Fall (30 page)

Eden didn't follow the victim to St Vincent's with Frank. It wasn't her scene. He was the one to do the coddling and worrying – she would direct the wind-down of the police operation. The cordons and checkpoints she set up after the victim was found in the Cross City Tunnel proved useless, of course. By the time the sound of Frank's bike had spooked the killer, he or she had run – and that kind of running was the most important of the killer's life. No amount of gall that the Strangler had struck right under their noses was going to help the police catch up. Eden knew that kind of terror, the electric flight of a hunter being pursued. Bodily limitations meant nothing. It was instinctive. Escape or perish.

At 3 am she returned home, shut her apartment door and breathed for the first time without feeling the strange tightening of her throat muscles that happened whenever she was in charge. She went straight to the bath, slipped beneath the steaming water and dragged the rack at the end of the tub towards her. For an hour or so, she clacked away at the keys of her laptop in the candlelight, sipping absent-mindedly at a single glass of cold moscato, now and then licking the beads of condensation from the side of the bulbous glass. When her officer report was finished, she got into bed and filled in her
operations overview report and an advisory report to the media, and updated the case log on the police intranet. When the sun began to peek beneath the heavy red curtains across the balcony door, she shut the little silver device and fell asleep.

It was dark beneath the curtains when she woke. Having a very expensive bed, with very expensive sheets and covers, Eden always slept like the dead. The trouble with that was that waking was always difficult and she was often forced to throw off the sheets completely and let the coolness of the dark room prick at her naked skin to bring her fully to consciousness. She took the phone from the side of the bed and read through Frank's text messages one at a time.

Eden stretched, yawned, and rolled out of the bed. She pulled on her clothes and threw open the curtains, looked at
the orange-lit night. Lovers walked along the sandstone wall across the street, arm in arm. A bus roaring past almost drowned out the sound of knocking at the front door. Eden padded to the door on the cold tiles and looked at the small monitor next to the intercom, a pinhole she'd installed beside the outer handle for those rare cases, like now, when someone slipped in the front door without buzzing. The visitor waiting there made a small wave of heat sweep over her body, the instinctive sizzle of nerves rushing to their edge. She opened the door a crack.

‘Hi,' Amy said.

‘Can I help you?'

‘Yeah,' Amy smirked. Eden remembered all the times Frank had bugged her lately about how she greeted people, the straight-to-the-business style that had infected her since her accident out on Rye Farm. Eden came close to death that night. Lately, pleasantries seemed a waste of borrowed time.

She supposed she should let the girl in, so after a moment or two of silent contemplating, thoughts slowed by the girl's incredibly bad outfit, she let the teen wearing the dusty purple boots into the apartment and shut the door. The girl's attire had struck Eden since she first laid eyes on her as a confusing mix of ‘look at me' and ‘stay away'. Yet another side-effect of her near-death experience had been an aversion to confused motives. She headed to the kitchen, putting the marble island between the girl and herself. She recognised this as her first survival-mode strategy. Why had she suddenly flipped into survival mode? She found herself opening the fridge without knowing why, taking out a bottle of milk.

‘Coffee? Tea?'

Eden wasn't even sure she had any tea. She heard the girl ease onto one of the stools on the other side of the island, drop
her shoulder bag on the floor. There were knives in a block to the girl's right. Eden added this to the calculations hurrying through her mind.

‘No, neither. Thanks.'

‘Did you go to the hospital with Frank?'

Keep the conversation on your terms, until you know the motive for the visit, then decide whether you'll allow the original reason for the visit to be addressed. Everything was about control now. The conversation. The environment. The available tools. Eden opened a cupboard beneath the sink and took out a spray bottle, ran a cloth under the water as though preparing to mop up a recently noticed spill. She gave a couple of sprays, mopped at the invisible spot.

Why was she so paranoid? She paused by the sink and closed her eyes. This was all a symptom of being alone with a teenage girl again. The last teenage girl she'd trusted had tried to kill her. Amy might just be trying to hold onto the Parks Strangler case while Frank was tied up, and had got the message, however wrong, however moronic, that Eden welcomed her as a companion. Eden couldn't recall even the most subtle indication she might have given the girl over the last few days that would inspire the idea. She'd mostly ignored Frank's weird little fangirl completely. Or so she thought.

‘No. No, I hung around after the ambos got there for a little while and then I went home.' The girl coughed. Eden put the kettle on. ‘We need to talk though.'

Eden turned, the spray bottle and cloth in hand, and looked at the girl's short blonde prickles. It was an odd look. Amy's pale cream skin led naturally to expecting striking black Asian hair framing the high cheekbones and chocolate eyes. The
style was new-recruit military but she'd bleached it hard so that it was almost snow white.

Short blonde hair.

The girl held Eden's eyes. Defiant.

‘Out with it then,' Eden said.

