Fall (11 page)

‘I think something terrible happened at my house,' Ruben said. Donato sat beside him in the back row of the small, bare classroom, texting his new Australian girlfriend, a tall, leggy blonde who'd come to the hostel to complain about the music. Ruben could see the edges of picture messages on his friend's phone and tried not to lean too far sideways in his chair in case his snooping was revealed. He sighed when he couldn't see more than elbows and knees. He looked at the posters on the classroom walls instead.
G'day, mate!
cried a cartoon kangaroo. Ruben hadn't heard anyone say ‘G'day' since he arrived in Australia, nor had he seen a single kangaroo. But then he spent most of his time at the house, being followed from room to room by the creaks and whispers of the ancient building.

‘Something terrible like what?' Donato whispered in Italian.

Ruben told him about the watch by the bed, the inconsistent amounts of dust on the books there. He told him about the pill packet on the living-room floor, the footsteps in the attic bedroom that was always locked, the television that played the same phrases over and over.

Reach out and take what you've always wanted.

You deserve it. You deserve it. You deserve it.

Donato brushed him off.

‘Why don't you just go up there? Why don't you just knock and say hello?'

‘You'd understand if you were there. The house is a nightmare.'

‘Come work with me then.' Donato finally put down his phone. ‘I can get you a job at The Argyle. It's pumping there, brother. The chicks, oh. The chicks.' He smiled at the ceiling.

‘What time did you finish up last night?'

‘Three.' Donato shrugged.

‘That's why I don't come and work with you.' Ruben tapped his friend's chest.

‘Are you guys listening back there?' the teacher called.

‘Yes,' the boys answered in English. Ruben spread a stack of old newspaper clippings before him.

‘What are these?' Donato asked.

‘The translation assignment, idiot. You had to bring something in.'

‘Oh, shit!'

‘Yeah, I brought extra for you. You'd forget your own mother.'

‘What are these? They're so old.'

‘They're not that old. They've just been lying in the sun. I found them at the house, in one of the bedrooms. You're going to help me figure out what they say.'

‘You're like Scooby-Doo,' Donato sniggered. ‘Solving mysteries. Getting to the bottom of things.'

‘Shut up and translate.' Ruben shoved a dictionary into Donato's hands. ‘I don't want to hear any more of your shit.'

‘Are you guys working back there?'

‘Yes,' they answered.

There's a feeling very much like defeat that overtakes me whenever I open a flat pack from Ikea. I would have been very good as a Neanderthal – rolling rocks together and covering them with lumps of wood. Setting things on fire and breaking things down from their natural height into smaller chunks. But when it comes to tiny screws and pieces of plastic and stickers and things that you pop out of perforated sheets, I'm incapable. There's no other word for it.

I stared at the instructions for my new kitchen for a while and then decided I'd figure everything out when I got all the pieces out of their boxes and onto the floor. Bad idea. I sat in the middle of my mess and opened fake beer and went to the instructions again. The cartoon handyman with his oversized allen key was grinning at his construction like a fool. It was midnight. I couldn't sleep. Whenever I closed my eyes I started running and there was a darkness behind me, bodiless, trying to catch up.

Sweaty nights usually accompany the beginnings of a big case. Particularly when the media get hold of it. The watchfulness, the expectation of a country, sometimes the world, flutters at the back of your mind, lingering behind everything – the look on the guy across the train carriage, the tone in the
waitress' words. Desperation. Solve this. Solve this fast. If the murders keep happening or the rapist isn't caught or a body lies unidentified beyond a reasonable time, you're almost committing the crimes yourself. Why didn't you stop him? Why didn't you save her? Why don't you do something? What are you? How can you sleep at night?

You never sleep at night. Right from the beginning.

The front door opened and closed just as I finished needlessly categorising all the different screws and nails and things by size. Eden walked in and chucked her keys onto the floor beside the door, looked at the catastrophe around me.

‘Can't sleep either?'

‘What are you –?' she said. She blinked at some marble countertops leaning against the wall. ‘Never mind. Get out of the way.'

