Chapter 8 #2
“So, Frank had a brother who needed help his whole life, and instead of telling us, he just paid the bills and kept it a secret.” I shook my head.
“Frank preached about blood and land being the only real thing his whole damn life. Koolaroo belongs to the Bransons. The Bransons look after their own. And all that time, he had a brother he never fucking mentioned?”
“Maybe he was protecting his brother,” Sapphire said, shrugging.
“Bullshit. Frank only looked out for himself.” I stared at the horizon.
“Well, someone’s been paying the upkeep on that house for the last seven years. My guess is it’s Frank. I bet that’s where Frank’s been hiding.”
The words landed like a fist. “What the actual fuck?”
I’d lived under that man my whole life. He’d raised me on Koolaroo.
He’d beaten the hell out of me when I’d stepped out of line and called me useless on what felt like a weekly rotation through my teenage years and twenties.
But in all that time, he’d never mentioned a brother who’d been alive. Or a brother who had died.
What else didn’t I know?
The old familiar rage crawled up my spine. The one Frank had put there. The one I’d spent years trying to outrun.
I felt like a fucking idiot. Thirty-two years old, and I didn’t know my own father. Maybe none of us did. Maybe Frank had made damn sure of that.
Sapphire went back to her screen without a word. She’d always known when to push and when to let me be. I’d forgotten that about her.
I reached past Sapphire and clicked the satphone over to channel two. “Hey, Declan, you there?”
There was a long crackle.
“Kayden? What’s up?” Declan’s voice came through tinny and far.
“I’m in the chopper with Sapphire. Headed for Winton. We’ve got something.”
“What?”
“Did Dad have a brother?”
A long silence.
“What kind of question is that?”
“A simple one. Did Dad have a brother? Alive or dead?”
“No.”
“Do you know a William Branson?”
“No.”
“You sure?”
“Mate, if Frank had a brother, I would’ve known.”
“Well, he did. William Branson was two years younger than Frank. He died seven years ago of an overdose.”
“Seven years ago? What? Are you sure? We would’ve known.”
“Sapphire just looked it up. Another thing, do you know anything about a house in Winton?”
“A house in Winton? No. What house?”
“William owned a house, and it looks like Frank’s been paying for it since William died.”
“There’s nothing in the books about any property other than Koolaroo. There is nothing, Kayden. Not with any account I’ve ever touched, that’s for sure.”
“He must’ve been paying with cash. Or he has accounts we don’t know about.”
I heard him breathe out hard. “Fuck.”
“That’s what I said. Okay, buddy, Sapphire and I are heading to the house now. I’ll let you know what we find.”
“Okay, but, Kayden … be careful. There’s something fucking weird going on.”
“I know. We will.” I clicked off.
Sapphire was watching me. “Did you want to ask Mitch or Cassidy if they knew about William?”
Mitch and Frank had some seriously messed-up history.
Cassidy, too. But if anyone would’ve spotted unusual spending, it was Declan.
“No point. Declan runs the books. If Frank had been funneling Koolaroo money toward a brother or a house in town, Dec would’ve found the trail eventually and asked questions. Frank was hiding it from all of us.”
“Or someone was hiding it for him.”
“Yeah. And there’s only one person Frank ever trusted with anything.”
“Bob.”
“Yep.”
She held the laptop open a moment longer, then closed it slowly, like she was closing a case file she wasn’t ready to put down.
“If Bob knew about William, he’d have known about that house,” she said, more to herself than to me.
“Yeah.”
“And Bob sent Wayne and Bruce to that house last night to bring Frank in.” She paused. “Does that mean Bob knew Frank was hiding there all along?”
I shook my head. “I don’t think so. When we told him Frank was missing, he looked genuinely blindsided. And pissed off.”
She stared out the windshield for a long moment. Then she pulled out her phone and dialed.
“You calling Bob?”
She nodded. Waited. Tried again. And again. “Not answering.” She lowered the phone. “I’ll try the station.”
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?”
She cocked her head. “Ringing the station?”
“Sapphire …” I kept my voice even. “Bob is a crooked cop. I think you know that now as well as I do. But what about everyone else at the station? Can you trust them?”
She looked at me for a moment. Something moved across her face that I couldn’t quite read. Then she pressed dial. “Nate. It’s Sapphire. Where’s Bob?”
A pause.
“Did he say where he was going?” She shook her head at me. “Has anyone heard from him since he left?”
Another pause.
“Nothing. Okay. If he comes in, get him to call me the second he’s through the door. And, Nate,” her voice dropped slightly, “keep this between us. I don’t want him to think I’m checking up on him.”
A small silence stretched on the other end.
“Yeah. Sure. Will do.”
She ended the call. She hadn’t mentioned the house in Winton. Hadn’t mentioned William Branson. Hadn’t told Nate where we were headed.
I couldn’t decide if that was because she didn’t trust Nate, or because she wasn’t sure how much she should say.
She slid the phone into her jacket pocket, reached up, and gripped the grab rail above her head. Her knuckles went white. She sat like that for a long time, not looking at me, not looking at the country rolling beneath us.
Twenty minutes ago, she’d told me she never gave up. But now, she might be questioning what she was up against. She’d had four years to build her picture of Bob Ackerman. I’d had my whole life to build mine of Frank. I knew exactly what it felt like when that picture shattered into pieces.
I kept my eyes forward and let her have a moment.
The country below us shifted slowly from red dirt to scrubby grass.
The first lonely fences appeared. A water tank on a rise.
A gate left open on a dirt road going nowhere in particular.
A tractor crawling its slow line along a stretch of paddock, raising a thin trail of dust behind it.
The Outback, beginning its reluctant crawl toward town.
I didn’t know what was waiting for us at that house in Winton. Neither did Sapphire. But in the last hour, we’d stopped being a cop with a job and a pissed-off rancher she was using as a chauffeur.
We were just two people headed to the same place for the same reason.
Whatever we found there, we were going to find it together.
I told myself I was just doing what any decent bloke would do for a woman walking into a situation without backup.
It was a hell of a lot more than that, and I knew it.
Winton came up under us, a town the color of dust and tin, scattered along a main street that ran east-west with paddocks gone yellow on every side.
The afternoon sun was dropping toward the western horizon, and the shadows were stretching long.
The entire place looked half-asleep the way Outback towns did on a weekday afternoon when nobody needed to be outside.
Sapphire had the address on her phone. “That side of town.” She pointed. “In the back streets near the showgrounds.”
“Got it.”
I flew over the address once at altitude, picked a paddock half a kilometer south, and brought the chopper down into the dry grass behind a stand of wattle trees covered in yellow flowers. I killed the engine, and as the rotors wound down, the country went quiet around us.
We climbed out into the heat. It was late afternoon and still thirty-eight degrees, the kind of dry heat that pushed the breath back into your lungs before you could properly take one.
Sapphire took off at a jog along the fence line. I fell in beside her.
We ran through the dry grass, past a crusted dam that hadn’t held water in months, and past a rusted-out tractor somebody had abandoned mid-paddock.
The town was quiet around us. No cars on the back streets.
No kids. No dogs. Just the distant hum of a generator somewhere and the sound of our boots in the dry grass.