23
I
missed the start of the briefing to the media by ten minutes. Everyone noticed. Eden told the press that the department was employing all possible means of finding Beck and asked the public to contact the police if he was spotted. I stood against the wall of the conference room and watched as she read from a list of what we had so far.
“Jason Beck, thirty-nine, is wanted on a number of charges including murder and abduction relating to the discovery of bodies at Watsons Bay and Kurrajong, and for related offenses dating back over the last two years. Beck is believed to have studied at the University of Sydney in 1999 and worked as a medical practitioner in a number of overseas locations between the years of 1999 and 2003. Beck’s whereabouts from 2003 to the present are not known. It is not believed he practiced licensed medicine in Australia at this time.
“What we have been able to discover about Beck is that he has been a committed and talented student and a valued and responsible employee. Our interviews with his former colleagues and co-workers reveal that he was a quiet, socially limited and well-mannered person, and we have no reason to believe that anyone who has interacted with Beck in the past anticipated such abhorrent action by him or indeed acted to assist him in any way. His behavior has come as a shock to many. Consistent interpretation of his actions by the people we have interviewed suggest that Beck’s behavior might have something to do with his immutable beliefs about nature, Darwinism, natural selection and the like. But we’re only speculating at this point. Our real priority is getting him in custody.
“I’d like to make it abundantly clear that at this point we have no reason to believe that Beck has ever acted in partnership with anyone, nor that anyone we have spoken to from his previous employment has known about his actions. We believe more will come to light about Beck’s motivations in the near future, but until then we can’t say much more. The Sydney Metro Police Homicide Squad again warns the public that at no time should the suspect be approached if identified in public.”
From the report that Eden had compiled during the night, it seemed that Beck had established himself as a one-man travelling GP in Uganda, where he had received government funding to work at refugee camps and small villages. It seemed the perfect training ground for the kind of unorthodox methods Dr. Rassi mentioned, those required to chop and change medical procedures to successfully perform transplants on his own, and not as a team.
As soon as Eden stopped talking the questions erupted from the crowd. She answered them stoically, her hands folded on the tabletop before her.
Cameras flashed and journalists yelled as Eden finished answering the required amount of questions and stood. She left the table and walked towards me. Her gaze was exhausted and irritated as she passed me without a word.
I was achingly aware of Eric’s movements around the bull pen. He and two other officers had been assigned to help us sift through the public tip-offs we received about Beck. He sat with his feet on his desk, tossing a blue rubber ball up in the air and catching it behind his head. As I tried to keep my head down, I was startled by the ball bouncing once, hard, on the paper in front of me before landing in my trash can. Eric slapped me on the shoulder as he passed.
“Sorry about that, mate.”
“No probs.” I smiled. “Let me know if I can help you find a place for that thing.”
Eric wandered over and bounced the ball a few times on Eden’s desk, looking down at her as she worked. He leaned over and whispered something in her ear and she frowned and glanced around her at the room.
“It’s too soon,” she murmured. “You know that.”
I leaned on my elbow and watched Eric making restless circuits of the room, unable to keep my mind off the disappearances of Jake DeLaney and Richard Mars. Between shifting through the stacks of useless tip-offs to the
Crime Stoppers
show, I treated myself to five minutes—no more—to address my obsession with DeLaney and his associates. Watching Eric’s progress back and forth, I opened the lid of my laptop and logged into the criminal database.
Geoff Gould’s profile came up with a flashing bar beside a grainy mug shot. I placed a paperclip between my teeth and chewed it as I stared at the blinking red text.
WHEREABOUTS UNKNOWN—SEE MPR 06/02/95
I clicked on the missing persons report link and got a bunch of text and another picture of Gould, this one strikingly similar to the photo of DeLaney holding a baby on the cover of the
Herald
. Gould, however, was grinning at the camera.
Mars, Gould and DeLaney. All criminal associates. All missing. Were they all on Eden’s list?
It was only by sheer chance that I closed the laptop lid as Eric’s ball sailed towards it. I caught the rubber ball against my chest and stood. One of the owls was stepping through the sliding door to the smokers’ balcony. I pegged the ball through the gap as it closed, the shiny blue orb gliding over the rail and into the empty space below without a sound.
Eric watched the ball disappear with his hands hanging by his sides. Emotionlessly, he opened the top drawer of his desk and extracted an identical one, smiling cheerfully at me as he bounced it on the surface of his desk.
“Fucking incredible,” I sighed, sinking into my chair. The telephone on my desk started ringing.
“Frank Bennett.”
“Detective Bennett?” A woman’s voice. “This is Gina at the front desk. I think you should come down and see me, please.”
Immediately the sense that I was in trouble for something. It reminded me of my days at school, when I would be called to the principal’s office via the PA system.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll head right down.”
