I hope he likes the room, she thought, opening the door with a smile.
If it hadn't been for the old woman, Karen's first reaction would have been to shut the door again immediately. As it was, however, the tiny, bent lady looked as though she could not stand up for much longer, despite the fact that the man was holding her arm so solicitously.
She showed them in and asked the old woman if she'd like a drink.
'Just some water, please,' he answered for her.
'My grandmother has lived through war and famine,' he said when Karen returned with the water. 'She has arthritis and she turned ninety last year, but she still insisted that she come and inspect the room before I take it.' He smiled fondly at his grandmother as he helped her accept the glass.
Karen smiled uncertainly. She did not like his long hair, but he seemed a much nicer person than her first glimpse of him had indicated. Anyone who was this close to his grandmother must be a good person. She had a sense about these things. Just goes to show, she reminded herself, you can't judge a book by its cover – her own grandmother had taught her that.
'I'm afraid there are a few stairs,' she said, shifting a shy Eva to the other hip. 'But when you're both ready, I'll take you down to see the room, Henry.'
'That'd be great. Thanks.'
Karen smiled more brightly and led Cutter and his grandmother from the room.
In one of the Department of Community Service's many attempts to 'help' him, at thirteen Cutter had been sent to a small group home for troubled children. The house was in leafy Baulkham Hills, and he was pretty sure that most of the neighbours didn't know the purpose of the home. A couple, Debbie and Ian, chosen and paid by the Department for their extraordinary progress with even the most difficult kids, ran the home.
Cutter had loved Baulkham Hills. Sure, everyone was racist there, but that was the case pretty much everywhere when he was a kid. The Australian families fascinated him, and after twilight, he would sit in the bushes for hours watching the mums preparing dinner, the kids doing their homework, their dads arriving home from work. He'd laugh quietly at the funny way they ate, the way the kids were disciplined and ran crying to their rooms. Better than any TV show he'd ever seen, however, were the backhanders he saw some of the perfect dads give the perfect mums. He'd found at least four of these households, and he would sit in their azalea bushes, the camellia shrubs, and stuff his hand in his mouth to stop his laughter being heard. The suburb was so quiet in the evenings that he'd even taken to bringing a towel to muffle the chortles while he watched his special TV screens – their well-lit loungeroom windows.
Debbie, his group home 'mum', had told him he should be coming home earlier. She would sit with him at night and quietly ask him where he went, why he never ate with them. He couldn't tell Debbie that he skipped school and went home most days to eat rice balls and fish soup. Debbie would be furious that the school had not told her he was seldom there. Things were going just fine for him at that school – he didn't want to be there, and they couldn't have been more delighted with his decision.
Debbie just wouldn't give up on him. She'd bring Ian into his room at night and they'd play good cop/bad cop; she'd read the Bible with him; she learned about Vietnam, and even tried learning some of the words to encourage him to speak to her. One night, when he'd broken into a face-splitting smile, she'd thought it was working. She was winning him over. Cutter couldn't bear that her efforts would now redouble and he'd have to sit here for hours more, listening to her shit. Instead, he spoke his first full sentence ever to Debbie.
'You know why I smiled, Debbie?' He looked up at her through straight, black eyelashes, shadowing bottomless black eyes.
He really is a striking boy, she thought, reaching out with her foot to touch just the tip of his shoe, the first time she had ever touched him. Finally, she was getting through. All they need is a little love, she told herself.
'Why Henry? Why were you smiling?' She leaned in close.
'Because I can smell your cunt, you slut. You fucked Ian just before you came in here, didn't you?' He spoke quietly, concentrating on every feature as the horror flared her nostrils and dilated her pupils. Before she could physically recoil, he grabbed at her crotch under her pretty, yellow skirt, and managed to push his finger through her panties and hard into her hole.
'Or maybe,' he continued, holding her arm now as she screamed, 'you were waiting for me, with your finger going round and round in there. I've seen the way you look at me.'
He could no longer hold her and she fell off the bed, screaming and screaming, scuttling backwards on the floor. He jumped out the window before Ian could grab him, but not before slowly sucking his finger on the window ledge.
