Eden (24 page)

I
ran. As I pounded through the bush after the shadow of the cadaver dog I found I couldn’t dodge anything—tree branches whipped at my face and arms, caught at my shins. The ground was uneven at best, uphill, and sometimes sheer bracken that thundered and crashed under my weight. My best bet was to catch the dog before it got out into the flat bare earth by the farm, because I knew if it got sight of other animals out there it would really go. Right now it was at a medium pace, stopping to snuffle just within shouting distance, galloping away when it saw me coming. I saw a glimmer of fire between the trees and grunted, shoving myself forward down an animal trail. I felt a splinter of pain in my left knee.

I’d gained on the beast by less than ten meters.

Without warning it stopped on the path ahead and looked back at me. I skidded to a halt, barely able to huff words.

“Stop. Bad. Dog. Bad dog. Come here.”

The dog stared. I caught its eyes at the right angle and they glowed green. I could hear my team crashing through the bush somewhere behind me. I stepped forward, arms out in what I hoped was a friendly gesture. What came out of my mouth was not as friendly.

“Come here!” I snapped.

The farm’s dogs barked and Bones’s eyes widened. I threw myself forward and grabbed at the beast’s legs, got hold of a back paw, a hard toe, and yanked it. The thing yelped, was out of my hands and staggering for a second. I fell forward and wrapped my arms around it. We were meters from the edge of the bush.

 

 

Skye was trembling when Eadie put her hand on the girl’s arm, wrenching her attention away from the men as they turned and trudged toward the caravans. Her eyes were wild. For someone so accustomed to violence, that directed toward Jackie seemed to reach her tender core. Eadie wondered if the girl really loved the creep, if tearing herself away from this life would be more complicated than she first imagined.

“You all right?”

“That was scary,” the girl said. “Where did he even come from?”

“No idea. I wish I knew what they were going to talk about, though.”

“Same. Let’s go spy.”

Spy. Always the curious child.

“You’ll get us in trouble,” Eadie said, leading the girl toward the vans.

“It’ll be all right if we don’t get caught.”

They left the crowd at the fire and skirted around the back of the vans. Eadie almost tripped over Skylar as the girl hurled herself into the long grass beside the caravan and crawled forward on her forearms. Eadie, snuggling in beside her, put her hand in something damp and soft. A cloud of fruit flies swelled around her and she smelled organic rot. A peach.

The men’s legs were within arm’s reach. A cigarette fell and sparkled like a star.

“There are two other girls missing,” Michael Kidd was saying, “And they’ve both been out here, and if you think—”

“Missing how? Are the cops onto it?”

“You bet they’re fucking onto it. No one’s heard from these kids. No calls, no bank account movements, no sightings, fucking nothing.”

“Who are the other two girls?”

“You know who the other two fucking girls are, you little—”

“Hey, back the fuck up, dickhead. I’ll go ya before you know what your fucking name is,” Nick said through his teeth, his big feet shifting in the dirt.

“Who are the other two girls?” Jackie’s voice was low, calm. Skylar was wiping her nose on the back of her wrist beside Eadie.

“There’s a sex tape,” Michael said.

Silence. Eadie felt her pulse hammering in her neck.

“There’s a sex tape of you two and some girl from Chatswood or some shit.”

“Mate, you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

“If you’ve done anything with my kid—”

“You better tell me who the other girls are or you’ll be the one the cops are looking for.”

“Ashley Benfield. Keely Manning.”

“Ashley Benfield’s in Freo.”

“What?”

What?
Eadie thought. Skylar was brushing her hair back from her face.

“The flies!” the girl whispered.

“Ashley Benfield’s boyfriend ripped off the Liquorland on Green Point Road,” Jackie snorted. “Jordon Brown. She’d been working there last year for a little while before she came here and she gave him the back door codes. The two of them ran off to Fremantle.”

“You’re lying.”

“They snagged about thirty grand, from what I heard. Melbourne Cup day. She was just kicking off a nice sugar habit so they’ve probably blown it all by now. Mate, you can believe whatever you fucking like. Ashley Benfield’s in Freo and has been for months.”