The girl drew a breath and nibbled her bottom lip, just once, refusing to back away from the cliff edge she had crept onto. When she began to speak the words tumbled out, one after the other, a series of gunshots.

‘I know that you're Morgan Tanner.'

Eden's mouth was immediately dry, denying any verbal response. She found herself smiling, licking her lips. She hadn't thought it would be this easy, the solution to the problem of the woman who attacked Hades. It was terrifyingly easy. The mouse had wandered right into the cat's basket.

‘Oh,' Eden said. She looked at the floor. ‘That's interesting.'

Amy opened her mouth to reply, as Eden anticipated she would, and it was in those precious microseconds that she was inhaling air to make her response that Eden lifted the spray bottle and pulled the trigger, saturating the girl in trichloromethane. Eden didn't use chloroform in any of her night-time games – she found the practice a little unfair. But a homemade cocktail of the stuff in an easy dispenser was a must for her household. She wandered around the kitchen island as the girl coughed and spluttered, wiping at her nose and eyes, the wooden stool tumbling and splitting the air as it hit the ground. A couple more puffs and the girl was on her knees.

‘Wait, wait, wait!'

Eden didn't wait. She gave the girl another good spray and watched her fall, listened to the satisfying clunk of the back of her head on the tiles.

Waiting for Fiona Ollevaris was like watching one of those time-lapse documentaries when a camera is set up over the carcass of a dead rabbit and little creatures are captured rushing in, taking tiny pieces and scuttling away quicker than the eye can follow.

I sat by her in the curtained-off section of the trauma ward at St Vincent's and observed these many creatures coming and going, the doctors and nurses who monitored her vitals, poked and prodded her, put things into her and took things out while she lay swaddled in bandages from the neck up. Forensics people photographed her injuries, took swabs from her scraped knuckles, picked and bottled skin and blood cells from beneath her fingernails, measured her abrasions and marked things down on evidence forms. Patrollies and hospital staff pushed back journalists who posed as friends and relatives at the door and maybe reached the windows at the side of the ward and ogled a bit at her feet, which was all they could see from that angle.

Her real family members arrived one by one and stood around uncomfortably – the older brother first, an awkward man with the kind of gravely set face that I'm sure wouldn't have altered much if she were dead, a man who wanted to pace
with his arms folded. The mother and sister came next, sobbing women who seemed to want to smother me with affection by way of coffees and baked treats from the downstairs café for my role in her rescue. Then came the father, another stern man who took up residence at my side as a kind of silent tribute, following me like a long-faced dog when I went out to make phone calls and send texts.

When they took Fiona off to surgery, the family all stood around in the empty space her bed had occupied and talked about her, as though they'd not been able to in her unconscious presence. I learned she was an amateur mixed martial arts fighter who'd had a couple of bouts with other girls her size. That probably explained the skin under the nails, the blood all over the walls of the fire escape, patterns of hands and palms I'd glimpsed briefly in the torchlight as the paramedics attended to Fiona. It probably explained the thumping I'd heard, the scuffle while Fiona was being strangled, a hold she probably knew how to get out of – and was pretty close to getting out of when I arrived with Hooky. The mother berated the father about his aversion to Fiona taking up the sport, as though she'd always known that it would come in handy one day when a serial killer struck their daughter in the middle of a public running festival. He didn't reply. I guessed they were divorced.

All the while, as I was sitting there on the stool I'd nabbed from the nurse's station, Fiona's last words before she drifted into unconsciousness plagued me. No way that I tried to interpret the words made any sense. Hard face. Was she talking about the killer's face? It was a strange message if she meant to tell me what the killer looked like so that I could identify him or her in my suspect pool. I was looking for someone stern?
Emotionless? Someone old, deeply lined and weathered, like the hard-faced captains who came to visit headquarters every now and then to confer with Captain James? Fiona's father and brother had pretty hard faces. That didn't help. I'd be better off knowing for sure if the killer was male or female. What colour his or her hair was. What ethnicity, age.

Was she talking about her own face? She was touching her face when she said it. Was she telling me the assault she'd suffered at the hands of the killer wouldn't break her, wouldn't destroy her beauty – that she had a hard face? A strange sort of thing to say to your rescuing cop on the edge of impending darkness, if that was what she meant. From the pictures her mother had shown me, tattered things she drew from the depths of her purse, Fiona didn't have a hard face at all. She was a very pretty, soft-looking girl, an oval-faced beauty with long brunette curls she swept up in a high pony when she was fighting. She had big lips and a generous smile. There was nothing hard about her, I imagined, except for her right hook. I knew that from all the skin she'd taken off her knuckles in the struggle. She'd gone right down to bone.

The day dragged on. I ate myself into a pot-bellied, languid state. I needed something to do with my hands and people kept bringing me treats, everybody's favourite cat under the table lolling on its side, snapping up sardines. It was not a good situation. About four in the afternoon I was so frustrated with the ‘hard face' problem I was talking to myself, staring at the floor.