Debbie could tell Ian all about what that gesture meant later, when she was feeling better.
Cutter checked out the basement underneath Karen's huge back patio. He showed his grandmother carefully to a chair by a desk. She'd been wonderful. He knew he would never have got this place in Baulkham Hills if he'd come alone. And he knew his grandmother would always do whatever her number-one grandson asked.
He smiled at the two women, walked to the small window looking out onto the backyard and breathed in the lemony air.
'Perfect,' he said.
22
'YOU WANT SOMETHING to drink?'
Jill looked at Gabriel standing in his kitchen. Yeah, white wine, she thought. Where did that urge come from, she wondered. She hadn't had a drink in ten years. 'Um, some water would be great,' she said.
'Help yourself.' He pointed his chin at the fridge, his hands expertly paring the skin from two fat, brilliant-orange salmon steaks.
She opened the refrigerator and looked around, almost disappointed to find there was no wine in there anyway. A tall bottle of water stood in the door. She pulled it out and put it on the bench, then stuck her head back in the fridge.
'You want me to make a salad or something?' she asked, spying bags of lettuce and carrots.
'If you want,' he said. 'And pass me those beans.'
She grabbed the vegetables and set them next to the water on the bench, then stood for a moment, figuring he'd tell her where things were. When he didn't, she went looking for the glasses, a knife, a salad bowl and chopping board. She also found some warm, ripe tomatoes, a lemon and a Spanish onion in the fruit bowl, and set to tearing lettuce leaves. She stole glances at him as he worked. Without his cap, dark curls fell into his eyes. He kept wiping them away with his wrist, careful not to touch his hair with his fishy hands. She realised she had never seen him clean-shaven. He always had a dark stubble; she noticed for the first time that it was flecked with just one or two greys. His full lips moved unconsciously as he concentrated completely on the food.
She looked away and checked out his apartment instead, stamping firmly down upon the stupid thought that this felt more like a lunch date than a day at work. We gotta eat, she told herself. Might as well be here as anywhere else.
Actually, this is quite nice, if kind of weird, she thought, looking around the apartment. It felt more like a treehouse than a two-bedroom, third-floor unit in Sydney's northwest. A giant eucalyptus tree that danced literally at the edge of the balcony established the effect. Midway up the tree trunk, the view from the unit was of spinning lime-green leaves and gnarled branches, with just a few glimpses of the sky beyond. This apartment building felt as if it had been surgically inserted into one of the rare pockets of original Sydney bushland.
She drizzled olive oil onto the salad, and walked over towards the balcony to take a better look. Sliding open the glass door, she stepped into a greenhouse, took sips of the green, oxygen-soaked air. Had she dared, she could easily have climbed onto the balustrade and down the knobbly trunk of the huge tree. She could see no sign of other humans living anywhere nearby. She imagined strolling as far as she could see along the bush-gully floor, through fallen leaves and stands of stringybark and gum trees. Half-tempted to do just that, she suddenly noticed a smok
e-like shape break away from the base of the tree and hurtle up towards her. She almost stepped back in fear until she recognised the lithe movements. She waited to see where the small cat would go. Within half a second, it sat staring at her from the branch closest to the balcony. Entranced, she froze, and they stared at one another until she had to blink.
The cat sprang silently from the branch to the balcony floor and rubbed its chubby grey cheeks around her ankles. She blinked down at it for a few moments more, hoping it would not run away, and then bent carefully to pat it. There was a rumble of purring, and then the little cat lifted high its tail and sauntered into Gabriel's apartment.
Jill followed it in, leaving the doors open. Inside, from this angle, the room was less remarkable. A couple of squashy lounge chairs and a coffee table, a TV, no dining table. The light in the apartment was a cool, flickering green – the effect of the tree outside, breathing through the room.
'Ten,' said Gabriel, matter-of-factly, from the kitchen.
'Pardon?' she said.
'That's Ten,' he pointed at the floor.
She looked down, lost.
'Oh, the cat!' She finally got it. 'Why do you call it Ten?'
'Her. She's a her,' he said, and then, 'Lunch is ready.'
