“Yes. All I’ve seen is the car.”
“You got cameras out there on the road?”
“I do now. Haven’t caught anything.”
It had been a long time since I’d been on a case. I was hungry for it.
I reminded myself where I was, who I was talking to.
Hades watched me thinking, sipped his coffee, set it down and looked at it.
“Journalist?”
“They’re not usually this persistent.”
“Is it a threatening kind of watching or a curious kind of watching?”
“How am I supposed to know a thing like that?”
“It’s an instinct, I guess.”
Hades was silent for a moment.
“I’d say threatening. Like letting me see the car was a kind of hello. Now there’s uncertainty. Worry. It’s not a very nice thing to do, even by my standards.”
I made like I was considering. Weighing my options. We both knew I had very little choice.
“How much?” I asked.
“Ten grand to start you off, ten grand again when you catch him. Plus expenses.”
“I won’t be catching anyone for you, Heinrich,” I said. “And I’ll need to think about this a little. But if I do agree to it I’ll tell you who he is and why he’s watching you. That’s it. You want to hire me as a private investigator, I’ll privately investigate. You want an accomplice in whatever you plan to do to him, you can go elsewhere.”
“Good enough,” the old man smiled. “And please, call me Hades. Everyone else does.”
I went silent. A deep discomfort had begun to grow in the top of my stomach, under my ribs, hard like a stone. I knew that nothing short of finding Hades’ watcher would shift this ball of anxiety. I was in this now. The mere fact Hades had told me he was being threatened meant I was on the case.
I must have sighed, because Hades laughed as he got out of his chair. He sounded like a man who liked trapping things, watching them bash around the cage.
“Coffee?” he asked.
T
hat evening I was feeling good. A combination of sun exposure, a couple of tall ice-cold beers, and a new project to work on had me pretty upbeat. I sat at the bar in my local with a coaster and pen and began planning how I would tackle Hades’ problem. I made a couple of calls, just to be certain that there wasn’t a pending investigation, state or federal, that might mean that someone was surveilling Hades. My list of things to do was pretty extensive when someone brushed against my shoulder. I looked up into Eden’s eyes as she sat down beside me.
“Jesus, Eden, you’re like a bloody stalker.”
“Lovely to see you, too.”
“What have I done now? I’ve been an absolute angel today. I didn’t trash my place. I went and spoke to Hades. I surrendered to his blackmail with a handshake and a polite smile. I’ve had two beers. Two.” I held up two fingers.
“If I had a doggy biscuit I’d give it to you,” she said. “I’m here to brief you on the missing girls case. We’ve been signed up, as predicted by yours truly.”
“I’ve got two sessions with the shrink left yet.”
“And you’re doing them, back to back, tomorrow morning.”
“Oh fuck off.”
She nodded to the bartender. “Merlot.”
“What do you mean I’m doing them tomorrow morning? You’re coming with me, aren’t you?”
“I did mine this afternoon after Captain James signed me on.”
I exhaled. The tiniest smile crept to the corner of her mouth as she took the wine from the bartender and sipped it.
“I can’t believe you’d leave me alone with that woman when you’ve seen how she bullies me,” I said. “You obviously have no regard for my spiritual well-being.”
“You’re right. I don’t.”
She took a slim shoulder bag from beside her and brought it to her lap, slapped a manila folder on the furry bar runner in front of us.
“Happy birthday to you.”
“Urgh. I’m not doing this on an empty stomach. Can I get you dinner?”
“As long as you don’t go telling anyone.”
“Oh. Should I take it off Facebook then?”
She smiled wider.
“Relationship status: It’s complicated.”
She laughed. It was a deep and soft musical laugh, something I’d heard only once or twice since I’d known her. Two or three beats and it was gone. It was thrilling, getting Eden to laugh. Something I imagined circus trainers feel when they get a tiger to stand on its hind legs for the first time.
We moved to a booth and ordered steaks. I accompanied mine with a scotch. I was surprised when Eden slid onto the leather seat beside me. She smelled good. I’d been attracted to Eden when I first met her—she was beautiful and dark like an enchanting witch from a fairy tale, and as with all practiced evil beings she could look like a child in the light of one room, a queen in the next, a she-wolf in the dark. But over our time together the attraction had changed. My fear of Eden, of what she had done and what she was capable of, bound me to her like a magnet. In some ways I wanted to know everything she had done but was afraid of letting her get her claws deeper into me. She was irresistible, like the carnage of a road accident. Something inside me wanted to see the blood, hear the screaming. I wanted to know exactly how bad she was.