Gina Shultz, a woman I passed on my way to the bull pen every morning, was standing by the front doors of police headquarters. I had never seen her out from behind her desk before. Not only did she have legs, but they were muscled and tanned like something out of
Playboy
. Delicious. I approached and stood beside her as she stared out at the rain.
She seemed to sense me there and nodded towards the front steps, the pouring rain.
“Friend of yours?” she asked.
Martina was standing on the third step, her arms wrapped around herself. I felt my smile fall.
“Why didn’t you bring her in?”
“I tried,” Gina said.
I jogged out into a torrential sleet of icy water, cowering as it battered my ears and slid between my shoulder blades. Martina was drenched through to the skin, a black T-shirt and jeans hanging off her like an extra skin. I went against all my professional instincts and wrapped my arms around her as though I could protect her from the weather. She gripped my shoulders like a cat, pushing her face into my chest. I could feel sobs wracking her entire frame.
“I’m not okay. I’m not okay.”
“No.” I squeezed her shoulders. “Obviously not.”
I walked Martina inside the building and stood at the door with her. Her sneakers squelched and squeaked on the marble tiles. Gina stood by, holding a standard-issue Windbreaker, something I’d worn dozens of times beating the pavements of Sydney in the winter. I wrapped it around Martina’s body. It fitted like a blanket.
As Gina retreated quietly, Martina struggled to swallow sobs. My whole body felt hot from her touch. It wasn’t a sexual sensation. It was something more primal, like a fitting together of pieces, a coming home from a long time away. I felt renewed by the feel of her, awake and exhilarated. I didn’t worry about the men and women moving through the foyer around us, curiously tossing glances our way. I wiped back the wet hair stuck to her cheeks and pulled the collar of the jacket up around her neck.
“Silly woman,” I said. “Look at you.”
“You’re probably busy.”
“I’ve got enough time for you,” I said. “Come on. It’s warm in here.”
The café to the side of the foyer was for the exclusive use of those in the building yet it didn’t have the usual tinny, stale feel of work restaurants. Taxpayer money had been used to fit it out with immaculate red leather booths and modern chrome and glass. A goldfish pond, artfully incorporated into a black hexagonal pillar, dominated the center of the room. I took a booth at the back, facing the doors. I was surprised when Martina slid into the seat beside me. Her thigh pressed against mine. I ordered two coffees while she patted down her face with a napkin.
“I told you you needed to be seeing someone,” I said when the waitress was gone.
“I’m seeing you.”
I was struck dumb by that for a minute or two. The waitress came and deposited our coffees. Martina massaged the sugar inside the paper packet, breaking it down into the individual granules with her fingernails.
“How do people keep going on?” she asked, looking around the room. “There’s a monster out there. He’s making monsters of other people. Men and women and children are dying. Why hasn’t everything stopped?”
I followed her eyes. Two women were sitting by the windows, laughing and sniggering behind their hands. Outside in the street commuters billowed out of the train station, running under tilted black umbrellas across the street and under café awnings. The rain kept falling, on and on in hammering waves. No one had stopped. Life was churning away while the woman beside me struggled to assemble the pieces of her own. She had forgotten her umbrella. She had forgotten her coat. She had forgotten how confused people were when they saw a stranger crying and shivering in the rain. The rules of her life had been destroyed. How was she supposed to respect these simple normalities when another human being had put her in a cage?
“No one understands this thing but you,” I said. “No one else can feel it. To them, it’s a passing interest in their lives. This darkness is yours alone. All pain is like that, you know?”
I didn’t know if she understood what I meant. Her eyes were fixed on her hands. I was thinking about my ex-wife and the baby whose death I hadn’t been there for. Even when I had arrived at the hospital Louise’s agony had been untouchable. I couldn’t help her. No one could. I was helpless to understand what the child meant to her, what losing it really felt like. The world kept going on and on then, as it did now. People laughed and joked and went to work. The weather was reported on the news. Other babies were born in other rooms of the hospital. Nothing stopped. Time was careless. I forgot how to eat and sleep. There was no one who felt my wretchedness, no one to share the burden of it. It was unrelenting. The guilt. It was a poison in me.
Martina took my hand suddenly. I looked down at her fingers. Her nails were pink and perfect, unreal next to mine.
“It’s going to take forever, isn’t it?” she said. “It’s going to take forever to remember how everything works.”
“I’ll be here,” I said. A tiny smile crept over Martina’s lips. The sobs that had been shuddering gently through her had stopped. I still felt the heat that her body had given mine, the indescribable energy that came off her, as though my body was recognizing hers. I didn’t know how to treat this strange new desire for another human being. I wanted to spend every minute with her, but not in the way I’d been attracted to women before—the longing for ownership, domination, compliance. I didn’t
want
Martina like I’d wanted to win women before, remove them from their lives, call them my own. I felt like I would be happy to observe her in her little world forever, maybe link that world with my own. Stupid thoughts were running through my head, one following the other like train carriages. She made me ashamed of myself, this woman. Ashamed that she could touch me, and all that I was.
