Hades (An Archer & Bennett Thriller)

by Candice Fox

  “Do you know your name, boy?” the man asked.

  “Yep,” the boy answered, licking his cracked lips. “Do you know yours?”

  6

  I’d taken a girl home. I do that now and then. She was someone I’d found while dropping into my local for a double scotch to put me to sleep before wandering up to my apartment. There’s an odd moment that passes between perfect strangers sometimes when, without words, their eyes meet and both have a look on their faces that says how lonely they are, despite the vague successes of their lives, despite their manufactured identities. All I’d had to say was, “Let’s get the fuck out of here.” In the morning I wasn’t lonely anymore and I don’t think she was either.

  We were snapped awake by my mobile phone. I knew who it was and ignored it. It was five and still dark. The girl groaned at the noise, her sharp toenails carving lines of protest down my shins. The phone stopped ringing and seconds later there was a pounding knock at the front door. I grabbed the blanket and pulled it up over our heads, pushing the girl over and gripping her around the middle so she wouldn’t go, addicted to the heat of her body in the bed.

  “Just lie still and be quiet and she’ll go away.”

  “Frank! Get up!”

  “Who is it?” The girl asked.

  “No one.”

  Eden knocked on my window. I pulled the blanket down tighter.

  “Go away, devil!”

  “They’ve got nine bodies for us. We need to go.”

  “They’ll keep. It’s the middle of the fucking night. What’s wrong with you?”

  “Bodies?” the girl sat up sharply, shoving the blanket aside. I sighed. “What are you, like, a cop or something?”

  “You didn’t wonder about the handcuffs?”

  “I’d liked to have known you were a cop. I don’t like cops.” She frowned over her shoulder at me.

  “Only crooks say that.”

  She started gathering her things and I crawled, shivering, from the sheets. That beautiful smell of warm bodies and slept-in sheets and gentle exhalations evaporated. I tore open the front door and Eden’s eyes dropped to my naked crotch, then rose to the eagle tattoo on my chest, then finally met my own. She looked aggrieved.

  “Frank.”

  “This is what you get, you come to my place at this hour.”

  “Put some fucking clothes on and get in the car.” She shook her head and walked away. I laughed as she descended the stairs, swivelling my hips so that everything jumbled around.

  “Get a good look,” I called. “You won’t do it again!”

  I was still laughing as Eden passed my elderly neighbor on the level below. She was stopped by the stairs, washing basket in her arms, looking up at me. I covered myself and walked inside.

  The nine bodies were laid out on two rows of morgue tables in the Parramatta District Hospital mortuary, each with a clipboard detailing the autopsy. Some had been reassembled. Others were curled up as they had been to fit the shape of the boxes, the pathologists and forensic specialists reluctant to straighten their limbs in the preliminary stage of investigations. I wandered between the gurneys, looking at each of the corpses. There were four females and five males. The youngest of the females was the girl who’d been in the first box we opened. The youngest male looked about fifteen.

  I stopped by the boy’s body. His face was tucked against his knees but I could see in the shadow of his limbs that his eyes were closed. His hair was falling out around his skull as his body decomposed. The smell coming off him was unnatural in its intensity, the powerful reek of rotting flesh having been added to with toxic chemicals. I stared at his curled fists. Eden came up beside me and I shifted my eyes away. I felt strangely ashamed.

  “We began with the bodies that were the least decomposed,” said the pathologist, a lanky Asian man. “There are twenty bodies. We estimate that around half will have to be identified by dental records. These are the only ones with faces.”

  My stomach turned. Eden was staring coldly at the body of a man on the table next to us.

  “There’s a unifying cause of death, which makes things easier for you,” the pathologist said pleasantly, pointing his pen at my nose. “All these bodies were bled out. Each of them had a surgical wound that was not closed.”

  “A surgical wound?” Eden frowned. “Give me an example.”

  The pathologist pointed to the boy beside me.

