by Candice Fox
‘But we know it’s not personal. We’ve pretty much ruled out anyone in Ivana Lyon’s life, and now –’
‘Maybe it’s personal by proxy,’ Eden said. She took a packet of cigarettes from her back pocket and slid one out, put it between her lips, patted her pockets for her lighter. ‘Hence the face. She can’t get at the person she’s imagining her victims to be. They might be beyond her reach somehow. So she plays the fantasy out on random women. Once the face is messed up, she can imagine the victim to be whoever she’s imagining she’s killing. It’s pure Bundy.’
Some bystanders at the tape near us bristled with excitement at the mention of Bundy. We took a step or two away from them and turned our backs.
‘That’s the second time you’ve dropped the old Bundy stick,’ I said.
It’s always difficult to bring Ted Bundy into discussions about cases. The ‘poster boy’ of serial killing is a perfect model to teach young homicide detectives about serial murder, so Bundy is drilled into you from the moment you transfer up from patrol. Bundy was responsible for the deaths of at least thirty-six young women in the mid-1970s, from schoolgirls as young as twelve to college students on the brink of starting their professional lives. He had a ‘type’ – they all had long dark hair parted in the middle. Clever and beautiful girls who showed academic promise, women he lured into a Volkswagen Beetle with his charm and good looks. It was never revealed why Bundy was so taken with long dark hair parted in the middle – but some speculate that he was trying to symbolically kill an ex-girlfriend, Stephanie Brooks, who had humiliated him by rejecting him. Bundy was driven to murder her ‘by proxy’, to rape and mutilate and bludgeon and strangle women who looked like her as a way of enacting that same violence on Stephanie over and over.
I wasn’t sure we had a Bundy killer on our hands here – as a homicide detective I’d heard the term mentioned plenty of times. It was thrown around a bit whenever violent crimes showed any kind of pattern. We had a second victim. I thought it was too early to bring out Ted.
Eden waved at me for my lighter.
‘What are you doing?’ I lit her cigarette. ‘You don’t smoke.’
‘I’d argue to the contrary.’ She eased smoke through her teeth.
‘You’re acting weird lately. The tattoo.’
‘I got a tattoo, Frank. Big whoop. The press are over there if you want to make an announcement.’
‘This thing with Imogen.’
‘I don’t have a thing with Imogen.’
‘It’s just not like you to let someone piss you off like that.’
‘She doesn’t piss me off.’ Eden gave one of her old half-grins, showed me a canine. ‘I just think she’s a loser. I’ve got bigger fish in my life.’
‘Who?’ I asked. ‘Is someone bothering you?’
‘No.’
‘Well,’ I shrugged again, ‘I’m here if you need me.’
‘I neither need nor want you.’ She finished her cigarette and threw it on the ground, pushed it into the wet grass.
‘Hey!’ someone shouted from the crowd. Eden and I turned. It was hard to know who’d spoken at first. All the faces, the eyes, were examining us. A couple of people turned towards a man in his thirties in a full running skin-suit, black lycra, slippery looking like a seal. He had a belt strapped to his waist with tiny bottles of water on it, a set of keys, some kind of step-tracker device.
‘Yes?’ I frowned.
‘What the fuck are you two doing?’ He put his gloved hands out. ‘You going to catch this guy or what?’
‘Excuse me?’ I looked around, tried to determine if I knew the man. Eden was playing with her phone.
‘I asked if you two are going to catch this guy,’ the man said, folding his arms. ‘You’re standing there soaking up the morning like you’re at a fucking picnic. People are scared out here, mate.’
I laughed. I guess I was surprised and outraged and didn’t know what else to do. I checked again to see if Eden was getting this, but she just looked bored. She took my lighter out of my hand and used it to light another cigarette. The man in the seal suit pointed at her first cigarette on the ground.
‘You’re contaminating the crime scene.’
Crime-show fan.
‘The crime scene’s in there, you idiot.’ I jerked a thumb towards the tent. ‘Who the fuck are you?’
