Eden (27 page)

“Cut her shirt off.”

“Skylar, I’m telling you to listen to me. You’re not bad. You can stop this now if you just listen to my voice.”

“Look at that body.” Pea’s cold hand ran over her belly, her abdomen, her crumpled ribs. “You probably like women looking at you, don’t you, you dyke bitch? You probably worked hard on this body. Skye, start cutting here. We’ll open her up first and get a good look inside.”

Skylar took a blade from the apron’s pouch. A long filleting knife. Eadie knew it well. It was one of her favorites. Lean. Sharp. Good for going deep. She felt the pressure, then the tip pierced the skin, and then there was only heat. The blood ran down her neck into her hair. Dark as ink.

“I’m giving you a chance,” Eadie shuddered, looked down at Skylar’s dead eyes. The girl’s cheeks were wet with tears. “Skylar, I’m giving you a chance to stop.”

Eadie inhaled as the knife went deeper, too deep. She pulled her wet hands loose from the twine. Eadie grabbed Skylar’s ankles, yanked herself forward, twisted her head, and bit down as hard as she could through denim, through skin, through flesh. Skylar gasped, screamed, and the sound of it swelled up around Eadie. The knife clattered at her head. Eadie let go of Skylar’s legs, reached, and fumbled at the blade as the barrel of the shotgun came around to her face.

 

 

Juno looked at the monitors on the shelf in front of him, sipped the Heineken he’d bought from the liquor store. All week he’d been parked in the lot behind the shop and had not bought one item, had not taken one sip, hell—he hadn’t even gone in for the free wine tastings they did on Friday afternoons. He’d sat there in the heat and the silence and the monotony completely sober except for a single fucking Jack Daniel’s that hadn’t even given him a buzz.

The beer was painfully cold, hit the back of his throat like a ball of nitrogen. He exhaled, bared his teeth. Eden’s pendant camera was aimed at the ceiling again. She was taking a shower. The sunglasses camera was showing an empty bedroom, a blanket on the floor. Juno wondered if she was showering with the girl. If the frigid bitch had finally turned her. Probably. He stretched and settled back against the side of the van and looked at the speakers on the counter. Maybe he would put some tunes on.

 

 

Eadie arched her back and twisted, felt the heat of the blast against the side of her face and the spray of shrapnel to the front as the shells plowed through the trough inches from her head. She didn’t open her eyes. She heard the telltale singing in her left ear of frequencies she would never hear again. The knife was in her fingers. She swung forward, reeled back, and then swung forward with all her might, crunching broken ribs, crushing torn flesh and punctured organs. She swiped at her ankle. One shot was all she could endure, all she had the strength for. One moment to take in the twine through the blood, to aim, careless of bone or skin or the iron brace, and slash for her life. The blade hit the twine. Cut. She fell, twisted, felt the twine rip.

Pea was reloading the weapon, fingers fumbling. Eadie managed to sit up, to draw a breath before Skylar’s arms wound around her throat.

“Hurry, hurry! Jesus, Mum, hurry!” the girl screamed. Skylar’s grip was weak.

Eadie twisted, rose up, and drove the knife down into the tender flesh between the girl’s neck and shoulder. Pea screamed. Skylar made no sound. Eadie scrambled over the top of the trough and fell in the dirt, her lungs squeezing out hoarse breaths.

“No, Skye, no, no, no. Please! Please!”

Pea pulled out the blade, grabbed at the girl’s throat, tried to contain the blood. The girl kicked.

Eadie dragged herself toward the shotgun lying like a broomstick on the ground. She lay on her side and tried to fit the shells into the weapon with numb, sticky fingers. One would do. She held the gun and breathed. The older woman came to herself as the girl’s legs stopped twitching. She turned on her heels, still crouching, and looked at Eadie where she lay.

“I gave her a chance,” Eadie said, and fired.

H
ades sat in his chair at the kitchen table, silent, looking at the file I had put in his hands. My scrawled notes from a phone conversation with Nicky the forensics girl, after she’d finished abusing me for calling her so late at night. His breathing was still elevated from the brawl outside his house. Adam stood in the corner by the hall, his arms folded, staring at the sink. His face was a bloody mask, but he ignored it. The blood dripped from his jaw onto his shirt, a long series of red teardrops.

