Vodka Doesn't Freeze Read online

  Jill mentally snorted. Her sister was a fashion model, and she knew Cassie ate just enough to keep herself out of an anorexia ward.

  'Wow. Morocco. Sounds amazing.'

  'It was boring. Horrible food. Dirty,' replied Cassie.

  'Yeah? Where to next, then?' Jill felt the distance between herself and her sister more than ever. The effort to find common ground was beyond her right now.

  'Just Cairns this trip. Swimwear shoot.'

  'Lucky you.' Jill tried to convey enthusiasm.

  The conversation faltered, and then Cassie spoke up; it sounded like she was scrambling for something to say. 'So, are you still seeing what's-his-name?' she asked Jill.

  'Huh?' Jill paused. 'Oh. Joel. Forgot you met him that night. No. That's history. Listen, Cass, is Mum there?'

  Cassie had been ten years old when Jill had been kidnapped. Their family had been transformed by the incident, their best-friend relationship severed forever. For years their father, Robert, had withdrawn into himself, ashamed that he hadn't been able to keep his family safe, unable to look his daughters in the eye. Their mother, Frances, had spent much of her time helping Jill battle the terror that lived inside her like cancer. At first Cassie had been bewildered by Jill's anger, anxiety and nightmares. As time had marched forward she'd become hurt, lost, invisible.

  By the time they'd reached high school, Cassie had developed a defensive shell, a sardonic superficiality through which she interacted with the world. Despite her scorching putdowns of almost everyone and everything in their hometown of Camden, people lined up to be looked down upon by the beautiful Cassie Jackson. She'd kept her most scathing opinions for her kickboxing, social-phobe sister. By the time Jill was well enough to mourn the loss of their closeness, her own protective shield had seen her incapable of thawing the ice between them. She had no vocabulary for her feelings any more.

  When her mum came on the line, Jill relaxed a little more. Her calm voice had been there through many of the hard times.

  'Hi, baby,' she said. 'How was your day?' Jill smiled. No-one else ever called her that.

  'Oh, okay. Foul actually, but I don't want to talk about it. What'd you do?'

  Eyes closed, she listened as her mum ran through a Tuesday in semi-rural New South Wales; gossip about the neighbours, all of whom Jill knew, and minute details about her immediate family, cousins, nephew and niece. By the time she hung up, she felt exhausted.

  She needed rest, and wished she could bypass her gym for once, but she'd never sleep without following all her routines.

  She trudged into her spare room, set up as a gymnasium, floor to ceiling in weights and machines. She wrapped the blindfold around her eyes and began kicking the heavy bag suspended from the ceiling.

  When Mercy Merris had first heard about paedophile rings operating in Sydney, she'd thought the reports far-fetched. She had then been a clinical psychologist for five years, specialising in working with survivors of childhood trauma, and hadn't come across any evidence for such goings-on. However, one afternoon about five years before, a colleague had invited her to a late evening gathering of psychotherapists at a local hospital, where she'd heard tales of satanic cults and organised kiddie-porn groups that had supposedly existed in Australia for years. She'd listened, incredulous, as members of the group spoke about links between these groups and their overseas counterparts, who, they said, had been breeding children for abuse for generations.

  The aim of the meeting had been to discuss therapeutic methods to try to counteract brainwashing techniques that these groups were said to use upon some victims to stop them escaping from the cults. At first, she and a couple of other therapists had asked sceptical questions to try to clarify what they were hearing. Finally, one member of the group spoke to silence them.

  'Look, it's great that we have new members at this meeting, and everyone's welcome,' the man began in response to the last question, 'but we're not actually here to prove to anyone that organised paedophile rings are operating in Australia. That's someone else's job. The people who established this group are working with the victims of these groups. We know they do exist, and we need to help each other find ways to de-program the victims.'

  The relatively young man, dressed in an expensive, although crumpled, suit, ran his hand through mussy light-brown hair. He looked more like a lawyer than a therapist, thought Mercy.

  'If there are people here who'd like to do some reading about these activities, we can give you some references to follow up, but I'm getting tired of the curiosity factor tonight, and I want to get back to focusing on therapeutic techniques to help these people.'

  Chastened by his earnest exasperation, Mercy had sat back and listened for the remainder of the meeting. It was like sitting in while a group wrote a horror movie. She heard the young man speaking about one of the patients in his hospital having a 'call-back' activated during one of her admissions to hospital. Mercy gathered that this meant that the therapist had inadvertently triggered some pre-programmed message to return to the cult. He explained that the woman had presented for treatment, but once her therapist had approached a topic that could have identified the cult, an alter-personality, programmed by the cult for just such an eventuality, had surfaced. The woman had switched from sobbing victim to malevolent aggressor in five frightening seconds. She'd picked up a phone and thrown it at the therapist's head, then had run from the room, discharging herself without heeding any of the staff or other patients.

