Chapter 14
Sapphire
Kayden followed me back inside. Everyone was still seated around the table, still reading, and the pile of unfolded notes in the middle had grown considerably.
“What did we miss?” I asked, pulling out my chair.
“Plenty,” Mitch said, in a tone that made plenty sound like the understatement of the decade.
Kayden picked his chair up off the floor and dropped into it with a huff.
Cassidy watched him the way older sisters watch over younger brothers. “You okay?” she asked.
“Yep.” The look he shot her said otherwise.
“Would you like another beer, Kayden? Or anyone else?” Bella said, pushing back on her chair.
His shoulders dropped half an inch. “Yeah. Thanks, Bella.”
She rested her hand on Declan’s shoulder. “I’ve still got some of that passionfruit slice from yesterday if you want some.”
“God, yes.” Declan’s face lit up as he brushed his hand over her arm.
She leaned over and pressed a kiss on his forehead. He caught her hand briefly before she moved away. The whole thing lasted maybe four seconds. They were comfortable together. No, it was more than that. Those two were in love.
A soft ache settled in my chest, and I looked down at my notepad.
I had no idea where the feeling had come from. Was I jealous? No, that was too strong a word. It was longing. And it was damn inconvenient right now.
I’d had that with Kayden. Not the forehead kisses and the easy domesticity. We’d been too young and too combustible for any of that. But we’d been drawn to each other. A gravitational thing where he’d had my attention, whether he’d tried to or not.
Ten years without seeing him, and yet, I’m straight back into his orbit.
I clicked my pen and looked back at the box.
Get your shit together, Constable Delaney.
Keeping it professional, I turned to Kayden. “You want another note?”
“Yeah, I guess.” He held out his hand.
I reached into the box, pulled out another note, and gave it to him.
Bella returned with drinks and a passionfruit slice, cut into fingers, which she handed out to everyone. Refusing to look at Declan’s reaction to her return, I selected another note for myself and unfolded it. Title: The night our lies became truth. Date: Sometime in 1977.
The oldest one yet. Frank would’ve been a teenager. Did his crimes really stretch back nearly fifty years?
I started reading.
A sense of dread settled in as I deciphered Frank’s handwriting. This note described wayward kids sent out to Koolaroo for thirty days at a time. Some kind of rehabilitation program. Hard work. No phones. No parents.
A line stopped me.
That’s how I met Bob and Donny.
Jeez. They’d known each other for nearly fifty years.
I kept reading. Bob had been seventeen—loud, confident, already practicing authority.
And there was a boy named Donny, quiet and eager, who’d followed Bob because he’d wanted to be like him.
And then a girl. Katherine. Known as Kat.
Chronic runaway. Thick file. Sent to Koolaroo because she couldn’t be contained anywhere else.
She never walked away from Koolaroo. Oh shit!
My breaths shot in and out.
Bob never called it murder. He called it a problem that needed managin.
My heart pounded.
That night bound the 3 of us together for good.
Me, because I knew where to hide the body. Turns out that lesson served me well over the years.
Over the years?
Fucking hell.
Was Frank a mass murderer?
My hands shook as I set the note down. “Hey, umm …” I looked around at all of them. “I have a note you all need to hear.”
The serious tone in my voice must have caught their attention because nobody reached for their drink, shifted in their chair, or cracked a joke. They just looked at me and waited.
I started reading.
Frank’s handwriting was rough, and the spelling was patchy, but the meaning was crystal clear, and it got worse with every paragraph.
I kept my voice level, reading the note word for word.
Frank’s confession was brutal enough before I even reached the part where they’d killed a young girl named Kat.
“Oh, my god.” Bella put her hand over her mouth.
“Son of a bitch,” Mitch said.
When I read the line about Bob, Frank, and Donny working together to bury the body, I stopped and looked up. “Has anyone heard of Kat, or Katherine? Or know who Donny is?” I asked. “Frank only gives a first name.”
Nobody answered around the table, and everyone shook their heads as if answering was too hard.
I made a note. Koolaroo Station. 1977. Donny, no surname. Katherine–AKA Kat. No surname.
There would be a file in the system. An old one, and probably very thin. Kat, a girl with a history of running away who’d run away one last time, and nobody had cared enough about her to look for her properly. Bloody sad.
I would look. No matter how long it took or how cold that trail was, that girl deserved better than a closed file and nearly fifty years of silence.
“So, Frank murdered a girl when he was a teenager and buried her here.” Cassidy looked toward the dark window. “On Koolaroo. Somewhere.”
“It doesn’t say who killed her, but they all buried her,” I clarified.
“And Bob covered it up,” Kayden said.
“Jesus.” Declan pressed his knuckles to his mouth as if trying to hold back his shock.
Mitch hadn’t moved a single muscle.
