by Candice Fox
“I’m not suggesting anything. If I was trying to ruffle your feathers, you’d know about it. Everyone has problems with their step-kids. I’m just trying to get a picture.”
“They were both pretty good about it,” Derek sighed. “They were young enough that it didn’t really matter. Courtney gave me some a few years ago about not being her father but . . . I guess that’s pretty normal.”
“Did you notice anyone suspicious hanging around your neighborhood or your house in the days before Courtney’s disappearance?” I asked. “Did you have any strange phone calls?”
“No.”
“My colleagues tell me you guys moved into the area just a few months ago,” Eden said, looking at her notes. “The girls started at a new school. Anyone at the school you’re having trouble with?”
“No, no one.” Eliza sniffed. “Everyone’s been lovely. All the neighbors . . .”
“We answered this sort of stuff with the missing persons people,” Derek murmured.
“I know. We have to ask again, in case anything new comes to mind.”
“Courtney’s blood type was O negative,” Eden said carefully. “Which is reasonably rare. If you had to make a list of people who knew that, who do you think you’d start with?”
“Jesus. I don’t know.”
“Try,” Eden said. “As best you can. Take your time.”
Eden passed her notepad to Eliza. Eliza took one look at it and rose from her seat, walking drunkenly into the kitchen.
“I’ll make tea,” she said. “We should have tea.”
“That’s rough,” I said. We were in the car. The rain had cleared and the afternoon sun was blazing red between the billboards advertising new apartment buildings over fenced-off sandy wastelands. I’d offered to drive but Eden said she liked it. I could understand what she was talking about. Concentrating on the road. Avoiding hazards. Analyzing and predicting the actions of others. Anything but the thought of your child suffering. Anything but the thought of the years ahead without her.
“For the money or for the love. What do you reckon?” Eden asked eventually.
I thought about the question. How much was our killer making by offering a new life to patients staring down the barrel of oblivion? Was he doing it because he wanted to profit from the suffering of others? Or because there was a certain thrill in deciding who gets the chance to live and who slowly wastes away in the hospital waiting for the stroke or car accident that would bring a new kidney, a new heart, a new set of lungs?
“He gets a kick out of this,” I concluded. “He has to. There are twenty bodies that we know of so far. You don’t do something that many times for the money. You don’t do something that many times because it’s a chore.”
“I wonder if they knew, the recipients,” Eden mused. “I wonder what he told them. He could easily have spun some lie to make the whole deal more appealing. If you were dying and I told you I had a kidney that I was shipping in from some death-row inmate overseas, would you take it? I mean, it has to go somewhere.”
“I don’t know.”
“You’ve been on the waiting list for six months. Ten months. Two years. You’ve been bedridden for two years.”
“I’d have to think about it,” I sighed. We passed a billboard advertising end-of-fiscal-year clearances in bold red letters. Prices slashed!
Neither of us spoke.
Jason stood in the field by the boarded-up house and looked at the mountains. A storm was creeping towards him from deep in the dusty West, and though he couldn’t see it, its earth-stirring smell had reached him an hour before. He had gone out into the long grass to wait for it.
Storms always reminded Jason of his father, whose return from the office each day had been very much like the stomach-thumping power of Mother Nature. The bright heat of midday always made the little house on Greendale Road seem like a dark cave because his mother, a slave to the drowsiness the heat produced, would pull down the blinds and shut the doors and windows, turn out the lights and let the quiet soothe her into a doze. The temperature dropped, the silence came, and he and his slobbering, bumbling little brother Sam played in silence in those afternoon hours as the pressure slowly mounted. His mother woke each afternoon at four and busied herself with preparations for his father’s arrival, spinning and spinning around the house in faster and ever-tightening circles, crackling with energy, brushing and scrubbing and polishing things. When his car rumbled into the driveway she would stand with the two boys at the end of the hall and listen to his footsteps getting louder. The adult Jason remembered these times with terror and glee as he stood looking at the black mountains, the white light snapping between their jagged tops and the dark ocean blue of the clouds above.