They ate on the lounge chairs with their plates on their laps. Gabriel had coated thick fingers of the salmon in the most translucent tempura Jill had ever eaten. The fish had barely been cooked through, and when her fork caused the soft pieces to flake apart, she copied Gabriel and ate it with her hands. It was deep-fried, and the delicious sin of this made her lick her salty fingers with each bite.
'You ready to look at the tape?' he asked eventually, the first words either of them had spoken since they'd sat down.
'Huh? Oh, yeah.' She stood. 'That was just . . . great. Thanks.' She took the dishes to the sink, and tried to rise out of the strange mood that had enveloped her since she'd walked in here. She dropped her fork when she identified the feeling.
She was relaxed.
The knowledge made her hands shake.
23
'AW FUCK, MOUSE, now look what you've done!' Simon Esterhase threw his snooker cue into the rack in disgust. 'I sank the black, man. Why don't you stop bitching for a while? It's getting old.'
'Are you fucking serious?' Dang Huynh, known to most people as Mouse, chewed at his thumbnail. The skin around all of his fingernails was red-raw. 'I'm telling you I can't take anymore of this shit. He's a fucking psycho! What's to stop him from chopping one of us into pieces?'
Esterhase rubbed at his neck. He'd had diarrhoea every day since the Capitol Hill thing, and he just couldn't sleep right. But what was he going to do? Mouse and Tatts were losing it, and it was true that this could get them all killed. They'd all known Cutter was mental since they were kids, but he'd never done anything like this before. Now, though, Esterhase agreed with Mouse that it wouldn't take much for Cutter to turn his radar on them. He winced as images, sounds, flashed into his mind.
Esterhase sat down at his coffee table, chopped up some more pot. The ritual soothed him. He'd smoked twenty cones a day for the past fifteen years. Truth was, now when he had to be straight for some reason, he felt stoned.
Fuck, Mouse had paced the same circle fifty times.
'Man, can you sit down, Mouse? You're making my dick itch.'
'Why did he have to start with the killing? He's not going to stop,' said Mouse. 'How are we going to get out of this? He's going to get caught and we're all going up for fucking murder, man.'
Esterhase knew it. He packed a cone tightly and lit it, his lungs burning as he pulled the hit of marijuana, clean. They had always been scared of Cutter, but you just kind of ignored his sick shit back in the day. They'd all done so much time since then that none of them really knew how bad he'd become. Maybe Cutter didn't even know. The fucker was mad, that was for sure. Esterhase packed another cone.
'Here, Mouse, have this. You'll feel better,' he said, holding the bong out to his friend.
'I don't want it. I'm paranoid enough already!' Mouse wrung his hands. He had dark circles under his eyes and Esterhase noticed grey shot through his greasy dark hair. 'I keep thinking he's gonna break in my house and cut me up.' His voice cracked.
'Well, what do you want to do, Mouse? We go to the cops, we'll go down with him. They won't stop until they get the rest of us.' He lit the bong and had half the cone himself. He stared at Mouse through the smoke, red-eyed. 'We can kill him.'
Esterhase expected Mouse to freak at the suggestion. He, Tatts and Mouse had never done more than give a bloke a good flogging. The machetes were all for show. At least they had been.
Mouse said nothing.
'You wouldn't want to fuck a thing like that up though, now would ya, Mouse?'
'How would we do it?' Mouse's voice was tiny.
'You're fucking kidding me!' Esterhase gave a dead laugh. 'You've thought about it then?'
'What else are we gonna do?' Mouse pleaded. 'We've got to get out of this shit somehow.'
Esterhase looked around his rumpus room. He saw a luxurious, relaxing room to chill out in. In reality, the room was like the rest of the house, crammed with mismatched stolen property, half of it broken, all of it coated in a thin layer of grime. The walls were yellow with cigarette and marijuana smoke.
Esterhase was the pride of his family. The only child to have a job for more than six months straight, and to make it out of the housos. Shit, even his dad had only had a job once for about a year, back when Esterhase was a kid. Removalist too, just like him. But while his father had fucked his back up early, Esterhase had been smart. He'd always got others on the job to do the heavy lifting. The Maoris would work all day for smoko or some speed at knock-off time. And the job was perfect for finding places to do over.
