Fall

by Candice Fox

  ‘What?’

  ‘Psychology patients falling in love with their doctors,’ Hooky said. ‘In the discipline they call it transference.’

  ‘In my discipline, we call it “punching above your weight”,’ I laughed. She didn’t.

  ‘The patients redirect their feelings away from what they’re dealing with and onto to the psychologist during psychotherapy,’ she continued. ‘They get all wrapped up in the care and consideration they get from their psychologist and they emotionally attach. Try to take it beyond the professional setting. Psychologists are supposed to keep an eye out for it. Make sure they don’t take advantage of their patients while they’re vulnerable.’

  ‘I quite enjoy being taken advantage of.’

  ‘So the two of them only know each other through therapy.’

  ‘Yes, Eden and Imogen are certainly not friends,’ I said. I remembered the evening at Malabar and cringed, turning off Parramatta Road and onto Ross Street. ‘Why?’

  ‘I was just wondering how it all fits together,’ Hooky shrugged.

  People assume morgues are gloomy places, full of the reservation and reflection people associate with death. But they’re not. Sure, the building is stuffed with dead people in various states of assembly, but being depressed about it all day long makes for a fairly unsustainable workplace for the administration officers, pathologists, forensic scientists and nurses who work there. The first time I entered a morgue as a young police officer I was struck by the presence of a vending machine just inside the automatic doors. A vending machine? The idea that people would casually munch a Mars bar standing over the mangled body of a stranger, or grab a Coke before they go in to carve out semi-decayed livers and weigh them on scales, just boggled my mind. But they do. People do eat Mars bars at work, even when their work is with cadavers. They also gossip, laugh, play pranks on each other and decorate their little workspaces with happy pictures and fuzzy pens. They play music. They text and take smoke breaks. It’s just like any other workplace.

  Just outside the automatic doors, I stopped Amy on the stairs. ‘Now look. You’ll probably want to make a lot of hilarious puns in here,’ I gestured towards the doors. ‘But there are tons of them, and I know them all, and they can take a long time. So we ought to get them out of the way before we go in so that we don’t waste time.’ I rolled my shoulders. ‘Gee, this is the dead centre of town, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘Well, this is anything but a dead-end job. Oh dear, my back’s feeling a bit stiff. This is a great place, people must be just dying to get in here. Care for a drink after work? Maybe some spirits?’

  Amy looked at me.

  ‘If you wanted to contribute,’ I informed her, ‘you could say something like “Oh stop, Frank, you’re killing me!”’

  She went inside.

  I’ve known Carrie, the receptionist, for years, but I was surprised when she put the sign-in clipboard on the counter and smiled at my young partner with recognition.

  ‘How you going, Amy?’

  ‘No complaints.’

  ‘Well, aren’t you full of surprises?’ I squinted at Hooky. ‘What have you been doing hanging around my morgue?’

  ‘Your morgue?’ Carrie laughed.

  ‘Research,’ Amy said.

  ‘She’s dead serious about her research, Frank.’ Carrie struggled to keep a straight face.

  ‘Oh, nice delivery on that one, Carrie. Absolutely deadpan.’

  ‘Excuse me, won’t you?’ Amy sighed. ‘I’m going down to Lab 16, Carrie.’

  Amy turned and walked down the wide hall. I followed her, soaking up the hospital disinfectant stink. People don’t like that smell, but I’ve never minded it. It reminds me of when my dad was dying. All the treats and attention I got, the sense of newness in the air that surrounded his passing. He wasn’t a nice guy.

  ‘How long have you been coming here?’ I asked.

  ‘I drop in and out,’ she said.

  ‘And what exactly have you been telling them that has convinced them to let you in here?’ I asked.

  ‘This and that,’ she said.

  ‘You’re creeping farther and farther into murder police territory, Hooky bird,’ I said, after quietly considering whether I would raise the issue. ‘It’s a long way from what you’re approved for with the department.’

  ‘So I’m allowed to let creeps show me porn all night long but I’m not allowed to look at stiffs? That makes sense.’

  ‘It depends on the porn.’

  ‘Officially, I’m not approved to do that either, I’ll remind you.’

