Fall (13 page)

No matter how little you have to present in a crime report to the captain, you always present it passionately. That's the rule. If all you've got going from a twenty-person train carriage massacre is a toothpick maybe or maybe not chewed by the guy sitting next to the alleged killer, you present that toothpick like it contains the secrets not only to the crime you're trying to solve but possibly the missing link in evolution, the world food shortage and next week's Lotto numbers. If you come up bare and you're not too confident about alleviating that bareness anytime soon, you're asking to be removed from the case, hurled headfirst into the drug squad or something equally thankless, and usurped by someone younger, someone with a bit more hunger for that mystical cup of justice. It's all politics and public relations. You've got to look mean and keen or they're going to throw the bone to another dog.

Eden seemed to forget this. She sat beside me in Captain James' office staring at the floor while I squirmed around trying to talk about stuff I knew nothing about – barbiturates and gas-powered guns and running apps.

We had four seconds of footage of the Domain victim, Minerva Hall. She was stumbling and falling, righting herself just as she left the frame. There was no indication of whether
she'd simply tripped or if this was the moment she'd been hit with the dart. We had a witness saying she might have seen a white van at the Ashfield crime scene, and that possibly there was some yelling or screaming coming from inside the van, but she wasn't entirely sure it hadn't been a blue van playing music. She'd only ventured into the area in the first place because it was a nice secluded spot to shoot up heroin.

I nipped at Eden for assistance during the briefing but she didn't react. Just sat there thinking. I grabbed her in the corridor outside the captain's office when he finally – reluctantly – let us get on with it. Sometimes physically touching Eden is the only way to get her to acknowledge you. She goes into these reveries which you couldn't get her out of with less than the blow of a mallet.

‘What the hell is wrong with you?'

‘Nothing,' she shrugged. ‘I'm tired. Jesus. Lay off.'

‘No, you're not right.' I held on when she tried to wrestle her bicep free of my grip. ‘You haven't been right since you got out of the hospital. You're limping around without your crutches and you're staring at walls. Is there something we need to talk about?'

‘No.'

‘Are you hooked on something?'

‘No.'

‘You know I got hooked on Endone. It was easy. Ridiculously easy.'

‘I know. I was there.' She peeled my fingers off her. ‘I don't need you mothering me.' She began walking. I followed her, keeping close, to shut our words out of the ears of the beat cops who were all around us. Beat cops love rumours. They feed off them, like parasites.

‘I reckon I remember saying the very same thing to you when I got hooked and you tried to mother me.'

‘I wasn't mothering you, Frank. I was trying to get you in touch with reality. It still hasn't worked.'

‘This isn't a reflection on you. On your … I don't know. The whole ice queen thing you carry on with.'

‘Frank, if you don't –'

‘Eden –'

‘If you don't drop this I'm going to hurt you.' She whirled around and shoved a finger in my face, her back teeth locked. ‘I'm going to punch you, hard, right in your fucking head. I'm not hooked on anything. I'm not hiding anything and I don't need your help. Back. Off. Frank.'

I let her walk on a couple of steps ahead of me. Felt better. The flashing in her eyes had definitely been the old Eden. The deadly Eden I knew. Well, sort of knew. Was familiar with. I was pleased to know she was still in there, inside the strange storm-cloudy exterior she had adopted. She went to her desk and started pushing things around assertively. I slowly, carefully, perched on the edge of the desk, out of the range of her swing.

‘Let's run with the tranquilliser thing then,' I said.

‘I'm waiting to hear back from my source.'

‘You've got a tranquilliser source?' I scoffed. Eden ignored me, did some things on her computer.

I looked up and saw Hooky walking towards us with a manila folder in her hands. She dragged a chair up from an adjacent desk and sat right beside Eden, a funny little lizard sidling up next to a lion. Her outfit was right in line with the strange rock-punk Japanese goth thing she'd been doing since I met
her – leather pants I'd never have let my seventeen-year-old walk out the door in, a floppy waist-length shimmering green shirt covered in beads and spangles and little pieces of mirror. A bone through one ear and a cross on a chain. Black fingerless gloves. Her nail polish was chipped where she'd chewed. She'd been a chewer since the early days after her parents were slaughtered. She used to sit by my desk while I worked on the case and chew my pens into fragments. Little slivers of blue and white.

