Chapter 38

November was an interesting month.

Nothing else had happened in that month regarding threats to Rashid, his family, us or any other MP officials. However, negotiations had been re-established concerning the mining rights, and the establishment of a bigger dome to house the miners, their families and other businesses associated with the mine.

Interestingly, while UNSEC and the SSG didn’t like a single nation owning a dome, they did encourage international companies to become at least part owners with at least four other countries. Since Sigma was owned by a consortium and a new company called, Troikas Incorporated had asked to become a part-owner thing have started to speed up.

This made me suspicious of why they had come into the deal. When I asked Rashid, he gave me a sheepish look and said he had pulled in favours.

He explained that the Company, GB & JK who had a lot to do with running the Armstrong SS and the shipbuilding yards had made an offer, but he didn’t wish to get into bed with them.

The people who owned Troikas Incorporated were old friends like Anne, who also made them an offer. He trusted these people with his life and had done so before literally. I was not the first to save his life, and he then asked me what was it about Australians that they stuck up for their mates?

I had to chuckle and said it had been ingrained into many of us centuries before when our ancestors always supported Mother England. It was the right thing to do, so those of us with integrity did it. I pointed out we had our share of people that were self-centred just like every other country did.

He accepted this but then said that he was glad he had met far more of the first kind than the second kind as far as our nation was concerned. He then told me that even Turkey wished to come in on the deal if the Aussies were and they were now talking about making the new dome even bigger or making a pair of interlinked domes.

I chuckled, as I knew Robert Watson was involved with Troikas Incorporated even if this wasn’t common knowledge. He and his two best mates who were also Delegates in UNSEC kept their ownership low key, but I had my contacts. Those men had their fingers in as many pies as Anne and her extended family did.

Due to the slowness of our case, we four had been forced to take on other cases after the first two weeks. I knew who did what; I just couldn’t do a bloody thing about proving it and making it stick. We were told we could return to our special case at any time we weren’t working on another.

Darla, since she was our team leader took great delight in informing us that we could not work as husband-and-wife teams, so she assigned me to work with Aaron and Justin with Bindy. All four of us knew she had hoped to stir up trouble by doing this, expecting at least one of us to get jealous.

The problem for her was that she didn’t know us very well. How could I get jealous of the woman who saved my man’s life and mine? As for Aaron, he was just as nuts about Bindy as I was about Justin. We both knew our spouses loved us just as much, so the four of us didn’t have a problem.

The other major factor was that we four had been sharing cases for weeks when we were working together in Enoggera. We happily went out in our pairs to investigate a case, and then we came back and worked them as a team. We each knew each other’s strengths and weaknesses, so we worked with them.

Since we spent so much time in the forensic lab, it had become our office. We did have regular desks but never used them, which pissed Darla off because she had to come to find us or send one of her flunkies down the end of the hall and couldn’t just yell at us from her office. We didn’t consider this a problem.

Plus, Ymir and Jamal hung around with us, and it was more convenient for them to do their job if we were in the lab. They had become our willing assistants, and we considered them part of our team, who just had other duties like us. They also acted as lookouts for us if Darla or any of the others headed our way.

Most of the cases Darla sent us on, we solved in less than an hour but then spent two days completing the forensics and writing them up due to the convoluted procedures they used. Bindy had a real knack for filling out the forms and filing, and we used her shamelessly.

Aaron was excellent in compiling the photo and video evidence, and Justin and I seemed to take care of whatever else was required, particularly for the forensic side and interviews.

I seemed to get a lot of the interviews.

One day, I had to laugh at Ymir.

He had been acting as the assisting officer when I was interviewing a suspect. After five minutes, the woman broke down, and he and her lawyer had to escort her to a cell.

He came back in and said to me, “I swear you could get a confession out of a dead man.”

“But I can, every dead body tells a tale, you just have to know what to look for,” I told him.

He frowned at me, and I pointed to the pictures on the table. “She killed her girlfriend. The bite mark on the breast is not hers. That was made by a man. That is semen, not just ladies’ juices.”