  ‘I was going to ask you about that. The chiefs know you’re doing that sort of work in the offices. But was that screenshot I saw yesterday from your personal computer? Because it had some very questionable chat group names on the bottom of the screen.’

  Hooky walked. She said nothing.

  ‘You’re not going off on your own to chase these guys down, are you?’

  ‘So what if I am? It’s the same thing I do in the office with a bunch of cops gawking at me. I still hand the guys in to the chiefs. I just don’t do all the bullshit reporting and filling out of forms.’

  ‘Oh Jesus, Hooky,’ I moaned. ‘You’re too big for your own boots.’

  ‘My mother used to say that.’

  I bit my tongue. I let a minute of silence pass, in which I tried to remember that Hooky was not my child and if she got her privileges at the department stripped for overstepping her bounds, there was nothing I could do to stop it. She was as stubborn as an ox.

  ‘Homicide is different. Very different. And if you think you can mess around and play games with your sex crimes resources, you cannot do that here.’

  ‘You and Eden are the only ones really aware of what I’m doing, Frank,’ she said. ‘No one’s going to kick up a stink.’

  ‘What if I kick up a stink?’ I said.

  ‘You won’t.’

  ‘Look.’ I took her arm. ‘I know you can get yourself anywhere you want to go. You’ve proven it, to everyone. No one can stop you going after what you want, and that’s fine – you’ve earned that. You’re brilliant at what you do, so people bend the rules and look the other way for you sometimes. But that doesn’t mean some of us shouldn’t try to stop you when you wander into dangerous territory. I’m worried about you messing around over here.’

  ‘Where? In the morgue?’

  ‘In the morgue. At crime scenes. In the evidence files. Over here, over in homicide.’

  She stopped walking and looked up at me. Ran a hand over her prickles and laughed, incredulous.

  ‘You’re quite happy to accept my assistance when I’m right, when it helps your case. But then I stray too far –’

  ‘I’m not saying you’re straying too far. I’m just saying that one of these days, you might. You might get in too deep. And I don’t care how old you think you are. At the end of the day, you’re seventeen years old. No amount of pretending is going to change that.’

  ‘Do you think I’m going to be traumatised, Frank?’

  ‘I’m traumatised.’ I tapped my chest.

  ‘Please.’ She waved her hand at me, snuck me a dirty look. ‘Don’t play Daddy. You’re no good at it.’

  I couldn’t control any of these women. Eden. Hooky. Imogen. None of them listened to me. I followed Amy towards Lab 16 and thought about getting angry. Sometimes getting angry with them works. Sometimes it blows up right in your face. It didn’t work with Imogen. I hadn’t been game to try it on Eden in case I woke up in a hole somewhere, startled by the pattering of the first shovel full of dirt on my chest. I gathered a lungful of air and put on my most determined face.

  ‘You –’ I started, as we got to the freezer doors.

  ‘This is Jill Noble,’ Hooky said, popping open one of the narrow compartments. Mist swirled around a blue tarpaulin body bag. Amy drew out the body rack and unzipped the thick black zipper on the side of the bag. ‘She came in on 4 August, thirty-six days ago.’

  I looked down
at the passive face of Jill Noble. There was little I could tell about her from her shoulders up, other than that she’d been allowed to decompose indoors or sheltered from the elements somewhere for about a week before being snap-frozen in the state she was now. Her body had swelled and deflated again, the way it does in the first three days. One of her ears was black as coal from lividity and the cheek on that side was swollen, cloudy and dark purple. I glanced into the bag at her breasts, her left arm. She’d been lying on her side for quite a while. Her tricep was pressed flat.

  ‘Hi, Jill,’ I sighed.

  ‘Jill Noble was the Sydney Parks Strangler’s first victim,’ Amy said.

  ‘I wish everybody would stop calling him the fucking “Strangler”. He sounds like a monster from a kid’s movie. Watch out. It’s the Strangler! It’s the worst of the serial killer names.’

  ‘How many are there?’ She frowned.

  ‘Are you kidding? There are heaps. Butcher. Slayer. Ripper. Slasher. Stalker. Werewolf.’