A couple of the press cameras had turned towards us. I heard clicks, realised my jaw was out and my shoulders were up. Eden waved her cigarette in my face and brought me back around to her.
‘I’m going to get onto the CCTV and get the tech heads after that phone. If you’re done cavorting with the locals, you can join me.’
I glanced at her, but my mind was elsewhere – over the shoulder of the dickhead I’d spotted something odd at the edge of the police tape. It took me a few seconds to put together what I was seeing. There was a camera crew and a reporter taking an interview from a woman just beyond the back of the crowd. I recognised the sharp ponytail, the muscled profile. It was the apocalyptic woman I’d seen at Malabar Indian. Immediately, the fight with Imogen came to mind and my stomach flipped. I ducked under the tape and worked my way through the crowd, then stood behind the cameraman and watched the woman giving the interview. She was wearing full running gear – the same kind of body suit the dickhead was wearing but without, somehow, managing to look like a seal. She looked ready to rappel down into a bank vault and steal a diamond. There was no belt, no nylon cap. She thumbed the straps of a high-tech little camel pack with a water hose. There wasn’t a bead of sweat on her. She was wearing thick bronze make-up and dark gold eyeliner. I couldn’t decide if she was going to a charity ball or setting out to run to Parramatta.
‘What we really need to do is recognise the message behind these killings,’ the woman said, swishing her ponytail. ‘And that is that strong, athletic, assertive women taking charge of their own health and wellbeing are threatening the dominant masculine archetype that’s so much a part of Australian history.’
‘The what?’ I looked at the cameraman. He was focused on the machine in his hands.
‘Both these women were runners,’ the woman continued. ‘They were both targeted on their daily run while they were out there trying to better themselves, better their health and their lives. They were taking time for themselves. They were being selfish, which is a misunderstood and demonised word applied by ignorant people to the women they want to serve them. I think we need to take the message that this guy is giving us – that these women need to be punished for their self-empowerment, for their rejection of the simpering, weak, subordinate female mould – and we need to stick it where the sun don’t shine.’
‘Who is that?’ I asked the cameraman. The microphone guy emerged from behind him, leaning back as he lifted the furry mic hovering above the journalist’s head.
‘That’s Caroline Eckhart.’
‘Who?’
‘Caroline Eckhart.’ He frowned at me like I’d asked him who Jimmy Barnes was. I shrugged helplessly. He went back to his mic with a shake of his head.
‘So what you’re saying is that these killings are a distinctly feminist issue?’ the journalist said.
‘Oh yes. There’s a deep misogyny at work here, one that all Australians need to recognise, not just those horrified by these brutal murders. Domestic violence is a frightening epidemic in this country, and whoever this man is, he’s –’
‘Who said the killer is a man?’ I scoffed. Several people turned to look at me. The crew, the journalist herself. Everyone but Caroline. She was on a rant, and nothing was stopping her. Her eyes were on the skyline, the glass windows of the distant CBD. ‘What the hell is going on here?’
‘Mate, you’re messing up my bite,’ the mic guy snapped at me.
I felt Eden’s hand on my shoulder. She was pulling me towards the tent. ‘Stop wasting time.’
‘Who is this chick?’ I yelled as Eden tugged me away. ‘Woman, you have no idea what you’re talking abo
ut.’
The crowd at the tape turned to look at me. Almost all of them with hateful glares.
Hooky was haunted. But she didn’t mind. To be haunted was never to be alone. From the moment they had come and taken her from her classroom to the principal’s office, sat her down and told her that her parents were dead, she had almost never been without her mother and father’s presence, or the presence of something she believed in the beginning had been them. They hung on her, weighing heavy and hard in her chest like a rock on a chain, a lump at the base of her oesophagus. Never satisfied, as they had been in life – but unlike in life it was those around her who they were never satisfied with. She became a kind of voice for them. A puppet. She became the advocate of angry ghosts.
