by Candice Fox
‘Honey?’ Caroline snapped.
I walked away from her, heard her fire her defence at her press cronies.
The radio was filled with speculation about the park murders. Eden hardly listened, nor did she pay much more attention than the necessary nods and noises to Frank’s complaining about the fitness woman. She thought dimly about the girl, Hooky, who’d texted Frank to tell him that she had found a better image of the lovers on the park bench and sent the file on to be analysed by the forensics department. A strange creature, that one. There was something faintly predatory about her, like a newborn crocodile, all cute except for the teeth. Losing her parents had changed Eden, darkened something inside her. Perhaps it had done the same to this young woman. What was she now, this gifted little liar? A threat? Or just a curious natural-born police officer following her instincts? Plenty of officers Eden knew had joined the crime war because of loss, violence. The mother beaten to death by the cheating stepfather. The brother killed by a king hit in the Cross. The favourite school teacher stabbed after a mugging gone wrong. Tragedy changed lots of people. Inspired them to be cops, nurses, firemen, lawyers.
Frank fell asleep beside her as she wound the car slowly out of the city and into the Western suburbs, clapboard houses sailing unnoticed past his eyes, his arms folded and tucked into his grey woollen jumper. Given a spare minute anywhere, anytime, Frank would sleep. He slept in the locker rooms, in the tea room, in the car while she grabbed coffee at a service station. It wasn’t even an exhausted sleeping – he wasn’t a sleepy person. It was almost like his body went on standby when he couldn’t do anything or think anything about the case for a minute or more, like a computer left unattended. The fingers of the right hand, now and then, softly twitched with an angry nerve damaged when her brother had shot him.
Eden still thought about what might have happened if she’d let Eric kill Frank, if it were him beside her now riding the M4 between wooded mountain ranges. When would Eric have stopped? When he was still alive, sometimes she wondered if their night-time killing games together hadn’t been his only nocturnal activity, if killing the innocent as well as the murderers, rapists, gangsters and pedophiles they selected for their toys hadn’t quietened his addiction. Was he responsible for other deaths? Had she turned a blind eye to the very same evil that they hunted together, brought onto the undeserving by her very own brother? Had killing Eric been the right thing?
Did Frank deserve to be here beside her, softly sleeping, any more than Eric did? Her night-time games had been halved since she lost her hunting partner. If she’d let him live, she would have made the world much safer, predator after predator after predator, than she was able to now. How many more could she have caught with Eric assisting her and Frank dead? How many lives could they have saved? Who was dead now, who was running free, so that Frank could live?
She shook these thoughts out of her head as they entered the Vulcan State Forest. The eucalypts towered here, reaching blackened fingertips towards the sky, burned mouths gaping, shoulder to shoulder, jealously crowding the view of their shadowed depths. Something large and reptilian streaked into the undergrowth as she rolled through the unmanned boom gates and onto the dirt road. From here, it was an upward climb through the mountains towards Bood’s house.
Morris Alexander Bood had been one of Eden’s first solitary hunts, when Eric was away for two months on a murder case up north. The itch had become unbearable after six weeks, and with her brother uncertain about when he’d get back, she gathered up all the information she had on the freelance assassin, caught a plane to Hobart and went after him.
She was twenty-three, violent and lustful for blood, much less controlled in her pursuits than she was now. She’d hunted down police surveillance photographs of Bood and shuffled them in her fingers on the plane, thought about his body, about the fight he’d probably put up when he discovered she planned to kill him. At 195 centimetres tall, broad and thick-limbed like a draft horse on its hind legs, he made an unlikely assassin. Most dial-a-death guys she’d encountered were small wiry types, the kind who could flit up stairwells and peek over roofs with their scopes aimed at politicians or husbands or jurymen targets, the kind who could disappear among crowds, sail through airport checkpoints unnoticed. Bood was distinctive for his sheer size alone. Cramming into passenger seats and holding cups of tea in his huge fingers, ducking under signs in airports and blocking out windows as he tracked his targets, he would draw eyes. Eden had heard whispers in the criminal community that, despite his bulk, Bood was very good. Efficient, and so cold, so callous, he was said to be the man to hire no matter the morality of the situation. He took out wives for insurance money. He knocked off grandparents for inheritances. Morris Bood was a killer without a compass, they said. He took or passed up jobs as randomly as the results of a coin toss. Sometimes he backed out of jobs for no apparent reason. Sometimes he turned and killed his client. He was unpredictable, accurate and left little evidence behind that would suggest to police that he was anything but a myth among the bottom-dwellers of the world.
