Hades (An Archer & Bennett Thriller)

by Candice Fox

  “You all right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Sure?”

  “He’s not here,” she said, sounding as though she was struggling to believe her own words. “He wouldn’t come back here.”

  The smell of smoke became overpowering, stinging in my eyes and throat. As we approached a break in the bush I noticed the leaves were coated in wet ash. We emerged into the long grass beside a barbed-wire fence.

  A property sprawled before us, bleak and abandoned. Half of the grass was dead and shrunken against the earth and the other half was waist high. A small house had stood in the middle of a large field. Now it was a blackened carcass, ribs of charred beams reaching towards the grey sky. There was a fire engine sitting by the remains of the building, as well as a patrol car. Two female officers leaned against the hood, one writing a report, the other taking photos. I looked around for Eden and the others but they were already halfway across the field.

  “You were wrong,” I told Martina. “He came back.”

  She nodded. The female cops were surprised to see us arrive.

  “So you guys couldn’t put two and two together?” I gestured towards the house.

  “You’re not in Grose Vale anymore,” the lead male answered. “We’re in Kurrajong’s jurisdiction now. I’m sure if they’d known they’d have let us know—right, girls?”

  “You’re Martina Ducote.” One of the Kurrajong officers pointed at Martina with her pen. “So this is . . .”

  We all looked at the house. Firemen were walking around the black and wet innards, kicking things over, stomping on embers.

  “Yeah,” Eden sighed. “This is the chop shop.”

  He had done a good job of destroying the house. The heat had been so extreme that the cage from which Martina had escaped had melted and bent and was now a surrealist appropriation of its former self. The room with the operating tables had taken the explosion of several gas tanks. Parts of the table were embedded in the field fifty meters away, with pieces of scalpels, knives, saws and syringes. What remained of the defibrillator was a melted pool of beige plastic. I walked among the ruins with Martina, picking up pieces of burned paper and the broken halves of chemical bottles and slipping them into evidence bags. There were remnants of a couple of pieces of jewelry that had survived the fire: a gold hoop earring and a man’s watch.

  Eden came over and walked beside us, told us that a check of the property’s deed showed it was government-owned land and that the house had been scheduled for demolition years ago, but hadn’t been a priority. I watched as Martina broke away and crouched in what must have been the living room, reaching out and coating her fingertips in ash from the floor.

  I should have been looking for evidence. I should have been feeling something for Martina, a woman who had survived an entanglement with a monster, who had returned to the place where he had attempted to take her heart. But my mind was elsewhere. I hugged my jacket against the wind and looked out at the Blue Mountains.

  A news van came into view, rumbling down the narrow service road towards the front of the property. There was no way of knowing if they were simply trying to cover the fire or if somehow they’d got wind that this was the killer’s chop shop. Two of the police officers were on their phones. I started walking, hoping to stop the reporters before they defiled the crime scene.

  “Hey!” one of the Kurrajong officers cried from the other end of the field. “Hey! Hey! Come here, quick!”

  I stopped in my tracks. Not only was she screaming so that her voice could reach us, but it had risen more than a few octaves. She sounded afraid. I turned and ran with Eden into the mess of grass behind the house. The cop was standing by a squat stone structure in the far right corner of the field. My boots crunched on glass and debris, even as I approached the barbed-wire corner of the property.

  The structure was a well. Officer Sanders of the Kurrajong Police had gone right ahead and shoved the concrete lid halfway off the well. She’d stopped vomiting long enough to call us and that was all. I scooped up the end of my shirt and pressed it against my mouth, shading my eyes as I looked down into the dark.

  The well was about six meters deep. I could see one dead milky eye staring up at me in the crescent moon of grey light. From the smell I could tell there were many more.