“These are our missing girls,” Eden said, opening the folder and laying out three photographs.
They could have been sisters but for the tiniest of details—one’s nose was a little upturned, one had curly hair, one smiled with big square white teeth while the others brooded. They were all in their late teens or early twenties. One was posing with another girl at what looked like a nightclub, one was sitting on a milk crate smoking a cigarette, one was taking a melodramatic half-profile self-portrait. They were all blond.
I didn’t feel anything, not then. I didn’t know these girls, and nothing so far told me that they were dead. I sipped my scotch and tried to memorize the faces.
“This is Ashley Benfield. This is Keely Manning. This is Erin Kidd.” Eden pointed to the photographs in turn.
“Uh huh.”
“Missing sixty-four days, missing thirty days, missing four days.”
“Any movement on the bank accounts, online accounts, or phones?”
“No.”
“Check the bedroom closets of all their boyfriends?”
“They were all single at the time of going missing.” Eden shifted Keely’s photograph up above the others. “Last seen leaving her mother’s house in Narellan to meet a friend in the city. That was the story, anyway. We’ve confirmed that she was actually going to Bankstown to get drugs and go on a three-day sex binge. She wasn’t a full-time prostitute—she’d get her pimp there to rent her a motel room and she’d take as many customers as she could over the three days. Live off the money for a couple of months.”
Keely was the curly-haired one, smoking a cigarette on a milk crate, skinny bare arms curved forward against the cold in a stripy gray and orange hoody. She was a pretty girl under all the makeup. Eden set her photograph aside and put up the photo of the profile shot.
“Ashley was a full-time prostitute,” Eden said. “She was couchsurfing between girlfriends’ apartments when she slipped through the cracks. No one reported her missing for five days because everyone thought she was somewhere else. Last seen leaving Penrith Panthers alone at midnight after playing the poker machines there for four or five hours. A crew of locals was with her and offered her a ride but she said she wanted to walk.”
“Silly girl,” I said. I looked at her photograph.
“Now this one,” Eden said, moving to the last photograph. “Gave us our most promising lead. Erin was a recreational prostitute. She’s been in and out of a few different jobs over the years but she was sleeping with a couple of guys in Camden for rent just before she went missing. She was supposed to have been seen hitchhiking on the Pacific Highway out of Camden four days ago, but we can’t confirm that.”
Erin was in a nightclub in the photograph, smooshing her face against another girl’s for the picture. Her eyes were bright and wild, the pupils huge.
“What’s the lead?”
“One of the guys she was sleeping with is Jackie Rye,” Eden said, flipping through the folder and extracting another photograph. “Jackie’s got a permanent girlfriend, another young girl, but they’re on and off again all the time and it looks like Erin might have slipped in there to knock boots with Jackie in the off period. She was only at his farm a short time. Over the past year Keely and Ashley have lived there, too—for a couple of months each. It’s the one thing all three girls have in common.”
I looked at the photograph of Jackie Rye. It was a mug shot, so the pale, washed-out look was very familiar, the shadows under the eyes and in the deep hollows of his cheeks and the slight yellow tinge to his skin. He was almost bald, a tuft of hair on the very top of his head combed back and the hair at the sides of his head slicked into what might have been a curly ponytail or mullet. His lips were pouty, which suggested to me that he might have been missing teeth.
“What do we know about Super Creep?”
“The usual history of small-time aggressions.” Eden slipped a stapled pile of police reports in front of me. “Mostly drunken and drug related. Three sexual assaults and no convictions recorded, all withdrawn before trial.”
“This is sounding like a good tip.” I flipped through the report. “Except for the fact that he’s been a fucking angel for five years now. What? He found God?”
“Came into money. Daddy died and left him the farm.”
“What did he say when we pulled him in?”
“Nothing. He hasn’t been pulled. No one at the farm has been questioned at all. Best hope is that none of them know we’re even looking.”
