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“Do you mind if I take this with me?” Reed held the letter up in his gloved hands. “I’ll give it back once I’ve taken a closer look.”
“What? Oh sure.” Sierra didn’t really care what he did with it. He could burn it, for all she cared. Tiny pinpricks of light were starting to dance in front of her eyes. She needed to go and lie down. Now. This was going to be a doozy of a migraine, if the pain in her head was anything to go by. A legacy of the accident. Of the brain injury she’d received. The doctor had told her she was lucky to survive with minimal symptoms. But she wasn’t sure she was the lucky one at all.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” His compassionate gaze held hers, eyes as dark as obsidian. For a second, Sierra wondered what it would be like to have someone care for her. Look after her when the migraines hit and all she wanted to do was go and hide in the dark like some wounded animal. But that life was long gone, now. That life where she deserved to be happy. She lived alone, dealt with the pain alone, and existed as best she could. That was all.
“Thanks, Reed. I just need to go and lie down for a while.” She raised her chin to look up at him, stepping back at the same time and crossing her arms. “I’m fine, really. You’d better go, before Don starts hollering for you.”
“It was nice to see you again,” he said. “Shame it wasn’t under better circumstances.” He smiled and the dimple in his chin came to life.
She couldn’t disagree with him. He pushed the door open and she watched him stride across the driveway to the waiting police car, long legs eating up the distance, shoulders squared and confident. Jesus, he was a good-looking man.
A sharp slice of pain ran through her head and she turned, making her way towards the bathroom to find her bottle of painkillers. It was going to be a long day.
* * *
There was silence inside the Land Cruiser as Don steered it down Sierra’s long driveway and then turned right onto the main gravel road. Reed rolled the scene of the burglary over in his mind. His gut was telling him things just didn’t add up. He glanced quickly at his boss. What had he thought about it all? Was his gut telling him the same thing? Don had been in the force a long time, perhaps his experience was telling him something different to what Reed was feeling. Only one way to find out.
“That was an interesting start to our morning. Do you get many of those on the island?”
Don looked startled for a second, as if his mind had been miles away. “You mean robbery and theft, break-ins?”
Reed nodded his head.
“Not too many. It used to be one a month. Two at the outside. But they’ve been going up lately. Over the past nine months, rates have steadily increased until we’ve been getting up to ten or so a month.”
Reed did a mental double-take. That was still extremely low. Even when he’d been working in Ballarat, there’d been at least fifteen or twenty robberies or trespass and theft every night. The population was nearly ten times that of KI in Ballarat, but still. Crime on the island seemed to be much lower per capita than he was used to.
Don continued. “It normally happens in the main townsites, you know, in Kingscote or Penneshaw. It’s unusual for someone to make the effort to come out to the more isolated communities. They’d need a car. Probably more a crime of luck and circumstance than anything premeditated. A bunch of kids out on a joyride, see the house is empty and take a chance, that kind of thing.”
“So, you think it was just kids? That wad of cash she had sitting in her top drawer would’ve been like manna from heaven for them. Could someone have found out she was keeping it at home?” Reed was musing aloud, trying to corral his thoughts into some kind of order.
“It’s not unusual for people to keep money in their houses on KI. Cash machines are few and far between out here. It’s often hard to get money if you need it quickly. So, it might’ve just been a good guess on the burglar’s part.” Don didn’t take his eyes off the road, but his frown deepened as he stared straight ahead.
“What about drugs? Dealers and users. Is there a problem on the island?”
“Yes, a growing one, I’m afraid.” Don’s tone turned bitter, his mustache practically vibrating with indignation. “It’s one of the reasons Detective Senior Sergeant Breevant allowed me to hire you. We needed another member to help us deal with the rising crime rate, which is tied loosely to the rise in drug use.”
“So, it could be someone out purposely casing houses, looking for easy-to-steal-items and cash?”
“Yes, a definite possibility.” Don hesitated and drew in a deep breath. “The strange thing was, there were no fingerprints around the broken window. Not even a partial, or a smudge. But there were glove prints. Latex, if I’m not mistaken.”
“The perp was wearing gloves?” Reed’s internal alarm went off. This didn’t sound right. Your normal criminal usually wasn’t smart enough, or prepared enough, to think of wearing gloves to cover their tracks. Something a lot of criminals didn’t realize, however, is that with the advent of better techniques in forensics, gloves also left their own unique prints, and could be processed in much the same way as a fingerprint. In some cases, these had been used to make an arrest. But these cases were few and far between.
“Looks like it.” Don narrowed his eyes at the notion.
“That seems a little high-tech for a couple of kids, or even a druggie looking for cash, don’t you think?”
“Yes, it’s unusual.”
“And Sierra said they didn’t take any of the drugs in her bathroom. Which would’ve been the first thing a drug addict would’ve gone for,” Reed added. “So, what are your thoughts on this stalker of hers?”
“First I’ve heard of it,” Don growled. “How the hell do people think we’re going to be able to protect them, if they don’t tell us important things like, oh by the way, I’ve been getting threats for the past ten years from some deranged psycho.” He mimicked a high, squeaky, woman’s voice.
On one level, Reed agreed with Don. Police couldn’t do their jobs if they weren’t given all the facts. But Sierra had been dealing with this well before she moved to the island. Obviously, she thought she had it under control. And she’d said he’d never actually done anything to follow through on his threats. Never made a physical appearance, just mocked her from afar, from the safety of his own living room. An arrogant, cocky bastard who liked to terrify her in a sick attempt to make up for some lack of his own self-worth. Reed made a mental note to look into the articles Sierra was talking about in The Advertiser, when he got some free time.
“What do you think that reference to her judgement day meant?”
“Not sure,” Don replied. “I have heard stuff through the grapevine about how Sierra moved to the island to get away from a horrific accident that changed her life. But I’ve never spoken to her about it personally. We tend to talk about strictly professional matters.”
