Chapter 29 #3
Taryn fake-smiled at her boss, who was halfway into a yarn about fishing in the Territory, as she reached into her trusty workbag.
‘When I was up north, they say you don’t just catch barra, you race crocs for ’em.
’ Russ leaned back on her couch, hooking his bad leg over his other knee to rub the joint that had landed him a permanent desk job.
‘I’d never seen anything like it. Big salties sunbaking on riverbanks like they were British backpackers on holiday, waiting on you to catch the fish so they could steal it from you.
And some of them crocodiles were bigger than the boat we were in… ’
‘Really?’ She nodded politely as her fingers brushed past her notebook until they closed around her encrypted laptop. The one her father had purpose-built for her, days after Meghan’s funeral.
She killed the office wi-fi, then booted into her father’s ghost-net protocol. And typed only a few words into the secure console:
Andrew Bannon + Meghan Forrester
The search was short and showed nothing, no red flags, because she’d already combed every file, every shared email trail, every whisper for a connection, for Meghan’s name.
So why not try something new?
While her boss droned on about crocodiles the size of bathtubs, she keyed in:
Andrew Bannon + Renzo
Just the first name, since she had no last name for the man who’d murdered her cousin, all without any hope that it’d work. She even leaned back in her chair and listened to her boss. ‘Did you eat that fish?’
‘Eventually. The guys I went fishing with helped me cut it up, snap-freeze it, and I carried it home in my hand luggage.’
Taryn let out a soft laugh. ‘You big game hunter, you.’
Russ chuckled. ‘The customs copycats—those quarantine fellas at the airport—didn’t love it. They thought I was smuggling in frozen dinosaurs when I landed back in Canberra.’
The spinner ticked.
Still digging.
Oh, she hated that thing now.
Her boss kept nattering from the couch about crocs sunbaking like retirees, and how small boats barely outrun them. She could recite this story by heart: Crocodile story number seven.
But this time, she couldn’t laugh. Not with her own monster somewhere in the system. And the longer that spinning cursor of doom rolled like a beach ball that went nowhere, the deeper it was trolling for information, the more her patience frayed.
She should’ve called it, shut the lid and let the thread go cold.
But now the spinning thing had her hooked.
It was still searching.
By now, like all the other searches, it should have stopped cold.
Yet, it was still searching.
Then—
Three results pinged.
She clicked the first one.
The screen blinked and showed a plain document. No letterhead. No classification. Just some old metadata with the title:
SEALED FILE – CLASSIFICATION: INTERNAL ONLY
Authorised Access: Restricted
Access Key: [DECRYPTED]
Name: Lorenzo Matteo Caruso
Alias: Renzo
Age: 16
Referral: Property crime – suspected rural theft syndicate
Outcome: Referred to Qld Rural Work Initiative
Supervising Officer: A. Bannon
Status: Completed.
Notes sealed.
Taryn stared hard with a long, slow exhale caught halfway in her throat.
Finn’s words whispered in her ear—Drew was working in the old cop shop that was barely standing in the sticks. Through Finn, she’d learned the Commissioner was a cop who’d sit at bus stops, doing word puzzles, while babysitting kids who’d been expelled from school.
Back then, it had sounded like nostalgia for a good guy.
Now it felt like a warning.
Taryn’s heart thudded. Drew knew the man who’d killed Meghan.
Her hands trembled as she grabbed her mouse.
Finally, she had the link, that thread she’d been chasing all along, the one that would unravel everything.
With her fingers flying, she tapped out a secure message to her father, attaching an encrypted copy of that file:
It’s him, Dad. It’s Andrew Bannon!
Even if the name felt radioactive now, she didn’t hesitate to hit send.
And for the first time since Meghan’s murder, she felt like justice wasn’t just a dream. Drew, the man who’d sent her after Finn, was linked to Meghan’s murderer. It was him, the Commissioner.
It had to be him.
He was the one who’d accessed Izzy’s file on Everlight and her kidnapping first.
The first to receive Finn’s Gaps File, submitted in good faith, and full of holes that Drew knew how to exploit.
Had he set Finn up to fail? To use him? Then tried to shut him down once he’d exposed too much, while using her to do it?
Her pulse roared in her ears.
She closed her laptop, slipping it back into her bag. Then sat straighter and locked her posture into the perfect picture of tranquillity.
Across from her, Russ was still going on about something about mud crabs with nippers so big they’d snip your big toe.
His phone alarm dinged, and he switched it off. ‘Ah, right, that time already… It’s my turn to pick the kids up from sports practice.’ He pushed himself up from the couch.
‘Russ? The Commissioner might be right. If there are inconsistencies, and if he wants me to dig deeper, I’ll need to go back to the Territory and take another crack.’
‘You think something’s wrong with the data?’
Taryn smiled at her boss. ‘I think someone’s hiding the truth.’