Eden (13 page)

I sighed. The old man folded his arms on the table, looked at the windows, the night.

“Caesar and I . . . We had trouble at the time. Big trouble. If it had been anyone meaningful it would have been him. Him or one of his men. But I told you. I looked into it. I looked into it for years. It wasn’t them.”

“It’s going to be difficult to find out what happened if it was just some angry john or a deal gone bad or something.”

“You’d remember killing Sunday,” he said. “She wasn’t any ordinary girl. People still remember her. She was . . . different. Wild.”

“Whoever killed her might be dead.”

“They’d wanna hope.”

“All right. Well. You keep your head down until we chat again. I’ll work on this as much as I can but I’ve got to watch out for Eden as well. Don’t cause any trouble. Don’t go inviting any guests. And don’t, whatever you do, go down there thinking you’re going to talk to the guy. You slip up once and it’s on tape.”

“Tape?” Hades sat upright in his chair.

“He’s filming you.”

The old man’s face hardened. I hadn’t thought it could get any more menacing, but it did.

“This is harassment. This is stalking.”

“I know it is.”

Hades’ eyes drifted away from me. I could almost see his clockwork mind ticking away, devising painful scenarios.

“Don’t do anything. Not yet.”

“You better move fast, copper,” the old man said.

I packed the papers back into the folders. I was going to take the last photograph, the group one with Sunday in the corner looking at her fingernails, but Hades’ elbow was on it so I left him there with it in the shack. The sun was red over the trash mountains as I walked to my car.

 

 

Waiting outside Eden’s apartment, Juno was like a teen in the queue for a rock concert. It’d been awhile since I had been to one, but I recognized the shuffling feet, restless eyes, anguished sigh toward the heavens every now and then. Taking his backpack off, unzipping and staring into it, putting it back on. When Eden emerged from the elevator he stopped in his tracks and folded his hands into his pockets, dropped his head. She looked tired. Her eyes flicked to me and there was some of that raw animal rage you see in people who’ve had their civility worn down to glass.

“What is he doing here?”

“He’s the tech. We gotta have him.”

“I thought we were just talking tactics.”

“We are. There are things he might have noticed that you didn’t, though. He’s been on the surveillance a lot longer than I have. I’ve been slack.”

Eden narrowed her eyes at the boy, seemed to measure him with a glance. She unlocked her door with exaggerated movements. I stood looking at the black hair creeping into the bad dye job, the way it turned from midnight to brown to burned orange to sunflower yellow over a matter of centimeters. I could see the tendons moving in her white neck.

She flicked the gold halogens on. The apartment was as I remembered it, like some weird kind of gallery hotel, somewhere you could pay to sleep among the art. No signs of humanness about it—no T-shirt lying on the couch or pair of knickers on the floor or empty coffee mug forgotten, stains on the bottom. Everything was sterile, tucked away, folded up, shelved. Furniture-store neat. It was probably a good thing. I didn’t know what Juno would do if he caught sight of a pair of Eden’s knickers. He stood looking around with his mouth open until I bopped him in the chest and he came to himself.

Eden hung her bag on a hook by the door, punched a code into the alarm system, tossed her keys into a bowl on the kitchen counter. Coming home. She relaxed into her normal posture, discarding Eadie’s defensive, hunched stance. She turned to us, pulling off her jacket.

“You, watch him.” She nodded at me, and then Juno. “You, order dinner.”

Juno snapped to attention.

“What, uh, what should I get?”

“I don’t care.” Eden walked toward the hall under the loft stairs. Juno looked at me helplessly.

“Not Japanese,” I said.

“What, so, anything? Anything, just not Japanese?”

“Anything,” I said.

“
Anything?”

“Just order the fucking food.” I put my stuff on the floor by the coffee table. “And don’t touch. She’ll kill you.”

Juno went out onto the balcony, panting, curling the orange ringlets behind his ears around his fingers. I set up the laptop and wandered into the kitchen. I selected a bottle of wine from the rack and grabbed some glasses from the immaculately arranged cupboards. Out of curiosity I opened a few for a peek. She had the stainless-steel knife set of a professional chef and all her cutlery was polished to within an inch of its life. All the mug handles were facing the same way and her foodstuffs were from weird organic stores I’d never heard of. Sicko.

