Fall (4 page)

Ruben was pretty sure he had the cruisiest job in Sydney. He'd been caretaking the three-storey monster of a house on the edge of Centennial Park for three weeks and he hadn't seen the owner, or anyone associated with the building, once. He'd been translating job advertisements from the
Telegraph
using his phone while sitting at the arrivals terminal at Sydney airport, waiting for his bus. He had begun with the briefest one. Cleaner wanted, twice weekly. He emailed the agency advertising the job, which hired him and explained that he was to let himself in, make sure the place was dust-, insect- and mould-free, and leave.

He'd been in the country ten minutes and already had a job – great pay, zero human interaction and completely self-directed. Too good to be true. It was like the start to an old horror film.

The only catch was that Ruben wasn't the best cleaner on earth. He'd never got over his teenage habit of shedding clothes and letting them drop wherever he stood, which had bothered a lot of travellers in the dozens of hostels he'd stayed in across Europe, down through Asia and finally along the coast of Australia. He also loved tissues, gum, elastic bands – he'd use them and fling them, telling himself he'd pick them up later.
He was a flicker of toothpaste onto clean mirrors and a leaver of stubble in sinks. Getting a job as a caretaker was a bit of a stretch for Ruben, but he was up for the challenge.

He was posted a key and emailed a map to the house on Lang Road, across the street from Centennial Park. He was to go through the house from top to bottom and alleviate the damages of disuse. Fight back the dust. Fluff the pillows. Spray bleach on the creeping mould. The emails didn't mention anyone living in the house. Nor did they mention when the occupants would return. Ruben didn't ask any questions. The pay was too good.

He spent the first day showing himself around, gathering the things he'd need for the job from the places they were hidden all over the gigantic house. There were cleaning products in the kitchen, but everything was covered in dust and mould. He'd need a new vacuum just to clear it off the floors. Ruben guessed his being hired was a reluctant measure from someone who didn't want the house to fall apart – he arrived at the very moment dampness and mould threatened to cause permanent structural damage. The precise moment when vermin had begun to colonise the ground floor but hadn't begun to destroy it.

The overgrown back garden was a haven for spiders, who made their homes in the corners of every downstairs window. But, strangely, the front garden, which might attract the scrutiny of passers-by, was perfectly manicured. The house was dark and creaked a lot, and Ruben had to play music all day long just to stop himself getting the creeps. He spent as little time as he could in the many bathrooms. Horror-film ghosts always appeared in the bathroom mirrors first.

It took him until the very end of the first day to realise there was someone in the attic room. At the beginning he'd
ignored the creaking of floorboards that followed him everywhere, but as he rose through the levels of the house towards the loft he heard a television playing. At first he thought it must be outside, next door perhaps, but when he stopped to listen he realised it was upstairs. Something was being played on it, an advertisement run through in full, then rewound to certain spots and played again. Over and over the words and the theme music rolled. He shook the dust from the covers in the rooms below, mentally translating the words in his poor English.

My ten-week program gives you everything you need to escape the you that you've become and find the person you should be. Take up the challenge today! It's easy.

The words replayed over and over.

… escape the you that you've become
…

…
escape … you
…

…
find the person you should be
…

…
find the person
…

It's easy.

Ruben listened for a voice, a movement, anything to indicate that a person was playing the advertisement. There was nothing. It was as though whoever was up there was a ghost.

I didn't get to the crime scene straight away. I was following Eden up the gentle green slope towards the tree where the body had been found when I spotted little Amy Hooku standing nearby with her arms folded, staring at the grass in that little-girl-lost way she sometimes got about her. Amy was barely seventeen years old and not afraid to show it. She wore a blazing red top covered in dancing pandas, heavy black jeans and glittery silver Doc Martens. The extreme buzz cut of bleached blonde prickles jarred against her Vietnamese features. Complicated electronic gear hung all around her like vines on a small thin tree: huge earphones at her neck, things clipped to her belt, two phones bulging in her back pockets – one personal, one police department. She was the only teenager in the country with a standard-issue cop phone, and it was only because she'd earned it. I came up behind her and grabbed the back of her skinny neck.

‘I've got her. Backup! I need backup! I've caught Sydney's greatest liar.'

‘Get your hands off me, asshole.'

She tried to swing at me and I grabbed her wrist, put a leg into the back of her knee. I let her hang helpless for a second. The face was all teenage exhaustion at my incredible lameness. The
crowd at the edge of the police tape gave us confused looks – the wild-faced white guy manhandling the stringy Asian girl.

‘What is wrong with you?'

‘I'm excited to see you. You must have grown a foot and a half.' I pulled her up and grinned at her, punched her in her hard shoulder. She had grown taller, but not filled out at all. She was a miniature replica of the tall, lanky and incredibly beautiful woman I knew she would grow into. Her parents had been absolutely stunning people – he a broad-shouldered football-player type and his wife one of those bony models who always seem to glow gold. I knew Mrs Hooku from the autopsy photos, the
60 Minutes
special on the murders. I'd seen her father around the North Sydney Metro office, a quiet shadowy figure who walked too fast.

