Free Hit by Tara Moss Page B

Marian’sinvestigations were to find missing persons—runaway teenagers, AWOL spouses, deadbeat dads, that sort of thing. Record checks on any vehicles, leases, mortgages or change-of-address applications in their names were invaluable in revealing not only a person’s whereabouts but a lot about their lifestyle and habits as well. If this subject was in jail already, though, Mak couldn’t see how she would be needed for more than two or three days of work at the most. Given Marian’s magical and somewhat mysterious contacts, there would be little for her to do.
    ‘The client wants a complete report on the suspect’s background, and what the case is against him.’
    Ah. The case against him. Was Mak expected to lean on her police contacts to learn about the case?
    ‘Do you know the kind of outcome he is searching for?’ Mak said. ‘Perhaps to get the information he feels the police don’t have, or aren’t telling him?’
    Marian looked up. ‘I would say so,’ she said. ‘He wants everything you can get.’
    So he feels dissatisfied by the way the police are approaching the investigation…
    Mak shifted awkwardly in her chair. ‘Um, Marian, I didn’t get the job because I have police contacts, did I?’
    ‘You got the job because you are turning into a good investigator,’ Marian said.
    Mak smiled at the compliment.
    ‘Who has good contacts,’ she added sharply. ‘Nearly all of my investigators have police contacts of some kind, Mak. No one is expecting you to jeopardise your relationships for an investigation. That would be counterproductive.’
    Mak nodded. ‘Okay,’ she said, though she still wondered if those relationships were the main reason she had been chosen. Her ties to the police—to both her lover, Andy, and her friend Detective Mahoney—might give her an advantage in a case like this, but if either of them helped her out with information and was discovered, it could put their careers at serious risk. So far, she had not considered exploiting them for that kind of help.
    Marian slid a piece of paper with a name and address on it across the desk. ‘The client took his PA to a party on Wednesday night and that was the last he saw of her. Yesterday she left him a message that worried him. That was the last anyone seems to have heard from her. The client thinks she might have gone home with someone who was there called Simon Aston. He wants you to check him out.’
    Sounds like a jealous lover to me.
    ‘Where was the party on Wednesday night?’ Mak asked, her pen poised.
    ‘He wouldn’t say.’
    Mak frowned. ‘He wouldn’t say, or he didn’t say?’
    ‘He wouldn’t say,’ Marian repeated.
    ‘Well, do I get to meet the client? Ask him a few more questions?’ Mak asked eagerly. She was new to the business of private investigation, but it seemed to her that she could get a lot more information if she just talked to the client directly.
    ‘No. As far as he is concerned you don’t even know his name, so there are to be no mentions of him and no contacting him. He is paranoid about his confidentiality.’
    ‘Oh,’ Mak replied, disappointed. She thought for a moment. ‘Is he married?’ She suspected a guilty affair with the deceased.
    ‘Yes,’ Marian answered, but failed to add any juicy personal details. ‘Mak, stop analysing the client. That’s not your job.’
    Mak smiled. Sorry.
    ‘There’s more.’ Marian closed her eyes again as she continued to speak. It was one of her unusual quirks that she spoke this way—eyes closed—when recalling details of a case or a conversation. It was rumoured that she had a photographic memory. Mak sometimes found this mannerism of Marian’s unsettling. She never knew where to look. The tops of her boss’s lavender-painted eyelids? The desktop? ‘The client wants everything you can get on the victim’s life in the weeks leading up to her murder—her close contacts, secret lovers—everything, and any relationship she might have been