“Bonnie Melich went missing two days before Sunday disappeared. She was big. Six foot four. You can tell that from where she’s standing there, in the photograph,” I said. I pointed at the photograph of the tall lean girl in the doorway of the Lord Nelson, the basket of roses on her arm. “You count those sandstone bricks beside her, get out your measuring tape, and there you go. Problem is, the body Detective Tom Savet turned up in the car in Botany a week later, the body which was supposed to be Bonnie Melich, was distinctly shorter. Five foot nine, or thereabouts. The autopsy report puts it down to shrinkage due to the extreme heat, the hardening of the bone fibers, the loss of cartilage. We can tell these things now—I mean, forensic scientists can. They can get it pretty exact, given her age, her approximate weight, the maximum temperature a body can get to in a motor vehicle.”

“Detective,” Hades said. One word. I cleared my throat, gave it a minute, felt my face grow hot.

“There’s no way, scientifically, that Bonnie Melich was the body that Tom Savet found in that car.” I reached into my pocket and pulled out a small envelope the size of the palm of my hand. The label on the envelope had yellowed with the years. The handwriting on it was neat blue cursive. A forensics file number, and a name.

“Tom Savet was at a police function the night Sunday went missing,” Hades said. “I checked. I checked a hundred times. He can’t have been involved . . . He wasn’t . . .” Hades murmured.

“They found this in a woman’s coat. It was near the vehicle.”

I placed the envelope in Heinrich Archer’s hand. He pulled a small slip of torn, yellowed notepad paper from it, unfolded it, smoothed out the creases over the stamped stationery header marked “Jeremy’s.”

One line of text in clumsy lettering, pencil.

“Nine . . . nine
p.m.
,” the old man said.

“Sunday thought you wanted her to stay in the hotel room until the following night, nine p.m. So she was waiting there that morning, at the same time you were waiting for her at Central Station. Tom Savet, meanwhile, had a new case. He was looking for Bonnie Melich. He needed a body. He needed to keep up the charade of being Sydney Metro Homicide’s fastest man.”

Adam White’s breathing was hoarse. I could hear it from where I stood. I wiped sweat from my brow.

“You . . .” I cleared my throat. “You thought Savet’s big game was the drug scene. Caesar’s connection in the cops. But it wasn’t. His game was murder. He’d wait for a case, provide a body, and fill in the gaps. Twenty-six cases in all. They were all . . . Uh, Jesus. They were all unidentifiable. At least, with the technology you guys had back then. Burned. Buried. Boiled in acid. He was lazy and deadly and he wanted the power. The incredible power that would come to him in the following years. He needed someone that morning, and Sunday was . . . She was there. She was always underfoot. You said it yourself.”

Hades and White looked at each other. The old man ran a hand over his short hard hair.

“Why did you spend so long checking Savet’s story?” I said. “He wasn’t a friend to you. Why didn’t you just—”

“Because I was sad, all right?” Hades’ teeth showed just for a second as he turned his profile to me, his eyes on the table. “I was sure she’d run out on me. The more I checked the facts, the surer I was that Savet hadn’t been there, the surer I was that . . .”

“That she’d left you.”

Hades put the note on the table in front of him, smoothed it out, a relic to be treasured. His big hand covered it, as though hiding its awful truth across the years.

“After she was gone, I didn’t care,” he said. “I’d been so concerned with my own fucking . . . my pigheaded rage. Vengeance. Meaningless vengeance. I turned my back on her for a second, just a second, to do something for myself. For the man who’d saved me. And in that second . . . she was gone.”

Adam White was shaking his head. I barely heard my phone ringing beyond the pounding in my ears. I pulled it out of my pocket and looked at it. Juno. I lifted it to my ear, anything to break the tension in the room.

“I’m busy.”

“Yeah, um, look. I’m just a bit worried about Eden.”

“Huh?”

“I just noticed . . . I just noticed she’s off camera. Has been for maybe, like, an hour.”

“An hour?” My stomach plummeted. “Which camera?”

I heard Juno inhale.

