Hades (An Archer & Bennett Thriller)

by Candice Fox

  “Oh Jesus!” Derek howled, crawling numbly off his chair. “Oh Jesus!”

  There were two plates of scrambled eggs and toast on the table. The smell of roasted coffee filled the room.

  “Mr. Turner,” I said. “I’m going to ask you once where Monica Russell is. You don’t tell me, I’m going to put a bullet right in the back of your skull.”

  I already felt like I was burning up, my body thumping with exhilaration. There was sweat on the back of my hands. Eliza Turner was screaming. She stopped abruptly when Eden pressed a boot down on her neck.

  “Please. Please. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Eden threw down the printout she had rolled up and stuck in her back pocket when we left the station. It was a copy of the waiting list. On page four, three from the bottom of the list, was Monica Russell.

  Female. Age thirteen. Chronic glomerulosclerosis. Two kidneys required.

  Monica had become very sick. Her family was visited by a tall handsome man with a big leather bag one dark night while the two girls were supposed to be sleeping. Not long after the family had moved houses. Monica had become sicker and sicker as the months passed but she’d still attended a new school with a new name. They’d pretended everything was fine, all according to plan. One night Monica was taken by the man with the bag to a house somewhere and given a needle to make her go to sleep. Monica lay on a steel-top table next to her sister, Courtney, who had smiled wearily and held her hand as the other girl was put to sleep too.

  The rage in me was so heavy and so hot that I felt out of control, frightened by what I might do. I could see Courtney against the back of my eyelids. I crouched over Derek and slid my fingers into his hair, wrenching his head up as I knelt on his spine.

  “You organized the murder of a fucking child.”

  “Derek,” Eliza sobbed. “Don’t say anything.”

  “We didn’t have a choice. Monica was going to be on the list for years. There was no time.”

  “You had Courtney killed to save Monica.” Eden was shaking her head. “Why? Why? They were both yours.”

  Derek started crying. I shoved his face into the floor.

  “Why?”

  “Derek, don’t.”

  “Because I wasn’t going to have that bitch live over Monica,” Derek said, tears dropping off the edge of his jaw. “Courtney was so fucking spoiled. Monica didn’t deserve what she got. One of them was going to die anyway. One of them was going to die. We didn’t do anything wrong. We didn’t kill anyone else’s kid. We just switched them, that’s all. We just switched them. They belong to us and we can do what we goddamn want with them.”

  The backup officers filled the room. One of them took Derek from me. Eliza struggled in Eden’s arms as she was cuffed. Eden stood and covered her mouth as the patrol officer took over, her eyes wandering across Eliza’s body like she didn’t know what the woman was.

  “Detective Bennett,” one of the officers said, putting a hand on my shoulder. “We found the girl.”

  I stepped outside with Eden and paused by the back door of the house. There was an old green-and-yellow swing set by the fence, its legs submerged in unmown grass. We were both huffing, pacing, wiping our faces in the cold morning air. I couldn’t get my heartbeat down.

  In the car on the way to the house I’d hoped that I was wrong, that somehow there was another Monica Russell out there suffering, dying, that the Turners’ daughter really was at Derek’s mother’s place. But Derek’s eyes as they lifted to mine in that moment when the door had slammed open confirmed I was right. I followed Eden to the aluminum shed at the back of the yard and slid open the glass door.

  The sun on the heavy curtains was weak. There was a female patrol officer sitting beside Monica’s bed, holding the girl’s hands. I let my eyes wander over the machines that surrounded her—the heart monitor and the respirator and the stand holding the intravenous. Monica looked small and frail. Her hair had thinned down to a limp curtain of chestnut brown that hung about her bony shoulders. An oxygen tube was taped under her nose.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked me, her eyes wild and black. “What’s happening?”

  “It’s okay, baby,” I said, a sour taste dancing on my tongue. “You’re, uh, you’re going to be out of here in just a minute.”

  “Where’s Courtney?” the girl asked, looking at Eden and the woman beside her for guidance. “Are you going to take me to where Courtney is?”

