by Candice Fox
I snatched the folder from him. His wide hand thundered on my shoulder.
“I’m just giving you a hard time.”
I ignored him and he wandered back to the group of owls. He jerked his thumb towards me and said something and the owls stared. Eden was watching my face. I scratched my neck as the heat crept down my chest.
“Fucking jerk.” I shook my head.
“Yeah.” She smiled, a full-size, bright white flash. “He’s good at that.”
2
I found out Eric was Eden’s brother minutes before we got called away from the station to a crime scene. I don’t know why the resemblance hadn’t struck me before. They shared the same bold dark features, the same contained power and malice. Bored and powerful—misfit siblings. Eric looked wilder than Eden. I couldn’t decide who was older. She sat in the driver’s seat beside me, both hands on the wheel, chewing on her bottom lip as though she had heavy things on her mind. She seemed like someone holding on to a terrible trauma, something that stained her days and picked at her insides at night. Secrets and lies. Eric struck me as the life of the party, uncontrollable and unpredictable in turns.
The traffic was at a standstill on Parramatta Road almost directly out from headquarters on Little Street, heading in towards the distant blue outline of the city. We crept across an intersection and stopped again outside a Greek restaurant where a young man was scraping spray-painted snowflakes from the windows, months late. A giant red and yellow sign hanging over a DVD rental place asked if I wanted longer lasting sex, in bold typeface lit up by an already blazing sun. The Greek boy’s father came out and hustled him to work faster, gesturing at the Thai restaurants wedged on either side with their immaculately polished windows.
“So, a drinker and a serial marrier.” Eden smiled suddenly, as though only just remembering. “No wonder your partner necked herself.”
“Give me a break.”
“Don’t let Eric get to you. He’s just having a dig.”
I struggled not to burst into profanities. I knew that being bothered by what he had done would only make things worse. So I’d been DUI-ed. Who hadn’t? So it had been on the way to work. I’d had a rough year.
“Working with your brother. That’s a little incestuous, isn’t it?”
She smiled. I’d expected a laugh. She shifted lanes, flicked her blinker with her little finger like she’d owned the car for years.
“We’re never partnered,” she offered. “Conflict of interest, you know.”
We pulled up at a small marina on Watsons Bay, east of the harbor and between the Navy base and the parkland. The street was lined with rendered pastel-colored apartment blocks, with the obligatory banana chairs on the balconies and striped beach towels hanging artfully on chrome racks. The local butcher’s shop advertised garlic and rosemary sausages on a chalkboard, eighteen bucks a kilo. Everyone, it seemed, knew the dress code: boat shoes and cargo pants, men and women alike. The change in scenery was jarring. What seemed like minutes earlier we had been driving past the above-shop brothels of North Strathfield, through the shadowed shopping districts of Edgecliff. Now, for some reason, sausages were ten dollars dearer and wet exotic plants brushed the windows of the car as we parked. I sighed and got out, feeling unwelcome.
Eden stood by the car, polishing her Ray-Bans on the edge of her shirt and glaring coolly at the dozens of apartments at the edge of the road. Boaties locked off from their yachts and gawkers from the surrounding parklands were perched on the hill, holding their hands up against the white glare of the morning and ignoring the insistent tugging of a variety of compact dogs on leads. Poop bags jangled on key-chains. They spotted a couple of homicide detectives straight away, nudging each other and pointing. Yes, things just got interesting. Grab a latte and settle in for the long haul. Some journalists snapped shots of Eden talking to a security guard. They seemed to miss me.
At the epicenter of the gathering of cop cars and paramedics was a lone young man wrapped in a grey blanket, sitting on the edge of an open ambulance. The overkill meant something god-awful had happened to him. I stood to the side, studying the man’s downturned face and desperate eyes, and let Eden go in. People made way for her. I was surprised no one wanted to accidentally brush against her, try to soak up some of that power and beauty. They seemed to know her, seemed to possess some prior knowledge of her dangerous nature.
“Go ahead.” She flicked her chin at the man in the blanket.
