Turtle Island: 20th Anniversary Edition (Georgina O'Neil Book 1) Read online

  ‘Don’t you guys ever knock; I could have been having a private moment. Sit down.’

  Frusco neither had the patience nor the will to further this line of conversation, knowing that for every jibe LaPortiere would repost with two, at least.

  ‘Where’s O’Neil?’

  Rick sat. He answered his boss. ‘She’s still analysing the tape.’

  ‘Yeah, the techno boys have got their computers and microscopes out.’ Leroy chipped in.

  Frusco leaned forward on his desk. ‘Rick, I want you to know that we have already placed an armed guard outside and inside your house. Ray and Jo-Lynn are perfectly safe.’

  ‘What I want to know is, how does that sick freak-show know anything about me?’

  ‘I don’t know but he seems to have made a link with you for some reason, but we can use that to our advantage.’ Frusco tried his best to sound confident; truth was he was worried.

  8-55pm. Another long day. Agent O’Neil removed her reading glasses and rubbed her eyes. The static flicker of the television was causing her pupils to hopscotch. She scooped the cold remnants of fried chilli beef between her chopsticks and force-fed herself. If the job didn’t one day kill her, the diet certainly would. She longed for home, a cool bath, and a massage. The thermometer read a sticky 74 degrees that in actuality felt more like 94. She rewound the tape, now a copy, the lab boys were scrutinising every micrometer of the original. She decided to watch it one more time before leaving for the ‘comfort’ of her motel room. The tape whirred and locked. Georgina pressed the remote. The screen went blank, before an out of focus image of a man sitting tied and bound to a chair slowly sharpened. A figure dressed in black walked behind the bound man, his face was not visible. A hand removed the carpet tape that had been stuck across Max Dalton’s lips, ripping roughly from his bloodied mouth. His mouth was a mess. The teeth had been crudely hammered out, the lips split, swollen and pulpy.

  Off screen the killer spoke one word.

  ‘Read.’

  Even this had been electronically disguised. He pushed the bound man’s shoulder. The words were barely audible spewing out of the mashed orifice that was once a mouth. Agent O’Neil turned the volume up and began to write down Max Dalton’s last words.

  ‘By the time you receive this; things will have progressed. I have a plan.’ Max is interrupted by the sound of the killer laughing; again, it has been distorted, making it sound more grotesque. All the time he is pacing back and forth in the background. He tells Max to ‘Continue.’ and strikes the back of Max’s head with a stinging blow using his knuckles.

  ‘Mr Max Dalton is already...’ Fear is etched so deeply in Max’s eyes that a shiver runs up Georgina’s spine even though this is the seventh time she has viewed the tape. ‘Dead.’ Dalton’s voice quivers. ‘And now Detective Montoya, you will be looking for…’ Max Dalton stops reading and breaks down crying. ‘I can’t...I can’t do this.’

  The killer walked around to face Max Dalton, his face still remaining out of shot. Slowly he began to beat Dalton’s body with a Hammer. The blows were carefully aimed at the bound man, designed to break a rib, shatter a collarbone, chip his elbows, pulp an eye socket. Georgina looked away from the screen as the hammer pummelled into Max Dalton’s groin. His screams distorted the sound recorded by the microphone. The screen went blank. Georgina guessed Dalton must have become unconscious at this point. When the image came back on, the date recorder on the bottom left hand corner of the image had moved on by two days. Dalton was still bound and looking like shit. He was crying uncontrollably mumbling his way through the rest of the message.

  ‘And by now Detective Montoya... you will be looking for Stephen England, or maybe even...someone else...’

  At first nobody saw the photographs that were carefully placed behind Max Dalton, it was only on the third viewing that Agent O’Neil noticed them, the camera briefly but purposefully focused on them for no more than a second before the tape ended. The unmistakable images of Jo-Lynn Montoya and Ray. Photographs taken of Jo-Lynn kissing Ray goodbye in the morning, as his nanny was about to take him to school. The images were sharp, though taken with a telephoto lens, probably from a car parked nearby. The screen finally went blank, fading to black. Georgina let the tape run as her mind tried to absorb the information. As she leaned forward to turn the cassette off another piece of the puzzle revealed itself.

  The killer’s voice rasped. ‘Tell Detective Montoya, I’m changing the rules of the game.’