I took my beer and shuffled to the side of the room, grabbed a chair and put it in the corner. She sat sighing and reading the instructions as if what I'd done had been a personal insult to her. When she'd perused the diagrams for a minute or so she set them aside and started grabbing pieces from around her, fitting and locking things together with satisfying clicks. Things that looked like they fit together, things that so obviously fit together that it was beyond reason why I hadn't fitted them together myself. I didn't thank her. She wouldn't have responded if I had. She started fixing things to the wall with a wood-handled screwdriver my father had owned, her hair hanging in her face. In minutes, it seemed, a frame was assembling, the bottoms of drawers and cupboards were being slotted into place. She was such a capable person. I was jealous of her. I had been, a lot of our time together. It's not hard to feel like a loser around Eden.

Eventually she took a break and sat with her legs crossed sipping a fake beer, looking through diagrams of drawers.

‘It's 2 am. We've got to brief Captain James in four hours,' she said after a time.

‘You want to lead with similar crime analysis?'

‘No. The tranquilliser,' she said, setting the pamphlet aside. ‘It's our best lead so far. Let's face it. We've got shit all otherwise.'

Images retrieved from CCTV around Centennial Park on the evening of Ivana Lyon's murder were fairly useless, which greatly surprised us. There were cameras around the gates of the park, but few inside the 189 hectares of parkland itself. The park's cameras were designed to capture thieves or vandals targeting the café or equine centre, so were not directed towards joggers on the tracks. Crime in the park was rare. A serial rapist targeted a woman walking there at night in 1989 and was nabbed for it in a DNA sweep in 2005. In 2010 a woman was abducted and taken to Queens Park, a smaller park off the side of Centennial, and sexually assaulted. There were the odd cases of bashings and robberies in and around the park, but not enough to erect a twenty thousand dollar surveillance system, put together a command centre or hire security guards. The park was unpopular at night and too populated during the day for any real drama.

Our killer hadn't brought the van into the park itself, so we couldn't get a number plate. There were three clips of Ivana running laps, her hands flat and open and her lips pursed as she passed the gates. No sign of anyone watching or following her. No one was keeping pace with her – she was being lapped and lapping others at irregular intervals, so for long stretches she would have been on her own. On the third lap, we caught
a glimpse of a shadow moving along the tree line in the bottom left-hand corner of the image, but there was no telling if it was in any way related to Ivana. We didn't capture any footage of her being shot, stumbling, perhaps being helped through the bush towards a gap in the fence, to a car waiting, while she fought for consciousness.

Plenty of people had seen others getting into vans around the time Ivana was taken. After-work traffic already clogged Anzac Parade, Oxford Street and Alison Road. The athletics field and Queens Park were flooded with corporate soccer and running teams as kids were being picked up from Little Athletics groups – there were cars whizzing in and out of the same spots, horns blasting as people squeezed into tiny gaps or waited for young ones dashing across the grass. Apologetic waves and sheepish grins in the fading orange sunlight. Dogs barking from open car windows. The killer had used the cover of crowds and noise to snatch Ivana Lyon away from the pack like a crocodile at the edge of a thundering herd of buffalo crossing a river. Nobody saw anything. A thousand people all in their own little worlds. This was how kids like Jamie Bulger got walked right out of a crowded shopping centre without anyone batting an eyelid. Crowd blindness.

It looked like Minerva Hall had been snatched at around the same time of day as Ivana. By all accounts, she'd done a couple of laps of the Botanic Gardens and Mrs Mac's Chair and then disappeared. She didn't look like Ivana – but we couldn't rely on that to differentiate the cases, because after both women's faces were beaten in they were both just female runners to the perp. Minerva's phone turned up on the rocks beside the running path where it led to the headland, washed
down a crack between the oyster-laden stones. She had carpet print on her shoulders, just like Ivana, and her heels and the backs of her calves showed bloodless drag marks, suggesting her body had been moved post-mortem.

There were plenty of homeless people in the Domain at night. Far more than in Centennial. It was closer to the CBD, more opportunities for cashed-up lawyers walking home to toss some change on the grass. Even as I realised this, I was already dismissing it as a possible source of leads. Homeless people wouldn't speak to us.