  15

  I caught some sleep at my desk while Derek and Eliza Turner were processed. It had been an awful rush at the Turner residence to get the parents into the paddy wagon, secure whatever physical evidence we could from the scene and remove Monica. The worst thing that could have happened would have been for the press to turn up while we were there, to discover what Derek and Eliza had done, to leak this to the world before we could use it to our advantage.

  Within the hour, the Turner house was shut up, the phone disconnected, the curtains drawn. Neighbors, who had gawked from their windows, quickly lost interest. When I woke around midday there were no journos on the front steps of the station. If we were lucky, we might have pulled it off without the country knowing what had occurred.

  As I slept, Eden took her rage out on the treadmill in the station gym. I found her in the hall outside the glass doors to the cardio section, towelling down her neck and breathing through her mouth.

  “You feel better?” I asked.

  “No,” she replied.

  I didn’t either. We were both angry. I had spent many restless hours thinking about Courtney, about her parents, about what it must have felt like to have a child ripped from your life. I felt sick now thinking about how they could have set up the killing of Courtney in Monica’s place. Had they allowed the killer to abduct her right off the street, as he seemed so skilled in doing, or had they taken her and Monica to the door of his chop shop? Come on, girls, we’re going for a little ride. Had he even taken them anywhere? Had he conducted the operation right there in the garden shed? I wanted to hurt Derek Turner. I wanted to twist his bones. All the tears, all the heartache, now seemed like a personal insult to Eden and me. Maybe the Turners had been hurting. Maybe they had genuinely felt something about the situation. I understood favoritism happened in families—particularly with stepparents. Hell, I wasn’t that naive. But to murder one child for another? How much trouble could Courtney have been?

  I followed Eden to the ladies’ changing rooms and stood outside while she showered and slipped back into her clothes. She came out and walked right past me, pulling her long inky hair up into a ponytail. We didn’t speak as we entered the interview observation room. Derek Turner was sitting at the table with his wrists cuffed, his wide hands clutched around a half-empty paper cup.

  “Someone gave him coffee?” Eden asked.

  There was silence from the men and women who stood around the observation room, watching the man through the mirror. No one admitted to giving Derek Turner a coffee. It might not have seemed like a big thing to anyone else, but I felt, as I was sure Eden did, that the coffee cup should have been rammed down the man’s throat.

  I followed Eden through the side door into the interview room. We sat down. Derek looked at us, expecting something, but I didn’t speak and neither did Eden. It was hard to know what to say. Eden was looking at her hands, straightening her fingers to examine the nails.

  “I haven’t asked for a lawyer,” Derek offered.

  “Were you there?” Eden asked without lifting her eyes. Derek seemed to tremble. He drained the rest of his cup of coffee and let out a great long sigh.

  “Were you there when he put her to sleep?”

  “No,” Derek said, his voice already straining. “No, I wasn’t there.”

  “Weak stomach?”

  Derek shivered and rubbed at his nose. His breath was steadily increasing, seeming to catch in his throat as he talked.

  “One of our children was going to die, okay? You understa
nd that? We’d already come to terms with the fact that she was going to die. She had a rare blood type and aside from that she was way down the donor list. A man came to us and told us he could fix it. He said it would take him some time but he could find us another kid to take her place. We didn’t . . . we didn’t like the idea of killing someone else’s kid. Courtney was giving us so much trouble at the time. She was such a fucking bitch. She was just . . . she could be unbearable.”

  There was silence on our side of the table. Derek wiped at a tear and sighed again.

  “Courtney had never liked me, ever since she was little. She was just like her idiot father. She was always wild. When Monica started getting sick, she started abusing teachers and skipping classes and throwing tantrums at school. The head teacher asked us to get her assessed, you know, for being mentally ill or something. I knew she wasn’t mentally ill, she was just a fucking brat. She was . . . I don’t expect you to understand.”

  “Good,” Eden said. There was a long moment of silence. Derek seemed to be off in his own world, staring at the coffee residue staining the bottom of his cup.