  ‘You know, I feel very, very wicked.’ Karen Fuller smiled. She leaned across the car seat and kissed Charles Fleisher slowly, passionately on the lips. Her tongue parted his lips and entered his mouth, probing searching, tasting, licking. Charles responded equally passionately, sucking, biting, savouring. They had parked outside one of the properties that Charles was letting and knew to be unoccupied but lavishly furnished.

  Karen pulled at the front of her loose-fitting dress, exposing her delicately small but pert, tanned breasts. ‘It gets so hot, sometimes it’s hard to breathe. Don’t you think?’ Her southern drawl tried to excuse her actions on the weather, but Charles knew better. ‘This does not look like the home of a real estate agent. Are you going to seduce me, Mr Fleisher?’ Karen kissed Charles again, this time she let her hand fall on to Charles groin, where she felt his already hardened penis.

  ‘No, I’m going to fuck you, Miss Fuller.’

  ‘Why Mr Fleisher, what would Harley say?’

  Charles knew the answer to that, but somehow thought that the teacher wouldn’t understand about his relationship with his daughter, instead he put his hand on her breast and whispered, ‘I want to fuck you.’ He said it with such passion that it didn’t even sound crude; to Karen’s ears it somehow sounded romantic, and it was just what she wanted to hear. Charles put his hand into his jacket pocket and withdrew a set of keys.

  ‘Charles, I’m going to give you a night to remember.’ Karen flicked her head back just as the main beam of a passing car exposed her cool beauty.

  On the journey back to the motel Georgina thought over the developments of the day. She was tired and her head was beginning to pound. The bright lights from the oncoming traffic did nothing to soothe her pain and she was regretting not taking a couple of Advil tablets to ease the sharpness of the constant ache when she had the opportunity. She tried to think of brighter things, maybe she would phone her father when she got in and question him about the case or take that bath like she had promised herself. As tomorrow was Saturday and one of the few foreseeable days where they might be able to sneak a little free time, Rick had invited her to his house for a barbeque.

  ‘Jo-Lynn wants to meet you, accept a little southern hospitality. It’s more of a barbeque actually, I hope you eat meat?’

  She gratefully accepted, the prospect of another fast food meal and her stomach would surely rebel? With the afternoon off it would be a great opportunity to get to know the other side of the detectives, the private world of real people. Rick invited Leroy and Lia too. Georgina looked at the illuminated clock on the dashboard. 10-58pm. She briefly envied the girls in the typing pool with their nine to five’s, briefly. Her job infringed on many aspects of her life, too many, the social part being the greatest intrusion. It was three months since she had been on any sort of a date, she could not remember the last time that she had made love to anyone but herself. She kept telling herself the sacrifice was worth it; that it would pay off with promotion. She laughed to herself in the car, wondering who she was trying to fool. Younger, less experienced men gained promotion above her; she stared at the soles of their shoes through the glass ceiling. If she complained she knew that was be a one-way ticket to obscurity, relocation to some god-awful field office. Georgina knew the options, tough it out and be so much better than the rest so that they had no option to ignore her, or loose ambition and stay in the field, eating shit, taking shit and having shit fired at her from every angle.

  The motel came within sight, its
garish neon illumination buzzing quietly, proudly, to the world, praising its very existence. Insects battered off the windscreen in a kamikaze duel, harbingers of another muggy night. For another twenty bucks a night she could have rented a hotel room with air conditioning, instead it was another night listening to the vibrating swirl of the fan blades as they fought valiantly to redistribute the humid, heavy air and the noisy lovemaking of the hookers in room 22. She pulled the rented Lincoln to a halt outside number 24, turned the lights off and sat alone in the dark for a few moments. Letting her mind start to unwind a little, she closed her eyes and saw the hammer swinging toward her. Her eyes snapped open. Relaxing tonight was going to be a little more difficult than normal.

  Narla needed the drink. She had slumped from the settee to the floor. Physically and mentally she could not reach a lower point. The images that bombarded her eyes were such a shock that she had to stop the tape on three occasions because she could no longer see the television through her tear streaming eyes. Her husband, the man she had vowed to love until parted by death, was stripping their daughter naked, even though she was crying and obviously distressed. He kept forcing her. She could hear his voice on the tape. ‘Mummy wants you to love Daddy, you do love me don’t you.’

