by Candice Fox
“Yes,” Martina shuddered. “Yes, yes, yes.”
She rose, her back bent, feet flat on the floor between the bars. The cage seemed to weigh a ton. She shuffled forward away from the wall, dragging the cage two half-steps, and then dropped it, robbed of breath and strength.
As she waddled towards the doorway with the entire weight of the cage braced against her curved spine, the first operating table came into view. She saw the instruments and bottled drugs lined up in the cabinet and stopped to be sick all over her hands.
It felt sinful to be enjoying an almond croissant, surrounded by so much sickness and death. Eden insisted I finish the breakfast treat in the hall outside Cameron Miller’s hospital room. She scowled as I moaned and munched, soft almond paste slick between my teeth. I’d offered her one and she hadn’t wanted it. Her loss.
She’d been strange, stranger than usual, since she’d climbed the stairs of her apartment block to return to the party the night before. I’d sat down to watch the rest of the game, pondering what had made her so desperately paranoid about a single phone call. The only people I’d ever known to walk off into the distance to take phone calls had been guys I knew who were compulsive cheaters. But from what I could see Eden was single and vehemently refusing to look.
At the press conference, we had announced our dead ends. We’d traced all the public telephone calls to Ronnie Sampson’s phone in the days before his operation but couldn’t get any CCTV on the phone boxes, and they were littered throughout the city. The toolboxes in the bay hadn’t given us a positive ID of the killer—they’d been purchased in no discernible pattern, at different stores, all without video cameras or particularly observant counter staff.
We had identified Courtney Turner and four others but there were still sixteen bodies without names, so every family from Sydney to Madrid with a missing son or daughter who could fit their loved one into the place and time frame in any conceivable way was clogging the department phone lines wanting to line up and see them.
We’d tried to see if a leak in the national patient information database could give us a clue about where the killer was getting the Medicare records, addresses, birthdates and treatment histories of the victims and recipients, but every GP in the country had or could get access to the same information on the office computer, and searches into individual records weren’t logged like they were with prisoners and wards of the state. We were running with leads on stolen drugs across Sydney hospitals, but nurses, orderlies and doctors could be sticky-fingered, and some hospitals were giving us trouble bringing in their numbers.
Eden and I had driven to the Prince of Wales Hospital in silence, the weight of our task pressing on us like an unbearable heat.
Cameron Miller’s bed was closest to the window where he could enjoy a view of the hospital’s decidedly heartless architecture, a courtyard of walls studded with identical windows where the sick and injured stared out. The quadriplegics could stare across the vast empty space at the cancer patients and wonder what it felt like to be in pain. The cancer patients could stare back, imagining numbness. I took my position at the window ledge and felt guiltier still about my almond croissant.
Mr. Miller was dying of pancreatic cancer and had been for some months. We’d received a call that morning saying he wanted to talk. He was still on the list for a transplant. I looked over his anemic and dishevelled body half-sunk in the bed and I wouldn’t have put money on his chances of success.
“I’ve met your killer,” he said as Eden sat down. She froze in the red plastic chair, her hands braced on the armrests, her lips parted as she tried to reassemble her thoughts.
“You have?”
I gave a surprised smirk and sunk into the other seat. Cameron’s cheeks were so hollow I couldn’t tell what expression he had on his face. With yellowed eyes he glanced at a packet of Pall Malls on the counter beside him. I picked them up and extracted one.
“I’ll bet the nurses give you flack for this,” I murmured as I lit the cigarette for him.
“Fuck “em,” Cameron grunted.
Eden took out her notebook and sent a quick text on her phone. Cameron Miller took his time, smoking quietly, his stubble looking blue in the icy light of morning.