Skye huffed hard through her nose to clear a fruit fly that had landed in her nostril. Eadie froze, and Nick’s feet rounded the side of the caravan.

“Tha fuck is this?”

“Sorry! We’re sorry. We just wanted to know what’s going on.” Skylar put on her best whiny face, looked at Eadie for help. She said nothing.

Jackie and Nick emerged from the side of the van. Jackie spat at his feet, flicked his cigarette away.

“Having a good old sticky beak, are we, Eadie?”

Michael Kidd’s brow dipped at the sound of Eadie’s undercover name. The big man’s eyes examined her silhouette in the soft light of the distant fire. Eadie shielded her eyes, scratched her brow.

“We’re sorry, Jackie,” Skylar howled.

“What did you say your name was?” Michael Kidd squinted at Eadie, and she fought the urge to bite the inside of her lip.

“Eadie.”

“Eadie,” the big man repeated. He licked his back teeth in thought. Nick frowned at the big man, then at Eadie.

“You two need to mind your own fucking business,” Jackie snapped at the girls. “I didn’t let you in here so you could eavesdrop on my fucking conversations, either of you.”

“I’m gonna go,” Michael said, backing away. “I’m going.” The big man turned on his wide foot and walked away into the darkness. Nick Hart watched him go, then let his eyes drift back to Eadie, cold as an empty house.

“What was that all about?” Nick’s eyes were locked on Eadie’s. “Do you know him?”

“No.”

“You sure?

“Both of you get the fuck outta here.” Jackie waved his arm before Eadie could answer, fixing Skylar with a glare and a pointed finger as she tried to hide behind Eadie’s arm. “And don’t you come back to the van tonight, you nosy little slag. I don’t want to see your sneaky, deceiving fucking head.”

The two women turned and fled. Skye’s hand drifted into Eadie’s and squeezed her fingers, wet with terror.

“We’re in big trouble,” she said.

“You said it,” Eadie agreed.

T
here was something about art that took Hades’ mind away, put him in a place of swirling paints and flying sparks and woodchips, where there was no thought, only sensation. He would begin a project, become a machine himself, fixing and bolting and sawing and welding, oblivious to the labor he was putting his body through until he was left exhausted and filthy. He’d lock his workshop and shuffle up the hill toward the shack like an invalid. It would take a burn or a carelessly wielded hammer to bring him out of the warm, lofty place his work took him.

Right now he was grateful for such an escape. It was four in the morning, and since midnight he had been tossing and turning in bed listening to the sounds of the dump, wondering which of them were animals, things rotting and falling over, the wind shuffling things around, and which was his stalker.

His current project was a four-meter-high Australian swan preparing to take flight, wings spread and long neck bent, made from polished copper pipes intricately interwoven and coiled and braided. It was a finicky job, a noisy job, and it shut him into a world away from Adam White. The endless delicate puzzle made his hands ache, gave him pain to focus on. Hades stood by the frame of the thing with his eyes glazed and his hands fusing pieces together to construct the head on his thick wooden workbench. He was happy.

The first lump of brick came through the glass panel of the workshop door. The sound of it split the thin bush air like an explosion. Hades fell off his stool and hit the ground. Glass all around him.

Hades crawled to the nail cabinet and grabbed the Colt he kept there and pulled himself up by the edge of the workbench. The second brick came through the east window and showered the tabletop there in glass, sprayed fragments all over his tools, his papers, his books. Shards of pain prickled his chest and arms.

Even with the first two blown out, Hades wasn’t prepared for the last window to explode inward, glass raining on his shoulders as he hunched against the impact. He ran to the workshop door and charged through it, expecting to find one of two things—an unhappy client with a gun trained on him or a bunch of kids fleeing into the dark. What he found was Adam White standing at the base of the hill, a video camera in his hands.

Hades knew who he was looking at. The boy had Sunday’s feral cat eyes, the same sly slouch to his shoulders. The boy smiled and lifted the camera as Hades tried to catch his breath.

“You have no idea what you’re doing, kid.”