I picked up the note again. “There’s more.”
I kept reading aloud until I reached the line.
Me, because I knew where to hide the body. Turns out that lesson served me well over the years.
I stopped there and lowered the note again.
The room was quiet.
“Over the years?” Mitch said, as if he were assessing the implications that I’d already worked through.
“Yes.” I held his gaze. “Kat wasn’t the only body he buried on Koolaroo.”
Nobody spoke.
But Kayden’s eyes went straight to Cassidy, and Cassidy’s went straight back to him, and that little exchange lasted less than a second and told me everything.
They knew something. Or suspected something. And they’d made a collective decision not to tell me.
And that pissed me off.
Trying to keep an eye on them, I kept reading.
Another line stopped me.
I cleaned out his cash. Well, as much as I could carry. Turns out cash is heavy.
As much as I could carry.
I set the note down and looked up slowly. Everyone had their heads down, reading their own pages.
Frank was a sick man in his sixties running in the middle of the night. He could’ve managed a duffel bag, two at an absolute stretch. However, his earlier notes talked about millions. Stacked inside walls. Years of it.
The eastern outstation walls had been stripped bare before Bob had ever gotten there. Bob had walked in, seen the empty cavities, and panicked.
But Frank hadn’t taken all his money. Frank had barely made a dent in it.
Someone else had gotten there first.
Someone who knew where to look.
I put the note down. “You guys moved the money from the walls,” I said to nobody in particular. It took all my effort to keep my voice pleasant. The same tone I’d used this morning, when I’d quickly established that this family was hiding things from me. “Didn’t you?”
Nobody spoke.
Cassidy’s gaze went to Mitch. Mitch’s went to Declan. Declan’s dropped to the table.
I waited.
“Where’s the rest of the money?”
Still nothing.
I looked at Kayden, his gaze darted to Mitch, then back to me.
“Outside. Now.” I stood and walked out without looking back, because I knew he would follow.
The cool night air skimming off the paddock smelled of cow shit, which did nothing to help the sick feeling in my stomach. I strode down the steps and marched across the dry grass, needing to put some distance between myself and the Branson family.
The screen door banged shut behind me. I didn’t turn around. I made Kayden come to me.
He stopped at my side with the look of a man who already knew exactly how this conversation would go. “Sapphire.”
I turned on him. “You guys took the rest of that money. Didn’t you?”
“We did.”
“When?”
“The day after the cottage fire. Cassidy and Xavier found it by accident when the fire blew a hole in the wall. They used the ax to tear the rest of the plasterboard off, just like you figured. We went back out the next day and moved it.”
I looked up at the sky and took a breath. Out here, the stars were ridiculous, wall to wall, the kind of beauty that shouldn’t exist above a property that had been hiding bodies and laundered cash for years.
“Sapphire, you need to understand—”
“Oh, I understand plenty.” I brought my gaze back down to him. “You moved millions of dollars of laundered cash and weren’t going to tell me.”
“We didn’t know whose it was.”
“You knew it wasn’t yours.”
“Yes. We knew it wasn’t ours. But we didn’t know if it belonged to Frank or Bob or some other bastard we’d never met. We figured if we left it there, whoever owned it would come and get it.” He paused. “With us taking it, we could say we knew nothing about the cash and blame Frank.”
I shook my head. Not angry. Past angry, actually, which was worse. “I said today that I was probably the only person who really knew you.” I kept my voice level. “I was wrong about that. I never knew you to be a liar.”
He dragged both hands over his face and held them there for a moment. When he dropped them, his eyes were red at the edges. “Sapphire, please—”
“Please, what? Please forget that the man I once loved was capable of lying to my face?”
He flinched. Good.
“I didn’t want to lie to you. But I made a promise to my brothers and Cassidy before any of this started. Before I had any idea whose side you were on.”
“Your promise to your family doesn’t outrank my badge, Kayden.”
“I know.”
“Do you? Because from where I’m standing, it clearly did for most of today.”
He didn’t answer that. Which was its own kind of answer.
“Is there anything else?” I kept my voice flat and direct.
“You said you would tell me everything. So tell me. What else don’t I know?
” I held his gaze. “Tell me. Or I walk back in there, and I call the Queensland Police Commissioner and tell him that you and your siblings stole millions of dollars of laundered money belonging to a corrupt senior sergeant. Do you understand me?”
The wind moved through the dry grass around us.
“Yes.” Kayden looked at me for a long moment. “There’s a lot more we need to tell you. And we will.”
I held his gaze. He wasn’t scrambling, backpedaling, or trying to manage me. He looked at me like a man who’d finally decided that the weight of his deceit was too much to carry alone.
He’d reached a point of no return, and he knew it.
Now, he needed to choose between me and his family.
The same decision he’d made ten years ago.
The one that had broken my heart.