  Mercy had mentally blocked a lot of the rest of the meeting, internally asking the questions she longed to ask out loud. Oh come on! she'd wanted to protest. Surely police would have discovered evidence of organised kidnapping, paedophile cults, humans bred to be sex slaves. Why hadn't she heard this stuff on the news? Still, she'd thought, police had never managed to stop her father bashing the shit out of her and her mother and little brothers every night. Lots went on behind closed doors that people didn't know about.

  Mercy had later done some reading on the subject, learning that the paedophile rings purportedly contained members of the judiciary and police service, some of whom had supposedly grown up in these cults, and had been selected to be placed in positions of power to further their ends.

  But as her reading had widened, Mercy also found literature for therapists treating patients who'd supposedly been abducted by aliens, or who could not let go of their past lives as Roman kings or African slaves. At that point she'd put the material down in disgust and had not returned to the meetings. It was easier to lump the whole lot in as a bunch of loonies, or at best as over-involved counsellors who'd been carried away by some sort of group hysteria. Sure, she knew there were plenty of sickos who preyed on children, but organised gangs of paedophiles running amok in Sydney sounded like a paranoid delusion.

  But that was then.

  4

  WHEN MERCY ARRIVED at the private psychiatric clinic at which she worked, Carole Dean, Programs Director of the Sisters of Charity Hospital, caught her before she'd made it past the marble reception desk. The receptionist was already waving a fistful of messages at Mercy.

  Carole, flawlessly groomed, took in the sight of their foremost psychotherapist with anxiety. A mass of uncombed black curls, a too-tight designer suit and tottering heels had always been delightfully unconventional when paraded with confidence by Dr Merris, but lately she was just looking unhinged. Smelling of smoke and heavy perfume, there was a vacant look in her eyes and lipstick stained her teeth. File notes, unlawfully removed from hospital grounds, poked from a large tote bag; some of them, Carole noted with alarm, smeared with what looked like blood. Carole then noticed a blood-soaked tissue pressed into Mercy's palm. Without doubt, this woman looked more like her patients every day.

  'Dr Merris – Mercy – I'm glad you're here,' Carole found herself speaking in the soothing tones she usually reserved for the clients. 'It looks as though you've cut yourself. Let's go to my office and see to that. I'd like to catch up with you before you sta
rt your day.'

  Mercy allowed herself to be steered from the lobby through the halls of the beautiful hospital. Her head still hummed, but she felt comfortably disconnected from the scenes around her, unaware of the CEO of the hospital headed purposefully in their direction, or of Carole's smooth, non-verbal deflection of him. She sank gratefully into a deep armchair in Carole's office, feeling comforted, as intended, by the beautiful architecture, deep carpeting, fresh flowers and family photos.

  'Mercy, you look tired. And you're hurt. Here, let me look,' Carole unclenched Mercy's palm and saw the bleeding gash that had been caused when Mercy had crushed her pager in the car.

  'That's deep. What happened? You may need a stitch. Let me call Kim.' Carole reached for her phone and asked one of the nurses from the closest unit to come to her office with a first-aid kit. Mercy watched her serenely.

  'Are you okay, Mercy? We've a lot to deal with today. I had to cancel your first few appointments this morning, as we have some important matters to sort out.' Carole was growing increasingly worried by the placid demeanour of this usually extroverted woman.

  'Mmm, fine. Just tired.'

  'Mercy, I'm not sure whether you know yet . . . One of your . . . one of our patients, Carly Kaplan, died yesterday. I'm sorry to tell you, Mercy, she took her own life.' Carole paused, waiting for Mercy's reaction.

  Mercy gazed back with a look of polite interest.

  'And,' Carole continued slowly, 'there will be an inquest. As you know, Carly was having outpatient treatment with us, having been discharged just last month. We have a lot of paperwork to do, and we can't place this client's file. Mercy, do you have the file?'

  'Mmm.'

  Mercy reached down and pulled a mass of bedraggled notes from her tote bag, the cluster of which had also caught up a parking ticket, pharmacy script and a broken hair clip.

  Carole stared for a moment at the mess on her polished side table and then opened a drawer beneath it and slid the paperwork in. She'd have to straighten that out before the CEO arrived.

  She turned anxiously when a knock sounded at her door, but it was just Kim from St Brigid's unit, first-aid kit in hand. Carole ushered her in and closed the door.

  'Shit, Mercy, how'd ya do this?' grinned Kim. Dr Merris was a favourite with most of the ward staff, working long hours, helping out on the units, and always taking the hardest patients.

  Mercy looked perplexed as she stared down at her hand.

  Kim threw Carole a glance; Carole stared flatly back, and Kim was suddenly all professional nurse, firm and gentle, tending to the wound.

  'You know, Mercy, this needs a stitch or two. I have what I need right here. Let's fix this up properly.' The nurses on St Brigid's unit were more than used to suturing wounds like this; there were at least two and up to ten self-harm incidents each week.