“Oh, I don’t know. I think I’m making a good go of it, bro.”

Hades lifted the pistol and pointed it at the boy’s head. It had been years since he had felt such hard, heavy fury, the kind that sat between his temples like smoldering coals and made his eyes pulse. The gun trembled in his calloused hand. “Do it,” the boy said.

Hades didn’t do it. Not right away. His trigger-happy days were gone. He knew what kind of a mess could be created with just a gentle, satisfying pull, an exhale of breath, a letting go of thoughts. It would be so easy. He reached into his pocket, the gun still wavering on the boy, and dialed one of only two numbers in the device with his thumb.

“Hades?”

“I’m holding a gun on your creepy little spider,” the old man trembled. “You better tell me quick why I shouldn’t just exterminate him right this second.”

“Jesus Christ, Heinrich,” Frank said.

“I said quick.” The old man clicked the hammer back into place. Adam White laughed, though Heinrich could see his body was shaking. This was a thrill. A terrifying, satisfying thrill. Something long planned, long worked for. Heinrich felt for the first time the dangerous nature of the boy before him.

“Just wait a second. Wait. He’s got you on tape. Right now, he’s taping you,” Frank said.

“I’ll bury the tape with him.”

“Hades, listen to me,” Frank’s words tumbled into each other, “that camera he’s holding is wireless.”

“I don’t know what the fuck that means.”

“It means he’s filming it there and it’s recording somewhere else.”

Heinrich grunted with rage.

“Heinrich,” Frank’s voice was calm, but trembling. “If you shoot Adam White right now I can’t help you get out of the mess you’ll be in. And it’ll be a big mess. You can take my word for it.”

“Is he putting a leash on you, Hades?” Adam White laughed, the zoom on the camera extending like an accusatory finger. “Is he getting his muzzle out?”

“Heinrich? Don’t do anything stupid.”

“I’m being terrorized here. I have a right to defend myself.”

“Sure. Sure. You can tell them that in court.”

Hades dropped his aim.

“You better solve this thing the right way before I do it my own way, copper,” the old man snarled into the phone. “There’s only so long I’ll play this stupid game.”

“I’m on it, Heinrich. I’m doing the best I can with the time I’ve got.”

Hades was watching Adam White walk off into the black forest.

I
knocked on Dr. Imogen Stone’s apartment door with my heart still hammering from Heinrich’s phone call. Since two a.m. I’d been sitting in my car in the street outside Camden trying to get my thoughts in order. The terror of almost losing a police dog into the middle of Eden’s undercover operation had left me jittery and uncertain. Juno had texted me some business about one missing girl’s father barging into the farm and almost ruining everything. Then Heinrich had called and I’d driven straight to Stone’s place.

Maybe I was trying to use her to replace the Eden I needed right now, the grounded and practical and unshakeable Eden I’d come to rely on, the kind of woman who would kill her own brother just to make sure all her plans remained on an even keel. But that was a fallacy, wasn’t it? I had no idea how Eden operated. Maybe I would get a bullet in the brain when I became inconvenient, when I threatened her plans.
I’m sorry, Frank. You were warned.
Frank? Frank? I looked up and realized Imogen was standing in the doorway staring at me. I had to shake my head to clear my thoughts before I could answer her.

“Frank?” That robe again.

“Hi.”

“What the hell are you doing here?”

“You tell me and we’ll both know, honey.”

“It’s the middle of the night.”

“It’s the middle of the morning, really.”

Imogen shook her head, tried to get ahold of what I was saying.

“Have you slept?”

“No.”

“Get in here,” she scolded and held the door open. “Jesus, this is the very definition of inappropriate.”

She pushed her hair behind her ears and went into the kitchen, took a bottle of milk from the fridge, and drank from it, thinking I couldn’t see her. I heard the flip of a kettle switch and the kind of sigh you only give when someone you know is so beyond help they’re beginning to undermine your faith in humankind. She came and sat next to me and rubbed her eyes, and I took one of her hands and held it in both of mine.

“I like you,” I said.