“Why?”
“There are approximately eighty people involved in the day-to-day running of Jackie’s farm. It doesn’t look like much but it’s big business. His costs are low and profits are high. He sells specialty organic meat and other produce to major supermarket chains all over the West. He also makes a lot of cash from housing horses. There are two separate camps of workers with caravans where up to five people live at a time. Here and here.” Eden slipped an aerial map from the folder and pointed to two clusters of white blocks in a huge brown wasteland. “People come, and people go. Jackie takes anyone and he’s notorious for it. Runaways go there either to work on the farm or to hook up with the farmworkers and share their beds. He’s given a new start to plenty of violent criminals, people on the run, laborers looking for money on the side. It’s a living, breathing community of deadbeats. It’s not as simple as just locking Jackie up, no matter how good he looks for it. All these girls seem to have stayed at Jackie’s place long enough to give it as a stable address to their parents. But there’s nothing to suggest Jackie himself even knew who Ashley and Keely were, that they were on the property. If we string Jackie up and he’s not the killer the whole camp’ll know before we have time to put up the fences.”
“Okay. So we bring them all in. All eighty.”
“You ever tried catching eighty cockroaches at once with your bare hands?”
“You sound like you have a better plan.”
“Captain James wants to send me in undercover,” she said.
The steaks arrived. Eden shifted to the other bench and began hers. It was rare. She noticed me watching her.
“I’ll be fine, Frank.”
“What if you have to sleep with someone?”
“That’s your first concern? Of course it’s your first concern. It’s all you think about.”
“You’ve never been undercover. I have. You have to do things to keep your identity. Things you don’t want to do.”
“I’m sure it was traumatic for you.”
“Eden.”
“I won’t be sleeping with anyone.”
“What the hell am I doing while you’re in there? Standing outside the fence holding my dick?”
“You’ll head the surveillance team.”
“Oh, okay. Parked in a van outside the fence holding my dick.”
“Frank.”
“I don’t like this,” I said. “Why you and not me? I’d be a lot safer in there than you.”
“Why?” she asked.
I was about to tell her that it was because I was a man, but she gave me that look, the hunter’s glare, and it halted the words in my mouth. Watching her slice her meat in the soft gold light of the bar, I’d succumbed to her camouflage. Her thin silky fingers, the way she tucked a wave of inky hair behind her ear, revealing the sparkle of a modest diamond. It was all bullshit. She held my gaze for a second or so, showing me the emptiness buried deep in her pupils, and I remembered that I was in the company of something very foreign.
I cleared my throat. “You might be right.”
“You get your meeting over early tomorrow morning and I’ll get working with the team on an alias. We’ll meet at, say, ten?”
“When are you thinking of entering?”
“Tomorrow night.”
“This is all happening very fast.”
“Spoken like a true commitment-phobe.”
I ordered another scotch and she finished her steak. I wasn’t very hungry. She reached over and stole a french fry from my plate with the swift, seamless actions of a bird. We small-talked for a while and then she checked the time on her phone like she had somewhere to be. Early in our partnership Eden and I had silently established that despite our opposing sexes and the usual social rules we didn’t kiss or hug hello or good-bye. In fact, I rarely touched her. When she left tonight, though, she gave my forearm a couple of little pats and smiled.
I sat with my scotch for a long time wondering what that meant.
E
den liked driving at night. Hades had driven her and her brother through the city in the dark with the windows down in their younger years when they refused to sleep. She liked the shudder of wind through the car and the people creeping along the streets, some dancing and falling, drunk, some strolling arm in arm. She liked the way the city throbbed and glowed like an egg sack nestled in a black cave, writhing with ill-formed life.
Tonight she began the ritual by taking a packet of cigarettes from the glove compartment and lighting one, hanging her elbow out the window. She didn’t smoke, didn’t hang her elbow out the window of the car usually, but this brought a little of Eric back to her. And lately she didn’t feel as though she could continue the night games without him.
She turned up the radio and let her speed drift down ten under the limit, preparing her mind for what was to come.
Do you remember?
Eric would ask her.
Do you remember that night?
Eden wondered sometimes if half the reason she and Eric had let the need control them was to preserve the rage, the fear, the fragmented memories of the night their parents were murdered.