“I told that cop in the hat I didn’t wanna make a statement,” the man trembled, nodding towards a chief standing smoking by the gates. “You got what you need. I wanna go now. I wanna get outta here.”
I was beginning to notice bumps and scrapes on the man, blood matted in his hair. His ankles were rubbed raw and his left foot was splinted. He jogged his right foot up and down, sniffling and letting his eyes dance over his surroundings.
“One more time.” Eden slid her notebook out of her pocket. “Then we can think about letting you go.”
There were track marks on the man’s arms, purple and wet as he ran a hand through his damp hair. He seemed to want to pick at an old sore that wouldn’t heal on his left cheekbone. He glanced at me. I leaned against the ambulance, my arms folded across my chest.
“I was up on the road.” The junkie shuddered, nodding towards the boat ramp leading down to the marina. “I was trying to get a ride back to Bondi where I’m staying with mates. But none of these posh fuckheads would stop. It was maybe . . . three in the morning. I saw a guy backing a van up through the gates, pulling it alongside a boat. The gates were open so I thought I’d, like, see if I could slip in, you know? I was gonna set off by myself down the marina but I decided to keep watching the guy with the van.”
“You were going to roll him?” I asked.
“Maybe. I was thinking about it. I was trying to make out what he had. I reckoned whatever he was shifting at that hour might be good for me. Whatever he had was locked down tight in one of those nice shiny steel toolboxes you see tradesmen carrying on their SUVs—about a meter long. He must’ve been a big bloke because he was carrying it lengthways across his chest with an arm on either end. He set it on the boat and went round the van. I waited to see him come out the other side but he didn’t. I waited for ages and he just didn’t come. I was just going to shift around the back of the trees to see where he was when I hear this massive crack and then there was just nothing.”
The junkie reached up and touched the back of his skull, feeling stitches. Eden stood with her boot on the folded ramp at the back of the ambulance, watching the man’s eyes.
“I woke up on the deck of the boat with a big chain around my ankles.” The junkie twitched, scratching at his stubbled beard. “I didn’t think we’d left the marina, the boat was so still. It was getting light so I must have been out of it for ages. There was blood everywhere. I rolled over and saw him shoving the toolbox towards the edge of the deck. I followed the chain attached to my ankles and saw that it led to the box.”
“Christ.” One of the cops behind me laughed. I looked over my shoulder at him. I’d forgotten about the crowd around us, all street cops with their arms folded, cigarettes between their teeth. The water beyond the pier sparkled between them. I squinted.
“I went over.” The junkie trembled, his right leg jogging faster, up and down like a piston. “I hit the water.”
The junkie in the blanket burst into tears. The cops around me twisted and looked at each other and shook their heads and scoffed and laughed. Eden was perfectly still, her sharp face resting in the palm of her hand, her elbow on the knee of her jeans. Breathing, long and slow. The junkie swiped at his eyes with a skeletal hand. Long fingernails. Before he could resume his story, one of the cops piped up:
“So how the fuck are you sitting here, Houdini?”
The junkie tossed an evil look at the men and women around him.
“Broke my foot when I was a little kid,” he murmured. “Clean across the middle—dancing.”
“Yeah, dancing,” the junkie sneered. “I was fucking dancing in one of those primary school talent shows. I jumped off the stage and landed on it wrong and snapped it right in half behind the toes. It’s been off ever since. When I was going down I was pulling and tugging and struggling with the chain. As I got deeper I just reached down and broke it again.”
Everyone looked at the splint running up the side of the junkie’s ankle. A low moan of appreciation went up from the bodies around me.
“You must be the slipperiest fucker alive.”
“Hallelujah. You been touched by a goddamn angel, son.”
“You got a lot of will to live for someone who spends all day jacking themselves with deadly chemicals,” another cop said.
The junkie wiped dried blood from his nose onto the back of his hand.
“Thanks, mate.” He scowled. “Thanks for that.”
“No problem.”
“Okay, okay,” I cut in. “Back to the story. Did he see you when you came up?”
The junkie bristled. Eden was watching me, expressionless.