I poured the wine, took a sip, listened to the shower running down the hall. I heard it finish, a door open and close, and headed down there. The hall was warm from steam. There were two doors, both closed.

“Eden, I need to use your loo.”

“Go ahead,” she shouted.

I was sure her voice came from the door on the right. But when I opened the one on the left, I caught a glimpse of a big room, red curtains, a stiffly made bed. And Eden standing with her side to me, a towel around her hair.

“Frank!”

“Oh God. Oh God! I’m sorry.” I slammed the door and started laughing, still holding onto the handle. “I’m sorry. I thought this was the bathroom.”

The doorknob twisted in my fingers and she wrenched it open. She was wearing a black satin robe.

“What the hell is wrong with you?”

“I’m really sorry.” I stood there laughing, unable to stop. She was looking at my eyes like a wet, angry tiger. “Honest mistake, really. I couldn’t hear which room you . . . and . . .”

“Stop laughing, use the bathroom, and then fuck off out of my hallway.”

“I just have to stand here a minute.” I closed my eyes and drew a deep breath, expanded my chest. “I just have to recover from the single greatest joy of my young life.”

She slammed the door in my face. I was still chuckling in the bathroom. I’d seen Eden in her underwear once before and the effect had been just as thrilling, like catching a glimpse of a rare butterfly, so swift and glorious it’s gone before your eyes can really settle on it. We’d been upgrading our riot training together down in Jervis Bay at a fire grounds, and she was behind a curtain stripping off clothes saturated in tear gas. Back then I hadn’t seen the bright pink birthmark that looked like a prancing horse on her ribs, so perfectly shaped it was almost like a tattoo. The only blemish on an otherwise marble-sculpted frame.

I spent most of my time trying to be a mature, restrained, well-rounded almost-middle-aged man but the sight had set off something juvenile in me—not helped by her obvious annoyance. I went back to the living room, where Juno was sitting rigidly on the couch, setting up his laptop.

“I just saw Eden in the nick,” I said.

“You
what?”

“The nick. The nuddie. Nekkid. Starkers. Bare-assed like the day she was born.”

Juno’s mouth was hanging open.

“No way.”

“Way.”

“I bet she’s hard, man.”

“Like a stone.”

“She’s gonna kill you.”

“She’s gonna kill me,” I agreed.

Eden came out of the hall drying her hair in a towel, wearing pale jeans and a long gray shirt.

“You guys quite finished?” she asked, hanging the towel on the back of one of the kitchen stools. “You want to call the papers?”

“No, we’re good,” I smiled. “That’s a really pretty birthmark in a really pretty place though.”

“One more word about it and I’ll slap your face off.”

“I know you will.” I shook my head like I was clearing water from my ears. “All right, let’s work.”

Eden took the wine I’d poured her and sipped it long and slow. She gave me a filthy look. She wedged herself into the corner of the couch and put her feet up next to my leg. Her toenails were perfect pink squares, but she had a scar on her left foot about eight centimeters long and white as porcelain. I’d glimpsed other scars on her ribs. I wondered where she’d got them, then came to the natural conclusion and stopped myself. It was easy to forget what Eden was. Now and then I liked to pretend she was just a strange and beautiful woman and that her social awkwardness was nothing to worry about. That she wasn’t, in fact, something that I spent most of my day hunting and most of my night dreaming about hunting. The fox to my hound.

“There are a couple of people out there who worry me,” she began, cupping the wine with her hands. “Nick’s and Jackie’s natural tendency toward violence make them stick out among the pack. There is genuine malice everywhere though. No one has a problem joining in. I don’t know how we’re going to separate suspects if everyone’s willing to egg each other on.”

“That was a clever move by the way,” Juno piped up. He grabbed his wineglass and tried to hide behind it. “The gay thing. Everybody’s a little more aggressive now.”

“Thanks,” Eden said. Her voice was flat.

“And, and this morning,” Juno swallowed. “Man, that was swift.”

“What happened this morning?”

“Forget about it, Frank. Jesus. Move on.” Eden waved at my computer.