“I’ve been in Critical two months,” he began. “Got moved up from General when they stopped with the experimental surgeries. I haven’t taken a shit of my own accord in all that time. Cancer’s spread to my stomach, you see, so they got to feed me through a tube. Before that it was flowers and live music and library-cart visits, all that crap they go on with down in General to keep your spirits up. The Wiggles. Fucking kiddie pop, every day, like they live here—bunch of skivvy-wearing faggots. Up here on the seventh floor, people are waiting to die. There’s no food. There’s no music. The best thing they got going around is the jolly trolley and I can’t eat anything on it. They don’t let the volunteers in because people are likely to snap at you on this floor. They don’t like that. Stops the volunteers from coming in, they see a bit of fear and death.”
Eden looked at my eyes. The sweetness of the almond croissant was going bad in my stomach and I felt, somehow, that she knew it.
“About a month before I got sent up here I got a phone call in my room,” Cameron continued, licking his dry lips. “Thought it was probably my ex-wife. She calls now and then to tell me how bad she feels and how she’s spending my money. Half the time I’m so juiced up on painkillers I can’t work out how to hang up, so I just listen, you know, until the nurses come back. This time it wasn’t my ex-wife. It was a man who wouldn’t give me his name.”
Eden scribbled a couple of quick notes. I stared at the veins in Cameron’s skinny wrist and tried to guess how old he was but found the task impossible. He could have been thirty, or seventy.
“Do you know the approximate date of this phone call?”
“I don’t even know what month it is right now.”
“That’s okay.” Eden nodded. “Go on.”
“So this guy, he starts telling me things that get my old heart a’ticking. He tells me he can bypass the organ waiting list and do the pancreatic transplant himself. I think he’s joking, so I laugh, which fucking hurts. He tells me he wants to meet with me and I tell him that’s fine. I got no visitors, see, and I kind of wanted to hear the punch line. The next morning he turns up here and sits beside my bed, just the way you’re sitting looking at me now.”
“Jesus,” I said. Eden’s eyes concurred.
“He told me the deal,” Cameron said. “Told me what it would take. Didn’t pull any punches, this guy. Said he’d been doing it going on two years with a lot of success.”
“Two years,” I said. “No way, man. Someone would have refused it. Someone would have reported him.”
“I said that myself.” Cameron smiled a little and nodded at me. “I said, what if I refuse? Go to the cops? What then? I’m gonna die anyway, what have I got to lose? Then he showed me a picture of my little grandkid, my son’s boy, playing in a sandpit somewhere, I don’t even know where. The picture was taken on a mobile phone. He said it wasn’t worth it. Asked me what I was going to tell them anyway. I didn’t know his name or where he’d come from or how I could get in contact with him again. We didn’t talk much more about the what-ifs, but I got the idea that people don’t refuse him often and when they do nobody says anything. Pretty good at making problems disappear, this guy. Got all his bases covered. Likes things sterile, you know what I mean?”
“So just to be clear,” Eden said carefully, “when he made the offer, the man told you he would recover the organs from unwilling donors?”
“He didn’t put it so nice like that,” Cameron said. “He told me someone would have to be murdered so I could survive and I would have to live with that forever.”
The room seemed suddenly smaller. I had been listening to Cameron speak, thinking I was getting to know the guy. Now all that was shattered. I realized I didn’t know this dying man in the bed before me.
The way he spoke about the murder of others, in his slow drugged tone, was confusing and cruel.
I was holding my breath. Cameron stubbed out his cigarette on the face of a pink Hallmark card that was lying on the bedside table.
“So what did you say?” Eden asked.
“I said, how much?”
Eden exhaled quietly. She stared at her notes for a long time, perhaps waiting for me to speak. I had nothing. I was afraid that if I opened my mouth I would be sick.
“Yeah, yeah. I know what you’re thinking right now, both of you,” Cameron sighed. “And I’ll tell you, it’s not only the situation of our physical differences that disqualifies you from understanding. I’m being eaten alive from the inside, see, and you both look like you’ve been up all night drinking or fucking or talking. Generally enjoying your health. You could leave here and go to the beach, get some sun, breathe in the sea air. You could go out to dinner, have a steak, enjoy a fine glass of Merlot. You could quit your jobs, gather up every penny you have and go live in Rome. I’ll never step outside this room again. This is it. They’ll wheel me out of here when it’s over, straight down the lift and into the morgue, and from there it’s the ground. The cold, hard ground.”