As much as Martina protested, I called around and soon found out that the closest person in her life was her landlady, a fussy Italian woman called Issa with a squat frame and huge breasts who occupied the apartment above Martina’s in Randwick.
When I walked Martina up the stairs towards her door, Issa was standing with her hands on her hips in the doorway, babbling sternly in Italian. She gathered up Martina’s cheeks and squeezed and shook them in a gesture of half desperate love and half disappointed fury. Martina stiffened like an unfriendly cat. Issa hugged and kissed her before disappearing into the apartment, picking up clothes strewn on the floor and straightening furniture like a scolding parent.
“You speak Italian?”
“Not a word,” Martina mumbled.
“She speak English?”
“Nope.”
“I’ve organized a counsellor to visit you tonight,” I told her. “But I don’t feel right leaving you here alone. Not when you’re this upset.”
“I won’t be alone.” She smiled weakly. “Issa won’t leave now that you’ve got her started. She’s going to stuff me full of meatballs and scrub my kitchen all day.”
I nodded. The sounds of pots and pans banging were already coming from inside the apartment. I knew this was the time to leave but instead I stood reluctantly in the hall, the stairs at my back.
“I’m fine.” Martina sniffed. “Just go, Frank, please. I’ve embarrassed myself enough already.”
“Christ, don’t be embarrassed.”
She smiled a little and put a hand on my shoulder. I was about to speak again when she kissed me, softly and insistently, on the lips. It was hardly anything more than a peck but that instant or two beyond friendly left me shaken. I watched, my throat burning, as she walked inside. After the door had closed I stood there dumbly, trying to remember which way I had come.
Eden and Eric sat in the rental car for a long time, watching the apartment block where Martin Vellas lived. It seemed to Eden that sitting there, with the distant presence of the man behind the lit window, was enough. It was enough to imagine him wandering in the rooms of the third-floor apartment, enough to see a flash of his shadow against the kitchen curtains as he washed the dishes and put them away. Enough to know that he existed, that retribution for the death of her mother and father was possible. She breathed evenly and as she sat looking through the darkness she heard Eric’s breathing synchronize with her own.
“Do you remember?” Eric asked. He didn’t need an answer. She remembered every moment. She remembered the heat of the room and the strange blue of the summer night outside the cabin, the way the sun still seemed to glow in the glassy water of the lake long after it was gone. She remembered her father’s cotton polo shirt and the feel of it against her cheek, his fur-covered arms, his fingers in her long hair. She remembered the soft sound of the television, watched by no one, and all of them just sitting there on the leather lounges and being in the presence of each other. Being together for the last time.
She remembered the busting glass and the way the footsteps had made the French doors shake. She remembered shouting so slurred and so rapid that it sounded like explosions. She remembered her father’s arms tightening around her, the yank in her shoulder joints as she was pulled away and thrown on the floor. The ripping sound of duct tape as it came off the roll. Eric’s face beside hers on the polished hardwood floor, blood on his teeth, the only person in the room who wasn’t screaming.
She was five years old. She was a child then and never was again.
“I remember their faces,” Eric murmured beside her. She looked at him finally, finding his eyes in the dark car. They were lit by the gold squares of Martin Vellas’s kitchen windows. “People say you’re supposed to forget their faces first, but I’ve never forgotten. The way the air sucked out of her as they came through the doors. Her crumpled look.”
Eden felt her jaw tightening. Her fingers followed, pressing into her palms, tighter and tighter, until she felt her own blood pool on the skin. She took out her wallet and extracted the list of names, looking at Martin Vellas’s name, second from the top.
“Martin Vellas,” she whispered.
Eden closed her eyes and slipped the paper back into her wallet.
Eric moved slowly, as though he were drunk, taking the latex gloves out of the packet kept in the center console and pulling them on. When Eden tried to do the same the sweat on her fingers stuck on the rubber. Eric rolled his balaclava down neatly over his face. She was panting now, the wool already matted to her face.
“We’re supposed to be merciful,” she whispered quickly, struggling to get her seat belt undone as Eric slid out of the car like a collection of smoke.
“We’re supposed to be merciful,” she said, catching his arm as he advanced across the road. Eric took her fingers in his, squeezed them so that she could feel the heat of his body through the rubber. He grinned under the woollen mask, flashing his harsh white teeth in the light of a neon sign hanging above the car.
“We’ll be merciful,” he murmured, nodding. “Eventually.”