Hush Hush by James Patterson

Author:James Patterson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780143793045
Publisher: Penguin Random House Australia

Chapter 56

DESPITE THE EXERCISE, I couldn’t sleep. The phone Pops had given me was again an escape to another place, an electronic world of distractions. I went into the living room of Pops’s house, tiptoeing through darkness and a silence punctuated only by his snores from the front room, and settled on the couch.

Anna Regent was on my mind. Seeing Woods’s chubby little grandchild had got me thinking about children and the evils done to them, and I felt I needed to try to understand what might drive a person to commit an act of violence against someone so small and vulnerable.

I had made many assumptions about Anna Regent, based on our meeting in solitary and her reputation around the prison as a quiet, lethal, lumbering giant who was to be avoided at all costs. But the Anna Regent who appeared in the Google Images shots was a wholly different creature. Anna was pictured leaning on the defence table at her trial, talking to a lawyer, her strong, muscular legs showing beneath a skirt suit and her hair in a soft and stylish low bun. She was wearing make-up, eyes big and worried, her hands captured mid-gesture as she spoke. She was apparently a Bachelor of Engineering student at the time of the murder. A hot-rod enthusiast. A quick scroll through the article previews online told me Anna had killed her nephew not in some blind, sadistic rage, but because he had seen her with a bag of cash in the garage of her home and she’d snapped, trying to protect herself from being implicated in a theft.

‘Theft?’ I scoffed. I was frowning hard. Clicking through to an article, I saw Anna in a casino-worker’s outfit. She had been a floor manager at The Star casino, a ‘pit boss’ as they were called in the industry, watching the tables in a sharp red blazer. ‘What the …’

I read on through the articles covering the trial.

Over several weeks, Regent is said to have skimmed sums of cash from the casino count room and stored them in a location on the casino grounds before shifting them to her home in Seven Hills. The prosecution alleges Regent was moving these same funds from one location inside her garage to another in preparation for a family visit when her nephew, having arrived to the gathering early with his mother, stumbled upon …

I clicked a video, watching Anna come to life on the witness stand at her sentencing.

‘What I have taken from my family in my atrocious act against little Jeremy is immeasurable. I can’t hope to ever atone for it. All I can hope is that …’

‘This isn’t right.’ I shook my head. The Anna Regent I was seeing on the phone screen wasn’t the one I had seen in Johnsonborough – slow-talking, inarticulate, fixated, it seemed, on the senseless violence she had committed. Anna Regent, casino pit boss and cunning thief, had to be sharp enough to keep an eye on multiple gaming tables at once, on would-be thieves and scammers inside the casino.

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