Eden looked forward to killing him.
Unlike most assassins she’d known, Bood didn’t stick around to fight when she cornered him in his car on the outskirts of wet, sleepy Orford one night in June. She waited in the back seat for him, felt the whole vehicle rock as he swung his legs into the cavity beneath the wheel. She slipped the wire over his head and yanked it tight, put her lips right beside his ear, blessedly warm and soft, just as she’d imagined.
‘Don’t move,’ she said.
‘Forget that,’ he answered, reaching up and grabbing the wire with one hand, tugging it right out of her fingers as though it were dental floss. He turned, quick as a snake, and shoved her hard in the chest, the blow turning from a balled-fist punch to a flat-palm push at the very last second, the second he recognised her silhouette against the orange lights as that of a woman. Eden was just recovering from the surprise of the blow when Bood took off across the car park, running upright, confident, like a competition sprinter. He was at the tree line before Eden could scramble out of the car. She ran for the trees.
This is wrong, she thought as she entered the dark forest. You’re on his game board now.
She barrelled headlong into his territory, telling herself all the while to turn back, remembering the crime-scene photographs of men and women on the bush floor, heads blown off, arms and legs splayed in the moist undergrowth. He liked to catch and release them, let them get ahead of him, relax, walk through the valleys like deer, crying and calling out. The night air was painful in Eden’s lungs as she ran. She wove and ducked between the eucalypts, tiny slices of moonlight through the canopy her only guide, the only thing stopping her from slamming headfirst into a tree. She stopped, whirled, ran again at the faintest movement, a shimmer of black ahead, the grind of a leather boot. A line of white dotted against the undergrowth slowly emerged, widened, a frozen lake lit by the moon, a kilometre wide. She saw the big man run out onto the ice and followed in a direct line behind him, sure that if the ice could take his monstrous weight it could also take hers. Then she felt the ice give and heard a gut-deep yelp escape her lips. A pop noise, like a gunshot, the squeaks of dry ice rubbing. She put a foot into slush, then another into water, and she plunged. Eden screamed as the pain rushed around her, into her ears and mouth and eyes – not water but raw red hurt.
She rose up, scrambled and grabbed at the slush and chunks, her fingers and hands and now wrists numb. Eden heard her own cries and gasps and coughs as though through cotton-stuffed ears. The edge. She found it, climbed up it, felt it crack and tip and slide beneath her. She found another edge and gripped at it with her fingernails. Her coat dragging her down into the darkness. Her boots kicking at nothing.
In the chaos, she saw him out there on the ice, watching her. Between her sinking, drowning, hauling herself up and sliding back, he approached her, slowly crouched just out of reach. He was watching her die. Crouching there and wa
tching the end of her, as she’d planned to watch his death, coldly and emotionlessly. She wouldn’t beg him. Eden kicked and grabbed the surface, dug in, watched the ice curl and powder as her nails scratched lines back towards the sucking depths.
Nine or ten times she hauled herself up and slid back. Each time, it took longer. Bood watched. The moon glowed above.
Eden kicked, one last time, groped at the ice, and felt his hand on her wrists. He was lying on his belly on the surface of the lake. He pulled her and she gripped his coat, let him drag her onto the surface, drag her to the edge and dump her in the wet grass. Sounds came out of her she could not control, gasps and howls of agony. Everything was limp, useless, pulsing with her thundering heartbeat. She lay on her stomach like a doll while he pulled her coat off her arms, replaced it with his own, lifted and rolled her so that the wool brushed her numb face and her eyes took in the black sky.
‘What a fighter,’ she heard him laugh, somewhere above her in the haze of impending unconsciousness.
She lay there on the edge of the lake for what seemed like hours listening to the sound of ambulance officers coming down the embankment, torches sweeping. Bood was long gone. She hadn’t seen him again for years.
