Free Crystal Coffin by Anita Bell

smuggling ring from Sydney to Rome, he’d been kept busier than a pig with two mudholes, but the gruesome murder of the Arts Minister promised to liven things up even more. It almost made him smile — almost. But his smiles were reserved for the rare occasions when he achieved a successful jail conviction after a court hearing, when he could curl up on his dead daughter’s oversized beanbag with a solitary glass of scotch and whisper to her photo that he’d bagged another bad guy. But it had been three years, seven months and four days since his last smile, and his wife had given up waiting.
    â€˜I have reason to believe,’ he added, guarding his words carefully, ‘that her husband Mr Fletcher may be involved in another case that I’m working on.’
    â€˜The smuggling scandal?’ Burkett guessed. ‘I’m surprised politicians haven’t been coming out of the woodwork, telling you to go sit in your corner like a good little blue heeler until after the next election. That’s what happened to me when I tried to follow up on a few missing paintings from the Dumakis Art Gallery last month.’
    â€˜Who said they haven’t?’ Parry said. ‘Renée Dumakis was being groomed as the next Prime Minister, and you know politicians. They’d order us to back off a Port Arthur gunman if he was married to someone who could stop them from losing the next election for them. But the lady’s dead now, and if you read the papers you know there are plenty of people out there who want to know why.’
    â€˜You don’t think that includes her husband?’ Underwood asked, tugging his collar away from his thick neck and coughing. ‘I was the one who interviewed him while they were taking her body away and he seemed pretty convincing to me. And let’s not forget,’ he added, looking at Burkett, ‘that those three paintings they had on loan from the vaults of the Vatican did eventually turn up. They were mistakenly packed into storage by some air-headed artist instead of being shipped off with the rest of the exhibition to the next museum on Mr Fletcher’s tour.’
    Burkett pushed his fists into his pockets, frowning. He was young, but he wasn’t naive. He’d checked that Dumakis Gallery throughly and then the paintings had very conveniently been found the moment he’d started investigating the case as if it was an insurance fraud. That was about the same time that politicians had bolted to the newspapers to shout that Renée Dumakis and her family were ‘clean’.
    â€˜Well,’ Parry said, pushing his fists into his pockets to mimic Kalin Burkett. ‘I’ve just been granted permission straight from Parliament to make sure, and I’m recruiting my friend here with the ponytail to help.’
    Oh great, Burkett thought, already imagining himself wrapped up in lunch-wrap. I’ve been promoted to the plastic police.

    Nikki shifted around on the truck seat trying to avoid the jaggard collection of slashes in the sun-ravaged vinyl. The Bedford was fitted with a bench seat, one long innerspring that looked older than the truck itself. The back was split so the driver’s could be folded down separately from the rest and every bump in the road reminded her she was sitting beside a stranger.
    Jolt. Lurch. Another pothole.
    She felt Locklin’s weight shift in the seat beside her, felt his body bounce in time with the truck’s suspension and she floated on the reverberations like a cork bobbing, on pond ripples.
    She tried not to look at him. Instead, she studied his reflection in the dusty glass to her left.
    He wasn’t like any of the guys she’d known in Sydney — not that she’d dated more than a handful and none of them had lasted more than a term at school anyway. She’d always had her head buried in the art gallery accounts or stuck in assignments to finish her senior year and