Eden (25 page)

I
stood outside the house in Ashfield and took phone calls, one after the other, hoping at some point to be able to stem the stream of information coming from Juno and the forensics team and get to the door hidden behind dozens of bags of rubbish and cardboard boxes, beyond the waist-high grass of the tiny lawn. Four underling detectives were heading to Perth to liaise with the department over there to see if there was anything to Jackie Rye’s tale about Ashley Benfield taking off with her boyfriend.

Captain James was threatening to take Eden out of the field if there was, because it seemed to him that a possible double homicide, with the potential for more, wasn’t as critical as a triple. Eden’s field play was worth three bodies, apparently, not two. Of course, the captain hadn’t said as much in as many words. But it was clear. Everything Eden had done would be scrapped if Jackie turned out to be just another double killer and not the kind of glorious sicko serial job that made the department headlines.

I warned the captain that Eden was in a very delicate place and any disturbances to her work would put her life in danger. She’d already been threatened by one victim’s father turning up and almost making her in front of the very suspects we were interested in. I hadn’t mentioned that Michael Kidd’s recognition of Eden had been my fault, that I’d mentioned her name in front of the families out at Narellan, that he’d worked out that “Eadie” had been ingeniously concocted out of “Eden.”

When the forensics girl came on the line I moved into the shade of a tree to listen to her report. I knew it would be long. The sun was blazing on my shoulders, making my shirt stick to my ribs.

“There are two sets of female DNA present on a total of forty-two different items of clothing,” she began.

“Forty-two?” I scoffed. “The stuff you picked up on the riverbed barely filled an evidence bag.”

“Fire is generally pretty good at reducing the size of items, Detective Bennett. Big pile of clothes, plus fire, equals small pile of clothes.”

“All right. I’m the idiot. You’re the scientist.”

“Uh huh.”

“I was just surprised.”

“Some of these items, like the bras for example, have been reduced to nothing but a portion of a strap. A hook, in one case. That’s all we’ve got, but if we need to we can reconstruct from fiber analysis, find the brand, the size . . .”

“You’re true wonders.”

“Luckily, some of the items are almost fully intact,” she continued. “The pile was burned carelessly. One of the items interests us very much. There’s back spray of blood on the rear of a cotton tank top. We don’t have a report yet, because we’re rushing this through at an extraordinary pace—”

“I realize you are.”

“But on sight, a consultant said it’s consistent with some blunt-force patterns he’s seen. Someone gets hit hard enough and the skull casing is split in the first blow. Flecks of blood travel upward as the object comes back over the attacker’s shoulder and then downward as the attacker goes in for a second blow. The victim is usually down by the second blow so you just get this upward-downward pattern and nothing else. We’ve also got scissor marks on some of the items. Jeans.”

“Scissors? Not just some sort of blade?”

“No, the deliberate cuts of scissors, uneven and frequently changing direction. Upward along stretched seams. The jeans were on someone when they were cut off.”

“Christ. Well. Good evidence of violence. Sexual element to it, too. Might get us some more time in the field.”

“Uh huh,” the woman said again.

“Any idea who’s been hit?”

“No. We don’t have any names on our files. We’re scientists. We’re impartial. You’ll have to wait for the report.”

“Yeah.” I’d known that and asked the question anyway. Looking like an idiot in front of this woman seemed to be a compulsion. “Thanks for all your help, Nicky.”

It’s a strange sensation to be glad that evidence has arisen suggesting someone has been hurt, that they’re probably dead. Obviously it wasn’t what I wanted. I had no malice toward those girls. I felt awful for their families. But from the moment Eden had sat me down and explained the situation, I’d known somehow that they were dead. It had happened, completely out of my hands, and I was more passionate about uncovering what had occurred than feeling unhappy that it had. As hungry as the new evidence had made me, I had to put that aside and think about Hades’ case. Each night he was getting closer to killing Adam White. I wasn’t sure if White had a death wish, but he was sure playing the game like he did. He couldn’t know that the fall of his dice would affect so many people—not only Hades but his daughter, and through her, me.