  19

  Cops become callous. It’s a story as old as time. Those overexposed to death and cruelty stop believing in the general goodness of the human heart and all that greeting card crap, and they look upon depravity and murder as being common to the human condition. They stand by, smoking, joking about the dead, moving off topic and speculating about the weekend’s football. They sigh and trudge in the grass and whine about their work in a manner identical to a thousand other professions.

  For the cops who arrived to empty the well of bodies, a job that would last long into the night, the killer’s evil was more of an inconvenience than an abhorrence against humankind.

  So when Martina Ducote decided to stay and watch, I felt a twinge of concern in my stomach. Not only was she about to witness what she might have become but she would, no doubt, see the disrespect of the dead that comes so naturally to cops.

  I kept an eye on her as night fell and two forensic officers were lowered by harness into the well to photograph, fingerprint, take samples and the like. They were rushing some special forensic anthropologist in from the city by helicopter, having called her at home while she was making dinner for her kids. What a job. A bunch of patrol officers were trying to move the camera crews and pretty journalists back from where they’d set up, blasting light onto heavily made-up faces and setting up mikes.

  Eden wandered around with her arms folded, thinking. I lost myself in thought as well, probably coming to the same conclusions. Why well bodies and bay bodies? It seemed like he was conducting operations here and this was the most convenient way to dump the corpses, and those he dumped in the city must have been from another operation site near the bay. Did he have a city apartment?

  Within two hours the first of the bodies was removed, carefully extracted from the tangle of remains like a piece of a puzzle sculpture, lifted out of the darkness using a stretcher and a winch. It was a man, curled on his side in a fetal position, eyes closed. Martina watched the body hover above the well with no expression on her face. Her cheeks were lit with the flashes from the press who had spotted her standing there beside me. Someone made a crack about the dead man sleeping on the job and people sniggered. I put my hand on Martina’s shoulder.

  “Haven’t you got anyone worried about you?”

  “No,” she said without looking up.

  “Can I give someone a call?”

  “No one who won’t be surprised to receive it.” She smiled a little at my efforts. “I don’t really have anyone close enough to be ‘the one’ I would call in a crisis.”

  I stood there for a moment thinking how sad that sounded before I realized I was in the same position. It seemed that Martina and I ran the same kind of lives—unattached, coasting through circles of acquaintances, intimate only with strangers. I lived that way as a destructive self-preservation technique I’d long grown accustomed to. Martina Ducote didn’t seem old enough for that. I realized she was watching me and smiled awkwardly.

  “This is going to be an all-nighter,” I told her. “I saw a Hungry Jack’s at the bottom of the hill on the way in.”

  “I love Hungry Jack’s,” she said. Someone started singing “We’re Sendin” Our Love Down the Well” to a chorus of laughter and I blushed, ushering Martina quickly towards the car.

  I don’t know how long it had been since Martina had eaten something, but she gave me the impression of someone taking the chance while it was safe to do so. She backed up her burger with onion rings and a Coke, which she sipped retrospectively, staring out the window at the cars pulling off the highway on their way up the Blue Mountains or back down. The restaurant workers, who were all teens, kept darting out from behind the counter whe
n they had the time to frantically wipe tables, their cheeks rosy and shimmering with sweat. My first job had been a fries boy at McDonald’s. I took a moment to appreciate how awful the job was and the fact that I was sitting there eating and not engaging in it.

  “You want a sundae?” I asked Martina, kind of hoping she would want one so I could have an excuse to get my own.

  She snorted, folding the corner of her burger wrapper.

  “Thanks, Dad.”

  I brought back a strawberry and a chocolate. She took the strawberry one. It was very feminine of her, I thought.

  “You deal much with this sort of thing?”

  “With what?” I asked, putting my arms on the table.

  “I don’t know. Kidnapping victims. People who . . . people who were almost . . .”

  “No.” I stabbed my sundae with my spoon. “I generally try to get the reports and leave it at that. To be honest, victims don’t usually hang around the way you have.”

  “I don’t feel safe,” she admitted, keeping her eyes locked on the cup. “Funny things make me want to run and hide. Lights. The feel of cold metal. The sound of the wind.”