He stood in the field and remembered the perfect storm, one of the last storms before he and his father left the house on Greendale Road. It had come from another of Jason’s experiments. Jason was just about finished with his games with the birds and their strange, wordless marriages in the wild. But he was still thinking about the bonds between creatures. He’d been inspired to find out more about the bond between mother and child when he discovered the deflated body of an infant brown dove at the bottom of a tree by the lake, its gnarled claws and hollowed eyes crawling with ants, its thin leather skin receding from the tiny skull. Jason looked up and spied the nest, and almost in the same instant heard the chirping and pipping of the other babies in their bowl of sticks and mud and feathers. He was amazed. What was different about this baby that it had been forced to suffer such a cruel fate? How did the mother, who he was sure could feel and share love, switch off her love for this offspring so completely? He walked home, carrying the tiny dried carcass in his hands, placed it carefully on a tissue atop his tiny wooden desk and began to read.
The night of the greatest storm had begun like any other. The darkness of the afternoon descending over the house, his mother’s bare feet crossed at the end of the tightly made bed, the quiet tumble of wooden blocks on the polished floorboards as Sam played. Jason watched Sam for a long time—the clumsy grip of his pudgy fingers, the translucent string hanging from his dimpled chin. Jason knew there was something different about Sam. Something weak. His mother had told him that Sam had to be treated gentler than Jason’s other little cousins because Sam wasn’t as strong, that he hadn’t grown as well, that something had gone wrong in Mummy’s tummy when Sam was in there waiting to be born. Sam was different from the other babies. Jason watched Sam and wondered. Why didn’t his mother push Sam out? Did she want to? Was something stopping her? Was pushing Sam out the natural thing to do?
As usual Jason’s mother woke at four o’clock and began her polishing and scrubbing and spinning around, pushing open the windows, wiping the countertops, fussing with the couch cushions and muttering to herself. She fixed Jason’s collar and combed his hair and wiped his cheeks like she always did, sighing with annoyance at the dirt on his palms and the leaves in his shirt. Then she looked around for Sam. Father had come home and she wasn’t ready, and the two of them got to talking quickly and loudly and then to shouting. Jason watched, curious. His mother started crying and his father erupted, and soon enough the two of them were screaming and running around to all the rooms in the house, their voices loud as thunder. As they ran out into the yard calling Sam’s name, Jason followed, his head cocked, trembling with excitement as his experiment unfolded.
They’d never find Sam.
9
It was my turn to pick Eden up the next morning. I hadn’t slept. My night had been filled with steel toolboxes, with scalpels and needles. The junkie had yelled at me all night. I just reached down and broke it. I just reached down and broke it. The kind of desperation that would cause a man to break his own bones. I knew that as I slept. More than once I woke sweating and listened to a storm rolling overhead. It had been a while since a case had touched me like this.
I pulled up in front of Eden’s apartment block. It was a nondescript redbrick place that mig
ht have been one of those ultra-trendy reclaimed and fitted-out factories. I could see through round windows on the wide street that all the top floors had lofts, and all the beams inside looked exposed. The old loading dock on the ground floor had been turned into a tiny café with only stools to sit on and everything written in chalk. Eden peered out at me briefly from a set of balcony doors on the third floor. I raised a hand in hello but she didn’t answer. It was while I was searching the emptiness behind her that I noticed the painting on her wall. I lifted my eyes to the circular window above her and spied a couple more paintings and something covered in a paint-stained sheet. A grin spread over my face.
Finally, one of her secrets.
She opened the apartment door and jolted as she saw me standing there. She had a short black military-style jacket on over a black blouse, tailored jeans that hugged everything. She swept her long hair off her shoulders briskly.
“You didn’t have to come up, Frank.”
“Show me your studio.” I smiled.
Eden froze, giving me one of those brief obligatory looks in the eye.
“I don’t . . .”