“All of them,” he said.

I shoved past Heinrich’s chair and ran out the door.

 

 

Pea ran. Memories of the last few minutes tripped over each other as her brain tried to catch up with the events in the kill shed, seemed to want to linger with sickening clarity over Skylar as she lay in the dirt, writhing, desperate eyes searching the encroaching darkness for her mother. The woman who was supposed to protect her.

The visions rushed, slid, exploded, and there was Eadie under her hands, struggling for the knife with red wet fingers, the shotgun now useless, the blast batted away at the last second by something raw and animal and instinctual in Pea that still wanted her own survival even though she knew deep down inside that Skye was gone.

Skye was gone.

She stumbled to a stop beside the water tanks, kneeled, and vomited in the dust. It seemed her body wanted to purge the visions from her, and when it was done she felt ruined, trembling as she looked at the huge bonfire blinking in the dark across the horse paddock, the bodies that passed before it, making it twinkle like a star. She heard music on the wind. Laughter. Pea gripped the earth and grass beneath her, tried to control the sobs that racked up from low in her heavy body.

She needed a plan. Couldn’t make one here.

Pea found the wire fence that lined the horse paddock and inched her way along it, fists clenched on the wire and fumbling at the posts toward the gates. There, she knew, was one of Jackie’s trucks. She picked out the truck from the darkness and ran to it, wrenching open the driver’s door and closing it behind her. Warm. Quiet. There was a canister of kerosene on the passenger seat, stinking, intended to fill the lamps in the stalls in the west corner of the farm. Pea rolled down the window, breathed in the night air, and tried to calm her breathing. She gripped the wheel and bowed her head and shuddered with sobs, giving herself mere seconds before she straightened in the seat.

At first she thought she had pulled a muscle in her back shifting upward and back behind the wheel. Then she heard the voice of the one named Eadie and felt the girl extract the filleting knife from where it had plunged through the soft foam of the driver’s seat and into her spine.

“I’m sure it’s not all that bad,” the girl said.

Pea gasped, could draw no more than a quarter of a breath. Her legs were numb. She watched as the girl, now a ghoul with a bloody mask, climbed from the cabin and shut the door behind her. She was wearing only workman’s pants, the bra, a vest of her own red, red blood. The hole in her belly gaped, inches deep, inches long, a vertical eye-shaped slit she ignored. Pea tried to lift her arms from where they had fallen in her lap. Somehow, the limbs refused the message, simply lay there on her thighs as though detached. Eadie walked to the driver’s side door, pulled it open, reached across Pea’s body, and poked the canister of kerosene with the tip of the knife until it pierced the plastic and sent the clear liquid gushing down the seats.

“I told Skye I know bad people.” Eadie straightened, slamming the driver’s door shut. “I know them, because I’m one of them. You made that girl what she was. In the end, even though her heart was telling her to stop, all she knew how to do was follow you. When you give birth to something, you should be held responsible for what it becomes.”

Eadie reached in the car window and turned on the engine. Pea thought she should probably have been able to smell the kerosene, but for some reason, she couldn’t. She could feel the fumes in her eyes, feel the tears they produced rolling down her cheeks. Eadie turned the wheel of the vehicle toward the bonfire in the distance, put it into drive, and let off the emergency brake. The car began to roll. Eadie shuffled beside it, limping, one arm clutching at the hole in her abdomen, the other extracting a packet of cigarettes from the pocket of her workman’s pants. She put a smoke in her crooked jaw and struggled to light it against the wind. The ghoul she had become shuffled, seemed to drag her leg behind her. Pea thought of the undead. She tried to scream, but no sound would come.

When the cigarette was half-smoked, the ghoul reached into the car and jammed it between Pea’s slack lips, where it burned, red, at the edge of her vision.

“Bye, Pea,” Eadie said, her voice haggard in the wind. “Nice workin’ with you.”

Pea closed her eyes and felt the cigarette falling, tried to force her lips to shut around it. They wouldn’t. The car kept rolling on, and the ghoul stopped following.