  It hurt to hear her talk about the niggling desire to dart right out of life. I’d experienced it after Louise’s baby died. Our baby. The sound of a female voice on the phone. The sight of a pregnant woman. The color pink. These things had made me nauseous and flighty, right on cue, for months. My second wife, Donna, I’d found and married pretty swiftly to try and force myself back into the women-and-babies lifestyle, like a kind of immersion therapy. Bad idea. She’d got wind of my weirdness and coldness and “emotional unavailability” within months.

  “They got a name for that,” I said. “That’s why you shouldn’t be hanging around with us. You should be sitting on a couch somewhere trying to feel better.”

  “I feel better when I’m with you,” she said. She let the words hang in the air, punctuated only by the crash of fries baskets and the yelling of order numbers in the kitchen. A couple of truckers took a booth behind me and Martina followed them with her eyes, scratching unconsciously at her temple.

  “I know he probably won’t come back.”

  “He won’t,” I said. “You’re not the only escapee. He tried to drown a junkie off the harbor the morning we found the bodies. By all reports he was happily finding Jesus with a bunch of other NAs in Darlinghurst last night.”

  Martina listened to my words carefully, dissecting them as the ice cream melted before her. She took a couple of spoonfuls and sucked them thoughtfully, her big eyes hidden behind her black lashes.

  “Someone was in line for my heart,” she said quietly. “There’s someone suffering somewhere, waiting to die. Someone who’s sick and weak, maybe. Someone who believes they didn’t deserve what they got. I’ve seen his face, the surgeon, but I haven’t seen the face of the man or woman who was supposed to lie in the room with me. I could pass them in the street. They could be sitting here with us now.”

  I couldn’t help looking around. There was a family sitting in the booth behind Martina, a mother straightening a paper crown on her toddler’s head.

  “You never get them all,” I sighed. “Evil is like a disease. It rubs off, scrapes off, gets airborne and breathed in. It gets picked up from living hard or from being hurt. It comes from need. Everybody needs. The person lined up for your heart had a need. You can’t punish all the evil in the world. You wouldn’t get any further than yourself.”

  “You sound like you’ve been doing this too long.”

  “I have.” I was glad to see her smile, even if it was only the lifting of one corner of her mouth.

  “What have you done that needs punishing?” she asked. The sounds and smells of the restaurant seemed to have dissolved. My hand was near her hand on the table, looking gnarled and old next to her smooth fingers.

  “I was cruel to my first wife,” I said. “I was unloving to the next one. I didn’t like my former partner because she was one of those loud and outgoing and cheerful and chubby people who get around making everyone’s business their business and handing out annoying compliments. I ignored her and pushed her away when I should have been someone she could rely on. She shot herself.”

  There was a nonchalance to the voice in my head that formed the words coming through my lips. It was an unfamiliar thing. I wondered if I was tired, or if I simply liked Martina, liked the way she considered my words for long seconds before deciding on her own.

  “I hurt people to make myself noticed,” she said. I watched her sculpt her ice cream into a round pink hill. “It began when I was seven. I was adopted by a large mixed family after my parents died—a combination of half-brothers and half-sisters, adopted brothers and adopted sisters. You couldn’t raise an eyebrow by screaming but you could make them look at you by being vile, by being removed and bad. I liked it. I liked being the one that no one loved.”

  She glanced up as two cops entered the restaurant and strode to the counter. They were ordering dinner for the crew at the crime scene. The girl attending them seemed to shrink as the order went on and on, her finger weakly jabbing at the plastic panel before her.

  It was as I was letting my eyes roam over the restaurant, avoiding thoughts about how much Martina reminded me of myself, that I noticed the newspaper on the table beside ours. I spent long moments reading and rereading the headline. The picture on the cover meant nothing to me. It was a grainy black-and-white shot of a man in his forties holding a baby, his face turned to look down into the eyes of the infant.

