Juno felt his breath seize in his chest. His stomach was clenched. Eden stopped walking and turned around. He could hear her breath. It was slow and deep. A sleeper’s breathing. This didn’t rattle her. This was a game. Juno scrambled for his phone, dialed Frank again, and listened to the phone ring out.
Nick Hart locked eyes with Eden before he heard the snap of her pocketknife as it slid open in her fingers. Hart smirked and Juno saw his whole body jolt with the laugh. The tall man followed the fork in front of him down the embankment and back toward the farm. Juno panted as Eden returned to her walk.
B
y the time I left Imogen’s apartment that morning, managed to wrestle the image of her out of my mind, listened to Juno’s frantic dribbling updates, and hit the station, I was already ruined—and it was only midday. I briefed the captain, assembled a team, located where Juno thought Eden had spotted the evidence on an aerial map, and then grabbed a quick nap in the downstairs changing rooms to avoid collapsing at my desk in front of everyone. I probably looked like a drunk, and I knew I smelled like one, but there was no call for acting like one in front of the young and impressionable beat recruits. It would be a decade and a half before any of them had any excuse to get this run down.
Night had fallen by the time I got to Rye Farm. As the convoy of lights began heading up the highway toward me, I was sitting with my arms on my knees in front of my own car, trying to will myself to stand before any of my cronies saw any weakness. Eventually I moaned at the stars, held my breath, and dragged myself up by my bumper as the convoy switched off their lights and rumbled into a rough half circle in front of me. I had a couple of beat cops for muscle work, a couple of forensics specialists, and a cadaver expert with a dog. Both of the forensics ghouls were women I’d seen around the office but never met—matching ponytails and serious faces, the type who read a lot and smiled a little. I introduced myself as we waited for the cadaver guy to unload his dog. One of them was Nicky, but I didn’t catch the other’s name. She mumbled it into her chest as she checked her gear. The hound was a shimmery caramel-colored thing with a pink nose and against all expectations it dropped out of the cabin of the handler’s truck, bounded over, and hurled itself at me.
“Dog, I’ve got enough trouble standing upright without you.”
The beast shook itself, barked, and tried to dance with me. I looked off toward the ridge over which the main body of Rye’s Farm lay.
“Bones, get down.”
“You need to get this dog to shut up or you’re going to blow this whole thing,” I told the dog’s handler. He was a worried-looking guy, a brow creased from much disappointed frowning at unruly pups, I imagined. The thing was wearing a blue and white checkered police pattern collar.
“Sorry. Sorry. She’s just excited. She’s one of my best, really.”
“What the hell do you call this? Your dog’s wearing a cop costume?”
“I got it at my kid’s school fair. Thought it was cute. Jesus. She is a cop. Sorry.”
“Dog’s name is Bones?” Nicky the forensics ghoul asked.
“Yuh.”
“Bit morbid, isn’t it?” she snorted, glanced at me. “Like calling him . . . Detective Stab. Detective Strangle.”
“Detective Bludgeon,” her friend laughed. One jostled the other with her elbow. These girls were more fun than I thought.
“What is this? National Pick on the Dog Handler Day?”
“All right, all right.” I took the map from my hip pocket. “Take a look at this, everyone, and we’ll get going.”
I flattened the map out on my knee and spread it on someone’s hood. I’d made a bunch of notes on it during Juno’s call and now they were barely distinguishable from the mess of lines and ridges. I thanked my past self for having the foresight to highlight in pink. I pointed to the body of the farm.
“We’re not even a kilometer out from this boundary fence, ladies and gentlemen, so the first thing I want to say is that everyone needs to keep their lights and voices down from now until we’re back on the road. Minimal radio use. I want you two up there on the ridge looking out, both with a vantage point for our work out here in case we lose comms on the ground.”
The two beefcakes standing in as my lookouts nodded, hands in their pockets.
“What we’re after is a pile of burned clothes or other cloth. But I want to run the dog the length of the riverbed and see if anything turns up. If it hits on anything subsurface we’re to mark it on the GPS and leave it. We’re on the edge of an undercover operation so we don’t have the time or space for a proper dig. It’s in and out.”
The dog was licking its ass at my feet. I was losing faith in its natural genius.
“Are you guys close to an arrest here? Shouldn’t grabbing any bodies be the priority?”
I tried to think of a less appropriate time for this discussion and failed. I looked at my watch.
“It’ll keep. Situation’s rather complex.”
“It’ll keep?” Nicky scoffed. Narrowed her eyes. “This is what you guys do. You make our job harder so you don’t have to file paperwork. What about the families?”
The dog handler stroked the dog, avoiding human eye contact.
“It’s not paperwork, honey.” I pointed to the ridge. “My partner’s up there and she needs me not to fuck up all her hard work by digging up a corpse right under the nose of her targets. Whoever this piece of shit’s after next needs me to put him away before he can do any more damage. The girl in the ground can wait, if there is one. Risking lives to avoid paperwork is not what I do, so I’m certain you weren’t suggesting it.”
