Fall (31 page)

I called the Parramatta headquarters while I ran through the car park behind St Vincent's hospital, huffing my way down the concrete ramps. Trying to direct Gina through my desk in the bull pit was excruciating. For a receptionist at one of the biggest law enforcement establishments in the country, she's got no ability to zero in from the big picture.

‘I don't know. There's stuff everywhere.'

‘It's a photocopy of a newspaper article. I would have just dropped it somewhere there on the surface.'

I heard drawers opening and closing. I reached my car and got inside, my shirt clinging to my back and sides with sweat. Paper rustled on the other end of the phone.

‘There's a coffee mug here with mould in it.'

‘It's a forensics experiment. Part of an investigation.'

‘Right.'

‘Keep looking.'

‘New laws sought after high-profile surgery mishap?'

‘That's the one,' I gasped, my heart thundering in my neck, half the run, half pure exhilaration at the chase. ‘Read it to me.'

‘The state government has called upon federal leaders to impose regulations to curb the growing number of young
Australians seeking cheap cosmetic surgery overseas,' Gina read. ‘The move comes as reports arise that Tara Harper –'

‘Tara Harper,' I said. ‘Did it say what kind of surgery she had?'

‘It just says a great number at once,' she said. ‘Are you onto something, Frank?'

‘I'm not sure,' I said. ‘Maybe. Get me everything you can on the Harper girl.'

 

I had a team assembled just down the street from the Harper house by the time the sun set – eight or nine Kevlar-clad specialists, two of them women, standing around a squad car tucked behind a huge fig tree. Cars took the roundabout near us slowly, heads turning, before pulling onto Lang Road, running alongside the park itself. The yawning sandstone gates to a car-lined hill were directly across the road from number 7. The house was a gigantic cream mansion that could easily have been divided into two profitable semis, the ornate front garden lined with sandstone and iron, maintaining the neighbourhood style. White block-out curtains were drawn over the French doors of all four balconies, and the only thing moving on the property was a sickly looking ginger cat that had taken up residence on the wall beside the house to watch the raid.

I directed two of my team to the rear of the property. This involved barging through other people's houses and commandeering their back porches so we could see if they had a view into the house. The few times I've done this myself I've found people to be more excited about helping the police nab the bad guy than concerned I'm going to judge them on
their household mess or hassle them about the bong on their coffee table.

When the two were in place, I received a report that the rear of number 7 was all curtained as well. There was a garage behind the property, accessed by a narrow driveway down the right-hand side of the house. One of the officers reported that it was secured with a huge padlock and chain.

I sent two agents to the front of the house. They were wearing jackets over their police vests. After an initial walk-by, they reported that nothing stirred.

By now we'd garnered plenty of neighbourly attention. A woman stood on her step with a couple of children, describing our operations into a mobile phone while the little ones pointed and gaped. It was not an uncommon reaction. People who spot a police operation in their street will invariably try to get close to it, and if they can't will report it, sharing the experience with their friends, family, sometimes the media.
Sharon! You'll never believe this! There's a SWAT team outside the Calverts' house! Get over here – they're still setting up.
The kids obviously asked their mother permission to go down to the fence, and she allowed it. Their little heads poked up over the red brick fence, eager, probably wondering if I had any ‘Cops are Tops' stickers in my pockets. Almost as though she'd heard my thoughts, another housewife burst out of the house next door and jogged through the front gates, up to the porch to join her neighbour watching the drama.

‘Alright,' I told my team of four, ‘I've going to get those two to do a knock. You two take the sides, you two go in at the front.'

They rushed off. I gave the two walkers-by the command to knock on the front door. When no one answered, I gave it
a few seconds, then sent them in. I gave myself just a moment to be sad that I'd once been one of those hot-cheeked officers at the back of the raid team, wondering what was behind the closed door. Bellowing down the empty halls. Now I was too important for that. My ‘forensically trained mind' was put to better use elsewhere and only the ‘grunts' were allowed to do the front-line work, where they might brush up against any danger. I missed being a grunt. It was exciting.

The two housewives had a better view of the front door than I did. When the team busted through it, they clapped and the children cheered. I spotted a couple of teenagers by a tree on the other side of the park gates. One was filming the scene with her phone.