I’m not a religious man, but I walked toward Rachael Cricket’s house with some kind of plea running through my mind, to whatever universal power was listening, that she could tell me something about what had happened to Sunday—that out of fear maybe, or love, she’d kept that secret all these years and was somehow willing to give it to me, a stranger.

I’d managed to track Rachael “Jiminy” Cricket down fairly easily from her extensive dealings with Center link. Not Jimmy, or Kimmy, but Jiminy, named after the wise little green sidekick of Pinocchio I’d watched as a kid on VHS. The green bug in the top hat tattooed on her arm. Maybe she’d been there when Sunday went missing. Maybe she’d helped. Maybe she’d share her endless wisdom with me.

I was on the porch when I caught the first smell of what was inside the house. I couldn’t get to the front door through the bags and boxes and rusting items piled up there. From the rust stains on the tiles beneath the windows, I could see this clutter had been there for some time. A troupe of dogs struck up a cacophony as I glanced in the window. I could see nothing but darkness beyond the heavy drapes. Flies tinked and bumped against the window, trying to find a way out.

“Don’t be dead in there,” I murmured. I knocked on the window and one of the dogs squealed with excitement.

“Rachael? Rachael Cricket?” I breathed deeply through my mouth to cope with the stench. “I’m with the police.”

Nothing. I rapped on the window again. The smell wasn’t necessarily something dead, I reassured myself. I didn’t get that telltale biological perfume the body gives off in the days after it expires, the gasses that build up and swell in the stomach, the fluids that are released. This was rotting vegetables, dog feces—human feces maybe. I walked around the house and was hit with the reek of empty gas cans stacked in a pile as big as a car under the bathroom window, decorated here and there with a variety of hubcaps. Two sheds along the side of the house were stuffed full of hubcaps, in teetering stacks under the spider-webbed ceilings, thousands of space-age pizzas dripping rust and grease.

I pulled some boxes and bags away from the back door. Drenched my socks in what I hoped was rainwater but knew wasn’t.

“Rachael? Police. I’m coming in.”

I don’t like things that crawl. I’m happy to admit that. Plenty of men don’t like spiders, cockroaches, any half-squishy legged things you might encounter in a lush backyard garden. Things that come wriggling out of the soil. I’m a homicide detective. I’ve seen more maggots than most people have had handshakes. Men of my type just puff out our chests and clench our teeth and carry on when faced with creepy crawlies, because that’s what you do when you’re scared and you know you shouldn’t be. But when I forced open the door of Rachael Cricket’s kitchen I was faced with more crawlies in one room than I’d ever encountered together. And I was alone, so I indulged myself in letting my shoulders rise up near my ears, my hands come out from my sides, my lips draw back from my teeth, and my eyes bulge from their sockets. Generally, to freak the fuck out as much as a man can standing in one place.

What stole my attention was a large glass salad bowl atop a pile of pots and plates and cups on the counter, a quarter full of orange grease and three-quarters full of large, black dead cockroaches. Here and there shiny survivors of the salad bowl massacre wobbled and shuffled over the piles on the floor, waist-high mounds of everything imaginable. Packets of plastic cutlery. La-belless cans. Papers. Bric-a-brac of every variety, assembled according to no scheme—not what room it might belong in, or how old it was, whether it was organic, plastic, chrome. A baby’s rocker. A jar of thumbtacks. An empty fish tank full of moss-covered pebbles and a wooden cross as long as my arm. More hubcaps, a box of waffle ice-cream cones chewed through by mice and sprinkled with their feces. The flies were in their hundreds, most of them gathered around the windows and the microwave, some rushing over to examine me, my neck and forearms and ears, as I came in the door.

