Vodka Doesn't Freeze (7 page)

O
VER THE NEXT TWO HOURS
, Jill learned that Honey had run away from home twice by the age of ten. The second time she'd left, her mother had not even tried to find her, furious that her latest boyfriend spent more time watching Honey than her.

Watching Honey's every move was not the only thing her stepfather had done, though. At least three nights a week, he would stumble, drunk, into Honey's bedroom and perform oral sex on the frightened little boy. The other four days of the week, apparently cleansing himself of feelings of shame, the man would subject Honey to beatings and verbal abuse. When the nighttime visits escalated to sodomy, Honey fled, living in a park with other children who felt safer sleeping under a bridge than in their own beds.

One wet and freezing Sydney winter's night, Honey was huddled in the dirty stairwell of a supermarket, eating a barbecue chicken pilfered from a fat shopper's trolley. Her new friend Mia, a beautiful Vietnamese girl who looked around Honey's age but was actually fourteen, was sharing the meal. Honey had been wearing girl's clothes whenever she could for as long as she could remember and now that there was no one to interfere, her black hair was curling down almost to her shoulders. She knew that no one she met for the first time would think of her as anything other than the girl she believed she was.

'What would you say if I said there was somewhere we could stay tonight?' Mia had asked Honey, trying to wipe her chicken-greasy hands on the inside of her jeans so the stains wouldn't be so obvious. She glanced at Honey sideways from underneath her long, black fringe.

'I'd say what the hell are we doing here?' Honey laughed. 'Let's go. Now!' And she'd dragged Mia up from the filthy stairs on which they sat. Honey told Jill that she could tell even then that Mia was scared of the place they were going, but she didn't really care. Nowhere was safe anyway, right?

Mia and Honey had caught the train from Parramatta to Auburn and jumped down onto the tracks to avoid the ticket collectors. They'd scrambled up to the soggy street above the station platform and looked around. Kebab shops and amusement centres spilled coloured lights onto the wet roads, but the rain, and the dinner hour of 6 p.m., meant there were few people about.

'Um, I think it's this way,' Mia had said, holding onto Honey's cold hand as they made their way through the darkening streets. The shops alternated with houses and unit blocks now, and Mia eventually stopped in front of a block of flats, pushing the hood back from her sweatshirt, revealing her dark eyes. 'Shit,' she muttered, 'I know it's one of these.'

While they stood there shivering, a fat black car glided into the gutter in front of the units. A tall, skinny man with a scarred face and broken nose exited the front passenger's door. He threw them a hungry look, and opened the back door of the expensive car. Mia pulled at Honey's hand.

This was Honey's first sight of Mr Sebastian – a man in a dark suit. He stepped from the rear seat, pushing aside the thin man who was trying to offer him an umbrella. He smiled widely at Honey and Mia, his eyes on them from the moment the door had been cracked.

'What are you children doing out here in the rain?' he had asked them, covering the ground between them alarmingly quickly. 'Are you lost?'

Honey had expected Mia to make a typical smartarsed reply to this stranger, and was taken aback by her head-bowed silence and the white knuckled grip of her hand.

'Ah, I see it's little Mia,' he said when they didn't answer, 'and a friend. Lovely. Lovely,' he beamed, smiling down into Honey's face. 'I'm glad you've come to visit us, Mia,' he said, still looking at Honey. 'Let's get inside.'

The man had placed his big hand in the small of Honey's back, and marched them forwards towards the unit block. Honey noted that she and Mia were suddenly flanked on three sides by the men who'd got out of the car.

Although the apartment block was unprepossessing from the outside, the unit into which they were steered seemed amazing to Honey. The heavy front door opened into a wide room and Honey told Jill she'd later learned that the apartment had been rebuilt from the inside and took up the entire floor. Shiny white floors stretched towards several closed doors at the back of the large room. Huge potted palms filled the corners, and low leather lounges were wrapped around coffee tables and two huge television screens. A small boy in pyjamas was asleep on one of the lounges, sucking his thumb. Another boy, who looked about Honey's age, did not look up when the door opened, intent upon the joystick and video game in front of him. A white cat snaked out of a shining black kitchen and slinked around a corner before Honey could bend to pat her.

Honey and Mia stayed at the apartment for three days, helping themselves to food from the walk-in pantry and huge refrigerator, watching TV, and playing video games with Ethan and Andrew, the two boys sharing the unit. Honey slept curled up on one of the lounges with Mia and the white cat, occasionally waking when men came and went at odd hours.

On their second day at the unit, Mia had left with one of the men. She did not want to talk to Honey when she returned that evening, instead sitting with her knees under her chin, playing video games for hours.

