I
woke to the sensation of a tapping in the center of my chest, the kind of insistent tapping and rubbing you get when a paramedic is trying to bring you back to consciousness. Dr. Stone took my hand from my nuts and put a coffee mug into it. The heat brought me back. I was bent in a banana curve across her stiff square couch, my boots hanging close to what looked like a vase stuffed with dead twigs and my head baking in the heat of a curvy glass lamp. She flipped the lamp off and I tried to move, felt everything creak like it was going to fall apart.
“Oh God,” I said. Breathed low and deep. “Why? Why?”
“Yes,” I could hear her smile in the new dark. “It’s a good question.”
Her robed silhouette thrust open the curtains in front of the balcony. I covered my eyes.
“Stop. Go back to where you came from. Leave me here to die.”
“It’s ten. The day’s half over.”
I bent my head into my hand and felt dead inside. I twisted, groped for my pills, found my pockets empty. The place was spotless and small, like she’d only half moved into it or like she recognized such a tiny space could easily get cluttered and crowded by the things she owned, so she chose not to own things—to just look at them instead. She walked in bare feet to the kitchenette and retrieved her own coffee. I wondered if she was naked under the red satin.
“Did we sleep together?”
She coughed and swallowed her coffee.
“No, Frank.”
“Why not?”
“Because that’s the worst idea I’ve ever heard of in my life.” She looked at me, tried to stifle a smile. “You’re a train wreck.”
“I suppose.” I adjusted my shirt. It was misbuttoned and stank of cigar smoke. I tried to rebutton it and only made things worse.
“Your phone’s been going off. Could be important.”
I picked my phone up from the coffee table. Juno had called me seven times. Imogen came to the couch next to me and pulled her bare legs up beside her. She didn’t seem to mind that her feet were touching my butt. I was never going to get her, I decided. She was too together. And she was also right about me.
Seeing the girl with the ladybug earrings the night before had derailed me. I had a feeling that now that it had been so easy to surrender, the next derailment would be even easier. A woman’s laugh. Her smell. And wasn’t Martina just my latest excuse in a lifetime of excuses to stop and throw away Frank Bennett, police officer, and get wild? Hurt people. Break hearts. Damage myself. Was there something in me that liked to be this way?
Imogen Stone would be able to see things like that in your eyes. Smell it on your skin. I didn’t know a way back from the knife edge. I didn’t want her to show me, either. See the failure in her eyes when I fell backward after she’d spent so much time standing me soldier straight.
“There’s a way back, Frank,” Imogen said, as though she’d been sitting there sipping her coffee and reading my mind.
I got up and moved away from her, repelled by her easy morning beauty. Went to the desk by the balcony doors and shifted things around there like a nosy jerk. Empty coffee mugs, the glossy expensive type you see in specialty tea shops. Dozens of manila folders stacked in a corner against the wall, spread out over the tabletop. Client files? I flipped one open.
“Oh ho! Look at this. The juicy commentary of Sydney’s best nutcases.”
“Not exactly,” she said, curling her feet up underneath her. “I don’t bring my work home with me. Well, not usually. But you sort of followed me home.”
I looked at the papers in the folder under my fingers. Crime scene photographs. Photocopied notes. An autopsy report. I lifted the file and flipped through the pages.
“What’s this?”
“Looks like the Beaumont children case from here.”
“You writing a book?”
“No,” she laughed, sipped her coffee. “It’s an embarrassing little hobby I have.”
“Evans,” I read through the spines of the files against the wall. “Lillee. These are unsolved cases.”
“My name is Imogen Stone.” She put a hand on her heart. “And I am an armchair detective.”
“I can’t believe this.”
“I don’t know what’s so hard to believe about it,” she said. “I’m a cop psychologist. It’s one of the lowest paid and least respected appointments in the field. Something must have drawn me here. I like crime.”
“Look at you. Jesus. I don’t know if this makes you more or less attractive.”
She came across the room and took the file from my hands, folded it shut, and dropped it among the clutter.