Everything was pretty good in his life, he thought, finishing the rest of the cone.
Except for Cutter.
Lunch had been perfect, really, in every way. Well, except for the food.
Fortunately, Chloe Farrell and Andrew Montgomery had not been interested in the food. A newly retired couple sharing a muffin at the next table in the small café had wriggled closer on their bench seat while watching them. The man even moved his foot to touch his wife's shoe under the table. They'd been that way, once.
Andrew knew he was going to be late back, but he ordered a coffee anyway. Chloe had sparkling mineral water.
'Off the record,' Andrew said, watching her sip her drink through a straw.
'What is?' asked Chloe, ready for another joke, or flirtatious comment.
'A call came in late yesterday about the case.'
Chloe tucked her hair behind her ears. Sat forward.
'It could be nothing. Jane took it at the front desk. I was getting ready to knock off.'
'What was it?'
'Some woman. Anonymous. Gave the name of someone we should be looking at for these home invasions.'
'What was the name?' she asked, palms flat on the table, eyes serious, face angled up to his.
Andrew gave a laugh. 'You're a real little newshound, aren't you?'
'Come on, Andrew. It's my job.'
'Yeah, well, it'd be my job if anyone knew I even told you that much.'
'But you said it could be nothing. If I knew the name, I could dig around. Maybe I could help.'
'You digging around would not help, Chloe. If the tip was straight up, you would not want to go poking a stick into this guy's nest.'
'Is there anything I could say that would get you to give me the name?'
'Baby, I could think of a million things you could say to me that would make me give you anything. But that's not playing fair.'
'Okay,' she said, standing. 'Well, we'd better get back then.'
Andrew's expression was surprised, then hurt.
'I'll pay for lunch if you'll get dinner.' She smiled over her shoulder, as she walked to the cashier.
24
JILL STOOD IN the doorwa
y after lunch, silently taking in the bank of audiovisual and computing equipment in Gabriel's second bedroom. It wrapped around three walls: PC monitors and TV screens, cameras and tripods, speakers and hard drives. Electrical cords and cables snaked across the floor, climbed walls, and trailed sinuously across most surfaces. A curtain was drawn across the single window, and the room was shadowy. Green and red LED lights blinked rhythmically in the gloom.
Gabriel cleared his throat behind her; she stepped aside. Smiling broadly, he wheeled a second chair into the room, bumping it four-wheel-drive-style over double-adaptors and a couple of magazines. Jill, flattening herself against the bookshelf next to the door, turned and read some of the titles. Crime Scene Investigation; Criminal Profiling; Forensic Interviewing and Interrogation; Serial Killer Typology.
'So what sort of cases were you on before this one?' she asked, pulling down a thick tome. She flicked through it before closing it on a page of corpses, a black and white photograph of a child's dead eyes the last image in her mind. She blinked it away.
'Oh, this and that. Same as you I suppose,' he answered, smashing the second chair into a space at one of the terminals. He couldn't quite get it to fit, so she walked over, and with her foot, nudged aside a book caught between the wheel and the desk. The chair bumped hard against the table with Gabriel's final shove, and some of the equipment atop it lurched. 'There!' he grinned delightedly and threw himself onto the seat.
Jill took the other chair as Gabriel pressed buttons and moved a mouse to wake some of the slumbering machines. She looked at the screen in front of Gabriel too late to identify the official-looking logo that preceded the program he had opened.
'Could you just access my email, Jill?' he said, pointing to the monitor in front of her. 'I sent myself the voice recording of the anonymous phone call. It should be in there somewhere.'
She opened his email program, surprised at his lack of concern for his privacy. Probably this isn't his only email account, she thought. She found the MPEG file near the top of his unopened mail and double-clicked. Under it were a couple of the pharmaceutical and penis-enlargement spam emails that also choked her mailbox every morning. It seemed not even all this technology could stop them getting through.
Voodoo Doll Page 13