  The confused child nods. ‘You have to kiss Daddy to show him how much you love him...Kiss me.’

  Harley sobbing leans forward and gently kisses her father cheek, the innocent way a child would kiss her father. ‘NO!..I TOLD YOU...’ Charles raises his voice. ‘On the lips.’

  Narla stopped the tape, unable to watch further. The date on the corner of the tape made it over four years old. She scrambled through some of the other tapes retrieved from the summerhouse and found the latest tape. Six days old. She put it in the VCR. The image that appeared on the screen reviled Narla. Charles had obviously progressed in his corruption of their daughter. Straddled across her father, both of them naked smiling, laughing as though they were partaking in an innocent game. Narla hung her head and vomited on to the floor, she pushed away the tapes at the last moment. Totally drained of every emotion, Narla slumped backwards and lay there, listening to her daughter being raped by her husband, listening to Harley’s soft whispers, listening to Charles low moaning. The sound of his breathing becoming laboured. The grunting noise she knew all too well, the noise that he always made just before he comes. The noises mingled in her head, mixing, and growing louder and louder, until they were a spinning cacophony, a crashing symphony of defilement. Narla started to scream to make the noise go away, above it all she could hear Charles breathing and Harley saying ‘Yes, I love you Daddy.’ Narla needed to get away from the television. She placed her hands over her ears and continued to scream at the top of her voice until it echoed inside her head. She couldn’t hear the doorbell ringing. Life outside her head no longer made sense. All that made sense was the screaming white noise inside her head. She staggered forward and fell against the television set. Tumbling over it, pushing it backwards. Just before passing out Narla thought she saw someone standing in the room with her.

  Leroy opened the door gently, trying not to wake Lia. He crept in the front room and noticed that there was no sign of her,

  ‘Must have gone to bed.’ he said to himself.

  Not that he blamed her, waiting up night after night with no promise of when he’d be home was not what he would call fun. Leroy hit the remote control lying in the chair and flopped exhausted on to the seat. He lowered the volume of the TV set and scanned the channels thinking to himself how Bruce Springfield had got it right when he declared ‘fifty-nine channels and nothing on’. The shopping channel tried its best to sell Leroy a singing Marvin Gaye memorial doll, Leroy tried his best to stay awake, both failed. Sleep swept over him without protestation, Leroy kicked back on the reclining mechanism and within seconds succumbed. The faint drone of the ever-present shopping channel salesperson receded and all was silent in Leroy’s world, save for the approach of dreams.

  SATURDAY

  ‘Uh...What the …’

  Someone was screaming. Leroy woke with a start, confused, disorientated. He looked around, trying to obtain his bearings, trying to fix on the noise. It wasn’t screaming. It was loud, very loud talking.

  ‘AREN’T THESE DOLLS BEAUTIFUL. GET THEM WHILE YOU CAN, THESE BABIES ARE GOING TO BE WORTH TRIPLE WHAT YOU PAY FOR THEM NOW IN JUST THREE YEARS TIME. ISN’T THAT RIGHT KIRSTIN?’

  ‘YOU’RE NOT JOKING, BOB. REMEMBER OUR LIBERACE MEMORIAL DOLL, EIGHTY-FIVE BUCKS TWO FALLS AGO? ONE SOLD AT AUCTION IN MICHIGAN FOR OVER FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS AND THAT’S NOT ALL; OUR MARVIN GAYE MEMORIAL DOLL COMES COMPLETE WITH A CERTIFICATE OF AUTHENTICATION AND THIS UNIQUE PRESENTATION BOX. WE ARE CONFIDENT THAT YOU WON’T BUY A BETTER INVESTMENT THIS YEAR THAN THE MARVIN GAYE MEMORIAL DOLL.’

  Leroy stared at the screen finally comprehending where the noise was coming from; his arm had fallen asleep and gone numb, pressing his weight on the remote handset’s volume button. He shook his arm trying to get some life to return to the dead limb. The remote fell to the floor as a rush of blood brought pins and needles along with restored feeling.

  He bent down and reduced the volume. He stared at the plastic facsimile of Marvin Gaye.