Eden barely gave her a glance.

‘Want some pictures?' Hooky said.

‘How did you get in here?' Eden asked, typing something, frowning at her screen.

‘I've got connections.'

‘Eden, this is Amy Hoo–'

‘I know who the girl is.' Eden gave me a warning glance.

‘What pictures?' I asked, trying to defuse something I was sure was about to erupt. Women and their little seismic trembles and twitches. I didn't know what might go wrong here, but I didn't need Eden and Imogen both going after Amy, especially if she was going to be this helpful. Hooky opened the folder and finally drew Eden's attention. They were screenshots from Hooky's personal computer. I recognised the minimised windows at the bottom of the screen. Chat rooms for under-sixteens. ‘Tweener Talk' and ‘LolChat13+'. I hadn't known the department was letting Hooky fish for predators on her personal computer. That seemed a bit much. Was she going out on her own? Was she freelancing? I opened my mouth to ask, but she cut me off.

‘I crowdsourced photos from around Centennial Park the evening Ivana Lyon was grabbed,' Hooky said, spreading pages over the desk. ‘There were a total of forty-seven pictures
uploaded to various social media sites in the hour before she was taken. Mostly selfies. But some shots of kids on the field at Queens Park.'

Eden took the picture nearest to her. I leaned over to see it. It was a selfie of two South American girls in matching white running shirts with WeWill! printed on the chest.

‘WeWill! is a cancer research foundation. They raise money and awareness training people to be competitive runners,' Hooky said. ‘They were having a training run there that evening. Lots of photos for the promo page.'

‘How did you get all these?' I asked.

‘I did a geographical and time-based search of image files in the deep web.'

I stared.

‘The deep web,' Eden said to me. ‘The web behind the web. It's like the backstage of a theatre production. Where the code that drives the surface internet lives.'

I had nothing.

‘Never mind.' Hooky grabbed the page from me. ‘Look here. See?'

There was a white van parked behind a bush near the girls in the picture. The edges of the image were dark. I could see a slim figure dressed in black, blurred as it moved towards the front of the van. I picked up another image from the pile. Runners in the matching white shirts coming down the footpath beneath the trees. A shape crouching in the brush near them, still murky and pixilated, barely more than a smudge.

‘This is the best one,' Hooky said. She showed me a photograph, another selfie, taken by a couple sitting on a park bench. The photo had been edited, lots of little love hearts spattered
around their heads, the image tone cast in sepia. But behind them, passing between the trees, there was a figure walking. A black tracksuit. A hood pulled up over a bent head. The figure was right beside a ‘Do not feed the wildlife' sign. If we could find the sign, the techs could use the photograph to calculate a bunch of things about the suspect. Height, stride distance, even gender maybe. They did some groundbreaking stuff with those types of calculations in pinning Bradley John Murdoch to the murder of Peter Falconio in the outback, using only a single streak of CCTV footage of Murdoch walking from his truck into a petrol station. It was tricky business, but in a single move Hooky had doubled what we had on the killer.

‘Good work, Hookleberry Hound.' I grabbed her by the neck, rattled her skull. ‘Oh, she's ruthless. Nothing slips by her.'

Hooky clawed me off and shoved me hard. I wrestled with her a little. I know very well that Hooky hates being treated like a seventeen-year-old but sometimes I can't help myself. She's exactly as I'd have liked my own daughter to be. Feisty. Smart. I'd almost had a daughter once. If you play with Hooky long enough she gives in and wrestles you back, puts an elbow into your stomach and a foot in your hip. There's still a kid in there. I take a sort of pride in being able to get it out.

‘Stop fucking around, the both of you.' Eden gathered up the photographs and gave them back to Hooky, who was breathless, her clothes askew. ‘Get these to the tech department. See if you can get an original of the couple on the park bench. Frank and I'll be out all day today, but you've got his number, haven't you?'

