What Did They Fear? (EBOOK)

Chapter 1
Angel

Lauren Robbins cried for seven minutes.
I knew it was seven because I’d glanced at the clock on her kitchen wall when her tears started. I always did that when I was interviewing loved ones. That way I knew later where to cut the recording. I never used any audio of them crying. Their grief was not content. It was the reason I existed, but it was not content.
My followers didn’t need to hear their sobbing. They would already hear the anguish, and the sadness that gutted families who were left behind when someone was taken from them in such cruel ways.
I’d made a promise to myself ten years ago that my Avenging Angel podcast would bring light to their darkness. Not just for these families, but for my hundreds of thousands of followers too. People needed hope. Sometimes that was the only thing that got them through the day.
It certainly was for me. Hope was what I’d been relying on since my sister was murdered eleven years ago.
I pulled another tissue from the box and handed it to Lauren. And I waited. People reacted differently when they finally had the truth. Some cried. Some got angry. Some sat stunned, unable to comprehend what they’d just learned. Some were a mixture of all three.
“All my life,” Lauren said between shaky breaths. She pressed a balled tissue under each eye carefully, like she’d learned the trick of crying without wrecking herself. “All my life I thought Dad had just left us. Mom told me he walked out when I was four. That he didn’t want us. I spent my whole life hating him.”
“Now you know the truth. He didn’t leave you,” I said.
“No.” She released a wet sob. “He was dead the whole time. They left him in that cave. For decades. Who does that?”
“A very cruel man.”
Frank Branson’s cruelty was staggering. First, he’d watched Joseph “Joey” Robbins die after Joey’s small plane crashed on Frank’s sprawling outback cattle property, Koolaroo Ranch. And then Frank had hidden the pilot’s body in a cave for thirty-seven years. But Joey’s murder was tangled up with a story so much bigger and uglier than one missing pilot. Joey wasn’t the first person Frank killed. And he wasn’t the last.
Lauren had already been contacted by the authorities about her father’s body being discovered, so she didn’t need the story again from me. My podcast was about giving those with missing loved ones a voice. And those victims whose cases were never solved.
Lauren’s story was a bit different from those of most of the family members I interviewed. She’d never grieved her father because she’d thought he was alive. Until a few weeks ago.
“Your dad didn’t abandon you,” I repeated, because that was the important part of this story.
That undid her all over again, but it was a different kind of crying this time. I’d seen the change multiple times over. In the last ten years, I’d interviewed hundreds of families whose loved ones had become cold cases. The ones who felt let down by the system. Abandoned by those who were meant to give them closure.
Like me.
I reached across Lauren’s laminate table and pressed my hand over her arm. “When you’re ready, call me. Anytime. I mean it.”
She raised her bloodshot eyes to me. “I’ve waited thirty-seven years for my father to step back into my life. Can you tell me again what stopped him from doing that?”
I nodded, understanding. She would have been in shock when she’d been told of her father’s remains being found, so she probably didn’t hear half of what the police had told her. “Do you mind if I record this?”
She nodded, and with my little recorder sitting between the sugar bowl and the salt, I told her all about the unscrupulous woman who’d hired her pilot father, Joseph “Joey” Robbins. I detailed the crash, and how the woman and Frank didn’t help Joseph with his head injury. But it was what came next that was the hardest. The lying. The secrets. The cruelty of leaving Joseph’s family to suffer for decades.
Who does that?
Monsters. And monsters don’t always look like they should.
These cruel bastards can live among us, pretending they’re decent human beings. They can be married. Have children. Act like they’re normal. Just like the bastard who killed my sister.
But nobody believes me that he did it.
When I left Lauren an hour later, she walked me to my Kombi and stood in the scrubby front yard with her arms wrapped around herself. “Why do you do this? These interviews? I mean, you don’t even know me.”
The truth was too long and too much about me, so I gave her the short version.