“Well, I have something that might put a nail in it.” I leaned forward and drew up my email. “Got this from Keely’s brother. Says he found it on his sister’s phone and moved it to his before Missing Persons took it.”

“Why’d he do that?” Juno asked.

“People do weird things when someone’s missing,” I said. I started the video, turned up the sound. It was scratchy.

A mattress in a small dark caravan, barely visible against the green mesh of bad lighting, the pillows stripped and a sheet heaped at the side. A body curled, arms bound behind her at the wrists and elbows, making her shoulder blades meet painfully in the middle. A mop of curly hair, dark, maybe black. She turned, moaned, looked at the ceiling. A slice of white breast, pointy as an elbow. A body moved before the camera, threw something into the corner of the room. Jackie. Another figure in the mirror beside the bed, leaning against the doorframe, arms folded. Jackie climbed onto the bed. Boxers only. White legs from a distinct line high up on his thighs. One of those men who always wore short shorts so he was ready to go at any second.

“Oh God,” Juno put his wineglass down, covered his mouth with his hands. “Oh. Oh no.”

Eden was watching passively. She sipped her wine. Juno got up after a few seconds and faced the balcony doors.

“That’s Nick?” Eden pointed to the man in the doorway as the figures moved on the bed.

“Yeah.”

“Who’s this, then? Keely? She’s got the curls.”

“I thought so at first, but there’s no tramp stamp.” I pointed to the back of the girl on the screen, milk white in the dark. “Keely’s got a big tribal across the top of her ass.”

“This some girl we don’t know about, then?”

“Could be.”

Juno was covering his ears and shaking his head. I stopped the video a couple of times, looked at the shapes in the dark, tried to see if there was anyone else in the mirror, in the hall behind him. The footage was terrible. It had probably been shot and downloaded in a couple of formats, moved from computer to phone to computer, downsized and then upsized.

“This singles Nick and Jackie out from the others,” I said.

“Is this enough for an arrest?” Juno said, taking his fingers down from his ears carefully, in case the video started up again.

“No.”

“Why not? That’s . . . that’s rape.”

“It’s a nonconsensual-looking sex scenario. There’s nothing to say it’s not role play.”

“I’ll bet the girl will say it’s not role play. That’s . . . that’s sick, man.”

“Well,” I said, “you find her for me, Juno, and we’ll ask her, huh?”

“Who is this guy?” Eden asked me, jutted her chin at Juno. “Are you out of the academy or what?”

“He’s a civilian.”

“How do you get to do what you do?” Eden was squinting. “You’re not even signed on.”

“I’ve got a pretty unique skill set.” Juno sat down, gulped his wine, coughed. “They had me break into some mob computers on a contract basis last year, Captain Renalds in Drug Squad. I told them I could do surveillance. They offered me a job, but . . . I want to go to the academy in November. Do it properly.”

“You’re going to the academy? You’re softer than Camembert cheese.”

“Some things I just don’t like.” Juno’s face flushed a painful pink. He gulped more wine. “Jesus. It’s not every day you see something like . . . like that.”

“Would you not drink that wine like that,” Eden snapped. “It’s a fucking Armagh.”

“Sometimes you do see shit like this every day, Juno. Sometimes you see worse. You learn to switch off.”

“I don’t want to switch off.”

“Then look for another job,” Eden said.

“Give him a break.” I grabbed Juno’s neck, shook his head for him. Something about him made me want to grit my teeth. “He’s only a boy. He’s got a big heart. A big, orange heart.”

“Why don’t you get your boy to prove his worth on this video then? I want to know who that girl is and whether or not she’s still alive.”

I shifted the laptop over to Juno and he began clicking away.

“I gave Skylar the deodorant can camera,” Eden said, leaning over me to frown at the boy. “What did you pick up on that?”

“Nothing much,” Juno said. “Nick doesn’t visit Jackie in the cabin a lot. It’s mainly a TV room for everyone else in the park, and Jackie and Skylar’s love nest.”

“Have you been watching a bit of Discovery Channel action, Juno?” I snorted.

“I can’t watch them. The camera’s still turned around. She hasn’t used the deodorant.”