And then one night, coming to the end of a glass of merlot at a bar in Wynyard, another arrived before she could catch the waiter’s attention. Sent from the man sitting at the bar with his back to her. The blond giant turned his face just slightly and she saw his cheek lift with a devious smile.
Now here she was in the driveway of his Vulcan home. She parked the car beside the spotless Hilux under the second-floor verandah. Frank snuffled and stretched awake, took in his surroundings with a yawn. A strong wind gusted up the hill and shook the trees at the edge of the clearing, rattled glass panels in the verandah doors above. Eden sent a text informing Bood of their arrival. There was no telling where on the property he might be.
‘So this guy’s our tranquilliser expert,’ Frank said, popping his door and sliding out. He looked at the tree line, shielded his eyes against the bright overcast sky. ‘Man’s got a hell of a view.’
Eden led her partner up the stairs to the great sweeping porch, the huge redwood doors inlaid with glass. The big house was open, as she expected. Frank stood in the entrance and gaped at the massive black buffalo head hanging above the wall table across from the door. He reached out and seemed to want to touch the nose of a glassy-eyed fox mounted on a slab of polished oak next to the buffalo’s right shoulder. The room was done up log-cabin style, with woolly tapestries hanging between the mounted heads of deer, bison, big cats and a variety of small, handsome forest creatures.
‘Did you say you knew this guy, or …’ Frank spied the billiard table in the sitting room off to the left of the foyer. The bar.
‘I’ve known him for some years, yes.’
‘And you’ve never once considered that I might like to know this guy? That we might in fact make excellent best friends?’ Frank wandered to the sitting room door, noted the gigantic flat-screen television above the fireplace, the sprawling cashmere couches. ‘He’s got a bar.’
‘You’re a recovering alcoholic.’
‘A bar!’
‘He’s not your kind of guy, Frank.’
‘Oh Eden, really,’ Bood said from across the dining room to their right. His boots clunked on the polished floorboards. ‘I’m everyone’s kind of guy.’
She’d forgotten Bood’s almost supernatural sense of hearing. He could hear a sugar glider taking flight from five hundred metres. The huge man fitted his oversized surroundings, traversing the twelve-seater dining-room table in a couple of strides, thrusting his callused palm in Frank’s direction. For once, Frank seemed happy to be the less impressive specimen of masculinity in the room. He shook Bood’s hand enthusiastically.
‘Morris. Or Bood, as my friends have it.’
‘Frank. Great, great place, mate.’
‘Well, thank you.’ The big hunter smiled, folded his sheep’s leg arms over his chest. ‘When you’ve been a bachelor as long as I have, you can afford to dress your castle as a real man should. I’d love to take you on a tour.’
‘We don’t have time for tours,’ Eden said. ‘We’re here on business.’
‘Ever the pragmatist. My dear, dear Detective Archer.’ Bood put an arm out and Eden leaned into it, her arms still crossed, and let him kiss her cheek. He swept her into an unexpected squeeze and Frank laughed as she wriggled free. ‘I insist, though. Frank here seems like a guy who really appreciates a homeowner’s efforts. Come on.’
Eden broke away, having seen it all before. The hot tub. The study with its chart tables and battered maps on the walls, the cabinets full of shimmering butterflies, thorned grass-dwellers, beetles of impossible colours and patterns.
The wine cellar, and the door down there, chipped and blue she recalled, salvaged from some crumbling church somewhere or some ancient library burned to ruins. She’d seen what lay beyond the door, where Bood kept his real trophies, the trophies he certainly would not be including in Frank’s tour. Eden went into the kitchen, took a beer from the double-door stainless steel fridge and leaned against the kitchen bench sipping it. She looked at the mountains through the glass wall to the verandah. A change was coming through. Rain. She could see its slanted grey fingers on the distant white horizon.
Frank’s voice could be heard all over the house. Bood’s booming laughter. When Frank returned, his eyes were wide.
‘Did you see the moose?’
‘I’ve seen the moose, yes,’ Eden replied.
‘There’s a bear in the living room.’
‘And a chair as well?’ she sighed.
‘Now now, my love,’ Bood laughed, touched her shoulder. ‘We’ll get to the business end of things in just a moment. You’ve had a long journey. Can I get you a beer, Frank? A snack?’