“Come on, Eden. I can see it from the street. Share this secret with me and I promise you one in return.”
“Frank.” She lifted her shoulders as she breathed, let them drop. “Don’t.”
“I’m not backing down.” I folded my arms. “I’ll stand here all morning.”
Something flitted across her face. Rage. Shame. I’d caught her naked fantasies laid bare and I wasn’t letting it go. She covered her emotion with one of her crooked smiles and a roll of her eyes. I didn’t care. If this was what it was going to take to know something, anything, about her, then I was willing to force her a little.
Despite the run-down exterior, the apartment was large and modern. Polished hardwood floors met vast white walls where she had hung a great number of paintings, giving each the appropriate light and space to allow it a world of its own. Some of the factory’s original structures—strips of iron and bolts up the walls—had been left and painted over. A black leather lounge set hugged a huge plasma television set against one corner. Bloodred curtains hung against the balcony doors.
“Wow.”
She sighed and tried to figure out what to do with her hands as she stood impatiently by the door. I hesitated before heading for the twisting iron stairwell to the loft floor. There was too much to see. The paintings on the walls were like little universes, cut off and independent from each other. All of them in dark thick oils and pigments, hollow faces obscured by dream. A burning farmhouse. A man standing on a seaward-facing cliff. A small girl playing with a black stuffed toy dog in a room with bloody walls.
“How could you not tell me about this?” I scoffed.
“You’re not into art, are you? Art is a very personal thing.”
I tentatively touched the base of a polished wooden statue, two naked warriors caught in battle. One was strangling the other, trying to drive a blade into his ribs. I climbed the stairs to the studio. Gold Spanish horses rearing, their necks twisting, teeth bared. One wall was black and covered in brush marks and smears where Eden scuffed her brushes clean as she worked. The effect was a colorful vortex swirling in on itself. I examined the paintings silently, feeling I wouldn’t have enough time to appreciate them all. A stocky, thickly built man welding a piece of iron, live sparks hitting his shoulders and neck, spraying into the air. A thin black-haired teenage boy staring at a mirror, reaching out. Some of the paintings were of seemingly ordinary things but they each had a menacing quality to them, like a snapshot of a moment about to go horribly wrong. I wandered over to the sculpture I had seen from the window. It dwarfed me by at least half a meter on its steel frame. Eden stood by the stairs, folding and unfolding her arms. She strode forward, grabbing the speckled sheet and tearing it down from around the piece of work.
Again, two men. Smooth, impossibly black marble. One was pinned on his back, his legs and arms curled in defense, muscular feet and ankles anatomically perfect, grinding at the body of the other man. The warrior with the upper hand had the man on the ground by his throat, the other arm raised, a long sword hovering ominously in the air above the victim’s face. I looked at the victim’s chiselled cheekbones and howling lips. I bent and peered into his mouth, noting teeth shaped expertly from the marble.
“Where did you get this?”
“Italy. It comes in a series of large blocks.” Eden’s face seemed to flush a little with pride as she illustrated with her hands. “It weighed about half a ton originally. I had to get an engineer to tell me if the floor would hold it.”
The warrior’s lips were drawn back over his teeth in a snarl. Both men were naked. My fingers, with a will of their own, ran down the sculpted abdomen, wanting to know the ripple of the marble.
“What’s it called?”
Eden paused, studying the sculpture. I waited.
“Vengeance,” she admitted.
Without knowing why, I felt a little afraid in her presence at that moment. I got this strange feeling that every painting in the house, every sculpture, every bar of color and stroke of darkness were connected. They all meant something and Eden was nervous that I was wandering around in one giant temple dedicated to that thing. She was worried that I would get it. I didn’t get it, not then. But I wanted to. There was fear and yet there was a longing. I wanted to understand her and I knew I’d have a fight on my hands.
“You’re incredibly talented.”
“Can we go now?”
“Yes, we can go now.” I turned and headed down the stairs ahead of her. Color flashed in her cheeks. Tangible relief.
