Fall (23 page)

Eden narrowed her eyes. Then she laughed.

‘You think I'm the Sydney Parks Strangler.'

‘Well, for fuck's sake. Is it that much of a stretch? You're
some
kind of killer, Eden,' he snapped, his grey-blue eyes on her at last. His words were low, barely audible. ‘I don't know what. I've never known what. I know you killed six men, at least. Benjamin Annous. Jake DeLaney. The others, their cellmates. I can't prove it, but Eric trying to kill me for confronting him about it made it pretty clear that I was right. So then this murder happens up near Byron, while you're away for
the weekend, and the cops up there are saying the killer used a very sophisticated gun. Your best friend's a hunting expert.' He shrugged. ‘What do you want me to think?'

‘Whoa!'

‘Yeah. Whoa.'

‘Frank, I want you to think straight, that's what I want. Think straight, and not like a fucking idiot for once.'

‘I called you, what? Three minutes ago? You're saying you got from Rushcutters Bay to here in three minutes?'

‘Yes, actually. I'm sorry. Should I have stopped to pick up some milk along the way?'

‘You're wearing a black tracksuit. I hear about murders in the news and I wonder if you did them.' He shrugged again. Stiff and angry. ‘I can't watch the news anymore. You know that? I sit there and it's like, kid's body found in a creek. And I think, was that Eden? Old man bludgeoned in an apparent home invasion. Was that Eden? Four bodies found in a van in Byron. Was that Eden? You disappeared six guys off the face of the earth without so much as a hair left behind. Am I supposed to think that was your first time?'

‘Frank.'

‘You're the only killer I know.'

‘And that's the key, the thing you're forgetting,' Eden snapped. ‘You know me, you fucking arsehole.'

‘I can't even begin –' He paused as one of the area chiefs walked by them swiftly, speaking into a radio. ‘I can't even begin to list the things I don't know about you, Eden.'

‘Okay, we're going to stop this now.' Eden walked back to her car and got in. She put her face in her palms. Her hands were shaking. Waves of prickles rolled up and down her back. In the airless warmth of the car, she hid in her hands and flattened
her tongue against the roof of her mouth and growled. She had a strange surge of emotion when she heard the door beside her pop open and the familiar groan and sigh of her partner as he eased himself into the car. Emotion was not her friend in any form, but this brief and paralysing spark was not terror or rage. It was comforting, somehow. She felt comforted. Frank sat in the passenger's seat, his usual place beside her, and looked at the mess of people moving before them, a sea of blue.

‘I'm trapped here,' he said. Eden gripped the wheel and waited, but nothing more came. Frank stared at the dashboard.

‘What do you mean?'

‘I mean I'm trapped here, between Martina and Jason, and what he did to her and what I did to him, and you. Whenever I try to turn away from what happened between those two people, when I try to forget what happened to her, I open my eyes and there's you. Sometimes I feel like I can move on, maybe pretend she never existed. It never happened. But it did happen, and it happened because I left her there. I left her there because I was chasing you.'

Eden watched him. He stared down at his hands, lying open in his lap.

‘Martina is dead, and I killed someone, because of you. And every time you've killed someone since, I've been complicit in it.'

‘No you haven't,' Eden said. ‘Most of the time you don't even know it's happened.'

‘Did you kill those kids in Byron Bay? Those guys and those kids?'

‘What did I just say?'

‘There's no denying it.' Frank waved his hand, dismissed
her. ‘I'm complicit because I know what you are and I haven't stopped you. I mean, I'm not stopping you even now.' He ran his fingers through his hair, made a mess of it. ‘For some fucked-up reason, I've never stopped you.'

‘You can't stop me,' she said. ‘We both know that.'

He was silent. The restless hand fluttered at his eyes again, left a red mark on his brow when he scratched.

‘Why don't you stop yourself?' Frank turned in his seat and finally looked at her. ‘Give it up. You can turn away from it, you know. Maybe. You can leave it behind you. We both can.'

Eden felt again that wave of something, of familiarity perhaps. Of home.

She opened her mouth to answer. How to explain it all to him, a normal human man, someone with all his faculties, someone with all his emotions and neurological connections in order, someone with a soul. How to explain that at the core of her being, Eden killed people the way she breathed, the way she slept, that when she was hungry for blood it was as all-consuming as exhaustion for sleep, or the need for water to quench a thirst. Without the monsters that she hunted and caught and vanquished, she would suffocate. Flicker and extinguish. She ran on no other fuel. She was a consuming thing, and consume she must. To decide not to kill was to decide to die.

I don't want to die,
she thought.
I'll kill you before I let that happen, Frank. Because I'm a predator. That's the core of it. There's a beast in me, and it only knows how to kill and how to live.

A uniformed officer tapped on Frank's window. He rolled it down and Eden's comfort was lost.

