Fall

by Candice Fox

  Eventually she took a break and sat with her legs crossed sipping a fake beer, looking through diagrams of drawers.

  ‘It’s 2 am. We’ve got to brief Captain James in four hours,’ she said after a time.

  ‘You want to lead with similar crime analysis?’

  ‘No. The tranquilliser,’ she said, setting the pamphlet aside. ‘It’s our best lead so far. Let’s face it. We’ve got shit all otherwise.’

  Images retrieved from CCTV around Centennial Park on the evening of Ivana Lyon’s murder were fairly useless, which greatly surprised us. There were cameras around the gates of the park, but few inside the 189 hectares of parkland itself. The park’s cameras were designed to capture thieves or vandals targeting the café or equine centre, so were not directed towards joggers on the tracks. Crime in the park was rare. A serial rapist targeted a woman walking there at night in 1989 and was nabbed for it in a DNA sweep in 2005. In 2010 a woman was abducted and taken to Queens Park, a smaller park off the side of Centennial, and sexually assaulted. There were the odd cases of bashings and robberies in and around the park, but not enough to erect a twenty thousand dollar surveillance system, put together a command centre or hire security guards. The park was unpopular at night and too populated during the day for any real drama.

  Our killer hadn’t brought the van into the park itself, so we couldn’t get a number plate. There were three clips of Ivana running laps, her hands flat and open and her lips pursed as she passed the gates. No sign of anyone watching or following her. No one was keeping pace with her – she was being lapped and lapping others at irregular intervals, so for long stretches she would have been on her own. On the third lap, we caught a glimpse of a shadow moving along the tree line in the bottom left-hand corner of the image, but there was no telling if it was in any way related to Ivana. We didn’t capture any footage of her being shot, stumbling, perhaps being helped through the bush towards a gap in the fence, to a car waiting, while she fought for consciousness.

  Plenty of people had seen others getting into vans around the time Ivana was taken. After-work traffic already clogged Anzac Parade, Oxford Street and Alison Road. The athletics field and Queens Park were flooded with corporate soccer and running teams as kids were being picked up from Little Athletics groups – there were cars whizzing in and out of the same spots, horns blasting as people squeezed into tiny gaps or waited for young ones dashing across the grass. Apologetic waves and sheepish grins in the fading orange sunlight. Dogs barking from open car windows. The killer had used the cover of crowds and noise to snatch Ivana Lyon away from the pack like a crocodile at the edge of a thundering herd of buffalo crossing a river. Nobody saw anything. A thousand people all in their own little worlds. This was how kids like Jamie Bulger got walked right out of a crowded shopping centre without anyone batting an eyelid. Crowd blindness.

  It looked like Minerva Hall had been snatched at around the same time of day as Ivana. By all accounts, she’d done a couple of laps of the Botanic Gardens and Mrs Mac’s Chair and then disappeared. She didn’t look like Ivana – but we couldn’t rely on that to differentiate the cases, because after both women’s faces were beaten in they were both just female runners to the perp. Minerva’s phone turned up on the rocks beside the running path where it led to the headland, washed down a crack between the oyster-laden stones. She had carpet print on her shoulders, just like Ivana, and her heels and the backs of her calves showed bloodless drag marks, suggesting her body had been moved post-mortem.

  There were plenty of homeless people in the Domain at night. Far more than in Centennial. It was closer to the CBD, more opportunities for cashed-up lawyers walking home to toss some change on the grass. Even as I realised this, I was already dismissing it as a possible source of leads. Homeless people wouldn’t speak to us.

  Eden and I sat with our empty beer bottles, looking at the floor of my half-finished kitchen.

  ‘The Domain footage might be better,’ I said.

  ‘Hmm,’ Eden said.

  ‘So where does a person get a tranquilliser gun? You tell me.’

  ‘It’s not the gun we’re concerned about,’ she said. ‘You could get that anywhere.’

  ‘I doubt you’d get one just anywhere.’