  “It was his plan, all of it,” Derek trembled. “He told us to get the girls out of their school, move away, change their names but don’t do it with the registry so that they wouldn’t find her on the list. Wait—so people would forget us. We weren’t a very social family anyway. We waited as long as we could. Monica was really sick. He called and I told him we couldn’t wait any longer.”

  “So months of planning went into this,” Eden said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Months,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he murmured, scratching his neck. “Look, we didn’t kill anyone else’s kid. I don’t know why you can’t see that. He told us he could find us someone and we’d never have to know who it was. But we didn’t want that. We didn’t want to hurt anyone.”

  “Je-sus.” I laughed madly, covering my face with my hands. I felt like I was watching a terrible joke unfold. Like some serious hilarity was being attempted and was failing dismally before my eyes. Maybe I was tired. Hacking laughs erupted out of me. I ran my fingers up through my hair, scratching at my scalp.

  I guess Derek was confused by the whole situation. He’d probably seen interrogations on television where the cops talk a lot, insinuating things, threatening things, leaning over the accused and pointing their fingers in his face. Eden and I sat still in our chairs and looked at the ground. I didn’t know about her, but I almost didn’t want Derek to confess. I didn’t want to hear what he’d done or what he felt. I just wanted to jump across the space between us and punch his teeth in.

  “So, um . . .” he said, trying to spur some reaction. “So this is where we start talking about some kind of deal, isn’t it?”

  Eden’s face snapped towards Derek.

  “A deal?”

  “Yeah, you know, like a deal for my, um . . . for my confession and all that?”

  “Oh no, no, no. Honey, no.” Eden laughed. “No, Mr. Turner, you’re going to prison for a long time, there’s no question about that. A long time. It doesn’t really matter what the sentence ends up being. In a year, you know, maybe two, someone’s going to come into your cell in the middle of the night and put a sharpened toothbrush handle through your neck. That’s what happens to people who kill children, Mr. Turner. They don’t cut deals.”

  “But I can help you.” Derek shuddered, tears falling unchecked down his wide cheeks. “I can help you find him. I know what he looks like.”

  “Yeah? So do we. He’s a handsome prick.”

  “He’ll call me. He said he would call, on the first of every month after the operation for six months, you know, to check on Monica. I can make him come to me. I can help you trap him. You have to cut a deal with me. You have to.”

  Eden stood up from her chair so fast it skidded out from under her legs and hit the wall behind us. I remained sitting while she tugged Derek Turner forward by the collar of his sweat-stained shirt until his nose was inches from her own.

  “What you have to do, Mr. Turner, is pray. You better pray to God you have the chance to help us and that I give you something, anything, in return, because from here on in you’re going to have to beg for everything you ever get. You’re going to have to beg for . . . Every. Last. Breath.”

  16

  It was the third coffee of the night for Santi, and the last he would ever have. He stood at the Bean-Man espresso machine in the middle of the 7-Eleven and watched the brown foam rise in his paper cup, dreaming of being at home in his bed. It was always at this time, the third coffee and the eighth hour of darkness, that he would begin to think of home. The clean slide of his bare legs into the cold sheets. The tick of his wall clock. Three hours to go. The night shift was a long one but there were fewer people to watch, to cater for, to fear. The man by the magazine stand was the only person to come into the store in the last hour and he seemed satisfied with an impersonal nod from under his plain baseball cap. Santi took his place behind the counter, ran a hand through his dark hair to bring feeling back into his scalp and settled down for another hour of reading John Connolly’s Every Dead Thing.

  The woman came into the store and stood in the middle of the entrance between the grocery stand and the counter. For a moment Santi was so engrossed in the book that he didn’t lift his eyes to her. When he did, the book under his fingers tipped and slammed itself shut. He looked at the sheen of sweat on her bronze skin, the black stain of rope marks on her wrists. She was wearing a torn black dress that barely covered the curve of her backside and a set of heels that Naomi Campbell would have had trouble walking in and that were caked in thick clots of mud. Santi lifted his eyes to hers and recognized the cold animal terror there, the kind he had seen in the eyes of his co-workers during holdups.

