Fall (5 page)

‘There are programs you can download onto your phone specifically for running,' Hooky said. ‘They play your music, track your progress, time you, mark your distance and elevation.'

She gave me a bunch of very quick instructions. I stopped the music and brought up a screen full of numbers and images.

‘How the hell do they do that?'

‘GPS.' She rolled her eyes. Eden looked over my shoulder. Hooky made me bring up a green and grey map crisscrossed with colourful lines and numbers in flashing bubbles.

‘See here?' Hooky pointed with her pinky finger. ‘She did two laps of the park yesterday afternoon, 5.14 pm. Then she went off track … through the bushland over there, Queens Park Road. There was a pause of … three minutes. Then we're onto a road. Her pulse goes up from 180 to 210 beats per minute.'

‘This thing can do heartbeats?' I looked at Eden. She was deadpan. I guessed this kind of technology had been around for a while. I felt old.

‘Then she's off again.' Hooky frowned at the phone. ‘She speeds up to forty, then sixty kilometres an hour. Either the chick was running like the Terminator or she's been put in a car.'

‘Fuck me!' I said. ‘We can follow this right to the crime scene?'

Hooky tugged my arm back down so she could see the phone. ‘Yup. Looks like the killer drove her out to … Mangrove Road, Ashfield. Stopped for fifteen minutes. Then drove her back here.'

I pressed the bubble on Mangrove Road tentatively, not sure what would happen. A window opened marked with a small red X.

Heart rate error. Connection lost.

‘We're going to need a secondary team to follow us and
a third to check out the pick-up point by Queens Park Road.' Eden turned and began walking towards the car. She beckoned for the head crime-scene tech and gave him instructions as she hobbled down the slope, her aluminium crutch making holes in the wet grass. ‘Frank, give me that phone. We need to get screen shots of the map and send them to headquarters.'

I glanced back at Hooky as I ran towards the car. She was at the top of the hill smiling to herself.

 

Eden gets this look about her when she's on the hunt. She always has. Pointed. Cold. I like to try to keep things light and casual, especially when I'm a passenger with no way to control how fast the car's going or which route we take. If I can't keep a lid on my excitement, I start chewing my nails, my knuckles, my collar. My stomach starts churning.

Since her run-in with a killer, Eden's pointed look has developed a really deadly edge. She drives like she's handling a getaway car, sailing through gaps she has no cause to be confident about. I hung on to the seatbelt and tried to remember if you're supposed to go stiff or limp in a crash. We headed across the city towards Ashfield with people leaping from crossings and holding their children as the sirens announced our approach. The radio was playing, and as news broke on the hour Eden glanced at it.

‘… the remains of at least four people in a burned-out Kombi van outside the Black Mutt Inn near Suffolk Park, just south of tourist hotspot Byron Bay. It is believed at least some of the victims suffered gunshot wounds. Police are asking –'

Eden switched the radio off.

‘Ashfield,' I said, glancing at the phone now and then, trying to avoid making myself sick. ‘Why Ashfield?'

‘I don't know,' Eden said.

‘Bit of a horrible name for a place. Ashfield.'

‘You should pen a stern letter to the mayor.'

‘Maybe I will. The bus!'

‘I can see the fucking bus, Frank.' Eden swerved.

‘Jesus Christ, we're both gonna die.'

‘Would you shut up?'

‘Would you look at the road?'

Eden tossed a glance my way just as we blasted through a massive intersection, a half a second's worth of gap between us and a removal van passing across our bonnet. Silence lingered in the car, my words pulsing. It's always very present between us, the fact that Eden could at any time, and rightfully so, decide that killing me is the best thing for her future. As far as I could tell, it was only me and her father who knew what she really was, what she had done. People wonder, I'm sure. Our colleagues, our clients, some of the journalists who have covered her career. They wonder about that hard look, about her incredible instinct for catching killers, her seemingly biological ease at physical combat. She's a natural chaser, hunter, fighter. Once a man in my very position got too close to discovering who Eden really was and her brother put a bullet in his head. Her brother was gone now. Eden had killed him to save my life. But I didn't feel any safer. I couldn't afford to.

Arriving at the scene was anticlimactic. In an alley between two warehouses in Ashfield's industrial wasteland, the path the murdered girl had taken came to a point. Sandy black earth and bricks that hadn't seen sunlight in years. Eden parked and
we walked into the gap and looked ahead to the wire fencing at the end, the dead grass. There were a couple of boot prints beside a pair of tyre tracks. The tracks showed the vehicle had come into the gap, where the driver exited, walked around the vehicle, got in the back, exited again and got in the front. The GPS showed the van was stationary here for a mere fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes to leave the victim totally unrecognisable.