The forensics girl sighed and took out her flashlight. I straightened and sent the beat cops up the embankment. I was hoping we wouldn’t find anything that could be a body. For the girls themselves, their families—and for Eden. Because what I was interested in was justice, not turning back time.
If we found something, the countdown would be on to begin an excavation within the legal timeframe. We couldn’t hold off if we had any reason to suspect someone might be buried on Rye’s Farm. Eden would have to be extracted, and her work would be dismantled. Likely, at the stage we were at, Hart and Rye would get off. We’d be stuck with what we had forensically, which even then would be useless, because it could be argued by any half-witted defense lawyer that sexual or even violent relationships between the dead girls and Jackie and Nick were common knowledge, and they’d expected the forensics to show that.
Rape, violence—it didn’t prove murder. Very little proved murder. You could put people in the same room as the victim, on the same night, and not prove murder. Hollywood films teach people that finding the body is the end. Most of the time, it’s just the beginning. If we dug now, the best we’d get would be rape if we could find other tapes of Hart and Rye’s nighttime games.
Once the beat cops had left, the forensics girls walked ahead, heads down and flashlights sweeping. Only the handler stuck by my side.
“So your partner’s undercover up there?”
“She is.”
“How come you didn’t go?”
“She wanted to.”
“Huh!”
“Yeah. Women and their ideas.”
The handler let the dog off the leash. He seemed to have established some sweeping motion with it across the riverbed and it followed, scooping the sides, nose down and snuffling, kicking up dust in the flashlight beam.
“Is it just me or did you work on that crazy doctor case?” the handler asked.
I bent my head and kept walking, kicking over stones.
“It’s just you.”
“The one chopping up kids and selling their organs.”
“I know the one you mean. Wasn’t me.”
“Dude looked just like you. Saw him on the news. I think I read somewhere one of the victims was his girlfriend. Shit like that you only see in movies.”
“Could we focus on what we’re doing here? This isn’t a date.”
“Right.” The handler took it hard. Nodded ruefully. I felt bad. Missed Eden. I knew how to talk to her. Mostly I talked and she shot whatever I said out of the air like a slow pheasant. It was a system that worked.
I cleared my throat. “It’s a good-looking dog.”
“She’s actually mine.”
“Use her to hunt cadavers in your spare time?”
“Yeah,” he laughed. “Found me a roo skeleton in my backyard. Must be a hundred years old. Area’s been built up since federation.”
Bones the Wonder Dog left the sweeping trail and sprinted ahead past the forensics girls in a blur of fur. Within seconds it was barking in the dark.
“All right, shut it up.”
“Bones! Sccht! Sccht!”
The beat cops were following us overhead along the ridgeline, hands on guns. The hand on the gun made me think they were new graduates. The late-night assignment certainly suggested it. They were probably hoping for us to find some bones so they could brag to their little brothers.
The dog had hit on what Eden had seen from the ridgeline, a colorful patch of cloth half-submerged in sandy earth shifted in recent rains. The two forensics girls fell onto the evidence like scavengers, marking out a couple of square meters around the area, spraying luminol. We switched off our flashlights and they swept the area with little purple penlights. With the lights back on, they began excavating into evidence bags, dirt and all.
“Burned elsewhere and dumped,” one said.
“Yeah. Accelerant. Nylon here.”
“Probably lost any of the good stuff. Too much exposure.”
“We’ll get a soil composite.”
The talk was almost cheerful. It was probably like digging up treasure. They went about ten centimeters down. The clay was cut like dense cake and scooped in neat triangles. The dog had turned back to its ass again, now and then letting up to examine the air, almost frowning.
“Keep along the riverbed,” I said when the girls were finished. “I want to go right to the end. There might be more.”
“Come on, Bones.” The handler clapped. “Let’s go, buddy.”
The dog looked at the handler, looked at me, seemed to assess her chances. Then she took off. She turned and bolted for the ridgeline.
“Oh crap,” I managed before the handler was off after her. The dog loped up the ridgeline and through the hands of the beat cop standing nearest to her before turning toward the trees. She was heading for the farm. I started running, struggling to unclip my flak jacket. I let it fall and hurled myself up the ridge.
E
den liked being around other killers. If she hadn’t been a cop she might have liked to be a prison guard. She thought she might enjoy feeding them daily, watching them, keeping count of them as they slept like so many dangerous pets. It wasn’t anything that they did or said, but simply their potential that excited her.
Some of the times that she and Eric had played their games she’d encouraged him to slow down, to simply
be
in the presence of their killer prize—killers almost always being their quarry. Sometimes she’d have liked to draw the deeds of their prey out of them, interrogation style, know what their hands had done and to how many. Sometimes she wondered if this attraction to other killers might simply be a desire to be understood by another. Eric certainly understood where she had come from. What she was. But he’d never been big on sharing, enjoying, relishing their play. It was all frenzy to him. Sometimes she had wondered if it really mattered to him who they killed, whether they deserved it or not.
Now she sat in a ring of people with killer potential. The sexless twins sat in the dirt nearby, one drawing pictures with a stick in the fine grains, now and then glaring, heavy-browed, at Eadie. Nick and Jackie were across from her on milk crates on the other side of the bonfire, like assessors, talking between themselves.
