan.
Two years later, the car accident that plagued his dreams.
It was Jack who had asked him to head up Private India; Jack who had picked him up when he’d needed it most. And if he drank this drink then it would lead to another drink, and another, and with each subsequent drink he’d fall a little harder and fail Jack a little more.
He placed the glass back on the coffee table, pulled his knees up toward him. Decided to wait the morning out. He dozed, then woke, then dozed again, and each time he woke the drink was still there, waiting for him. He ignored its call. He chose Jack over Johnnie.
Even so, it was a relief when the phone rang and duty called.
I HAD GOOGLED plenty of info on Justine Smith before I met her. Funny thing, though: even the most serious, businesslike websites couldn’t resist slipping in how great-looking she was.
Justine Smith, the stunning second-in-command to Jack Morgan at Private L.A.…
Justine Smith, well known to the L.A. underworld for her unsurpassed police smarts, is also known to the L.A. paparazzi for her unsurpassed figure and face…
I couldn’t resist: I pressed the Google Images button and took a tour of some mighty impressive photos. Justine posing with fifteen police officers after a major blow-and-smack bust in Venice Beach; Justine, all businesslike at her desk, with Mayor Garcetti on the other side; Justine in a very snug gray Versace gown at the Oscars.
I was mentally reviewing these images as I waited for her at the Sydney airport Customs arrival. Jack Morgan, perhaps the most important private investigator in the world, was sending her to help me launch Private Sydney, his latest addition to what is probably the most important investigative bureau in the world. Once described by Jack himself as “what Interpol tried to be, what the FBI wants to be, and what the CIA should be.”
Private was located in major cities throughout the globe. Now Sydney would house headquarters for the Asia-Pac branch. And Jack Morgan had chosen me, Craig Gisto, to oversee this newest jewel in the Private crown.
Jack Morgan had the resources—both personal and financial—to do it. He installed scientific police and laboratory equipment that went beyond state of the art. He paid university researchers to bring their findings to him first. And Jack Morgan had something else…
He had the brains to hire the best people. Yeah, I know that sounds easy, but it doesn’t happen much. A lot of CEOs say they want the best people, but what they really mean is “I want someone almost as good as me” or “someone who’s really good… at taking my shit.” Not Jack. He wanted the best. And in his mind, that meant equal amounts of brainpower and guts.
It was a select group, all right, and I was excited, ecstatic, and frankly terrified that Jack Morgan had put me in it. Having Justine help me was another wise move. She knew Private; she knew Jack Morgan. And, watching her—the first passenger out of Customs—I immediately knew one thing: the Google image search had not done her justice.
I held back and let her family greet her first. There was her sister, Greta, and Greta’s husband, Brett Thorogood, my new best bud. Brett was the deputy commissioner of New South Wales Police and was nothing but happy to have Private Sydney opening in his town. Brett and Greta’s kids—Nikki, eight, and Serge, ten—ran to their aunt Justine. Hugs and kisses all around. Then I stepped forward. I shook Justine’s hand. This was going to be one fine partnership.
I’d parked my Maserati GranCabrio in the pickup zone. The Thorogoods headed off after we’d all synchronized watches for the launch party that evening, and we were off, pulling out of the airport and onto the sun-drenched freeway.
Neither of us knew then that we were in the fast lane—the very fast lane—headed toward a great big pile of shit.
Chapter 1
That same night
HE RUNS LIKE a crazy man, a horribly injured crazy man. The stumbling and falling, long strides of a man overwhelmed with pain and fear.
He runs, gasping, then he hits a hard object—face-first. His nose shatters, sending a cascade of blood and snot down his face, agony through his head and down his spine. The man falls back, slams to the floor. His head cracks as he hits the concrete.
He has been deaf since birth. He can sense his frantic heartbeat. The rumbling of his stomach. He feels the blood on his stomach and hips. The blood feels more like a thick syrup than a thin liquid.
He is blind. They have tied a leather sack around his head, fastened it at the neck with wiring and rope. The leather sack is tight and painful and totally immovable from his neck.
He vomits. The vomit starts to fill the leather bag that covers his head. The sack begins to fill with the chunky, nauseating upchuck. He is about to drown in his own hideous diving mask.
The man hits a wall. Literally. He clings to it and suddenly feels a searing pain, a slash in his right thigh. Now two deep wounds shoot into his back. He thinks, Kidneys. He also thinks he cannot collapse. If there is salvation it will be entirely due to his own willpower.
He feels the vibration of feet, people running after him. A burst of terrible agony in his back. Two thumps propel him to the wall. He smells fresh blood. He smells tire rubber. Another crunch, his thigh exploding. He keeps to the wall; blood drips from his nose, his leg, his back. He feels wet all over.
I’m not really awake. I’m not really asleep. I am afraid that the pain is so great that something will explode. Like in a mad cartoon, the top of my head will shoot right up and off. The pain will burst out of me like the fire spitting out of a volcano. My eyes have disappeared. They have been replaced by swirling pools of agony. How will I see the long white tunnel of death when it comes to take me away?