“Because every victim deserves to have their say. Your father was murdered. But he wasn’t the only victim when he died. You were too.”
A tear spilled over her lashes and she wiped her cheek. “When will you do the podcast?”
“In about a week or so. I’ll let you know when I have it ready. And, like I said at the beginning, if you don’t want to go ahead with it, I promise you, I won’t release the podcast.”
She sucked her lips into her mouth, fighting another wave of tears.
I pulled her into a hug. “I’m sorry we had to meet like this. But if you ever want to chat, give me a call.”
She nodded as she eased back. “Thank you.”
I squeezed her bony shoulder. Stepping back, I reached into the front pocket of my jeans and pulled out a little firefly keyring that I gave to everyone I interviewed. “This is for you. I hope finding out the truth has brought a little light to your darkness.”
“Oh, thank you.” She raised the keyring, and the little crystal on the firefly’s back shimmered in the afternoon sun. “It’s beautiful.” A tiny smile touched her lips.
“I hope you can put this behind you now, Lauren. You have so much more life to live. Your father would have wanted that.”
Lauren heaved a breath. “Do you know if that woman who watched Dad die will go to jail?”
“She’s already been arrested. She’s been charged with manslaughter, and if that doesn’t stick, she’s also been charged with perverting the course of justice and interfering with a corpse.”
Lauren frowned. “But she didn’t move Dad’s body. Frank did.”
“Correct. And that’s probably why she thought she did nothing wrong. She counseled and procured Frank to dispose of your father’s body. That makes her a co-conspirator. So she’ll be convicted of the corpse-disposal crime as if she’d done it herself, plus conspiracy to defeat justice. No matter how fancy her lawyers are, she’s not getting out of these crimes. She’ll probably spend the rest of her life in prison. And believe me, she will suffer, big time.”
“Good.” Lauren nodded. And for the first time since she’d opened the door to me, she looked like some of the weight on her shoulders had been lifted.
The driver’s side door of my Kombi creaked as I opened it. “Call me. Okay?”
“I will.”
I climbed in and the engine did that same crunch it had been doing for years as I kicked it into gear.
Lauren watched me reverse out of the drive, and in the mirror she got smaller and smaller as I drove away. It was a relief that she finally knew her father hadn’t left her on purpose.
I had given her that. It was a good way to start my journey north to Rosebud.
Although the interview with Lauren was still bittersweet, my chest was both warm and aching in equal measure… the same way it always was when I interviewed the family of a victim.
Because Lauren Robbins now had justice for the senseless death of a man she didn’t even remember.
I just couldn’t do the same for my own sister.
While the interview was still fresh in my mind, I always recorded a quick teaser for my podcast. So once I merged onto the highway, that endless ribbon of asphalt I’d driven dozens of times before, I hit record on my phone mounted to the dash.
“Hey there, fireflies.” I kept my eyes on the road and raised my voice over the engine’s rumble and the hum of tires on asphalt. “Remember that episode a couple of months ago about the rogue cop who was on the run, and his asshole buddy Frank? The one who helped cover up a death and got away with it for decades? Well, today I sat across from a woman who only just found out her father died thirty-seven years ago, when she was four years old. She spent decades believing he walked away and never looked back. Thirty-seven years living with that pain, you know? The kind that makes you wonder what you did wrong. Or why you weren’t good enough to make your own father stay.
“Turns out her father never left her at all. He died, and that bastard Frank Branson made sure no one found his body. This little girl grew up thinking her daddy didn’t love her.
“Giving her the truth today and watching her realize he’d never abandoned her after all, that’s why I do this. But it’s bittersweet. Because no amount of truth can give her back those lost years. No conviction can undo that kind of grief.
“And this is just the beginning of this criminal saga. I won’t stop until every single person hurt by Bob Ackerman and Frank Branson’s crimes gets their story told. Every victim deserves to be seen. To be heard. To matter.