Be dead
, I thought.
Don’t be alive and living like this.
I drew a breath to call Rachael again, coughed, swept flies out of my eyes. I waded through the rubbish, pushing bigger items out of my way, crunching others beneath my boots. There had been a path through it all at some point but the piles had collapsed. The hall was filled with books and newspapers to waist height, and then things lost their way with stuffed toys and plastic plants, a collection of umbrellas in their cloth cases that went for as far as I could see, rows of them like wrapped bodies lying in the dark waiting to be buried. A two-meter-high papier-mâché flamingo that looked like it had come off an old Mardi Gras float fell as I passed and slid down my back, blocking the exit through the kitchen, if you could call it that. A wave of claustrophobia rushed over me. The dogs in the front room were going mad.

Rachael Cricket was sitting propped against a mass of yellowed pillows without cases in the far corner of the front room, barely illuminated by the glow from behind the drapes. She was a meter off the floor on a mound of items—cushions and boxes and plastic tubs, books and stuffed toys. I stood in the doorway and wondered if she was dead. She looked it. Her skin was jaundiced, the way people get in the first couple of days, and her head lolled to one side. She was all layers—layers of skin folding over each other around her arms and neck, two bony legs poking from beneath a gray blanket. The smell here was worse. I knew from the treacherous path to the kitchen that she was incapable of making a journey down there, and I’d only seen one bathroom off to the right on my way. I tried not to imagine what was in the green plastic bags tied and littered all around the room. There were packets of two-minute noodles here dumped in piles as high as the windowsill. No bowls.

The dogs broke free of the second front room and came crashing over the mounds of newspaper toward me. I picked one up as a gesture of goodwill and held it wriggling in my arms. Its fur was matted with dried hardened shit.

“Rachael, um,” I felt strangely teary. I cleared my throat. “I’m Detective Frank Bennett. I’m a police officer.”

Rachael said nothing. I jogged the dog up and down in my arms like a babe.

“I’m here about a girl named Sunday White. You used to be good friends with her sister, a long time ago. I got your name from a . . . a shoplifting case back in seventy-seven.”

Some reaction occurred, though it was difficult to measure. It was mainly in her eyes, fixed pupils that reduced and then flared with what looked like terror.

“You knew Lynda. She was your friend. Until recently, she’s been trying to find out what happened to her sister. You probably don’t know what happened to Sunday, or you would have told your friend. But maybe you remember something now. Something that could help me. Lynda thought it was Hades. But maybe there was someone else who was dangerous. Someone else you girls were afraid of.”

“Plishman,” Rachael said. Her mouth moved, and nothing else. The words came through black teeth and sagging lips. “Plishman.”

“Yes, I’m a policeman.”

“Plishman.”

“You’re not in trouble,” I said, patting the dog while the others snuffled and licked my boots. I needed to go back. Start at square one. “Do you remember Lynda? Do you remember Sunday?”

“The plishman. The plish.” Rachael’s eyes moved to me, locked on my face. “The plishman.”

I squeezed the dog and felt sad, watching as she frowned back at the window, said the word over and over, seemed to ponder what it meant. I said that I would go, but that I would call someone to come back and help her, help the dogs. The hardest part was putting the dog back among the others, identical fluffy things that had once been white but were now different shades of brown and black and the rusting red of over-chewed limbs. I straightened and headed for the kitchen.

“Sabbet,” Rachael said. I stopped in the hall to listen. “The plishman, Sabbet.”

E
den had spent a long time finding the perfect apartment to call her sanctuary, and she was obsessively protective of it. Admitting people was always an ordeal. Although she wasn’t stupid enough to keep trophies of her playtime in the night, she was well aware that she had unconsciously written the secret of what she was in her paintings, her sculptures, her notebooks full of sketches. They contained violence. Sadness.