Over the years, some memories had died, but now and then something new came to her—she and her brother crying together in the trunk of the car, the tape muffling their helpless sounds, or words on the wind, pleading, as they were dragged from the house. Gunfire. Maybe Eric had been chasing these memories through all those years of killing, trying to get as much out of that night as he could, as if somehow he could return to it. Change it. Do something. Warn them.
Eden knew that was impossible, but she liked to think about it sometimes. Dream about the woman she might have been if Hades had not saved her, if she had not been reborn a killer. She might have been an artist, she thought. But there was art indeed in what she did now.
She pulled up outside Vinh Lim’s apartment block and sat looking at the gold squares of light above her. Life—buzzing around in little boxes aligned toward the sky, people laughing and watching television and cooking dinner and going to bed, blue and white light flickering on chipping vermiculite ceilings. Students, most of them, like Vinh.
She let her eyes rise floor by floor to Vinh’s balcony, to the lounge chair where he spent his Sunday afternoons oiling his stocky hairless body and sunbathing, calling other drug dealers on the phone. Because, yes, Vinh was a student, and like most students he had figured out a way to do as little work as possible for maximum returns. But unlike his neighbors, this wasn’t through a combination of cash work and government benefits, a little petty theft or kinky massage services—Vinh’s family serviced much of Kensington, Kingsford, Rosebery, and Alexandria with ecstasy. Eden had been watching him for a couple of months, intrigued by Vinh’s deadly reputation and the combination of this power with his strange obsession.
The first time Eden had been inside Vinh’s apartment she came across the obsession accidentally. Vinh had been way down her wish list of potential nighttime playmates—she had bigger and badder targets for her cravings than him—but she’d been passing through and decided to do a little inventory, find out if Mr. Lim was worth her time. If he’d be any fun.
The living room, small kitchen, and guest bathroom were all minimalist, clean, stylish. Chrome, black glass, red velvet. She had wandered into the bedroom and found a huge painting of a Japanese dragon hanging over the bed, inset with mirrors, the ferocity in its design impossible to ignore. Eden had pulled her gloves on and toured at leisure, picking up things, examining them, getting a feel for Vinh. She opened his laptop and went through its video and image files. Nothing interesting.
Her instinct had told her, the first time she had laid eyes on Vinh, that he was worthy of a spot higher on her wish list. That there was more to him. She didn’t know what. She and Eric had only ever been interested in other hunters as their prey, and Vinh was just a convenience killer who snuffed out lives to feed his business. In order to fulfill the ritual, in order to bring back the memories, in order to play the game as it had to be played and finally satisfy that bloodthirsty urge inside her, Vinh had to be badder than this. He had to be a true prize. Eden went to the door to the spare bedroom and tried it. The door was locked. She smiled.
The door took a couple of minutes. Eric was the one good with mechanical things—locks, bolts, small machines, gadgets, engines. When she got it open, Eden was confronted first by the eyes in the dark. She switched on the light and looked around.
Stuffed animals. Hundreds of them. There were ponies and monkeys and piglets and bears, the whimsical characters of Japanese cartoons, horned and speckled and scaled, staring at her from the floor, shelves, bed, crowded around the little desk. Eden closed the door and stood in the center of the room, the main attraction in a packed stadium of stares.
Most of the animals were infants of their species. Most of them had grossly oversized innocent eyes. Most of them were undeniably female, a distinction made merely by a pair of pigtails, a set of eyelashes, a little tutu Velcro-strapped around a fluffy waist. Some of them had been altered, their mouths or crotches slit open and narrow fabric tubes inserted, then re-stitched. Eden let her eyes wander to the computer in the corner of the room, the toys sitting there. The favorites. She went to the computer and switched it on, knowing even before it began to power up what she was about to find.
Now, two weeks later, Eden sat looking up at Vinh’s window and remembering the army of toys, the things she had seen on the screen, the way the light played about the faces of the toys behind her, the way the small screams through the speakers seemed to come from among them. She decided she would line some of them up around her on the shelves and windowsill of Vinh’s bedroom as she worked on him, let their big buggy eyes watch.
The lights beyond Vinh’s balcony doors flickered on. Eden got out of the car.