Frank balked. Masculinity in peril.
‘One of us has got to be zero. Cop thing. No beer for you, shithead.’ She jabbed Frank in the ribs. He gave her a relieved look. ‘He’ll take the snacks though.’
Frank followed her into the huge eastern room, stopped only to take in its high ceilings, the windows above the shelves crammed with books slowly darkening with the coming rain.
‘What does this guy even do that he can live like this? What is it? Old money?’
‘Probably something like that.’ Eden flipped her laptop open on a coffee table set between two red, oily leather wingback chairs. ‘Don’t get distracted. We’re here to get information and then we’re leaving.’
Frank was looking through a brass telescope at nothing, fiddling with the dials. He touched a huge open notebook and Eden watched him slowly realise the instrument had likely been microscopically tuned to follow particular comets and stars. Her partner went stiff all over, shuffled guiltily to the seat beside her.
‘You’ve been warned about touching things you’re not supposed to.’
‘Look at the guns, Eden.’ He pointed to a rack of twelve ornate rifles wedged between two pillars of books. ‘There are guns all over the goddamn house. There’s a cabinet of semi-automatics near the laundry chute. We don’t have this many guns in our armoury at HQ.’
‘Mmm.’
Bood entered with a plate of nibbles and set them beside the laptop. He pulled one of the wingback chairs into the semicircle made by Eden and Frank’s chairs. Frank set upon the crackers and cheese like he hadn’t eaten in days, collecting crumbs on his knees and the floor around his feet.
‘So, Frank, you’ll have caught on by now, I’m sure, that Bood here’s an enthusiastic big game hunter,’ Eden began. She drew up her email account and extracted images of Ivana Lyon and Minerva Hall’s puncture wounds that the pathologist had sent through. She set these beside each other on the screen. She turned to the big man. ‘I hoped maybe you could tell us something about the tranquilliser used in capturing these two victims. I’ve got a toxicity report from the coroner, but we’re not even close to bei
ng able to identify the brand of chemical used from the distribution alone.’
Eden sat back and let Bood take charge of the laptop. His brow was heavy, dusted with strawberry blond eyebrows that met over a long, wide nose. There was grey creeping into the sides of his short beard and spotted through the fur at the back of his neck. Eden turned away, and as she did caught Frank examining the big man with the same idle curiosity. He was a fascinating man to look at, not only in his scale, but in the objects and images that surrounded him and how they played about his features and movements. Bood lived among decorated corpses, big cats, deer, silky buffalo, large animals, small animals, predators and prey alike. Comparing his own shape and movements with the animals that surrounded him was unavoidable. His hands came together and he rested his chin upon them, careful to think through his response before he gave it.
‘Well, it’s a smaller dart,’ Bood began. ‘I can tell from the wounds. Darts of around 1.5cc won’t break the skin when they’re extracted. Most tranquilliser darts have a rubber stopper on the needle so the animal can’t pull or knock the dart out when it falls. It goes in, and the rubber stopper stops it coming back out before all the chemical can be released into the animal’s system. This dart didn’t have a stopper. So it was a small quick-acting dart rather than a large slow-release dart.’
Frank took a notepad from his pocket and began writing.
‘Whoever’s using the darts must have some idea what they’re doing,’ Eden said. ‘Or they would have gone over the top. Shot for an overdose, rather than have their victim limp away on an underdose. Am I right?’
‘Right,’ Bood said. ‘It’s a tricky thing to calculate. You’ve got to understand the nature of the animal itself. How its blood flows. Its epidermis. You can’t hit a crocodile and a human with the same dart. Some darts will penetrate tough skin, like reptile skin. Some darts will penetrate softer skin. Some darts are good for animals with fur, feathers – some are better for hairless creatures. Something delicate was needed for human skin, and a delicate dart was used here. If you’re going to do this, you’ve also got to consider dosage. How fast does the heart beat? Was the animal resting or running? Was it frightened or calm? The rate of uptake will be affected by how quickly the chemical is absorbed into the bloodstream. You don’t want to hit a resting tiger with a slow-uptake tranquilliser or the thing will come around and have you for dinner.’