Much of what she explored in her art was how to capture those precious moments with her victims that she could treasure: here agony, here hopelessness, here rage. She enjoyed toying with raw emotions. Never were they so raw as when a victim knew death was coming, had accepted it, had nothing left to lose from submitting to it. It amused Eden that so many storybook victims were fierce and heroic at the end, defiant in the face of their reaper. No one was, in her extensive experience. But perhaps she had been playing too long with cowards.

With only eight hours to relish in her sanctuary, Eden wasn’t going to waste it sleeping. She needed a battery change and to report in to the station. Rye had called a stop-work so the irrigation system could be fixed and it would be tight getting out and in again without being noticed. While she waited for Juno, she would burn off some of her frustration. She hungered for making art the same way she hungered for the kill.

She worked at the huge trunk of an ancient red eucalyptus she’d rescued from the clutches of someone she was sure had desired the wood for overpriced outdoor furniture. She’d been dying to try out a delicate little miniature chainsaw, suitable for wood artists and ice sculptors, but all she could think about as she curved out a figure from the wood was how nicely the device would go through bones.

She didn’t hear her doorbell over the growl of the little thing but the flashing red bulb she’d installed above her door caught her eye, and she lifted up her goggles. She was sweating. She left the chainsaw running as she approached the door and pulled it open, hoping the rumble of the machine might diminish the need for any unnecessary conversation.

Juno. The computer nerd. Eden glanced behind him into the hall and didn’t see Frank. She let her confusion show on her face. The guy looked intimidated by her dust-covered apron, the oversized gloves, the chainsaw humming away in her fist. She revved it a little to get him talking. He cleared his throat and readjusted the leather satchel hanging from his shoulder.

“Got your batteries,” he said. Handed her a tiny package. She slipped it into the pocket of her apron and tried to close the door. His voice stopped her.

“Everything working correctly?”

“Seems to be.”

“Can you, um . . .” He glanced at the chainsaw. Eden followed his gaze. “Do you mind?”

Eden switched the chainsaw off. Left it hanging from her arm, a menacing prosthesis.

“Did you, uh . . . I told Frank about Michael Kidd.”

“Frank and I have spoken.”

“Right, of course you have.” The boy nodded, an exaggerated bobbing, and scratched at the back of his neck. He really was very orange, Eden thought. Furred with it lightly, like a newborn pup. He was a marker for the difference in human genetic breeds, carrying with them colors and tinges and lengths and widths. She found herself squinting, trying to get a better look at him.

“Is there anything else?” she said.

“Look . . . I’ve been . . . spending a lot of time with you lately. You know. Like, um. Frank said that when you, uh, you do a lot of surveillance you can sometimes get closer to people than you really are . . .” He was struggling now, looking everywhere but her face. Eden enjoyed it. “So yeah, you know, I get it. I get that over the last couple of weeks I’ve been spending more time with you than you have been with me, really. But, like, I’ve got to put it out there. I’d like to spend more time with you. Outside work. You know? And have you spend time with me.”

Eden squinted. Licked her lip. Tasted the microscopic layer of wood dust there, an ancient dead tree, something she understood better than most people. She shut the door in Juno’s face and walked back across the apartment to the stairs. Let the chainsaw roar.

 

 

Dr. Stone had come to know my knock. I could tell from the smile she had playing about her lips when she opened the door. I slipped inside, into the dark, and let her lead me down the hall with her slender fingers. We fell into whispers in the kitchen, up against the bench, memorizing the nooks and crannies of each other’s necks and ears and shoulders with our mouths, our noses. She smelled like sleep, like the safety of freshly washed sheets. She lit a candle by a windowsill cluttered with tiny, overflowing houseplants and took two wineglasses from the back of the fridge.

“How’s the case?”

“Not good.”

“This could go on for years. These late-night visits.”

“What a tragedy for you.”

She laughed. Bit my bottom lip lightly.

“What time is it?” I asked.

“No idea.”

“They want to take it off us. Hand it over to regional. They’re saying one of the girls is hiding out in Perth. We’ve tried to confirm it. It’s all nods so far. When they get hold of her it’ll be swept off my desk. You’ll never hear of it again.”