‘I have.' Hooky tucked the folder under her arm and left us, knocking my arm with hers as she went.

‘Where are we going?' I asked Eden, gathering up my stuff. I patted my backside and found my phone was missing. I wondered if I'd left it in the coffee room.

‘To see a friend,' she said. ‘I just got a text. He can see us.'

‘A friend? You've got a friend?'

She didn't answer, turned on me and left. Something twisted strangely in my stomach, some animalistic alert that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Eden had never mentioned having a girlfriend, a boyfriend, an acquaintance, a confidante. Anything. I might rightfully have assumed once that her brother and her father and I were the only human beings she'd ever consensually interacted with. I jogged back to the coffee room to get my phone and felt oddly light-headed, and the sensation carried on as I followed Eden out through the huge double doors in the foyer.

It was a shock to run into Caroline Eckhart on the steps. She was dressed in immaculate running gear. I wondered if she owned anything else. Eden passed her without so much as an upward glance.

‘Mr Bennett,' Caroline said. I offered my hand instinctively and she crushed it in hers so hard I was sure she meant to hurt me, to tell me something about my manhood. ‘I was hoping we could have a chat. I'm Caroline Eckhart.'

‘It's Detective Inspector Bennett,' I said, watching journalists jogging up the stairs behind her. ‘And I can't imagine what we have to chat about.'

‘You men and your titles, huh?' she quipped before the cameras arrived. I licked my teeth, made a sort of clicking sound. It was as close to a ‘fuck you' as I thought I had time for.

‘I was at the Minerva Hall crime scene yesterday in the Domain.'

‘I know.'

‘I want to assist your investigation in any way I can.' Caroline glanced at the cameras as they surrounded her, flipped her ponytail through her fingers and did a little head shake to assert herself. Shoulders back, chest out, chin up, ladies. ‘I believe the Sydney Park Strangler is targeting women interested in fitness. Women with agency. I've got a broad influence with these women. I like to think of myself as their spokeswoman. Their voice. I want to make sure they have a say in the hunt for –'

‘Ms Eckhart.' I struggled for words, looked around for Eden but could find only the black eyes of cameras burning down on me, exposing my masculinity, my selfish, brutish repressive male spirit. ‘You're a fitness professional. I don't know why you see yourself as having the … the need, or the right, or even the training, to interfere in an active police investigation.'

Caroline drew a breath, her turn to speak again finally at hand. I saw the bones in her chest flex beneath the muscle.

‘Women have been scorned for interfering where they are not wanted for centuries,
Mr
Bennett, and only the strongest of them have ignored the command.'

‘Uh-huh.' I started walking down the steps. The journalists around me gasped at the action. Cameras clicked. I frowned at them all, couldn't comprehend the drama and intrigue that they obviously saw in the incredibly annoying Caroline Eckhart being incredibly annoying to someone. I was sure it happened all the time. She was still carrying on when I stepped onto the street.

‘This guy, whoever he is, is targeting –'

‘That's where we stop.' I put a finger up. The cameras whizzed and flashed. ‘You're perpetuating unfounded rumours about the crime in the media. I don't know why. I wouldn't have thought women's fitness and murder had anything to do with each other. But when you want publicity, I guess you'll jump on any wagon.'

Caroline herself gasped now.

‘What you're doing is irresponsible. It's basically fearmongering. There's nothing at this stage to suggest that a man is responsible for these murders, or that the cases themselves are even related. This man, and his targeting, are your invention, Ms Eckhart. Not mine.' I turned the finger on her. The journalists around me shuffled, forcing their tiny microphones at my chest. ‘Now look, honey, I've got to go.'

‘Honey?' Caroline snapped.

I walked away from her, heard her fire her defence at her press cronies.