  “Help me,” she said softly. Santi felt his mouth drop open.

  “What . . .”

  The last sound to leave Santi’s lips was a muffled chugh as the bullet met his skull. Martina jolted at the sound, turned and looked at the eyes of the man who had put her in the cage. He was standing in front of a rack of magazines, one of them rolled up in his fist, the other hand letting the gun lower from where it had dispatched the counter clerk. The man shook his head at her, his jaw set with rage.

  “How the hell did you get out?”

  With two long, angry strides he seemed to have crossed half the store. His hand encircled her bicep with room to spare. Martina remembered his touch. She felt her lip curl as her hand reached out, taking in the shape of whatever it was that was nearest to her with a crushing grip.

  Later, when the security tapes were analyzed, twelve officers would watch as a grainy image of Martina Ducote took the pickle jar from the grocery stand and swung it up and over like a hammer into the killer’s head. The sound of the impact could be heard outside, where a woman was filling the tank of her Mitsubishi. She would say later that she thought it was a second gunshot.

  “Get away from me!”

  Martina’s voice would sound like a cat screech on the tape. The killer took the blow heavily, his head snapping back, body limp as blackness momentarily closed over his eyes. Martina stood paralyzed in the entrance of the store as the man who had abducted her recovered, got to his feet, stumbled through the automatic doors. The woman who had been filling her Mitsubishi watched in confusion as the killer took off in a blue Ford with no plates. In the artificial light of the store Martina Ducote sunk to her knees on the pocked linoleum and began to cry.

  I caught a glimpse of myself in the rearview mirror as I pulled up at the hospital, my face lit only by the pale blue of predawn. I didn’t recognize the haggard, sleep-mussed man who looked back at me. I was surprised, therefore, to find Eden in the hall dressed immaculately, hair pinned up so that it was off her neck, a cup of coffee in her hand. It made me wonder if she had been up already when we received the call about the woman named Martina Ducote. I glanced at my watch. It was 4AM.

  “This is
it.” Eden grinned uncharacteristically. “This is our Big One.”

  All cases have a “Big One.” It’s the colossal mistake, the underestimation or oversight that killers make to break the case. Most homicide cases have one. Ted Bundy was pulled over for failing to stop at a routine traffic check and a search of his car revealed a ski mask, a crowbar, handcuffs, garbage bags, a coil of rope and an ice pick. Critical oversight. Jeffrey Dahmer’s last victim punched him in the face, escaped and led police back to his apartment, where they found a human head in the freezer and photos of the mangled victims on the walls. Devastating underestimation. From the telephone conversation I’d had that morning, Martina Ducote had got herself out of a dog cage, walked six kilometers through bushland and turned up at a 7-Eleven on the side of the Pacific Highway. Better yet, she’d run into the killer and conked him on the head with a jar of pickles. Colossal mistake. I’d driven to the hospital with sugarplum fairies dancing in my head. We probably had the killer’s blood on the jar, his face on the 7-Eleven CCTV, a description of his car. The killer might have touched something in the store, which meant we could lift his prints. The store clerk, some poor Indian student who took an extra shift on his night off, had copped a bullet in the head. Unless it was hollow point, Santi Verma’s bullet would lead us to a gun. This was most certainly our Big One. I was anxious to see Martina Ducote so I could hug and kiss her for saving us so much work.

  Somehow I hadn’t expected the woman to be in such bad shape. A person who could break herself out of a cage, scramble through the bush to safety and fight off her abductor with nothing more than a glass jar seemed, in my mind, someone who was impervious to injury. But Martina was roughed up bad. She was sitting on the edge of a hospital bed while a doctor treated blisters on her feet that were so large and gruesome they looked like acid burns. Her arms, face and neck displayed the telltale nicks and scratches of the bush. Her short black hair was sticking out at odd angles from behind her ears, and the little black dress she was wearing had given up on the left-hand side, revealing the edge of her round breast. She was deeply engaged in one of the two basic emotions victims of crime display: anger.