Eden

Book 2: Archer and Bennett Thriller

by Candice Fox

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

Most police duo’s run on trust and their shared desire to see killers standing up in court. But Detective Frank Bennett's partner, the enigmatic Eden Archer, offers him darkness and danger. She doesn't mind catching killers – but it's not the courthouse where her justice is served. As Eden heads undercover to work on a remote farm – a place linked to three missing girls – Frank’s priority is to monitor her 24/7; but is it for Eden's protection, or to protect their suspects from her?

Release date: May 30, 2017

Publisher: Pinnacle Books

Print pages: 352

Sample

The night of the boy’s murder he was working, wandering along Darlinghurst Road in the crowds of workers, picking pockets, begging, doing stunts for coins. Later the boy would think of his life in the city streets as the Winter Days, because even in the summer they seemed cold and damp, the daylight short.

It took years for the boy to forget how to remember, when one day ate into the next and nothing broke the monotony except the stabbing death of a whore or the chance find of a coin on the concrete. The sun shuttered above the buildings, on and off, counting the days. The boy wandered, head down, practiced at sniffing bins outside restaurants to identify treasures hidden within, at slipping through cinema fire exits to search for popcorn and sweets, at scaling tall buildings to raid clotheslines strung across cramped balconies.

Sometimes the boy felt he could have been ancient because all that came before the Night of Fire and Screaming was darkness. Now and then when he slept he returned to the fire, saw the faces of the woman and the man he supposed must have been his parents against the windows, heard their pounding on the glass behind the bars. Whenever he tried to remember how long ago the fire happened, who those people were and why they had died, how he had survived and how he had got to the city, he was confronted by blackness—a door closed, locked, impassable. He didn’t know how old he was or the name those screaming people called him. When the police and the kindly women who had spotted him came to take him, they said he looked eight. He was happy with that. They’d also said he was mute and malnourished, but he didn’t know what either of those things were. He’d fled the van they put him in and kept his eye out from then on. He didn’t like the police. He didn’t know why.

He wandered and tried to forget.

On the night he met the French Man, the boy was sitting on a set of steps down from The Goldfish Bowl, which was alive with laughing and shoving, the toppling of glasses, the slapping of beer caps onto the pavement.

The French Man came walking up the hill under the Moreton Bay fig trees, the smoke from his cigarette winding around a row of sailors advancing behind him. The boy moved off the steps and headed down to meet the sailors, stretching his dirty face into his brightest smile. The French Man caught him by the elbow and spun him in a half circle. The sailors parted to let him through.

“What’s the hurry, petit monsieur?”

The boy wasn’t fussy who his marks were. The French Man didn’t look like a cop, so he would make an easy meal. His accent was slurred and heavy. Perhaps he’d been drinking down at the waterfront. He smelled of cigarettes and wine, but his hair was neatly combed so that the ridges stood out across his curved scalp.

“Hello, sir! Got a coin?” the boy asked. “I can dance, I can sing, I can tell jokes. I can balance a penny on my nose.”

The boy did a handstand and walked in a circle on his palms on the dirty pavement. His black-soled feet waggled in the air. The French Man folded his arms and laughed, and a couple walking their dog stopped to watch.

“That’s very good, Monsieur,” the French Man smiled. “What else can you do?”

“I can make a coin disappear,” the boy boasted.

The couple laughed. Two other men stopped to watch. The French Man fished a penny from his pocket and handed it to the boy.

“Abracadabra, hocus pocus!” The boy swirled his arms in the air. Everyone smiled. He slipped the copper into his sleeve and dropped to one knee.

“Ta daa!”

“Magnifique!” The French Man clapped his long thin hands. “Now give it back.”

“I can’t,” the boy claimed. “It’s disappeared.”

More laughter. The boy did another handstand as the crowd clapped and then dispersed. The French Man remained, his thin lip curled slightly at the corner.

“Another coin for the show?” the boy asked.

“I’m afraid I’m fresh out. Plucked me dry. Are you hungry, boy?”

“Starving.”