  ‘Werewolf?’

  ‘Albert Fish. The Werewolf of Wisteria.’

  ‘Oh, right.’

  ‘Jack Owen Spillman was the Werewolf Butcher,’ I said. ‘Now there’s a cool name.’

  Hooky sighed at me, gestured to the body, trying to get me focused. I was only playing games, I knew, because I didn’t want to look at the body. I didn’t want her to tell me what she was about to tell me. To make my world that much messier. I bit the bullet and took Jill’s report, which was lying in a slot on the freezer door. On average, unexplained death reports are about thirty pages long, but if you know where to look you can skip all the bullshit and get right to the business of things. I checked the listed abrasions, lesions, respiratory conditions and stomach contents. Advanced ecchymosis of the left side and left hip. Lots of bruising in distinct patterns and laceration of the right kidney. No post-mortem trauma.

  ‘Beaten to death,’ I said. ‘Probably a lump of wood. Our park girls were beaten and then strangled.’

  ‘She was severely beaten. But she was beaten too bad, so there wasn’t any fight left in her for the strangling.’ Amy pushed Jill’s matted brown hair back off her neck. There were tiny dried leaves in it. ‘See here? Report says this mark is from her silver necklace lying on the right side of the neck while the body lay decomposing. A post-mortem weight trauma. But I don’t think so. You look at the thickness of the necklace. Its weight. It was eight grams and very thin. I think this is ante-mortem. I think it’s a light abrasion from a drawstring, a hood placed over the head.’

  I looked at the mark on Jill’s neck. To me, it was consistent with an abrasion rather than a weight. The first layer of skin was papery and the mark was a light pink rather than a deep purple or blue. It cut across her neck and disappeared around the front of the throat. I pulled Jill’s hair up further and searched for a knot mark but there was none. If it was a drawstring it would have been loose, hastily tied.

  ‘See here?’

  ‘Mmm.’ I ran my fingers over a dent in Jill’s throat, a distinct dip in the taut skin over her jugular. ‘Indentation. Could suggest post-mortem strangulation.’

  ‘The killer tried to strangle Jill, but Jill was already dead. Her heart had stopped beating. So there’s no bruising. She died too quickly.’

  ‘So she was kidnapped, hooded, beaten with a stick. Maybe a bit of experimental strangling. Maybe. It’s a bit of a stretch, Hooky.’

  ‘Look at the date of death, though. This is the Park Strangler’s first victim,’ Amy said. ‘If you look at the whole picture, it fits with what we know of the killer’s tactics now, now that she’s further along in her training. I think she hooded Jill’s face for the same reason she now beats the face beyond recognition. Because she’s trying to disguise the victim from herself, allow the victim to be whoever she is fantasising she’s killing.’

  Again, the visualisation of the killer as female. The recognition of the facial injuries as a type of revenge fantasy. Both Eden and Amy had marked the killings as the work of a woman on a woman, a living out of some attack that could, for whatever reason, not take place in reality.

  ‘This is what I reckon. She started with an instrument to inflict her wounds,’ Amy said. ‘But it didn’t suit the fantasy. It didn’t feel right, and it killed the victim before she had a chance to get really personal – to strangle her. The hood wasn’t right either. It interrupted the original fantasy. It was distracting. So when she got to Ivana Lyon she dumped the weapon and the hood and she was going at it bare handed.’

  It made sense. There’s plenty of research into violent fantasies that become realities. As homicide detectives, it’s our job to keep updated on it all, to read the thick intellectual bile that comes out of university psychology departments trying to tell us in too many words why murderers do what they do. Violent fantasies can come from plenty of places, but most often they’re the result of some kind of trauma. A person experiences a terrible trauma, either sudden or prolonged, and begins to relive the trauma over and over as a symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder. The trauma goes around and around and around in her mind, becoming more and more tangible every time it’s revisited. Sometimes it can be the result of something as innocuous as living through an earthquake. The re-visualising of the earthquake becomes so real that sufferers swear they feel the ground shaking beneath them. Kids who were sexually abused can feel their abuser’s hands on them. War vets have auditory hallucinations of gunfire, mates crying for help. It takes a lot of therapy to get yourself out of it. It took fast and hard therapy to make sure I didn’t become gun-shy when Eden’s brother Eric shot me. If you recognise the potential of a trauma when it happens, and immediately treat it, you can sometimes stave off the effects of PTSD.