  Kim cleaned the wound on Mercy's hand and after applying some anaesthetic spray began to stitch the skin together. Mercy was silent during the first two sutures. Then, without warning, she screamed, and Kim jumped. Her first-aid kit crashed to the floor.

  Kim stared at Carole as Mercy scuttled into the corner of the room. She squatted there, rocking, holding her hand and sobbing.

  All day Wednesday, Jill and Scotty worked almost exclusively on the murder of David Carter. No-one in the unit was co-operative when they needed help investigating the case, with Emma Gibson even suggesting that they lose evidence so the killer would never be found.

  'You're not seriously going to try to catch whoever took that arsehole out, are you?' Emma asked Jill and Scotty as they pored over the murder book. They were adding details from people they'd talked to about Carter's life and activities in the lead-up to his death. 'You know it's just going to be one of his victims all grown up and back for justice. It always is in these cases.'

  'Really, Emma? Damn. We hadn't thought of that,' Scotty said sarcastically. 'And we're just loving that we caught this case. You think we want to help this shitbag? I just want to get it done, so could you back off a bit?'

  Emma flipped her straight black hair over her shoulder and shot Scotty a sneer, but she looked stung by his tone as she sashayed back to her own desk. Everyone was used to Scotty being a good-natured clown, and Jill knew that Emma rarely took her grey eyes off him when they were in the same room.

  Jill knew it was probably her fault Scotty had no patience left for any more negativity on this case. She'd been making smartarse comments since they'd escorted Carter's body to the morgue, intimating, just as Emma and half the unit had done, that they shouldn't make any real attempt to find the killer. At first Scotty had laughed along, but when it became clear that Jill was serious, he'd seemed worried – Jill was usually the most conscientious on the job. By now though, he seemed fed up with Jill's constant comments that she was glad Carter was dead.

  'Don't you say anything,' he warned her as she stared at him when Emma walked away.

  'Huh? No,' she said, distracted. She'd been searching the database for new crimes in the metro area. 'Scotty, look at this. There are two other bashing deaths with similar MOs in here. Both male, alone, head beaten in with a blunt instrument. The cops who caught the cases thought there was something off about each of these guys,' she said thoughtfully.

  'They're rock spiders too?'

  'They could be. Listen to this.' She read: '"Victim: Dennis Rocla, River Road, Lane Cove, DOB 11/11/1955. Victim's wife reports finding victim near garbage bin in front of garage, deceased with head injuries. Victim's wife reports that they had been separated and victim had not been welcome at their home. States she was not aware that victim had apparently come to the home the night before when assault took place. Victim's details known to police."

  'And this one – "George Manzi, a.k.a. George Marks, 56." Again deceased, assault, head injuries. Says here, "Items of interest to police recovered from scene."'

  'Well of course they've recovered items from the scene. It's a freaking homicide investigation.' Scotty stretched and yawned, his limbs sprawling, his elbow almost taking out a pot plant on a desk behind him.

  'Exactly. So why even add that bit in there?' asked Jill, pensive. 'They've got something on him.'

  She rocked back on her chair, its front legs in the air, her feet up on the desk. Scotty knew better than to tell her to be careful, sitting like that. The one time he'd tried, Jill had smirked at him and balanced the chair on just one leg, using a toe to steady herself as the chair swayed slightly, three of its feet in the air.

  'And in both of these they also got no prints,' she read on, chewing her pen. 'Killer wore gloves; they got smooth glove marks from each crime scene. Don't you think that's unusual?' Jill and Scotty both knew that bashing deaths were usually crimes of passion or, more often, were committed by drunken youths in gangs. Gloves weren't typical in such cases.

  'Yeah, well, we've got enough to do with Shitbag here,' said Scotty, indicating the murder book, pulling his hand through his thick blond hair. 'We've got a couple more fathers of his past victims to talk to. Could be one of them got sick of waiting for us to lock him up. And we've also got to interview that shrink, Dr Merris, who was treating Carter's daughters from his first marriage. She might have something to say about them or someone they're involved with. The oldest daughter, Hailey, is nineteen now.'

  'Yep, okay.' Jill still felt distracted. She stared unseeingly at the flyspecked, dung-coloured wall of the squad room.

  'Let's go get lunch, Jackson. I'm starving. I swear I'm gonna die if I don't eat soon.' Scotty half-lifted her from her chair with one arm.

  'Yeah. You're fading away, fatso,' Jill laughed, woken from her reverie. She manoeuvred from his grasp, and in the same fluid movement aimed a roundhouse kick at his flat abdomen, deliberately just missing.

  'Cut it out!' shouted their boss, Inspector Andreessen, as Scotty tried to lunge at Jill again, knocking over a chair as she easily sidestepped him. 'Go do some work for godsakes!'

  Pushing each other through the office,
Jill paused when she heard her name.