“When I got up he was long gone,” he said, staring at the concrete in front of him. “I got picked up by a couple of guys in a small boat and brought back here maybe an hour later. Was too far out to swim and I couldn’t use my foot. I thought I was going to get my arse eaten by something. I thought I was really gone, you know?”
He sobbed once, hiding his face in his fist. There was silence all around us.
“So what are we looking for?” I sighed, taking out my own notebook. “A man, a boat, a silver box.”
“I can’t help you with the descriptions,” the junkie said. “I tried already. He was wearing a jacket zipped up to his nose and a fucking hat on top. The boat was white. I don’t know nothing else about it. Big. White. Boat-shaped. You want to press me about it, go ahead. That cop in the hat already tried.”
“What about the silver box?” I asked, putting my foot up on the ramp so I could balance the notepad on my knee. “It have a name on it? Anything written on the side?”
“No,” the junkie shook his head. “It was plain, like all the others.”
“All the others?” Eden asked, her voice ringing out so much finer and smoother than those around her, like a birdsong. “What do you mean, all the others?”
The junkie wrapped his arms around himself and stared at the ground, his lip trembling like he wanted to cry again.
“When I was going down I had time to look around me,” he gasped, squeezing his eyes shut. “The morning light was cutting through the water. There were others down there on the bottom of the ocean. Heaps of them.”
Blood had soaked into the sheet around her head, there were bloody prints on the cotton. Hades unwound the duct tape holding the sheet and rolled her out onto the floor. Tape around her wrists and face, sticking in her hair. She howled as he ripped it off her mouth, long and loud and full of fear.
“There’s another one,” he said to himself, hearing his voice tremble as it never had before while his fingers fumbled with the tape at her eyes. “He said there was another one.”
Hades left the girl on the floor and ran out of the house, his fingers slick with the blood that had coated her face. He smeared it on the keys as he tugged them from the ignition of the beaten-up red Ford, on the trunk as he shoved them into the lock. The little girl tottered drunkenly out of the house behind him, her long dark hair lit gold by the light of the kitchen. She watched soundlessly as he opened the trunk and dragged the other bundle of sheets from the darkness, her eyes lifeless orbs in a mask of red.
“Oh please,” Hades heard himself murmuring. “Come on. Please.”
The head of this body was soaked through with blackness. He pulled the damp sheets away and cradled the broken skull in his fingers. A face carved from onyx. Gaping mouth and sunken eyes. The man pushed his fingers into the slimy neck of the child. There was nothing. Warmth and stillness.
“Come on, boy. Come on.”
Hades didn’t beg. Not to men, anyway. He’d begged plenty of racehorses in his time. Begged greyhounds zipping across static screens. He was begging a boy now. Begging him to live. He bent his stubbled mouth to the boy’s wet lips. The girl watched, her hands gripping the front of her dress. Hades pinched the boy’s tiny nose and chin in his huge fingers, watched the little chest inflate and deflate like a wet balloon. As he pumped the small birdcage chest with his palms he looked up at the girl, watched her shaking in the light from the kitchen without really seeing her. The seconds lagged on. Peacocks made from twisted pieces of an old car stood and watched the happenings before the house. A bronze wolf howled in silence. In the kitchen, the stranger’s blood made a thick dark pool on the linoleum.
The body in his fingers bucked and coughed. Hades shook the boy roughly and thumped his back.
“That’s it,” he growled. “Come back now. Come on back.”
The boy vomited, gurgled, fell limp again. Hades knelt over him in the gravel and dust, his heart raging as it had not done in some time. He reached down and wiped the strands of matted black hair from the massive wound in the side of the boy’s head. Clotted flesh and frayed skin, the beginnings of bone underneath. Hades looked up at the sky and hated the stranger. Hated him over and over as the boy slept.
The girl followed Hades as he carried the boy into the kitchen. The child was so much smaller in the light, white skin between ink black and ruby splashes and streaks. He lay the ruined doll out on the table. Hades looked down at the boy, inspecting him like a butcher with a slab of meat, noticing the bulbous joints where cartilage strained and contracted, the limp feet and curled hands. He turned and looked at the sagging body of the stranger in the chair, and then his eyes fell to the girl who stood close by, her hands by her sides, her eyes locked on his face. Breathing, thinking, sorting through frantic voices in his head. For a moment the man and the child simply watched each other and wondered what was to come next. Hades seemed to decide what it was and reached out, encircling her thin arm in his massive fingers.