Honey didn't see Mr Sebastian again until the morning of their fourth day. She was sick of being inside and she and Mia had decided to go shoplifting for clothes at Westfield in Parramatta.

She and Mia were trying to figure out how to open the front door of the unit when it was opened suddenly, sending her sprawling backwards. There hadn't even been a sound to indicate the heavy door was about to open. She looked up to see Mr Sebastian smiling down at her, offering her his big hand. The smile didn't reach his eyes.

'You
girls
going somewhere, are you?' he asked, as Honey scrambled to her feet, ignoring his hand. Neither she nor Mia said a word.

'I'm going to need you today, Honey, Mia, so I don't want you going anywhere you could get lost. I'm hosting a dinner party tonight, and I'll be requiring your assistance.'

He walked past them into the kitchen, filling a glass with filtered water from the specially fitted tap on the granite benchtop. He spoke rapidly in another language to the hook-nosed man who'd entered the unit behind him, then turned back to the girls.

'Jamaal has some clothes for you to wear tonight. You can try them on now, please.'

Later that night Honey discovered the price of a warm place to sleep and food whenever she wanted it. Within a month or so she learned that being 'nice' to Mr Sebastian's friends also meant that she was given enough money to buy herself new clothes, jewellery and make-up. For the first month, although disgusted by the groping, fondling old men she was expected to kiss and cuddle, she'd thought that she could tolerate these weekly evenings for the exchange.

One night, however, a flabby white man, older than most of the others, had tried to push his penis into her bottom. She had run from him into the small bathroom that was attached to the bedroom they were in. Crying, she'd locked the door and hoped the man would get tired of waiting and leave.

Within ten minutes, she'd stopped crying and was plucking her eyebrows in the mirror when the door was kicked in. Mr Sebastian slammed the back of his hand across her mouth, splitting her lip and loosening her tooth. Jamaal picked her cowering body up from the floor and held out her arm. The thin man was smiling with stained teeth as he clenched his thumb and forefinger around her tiny bicep to restrict the blood flow. Flicking her arm a few times, Mr Sebastian then slid a thin needle into a vein in the crease inside her elbow. Both men stood back as she vomited into the bathtub, and then, her sobs subsiding, they led her back into the bedroom and left her with the old man on the bed. None of the men spoke or looked at one another.

Honey spent the rest of the night in a dream-like state, and had been seeking that sensation ever since.

I
N THE PRE-DAWN GLOOM
, M
ERCY
groped for her Ventolin, heart thumping, tasting bile. The sweat was drying on her skin, but her pillow was still damp. Another one. Another nightmare.

She felt for a cigarette and put down the asthma inhaler. She saw her hands tremble in the flare of the lighter. As she dragged in smoke she felt her heart slow. Stupid really; she knew nicotine was a stimulant, told her patients that every day, but she felt her nerves settle slightly nevertheless.

There was always so much blood; that was the problem. She'd have to find a way to do it without all the mess. Not for the first time, she pictured a huge gas chamber, herding them all in and letting them go to sleep in there.

She took a final shuddering drag of her cigarette and stubbed it out. She closed her eyes and settled back into the pillows, though she knew sleep would not come again tonight.

U
NTIL IT WAS RIGHT
behind her, Jill didn't notice the patrol truck that combed the sand every morning at Maroubra Beach. The unshaven driver motioned to her from his cabin to move over. She must have been running up and down the sands for more than an hour now; she realised that it was almost completely light.

Other features of the morning also began to register – she could hear seagulls fighting and playing, dive-bombing the waves. She saw some sandy adolescent surfers struggling, still half-asleep, into wetsuits, and an elderly Asian man was up near the pavilion, performing tai chi. She suddenly became aware that her thighs were trembling with exhaustion and she dropped onto the wet sand, her chest heaving.

She sat there for a while as her breathing slowed, and looked down at her raw, peeling hands. After she'd left Honey's unit yesterday she'd gone back to her own and embarked on her most obsessive cleaning frenzy in years. She'd ignored her mum's calls through the speaker of her answering machine, and her door buzzer sounding twice. The white-eyed girl from her dreams was haunting her while she was awake now, and even kicking the bag until her lungs were burning didn't distract her from her memories of herself in the basement.

Twice she'd gone to her large stainless steel refrigerator and rested her head against the cool exterior, her fingers on the freezer's handle.

'Open it,' the white-eyed girl had called inside her head. 'Make it stop. Please.'

Jill knew that if she'd opened the freezer at that point she would have remained standing there barefoot in her underwear until she'd drained the 750ml bottle of vodka that was hidden right at the back. The bottle had been unopened in her freezer for ten years, moving house with her three times. Her sister, Cassie, forced by their father to help her move once, had found the bottle and cracked the seal.