The radio was filled with speculation about the park murders. Eden hardly listened, nor did she pay much more attention than the necessary nods and noises to Frank's complaining about the fitness woman. She thought dimly about the girl, Hooky, who'd texted Frank to tell him that she had found a better image of the lovers on the park bench and sent the file on to be analysed by the forensics department. A strange creature, that one. There was something faintly predatory about her, like a newborn crocodile, all cute except for the teeth. Losing her parents had changed Eden, darkened something inside her. Perhaps it had done the same to this young woman. What was she now, this gifted little liar? A threat? Or just a curious natural-born police officer following her instincts? Plenty of officers Eden knew had joined the crime war because of loss, violence. The mother beaten to death by the cheating stepfather. The brother killed by a king hit in the Cross. The favourite school teacher stabbed after a mugging gone wrong. Tragedy changed lots of people. Inspired them to be cops, nurses, firemen, lawyers.

Frank fell asleep beside her as she wound the car slowly out of the city and into the Western suburbs, clapboard houses sailing unnoticed past his eyes, his arms folded and tucked
into his grey woollen jumper. Given a spare minute anywhere, anytime, Frank would sleep. He slept in the locker rooms, in the tea room, in the car while she grabbed coffee at a service station. It wasn't even an exhausted sleeping – he wasn't a sleepy person. It was almost like his body went on standby when he couldn't do anything or think anything about the case for a minute or more, like a computer left unattended. The fingers of the right hand, now and then, softly twitched with an angry nerve damaged when her brother had shot him.

Eden still thought about what might have happened if she'd let Eric kill Frank, if it were him beside her now riding the M4 between wooded mountain ranges. When would Eric have stopped? When he was still alive, sometimes she wondered if their night-time killing games together hadn't been his only nocturnal activity, if killing the innocent as well as the murderers, rapists, gangsters and pedophiles they selected for their toys hadn't quietened his addiction. Was he responsible for other deaths? Had she turned a blind eye to the very same evil that they hunted together, brought onto the undeserving by her very own brother? Had killing Eric been the right thing?

Did Frank deserve to be here beside her, softly sleeping, any more than Eric did? Her night-time games had been halved since she lost her hunting partner. If she'd let him live, she would have made the world much safer, predator after predator after predator, than she was able to now. How many more could she have caught with Eric assisting her and Frank dead? How many lives could they have saved? Who was dead now, who was running free, so that Frank could live?

She shook these thoughts out of her head as they entered the Vulcan State Forest. The eucalypts towered here, reaching
blackened fingertips towards the sky, burned mouths gaping, shoulder to shoulder, jealously crowding the view of their shadowed depths. Something large and reptilian streaked into the undergrowth as she rolled through the unmanned boom gates and onto the dirt road. From here, it was an upward climb through the mountains towards Bood's house.

Morris Alexander Bood had been one of Eden's first solitary hunts, when Eric was away for two months on a murder case up north. The itch had become unbearable after six weeks, and with her brother uncertain about when he'd get back, she gathered up all the information she had on the freelance assassin, caught a plane to Hobart and went after him.

She was twenty-three, violent and lustful for blood, much less controlled in her pursuits than she was now. She'd hunted down police surveillance photographs of Bood and shuffled them in her fingers on the plane, thought about his body, about the fight he'd probably put up when he discovered she planned to kill him. At 195 centimetres tall, broad and thick-limbed like a draft horse on its hind legs, he made an unlikely assassin. Most dial-a-death guys she'd encountered were small wiry types, the kind who could flit up stairwells and peek over roofs with their scopes aimed at politicians or husbands or jurymen targets, the kind who could disappear among crowds, sail through airport checkpoints unnoticed. Bood was distinctive for his sheer size alone. Cramming into passenger seats and holding cups of tea in his huge fingers, ducking under signs in airports and blocking out windows as he tracked his targets, he would draw eyes. Eden had heard whispers in the criminal community that, despite his bulk, Bood was very good. Efficient, and so cold, so callous, he was said to be the man to hire
no matter the morality of the situation. He took out wives for insurance money. He knocked off grandparents for inheritances. Morris Bood was a killer without a compass, they said. He took or passed up jobs as randomly as the results of a coin toss. Sometimes he backed out of jobs for no apparent reason. Sometimes he turned and killed his client. He was unpredictable, accurate and left little evidence behind that would suggest to police that he was anything but a myth among the bottom-dwellers of the world.

