Page 133 of So Wild

Taunt

Open Hearts

Act Your Age

Degrees of Control

Locked Box

Captivated (coauthored with Tessa Bailey!)

Locked Box

Remastered edition

by Eve Dangerfield

Chapter 1

Julia Bennett hadbeen Brenthill Police Station’s IT person, or ‘computer girl’ as she was still often called, for over a year. IT was a thankless job at the best of times but most days it seemed like Brenthill was striving to be voted ‘Least Technologically Capable Organization in Human Existence.’ There were old cops who longed for the days of secretaries and notepads, young cops frustrated by the outdated technology, general computer illiteracy, and some sexism thrown in just for fun. Today alone she’d taught an old geezer how to use a wireless mouse, uninstalled more malware than she’d thought possible to download, and been bailed up by a shifty-looking constable who wanted to make his web history disappear. The cop tried to pass off his incriminating searches as investigative, but they both knew he was lying.

They were always lying.

Three years she’d spent getting her Bachelor of Design, another two earning an Advanced Diploma in Professional Game Development and all that had culminated in spending her days deleting weird porn in the same backwater town she’d grown up in. Her mother, when she wasn’t poached in wholesale Russian vodka, used to say Brenthill was like quicksand; it smelled bad and it sucked you down. The older Julia got, the truer that statement became. All her life her responsibilities had kept her from throwing her belongings into her car and heading for the nearest airport, but on days like today it was tempting to do what her mother had done and just get the fuck out of Dodge.

Of course it didn’t help that it was six o’clock on a Friday and her workday still hadn’t ended. Ordinarily, Julia cut and ran at five on the dot like everyone else, but she’d fallen afoul of Henrietta Brennan. Henrietta was one of those aggressively cheerful women who fluctuated wildly between sweetness and anger. Julia had no techniques to deal with her brand of demanding syrupiness other than immediately agreeing to anything she asked. Synch up her phone, laptop, and tablet? Done. Convert her holiday photos into a slideshow with which she could bore others to death? Done. Run out and get more toilet paper on her lunch break despite that having nothing to do with her job? Sure. But, today’s request had been a whole new breed of bother.

Henrietta had come into the break room, taken away Julia’s mug of nitrogen-strength coffee and said, “Please organize the entire computer section of the Brenthill Evidence Room and have it done yesterday, thanks.”

Julia should have said no. She should have put her foot down. Instead she’d crumpled like a cheap suit.

The Brenthill Evidence Room was the size of a modest garage. Much like a garage, it was full of useless crap—soggy backpacks, rusty bicycles, tangles of fake gold jewelry. Brenthill wasn’t exactly the criminal hub of Australia. The cheap government housing attracted a lot of bad behaviour but it mostly came in the form of graffiti, domestic violence, and domestic violence’s mean old daddy—drunk and disorderly. When Henrietta said ‘computer section,’ Julia expected a couple of busted monitors and a USB cord. She was wrong. Three years ago the cops had busted a guy collecting computers from the tip. The former postal worker’s goal had been to build a CPU capable of overthrowing the government. The man was insane—he couldn’t have overthrown a kindergarten—but the cops seized the would-be doomsayer’s ‘assets’ and instead of chucking them back in the tip where they belonged, they became an almighty mountain of evidence. What Henrietta assured her was a ‘quick job’ was in fact a war of man versus machine. Julia scraped herself on exposed copper wires four times as she untangled dirty cords and slid heavy monitors onto shelves. She spent two hours alone bagging floppy disks.Floppy disks. And they wereblank.

Initially, Henrietta had been supervising—i.e. drinking tea, checking her phone and chatting with passersby—while the trusty computer girl took care of business. Then her daughter had been stung by some kind of bee and, overwhelmed with maternal responsibility, she’d fled, propping the door open with a copy of Encyclopedia Britannica and begging Julia to stay and finish the job.

She shouldn’t have agreed. Brenthill might have a lax ‘this is a country town, let’s all go play lawn bowls’ attitude but she wasn’t authorized to mill about the property office. If the station inspector found out she’d been in a position to steal all the weed and floppy disks, she and Henrietta could get fired. And yet, what else was she supposed to do? Stand up for herself? Not be such a pushover?

“Fat chance,” Julia muttered, wrestling with a tangle of grimy headphones, all of which wanted to strangle her.

A burst of masculine laughter filtered into the office and she felt a familiar tumbling sensation in her gut. She knew it wasn’thim, his voice was deeper, but her body tingled at the mere possibility. She stopped packing evidence and listened.

“Why not Italian?” the guy said. “Last time we had Thai my curry had a hair in it.”

A woman giggled. “That was your own hair. I want roti bread, we’re doing Thai.”

“Anything else we’ll be doing tonight?”

Even though the people had no idea she was listening Julia ducked her head, blushing at the intimacy of their words. She knew it was Constable Greg Ford and Senior Constable Melanie Bastow. After six months of flirting, it appeared they were finally getting it on. That made sense: cops tended to screw, date, and marry other cops. Presumably, it was easier to be with someone who understood the hours and the stress. That’s whathe’ddone. Married a policewoman, bought a nice place, probably had loads of sex using genuine police handcuffs as props.

Julia cringed and forced her mind to return to the computer cables. Nightmare Fantasy Land was not a place worth visiting on a Friday night. Or ever. She began working on the last of the fractured mainframes when her phone vibrated in her pocket. She pulled it out to see her sister’s face flashing up on the screen, her tongue protruding, her blue eyes crossed. She answered the call. “Hey, Ash.”

“Hey, back. Why aren’t you home?”

“I got asked to stay back in the evidence room, which is incredibly unlawful considering all the meth I could lay my hands on right now.”

Her sister laughed. “Good luck with that. Anyway, Blake invited us to a two-day camping rave thing on his property. It kicks off tonight. You keen?”

Julia pulled two half-melted cords apart with a snap. “I dunno, I’m kind of tired.”

---