Free Dead Heat by Caroline Carver

of his nose. “Lucy died three years ago. My wife . . . she was only twenty-eight.”
    Horrified, Georgia filled in the awkward silence. “I’m sorry, it must have been awful.” She didn’t dare ask how his wife had
     died. She racked her brains to think whether there’d been a Lucy at Nulgarra High but couldn’t remember one. He’d obviously
     met Lucy later.
    “Tabby and Gran live with me in Canberra, which works fine at the moment, but . . .” He sighed, ran a finger around his coffee
     cup.
    Georgia changed the subject. “So what are you doing all the way up here if you live in Canberra?”
    Leaning back in his chair, he said, “We travel wherever required. Gathering intelligence, conducting investigations. I’m on
     the PST. The People Smuggling Strike Team. We decided to drop an ‘S’ to avoid being nicknamed
psst.
” He gave a wry smile. “We work from the federal office in Canberra, trying to bust illegal immigration.”
    She’d never heard of the PST and said so.
    “We’ve only been going a couple of years. The penalties for people-smuggling used to carry a maximum of two years in jail,
     but now they get twenty years or fined a quarter of a million bucks. The stakes have been upped so much that the amateurs
     have dropped out and now it’s run by professional criminal enterprises. Lots of bribery and official corruption. Hence the
     creation of PST.”
    “Why Nulgarra?”
    “I got intelligence from our Chinese counterparts that the head honchos of a particular gang we’re after, the RBG, Red Bamboo
     Gang, might be up here. The RBG were responsible for the container ship that disembarked three hundred illegals in Cairns
     a couple of years back.”
    She remembered reading about that in the newspaper. The police had managed to catch only forty of them. The rest had been
     smartly trucked off to urban centers around Australia to melt into the general population.
    “It’s big business for the RBG,” he added. “Twenty grand or so a person.”
    She did the sums. Six million dollars for a single shipment of people. Not bad.
    “I’ve been working with the Brisbane police and we flew here this morning, hoping to track them down. Make some arrests. Your
     intruder, we thought, might be connected. We’ll see.”
    She recalled the figure she thought she had recognized as they taxied for takeoff. “I saw you,” she said, her voice surprised.
     “I saw you on the SunAir steps.”
    He looked startled. “You did?”
    “I didn’t know it was you,” she added. “Until now.”
    “Wish I’d had a crystal ball. I could have stopped the flight before disaster struck.” Small pause. “Are you planning to stay
     long?”
    “I’m leaving today.” She glanced at the clock. “After I’ve seen Bri.”
    “You’ll be lucky. Becky’s closed the aerodrome and the roads are still impassable. I checked on my way here.”
    “Then I’ll leave tomorrow, or the day after that. Soon as I can, actually.” She turned her cup around in her hands. “How long
     are you up here for?”
    He didn’t answer, just drained his coffee and pushed the cup away. Then he stretched, and stood up. “I’ll file the report
     about your intruder. Thanks for the coffee.”
    She followed him to the front door.
    “Why don’t you wear a uniform?”
    He turned and smiled at her. “My kind of cop doesn’t wear one.”
    “Why not?”
    “We’re supposed to be invisible.”

NINE
    G eorgia watched Daniel’s black-clad figure lope down the narrow concrete path, wondering how he’d come to be a policeman, and
     then she remembered Mathew Larkins. Everyone in Nulgarra knew the story. Mathew Larkins had fleeced Daniel’s father of all
     his savings in a get-rich-quick scheme, something to do with prawn farms.
    Daniel’s father had died of a heart attack soon after he heard he’d lost all his money, and Daniel, aged sixteen, now head
     of his poverty-stricken family, had blamed Larkins for his father’s death. When