In the beginning it had made her silent. Drew her back from the cuddling and the crying and the sweets that had come when her parents had died, the inevitable flooding of love. She felt choked, suffocated by the smells that erupted all around her – flowers, fresh and then rotting and then dead in brown water, the food, the cakes, the pickled things. It had made her explode at those who tried to help her. Her teachers. Her friends. The awkward scruffy-haired cop named Frank who didn’t quite know how to be around her, who couldn’t decide if he should treat her as a victim, a child, a woman, a survivor, an oppressed ethnic minority, a toxic entity.
The hurt in her chest had receded around him for some reason, the way it did when she managed to fight her way into her father’s office, into his hard leather chair – the only place where she could get the true smell of him, the feel of him, onto her skin. That haunting hurt had pulled and pulled her there, and she hadn’t known why. Then she overheard the three officers at the computers arguing about who had blown their cover in the teen chat room, who didn’t know anything about teen language, whether Miley Cyrus was still cool or not, what LOL meant and when to use it. She’d felt tugged forward on that chain again, a slave to the dark desire that no longer had a face or a name, that she wasn’t sure really was her parents anymore, but a thing that had grown like a tumour in her, a hateful and vengeful thing. When she began lying online, she felt in control for the first time since their deaths. She felt alright with being haunted.
It was a strange sort of desire that drove the thing in Hooky. Sometimes it wasn’t exactly right, if rightness could be drawn out and separated from everything that was wrong, from everything that would earn her a mark against her name – bad girl, girl on the wire. In the early days, cast out of the North Sydney Metro offices and put on a train back to her aunt’s, she found herself wandering aimlessly through Chinatown towards Paddy’s Markets, feeling the twisted justice pulse in her. An elderly woman had stopped at the McDonald’s attached to the Entertainment Centre, shook off a leopard print umbrella and set the pretty item on the bricks outside the restaurant before going in and joining the queue. Hooky was watching with her hands in her pockets, coming up the street behind a group of girls about her age, when she saw one of the girls – a thin, lean creature with pink streaks in her hair – dart out and snatch up the umbrella and continue walking, her pace never slowing, the theft so seamless and natural it was almost expected. Hooky followed the girl into the public bathrooms inside the Market City shopping centre, waited for her to emerge from the stall, and punched her, just once, square in the nose. The blow had been right on target, crushing the hard, narrow bones there and launching a rush of blood right down the front of the girl’s sparkly top. Hooky turned and left. Returning the umbrella to the old woman didn’t even crossed her mind. She didn’t know if what she’d done had been justified, had been ‘right’. She didn’t know if justice was a real thing, anyway. All she knew was that the burning in her chest was eased.
Sometimes Hooky felt compelled to cheat people. To make them believe things about her that were not true. She told herself sometimes that she did these things to hone her skills for her games with the perverted souls who lurked online – the men who wanted to be daddies pushed too far by teasing stepdaughters, the women who wanted to teach boys how to make love. But she was also aware, on some level, that she cheated and lied just because it was fun. She would strike up a conversation on a bus with an older man and build a Hooky that was not real, a twenty-one-year-old Hooky with a boyfriend named Ted who worked in graphic design, a Hooky who lived in a trashy little apartment in Erskineville and who couldn’t get enough of this vegan café there. Hooky wasn’t vegan. She’d only been to Erskineville once. The lies weren’t even particularly extravagant. But the way the older man nodded, accepted, didn’t question – that was what thrilled Hooky. No one questioned her. People trusted. Hooky could be anyone she wanted.
She began to buy costumes for her fantasy lives. Snappy suits and ragged jeans and an old stained chef’s uniform, silk-lined party dresses and demure librarians’ dresses, ankle-length and olive green. Money wasn’t a problem. Her parents, ever practical, had left her everything and not bothered with conditions, because they knew their family wasn’t the kind to waste their fortune in clubs and bars, to spend it on stupid cars and leave her and her sister high and dry for the rest of their lives. She made the necessary arrangements to have her sister’s share of the inheritance ordered over to her through Victims of Crime, to continue her parents’ investments, to take over their share portfolio, and she signed her name on the deed to her home. Hooky sold the house in which they had been killed for a quarter of what it was worth just weeks after the murders faded from the headlines.