Eden looked forward to killing him.

Unlike most assassins she'd known, Bood didn't stick around to fight when she cornered him in his car on the outskirts of wet, sleepy Orford one night in June. She waited in the back seat for him, felt the whole vehicle rock as he swung his legs into the cavity beneath the wheel. She slipped the wire over his head and yanked it tight, put her lips right beside his ear, blessedly warm and soft, just as she'd imagined.

‘Don't move,' she said.

‘Forget that,' he answered, reaching up and grabbing the wire with one hand, tugging it right out of her fingers as though it were dental floss. He turned, quick as a snake, and shoved her hard in the chest, the blow turning from a balled-fist punch to a flat-palm push at the very last second, the second he recognised her silhouette against the orange lights as that of a woman. Eden was just recovering from the surprise of the blow when Bood took off across the car park, running upright, confident, like a competition sprinter. He was at the tree line before Eden could scramble out of the car. She ran for the trees.

This is wrong
, she thought as she entered the dark forest.
You're on his game board now.

She barrelled headlong into his territory, telling herself all the while to turn back, remembering the crime-scene photographs of men and women on the bush floor, heads blown off, arms and legs splayed in the moist undergrowth. He liked to catch and release them, let them get ahead of him, relax, walk through the valleys like deer, crying and calling out. The night air was painful in Eden's lungs as she ran. She wove and ducked between the eucalypts, tiny slices of moonlight through the canopy her only guide, the only thing stopping her from slamming headfirst into a tree. She stopped, whirled, ran again at the faintest movement, a shimmer of black ahead, the grind of a leather boot. A line of white dotted against the undergrowth slowly emerged, widened, a frozen lake lit by the moon, a kilometre wide. She saw the big man run out onto the ice and followed in a direct line behind him, sure that if the ice could take his monstrous weight it could also take hers. Then she felt the ice give and heard a gut-deep yelp escape her lips. A pop noise, like a gunshot, the squeaks of dry ice rubbing. She put a foot into slush, then another into water, and she plunged. Eden screamed as the pain rushed around her, into her ears and mouth and eyes – not water but raw red hurt.

She rose up, scrambled and grabbed at the slush and chunks, her fingers and hands and now wrists numb. Eden heard her own cries and gasps and coughs as though through cotton-stuffed ears. The edge. She found it, climbed up it, felt it crack and tip and slide beneath her. She found another edge and gripped at it with her fingernails. Her coat dragging her down into the darkness. Her boots kicking at nothing.

In the chaos, she saw him out there on the ice, watching her. Between her sinking, drowning, hauling herself up and
sliding back, he approached her, slowly crouched just out of reach. He was watching her die. Crouching there and watching the end of her, as she'd planned to watch his death, coldly and emotionlessly. She wouldn't beg him. Eden kicked and grabbed the surface, dug in, watched the ice curl and powder as her nails scratched lines back towards the sucking depths.

Nine or ten times she hauled herself up and slid back. Each time, it took longer. Bood watched. The moon glowed above.

Eden kicked, one last time, groped at the ice, and felt his hand on her wrists. He was lying on his belly on the surface of the lake. He pulled her and she gripped his coat, let him drag her onto the surface, drag her to the edge and dump her in the wet grass. Sounds came out of her she could not control, gasps and howls of agony. Everything was limp, useless, pulsing with her thundering heartbeat. She lay on her stomach like a doll while he pulled her coat off her arms, replaced it with his own, lifted and rolled her so that the wool brushed her numb face and her eyes took in the black sky.

‘What a fighter,' she heard him laugh, somewhere above her in the haze of impending unconsciousness.

She lay there on the edge of the lake for what seemed like hours listening to the sound of ambulance officers coming down the embankment, torches sweeping. Bood was long gone. She hadn't seen him again for years.

And then one night, coming to the end of a glass of merlot at a bar in Wynyard, another arrived before she could catch the waiter's attention. Sent from the man sitting at the bar with his back to her. The blond giant turned his face just slightly and she saw his cheek lift with a devious smile.