 

 

There was already a team assembled at the gates of Rye’s Farm when I slid my car to a stop on the gravel drive. Ten men in flak jackets, with another truck on its way from the south. I’d spent the frantic drive from Hades’ dump on the phone, so it seemed these men had arrived in only seconds. In the distance I heard a chopper whomping, waiting for command. Captain James was on his way. The area commander, a dark-haired woman with small fierce eyes, strode toward me as I exited the car and strapped on my jacket. I was drenched in sweat. I pulled my gun and loaded it as she briefed me.

“We’ve been told to lock the place down and wait for further instruction. The south section will be in place in five.”

“You’ve got the cordon, Chief,” I said. “I’m going in for my partner.”

“I can’t offer you backup at this minute.”

“I don’t need it.”

My face seemed to get the message across. She took a step back and let me through. I jogged up the long gravel driveway into the dark. The wind was picking up and I smelled fire. The one thing they tell you to remember when you’re closing on a hostile area is to keep your breathing regular. Focus. In, out. I found a wire fence and followed it along, past a clearing filled with junk and rusting car bodies, a barbecue area, a group of vans. No one was around.

I glanced up at the sky, saw bats trailing over the trees in the fading light far away. In a group of vans beyond a small breakfast area I stumbled on a small wiry man stumbling down the foldout iron steps of an ancient Jayco, still zipping up his fly.

“Police! Hands up!”

Jackie just looked at me, his mouth hanging open. I rushed him and thumped his narrow shoulders into the door of the van. Put him on the ground like a doll.

This can’t be it
, I thought.
This can’t be how it ends. Something’s wrong.

“Where’s Eden?”

“Who?”

“Eden Archer.” I gave him a few good punches to the back of the skull, glanced about for backup. “Eadie Lee, the blonde, you sick little fuck.”

“What’s happening? What?”

I lifted Rye and dropped his head on the bottom stair. Cuffed his limp body and moved on. The van was empty. In the dark behind the cluster, another fence.

Across the fields I spied a bonfire burning. Within seconds, a vehicle I hadn’t even seen rolling through the dark of a paddock with its headlights off exploded, windows blazing orange squares hovering in the night. I ran along the fence line toward it. A chopper crossed overhead, flooding the paddock with light.

Under the cover of an awning made from dying trees I spied a figure walking toward me in the dark. The figure’s hands hung by its sides, lolling. It was tottering. I raised my gun.

“Police!”

The figure kept walking. I moved forward, my aim fixed.

“Stop where you are or I’ll fire.”

Eden was just moving her feet. When she stepped into the light of the moon I realized what she was draped in from neck to waist was not a lace shirt, as I’d first thought, but her own blood. She was crooked, her whole body slanted to the left and bowed forward. Her face was a mess, nose flattened, eyes black. I lowered the gun and rushed forward, skidded as a tall lean figure emerged from the dark behind her, a long arm wrapping around her neck.

“Hold up, copper,” Nick Hart said, pulling Eden upright. There was a little steak knife in his hand. Probably grabbed from the breakfast area. I lifted the gun and sprayed spit with rage.

“Drop it, shithead!”

“Just when you thought it was safe to have a couple of beers by the light of a nice fire. The fuzz comes in and fucks it all up,” Hart laughed. “Typical.”

Eden reached into the pocket of her baggy, bloodstained pants, slid a long slender blade into the light. Hart grabbed her wrist, shook it. She was half gone. Her eyes lolled, found me behind the gun.

“Listen to me, Hart,” I said. “That’s a police officer you’ve got in your hands there.” I inched forward as he inched back, dragging my partner with him.

“I was just starting to think that myself.”

“I’ll shoot you dead right here, mate. I’ll shoot you fucking dead.”

Nick laughed, and there was genuine triumph in it. To get him, I’d have to shoot Eden. She knew it, too. Her eyes followed mine, rimmed in blood, her lips moving.

“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s okay, Frank.”

My hands were shaking. I didn’t have the best aim even in the cool, sterile light of the shooting gallery. Frantic thoughts washed over me with unimaginable clarity, one after the other like deliberate calculations that had waited long enough to come to mind. I knew then, standing in the dark, that if I killed Eden Archer I’d be free of her. Of what she was. Of what she knew about me, and what I knew and wanted to forget about her.