He keeps trying to feel his way along the rough cement wall. He moves left. He wills his knees to hold him up. And that works. For a moment. A bullet stings his right earlobe. He keeps moving. Sharp flying pieces of the wall bomb his hands and bare arms. Then another bullet. Now the pain is so encompassing that he is not certain where he’s been hit. A new source of burning pain erupts. It is the back of his neck. The new blood and the old vomit mingle.
A doorway. He feels an iron handle. The door opens. He can no longer move from the waist down. The man falls through the open door. He falls headfirst onto a concrete floor. The pain eases. Maybe it’s a dream. Maybe they’ve slipped a painkiller into him. Maybe, he thinks. Maybe.
He lies there.
Blind. Bloody. Deaf. Dead.
Chapter 2
PLEASE EXCUSE MY raging ego, but I think most police types would say that I’m a good private investigator. (After all, Jack Morgan chose me to open and operate Private Sydney.)
Now, please excuse my really raging ego, but I think quite a few women would say that I’m a pretty good romancer. (After all, I’ve sported more than a few fine lady types around the hot pubs of Sydney.)
What can Craig Gisto not do? Well, high on the list is throw a party. The best I’m capable of is bringing in a few cases of Tooheys Extra Dry, setting out a few bowls of crisps, and hoping for the best.
Well, the kind of party—excuse me… reception—I had to give for the official opening of Private Sydney was not the kind of party I usually threw.
So I asked Mary Clarke, my second-in-command, how I should handle the situation. Mary looked at me as if I’d been born last Tuesday and said, “Hire a caterer and forget about it.” Then she added her favorite phrase: “Now why didn’t you think of that?”
As is often the case, Mary had the correct solution. Wild Thyme Catering filled the huge atrium reception area of Private Sydney with tables full of cold prawns and rock lobster, skewers of tenderloin chunks, huge bunches of sunflowers. The bar had good Australian Shiraz and even a few tins of ice-cold Tooheys.
As soon as I felt certain that everything was going smoothly, I was hit by a problem. Suddenly a tremendous crashing sound filled the room. At first I thought one of my fancy caterers had dropped a tray of fancy crystal glasses.
I watched as Mary Clarke spun around on her heels in the direction of the crash. Mary’s very tall, muscular—a big-boned woman—but she has the reaction speed of an Olympic gold-medal sprinter.
A nanosecond later I turned to see what had happened. I didn’t have to look far. A few feet from where I’d been standing was a human figure, facedown on the floor. Blood was pooling around the body. Mary crouched beside him. I knelt, and as the people in the room gasped and turned dead quiet, Mary and I turned the corpse over to reveal a vision of horror: a male with some sort of hood tied over his face. I had seen a few seconds earlier that he had both stab wounds and bullet wounds in his back. Now that he was lying on his back, his right thigh looked like a piece of ragged, jagged, bloody meat.
I looked over for a moment and saw Justine Smith and her brother-in-law, Deputy Commissioner Thorogood, standing over me and the dead man.
“Jesus H. Christ,” Thorogood said as I tried in vain to undo the wires and ropes that held the leather hood in place.
“Let me,” I heard someone say. It was Private’s techno and lab genius, Darlene. My usual picture of Darlene was of a skinny woman in a drab gray lab coat, protective goggles, and a thick, white hairnet. Tonight she was dressed in a snug red silk dress, and “skinny” had turned to “curvy.”
She slipped on a pair of latex gloves that she happened to have in her pocketbook, and then—I shouldn’t have been surprised—she dug into her bag a little deeper and produced a multifaceted knife. One of those facets was a wire cutter. She cut through the wires and rope quickly, and then Thorogood and I eased the sack from the victim’s head.
“Holy fuck!” Justine said. She was speaking for all of us.
The victim’s eyes had been gouged out. The sockets were red craters. A gray and beige bundle of nerves oozed from the left one. Nerves stuck to the dry skin. The blood around his neck mixed with—I wasn’t sure what it was: a disgusting-smelling brownish-yellow-pink liquid.
As if she could read my mind, Darlene said, “It’s vomit.”
It was tough to guess the guy’s age, but what little amount of skin was left intact was smooth and lightly tanned. He was a young kid, maybe in his late teens. At the most he was twenty years old.
I saw Johnito Ishmah, the youngest guy on my team, standing behind Mary.
“Johnny, get everyone out of here. Everyone.” Then I looked at Mary and said, “Come with me.” We both stood up as I watched Deputy Commissioner Thorogood pull out his phone. I heard him say, “Inspector…” And I knew his boys would be here in a few minutes.
“Well, not your average gate-crasher,” I heard Darlene mumble as Mary and I headed toward the bloodstained service door.
Chapter 3
WE OPENED THE door and followed the trail of blood down three flights of stairs.
“How’d he manage to get so far when he had to be so weak from blood loss?” I asked.
“Probably had some people helping him along,” Mary said. Yeah, I thought, why didn’t I think of that?
As we approached the first floor, Mary said, “Passage ahead leads to the garage.”
Holy shit. The concrete garage walls looked like someone had thrown buckets of red paint on them, almost like a macabre kind of modern art. As we picked our way round the puddles, I leaned on the second door, and we were out, onto garage level 1. Plenty of blood still, oval droplets on the rough concrete. The sort of splashes someone makes when they are running and bleeding at the same time.
The poor kid had stopped her. . .
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