Eden and I stood close enough, but not too close, waiting for the crime-scene techs. There were plenty of cigarette butts and bits of paper around for collecting. I don't know about Eden, but I stood there still and silent because I wanted to be sad for a little moment at the sight of the footprints, the reading on the phone in my hand. The heartbeat rose. Then the heartbeat was lost. It was a lonely place to die.

‘Kill van,' Eden said suddenly, nodding. I looked at her. Her arms were folded across her chest, her eyes squinting in the dim light, following the footprints back and forth. ‘It's a good move. Mobile, so you can grab and go at any time. Easy to acquire. Don't need to clean it. Just light it up and leave it. Ted Bundy had one for a while there.'

She sniffed and took her jacket off, crouched low with difficulty to look at the tyre prints. I felt a little ill and went back to the car to wait.

Hades Archer was starting to feel things were getting too quiet around the house when he noticed the men gathered at the bottom of the hill. He'd been told men his age became restless towards their twilight years and sought the company of people who didn't necessarily want to hear their stories or drink their coffee. Men his age became a burden on people when they got bored. So the trick, it seemed, was not to get bored. Always have something brewing. A project. A purpose.

The average man took up golf in his retirement years. But Hades had never been close to average.

He kept this restlessness at bay by focusing on his work. His legitimate work, mostly. Waste rates in the city were always increasing, which meant he was constantly facing the challenge of finding space in his landfill for non-recoverable garbage. He spent the months carefully considering which technology upgrades he could get government funding for, how to make use of the non-recoverables, whether there were charities that could benefit from some of the items he couldn't find buyers for – the thousands and thousands of bags of clothes, the old but still operational appliances, the building materials. He considered which landfill plots to turn over, knowing it took six or seven months for the bodies he hid beneath the layers of
waste to degrade to the point that they wouldn't be decipherable among the sludge and decay when the plots were dug up and relined for fresh garbage. He remembered where and when he'd buried people, and around about what their body type and fat content had been. He wasn't dumb enough to write this down anywhere, so it was a purely mental game. A memory puzzle. He'd heard men his age were advised to play them to keep the brain ticking.

It was an entertaining little test. Hades would stand on the doorstep of his little shack on the hill and look out over the fields, the trucks bumbling along in the distance spewing their black smoke into the air, and try to remember where he had buried this body or that one – and how deep. Ah yes, over there, by the fence behind the car shed, he'd buried the skinny rapist Denny ‘the Preacher' Mills. East of the Sorting Centre, he'd planted Sharon the black widow. And just last week, in the north quadrant, he'd sunk some junkie punk whose name he never learned. He had felt a twinge in his back as he loaded the boy's body onto the front of the digger.

In a way, what Hades did was a lot like gardening. He'd heard gardening was good for retirees.

That evening, as the old man watched the sun falling behind the round grey mountains of trash, he felt a certain pulling in his chest which told him that for all his activities, his gardening and his memory games, there was still something lacking in his life. There was only so much organising a man could do before there was nothing left to arrange. His nightly meals were cooked and frozen – hearty containers of lamb stew and shepherd's pies and soy chicken stir-frys in their dozens. He was well into his next artistic project – a mighty wolf assembled out of
hundreds of discarded black Singer sewing machines. Lots of welding work. Time-consuming and dangerous. But when he'd done all that, there was an unsettling stillness left behind. It was then that Hades let his eyes wander from the horizon and spied the men gathered down the hill beside the last truck to come in.

As the old man reached the bottom of the hill, one of the men turned away from the gathering and walked by Hades swiftly. Hades was surprised to see the grimy character had tears in his eyes. His fluorescent orange vest was spattered with all manner of tip muck – garbage juice, ink, paint, grease. Hades said nothing to the young man. You didn't acknowledge a man in his weak moments. Hades edged his way into the gathering.

All heads were bowed. At first Hades thought the object of their attention was a young kangaroo. The dog had the bony, elongated figure of a gangly joey. But the colour was wrong and so was the size. The animal was the sunburned caramel of ice-cream topping and milk-chested, a mixed-breed thing with a long snout and a pink nose. It was far too thin for how long it was. In fact, it was starved beyond anything Hades had ever seen, and he'd seen the dingoes that frequented the tip get down to bones and leather during the wintertime when the tip seagulls went back to the shores and wild cats were hard to come by.

The dog's lips were puckered inwards, and its hips were a collection of intricate spikes and ridges pushing up against skin. It was lying lifeless, white eyes bugging from its skull. An open garbage bag lay beside it, spewing its contents onto the ground.