  ‘Well, you might get one as a black market import. Go to a big game company. I mean, we might spend the next three weeks going through stolen gun reports. Any farm from here to Kalgoorlie’s got the right to have one. We don’t want to end up doing background checks on every big game worker from Taronga Zoo to Alice Springs. If it was me, I’d make the thing myself. Cheaper and easier to do it that way.’

  ‘And how exactly would you set about doing that?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know exactly. I haven’t really thought it through. But it doesn’t sound hard. It’s probably just some sort of gas compression job. You could take apart a .50 cal. paintball gun and –’

  ‘Never mind,’ I waved. I forgot, more frequently than was probably safe, what Eden surely did in her spare time. What she had been responsible for. It was easy to think of her as harmless when she was sitting on my kitchen floor braiding her hair. A news report I’d seen that morning on the TV in Imogen’s kitchen returned to me, made my chest prickle with anxiety. It was about the same incident I’d heard reported on the radio the day Ivana was found. Four dead in mystery slaying south of Byron Bay. Police likely hunting ‘expert assassin’.

  ‘So the gun’s probably a dead end.’

  ‘The drugs aren’t, though. There are only three families of drugs that would suit an uptake like that – through the muscle tissue, into the bloodstream,’ Eden said. ‘Sedatives, anesthetics and paralytics. Each family’s got its own characteristics. Some are faster than others, last longer, work on different parts of the body. If toxicology can tell us what type of drug we’re looking for, that’d be great. But I suspect it’ll be difficult. The elevated heart rate of the victims, the tiny amount that would have been delivered. We might need footage to understand how the thing worked on the victim. How long the take-down took.’

  ‘The take-down, huh?’ I licked my bottom lip. ‘Is that what you guys would call it? You and Eric?’

  I hadn’t meant the question to sound nasty, particularly as she had just about finished putting my kitchen together. I was genuinely interested. I was fairly certain that Eric and Eden had killed six men. Around the time my girlfriend was murdered, I witnessed the two stalking a man, Benjamin Annous, who subsequently disappeared. I was able to connect five other missing men with Annous. Eric coming after me had been admission enough that I’d overstepped my bounds in digging around in their night-time activities. He’d tried to kill me and Eden had stopped him.

  While this was all I had, I suspected Eden and Eric had killed more people than the ones I’d discovered. I didn’t know if they limited themselves to thieves and dangerous scumbags, as these men seemed to be. But if the utter lack of leads in their cases – to a body, to a suspect, to anything – was any indication of their skill level, it was possible the two had been killing for most of their lives.

  Had she and her brother developed a language for what they did? Had they talked about it at all? Did they have rituals, a routine, a trophy collection, like most serial killers? It was a purely academic interest. I’d detached the deed from Eden herself, as I always did, in order to function beside her. But the way the question registered across her face, I could see that the effect of my words had been malignant. She smirked a little and went back to her work, turning the screwdriver around and around in her skilled fingers as she fitted rails to the side of a drawer. Whatever it was between us, the unspoken understanding that we would leave her killer nature undisturbed, seemed to be thinning. The knowledge was like a black dog that followed us everywhere. Somehow I knew it wasn’t going to stay quiet forever. Eventually it would insist on us acknowledging it, dealing with it. It would lick at my hands and nudge at my legs and feet until my remarks and questions became more frequent, until
I couldn’t be Eden’s partner anymore, until I couldn’t hunt killers in the company of a killer and find sanity in that.

  Had Eden killed those four people up in Byron Bay on the weekend? Had she made a day trip of it – bought a pie at a roadside 7-Eleven and sipped iced coffee as she drove, her gun on the seat beside her? What was making me think this way? Eden was a killer and she knew about guns. That’s all I was confident about. Maybe I was being paranoid.

  When I asked myself if I really wanted to know if Eden was still killing, I found the answer was no.

  Tara thought about killing for the first time when she was sixteen. She was standing on the sports field at the edge of the cricket match, the sun blazing on her classmates’ uniforms, making them sting in her vision. Mr Willoughby was yelling instructions from the side of the field, but Tara couldn’t hear them. To her right, a group of girls had given up covering their section of the field and sat in a group stringing pieces of grass, some lying with their heads in the laps of others having their hair braided.