“I get the feeling I’d like you, too, if you weren’t such a complete catastrophe,” she yawned. Squinted. Yawned again. “I’ll make the coffee. We need coffee.”

She went into the kitchen and moved things around. Packet of some wanky espresso coffee from the freezer, the elastic band twanging. I fell asleep on the couch before she got back.

 

 

I got home around midday and went straight to the fridge, grabbed a beer, and popped it on the counter. Didn’t even look at the cat—no, because the cat was Martina, was an acknowledgment that she wasn’t really gone from my life and that it was far too early to be hanging around other women that even half meant anything to me. I stood by the fridge and looked out the window at the apartment block behind mine and told myself that I wasn’t “cheating” on Martina because Martina was gone now. Long gone, in the ground, deep and restful, the same place I had put the man who killed her, died with no thoughts of me on either of their minds.

That train of thought didn’t help. Wasn’t Martina still alive for me, not only in her cat but in Imogen? Wasn’t the major thing that had drawn me to Imogen all of that old-world survivalist intelligence wrapped up in beautiful milky white skin, hidden behind dark knowing eyes? Was that going to be the criteria from now on? How much like Martina my partner could be?

Graycat was giving me a good shouting down. The thing that brought me out of my reverie was a claw penetrating my jeans high up on my right thigh, pretty close to some of my crucial bodily equipment. I shook the cat off and got out its kibble, took the food to the balcony with the beast in hot pursuit and poured it with a clatter into the food bowl. The thing nudged its head into the stream of kibble as I poured, scattered it onto the concrete. I really needed to spend more time with the cat.

“Just. Hey! Slow down, fatty.”

I sat in the old armchair I keep out there and looked at the traffic, thought about Hades’s problem. My problem. Adam White wasn’t going to leave Hades alone until I could find out who killed Sunday. Cold cases this tricky needed a team—they were the type picked over by armchair detectives like Imogen for decades, the type written about in true crime books, used in the early papers of budding historians working on their PhDs.

Usually it was child murders that made it out of the decades of darkness and toward some sort of resolution. They earned armchair detectives the most reward money. Next after children came well-to-do women. Then politicians and actors. People were still staying up all night over who really shot JFK. You could watch the event re-created digitally from ten thousand different angles. The problem was, no one cared about a black girl from the seventies who was no good to nobody, a girl with no real standing in the world, a girl only ever loved by a couple of people, one of them being Sydney’s worst gangster. It was no surprise to me, thinking about it, that Adam White got his mind set on Hades being Sunday’s killer. He’d probably been the only person on the earth who really minded if she lived or died.

Jimmy. Kimmy. Whoever this friend or co-worker of Sunday’s dead sister was, she was probably my best bet at getting into Sunday’s world. My brief search into Lynda’s known associates hadn’t turned up any Jimmy, Kimmy, Jenny, Kenny or anything close to the mark. Her best friend was a woman named Rachael Cricket, a dumpy character with a big grin who was in the mug shots with Lynda brandishing a long green tattoo of a cartoon bug in a top hat. The two had been arrested for shoplifting. That was all I knew. Finding Jimmy or Kimmy was the only way forward I could see, my only means of understanding what the White girls were up to back then, because I’m sure Hades, much as he loved Sunday, was hardly privy to half of it.

Women and their secret lives. I got the feeling Imogen Stone had plenty of secrets, that I could spend years uncovering pieces of her, vulnerable pieces, which she’d been trained all her life to protect. Martina, too. But I didn’t want to think about Martina again. I shook my head and cracked my neck. Drained the last of my second beer.

The cat was pouncing and flopping onto its side in the corner of the balcony, scrabbling with something, getting dust and hair clumps stuck in its thick fur. I got up and went over to rescue the creature caught in its clutches and pulled a fairly extensively chewed cricket from its teeth.

“You’re disgusting,” I told the cat. I reached out and flicked the wretched insect off my palm into the air above the parking lot. I watched it sail into the garden below among the cigarette butts. It lay there, black in a sea of orange fellows. A cricket out of place.

I stared off my balcony and the realization hit me like a punch.