Now here she was in the driveway of his Vulcan home. She
parked the car beside the spotless Hilux under the second-floor verandah. Frank snuffled and stretched awake, took in his surroundings with a yawn. A strong wind gusted up the hill and shook the trees at the edge of the clearing, rattled glass panels in the verandah doors above. Eden sent a text informing Bood of their arrival. There was no telling where on the property he might be.

‘So this guy's our tranquilliser expert,' Frank said, popping his door and sliding out. He looked at the tree line, shielded his eyes against the bright overcast sky. ‘Man's got a hell of a view.'

Eden led her partner up the stairs to the great sweeping porch, the huge redwood doors inlaid with glass. The big house was open, as she expected. Frank stood in the entrance and gaped at the massive black buffalo head hanging above the wall table across from the door. He reached out and seemed to want to touch the nose of a glassy-eyed fox mounted on a slab of polished oak next to the buffalo's right shoulder. The room was done up log-cabin style, with woolly tapestries hanging between the mounted heads of deer, bison, big cats and a variety of small, handsome forest creatures.

‘Did you say you knew this guy, or …' Frank spied the billiard table in the sitting room off to the left of the foyer. The bar.

‘I've known him for some years, yes.'

‘And you've never once considered that I might like to know this guy? That we might in fact make excellent best friends?' Frank wandered to the sitting room door, noted the gigantic flat-screen television above the fireplace, the sprawling cashmere couches. ‘He's got a bar.'

‘You're a recovering alcoholic.'

‘A bar!'

‘He's not your kind of guy, Frank.'

‘Oh Eden, really,' Bood said from across the dining room to their right. His boots clunked on the polished floorboards. ‘I'm everyone's kind of guy.'

She'd forgotten Bood's almost supernatural sense of hearing. He could hear a sugar glider taking flight from five hundred metres. The huge man fitted his oversized surroundings, traversing the twelve-seater dining-room table in a couple of strides, thrusting his callused palm in Frank's direction. For once, Frank seemed happy to be the less impressive specimen of masculinity in the room. He shook Bood's hand enthusiastically.

‘Morris. Or Bood, as my friends have it.'

‘Frank. Great, great place, mate.'

‘Well, thank you.' The big hunter smiled, folded his sheep's leg arms over his chest. ‘When you've been a bachelor as long as I have, you can afford to dress your castle as a real man should. I'd love to take you on a tour.'

‘We don't have time for tours,' Eden said. ‘We're here on business.'

‘Ever the pragmatist. My dear, dear Detective Archer.' Bood put an arm out and Eden leaned into it, her arms still crossed, and let him kiss her cheek. He swept her into an unexpected squeeze and Frank laughed as she wriggled free. ‘I insist, though. Frank here seems like a guy who really appreciates a homeowner's efforts. Come on.'

Eden broke away, having seen it all before. The hot tub. The study with its chart tables and battered maps on the walls, the
cabinets full of shimmering butterflies, thorned grass-dwellers, beetles of impossible colours and patterns.

The wine cellar, and the door down there, chipped and blue she recalled, salvaged from some crumbling church somewhere or some ancient library burned to ruins. She'd seen what lay beyond the door, where Bood kept his real trophies, the trophies he certainly would not be including in Frank's tour. Eden went into the kitchen, took a beer from the double-door stainless steel fridge and leaned against the kitchen bench sipping it. She looked at the mountains through the glass wall to the verandah. A change was coming through. Rain. She could see its slanted grey fingers on the distant white horizon.

Frank's voice could be heard all over the house. Bood's booming laughter. When Frank returned, his eyes were wide.

‘Did you see the moose?'

‘I've seen the moose, yes,' Eden replied.

‘There's a bear in the living room.'

‘And a chair as well?' she sighed.

‘Now now, my love,' Bood laughed, touched her shoulder. ‘We'll get to the business end of things in just a moment. You've had a long journey. Can I get you a beer, Frank? A snack?'