Ruben lay in bed in the dorm past midday, which wasn't like him at all. When people came into the room to retrieve things from bags, to change, to cuddle, he turned and pretended he was sleeping. At some point Donato came and went, and for an hour or so he heard the rhythmic smacking of his basketball on the court outside, the rumble of the loose hoop hanging below the windows. Thursday at the big house by the park was coming. He had begun to dread the day. Terrified all night before he went, yet unable to pull away from the work – strangely drawn forward into the house, pulled within the orbit of the attic door.

As the sun began setting, he heard televisions come on throughout the building, the French girls upstairs with their reality television shows and the British boys catching episodes of
Neighbours
in the large living area off the bedroom in which he lay. On the edge of further frightening dreams, in which an unseen presence followed him from room to room around the big house as he furiously cleaned dirt and grime that would not shift, he heard a familiar voice. He wandered to the living-room door wrapped in his sweat-damp comforter, his hair mussed and eyes aching. The television sat like a blazing white campfire in a ring of couples, some of them sipping colourful
bottles of alcoholic cola, some of them passing a joint slowly. An athletic-looking woman filled the screen, standing on the steps of a building that was out of sight, grey concrete her only backdrop. Her sunflower hair swished in a high ponytail as she talked. This was, without a doubt, the woman from the tapes in the attic room, the tapes that kept being stopped and re-started, certain words and phrases captured and replayed. The subtitles were in German. Ruben had excelled in German at high school and could follow along as the letters flashed and flickered across the screen.

‘We won't stand idly by and let our voices go unheard,' the woman said. ‘If all goes well, this will be the biggest gathering of like-minded souls fighting for recognition in the daily struggle against domestic violence in this country. You need to escape the you that you've become, Sydney. It's easy!'

Hooky was distracted from the laptop on her knees by her aunt jabbering away in the kitchen, the low bubbling of her voice rising to a simmer as she walked into the large, immaculate living room, setting cutlery on the table. She was complaining about the ‘sickos' Hooky was chatting to on the internet. Something about her doing it at home, rather than at the station, made her aunt Ada think Hooky did it because she enjoyed it and not because she wanted to see the men she wrote to cornered, dragged into prison cells, given back some of the pain they perpetuated on their victims.

How can they let you do that at home, unsupervised? Ada asked, her Vietnamese so fast and perfect Hooky had trouble following. Who are these people? What kind of cowboys do they have running this city?

Hooky ignored her aunt. As long as her university grades didn't slip, Ada had never made good on her promise to confront her bosses at the department about just how much danger she was in and just how much freedom she had to hunt pedophiles online. Hooky made sure her grades were as near perfect as they could be. If the chiefs found out she was messing around with the perps they were watching in her own time, she'd be kicked out of the office for good.

Her fingers flashed over the keys, her eyes following as the words pumped into the small chat box at the bottom of the screen. The chatter, StanSmiles33, had already filled the screen with text in the moments Hooky was distracted. He was hooked, this one.

Hooky thought of the pedophiles she hunted in ‘levels', so this was the way she reported on them to her boss when she was working alongside officers at the station. Every inter action she made, no matter how casual, had to be reported, the conversations screenshotted and logged in files labelled with screen names for each individual target. Hooky had a small database of images she was allowed to use at the very end of her interactions with her prey – in the days and hours before their proposed first meeting. More often than not, just before meeting in person, one of her chatters would ask her for a racy photograph, a ‘commitment', something to show that she was ‘real' and serious about meeting up. Hooky had naked photographs of twelve boys and twelve girls of varying ages and ethnicities, the faces cheekily hidden or obscured, as final bait for her chatters. Hooky knew these children well – the grinning twelve-year-old girl taking a selfie in the mirror, the taut-skinned, serious-looking fourteen-year-old boy posing on a bed. These were for the level-five chatters only. She only ever used them once.

At level one, the target approached Hooky online, or she approached him, for casual chit-chat. School, weather, parents, the latest movies at the box office. Generally, ages weren't discussed, or if they were the men chatting to Hooky told her they were close to her age range. If she told the target that she was twelve, they often pretended to be fifteen. If she was fifteen, they would say they were seventeen. Sometimes,
Hooky had five level-one chatters to report on by the end of a chat session. Level ones often progressed to nothing. There was nothing criminal about an older man lying so he could chat to a younger person online as long as the chat was fairly pedestrian, and there was any number of excuses available to the outed online predator at level one – he wanted to reconnect with his own daughter who'd become moody and detached, so he chatted to young people, tried to get a feel for their worries, their interests. He was curious, maybe, about how young people interacted these days. He was living a fantasy, perhaps. Having an age crisis in his forties and pretending he was young. Didn't everyone think like that sometimes? What if I could go back? Start again? It was harmless.