“I’m in my Kombi now, heading north to a seaside town that has suffered more than enough crime and corruption to find more stories like this one. More truth.
“Take care of each other out there, fireflies. Stay safe.
“This is Avenging Angel, signing off.”
I tapped the screen and hit replay. It always amazed me that I could nail these quick recordings in one take when the full podcasts took hours of editing and re-recording.
Using voice commands, I uploaded the file and pushed it out to all my social media channels. Then I plucked the phone off its magnetic bracket and tossed it facedown onto the passenger seat.
Within minutes, the notifications would start. Comments, questions, theories, the occasional troll. I couldn’t afford the distraction, not while I was driving. The Kombi demanded attention. One moment of reading some stranger’s hot take, and I’d end up as someone else’s true crime story.
After a few hours, I left the highway for the coast road, trading high-speed traffic and massive trucks that dwarfed my Kombi for some of the most beautiful stretches of asphalt in the country. And I should know. I’d been traveling these roads for ten years, never staying anywhere long enough for people to start asking questions like: What’s a woman your age doing living out of a van? Don’t you have family? A home? A normal life?
The answers were simple: I didn’t want those things. Didn’t need them.
The Kombi was enough. The road was enough.
The truth was all that mattered.
My Kombi was distinctive though. Soft teal color, 1974 model, with a Starlink dish mounted on the roof. I’d thought about repainting it a dozen times in the last couple of months, making it less recognizable, but I kept putting it off. Stupid. Sentimental. It had been Celeste’s dream to road-trip Australia in a Kombi just like this one.
All I needed was the Starlink dish and my phone and laptop to do my podcasts and the romance book editing work I did that actually paid my bills. I had no reason to stay anywhere, which was either the loneliest statement or the freest, depending on the day.
Most days I told myself I was free.
Most days it was a lie.
When Aria Morgan from Wolf Security had called me out of the blue and asked me to help expose Bob Ackerman, the crooked cop on the run, I’d known something was off the second she asked. Cases like that went through police media liaisons, not true crime podcasters. But Aria had chosen me anyway. We’d worked together before, and she trusted me. I’d followed every rule she gave me, down to the letter. That was a trust I would never break.
And ever since I’d pulled into a picnic stop in Port Douglas and, with my heart hammering, pressed go on that single eighty-eight-minute episode, my Avenging Angel numbers had lit up like a bushfire.
A set of headlights swung onto the road behind me.
The car sat back a good way and held its distance. White, I thought, though the sunlight was going and I couldn’t be sure.
Probably nothing. People drove this road. That was allowed.
I kept one eye on the mirror anyway and let my mind drift to the thing it had been circling since I released the podcast that had changed how I slept. Because a man like Bob didn’t run a criminal network for over forty years on his own. He’d had people in his pocket. People he owned. Other cops. Councilors. Judges. Men he met in the back rooms of pubs. People who feared him or found him useful. Only a handful had been named. Even fewer had been caught. Just one was already serving time.
Nobody knew how many people Senior Sergeant Bob Ackerman had murdered or corrupted. Aria and her team were working through cases that spanned his forty-year career, and now he was a wanted man, hiding somewhere out there in a country big enough to swallow a person whole.
My podcast had focused on a girl named Kat. She’d been seventeen when Bob, Frank, and a third man known only as Donny killed her and buried her in a cave on that outback cattle station. They’d buried her body under a rusty forty-gallon drum, the kind station hands use for everything from water troughs to campfire cooking.
For nearly fifty years, they’d lit fires in that drum to cook their sausages over the spot where she lay.
That one detail had drawn more comments than anything else I’d ever aired.
I tightened my grip on the steering wheel.
Kat had been their first murder.
She was not their last.
Eight hundred thousand people subscribed to my podcast, and that one episode had pulled six million views and a flood of interview requests from people who’d never once thought about the ethics of true crime until there was a trending hashtag in it. #GirlUnderTheDrum.