'Well, the night's not a total loss, then,' she'd giggled, holding the bottle aloft, while with her other hand she'd removed a carton of grapefruit juice from the fridge. 'Who'd-a-thought you'd have vodka in the house, sis?' she said, kicking the fridge door shut with her foot.

In one gliding move, Jill had removed the bottle from Cassie's hand, opened the freezer door and returned it, before her sister had even fully registered what was happening. Cassie had looked down at her empty hand.

'Hey!' she'd sounded shaken. 'What was that? Don't do that karate shit on me.' She flicked her hair back from her face. 'God you're weird, Jill. If we're not allowed to drink in your temple, why do you keep that bottle here?'

Jill couldn't explain it, but she knew that if she had one sip of the colourless liquid, her carefully maintained world would slide into the abyss. She wouldn't be able to stop herself a second time.

Now, sitting in the foam at the edge of the ocean, Jill wiped her surf-wet hands across her face, tasting salt. She'd had little sleep, but she had a lot to do today and needed to get going. She stripped to her bikini and ignored the surfers' calls as she strode out into the waves, letting the fizzing water wake her fully.

Twenty minutes later, she jogged out of the water, smiling.

'I'm just not seeing it, J. I really don't see how she could've killed three men. Not like that, anyway.' Scotty and Jill were on their way to speak with the last group of parents who could have had an interest in seeing David Carter dead – the last group they were aware of, anyway. 'I mean, that MO is not really the way that women kill men.'

Jill sighed and stared ahead, eyes on the road. Scotty had voiced her own doubts about Mercy being involved in the murders. She took one hand from the wheel and rubbed at some skin peeling from her sunburnt nose. She knew that female serial murderers were rare, and that those who existed usually used poison or a firearm.

'I know. I know that. But, Scotty, the three deaths have got to be connected, and she's linked in some way to all three,' she said. 'And to be honest, no, I don't really think she killed them, but there's something really odd about her lately, you know? She seems . . . well, a bit cracked.'

Scotty turned sideways to view Jill's tanned profile. Her white-blonde hair looked tousled, not as in place as usual. He took in her set jaw and the cold sore on her lower lip. He turned his eyes back to the road when he caught his own face staring back at him through the mirrored lenses of her aviator sunglasses.

'What?' she asked, voice flat.

'Nothing,' he said, and then paused. 'It's just that you're looking a bit tightly wound yourself lately. You're not sleeping well again, are you?'

Silence from the driver's seat.

'Are you eating, Jill?'

She focused on the road.

'Right. Well. Anyway,' said Scotty, giving up, looking down at some notes in a folder on his lap. 'Let's go through what we know about these cases. If we're going to convince Andreessen that they're connected, we're going to have to find more to go on.

'Okay – George Manzi, AKA George Marks,' he continued, 'found in a car with another guy on Elizabeth Bay Road at the back of the Cross.'

'The other guy they found with him – do they know his name yet?' Jill asked, changing lanes to take the right turn that led to Bondi Junction.

'Yep. Jamaal Mahmoud, found unconscious in the back seat, single blow to the back of the head. He's still recovering – they've got him in the Brain Injury Unit over at Prince of Wales.' 'What'd you say his name was?' A bubble of recognition floated up from the tangle of thoughts in Jill's mind. 'Mahmoud. Jamaal Mahmoud.'

'Jamaal . . .'

'Yep. A hooker found them last Sunday morning. Manzi was in the driver's seat, but he wasn't doing much driving when he died.' Scotty read from the notes in his lap – he had an updated version of the file Jill had read a couple of days ago. 'His pants were round his ankles. You reckon he was getting serviced by the killer?'

'Mmm. Maybe, but what would Mahmoud have been doing?'

'Watching? Waiting for his turn? Who knows?'

Jill was distracted. Where had she heard that name?

'Harris and Jardine found no sign that entry to the vehicle had been forced, or even that they'd fought the attacker off,' Scotty told her. 'They've guessed that Manzi and Mahmoud let the killer into the car with them. Also says here that Mahmoud was probably drugged. Hospital tests found Special K in his system, but too much of it for just a night on the town. It could've been an accidental OD, but they reckon that amount would've knocked anyone out.'

This information was new to Jill. The man in the back seat had not yet been identified when she'd read the file. So maybe the killer had drugged Mahmoud. Why? It would make sense to wait for the drug to take effect on the man in the back seat before striking – it would be difficult to fight two men off within the confines of a car. Eight holes had been punched through Manzi's skull with a claw hammer, the left side of his temple caving in completely; the killer would have been covered in blood and brains. The killer had then struck the man in the back seat. This awkward position, or a passer-by, had probably saved his life. He'd been hit just once.