  Very rarely, sufferers of a traumatic event begin to add on to the revisualisation of the traumatic event. The child abusers see themselves being abused, and they extend the abuse out, turn and twist the fantasy until they become abusers themselves. The victim of workplace bullying revisits the bullying and adds himself calmly taking an AK-47 out from under his desk to the fantasy, blowing his colleagues away one by one. The fantasy, an involuntary thing, starts becoming voluntary. Enjoyable.

  Ted Bundy mused in one of his last interviews before his execution that it was violent pornography, viewed very young, that had made him what he was. He hadn’t realised it at the time, but his young, innocent mind had been violated by what he’d seen, and the reliving of the violence through the torture and killing of his victims was just the natural progression of his childhood trauma. I don’t know about that. Bundy was an arrogant man, full of excuses. But the theory was popular. Violence breeding violence.

  What had happened to the Sydney Parks Strangler? Who was she killing when she killed these girls?

  ‘Where’d we find this victim?’

  ‘Bradfield Park, Kirribilli,’ Hooky said. ‘She was under an old blanket, up against one of the bridge walls. People thought she was just a homeless person. Curled on her side, foetal position. It was three days before the smell was enough to start bothering people. Night-time boot camp groups had been exercising and jogging around the park, not a hundred metres from where she lay.’

  ‘Completely covered up?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  It went with the theory that this was the killer’s first victim. Ivana had been partly covered and hidden near bushes. Minerva had been more obvious again. The killer was getting bolder. Starting to ‘come out’ to us. Reveal herself to her audience.

  ‘Was she in exercise gear?’

  ‘Tracksuit.’

  ‘Shit.’ I felt the muscles gather at the base of my skull, preparing for the headache of a lifetime. ‘Shit. Fuck. Balls.’

  The difference between three victims and two in a homicide case might not seem like much on the surface of it, but in the public eye, it’s huge. The first murder stirs people. The second unsettles them further. It’s at this point that people can hang on to the hope that there isn’t
a serial killer on the loose – that in fact there’s no connection between the two victims and any link police might be pointing to could be a fluke. They don’t alter their behaviour. Sometimes, it doesn’t even make front-page news – particularly if there’s an election or a terrorist attack or some other major event. But whenever a link can be made between three homicide victims, killed separately, that’s the signal for a media firestorm. For the public panic. For the condemnation of the lead detectives and their lack of progress, no matter how much progress has been made. The fact that Jill Noble was victim number one and we hadn’t been right onto it was equally bad news.

  I zipped up Jill’s body bag and closed the freezer as though by containing Jill’s body I could contain what it meant. ‘This is on the down-low until further notice, Hook.’ I pointed at her face so she knew I was serious. She shrugged.

  ‘Good luck keeping this under wraps,’ Hooky said. ‘You know. I know. Carrie at the desk knows. The victim’s family will talk to the media, and they’ll know.’

  ‘We can try,’ I said. I took out my phone and called Eden.

  As I was putting my keys into the door of my car I heard Caroline Eckhart’s voice behind me. For a moment, I had to take stock of where I was. Turning and seeing her there, outside the low brown brick building that housed the morgue, was bizarre. There were no cameras in tow, but she was still wearing that running gear – the midnight-black Catwoman suit and blazing lime-green shoes. She had her hands in the front pockets of a shimmering black windcheater and I could see the outline of her knuckles and a phone. I wondered if she was recording me.

  ‘Frank,’ she said. ‘Can we talk?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘No, thanks. I think I’ve had enough front pages.’

  I unlocked the car and gestured to Amy. She didn’t get in. Unlike kids to want to be right where the drama is.

  ‘I just want to talk.’

  ‘There’ll be no talking, witch. Begone!’ I waved my arm. ‘You have no power here!’

  Hooky sniggered and got into the car.

  ‘Why has George Hacker been released from custody?’