  ‘Brother, you’re better off dead than seeing this shit.’ Leroy rose from the armchair. Daylight flashed a tentative eye through the small gap in the curtains. The clock on the wall told him it was 7-50, Leroy knew that it must be later than that because the battery had been running down for the past six weeks, it had been losing up to five minutes a day, though Lia usually reset it at least once a week. Leroy had been meaning to buy a new battery, but it was way down a long list of things that he meant to do and never seemed to get the time to get around to. He ambled to the bathroom quietly, not wanting to wake Lia up, not just yet. He showered and shaved and put on his towelling robe, ready to make breakfast. Breakfast in bed with Lia sounded good to Leroy, and after breakfast maybe a little love. Leroy certainly felt the need of a little comfort after the past few days. He stood over the stove, shuffling the bacon rashers back and forward, trying not to weld them to the non-stick pan. He flipped the eggs over and let them rest against the blistering surface for only a minute before removing them and placing them carefully onto the hot buttered waffles. As bad a cook as he was, Leroy’s stomach was doing a tango in anticipation of some sustenance. He poured some orange juice and two cups of freshly brewed coffee, placed them all on a tray and walked down the hall to the bedroom. The door was pushed too, as usual; Leroy opened it with his back while keeping the tray in front of him.

  ‘Hey, sleepyhead, time for breakfast.’ Leroy turned and faced an empty bed. The smile faded from his face. ‘Baby?’ He put the tray on the bed and moved swiftly down the corridor, knocking open the second bedroom door, empty. The bathroom, the kitchen, the lounge, the toilet, all-empty. And it slowly dawned on him that ‘empty’ was the correct adjective. How he didn’t notice until now baffled him. Even when he was in the bathroom, he failed to spot that all of Lia’s wash things had gone. Leroy went to her wardrobe and pulled it open. The clanging hangers echoed around the house, sounding the death knell of a home whose very heart had been removed. Stuck with Sellotape to a shelf where Lia used to keep her winter woollens was an envelope marked Leroy. He snatched the envelope and sat down on the bed scattering the orange juice and coffee, sending the liquids hurtling together in to an undrinkable concoction before they finally came to rest on the waffles. Leroy pushed the tray back toward the centre of the bed, leaving a trail of orangey-brown fluid on the crisp white sheets. The envelope was not sealed, the flap springing open almost too obligingly. Leroy pulled the neatly folded piece of paper out. A waft of Lia’s perfume, ‘Jewel’, a waft of Lia…a memory.

  Leroy,

  I have tried to talk to you on many occasions, but it seems that time is our enemy. We just don’t seem to have enough of it to spend with each other. I know that things will not improve because you love your work so much,
maybe more than me. I know that sounds harsh, but I really believe that you can live without me; I wish the same could be said about your work. I have waited and waited and waited; I can see my life passing me by. I need to find life before it’s too late. I have stocked up on groceries for you and the freezer is full. Don’t try to find me. I have taken two thousand dollars from our savings account to get me by. Don’t hold harsh thoughts about me, my heart is breaking but this is something I have to do.

  Love Lia xxx

  Leroy felt lost, an empty pit opened in his stomach, which he felt his heart would surely drop in to. A feeling of desolation and rage swept over him simultaneously and he could do nothing but sit on the bed and cry.

  The police arrived within ten minutes of Narla’s phone call. A detective, fattish, going bald, got out of the car with surprising agility for his size. Narla watched through the lounge window sitting wrapped in a blanket. She was holding a cup of sweet tea. A sense of relief at seeing approaching safety made Narla sob quietly. Narla dreaded Charles returning during the time spent waiting for the police, breezing in with his usual cheery disposition and his ‘Hi, Honey I’m home’ falseness.

  Norman Frusco stood at the door and rang the bell. Before the chime had finished, Harley had the door open and welcomed the detective in. His first impressions of 14162 Harpenders Grove was that the owners were far from poor. On the way down, Norman had the station run over any details that they may have had on the owners. Apart from two unpaid parking violations the Fleisher’s were model citizens.

  ‘Come in, detective.’ Narla’s voice was trembling as much as her hands. There was a hot sickness in her stomach. The image of Harley curled up on the bed wouldn’t leave Narla’s mind. She wondered about the damage both mentally and physically to her daughter and was amazed at how she could manage to keep the abuse a secret. To Narla it seemed too much of a burden for a girl to have to carry, it was too much for anyone to carry.