Pea sat among a group of women across the fire, glancing now and then at Eadie. The women were laughing. Pea was telling a story and her voice rose as she threw Eadie a sideways glance.
“I wonder if I shouldn’t maybe start locking up the female horses,” she sneered. The women laughed. Eadie smirked and looked at her beer in what she hoped appeared submission.
Skylar approached from the direction of her and Jackie’s van. Eadie hadn’t seen her all afternoon. She thought she saw the shadow of a bruise on the girl’s left cheekbone as she rounded the fire, but she couldn’t be sure it wasn’t the dance of unwashed hair. The girl took a West Coast Cooler from the ice slush in a cooler near Eadie and then stood by.
“Hop down.” She flapped her hand. “I want to braid your hair.”
“Your majesty.” Eadie slid off the milk crate and onto the dirt. The girl loosened her hair and began combing it with her chubby fingers. Eadie thought she heard a dog barking in the distance and turned. Skye pushed her head back into place.
“What’s up your ass?”
“Jackie,” Skylar grunted.
“Care to elaborate?”
“He thinks he can fuck me like a fucking prostitute.”
“Oh dear,” Eadie laughed. “No violins and satin sheets?”
“No.”
“Men, ay?”
“It’s not like that. You know he used to be romantic, when we first met.” Skylar pulled at a knot in Eadie’s hair.
“I believe you.”
“We first met in the town. I was doing an apprenticeship in a salon there. I’d been saving for this for ages and I was two hundred bucks off.”
Skylar lifted her foot in her rubber flip-flop and showed Eadie an intricate butterfly tattoo as big as a fist, surrounded by stars. The older woman nodded her appreciation.
“He put the money down straight off. We’d been talking maybe ten minutes. Just pulled it out of his pocket and said, ‘Here you go.’ We hadn’t even been on a date.”
“Smooth operator.”
“Now everything’s just . . . I’m just some pet. Some dog he’s trained to do the washing up. He fucks me like he doesn’t know me. Well, shit, man, I like a hug every now and then, you know? I like someone to say I love you.”
“I love you, Skye.”
“You’re just saying that because I’ve got a fist full of your hair.”
“I got some dishes back at the van if it’ll get you in the mood.”
“Shut up,” the girl laughed. “Rug muncher.”
The braid was too tight, but Eadie didn’t say anything. She didn’t mind the feel of the girl’s fingers in her hair.
“What are you going to do, then?”
“About what?”
“About Jackie.”
“I’m gonna turn into a dyke and get a job in the city. Wear expensive clothes and drink wine.”
“You can drink wine now. I think I saw a goon bag hanging from the clothesline.”
“Good wine.” The girl nudged Eadie in the back with her knee. “In restaurants.”
“You don’t have to be gay to do that.”
“Probably a woman would treat me better,” the girl said.
Eadie opened her mouth, tried to think how to tell the girl that her life didn’t have to be the way that it was, that maybe she didn’t have the brains but she certainly had the soul to do what she wanted to do. But her words were cut off when she heard the dog barking in the bush again. Skylar heard it, too. The two looked toward the dark horizon. When they turned back there was an extra man in the reach of the fire’s glow, advancing from the direction of the gates. Eadie felt the people rising from their seats around her as the man’s pace quickened, all but Jackie, who had his back to the danger. The stranger reached down and plucked Jackie Rye from his milk crate.
Eadie felt herself being drawn forward. She knew the man, though they’d never met. She’d met eyes with him once through the glass of the station waiting room. It was Michael Kidd, the missing girl’s father.
“Hey,” Skylar screamed. “Hey!”
“I want to talk to you,” Michael growled. “I want to have some fucking words with you, you little piece of shit.”
It surprised Eadie how small a man could look in the arms of another. Jackie might have command of the farm and everyone in it, but when he lost command of his own feet, as Michael Kidd yanked him into the air, all memories of that power were forgotten in an instant. Nick threw himself between the two men. People were joining them, trying to drag the pair apart.
“Where’s my fucking daughter?”
“Mick, Mick, you’re not thinking straight,” Jackie was saying, the words lost beneath Nick’s furious snarls.
“I’m gonna kill you, you fat fuck.”
Nick threw himself forward, was hooked and pulled back.
“I want my kid. Where’s my kid? What have you done with my fucking kid, Jackie?”
“What kid?” Jackie snarled. “Mick—”
“What have you done with her?”
The big man was heaving as though on the edge of sickness, or tears. He lunged for Jackie again and arms got in his way.
“Just settle the fuck down and come talk with me. Come talk with me away from everyone else.”
“I’m not going anywhere with you, you piece of human trash. You’ve killed my fucking kid.”
At the edges of the gathering, men and women stood and stared, hands by their sides, looking to each other for explanation. None of these people, Eadie guessed, even knew Erin Kidd was missing. Who she was. That she had been here once, a grubby face among grubby faces, a hand that passed the bourbon bottle. She looked at Pea’s group and saw Sal, her mouth still swollen, blinking confusedly at the others.
“Is that Keely’s dad?”
“No,” someone said. “Erin’s.”
“Is Erin missing, too?”