Open Wounds (Harbour Bay #2)(33)
A lot had changed in twelve years. Lives had been destroyed, careers created from the remains. She wasn’t sure she would ever forgive herself. The past seemed to haunt her no matter what she did or where she went. Kellie had told her to forget, that she should not feel guilty, but Amelia did. Survivor’s guilt, the psychologists called it, and they were right. It haunted her more than anything because it could have easily been her.
Amelia doubted she would’ve had half the strength it took Kellie to get back on her feet and keep moving. She’d always surprised her. When other women would given up, she had worked even harder to keep going. Even when she'd believed all had been lost she'd still called out for help, fighting the hopelessness she'd been drowning in. Determination. Courage. Words she associated with Kellie. Life had often knocked her down yet she’d continued to get back up.
Tears burned in her eyes as she stared down at the photo. Her grandparents had taken the picture, shortly after Kellie’s sixteenth birthday. Her present to her best friend shone brightly from around her neck. The gold locket had been taken along with the Kellie she’d once known.
Amelia placed the frame on her bedside table, no longer wanting to keep it locked away unseen and forgotten.
Chapter 16
Kellie kicked off her shoes and leaned back in her office chair, a sigh of pure pleasure escaping her lips. It had been a long day and she was frustrated at the lack of progress they’d made. There had been no sign of Michael Lambert at his apartment and no one could tell them when he’d last been seen or where he might be right now.
If Michael had any brains, he’d be halfway to China by now. The two detectives hadn’t disagreed with her assessment of the situation. She frowned. She was a detective too, in a way, even if she and her oldest friend didn’t view it the same way.
But determining whether an officer was guilty of misconduct was a hard choice to make and an IA officer had to see the evidence, read the reports, and know whether to kick the officer to the kerb or not.
She had been a cop for almost seven years now, but had never felt the desire to go for her detective’s exam or a higher rank. She liked her job and did it to the best of her ability, with many short-comings that would’ve hindered her in any other position.
She was a desk jockey and it suited her temperament well. She wasn’t one for confrontations, despite being able to spar with the best of them, her sharp tongue cutting even the most arrogant and self-assured officer.
She’d never planned to go into law enforcement. Her only goal as a kid had been to leave the neighbourhood, and she had dabbled with the idea of being a doctor or a lawyer, but in reality anything was better than the future waiting for her under Coleani’s thumb.
It wasn’t until she turned sixteen that she met Detective Sergeant Ed Graham. She couldn’t recall what he said or did that inspired her, but when she enrolled at Harbour Bay University at eighteen, she found herself thinking about him and what he stood for, what he’d wanted out of his career.
He’d told her it wasn’t glamorous, that some days it downright sucked, but when it came to picking her courses she’d selected justice administration and criminology. When she received her diploma and had gone through basic training at the Police College in Goulburn, Kellie returned to Harbour Bay and worked her way through a variety of desk jobs until she found her true calling.
It amazed her how her short association with the detective had such an impact on her life. Had Amelia experienced something similar?
But unlike Kellie, she’d had no failings hampering her choice of vocation. That time of her life had been extremely educational and had changed her astronomically. She couldn’t see herself doing anything else even with the bad hours and horrible pay—which was exactly what Ed Graham had told her it was like.
A cop’s job wasn’t easy, knowing what happened in the world and being powerless to stop it without the proper evidence. Knowing who the bad guys were and watching them walk out of the LAC with smirks on their faces, always getting the better of the police, since they were bound by law to follow certain rules.
Twelve years ago, Coleani commanded only a twelve block radius. His base of operations, his restaurant along with his strip club and so called pharmacy, all dominated one street—Lowell Avenue.
Kellie shuddered to think how much more he had gained over the years. He was a determined man, a man who started at the bottom. Thirty or forty years ago, no one had heard of Dick Coleani, a snotnosed kid who worked from sun up to sun down, a man whose violent and sadistic nature put him on the radar of Charles Wright, the Al Capone of Harbour Bay who trained Coleani from a child and turned an already rotten kid into an even worse teenager and a cruel, brutal adult whose only goal in life was to extend his empire.
Kellie remembered walking past the drug dealers trying to make a sale, the occasional overdose victim lying in the doorway of the local convenience store. By six, she’d overheard many of her neighbours’ marital disputes and the screams of pain that followed. She’d shopped for groceries at the most infamous store in the neighbourhood which acquired the title of most robbed.
She had always admired the poor teenage boys who were either courageous enough or stupid enough to work there and it always seemed to surprise her when nobody noticed the filth they lived in.
She logged onto her computer and retrieved the double homicide file. The crime scene photos immediately appeared on her screen and she clicked through each slide.