A second man in the gathering walked away.

‘There's got to be something in here,' one of the men said. Hades looked up and saw him rummaging through a garbage
bag identical to the one the dog had obviously been pulled from. ‘There'll be a bill with an address. A piece of paper. Something.'

Hades looked around as the men started rifling through the bags. Three of them remained, staring down at the dog.

‘You do it,' one of them said to another.

‘I can't fucking do it.'

Hades bent down. He heard his knees pop and crack as he lowered himself beside the animal. To his surprise, the chain of furry bone links jutting from the dog's hindquarters began to quiver, then to wag. Hades put his hand on the animal's cheek, smoothed its hairless leather ear back over its bony head. The dog was colder than a live animal should have been. Its tail continued wagging.

‘Someone's gotta do it,' a man said. ‘We can't just leave it like this. It's cruel.'

‘Here. Here. Look. An address. I've got a fucking address in Lavender Bay. Let's go. Let's get the fucking pricks.'

‘It might come good,' Hades said, more to himself than to the men around him. ‘You never know.'

The men watched as Hades eased his big hands under the dog's hips and shoulders, gathered the thing into his arms. It weighed less than a child might. The dog was long. Its impossibly narrow legs dangled limply over his arm, its head lolling. Hades looked at the faces of his workers as he got to his feet, each wavering helplessly between fury and despair, then he turned and laboured up the hill towards his shack.

 

That night Hades sat on the floor of his tiny kitchen, his favourite things from the tip adorning the walls all around
him. Taxidermied birds and framed dried flowers. Ten pocket watches hanging from their chains in one corner of the ceiling. Polished, renewed, ticking with life again, their engraved tributes reflecting in the light of several mismatched lamps.
To Sam, On Your Graduation.

The dog lay in Hades' arms in a bundle of blankets and looked at all the things above him, not having expected, Hades imagined, to see anything again after the inside of the garbage bag.

Plenty of things had come good for Hades out of the bottom of garbage bags over the years. The secret, he always believed, was seeing the potential when all was apparently lost. Potential was a sly thing. It hid in the darkest of places. When the dog wagged its tail at the centre of the circle of men gathered at the bottom of the hill, Hades had seen that potential. He'd smiled to himself. Now he held the dog to his chest, looked at his watch and decided it could have more water. He took the plastic syringe he'd found in his medical cabinet, filled it with water from the glass sitting on the linoleum beside him and squirted a little on the dog's hairy lips. Slowly, weakly, the beast awakened from its half-delirium and began to lap.

It would be a long night, but Hades had nothing better to do.

Imogen Stone liked money, and she liked murder, and there was nothing wrong with that. If she'd been able to pass the intake for the police academy, she'd happily have been a homicide detective, like her boyfriend, the murder-police poster boy Detective Frank Bennett. But she'd been young all those times she applied, and once the stain of her late teenage ‘narcissistic tendencies' and ‘lack of life experience' had been recognised in the personality test, they stayed with her through all her subsequent applications. She'd outperformed on the aptitude tests, but this couldn't shadow what the psychological report called her ‘grandiose sense of self'. It was ridiculous.

At the time, eighteen years old and quick to anger, she hadn't known what these terms meant. So she started researching how they were applied in psychology, and then started working towards disguising them, so that never again would they stand in the way of what she wanted. She became more reserved. More studied. She cultivated ‘shy' and ‘sweet'. She played down the apparent ‘overconfidence' she'd displayed in the academy interviews. She got so good at understanding her own psychological dysfunctions that she fell in love with the science of it. Being a cop psychologist was as close as she could get to that old dream of being the crime fighter, of rubbing
shoulders with truly dangerous people, both in and out of the job – not just pretenders – and she'd whizzed through the interviews for that role. But sitting there day after day in her leather armchair under the city windows, putting the pieces of broken cops back together, had done nothing for her narcissism.

Imogen loved herself.

In the end, it was impossible not to. Imogen had taken her one and only failure in life and turned it into a thriving success. Sydney's boys in blue looked to her as their saviour. They itched and twitched for her wisdom. It was Imogen they thought of deep in the night when sleep evaded them, sitting in the icy light of the bathroom, more comfortable among the razors and scissors than they were in their own beds next to their wives. It was Imogen they called. She was their triple-O. The first time she counselled one of the old boys who'd rejected her application as a young woman, she'd truly known what power was. Sitting there listening to him cry, she burned silently with hateful pleasure.

And then her first murder case. The missing Cherry boy.