  It was the name that zinged energy through my bones, making them ache for a moment as I sat still at the table. Something about the name made my insides burn.

  NO RESULTS IN SEARCH FOR

  MISSING FATHER JAKE DELANEY

  Martina, the one who no one loved, was watching me. I pushed the tray aside and stood up, grabbing the newspaper from the table and tucking it under my arm.

  “Come on,” I told Martina. “I’ll take you home.”

  20

  Derek Turner had spent five days in protective custody at Long Bay, separated from the general population of inmates to avoid word getting out about his arrest. The guards, however, had come across information about his crime—the way that guards do, through whispers and murmurs in hallways, through innuendo and sightings of official documents left lying out in the open. You can’t keep anything from prison guards. They’re a needy, paranoid, curious bunch. It comes from years of skepticism and watchfulness, the universal understanding that an inmate’s job is to keep secrets from the institution, and the institution’s job is to discover those secrets. A prison guard’s need to gossip is fed by hours of wandering empty halls and standing in spotlit courtyards, feeling time pass. A rumor or a mystery can keep a man entertained all night. When Derek Turner showed up and the guards were told that his presence was secret and his crime unknown, well . . . it was a mystery that could make the minutes tick by like seconds. It was a secret that simply had to be uncovered.

  Eden and I pressed into Derek’s tiny concrete cell. I stood by the wall while Eden took the only chair, a steel-framed, backless thing that was bolted to the floor. The place smelled of disinfectant and felt damp. Derek was covered in a thin film of sweat, and probably would be until someone could be bothered escorting him to the shower room where he would wash, swiftly and in cold water, in front of four guards.

  “They’ve been flicking razor blades under the door,” was the first thing Derek Turner said. Eden and I turned and looked at the tiny slit beneath the iron door to the cell. Down the hall, someone was screaming and banging on the walls. Eden glanced at her watch.

  “Yeah.” She nodded, bored. “They’ll do that.”

  There was no telling who was giving Derek Turner the means to kill himself but my guess was it was probably the guards. A child killer is a common enemy to inmates and guards alike. The guards would encourage him to kill himself for the good of everyone involved. The inmates would not be a
s merciful. The arrival of someone like Derek Turner into the system would cause a sensation at Long Bay. They would begin talking about what they were going to do to him the minute he set foot in the yard. My first case as a fully fledged homicide cop had been over at the John Morony jail investigating the in-house murder of a guy who’d strangled his ex-girlfriend’s little boy. He’d had his throat slit open with the lid of a tuna can by his cell mate. Took the guy half an hour, apparently.

  The Long Bay boys would be ready for Derek Turner with their buckets of scalding water, their braided sheets, their shivs. Eliza Turner would likely be getting the same treatment over at Silverwater women’s prison.

  “I’ll do whatever I can to help you,” Derek mumbled. “I want to testify against Eliza. I know what we did was wrong. I knew it all the time, but she . . . she was so strong, and . . .”

  “That’s really funny, Derek, because we’ve spoken to her and she wants to testify against you. So you can spare me the blame toss, okay?” Eden held up a hand. “I want to make this quick. Because I haven’t had breakfast yet and I’m not good when I’m hungry. You need to agree to follow a script when you receive the call from the killer tomorrow. His usual first-of-the-month call. You need to run through this script a couple of times with one of our specialists.”

  “I’ll do whatever you want.”

  “Officers are going to arrive tomorrow morning to prep you for the phone call. It’s a long shot that he’ll even make contact with you. This story is everywhere. But if you carry on like normal, like you’ve not been found out, he’ll be banking on the fact that you want your daughter to live and he’ll want the money you owe him. If he’s as addicted to the danger as we think he is, he’ll enjoy the risk. If you warn him in any way about what we’re trying to set up, I’ll make things worse for you. They can get worse, Derek. You might not think so, but believe me, they can.”