“I’m not some aging true crime groupie. I provided a lead on the Emily Dooville case. Took me a year and a half. Earned me fifteen grand in reward money.”
“Ah ha. I thought those were dollar signs I saw gleaming in your eyes.”
“Jesse Deaver, here—that’s up to a hundred grand. Imagine if I cracked that. Hello investment property.”
“What a little capitalist you are.” I smiled. She might have seen a weariness in it because she took up her coffee again and stood near me, not touching me, but warming me somehow with her very presence.
“You just have to do one job, Frank. That’ll get you back to where you need to be. A bit of focus.”
“Focus.”
“Be a cop. A good cop. Morning, afternoon, night. Stop being a man for a while and do your job. Your partner needs you. The families of those girls need you. The next girl in line, the one who’s waiting to be the next body you dig up, she needs you. If you can manage to stop thinking about Martina for a while and start thinking about what’s happening right now, I think you might be able to put yourself back on the tracks.”
I felt something stir in my chest. Some tightness, some desire, like the pull of magnets against my heart, making it beat in my throat, under my tongue. Stone rubbed my hand, and I drank the coffee, felt it making connections in my brain.
“You might be right.”
“That’s my job.”
“We should celebrate by sleeping with each other.”
“No, we shouldn’t.”
“You’re probably right.”
“Have a shower,” she said, taking my empty cup back to the kitchen. “Then get the fuck out of my house.”
There was something about Eden. Some natural, beautiful thing. Watching her, Juno imagined, was like being privy to the movements of a majestic and vicious creature in the wild lumbering around the world with all its deadly capacity proudly contained, a thing that everyone knew was dangerous. Panthers, for example. Sleek. Soft. Curved, not needing to advertise their lethality with spikes or ridges or scales or splashes of color.
Eden was very much like a panther. She slept like a panther. With natural exhaustion. Still as a rock. The unbothered ease of the queen of the jungle. He liked to watch it. It made him feel excited and at peace all at once.
Eden going to sleep was one of his favorite things. She had a long wind-down procedure. Unlacing her boots seemed to take minutes. She’d unclip a pocketknife from her belt, an old and much-used thing it looked like, fold it open, examine it. She would arrange things by the bedside, the knife, her phone, a pencil and paper. She sometimes used the pencil and paper, but he couldn’t figure out what she scribbled when she sat bolt upright in the early morning hours. Sometimes he thought it looked like names. Now and then she’d made a list and crossed them off one by one, her frantic breathing easing as she did, becoming the calm intake and exhale of sleep once more. In the mornings she always threw the lists away.
Sometimes Juno wondered whether Eden forgot about the cameras at night. But she never forgot in the morning when she disappeared into the bathroom, lifting the pendant over her head and setting it on the counter beside the sink. Beige ceiling squares inlaid in plastic, flowers of black mold. Juno had almost memorized their patterns.
Juno wondered if he was getting too close to Eden. He supposed that was a natural effect of surveillance work. Frank had warned him about it, said he’d spent two weeks watching a beautiful female drug dealer in his early days and had got himself all worked up about her. Small hot car. Hours alone. It had made the final arrest difficult. Impossible to follow the case in the paper after it left his hands. Afraid to know the sentence. Like she’d been a girlfriend. An ex-lover. In his mind they’d been together for years. In truth they’d spent a wordless car ride together to the station and that had been it.
“Nothing but your dick, the girl, and as much junk food as you can cram in the passenger seat,” the cop had said, watching Eden on the screen with minimal interest. “You think you know what they’re thinking after a while. Put your thoughts into their head. Truth is you don’t know a thing about them. You could watch her for the rest of your life. You don’t know shit.”
The matter-of-fact way he’d said it, leaning back on the milk crate in the corner of the van, his legs spread and his eyes lazy on the Jack Daniel’s.
You don’t know shit.