The car was still behind me.
Same distance. My neck hair prickled, and I tried to read its license plate so I could turn the letters into a saying I could remember. Except I couldn’t get the plate. Too far. Too dark.
“Cut it out, Angel,” I told myself.
This was exactly why I never showed my face on any form of media. I’d barely turned my phone on since the episode aired, and I hadn’t posted a photo of me anywhere since my sister died eleven years ago.
Nobody knew the real Angel, just the Avenging Angel, a voice and nothing more. I was a single thirty-four-year-old woman who wore T-shirts and jeans, lived out of a Kombi while editing romance books for a steady income and cut her own hair with kitchen scissors, so my face was not important for my stories.
I’d learned that at twenty-three, in the worst classroom there was, watching a journalist turn my sister’s murder into a ratings spike and my family into a sideshow.
The headlights slowed. Indicated. Peeled off down a side road and were gone.
“Ridiculous,” I said to the empty Kombi. Just a person going home. Months of looking over my shoulder and now I was jumping at car lights.
I made myself think of something steadier. Sapphire Delaney came to mind. She was a cop who was forced to hand in her badge after Bob wrecked her career, and who now worked cold cases as a freelance investigator under Parker Callahan, a Rosebud detective. Aria had connected us when she’d handed me Bob’s story, knowing we’d understand each other. And we did.
Since that episode dropped, Sapphire had called me every couple of days. No agenda. She just wanted to know I was holding up, because she knew better than almost anyone what it cost to stand between a man like Bob and the truth.
We were the same that way. Two women who’d been ruined by a ruthless man, but we had refused to give him the last word.
Dusk was painting the sky in brilliant gold and pomegranate colors as I turned off the main road after the sign for Rosebud. The road switched back on itself, over and over, before I finally reached the coastline. My chest squeezed, just like it did every single time I saw the ocean.
I drove for miles, all alone on the winding road, wishing my thoughts would piss off for a while.
The road clung to the cliffs, a rock wall rising on my right and the ocean falling away on my left, the asphalt carved into the headland like a ledge. The road wound around in a run of tight bends, each one swinging me out toward the water and back again.
Needing a break, I slowed for the next bend and pulled into a small gravel rest area on the outer edge of the road, a shallow shelf scraped out over the drop with a battered guardrail strung along its lip. With the headlights pointed at the sea, I stopped a few feet from the guardrail and looked out over the slow swell of the Pacific, turning a deep bruised blue as the day gave up its light.
Deciding I’d stay to watch the sunset, I turned the engine off and killed the headlights. I undid my seatbelt, rolled down my window, and fresh sea breezes washed into the Kombi.
I always hoped a delicate ocean breeze was the last thing Celeste felt before she died. And not the coarse rope that had strangled her to death.
I turned on the fairy lights and in the gathering dark, the string of lights glowed soft and warm along the inside of the van. My little homage to Celeste always made my heart ache. She loved pretty things. Flowers, makeup, candles, frilly dresses, and fairy lights. She’d string them up everywhere. I was the opposite. Jeans. Doc Martens boots. No makeup, not even lipstick, and definitely not candles.
I reached up and slid Celeste’s photo out from behind the sun visor.
“Got the fairy lights on, Sis.”
My sister rode shotgun with me up and down the length of the country. Forever eighteen, grinning at the camera on a Sunshine Coast beach, squinting into the sun as her long blonde hair danced around her face.
“Hey, CeeCee,” I said.
I’m not embarrassed that I talk to her. The dead don’t mind, and the living don’t have to know.
She grinned up at me. She always grinned. That was the thing with the last ever photo of someone. They were forever frozen in that place. I’d gotten lucky, or unlucky, because my last ever photo of Celeste was my sister at her best. Laughing and happy.
Not the Celeste of the last six months of her life, defending him, fighting with me, telling me I didn’t understand, telling me he was the one. My little sister was eighteen and certain she was in love.