  “He’s missing a heart.” He turned and pointed to another. “That one’s had her lungs removed. The young girl by the doorway, she’s lost both of her kidneys.”

  “Christ.” I shuddered. “Some sicko’s nicking body parts?”

  “This isn’t a sicko, not in the traditional sense. The person you’re looking for is a cold, calculated businessman.” The pathologist lifted a sheet from a body at the end of the row. I stared at the bloodless cavity in a young woman’s torso where some part of her had been removed. The pathologist pointed into her with the end of his pen, like an explorer following the edge of a map.

  “These wounds are clean and meticulously positioned and the organs have been removed with the utmost care in the manner prescribed for direct transplant. Each of the victims has sedatives in their system. He’s been doing this for some time. He’s trained—and he’s experienced.”

  Eden was chewing her thumbnail. She looked at the ceiling and let the air out of her lungs as though she was glad to have them.

  “An organ thief,” she whispered miserably. “This is a new one.”

  7

  Martina Ducote had woken up plenty of times experiencing the strangely thrilling sensation of not knowing where she was. The moment before she opened her eyes was usually filled with the leftover giddiness of a night on the town and the dread of wondering who she was lying next to. This time was different. The moment before she opened her eyes was filled with pain and, as her body twisted to gauge its surroundings, she felt cold steel and rust, not the softness of an unfamiliar mattress.

  She opened her eyes.

  The drugs she had been slipped in the wine bar on Oxford Street had ruined her depth perception, so when she reached out to touch the bars around her she bashed them awkwardly with her knuckles. She was still wearing the little black party dress but her wrists were adorned with bruises like strange bracelets and her lip was split from what felt like a punch to the mouth. Her earrings were missing and so was her watch.

  She rolled onto her knees and rested against the door of the cage, trying to will away the sickness.

  It didn’t work. Martina retched and vomited on the cage floor beside her water bowl.

  “Help,” she rasped, the sound barely loud enough for her own ears. “Help.”

  The common need among all forms of police is food. You’ve got to keep your calorie intake up if you’re going to maintain the kind of reserved edginess required for an occupation constantly fraught with danger. For the homicide detectives it compensates for energy spent on anxiety about the case, puzzlement as events develop, the horrors of the crime scenes. Stress for the small stuff. Eden sat down in the conference room, placed her iced coffee within arm’s reach and tore open the wrapping around a bacon and egg roll she’d bought for breakfast. She took the switchblade from her belt and cut the roll in half, then licked the blade on either side. I peeled the top off my breakfast pie, perusing the autopsy photographs before me. Unlike Eden, I would regret my high-fat breakfast, even though I knew it was necessary. She didn’t look like anything other than protein shakes and rice crackers ever passed her lips. I wondered if she worked out. Her hands were veined and strong. A fighter’s hands.

  In silence we read through the ten autopsy reports. Eden put her boots up on the table, reading at twice the speed I did. Journalists she knew called her a couple of times. She ignored them. There had been others milling around the front of the station, flicking cigarette butts in the garden as they waited for us.

  I felt better after a bit of breakfast. Eden was watching me as I f
inished up the last report, licking gravy off my fingertips. I made a call to the forensic office to make sure the toolbox serial numbers were being traced. The marina CCTV was useless. Like the junkie said, the guy was covered up pretty well and the boat had been rented the day before with a fake license. We were having the images examined to get a height and weight on him, and the boat rental office attendant was being quizzed for a sketch.

  “So what we’ve got to ask ourselves is whether we believe this guy’s chopping pieces out of his victims as part of a psychotic ritual or as part of an organized transplant operation.”

  “He’s so meticulous,” Eden murmured. “So careful. None of the victims has any signs of sustained abuse. He’s not violent. He’s not escalating. It doesn’t fit with the profile of a psychotic. My bet is he’s transplanting.”

  “To who?” I shook my head. “He’d have to have willing recipients.”

  “The donor waiting lists are packed in this country. There must be plenty of people out there who’d buy a kidney off the list for a good price if it were offered. For themselves. For their children.”