Said with the conviction of a man protecting his wife from the glare of a rival male, said with all the arrogance of a beast with a beauty on his arm. Frank was one of those hard cops who had spent too many years throwing his weight around to understand authentic interactions with other males anymore. He had spent too long knowing that his role in the force automatically put him above every man in every room he ever entered, no matter their size, their intelligence, their capability, their history. He used his badge to snag women. Juno could tell. Take the badge away and all you have left is a man with an ego problem. He wondered if Frank and Eden had ever gotten together in their time as partners. Small hot car. Hours alone. He doubted it. Eden was clever enough to see through shit like that.
She stood and Juno got one of his rare daily full-face shots of her as she tied her hair in the mirror, swept it into a bun at the nape of her neck, brushed her blinding white teeth for three and a half minutes as though it was something she timed. Cleanliness was her thing. Organization. Discipline. She’d be suffering out there beyond her natural environment.
Juno sympathized. His cramped little van had become like a stinking cave, never long enough or wide enough to accommodate him, never sunny enough to dispel a strange dampness that covered everything. The blinking of the monitors and the humming of the machines was like the stirring of organs inside a creature that had swallowed him. It was good to feel that he shared something with Eden, even if it was only discomfort, a longing for home. Juno slapped his cheeks, cleared the burger cartons off the makeshift desk into a garbage bag, and tried to get ahold of himself.
Eden walked out into the daylight and turned toward the back fields. It was too early for work, for breakfast. Juno frowned. Maybe she was heading to the kill sheds to take samples while everyone was asleep. Eden’s hands appeared on the screen. Three tiny evidence bottles, no bigger than toothpicks, that she examined before putting them back in her pocket. Frank had been wrong. Juno was inside her head. The evidence of it was everywhere. She was like his avatar, following his commands on the screen. Juno got Eden. Men like Frank didn’t get women like Eden.
Eden in the kill sheds. Gloves snapped on fast as lightning, a quick glance toward the doors, and then she began. She knew just where to go. The sorting tables. The slaughter line. The tools. If there was human blood here it would stand out among the pig blood like a fox on a bunny farm. One cell, one single cell, would add to the story. It would be near impossible for Rye and Hart to explain the girls’ blood here. This was a man’s space. Maybe blood from the missing girls found here wouldn’t be enough to convict, but Eden was a hunter and she would hunt down whatever she could—a whisper here and a blood droplet there, clothes charred and burned and left on a cliff edge. She would find hairs and fibers and text messages left behind, sniff out the missing girls, gaining momentum like a hound running after a scent, closer and closer until she made her catch. That’s how Eden lived and breathed. For the hunt. Juno knew it.
Eden capped the bottles and pocketed them. She left the kill sheds through the back doors and headed into the bush. Juno watched. He crossed his legs, tried to tap into Eden’s mind. She was probably going out to see if the burned clothes had been taken overnight.
Eden turned. Looked. Turned back around. Kept walking at an even pace.
“I’m being followed,” she said.
Juno sat up on his milk crate. Felt his muscles tense, his whole body shivering with energy. There was no indication of his own terror in Eden’s voice. Her feet kept the same rhythm, the camera on her chest looking forward into the wall of green before her.
“Nick Hart’s following me,” Eden said, touching the pendant as though to make sure it was still there, making the microphone crackle in Juno’s van. “He’s at about a hundred meters, following slow. Making no effort to conceal himself.”
“Oh God,” Juno said aloud. He grabbed for his phone, dialed Frank’s number. It rang out. “God.”
Eden kept walking. Her boots sometimes crunching on gravel and leaves, sometimes soundless on dirt. She turned and Juno caught a glimpse of the tall lanky figure of Hart between the trees, following the same path through the undergrowth. He seemed no closer. A hundred meters or so. Within shouting distance. In eye-contact distance. And he was making eye contact. Juno could see that. Cold, expressionless, the eyes hollow across the morning shadows.
“He’s not gaining,” Eden whispered. “I’m not slowing.”
“Get out of there . . .” Juno cringed. “Get out of there!”
She was heading deeper into the woods. Juno couldn’t understand it. Paths forked in front of her and each time she headed into the dark. Juno cranked up the contrast on his laptop. She turned again and Juno caught the edge of Hart’s shoulder between the trees, rounding a bend.
“Let’s play, baby,” Eden whispered.