“Something tells me you won’t let that happen.”

“No.”

“Eden?”

“No. No one wastes her time.”

“It’ll come good.”

“It will. Something will happen. Some mistake. You never know how close you are until it’s over. A phone call might do it. An overheard whisper. It’s like those guys you see in movies trying to dig through the bottom of prison cells with a spoon. They don’t know how deep they have to go. One day they make one last scrape. There it is. Precious earth.” I leaned back against the counter, drank the wine too fast.

“You’re not trying to dig out of prison, Frank. At least you shouldn’t be.”

“I’m digging up something.”

“But what are you burying at the same time?”

“I’ll ask the questions and I’ll construct the metaphors, thank you very much,” I pointed to my chest.

She smiled, ran her fingers up under my shirt, over my ribs. I let her pull it over my head. Run her nails up through my hair. I felt taken care of in her presence. Maybe it was the whole doctor thing. The certificates on her walls. The expensive waiting-room chic of the apartment. Maybe this was good. Maybe this was what I needed. Someone to take care of me, someone who I didn’t need to feel responsible for. Imogen was pulling my belt off. I scooped her off her naked feet and listened to her laugh against my neck.

 

 

It had been a day so long and so hot and so useless to the investigation that Eadie felt flattened, as though a great weight was lying on top of her in the bed and refused to give her more than the necessary inches to breathe. A day of being ridden like the horses she cared for—mostly by Pea, who somehow had an eye on every shortcut she tried to take, every stall she didn’t clear fast enough, every beast under her care who looked unhappy.

In truth, all of the animals were unhappy, and it had nothing to do with Eadie’s care for them. They were waiting, all of them, for the weather to break, for the humidity to ease. Paint was running. Cows were moaning. Wood was seeping mold. The flies attacked everything, clung to eyelashes and clustered around sweating bellies, walked over food and the rims of beer bottles.

Eadie lay in the dark and looked at the ceiling and thought about the missing girls’ bones. She was at that reckless point now, that exhausted point, where she fantasized about going out in the dark and simply digging, anywhere, just so that she was doing something meaningful toward catching the men, giving closure to the families, stopping the same from happening again. It had been ten solid hours of horse shit and the old woman’s watchful eyes. She hadn’t laid eyes on Jackie. She’d seen plenty of Nick.

At sunset, when she returned to the cabin, he came from wherever he’d been working and took up a milk crate in the shade of the van at the edge of the nearest cluster, fifty meters or so from her door. He stared at her windows. She stared back at him through the lace, standing well back in the dark of the kitchen. Hours passed. She had dinner in the caravan, showered with her ears pricked and her knife on the counter by the camera pendant. She dressed and come back to the stalemate. Someone had given Nick a beer. He sat with his elbows on his knees, just watching.

All right, asshole,
she thought.
Watch this.

Eadie went into the tiny kitchenette, switched on her television, and raised the volume. She drew the blind over the window, shut the doors to the bedroom and the hall, and then brought out the rusted toolbox under the kitchen sink. Rolling up the van’s carpet, she pried up the edge of the internal door to the storage hatch beneath. Eadie squeezed into the empty compartment, feeling spiderwebs collapse all around her in the corners of the rusting base as she descended into the dark. She took a dusty breath, pulled the hatch closed, and felt for the latch holding the outside door at the back of the van.

Ten minutes, Eadie guessed, she was in the dark. The nuts on the inside of the hatch door were rusted and required plenty of spit and swearing. She got the top two undone and bent the door forward, then slid out into the long grass. She left the hatch hanging and crawled under the fence and into the field. Skirted the field back toward the farm.

There was no one near Nick’s van. Everyone was over at Jackie’s. It was
Master Chef
night. They would be gathered there in the darkness like they were the night she’d arrived, wretched laughing mouths and glowing eyes lit by the screen. Eadie glanced about, then slipped into Nick’s van.