Eden and I sat with our empty beer bottles, looking at the floor of my half-finished kitchen.

‘The Domain footage might be better,' I said.

‘Hmm,' Eden said.

‘So where does a person get a tranquilliser gun? You tell me.'

‘It's not the gun we're concerned about,' she said. ‘You could get that anywhere.'

‘I doubt you'd get one just anywhere.'

‘Well, you might get one as a black market import. Go to a big game company. I mean, we might spend the next three weeks going through stolen gun reports. Any farm from here to Kalgoorlie's got the right to have one. We don't want to end up doing background checks on every big game worker from Taronga Zoo to Alice Springs. If it was me, I'd make the thing myself. Cheaper and easier to do it that way.'

‘And how exactly would you set about doing that?'

‘Well, I don't know exactly. I haven't really thought it through. But it doesn't sound hard. It's probably just some sort of gas compression job. You could take apart a .50 cal. paintball gun and –'

‘Never mind,' I waved. I forgot, more frequently than was probably safe, what Eden surely did in her spare time. What she had been responsible for. It was easy to think of her as harmless when she was sitting on my kitchen floor braiding her hair. A news report I'd seen that morning on the TV in Imogen's kitchen returned to me, made my chest prickle with anxiety. It was about the same incident I'd heard reported on the radio the day Ivana was found. Four dead in mystery slaying south of Byron Bay. Police likely hunting ‘expert assassin'.

‘So the gun's probably a dead end.'

‘The drugs aren't, though. There are only three families of drugs that would suit an uptake like that – through the muscle tissue, into the bloodstream,' Eden said. ‘Sedatives, anesthetics and paralytics. Each family's got its own characteristics. Some are faster than others, last longer, work on different parts of the body. If toxicology can tell us what type of drug we're looking for, that'd be great. But I suspect it'll be difficult. The elevated heart rate of the victims, the tiny amount that would have been delivered. We might need footage to understand how the thing worked on the victim. How long the take-down took.'

‘The take-down, huh?' I licked my bottom lip. ‘Is that what you guys would call it? You and Eric?'

I hadn't meant the question to sound nasty, particularly as she had just about finished putting my kitchen together. I was genuinely interested. I was fairly certain that Eric and Eden had killed six men. Around the time my girlfriend was murdered, I witnessed the two stalking a man, Benjamin Annous, who subsequently disappeared. I was able to connect five other missing men with Annous. Eric coming after me had been admission enough that I'd overstepped my bounds in digging
around in their night-time activities. He'd tried to kill me and Eden had stopped him.

While this was all I had, I suspected Eden and Eric had killed more people than the ones I'd discovered. I didn't know if they limited themselves to thieves and dangerous scumbags, as these men seemed to be. But if the utter lack of leads in their cases – to a body, to a suspect, to anything – was any indication of their skill level, it was possible the two had been killing for most of their lives.

Had she and her brother developed a language for what they did? Had they talked about it at all? Did they have rituals, a routine, a trophy collection, like most serial killers? It was a purely academic interest. I'd detached the deed from Eden herself, as I always did, in order to function beside her. But the way the question registered across her face, I could see that the effect of my words had been malignant. She smirked a little and went back to her work, turning the screwdriver around and around in her skilled fingers as she fitted rails to the side of a drawer. Whatever it was between us, the unspoken understanding that we would leave her killer nature undisturbed, seemed to be thinning. The knowledge was like a black dog that followed us everywhere. Somehow I knew it wasn't going to stay quiet forever. Eventually it would insist on us acknowledging it, dealing with it. It would lick at my hands and nudge at my legs and feet until my remarks and questions became more frequent, until I couldn't be Eden's partner anymore, until I couldn't hunt killers in the company of a killer and find sanity in that.

Had Eden killed those four people up in Byron Bay on the weekend? Had she made a day trip of it – bought a pie at
a roadside 7-Eleven and sipped iced coffee as she drove, her gun on the seat beside her? What was making me think this way? Eden was a killer and she knew about guns. That's all I was confident about. Maybe I was being paranoid.

When I asked myself if I really wanted to know if Eden was still killing, I found the answer was no.