  I looked down at the flakes of pastry left over from my pie. It seemed to me that we were discussing a nightmare, something absurd, unreal.

  “Naw, come on,” I scoffed. “You can’t tell me a civilian would go for this. You can’t tell me your average Joe would buy a kidney from a murder victim.”

  “I’m not talking about your average Joe. I’m talking about wealthy, desperate people. Who’s to say they understand where their organ is coming from? Even if they do, you can convince yourself of anything if you think about it in the right way. Who deserves life and who doesn’t is an age-old question with no real answer.”

  Something seemed to flicker in her then, some thought that wanted to push its way up from inside and make itself known. She shook her head as though to clear it away.

  “I mean, you, Frank, have bought drugs off the street with no idea who suffered and died for their production. We cause pain and suffering and death in countries across the world simply because we are addicted to a certain way of living. We never see or meet or hear about these people. We ignore the inconvenient. It’s in our nature.”

  A cold chill rushed through me. I liked the reference to my record. It was cute. Nasty, but cute. She was letting me know Eric had filled her in. On everything. She continued reading like she hadn’t said anything.

  “So he approaches people on the list,” I thought aloud. “People who have money. How does he select the victims? How does he know they’ll be a match?”

  “We’ll have to consult some specialist physicians.” Eden clicked the top of a stainless-steel pen and made a note. “See who has access to the donor list, how long it is, what sort of transplants have occurred here and what kind of training he’d need. I’m only guessing, but he’d have to find a victim with a tissue and blood-type match. He’d have to have access to the medical records of his victims to ensure they don’t have any health problems of their own. He’d also have to know the potential recipients had money. He’d have to be privy to their financial situation.”

  “This guy’s got a hell of a lot of private information at his fingertips. That tells me he’s either operated as a physician or a transplant surgeon or he’s got someone inside the system feeding him confidential patient information.”

  Eden nodded and sipped her iced coffee. The condensation from the plastic bottle was wet on her fingertips.

  “The organ recipients aren’t going to be forthcoming with the details,” I continued. “They’d be putting their heads on a chopping block. What would you call a charge like that? Conspiracy to murder? It’s receiving stolen goods at the least.”

  Eden smirked. I felt the smile drop off my face as Eric entered the room. He was wearing gold-tinted aviators to cover his hungover eyes. The collar of his black shirt was open, hinting at an ornate tattoo on his collarbone. His shoulder holster was crooked. He looked like a men’s magazine model someone had dressed up as a cop for a joke.

  “Morning, comrades,” he grinned, nodding at me. “Frankie.”

  I felt the desire for violence flex in me. A long breath eased through my teeth. I wanted Eden to trust me, as her partner and as a man. She was weird but I liked her. Eric was the predictable catch that came with having a dangerously beautiful and darkly mysterious woman fall right into your lap. I could handle him. He was a prick, a prick with knowledge of my past, but I’d dealt with plenty of pricks in my time.

  “Something we can help you with?” I asked. “We’re kind of inundated here.”

  “Hold your fire, cowboy. I come bearing gifts.”

  Eric slapped a plastic evidence bag on the table.

  “What would you do without me?” He grinned sweetly at Eden. She rolled her eyes.

  I pulled the evidence bag across to me, jiggling the object inside into one corner. It was a gold bracelet, covered in grime and rust. I felt it through the plastic with my fingers.

  “It was in the box with the young girl in it.”

  It was an identity bracelet with a small pink jewel embedded beside a name. Eden leaned over to see the name on the gold plate.

  “Monica,” she said.

  Our team had known the little girl in the box was the girl missing from Maroubra for hours. You could see it in the shape of her face and limbs and how these compared with photographs of the missing girl, though the look of a person changes dramatically after death and a little decomposition. But we couldn’t give a definitive answer to the parents, not until dental records and DNA had come back. No matter how certain you are that a body is a missing person, you never inform the family until you’ve got scientific evidence. Doesn’t matter if they have the same tattoos, birthmarks, goddamn amputated limbs. You never tell the family until you have the DNA. I remember my first homicide chief drilling that into me as I stood in his office for the first time in my brand-new suit and blindingly polished shoes. I got to wondering if his passion for the subject came from learning it the hard way.