For a chatter to progress to Hooky's level-two file, chat had to be sustained for more than one conversation, and innocuous photographs were exchanged. The chatter would ‘add' Hooky, or who she was pretending to be – send her a request to be her ‘friend' or to ‘link up', to ‘follow', depending on the site. A flurry of smiley faces celebrated the newly officiated, though still virtual, relationship. At this point, the more experienced online child-groomer backed off a little. Tried to make Hooky comfortable – didn't want to come on too strong. Connections were sometimes encouraged between Hooky and his other online friends, which often involved just the same chatter using different profiles, trying to make Hooky feel like she was part of a group instead of interacting with an individual. If the guy had friends, he had to be alright, right? Groups and clubs formed. The target sometimes asked where Hooky lived towards the end of this level.

To progress to level three, at which point Hooky flagged the
interactions with her chief at North Sydney Police headquarters, the talk had to turn romantic. Sometimes this was within mere hours of the chat being initiated for the first time. Sometimes it was only after months of association. It would begin with the odd love-song dedication or a ‘caring' message.
I was thinking about you today.
Invariably the target would search for an opportunity to assert himself as a strong, brave, masculine hero-type. If Hooky's character had a fight with his or her parents, the target would understand. The target would have experienced the same thing, or worse, from his own parents. If Hooky's character was being bullied at school, the target would reveal his evil plans for the perpetrators of the harassment. He'd progressively reveal his real age, either in stages, or all at once, confessing that although he'd lied – he was really forty-one – he felt such a connection with Hooky's character that he didn't feel it mattered. Age is just a number, right? Often at this point he would want to send money or a gift to cheer Hooky's character up. To show he cared. So he would obtain Hooky's address.

At level four, a second ‘location indicator' was exchanged. The target would ask where the girl or boy went to school or worked, maybe do a drive by of either location, or make a comment to the kid about the location. At level five, plans for a real-life meeting would be discussed. At this time, Hooky would consolidate her file, print out all the information she had, tag it and give it to her boss. And that was the end of her involvement.

There were many benefits to chatting to the perpetrators on her own, away from the office, although Hooky risked losing her job doing it. She could say what she wanted to the perps
without having to get approval from the cops sitting with her. She could be more graphic. More intense. The department strictly forbade her from talking to perps on the phone or in video chat at the offices. But when a target requested phone contact, and Hooky refused it, the perps usually got spooked and slipped away.

Hooky didn't like it when they got away.

When her reports were handed in, the department would link up with the Australian Federal Police and brief them for a joint operation. Sometimes Hooky saw her targets in the newspaper two or three months after she handed over their cases. The Feds never moved until they had everything. Computer files. Polaroids. Videos. Friends. Family. Co-workers. All picked over to within an inch of their lives.

Today, Hooky's target was ready to take it to level five. She sighed, bored, and drew up a picture she'd used many times before, something from the depths of the police files, something only she had access to. An image with a hundred legal documents attached to it somewhere, marking its confiscation from the girl who'd taken it and the man she'd shared it with – a girl with no idea how much trouble she was getting herself into – and permission from her parents signed away for its use in baiting monsters like the one who had lured their baby. Hooky posted the picture and yawned, wriggled her toes, making the laptop wobble on her knees.

Hooky noticed a small icon flashing in the corner of her screen and sent smiling Stan a quick message telling him her mother had come into the room, which halted chat immediately. She flicked over to another window and drew up a long column of boxes. The software she'd used to hack Imogen's
phone told her she was texting again. Hooky stretched out on the couch and balanced the laptop on her stomach, folded her hands over her chest and half-watched the television as boxes began to fill the screen slowly, one by one.

Hooky tapped her short fingernails on the edge of the laptop, felt half-thoughts zinging and crashing into each other. She drew up a quick news report on Eric Archer's accidental shooting by Eden Archer in a raid in a church in Randwick. Frank at the edge of the frame, his head in his hands, a paramedic trying to lead him away. Blood all over him. His girlfriend had been murdered only hours before. Hooky took the number from the interaction on Imogen's phone and ran it through a search engine. Peter Bryson was a low-level administration worker at Surry Hills police station. Hooky watched an email come through to Imogen's inbox from his work email address. She opened the file and glanced at the DNA profile of Eric Archer.

‘Interesting,' she said aloud.

A blonde woman was ranting on the television about domestic violence and a charity run in the city. Hooky looked back when the screen began flashing again.

A different recipient this time. Hooky waited. Knowing Imogen was waiting somewhere, probably in her office, about to leave work for the day. The text message from the new number came back promptly, like Peter's.

Hooky drew up her online banking surveillance on Imogen and watched seven hundred dollars shift out of her savings account into the ether, heading for the account of a woman named Lisa Louise Gilbert. A quick Google search told Hooky that Lisa Gilbert was an administrator at a small Western Sydney police forensics office.

‘You've got little birdies everywhere, haven't you, wifey,' Hooky murmured.

Hooky opened the DNA profiles of Eric Archer and Heinrich Archer. A mere glance, to the trained eye, told her they were not father and son. Her face felt hot. She shifted up on the
couch and watched more text messages begin to dart back and forth.

Hooky waited for Imogen to give an answer, staring at the boxes on the screen. None came.