‘Hard face,' I murmured. ‘Hard … face.'

‘She's got the same plastic surgeon that Renee Kelly had after the bus accident,' Fiona's mother was telling her father. ‘He did such a good job. You'd never know.'

‘What bus accident?'

‘Bus cleaned her up off the side of the road while she was waiting on George Street. She was mincemeat, apparently.'

‘Who's Renee Kelly?'

‘The singer. Renee Kelly. God, you're old.'

Hard face. I turned my paper coffee cup around and around in my hands. It was stone cold. Hard face. Hard face. Fiona had had a lot of blood in her mouth. Maybe I'd only heard ‘hard face'. Maybe it was something else.

I felt my heartbeat quicken. I watched the couple beside me as they argued.

Hard race. Hard pace. Hard chase.

I needed to be systematic. Fiona's mother's sigh was like a steam train. I could almost see her breath.

Ard face. Bard face. Card face. Dard face. Eard Face. Fard face. Gard face. Hard face.

I chewed my fingernails. They tasted like butter.

Quard face. Rard face. Sard face.

Scarred face.

I stood. My coffee cup fell to the floor.

The voices came first. Eden's and what sounded like that of an old man, but Hooky could not be sure she wasn't dreaming. She opened one eye and caught a glimpse of the floor she was lying on before her vision blurred. Tiles. Mismatched, laid in a complicated pattern, bathroom tiles with wave patterns and broken pieces of kitchen tile, ornate burnt gold tiles with upraised filigree. She could see a pair of legs close by. The voices came to her ears in bumbling tones, the words tripping over each other, sliding on top of each other, impossible to discern in order.

‘… really, really stupid.'

Suddenly her hearing cleared, all at once, as though her ears had popped. She sighed through her nose, tried to moan through the duct tape on her lips. An animal came towards her – she felt the wetness of its nose in her ear, on her cheek, its hot breath against her nostrils. There were whispers brushing her eyelashes.

‘Jimmy,' the old man said.

The animal disappeared. She heard Eden sigh somewhere behind her. Hooky tried to move but her fingers were numb and strangely distant from where she expected them to be. They were at the small of her back and bunched together. She shifted her cheek against the cold tiles, the panic rising.

‘Asian would have been the very first thing I said,' the old man was complaining. ‘When you asked me
what did she look like
, I'd have said,
she was Asian
, straight up.'

‘I guess I don't think as racially as you do.'

‘Don't be smart.'

‘Give me a break,' Eden snapped. ‘We're looking for a petite woman with short blonde hair who knows who I am. This one turns up at my place and spills her guts. What did you expect me to do? Turn her away? You're telling me I should have expected there to be two –'

‘Where are her things?' the old man asked.

‘Here.'

Hooky heard something slide across the floor. She was losing consciousness again. The animal, whatever it was, was near her, one golden brown paw visible, tendons straining as the animal shifted.

‘Got any spare spots?' Eden asked.

‘I've always got something.'

Hooky slept. The sleep was so delicious, so welcoming, that it was only the pain in her neck and shoulders as she was dragged along the ground that drew her out of it. If she'd been carried, she might have slept through the stars overhead, a thousand pinpricks of light peering between smears of cloud and gloom. When she became aware of the T-shirt bunching up at her back and her arms sliding in the dirt, she was snapped into a consciousness so complete she could feel every injury she had endured in the last few hours, from the bruises on her legs she must have got when she was being loaded into the boot of Eden's car to marks on her wrists and ankles from the duct tape. Hooky twisted, tried to look around her, but all she saw
were strange black mountains too close to be real mountains, strangely shaped silhouettes with spikes, bumps, ridges. She was in some kind of wasteland. The sour smell of rotting garbage assaulted her. She looked down and saw Eden dragging her by the left cuff of her jeans.

Hooky kicked. Eden turned and grabbed both ankles and held on as the girl struggled.

‘Don't be stupid,' she said.

They stopped by a hole in the earth. Hooky squirmed, caught a glimpse of the old man leaning on a cane, a squat creature with scruffy grey hair that was growing out of a short back and sides. A terrifying creature hovered by his side, like the skeleton of a dog reanimated, the eyes bulbous and black. Hooky looked at the neat edge of the hole, the pile of trash lying beside it, the great yellow excavator squatting behind the pile ready to shove the tyres, bags, pieces of lumber into the black cavern dug into the earth. Hooky felt a wave of nausea ripple through her insides and shudder in her throat. Her face was burning, damp with terror, the sweat coming from nowhere and suddenly drenching her clothes, making dirt tickle on her cheeks and neck.

‘No, no, no, no, no,' she moaned. She tried to twist, to look up at Eden's face. Her moaning rose to a scream. ‘No! No! No!'

Eden grabbed Hooky's shoulder and rolled her into the pit.