  Tara watched their easy physical intimacy and wondered about them, the popular girls, why they felt the need to constantly touch, what message that was supposed to convey. Because everything that came from them had a message. Nothing was said explicitly. Looks pierced her, words jabbed at her, turned backs left her cast out. The popular girls were always hugging and holding hands. They announced their morning greeting hugs with gleeful cheers, outstretched fingers. They shamelessly caressed and groomed each other, rubbed lipstick smears from the corners of gaping mouths. Now and then they would fall on a boy, all of them at once brushing his hair and massaging his shoulders, gripping the impossibly hard muscle through the fabric. Peter Anderson was always among them, whenever the teacher’s back was turned, guiding their hands towards the hardness of his thighs, laughing when they squealed. Girls he had known since primary school, who he watched blossom slowly. Tara felt hot, seeing them there.

  No one ever touched Tara. In the second grade the girls and boys in her class had developed a terror of her ‘germs’. If any of them touched Tara, they would have ‘Tara germs’. Anyone who touched the infected child would also have them. Tara was infectious. The game made the boys and girls squeal and run and slap at each other with their dirty, infected hands. Touching Tara meant social rejection, so when it came to grabbing a partner, getting in a group, forming a circle, Tara always found herself isolated in metres of space. The game had ended finally, worn off, over the summer holidays. But the symbolic infectiousness seemed to linger, even now that all of them were older, no one came near her.

  They seemed to touch each other all the more when they knew she was near.

  She watched the ball bounce heavily nearby, walked after it as the class howled, and it was then the thought came to her.

  Kill all of them.

  The words in her head shocked her. They were almost spoken. She was almost tempted to look around, to see if they’d been whispered from a body outside her own. But she was alone, of course. Always alone. She squinted in the sun and heard the voice again as the bell rang and the popular girls sprang to their feet.

  Kill all of them, she thought. Make them touch each other, if that’s what they want. Make the boys force their fingers into the girls until they scream. Make the girls strangle each other. Make them beg. Make them grip at each other. Make them writhe together like worms, naked, flushed with blood.

  By the pile of equipment, Mr Willoughby was teaching a group of boys about the seam on the ball while Steven Korin wanked a cricket stump, holding it against his crotch, jerking the softly sanded wood. His eyes rolled up in his head. The boy directed the stump at Mr Willoughby’s back, then turned on Tara as she got close and jabbed the dirt-clotted tip of the stump into her thigh.

  ‘Oh Nuggy, baby,’ the boy groaned. ‘Gimme some of dat sweaty lurve!’

  The boys turned and howled with laughter. Tara jammed her hands into the wet patches beneath her arms, started to run. They called after her, loud enough so that she could hear them as she ducked into the girls’ bathrooms. The second bell rang for the younger kids and a crowd swelled under the awning, tiny Year Sevens with their immaculate hats and bags and huge folders bursting with books. Tara watched them pass beyond the door. She thought about their little necks in her fingers, their knobbly little knees struggling and bumping on the ground as she took them.

  One day every week, Imogen took time away from her commitments at the clinic to work on her superhero life. Her pursuit of Eden Archer. Or Morgan Tanner, as Imogen was now sure was her real name. The anniversary of little Genny Bainbridge’s disappearance was a month away and Imogen knew increases to the reward money for missing children nationwide would be generous, especially for a double tragedy like the Tanner children. She was confident she would have enough on Eden to scoop up the reward money almost immediately after it was announced. With the bump to the reward for any information on the disappearance of Morgan and Marcus Tanner rumoured at a hundred thousand dollars, she had to make sure she kept her investigations quiet. There would be other armchair detectives and cybersleuths out there with search engine traps who would happily hack her once they realised she was picking around the case. She’d run into some hardcore players in her time on the job, professionals who travelled the globe picking up reward money for missing kids, rich dead husbands and wives. Some were so established they handed out business cards at candlelight vigils and hounded victims’ families on their doorsteps, shoulder to shoulder with the press. Imogen couldn’t dream of that sort of commitment, not yet. Her clinic kept her low-level obsession with police officers under control, kept her interested in her side games with the missing children. Imogen needed multiple forms of entertainment. She’d always been a restless girl.