“Come with me,” he murmured, pulling her forward. She let herself be led. In the cramped hall between the bedroom and the living room Hades rose up onto his toes and reached over the top of the ornate plastering that lined the wall, punching a hidden button. The wall sunk and slid away, folding into itself seamlessly. He pushed the girl into the tiny room. She glanced about her at the shelves that lined the three walls, the stacks of cash and dismantled weapons, the locked boxes and safes, the dozens of passports and forged birth certificates lying in neat piles.
And then she turned back to him. He reached up and pressed the button again.
“No!” she gasped, holding her hands out as the hidden door slid shut. “No! No!”
She screamed. Hades felt his face burn as the door closed and her fists began pounding on the other side.
“It’s only temporary,” he grimaced. “I’m sorry. It’s only temporary.”
He was speaking more to himself than to her. He could barely hear himself over her cries.
3
Eden coordinated everything from the shade of a blue plastic tarp strung up between two paddy wagons, leaning with her long legs crossed against the edge of a makeshift desk. She held a map of the marina in her hand and with her fingernail she drew a line around the boundary where she wanted the place cordoned off, her eyes lowered with the unenthusiastic appreciation of someone reading a tabloid magazine. The junkie was stripped, wiped down and photographed, and the ambulance where he’d been sitting driven off to the lab. The junkie himself she had driven away for a proper forensic examination. He put up a fuss but she ignored him. Her directions had a calm finality to them as though to defy them would be an act of idiocy.
Within an hour the barricade at the entrance to the marina was packed with spectators. Nothing will make strangers talk to each other more than a good scandal. The place was abuzz with gawkers leaning, murmuring, pointing, folding t
heir arms and predicting. Helicopters whumped overhead, winding a circuit up and down the coastline. Four patrol boats were being prepared to deploy divers in selected spots around the bay.
I stood by the desk and sipped a coffee someone had brought in on a cardboard tray. I felt like mentioning to Eden that there was little chance the junkie had been in his right mind when he saw the other boxes, chained as he was to a weighted toolbox and sailing towards the bottom of the ocean in the dim morning light. What he’d thought he’d seen were probably rocks, submarine pipes, crab cages or illegally dumped waste. I didn’t say anything though. Eden hadn’t consulted me on the coordination process and so I was happy to let her make a fool of herself if it all went pear-shaped. She folded her arms and stared out at the hive of activity around her like I wasn’t standing there. I cracked a couple of jokes and she ignored me. I could see the cool arrogance of her brother in her then.
One of the technicians, a young Filipino guy with acne scars on his cheeks, brought a laptop over and dumped it beside Eden. I recognized him as one of the frightened owls from back at headquarters. He ignored me as he opened the computer and clacked away, adjusting a wireless modem and linking up to a satellite service.
“What have you got?” I asked, moving around behind him. His shoulders seemed to lift up around his ears as I spoke, as though he were bracing for a blow. Eden squeezed in beside me and the technician shivered.
“I’ve got a link to the main patrol boat’s computer,” the owl murmured uncertainly. “They’re going to feed us the diver’s vision. The coast guard has spoken to the two guys who picked up the witness and got their GPS position. Calculating current, drift and the estimated time he was in the water, we’ve got a pretty good idea of where he was dumped. We’re going to put a team of divers down and see if they can locate the boxes. We’ve tried to pick them up on sonar but it’s not precise enough at that depth.”
The owl pulled up a GPS map of the coastline beyond Watsons Bay. The sea was illustrated in a pristine, depthless blue. There were animated arrows and markers on the screen, ten or twelve vessels depicted with Xs and triangles. I watched the tech click away at the black laptop keys. In minutes he was showing us heavily delayed muted vision from a camera that was strapped, it seemed, to a diver’s helmet. The screen showed a blurry shot of the patrol boat deck with the commander of the team giving a briefing as other divers suited up around the one with the camera.