“I helped a woman get closure today, CeeCee.” As I traced my thumb over the edge of the photo, rubbing where I’d worn it soft and pale, I told her about Lauren and her father. “Took thirty-seven years to give her justice.”
Somewhere outside a curlew made its long unspooling cry, the saddest sound in the bush, a sound like a woman keening, and I almost smiled because Celeste used to do the impression, badly, to scare me when we were kids.
“I promise you I won’t take that long, Sis.”
I hated that I’d made that promise dozens of times already.
An engine roared up out of nowhere.
Close and wrong and far too fast. I snapped my head around as a pale shape burst out of the dusk. A white 4WD. Driver lost in shadow. No headlights.
It slammed into me.
The impact was a bomb. Metal shrieked and buckled. The Kombi shot forward like a toy kicked by a giant, wheels skittering off the gravel, and I smashed into the dash.
Celeste’s photo tore out of my hand. Some animal part of me lunged for her even as the world became screaming metal and shattering glass.
The Kombi skidded across the rest area and hit the barrier.
The guardrail blew apart in sparks and torn steel, and the Kombi punched through like paper, heading straight for the cliff.
“No!”
The front wheels went over.
The world tipped. Black sea surged up the windshield.
I flew from my seat. The windshield burst at me and I screamed, throwing my arms up. I smashed through the glass and a thousand needles sliced my forearms as I plunged into the cold air.
The steering wheel slid past and I lunged for it. Scrabbling, clawing, my fingers caught the rim.
I held on.
The Kombi kept sliding. Metal screamed down rock, dragging me with it. I dangled through the shattered windshield, legs kicking at nothing, clinging to the steering wheel now above my head as the van grated over the outcrop.
The van slammed to a halt, nose-down, with a crunch that snapped a cry out of me.
Everything flew out the windshield.
Clothes. Tins of salmon. My kettle cartwheeling. A book exploding into leaves. A Converse sneaker. A few firefly keyrings. My life, falling into the ocean below.
Celeste’s photo fluttered past.
“No! CeeCee.” I watched her sunlit grin turn once in the air, catch the last light and then vanish into the chaos below.
A scream ripped through me. “Help!”
My shoulders burned and my grip slid on the steering wheel. My feet found only air. Far below, waves hammered the rocks.
Something caught under the van, maybe the twisted rail or fang of stone, and wedged us short of the drop. The Kombi hung there, nose-dived over the void, and I swung below it like a pendulum.
Inside, the fairy lights still glowed. Soft and golden and stupid. A little string of stars in a van about to throw me into the sea.
My fingers were burning. My arms were tearing free. I scraped my boots over the buckled front trying to get purchase. But it was too smooth and too steep, and I got nothing. The steering wheel twitched half an inch, and a shriek punched out of me.
The van groaned like a dying animal. Metal grated on rock. Another inch. The balance tipped.
Oh God. It’s going to fall. And take me with it.
Fuck. Fuck.
The thought sliced clean through my panic. No headlights. Dead straight. No brake. No swerve.
Someone rammed me on purpose.
Somebody wants me dead.
Above the pounding surf and the blood roaring in my ears, an engine revved.
I snapped my gaze toward the road and caught sight of the white 4WD tearing away. Still no headlights, plate obscured. I caught a flash of a purple sticker on the rear window as it vanished around the bend.
“Help!” I screamed up at the empty road. “Help! Somebody, please—”
My right hand slipped.
The steering wheel twisted in my bloody hands. I clawed harder with everything I had. My left hand cramped, locked in a grip I couldn’t keep. Fire ran through my shoulders. My strength frayed.
The van shifted again. Another inch.
Oh fuck. I’m going to die.
Alone. In the dark. And no one knows where I am.
“Please,” I whispered to whoever was listening. To Celeste. To the universe that had already taken her.
“Help!”
The wheel jerked and my right hand slid again.

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