I'd learned all I could about Tara Harper while I got approval for the raid, both from what Gina phoned in over the next hour and a search on my phone. There wasn't much about the girl going around. She had no social media presence whatsoever, which was strange. There wasn't a tried and failed Twitter account, a blog, a jobseeker profile – so far as I could tell she'd never had a job. There wasn't a picture of the girl anywhere, not even on a memorial page dedicated to her father set up by the company he'd worked for. Her mother, a stunning blonde woman with perfect cheekbones, was pictured frequently on society websites. Whippet-thin and eagle-eyed, she never smiled fully – she had discovered her perfect angle to camera and worked out a half-smile that made her look both powerful and coy, and she stuck with it. She'd been a sports model in her late-teen years, and then had met her sugar daddy and settled down to being a mother – which seemed to mean acting on the board of charities, drinking champagne, shopping and going
to premieres. She ran. A lot. Half the paparazzi shots of her were snapped for ‘Celebrities without make-up' – cheekbones exaggerated as she inhaled, mouth a supple O, the picture itself buried low on the page. Because even free of make-up, Joanie Harper was what I would, as a young man, have called a ‘honey'. She was fantasy material. A visual feast of human genes at their fittest and fairest. I didn't know what kind of surgery her daughter had sought in Thailand – all that was bottled up in media privacy laws – but I couldn't understand, if she shared even a portion of her mother's genes, why she'd sought any at all.

I was immediately struck by the smell of the house, the shut-in stink of mould and accumulated dusts, carpets that needed airing out and food that had gone off and dried. Dead flower water, perfume reaching through stink and being pressed down. The place was immaculate and gave the impression that was because nothing ever moved. A cabinet full of ornate tea sets near a sideboard that was bare except for an empty wooden bowl. The signs of life were missing – keys, newspapers, letters, pens that should have been set down where they were used, left behind to be used again. There were no magnets on the fridge and nothing in or around the sink. When I opened the kitchen cupboards, I found there to be no plates.

All the plates, it turned out, were in the attic room. The specialist team members called me straight there. I saw the top of Ruben's head from the stairs. He was lying as though a gust of wind from the windows had blown him right over, but the window was shut and the curtains were drawn. I ordered the team out of the room and stood in the doorway so as not to disturb anything.

I looked in. Ruben had been stabbed a bunch of times in the chest – for a second that made me wonder if I hadn't accidentally stumbled on an isolated murder and not found the Parks Strangler. The Parks killer had never penetrated skin, which for the novice doesn't sound like a substantial advance in technique. It is, however. There's a big difference between strangling and stabbing – the bloodlessness is the main thing, but the real distinction is in effort. It's difficult to stab someone. There are all sorts of thing in the way. Clothes and ribs and, usually, the person's arms as they grab and flail and try to stop you. And people make all sorts of awful noises when they're stabbed. They wheeze and cough and gurgle and scream – they panic and run around. Until that moment, Tara – if she was the Parks Strangler – had been dealing with half-subdued victims, and she close-fisted bashed in faces before fitting her hands around necks almost pre-made for the job. I crouched at Ruben's head, turned his face slightly with the tip of my pinky finger. The face was barely touched. She'd knocked him down and gone for it. When I peeled his wet shirt back from his chest, I saw the wounds were many and shallow. A surprise attack, meant to be over quickly.

I didn't linger on Ruben for long. I was half-listening to the specialist team commander giving an ‘all units alert' for the suspect. We had her name, but the commander gave a pause when it came to description. We still didn't know what Tara looked like. Tara would be flagged if she used her credit card, any transport tickets or cars registered in her name, but from all indications she didn't have any of those things. While I listened to the team members trying to come up with points to look out for to broadcast to our colleagues, I walked into
the attic room and beheld the display around me. The thousands of defaced faces, the mesmerising Joanie Harper in all her stony beauty. It was a visual punch. The crowded faces all seemed to howl at once, a noise I could hear in my brain, an angry, despairing noise, the noise animals make in final grisly moments of being eaten alive. In this room full of mouldy plates, Tara had erected an inescapable moment in which, multiplied infinitely, her mother howled at her, squealed, the hateful, accusatory pleading of a mother at a bad child.

My Googling before the raid had told me that Joanie Harper had slipped peacefully away over a couple of bottles of wine and some sleeping pills. It was so gentle, so easy, that the coroner hadn't been able to determine if it was suicide or not.

I had the feeling, standing there, that Joanie's delicate exit from life hadn't been what her daughter wanted.

Hooky hit the ground with her shoulder and rolled twice. Her body took control as the terror overcame her, flattening against the bottom of the grave, a strange carpet of damp earth and rotting detritus, now and then the hard, sharp edge of a buried toothbrush, a sliver of plastic, the rim of a can. The grave had been dug neatly into the already acidic, degrading layers of waste, and as she lay panting short breaths she heard, with bursts of bladder-clenching horror, Eden walking around the grave and mounting the huge digger. Hooky knew she should move, should make a last shot at life, but her body was paralysed at the shuddering visions of the darkness and pressure that would come in seconds, the sickening weight of the dirt and rubbish as it piled onto her.