  In her mind there was a future growing and developing slowly of her and Frank as a partnership, using his police skills and her investigative drive to make a real living out of being armchair detectives, or ‘web sleuths’, as the young people called them. She twirled the bracelet he had given her, a guilt token he’d come home with after the scene at Malabar. He could be bossed around. That was the first tick on Imogen’s list. He had access to things she usually had to beg her way into – criminal records, driving records, family medical records, cop-shop talk and lawyer buzz. If Imogen could bring down Eden Archer, right in front of Frank, it would show him how clever she was, how blind he’d been to the possibilities of using his skills outside his dismal job with its dismal salary. It would show him that if he followed, she could take him places. She could train him up, show him the ropes, give him a taste of investigative work beyond the badge. Open his eyes to his true potential. What she was doing was sometimes rougher, sometimes harder, than being a boy in blue – but she would show him he was capable, let him be her sidekick. The hunky meathead hero rescued from the force and put to real work – it would make a great story for her girlfriends. Imogen’s uni buddies had all married psychologists. She liked being the wildcard among them.

  Imogen ordered a latte from the young waitress and spread her things out over the table. She pushed her glasses up her nose and prepared to make a summary of what she had on Eden. From the moment she spotted the birthmark on Eden’s side in the newspaper coverage of Rye Farm, Imogen’s information had grown substantially. Sunlight filtered through the trees lining Macleay Street, making patterns across her papers. The barista, a Brazilian girl, juggled the orders of the men and women around her, designers and architects and the bored housewives of Potts Point beginning their day with newspapers and little biscotti on organic pottery saucers. Imogen always came here, to Marcelle’s. It was close enough to the Strip that she often saw junkies walking past the huge double doors, hearing them before they appeared, their cat-calling and grumbling as they shuffled quickly between hits. A troupe of detectives from the Kings Cross police station across the road frequented the café, so she got to eavesdrop on their conversations as she worked, live their adventures on the drug beat
vicariously. The staff at Marcelle’s let her work without hassling her for the table after an hour and only two coffees. Imogen was settled and ready to make some real progress. She felt warm and happy with purpose.

  Her first assumption was that Eden Archer was an adult Morgan Tanner. This raised a few markers for confirmation. The birthmarks seemed the same – she’d tried for a photograph of the mark on Eden’s side but hadn’t managed one yet. Eden was the right age, according to her service record. She looked very much like the child in the missing posters – the same sharp features, Daddy’s black hair and iceberg blue eyes. If Eden Archer was Morgan Tanner that meant there was a good chance that her deceased brother, Eric Archer, had been Marcus, the other Tanner child. He was the right age. Three very good coincidences, if that’s what they were – the brother, the ages, the birthmark.

  The first thing Imogen had done was investigate Eden’s supposed parents. The mother, Sue Harold, had been a junkie and a dropout – a wild woman who surfed through life quickly and carelessly and who, it was reasonable to believe, departed this earth with only a box of odds and ends left at her mother Maggie’s house ever suggesting she’d lived at all, her children long passed over to her ex-boyfriend and her bank accounts empty. Oddly, however, when Imogen visited Maggie Harold, asked politely to see the box of worldly possessions that Sue had bequested to her, she found not a single sentimental trace of the woman’s supposed two children in it. Not a photograph. Not a card, a drawing, a teddy, not a child’s blankie or a pair of old knitted booties, the kind of keepsake every mother, no matter how irresponsible, kept. There was a report card from Eric’s first year at school and two copies of birth certificates. These were folded neatly and sitting in a single envelope, together, pristine, as though they’d barely been glanced at on receipt and then tucked away forever.