Eden and I glanced at each other.
“It’s not only that, though,” he continued. “I served in the Gulf, twice. I’m no stranger to taking life to save my own. You get one life. That’s it. One. This guy was going to extend mine just when it seemed like it was up. I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t do anything to deserve it. If some junkie or some lowlife had to die so that I could live then, hell, what am I going to say?”
“The first body we recovered was an eleven-year-old girl,” Eden said, not lifting her eyes from her lap. Cameron didn’t speak. He was gazing out the window at the building across from ours like he hadn’t heard what she’d said.
“Why didn’t you go through with it?” I asked, when a heavy silence had passed. Cameron Miller’s eyes slid to mine. He smiled and the flaccid skin around his mouth hardly responded.
“I didn’t have the money,” he said.
We used the administration office’s fax machine to get a description out to all the major news networks and plied the security department for an hour on what we needed from their CCTV. We ended up with minimal slices of his face—a cheekbone here and the edge of a smile there—but he was wearing a cap and seemed to know where the cameras were.
Eden stood on the footpath outside the hospital for a long moment in silence, her skin white and flawless in the sunshine. People walked and jogged and hobbled and wheeled in and out of the hospital around us. A middle-aged woman and a small boy sat on a garden bench in front of the hospital’s stone façade. The woman was crying. The boy was drawing shapes in the dirt with a stick.
“This guy does a lot of work to get this gig in order,” I said. “A lot. He has to know his prospective client is the kind of person who will take the deal. Financially and emotionally. Even if they aren’t, he has to know he can hook them in some way so that they won’t reveal him. There’s so much groundwork. So much preparation. It must all be fun and exhilarating or he just wouldn’t bother.”
“I don’t think it’s a question of effort and payoff, Frank. I think it’s one of necessity. It’s a lifestyle. He just feeds the desire to get to the beginning of the ritual.”
“The ritual?”
“I’m only speculating,” Eden’s eyes darted towards me and then away, “but he’s doing the same thing over and over again. It’s planned, prepared, orderly. A contained experience between him and his client, him and his victim, in a makeshift operating theater. Imagine standing over the two of them with your scalpel in hand and slowly, carefully, taking life from one and giving it to another. Playing God. I can imagine it’s a pretty amazing experience, however abhorrent it is to us. An experience worth waiting for and ultimately something he can’t live without. Once it’s over the countdown begins until he needs to do it again.”
An ambulance whooped as it slid into the traffic circling the Royal Randwick Shopping Centre.
“Just speculating, huh?” I smirked.
“All doctors have some kind of God complex. Why would you be one otherwise? The hours, the stress, the years of training, the responsibility. Then you become a lifesaver. A hero. A demigod.”
“But his desire is tied up with taking life.”
“Yes, what a delicious duality for an unsound mind.”
We entered the underground parking lot and slipped into the motor-pool car. Eden’s cheeks were flushed like she’d run up a flight of stairs. A silence fanned out in the vehicle as she started the engine, that cold stillness that follows a line half-crossed. I felt ill at ease.
The old man disappeared for six days, telling the children not to follow him. Of course they knew exactly where he was. At sunrise Hades would slip into the dense forest that lined the east side of the dump, a playground of rotting logs, hollowed 200-year-old eucalypts, lantana as dense and unforgiving as razor wire. Eden and Eric had spent much of their childhood nights there, creeping, exploring, hooting and hollering and chasing, having snuck out of their beds the moment Hades began to snore. When Eric tried to follow Hades down to the forest on the second day, he was stopped by the dump workers, who had been warned that if they let him pass they’d pay with their jobs. He noticed other men, strangers, meeting Hades at the gate before sunrise. When he tried to enlist Eden’s help in sneaking around the boundary of the neighboring farm, trying to find Hades in the forest that way, she declined. She was too hurt at Hades’ silence. The old man hadn’t spoken to her since the night they had killed the teacher. When she had implored him to forgive her, Hades left the house and wandered alone in the alleyways and streets created by the stacked bodies of cars, old household appliances, rotting bookcases and bedside tables.