  The news that the bracelet was described on the missing persons report came back at the same time as the DNA. Even then it wouldn’t have been enough to give the parents an answer. When we left the station to go meet them at around 11AM they’d been waiting a solid twenty hours or so to find out if their daughter was still alive. I sat back in the car as we headed for Maroubra and stared at the airport between tunnels of orange lights, the city skyline black against a gathering squall of rain. Cake’s “Short Skirt/ Long Jacket” came on the radio. Eden sang softly to herself. It surprised me.

  “What happened to Doyle?” I asked.

  Eden gave me a piercing glance. When she stared ahead there was a border collie grinning at us from the back of an SUV. She looked the dog up and down as though confused by its presence.

  “Doyle copped a bullet in the face,” she exhaled. “Simple as that. We were chasing a dealer who we thought was unarmed. We called for backup but they didn’t get there in time. He waited for us around a corner. Doyle was faster than me. He went first. Got it right between the eyes.”

  “You see the shooter?”

  “I put in a sketch. Got nothing back.”

  “Bullet?”

  “Hollow point. Can’t trace it.”

  “I heard you had his blood all over you.”

  “Where’d you hear that?”

  “Dunno.” I shrugged. “Police report?”

  I’d lifted the file that morning, sifted through pictures of Eden standing by the ambulance covered in the blood and brains of her former partner. Her hair hanging in her face. Her palm to her temple and teeth bared. She hadn’t looked upset. She’d looked angry. Disappointed. Almost as though she’d wanted it to happen another way, a more dignified way.

  Eden’s lip curled in distaste. I shrugged.

  “What? Eric’s the only one allowed to go digging in old police reports for personal interest?”

  “I’d prefer it if you directed your p
ersonal interest elsewhere. I was right behind him,” she said. “I saw him get shot.”

  I let some time go by.

  We entered the eastern suburbs, hills laden with a tight mixture of weatherboard hovels, brick terraces and apartment buildings and glass-front mansions rolling towards the sea. Surfers milled on street corners, bare-chested and tanned. There were tribal tattoos and filigree scripts on skin everywhere and a stark absence of anything but white faces. I knew this city, had gotten myself drunk and fallen asleep on the beaches here many times as a troublemaking boy. It was a dangerous place for the Lebanese and Koreans, although they were safe at the larger beaches like Bondi. There was an unwritten code here about the faces that belonged on the scrub-fringed footpaths, those that belonged in the water, on the sand, in the pubs. In fact, everywhere but behind the counter of the local newsagent. At Maroubra even those strangers who met the criteria of ethnicity could take their boards and head up to the very southern tip of sand, never to the main beach where they would get in the way of the more experienced surfers. They were welcome at the Seals Club until ten and the main hotel until eleven. Maroubra had its local families who were born and raised here. Everyone else was a guest, and guests behaved themselves or were promptly and unkindly put out.

  I leaned against the window as the car rolled and dipped over hills, around the cliff edges. The rain began to patter on the windscreen and the surfers on the street corners didn’t move. I could make out more in the water, bobbing on the waves like lumps of driftwood.

  “Must’ve been hard,” I said. “You and Doyle were partnered for three years.”

  Eden sneered and there was no humor in it.

  “It’s supposed to be hard to see anyone shot in the face, Frank.”

  Hades didn’t know how the children came up with their new names. One morning they just started calling each other by them and naturally he followed. From the moment that Eric awakened, Hades felt distanced from the girl. He hadn’t been close to her in those initial days but she and Eric engaged in a relationship that was utterly exclusive and strangely intimate. They spoke in a language of gestures and looks. Now and then Hades heard them whispering in the night when they were supposed to be sleeping in the secret room, and he could never make out what they said.