George Cherry, eight, had gone missing as so many little angels go missing, on a walk home from school, the shark-infested waters between the classroom and home where the number of kids getting into cars and walking hand in hand with adults masks the hunt of society's nastiest. At first it was assumed the boy's estranged father had him. As happens so often, the critical first hours focused on the wrong man. Hours in the interrogation tank. More hours turning over the family home. Panic after the first lead failed, scrambling, stupid moves, roughing up the town's resident kiddie-fiddlers and the cultivation of myths in the media. More interviews.
More rummaging through drawers and leading dogs around tiny yards. Little George Cherry tumbled through the cracks. But he landed in the minds of his three pursuing detectives and they never forgot him, no matter how hard they tried. Imogen had been counselling the detectives for four years before her curiosity was piqued. Home alone one night and bored out of her mind, she went online on a sheer whim and the first thing her eyes beheld on FindGeorgie.com was blazing red lettering announcing a two hundred thousand dollar reward.

Imogen had taken on the case. And Imogen didn't lose.

She also didn't follow the rules. She didn't fill in reports. She didn't respect privacy. Imogen was all about winning, and in some dark corner of her mind she knew this was because all her life she'd been terrified of ending up like her father. A thirty-year veteran of the same security firm. A pencil-thin, hopeless man, the butt of his friends' jokes. Imogen's father was all she had, and she'd spent too many childhood afternoons watching him clearing up paper plates and empty beer bottles while his mates stood around the fire pit in the backyard of their suburban rental, munching damp bread and laughing globs of it into the grass. When he died, Imogen discovered a funeral plan for the old man that provided funds for a ceremony so lavish, so extravagant, it appeared he'd been contributing to it all his working life. Imogen hadn't accessed even half the funds for the ceremony she organised. As she'd predicted, only eight people attended.

Imogen was her own crime-fighting superhero. She didn't mind bending the law to get what she wanted, and that was what made Imogen so good at the armchair-detective game. Dr Stone put herself on the Cherry case and eight months later
was leading a squad down an embankment on the Murray River to the child's bones. She didn't let them mention her name in the paper. That would have been narcissistic. Grandiose.

Imogen had found something better than public recognition. She'd found murder money.

After the first case, she was hooked. She began hunting across the internet for cold cases she could conceivably solve, or at least contribute to, gaining a tasty share of the reward money. Sometimes it required her to do some unethical things. She wandered around in restricted-access police archive rooms. Now and then she carefully plugged her clients for details on their cases, making them reveal things that wouldn't necessarily be therapeutic in their revealing. She cultivated a network of administrative assistants, lab technicians and secretaries who now and then slipped her the information she needed. It wasn't ethical – but it wasn't hurting anybody. She told herself that all good detectives bent the rules.

Imogen was far more powerful as an armchair detective than she might ever have been as a cop. Sometimes it made her feel sorry for people like Frank, with his constant phone calls about reports, warrants, codes, legislations – crime-scene handling and the endless, endless discussion of contamination. Contamination of crime scenes. Contamination of impartiality. Contamination of witnesses. Frank's work in homicide had turned him into a physical and metaphorical germophobe. He wrapped the tasteless chicken and mayo sandwiches he took to work like they were radioactive. He wouldn't talk about anything related to his cases, wouldn't give her those tasty little tidbits she needed to fuel the hungry, voyeuristic thing inside her. Not until she begged him, anyway.

Imogen was no germophobe. She got as dirty as she could in her perfect hobby. She loved the feel of grit beneath her nails from digging and digging for truth, like a happy little mole.

After the Cherry boy, there'd been a few other half- and quarter-reward jobs, but nothing that had excited her like seeing the forensics team break earth above the boy's grave, the dig marked out on her coordinates, on her intelligence. She solved the mystery. She caught the bad guy. She hadn't felt that same exhilaration since. But now, sitting outside Maggie Harold's house, Imogen believed she could feel that rush again.

She folded the map in her lap and looked at the dusty windows of the little hovel outside Scone. Mynah birds tussled over territory on the lawn, hopping angrily in the grass, kicking up dust. It was dry out here. A nowhere place dotted with tiny towns where everyone knew everyone, punctuating huge distances where no one knew anyone at all. The house had been difficult to find, but now that she had, Imogen wasn't leaving until she was certain the woman calling herself Eden's biological grandmother was revealed as a fraud. One at a time, slowly but surely, Imogen would tick off all the lies of Frank's partner, reveal her for what she really was. The missing Tanner girl.

By the time she dropped this on the homicide department, there would be no keeping Imogen's name out of the paper. Eden Archer would be her greatest catch.