Sometimes Hooky trawled the nightclubs, made men buy her drinks, played the naïve Japanese tourist dumped by her friends, curious and a little frightened by white guys and their loudness. Japanese, Vietnamese, Chinese – these guys didn’t know the difference, didn’t care, as long as she played to their expectations, was cowed and grateful and a little surprised by her own passion after a couple of vodkas. Naughty oriental girl. Sometimes she indulged the fantasies of older businessmen, sometimes women, sitting at the bar at the Union Hotel with her expensive heels hanging off her toes, writing gibberish on napkins as she listened to a call from some director on USA time who didn’t exist. She never went home with them. That was the cheat. That was the point of it all. It was all lies. When their backs were turned, she vaporised.
Hooky knew, deep down, that she was in training for something. That the thing inside her wasn’t only pulling her through these little fantasies idly but was also growing, escalating, becoming hungrier. She was evolving into a skilled con woman. Soon cheating people with her chimera games wouldn’t be enough. She’d begin robbing them. She’d begin hurting them, making them cry. Emptying bank accounts and ruining lives maybe. It was something she could see looming on the horizon like a wave, but there was no running to the shore before it crashed over her. Her legs were stuck, sinking, being drawn out from beneath her.
Maybe one day she would start killing them. Luring them to their deaths. The thought that there was a killer inside her was terrifying. Was that inside her the way it had been in her sister, a killer genome cooking away chemicals in her brain, building a desire to inflict pain? Would the ghosts that had once been her parents haunt her so long that only blood would sate them?
Hooky was getting her morning fix of illusory online games at Sydney Metro police station when a woman came to the counter and rapped on the surface. Hooky leaned back in her chair and saw glossy painted nails, acrylics, and went back to her conversation with Badteacher69, her fingers darting over the keys. It wasn’t Hooky’s job to go to the counter. As a matter of fact it wasn’t officially Hooky’s job to be anywhere near the Sydney Metro Homicide Department at Parramatta, but she’d been hanging out hoping Frank and Eden would come in with news about the case, and so far she’d bluffed confidence about her computer access well enough that no one questioned her presence or activities. When the woman tapped again and called out a friendly hello, Hooky looked around and saw no one was near. She unhooked her headphones and went to the counter. The woman was small and blonde and pret
ty, with a neat, blunt-cut strawberry fringe on a freckled, uncreased brow. The woman glanced at Hooky’s outfit and the younger girl straightened her camouflage-pattern singlet, pulled up her baggy black pants full of items she’d never carry in a handbag.
‘Can I help you?’
‘I’m looking for Detective Frank Bennett,’ the woman said. ‘I’m his girlfriend, Imogen.’
‘Oh.’ Hooky laughed. She wasn’t sure why she did, at first. Maybe it was the fact that the woman was so small and neat and stylish – hardly Frank’s type. Hooky had never considered what Frank’s type might be, but this woman looked like something best handled with care. She thought of Frank’s big callused hands, the way he was always knocking things and crushing things, like every room was slightly too small for him, like everything was slightly too delicate. ‘Oh, right.’
‘I’ve brought him lunch,’ Imogen said, setting a plastic Tupperware container on the counter. Hooky nodded and took the container, tried to determine what its contents might be. She saw raw carrot. Tried not to smile.
‘Well, Frank’s out, Imogen. So …’
‘When will he be back?’
‘There’s no telling,’ Hooky said. She felt her eyebrows dart together. ‘Like, he could be anywhere.’
Hooky knew her tone was patronising, but couldn’t help it. It was just the funniest thing she’d seen in a long time, some wifely figure right out of Pleasantville with her perky heels and her gold bracelets, dropping off lunch for her Frankie-bear. Hooky had once seen Frank eat a muffin with the paper still attached to it. Starving and brain dead and filthy from crawling beneath some drug dealer’s house all day digging for a dead newborn baby, his hair stained black with some kind of muck and sticking out in spikes from behind his ears. Her amusement really had nothing to do with the woman at all, but Hooky watched as a coldness came over Imogen’s face.
‘So you’re Hooker, are you?’
‘Hooky,’ she said.