On the seventh night, 168 hours since they had committed their first human killing, Hades looked into Eden’s eyes. She stopped inside the hallway, her schoolbag slung over her shoulder, and watched him rise from his chair. Eric had been crashing and rumbling his way into the house with such relief to be home that he thumped right into Eden from behind.
“Leave your things here,” the old man said, pointing at the ground. He walked towards them and the children sunk into the wall as he passed.
He didn’t wait for them at the door. When Eric and Eden emerged from the house, Hades’ squat figure was distant on the path that led through the dump towards the forest.
The children ran. Twenty meters or so behind the old man, they stopped. Eden’s breath came in hot whimpering rushes. Her brother’s face was set, the eyes locked on the skull of the man in front of him. The bush was swaying with an icy wind that lifted the hair off Eden’s brow and burned her lips. She folded her arms against the chill and let her body brush Eric’s as she walked, his arm eventually coming around her shoulders and pulling her close.
“He can’t take us both at once,” the boy said. “We see one other person down here, I want you to go. You understand? I’ll take care of everything.”
“I don’t want to go,” Eden whispered. “Eric, please, make it all better, please.”
“Hurry up,” Hades snapped over his shoulder. Eden fell silent. They entered the forest and followed the uneven trail behind Hades. They passed a pile of disturbed earth, a vast dump of soil that smelled of rain and decay. Ten minutes passed in silence. Above them, the black canopy writhed and swayed against sky lit a dull orange by the dump’s sodium lamps.
Hades waited for the children at the edge of the path. They stopped three meters away from him. Hades thought that they looked afraid. He was glad. A cat moaned somewhere, gearing up for a fight, the sound causing Eden to jolt in the frame of her brother’s arm. Hades let them sweat under his glare for a minute or so. Eric held his glance while Eden shifted stones with the toe of her shoe.
“This is where you’ll be spending your days from now on,” the old man said, gesturing behind him. T
he children looked, squinting into the dark. Hades walked up onto the porch of a house, the steps seeming to materialize beneath his feet from the night, as though he had willed them there. Eric let Eden go and wandered forward, taking in the roof of the tiny bungalow, the recycled corrugated iron and mismatched pillars that held up the porch—one oak, one painted pine, one ornate wrought iron. Hades unlocked the front door, a heavy mahogany thing he had been saving for some time, fitted with stained glass, like something from a confessional booth. This is what you’ve been doing your whole life, he thought as he entered. Collecting the waste of others. Gathering the unwanted to you. Building your life from it.
The newness of the things inside the house was stark against the used scraps and bits that made up its exterior. In the first room, two large L-shaped desks, the barcode stickers still on them, polished black and inlaid with glass. Huge lights hung over them, ambient bar-lamps. Two great bookcases lined the back wall, stacked with volumes. Eric went to the shelf nearest him and ran his fingertips over the spines. Some were leather-bound, inlaid with gold, as thick as bricks. Some were paperback textbooks, covered with clear contact paper. They were categorized by subject, date, relevance. On the upper shelves Vesalius’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica by Isaac Newton. On the lower shelves titles like Hematology in the Technological Age, The Science of Ballistics, Autopsy: Finding Justice for the Dead.
Eden was standing in the middle of the room, her shoulders rising and falling gently as she panted. There was something like a heartbroken relief in her face. She let her eyes wander over the things arranged on the desks—the sleek silver laptops, one each, the stacks of notebooks and paper, the jars of pens. Under the window a reading place—two couches facing one another, a wide coffee table.