‘What are you doing here, Hooky Bird?'

‘I'm on my way to class, actually. Saw Simmons.' She nodded towards another officer we both knew, a bald crime-scene photographer from North Sydney Metro. ‘Knew it must be a good one.'

Amy ‘Hooky' Hooku was a genius, but I tried not to think about that. Beyond the punk-Japanese-rocker angry Hello Kitty thing she had going on – or whatever the hell it was – she possessed a rare kind of superintelligence that had seen her drop out of high school like it was child's play and sail into top university courses in computer science with an engineering major. At seventeen. I'd met her in North Sydney Metro when I was there working in Asian Gangs. My work had been mainly chasing up big drug crime families warring over territory, but they'd brought me in to consult on the Hooku family murders under the misconception that I could speak Vietnamese.

I was the one to sit Amy down in her school principal's office a year and a bit earlier and tell her that her younger sister had murdered her parents that morning. It had been a violent bloodbath that Amy only escaped because she'd unexpectedly spent the night at a friend's house and gone straight to school the next day.

I was a poor choice for the role. I was just about as situationally and experientially alien to an Asian teenage girl as a person could get. But with counsellors running late and the principal blubbering like a lunatic in the hall, it was down to me to tell Amy what had happened. Somehow, together, we'd worked through it.

I guess from that moment in the principal's office I'd managed to be separated from the rest of the world in Amy's mind. So she treated me like a human being and, however begrudgingly, put up with my childish bullshit, my rough-housing and my teasing. From what I heard from other people, though, she was very difficult to get to know. Pulled the ‘Me no speak Engrish' act whenever she was approached by strangers, no matter how friendly they were. All that was crap, of course. She'd grown up in Wollstonecraft. When she couldn't back out of interactions by playing the voiceless migrant, she could be openly aggressive, so the rumours went.

After her family was killed, the North Sydney bigwigs had approved her for a few low-profile administrative jobs here and there just to give her something to do while she hung around the station. She was a constant presence there after the murders, in the same clothes for weeks, just sitting in the waiting rooms staring at the crims or, if she could manage it, creeping into her dad's office to sit in his big leather chair.
People understood her obsession with the office – her father had been rooted to that chair in his glass cubicle, a silent figure tapping away at a computer, chasing down internet frauds, as rigid as a tree. I didn't know him but I'd been aware of him, the way someone will be aware of a chair or a desk without really taking notice until it disappears or is moved. Detective Hooku didn't move, though, until he disappeared, and all that remained of him was in that office. The office smelled like his cologne. It was covered in his used coffee cups. The laptop screen was marked with his prints.

Amy wanted to be close to her dead dad, so she kept sneaking into the headquarters.

They'd chase her out, the other cops, but she'd get back in through the fire escape doors. Once they had front and back door staff on the lookout for her, she stopped with the doors and started climbing in through a tiny window in the men's room. After a while the North Sydney superintendent let her file incident reports as part of unofficial ‘work experience', quietly, trying to avoid the scandal of a kid having access to sensitive criminal information. I avoided Amy as much as I could in those days, though I wasn't around the station a lot anyway. I felt uncomfortable around her. I'd seen her family's crime scene and didn't know how to not think about that when I spoke to her.

Amy thrived in admin, but she was hard to entertain. She started messing around with the station computers, installing new programs, making things easier, better, fixing bugs none of us technologically illiterate dinosaurs had any idea about. When the Major Crimes Unit assembled a task force to combat online grooming of teenagers for underage sex, Amy watched
while our out-of-touch middle-aged divorcees pretended to be young girls and boys in online chat rooms, and failed dismally. She knew all the language, the symbols. The cybercrime section of Major Crimes started letting Amy be in the room during online chat sessions, consulting verbally only. Then they let her sit in one of the chairs near a screen, still only verbally interacting with the crims, her words and advice translated through the police officer at the computer. Then, when someone got up to get a coffee one day, Amy slid into the driver's seat and controlled the conversations with the online pedophiles, ‘supervised stringently' by cybercrime officers. Amy's ‘work experience' had become work. She was still so young that had the papers got wind of what she was doing, the kinds of people she was talking to, there would have been a national scandal. Somehow the news never got out. It was because Amy was good. No one wanted to lose her.

She baited them, reeled them in, landed three major rock spiders in her first week officially on the job – one of them a cop at another station. She was a ruthless fisherman, an incredibly convincing liar. She could be a sexually confused fourteen-year-old boy in one chat window, and a nerdy, love-starved twelve-year-old girl in another. Her words were full of the misguided romantic fantasies so many normal young people her age brought to the online hunting grounds. She was fast and she was convincing. She set up names, family members, school grades, hobbies for her aliases. She could remember that the thirteen-year-old girl she was playing named Alice from Redfern had a cat called Stanley that'd been hit by a car and sprained its left back leg, at the same time as remembering that eleven-year-old Jessica from Mosman didn't
have pets because she got allergies. She had photographs for these people – multiple ones. I had no idea how she did it. Amy could lie like some of the worst sociopaths I'd ever met. Without hesitation. She was a hooker of bad men.