A car horn sounded behind them, and Jill noticed that the lights were green. She accelerated forward.

'Jamaal!' she exclaimed, suddenly remembering. 'What if it's the same Jamaal?'

Earlier that morning she had briefly told Scotty about her visit with Honey. He'd asked first thing about the girl who'd come in to report a rape. Half the squad room – the male half – had told him about her. Now Jill filled him in a little more on Honey's past, telling him about Mr Sebastian and his driver Jamaal and their private parties in Auburn.

'We gotta turn left back there, Jill – where are you going? I told you I should've driven.'

Jill cursed and pulled into a driveway. She'd have to do a U-turn.

She decided that tomorrow she was going to see Honey. It couldn't hurt to take her on a visit to the Prince of Wales Hospital, check out the patients in the Brain Injury Unit.

Jill shaved her legs in the bath that evening. She knew she was too thin, but she felt vaguely pleased with the muscles of her thighs, stomach, arms. At least her body felt strong. She rested her head against the back of the bath, let the steam relax her. Interviewing the Kaplans that afternoon had been awful.

The glare of the late summer day had respectfully kept its distance from verdant Woollahra. Red brick and sandstone mansions rested sedately in the shade of huge Moreton Bay fig trees. Jill had removed her sunglasses at the last moment when they made their way up the flower-lined path of the Kaplans' three-storey home.

Carly Kaplan was eight, and captain of her softball team, when she begged her mother for horse-riding lessons at Centennial Park. Her parents, Marie and William, gave in quickly, using the two hours each Sunday morning to take a walk and have coffee in the park while their daughter rode, under the instruction of a man who'd advertised in an Eastern Suburbs community newspaper. When Carly had wanted to quit the lessons five weeks later, however, William had put his foot down.

'We've paid for six months,' he'd told her, 'and you can't just go from one activity to another without seeing things through.' He told Jill and Scotty hollowly that he'd been determined not to let their children take their life of privilege for granted.

Marie Kaplan had been alarmed by her daughter's change in demeanour that year, but because Carly had seemed to lose enthusiasm for most things, she had not honed in on the riding lessons as the source of her misery. Besides, she'd tried to reason with herself later, Carly's best friend, Brianna, also took the lessons, and the girls were out in the fresh air. It had seemed the right thing to do to encourage her to continue.

But the girls hadn't spent all of their time in the fresh air. Their instructor, David Carter, had told them that he had to take some photos for their horse-riding licences. Marie and William learned years later that Carter had taken the girls into a disused cricket stand in the grounds of the park. Under the isolated bleachers he'd encouraged them to dress in their riding clothes and later fairy outfits, snapping away as they changed and posed, giggling, in the costumes.

Face grey, eyes dead, William Kaplan told Jill and Scotty that even when Brianna had quit the lessons he had insisted that Carly see out the six-month contract with the riding instructor. His wife stared at the carpet as he spoke.

Under the bleachers one week, David Carter had convinced Carly that he could kill her mother any time he wanted to. He told Carly where Marie Kaplan shopped, the name of her best friend and their next-door neighbour. He knew where Carly's mum swam three mornings a week, and that she volunteered at the school canteen twice a month. If Carly ever told anyone what they did under here, he'd told her, he would kill her mother before anyone could do anything to save her. And it would be all Carly's fault.

Her parents recounted how Carly's marks had declined steadily from that year. She showed no respect at school any more, especially for male teachers, and she became a nightmare at home – harassing her sisters constantly and lashing out in fury when chastised by her parents. Their formerly quiet home was constantly ringing with the sound of Carly swearing and slamming doors. When Carly was eleven, Marie Kaplan found cigarettes in her daughter's backpack. At thirteen, Marie and William had been called to Carly's new high school, enduring an hour with an excruciatingly embarrassed principal who finally choked out that Carly had been caught having sex behind the gymnasium. Later that month they were back at the school to take her home, suspended for arriving back to class drunk after recess; vomit in her hair. School counsellors and changing schools twice hadn't helped at all.

It wasn't until Carly's fourteenth birthday, after yet another screaming row, that Marie and William Kaplan had found out what David Carter had done to their child. A sobbing Marie told Jill and Scotty how she had walked into the bathroom to find Carly slimy with her own blood, razorblade in hand, carving at her thighs. In the emergency department at midnight she and Carly's father had learned that their daughter had been self-mutilating for two years, and that this was a commonly observed behaviour in child sexual abuse victims.