The machine started with a hideous roar. Hooky heard the clattering and grinding of the rubbish and soil as it started to move. The initial tumble of objects onto her legs was so gentle it made her sick. This was how her death would be. Gentle and slow and smothering, an excruciating fight against rock solid limbs that would not struggle against the tape, that would not roll her, that would not shift towards the edge of the pit out of sheer animal fright at what was being done to her. She was powerless to do anything but let out a long howl through her
nose, her teeth biting down against her tongue as the rubbish rolled over her.

The digger stopped. Its engine cut, neatly and clearly, leaving ringing silence in its wake. Somewhere beyond her grave, Hooky could hear dogs barking. She lay and shook against the dirt and listened to the night.

It took a long time for her limbs to respond. Only her legs were covered. She turned her face against the ground and saw that the pile at the side of the grave, the weight that would have smothered her, was still very much intact. What had happened? Had the engine stalled? She curled in a ball and wept hard, the sobs now and then breaking into panicked snuffles that racked her entire frame, awakened what were surely cracked ribs down her side.

She was feeling pain. That was good. If she could bring herself out of shock, perhaps she could push the ordeal towards whatever end was meant for it – whether it was the restarting of the engine and her smothering, choking death or, and she could not yet imagine it, her climbing out of the grave. She rolled onto her good side and groped at the ground with her fingers, picked up a square of some ancient discarded thing, poked and pricked at the tape between her wrists. When the sobbing interrupted her bid for freedom she was forced to stop. She tossed away the square when the back of her wrist brushed against something better, a sharp twist of glass. She broke the binds and tore her wrists apart.

Hooky grabbed at the gag. The sounds, when she released them, were repetitive gasps and cries. She rolled and pulled the tape from her legs, tears pouring down her filthy cheeks.

It seemed an age getting up the slope of rubbish to the top
of the three-metre-deep grave. By the time she scrambled onto the living earth again her crying had subsided into a morbidly quiet tremor in all her limbs. Her teeth chattered. There, some metres away from the grave, stood Eden and the old man, a squat, menacing creature sitting on the curve of an old tyre. The terrifying skeleton dog was there, wagging its brown tail enthusiastically. Eden looked bemused, her arms folded as she surveyed Hooky where she slumped against the ground.

‘Are you sure that took long enough?' Eden drawled.

‘Imogen. Imogen –'

‘We know,' Eden said. ‘We worked that one out by going through your things.'

Hooky scrambled to a crouch and surveyed her injuries. She was sure both wrists were at least sprained, if not fractured. Her right foot was numb. The shaking would not stop. She wondered if she would vomit in front of them both.

‘You stupid bitch,' Hooky said. Her voice was a hellish rasp. ‘You stupid fucking bitch.'

The old man laughed, turned his cane so it dug a hole in the ground.

‘She's got you worked out,' he told Eden cheerfully.

‘Why didn't you kill me?' Hooky pleaded. She looked at the hole in the ground and felt hot tears at the corners of her eyes. ‘Why. Why did you –'

‘You're a child,' Eden said. She jerked a thumb towards the old man. ‘This one here's got a sort of … philosophy about it.'

‘I came to warn you.'

‘I realise that,' Eden said. She gestured to the grave. ‘Now we're even.'

‘We're not even,' Hooky snarled. ‘We're not done.'

‘Oh no, this isn't over, no. I completely agree,' Eden said. ‘This grave will always be here waiting for you. You'll never, ever be much farther from where you were just a couple of minutes ago. No farther than a heartbeat really. You should take a moment to remember what it was like down there. Cement it in your mind. Because I'll be keeping it warm for you, little girl.'

Hooky breathed. She didn't doubt the older woman as she stood silhouetted against the orange sodium lamps that lit the tip, the trash mountain range behind her, an apocalyptic wasteland of discarded things.

‘My parents were murdered too,' Hooky said. She scrunched her eyes against the childish sound of her own voice. Her trembling hand tapped, flat, against her own chest. ‘I came to you because I understand you.'

Eden twitched at the words, as though startled by a whistle on the wind. Something in the woman looked hurt, Hooky thought, or frightened. It was only an instant of vulnerability, a flash of some past assault, the breeching of the walls by an enemy long defeated, put aside from concern. The woman laughed harshly to cover it, but Hooky saw a glimmer of that fear remaining in Eden's eyes. A nervous curiosity. Her lips sneered but the rest of her beheld Hooky with the interest a lion takes in the shimmer of movement in the grass near his pride.

‘Stop talking shit,' Eden snapped. ‘Get up and get out of here.'

‘No,' Hooky said. Even the old man laughed at that one. She tried to unlock her gritted teeth. ‘I said we weren't done.'