There was no possibility of switching on the lights. Her hands fell on dirty dishes and mugs and cups in the kitchen sink, fluttered to the curtains and then the blinds. Tiny cracks of orange light flooded the tiny space as she twisted the knob, opening the blinds. Her fingers were wet with sweat. Eadie squinted and came face-to-face with a spread-legged poster of a large blond woman. Hundreds of other porn pictures ripped and clipped from magazines were stuck messily and overlapping on the kitchen cupboards. They seemed to consume the man’s interest, those at the back turning hard and browning from sun exposure. Eadie opened the bedroom doors and glanced at the gray, sweat-stained sheets.

The DVD cupboard was by the bathroom annex—a tiny tower of shelves, neatly arranged cases. Cheaply made kids’ cartoons, animated series starring foxes and birds and badgers and bears in classic fairy tales.
Sleeping Beauty
.
Cinderella
.
Little Red Riding Hood
. Eadie selected
Sleeping Beauty
and popped open the case. A disk labeled with marker: MICHELLE.

Eadie panted, remembered herself, and checked the windows again. She popped open
Cinderella
and read the name. DANICA. Shoving the cases back into the shelves, she ripped out others, popped them open and slammed them closed. JOANNA. NONIE. STEPH. PENNY.

No Keely. No Erin. No Ashley. Eadie clenched her fists, shoved the cupboard door closed.

 

 

Eadie lay now in the early morning light and felt too tired to sleep.

When the soft knocking came she was on her feet before she knew what the noise was. The snuffling and whimpering behind the frosted glass told her there was no danger. She pulled open the door and Skylar came rushing in like a sweaty damp beast released from a trap.

“What’s the matter with you?”

She switched on the rangehood light. The girl was drooling blood.

“I can’t do this anymore,” she slobbered. “I can’t do this.”

Eadie’s hands were prickling as she went to the freezer. She popped the ice cubes from the frame and poured them into a dish towel.

“What was the blue about?” she asked.

“Ev-ery-thing,” Skylar sobbed. “Everything. Is. Go-ing. Wrong.”

“Calm down and hold this on it.”

“I. Can’t.”

“Stop talking. You’re safe now. Just lie here and be quiet.”

The girl lay down on the left side of the bed, by the cameras.

Eadie curled beside her. Didn’t touch her. Thought probably she should. Human beings touched each other when one of them was sad, she knew, but something about it seemed dangerous to her. She couldn’t care about the girl. Wouldn’t.

The girl was snuffling, letting tears and melted ice run down her neck. The bruise was deep in her cheek, probably rattling loose molars. A good sideswipe. She’d been knocked about before, Eadie could see in the dim light from the kitchen. Something had split her brow long ago on the same side.

“What did you fight about?”

“Money. His ex. You.”

“Me?”

“He doesn’t like you.”

“Most people don’t.”

“I want to get out of here,” the girl said, her eyes on the door.

“We can make it happen.” Eadie folded her hands on her chest. “Let’s make a plan.”

“I don’t want a plan.”

“Have you got any family out there?”

“I don’t want to be with my family.” The girl looked at Eadie. Wet fierce eyes. “I don’t want to plan. I don’t want to pack. I just want to go. I want to just . . . run. With you.”

The girl sat up. Eadie sat up with her.

“I can’t take care of you,” Eadie said.

“We can take care of each other.”

“Girl, you’ve got the wrong idea.”

Skylar grabbed Eadie’s cheeks, forced the kiss upon her. Salty with tears and shuddering with panicked breath. Eadie sat frozen and felt her mind closing, felt the shutters of her sanctuary coming up one at a time. This is how it was with her, the slow shutting down of a machine with a hidden glitch, a thing destined to attempt again and again to get moving, to function as everything else functioned—but unable to, always unable to, because of that missing part. The closer something inched to her, the harder she faltered. She reached up and took the girl’s hands down from her face.