‘So what's the story?' I motioned towards the crowd under the tree.

‘Looks like a jogger copped it. Bashed, I think. I heard them saying she got it last night and someone's called it in this morning.'

‘That's no good.'

‘Nope.'

‘How's your aunt?'

‘Oh Jesus. How's
your
aunt?'

‘Alright, alright.' I raised my hands in surrender. Amy had a real aversion to being treated like a child, even though she clearly was one. She let me get away with it most of the time, but when other people tried to mother her, she snapped. You couldn't ask her how she was doing at uni or if she was seeing anybody or whether or not she was eating right. I wondered sometimes if she did eat right. She was all bones and sharp edges.

‘What's your partner up to?' she asked.

‘You know Eden?'

‘No. But I guessed she's your partner.'

‘How?'

‘She's giving you the stink eye.'

I looked over and saw Eden at the edge of the huddle, her eyebrows raised at me. I nudged Hooky off balance and ruffled her spikes.

‘See you round, punk.'

‘Yeah,' she said.

Things were not good over by the tree. There was never any glamour to it. From what was left of the body I guessed she'd been a beautiful woman. Long muscular legs in torn purple nylon tights, matching top, one sleeve of a green jacket hanging from the left arm. No shoes. Sporty socks. Eden held the tarpaulin up and I peered in. The onlookers shuffled to get a glimpse. The blue light falling through the tarp onto the girl's mashed face turned the bloody meat it had become purple, like she was wearing some melted Halloween mask. I looked for eye sockets but found none.

‘Someone's angry,' I said.

‘Mmm-hmm,' Eden agreed.

Immediately, things start to pop and sizzle in your mind. Academy training in the psychological patterns of killers. An angry perp, someone capable of this kind of brutality, is usually known to the victim. Pretty difficult to get this aggressive, this violent, with a stranger. Facial injuries, in particular, are usually personal. The positioning of her body, lying on her back, hidden from view of the road – was the killer ashamed of his act? It was a bit confusing on that score. According to the textbook, a victim positioned on her back and uncovered suggested a willingness for the body to be found. Usually killers who are ashamed of what they've done curl the body on its side, suggesting peacefulness, sleep. Or they turn her over, hide the face and injuries in the grass. On the back, face up, is probably how the victim fell out of the guy's arms, carried fireman-style and then flopped down, arms out. So the killer wasn't displaying any shame in the positioning of the body. But leaving the victim off behind the bushes – that was strange. In the right circumstances, it could have been days before one of
the joggers pumping along the road at the bottom of the hill smelled her, before someone let a dog off the leash and the beast came up here. A mixed display. Not ashamed, but not exhibitionist. There was an uncertainty about it.

This was probably a first kill.

I looked around at the paperbarks surrounding us, pale and spotted trunks that had stood watch over the girl's final seconds. Or had they? There was no indication that the brutality had occurred here. No blood spatter. But the victim looked like a Centennial Park jogger. I'd been one myself once. Centennial Park is a great starting ground for weight-losers rather than serious runners – it's mostly flat, and the familiarity of landmarks helps you control the panic that you'll never make it to the end. The main obstacles are old people, dogs, kids on push scooters. I shifted the girl's shoulder up a fraction and looked at the lividity, the dark purple on her back and hips where the blood had begun to pool. There were carpet patterns in the blood on the backs of her arms.

So if the runner was picked up from here, but wasn't killed here, why was she brought back here? Why risk returning a victim to the place where you abducted her? Was the location important to the killer? Maybe she wasn't taken far. Maybe the whole thing happened in the park. I looked towards the road, at the cars parked under the trees.

‘Let's set up a tent before we move her. I want to catch any fibres.'

Eden rose and directed a nearby tech to bring in a tent so we could examine the body without onlookers gawking at us. I instructed another to go down and get a video of all the cars in the immediate vicinity.

I heard a noise. I reached under the tarp and unclipped a mobile phone from the girl's waist. Wires ran up through her shirt, under her bra, to her collar. I pulled the headphones clear and looked at the screen. Her running music was still playing. ‘Hazard' by Richard Marx. Ominous. I scrolled through the songs and found the girl had a weird compilation going. Plenty of 1980s love ballads and murder songs. Depressed taste. A recent break-up? Was she pounding the pavement to lose the kilos gained during a now-dead relationship? I sat back on my haunches and realised it was the first personal thing I knew about the girl. Her current music taste. More personal details would follow, and they would all be sad to learn. Sometimes the stupidity of it hit me suddenly, right in the middle of the job. Everything she had been, whoever she was going to be – it was all over now.

‘Hey, dickhead,' Hooky called. I looked over. She was standing closer now but still off and away from the centre of the crime scene, not wanting to contaminate any of it with her DNA. It's shockingly easy to leave pieces of yourself at a crime scene. Just by standing there, flaking skin and dropping hairs like a tree shedding its winter leaves.

‘Did she have an app going?' Hooky asked.

‘A what?'

‘An app.'

I looked at her blankly. Hooky beckoned me and I took the phone. I let her direct me around it. As a kid, there would be no handling evidence for her.