“I won’t forget the secret I owe you,” I told her as she closed and locked the front door.
“Yeah? Well, it better be a fucking big one,” she said.
Dr. Claude Rassi’s office was on the sixteenth floor of a building on Darlinghurst Road, a few blocks down from St. Vincent’s Hospital. It was a short stroll up the road to the convict barracks, then on to Hyde Park, laden with bug-eyed ibises and the homeless, coffee vans and lawyers on lunch breaks. I liked the idea of coming to work here every day. It seemed like a hive of activity, crisscrossed by angry motorists and cops on horseback.
From the look of his office interior, it was clear that Dr. Rassi hadn’t done much slicing and dicing in the past few years, aside from what he prepared for his dinner. There were four identical filing cabinets taking up one wall of the office and two other walls dominated by shelves of medical texts and journals. There were two stacks of papers on his large glass desk, one going in and one going out. Both were at least twenty centimeters high.
A floor-to-ceiling window gave the feeling of being able to walk right through the office and off the side of the building. I stood at the glass and looked down at the people on the street, enjoying the weightlessness.
“I haven’t got long, I’m sorry,” Rassi began, taking the huge wingback chair behind the desk. “I’m actually leaving the country this afternoon to consult at a seminar in India.”
“We shouldn’t take up much of your time,” Eden said. “We just want a brief rundown of the whole system.”
A stunning young woman clopped in on stilettos, all glossy hair and straining muscle, and set a mug of black coffee in front of the doctor. Eden ordered a white tea and I waved my refusal. The woman smirked at me with wet red lips and left. I felt like I’d just been slapped.
“My understanding from our phone conversation is that you’ve got a vigilante surgeon doing organ transplants?” Rassi said, raising his eyebrows. Put like that, even I found it hard to believe. I nodded anyway. He shook his head.
“From what I saw on the news so far, it’s a fairly large-scale operation.”
“We’ve recovered twenty bodies.”
“The first thing I have to tell you is that you’re probably going to find more,” Rassi sighed, rubbing his eyes. “Something this . . . primitive would take a few goes to get perfect.
Even with extensive training, adapting the transplant process into a one-man, garden-shed job is a significant medical feat. It’s not something I would try, even with my background.”
He waved at a series of framed certificates hanging on the wall. I looked them over and tried to make a suitably impressed face, something like a slow nod with my bottom lip poked out.
“So how can I begin to help you?” Rassi shrugged. “Organ donation rates are always a heartbreaker. There are around seventeen hundred people on the list at any one time and last year less than half the demand for organs was met. Things are getting better but they’re never satisfactory. A lot of factors influence such an unmet need. People have misconceptions about organ donation. People think it’s against their religion, that they’re somehow cheating what their god intended. But that’s just a load of codswallop. Few scriptures mention it simply because it just wasn’t conceivable.”
“What else stops people from donating?” Eden asked, her pen hovering over her notebook.
Rassi smirked bitterly, as though recalling a personal insult.
“There are plenty of myths and legends. A common story, which always happens to friends of friends, is the doctor failing to resuscitate car crash victims because their driver’s license shows they’re a donor. Harvesting without familial consent is another one. In optimum cases you can use a donor body to save up to ten lives and people are scared by the idea of a doctor sacrificing them to up his survival rates. The general impression that someone else will do it or I’ll never need one dominates people’s perception. There’s also a sort of ickiness that people don’t like about the concept of one person’s organ living and thriving in the body of another. It’s seen as unnatural. Particularly when you get into animal-to-human transplanting.”
Eden nodded as she wrote. I was beginning to feel the ickiness that the doctor spoke about looking around at the artistic diagrams on the walls, the ancient oil paintings of primitive organ surgery. In one, a tall man stood astride the body of a young man held down by several nurses, a long saw in his fist. In another, a corpse lay beside the body of a living patient, grey in the face, while black-cloaked figures discussed their plan of attack.