“Come on, then. This way. I’ve got a fresh batch of sausages waiting for me at home. Two streets back.” The French Man flicked his head toward the crest of the hill. “You’re welcome to a bite, little friend. Most welcome.”

The French Man kept walking as though he didn’t mind leaving the boy in the wind-swept street. The boy looked down the hill and saw no more sailors coming. As it swung back and forth, the French Man’s wrist glittered with a silver wristwatch. The boy licked his lips, brushed aside his fear, and followed.

Rain was dripping in silver streams from the corrugated iron roof of the terrace house in Ithaca Road. The boy huddled close to the French Man as the wind rippled through the huge figs. He tried to get a feel for a wallet or a coin purse as he brushed and bumped against the man’s side. There was none. The boy circled the man, sometimes ahead, sometimes behind. The French Man laughed and ruffled his hair.

“You’re a small boy. Got to bend to get ahold of you. Quick as a ferret.”

“How many sausages will there be?”

“Enough for a belly as small as yours. You’ve got an accent to you. Sauerkraut, is it?”

The boy shrugged. He knew he spoke funny but he didn’t know why.

They stepped up onto the porch. The French Man jangled his keys. Inside, the house smelled damp, as though something in the walls was rotting and about to drip out of the wallpaper. The boy skittered down the hall to a table under a grimy kitchen window. It was covered with shining, glimmering things. The boy looked over the mess and tried to pick something to lift before the man caught up. He pocketed a shiny lens. There was a paper bag stuffed with small square photographs. The boy glimpsed bare limbs, naked chests. When he put his hand on the bag the French Man brushed it away.

“What is all this stuff?”

“This, my small friend, is the Polaroid 110B, the Pathfinder. Newest thing on the market. It develops pictures instantly. Poof! Right in your hand. Like magic,” the French Man said, and winked. He picked the camera out of the clutter and held it in the light. “You don’t have to go to a store. You can develop your own pictures, right here, at home.”

“Are you a photographer?”

“Sometimes, yes.”

The boy let his eyes wander to the French Man’s face. There were scars on his cheeks from burns or acne, marbling the surface of his high cheekbones. “Here. You take a picture of me and I’ll take one of you.”

The boy giggled and took the heavy camera in his small chubby hands, turned it, looked through the viewfinder. The French Man struck a pose. The device hummed and zinged in the boy’s hands, seemed to zap like an alien thing. Light exploded off the walls. The camera spewed out a blank picture, which gradually rippled with light. The boy watched it develop with barely contained rapture. Magic. The boy let the camera go with reluctance.

“Your turn.”

He smiled and struck a pose. The flash burned against the backs of his eyelids. He wondered if he’d ever had his picture taken before the Night of Fire and Screaming, if there were pictures of him somewhere still, smiling and playing. The thought made the boy a little sad. The French Man snapped another picture of him standing and staring at the floor.

“You ever seen Sugar Ray? The boxer?”

“Course I have!”

The boy clenched his fists and hung them above his head, his puny biceps flexed as small cream-white lumps on his stringy arms. The French Man laughed and snapped a shot. The boy growled and brought his fists together at his belly. Another zap, hum, a spewed picture. The French Man flipped the photos onto the table without looking at them. The boy laughed nervously, shifting from foot to foot. The room seemed a little small, suddenly. The French Man snapped another picture, and the boy forgot to pose. He was simply standing there. Being him.

“Take your shirt off.”

The boy frowned a little. He slipped the shirt over his head, smelling it as the cloth passed his nose, three days or so of sweat and scum and rain. The boy cupped his hands and did a pose of his side as he had seen the boxers do. The French Man snapped him.

“I’m hungry.”

“Just a few more.”

The boy sighed. More pictures. The air in the room was hard to breathe. His cheeks felt hot. He didn’t know why.

“It’s no fun anymore. Let’s eat.”

The French Man snapped him again, crouching by the table, eye level with the boy. The light made the boy’s eyes water. He reached out and pulled the camera down. The man lifted it again.

“A few more.”

“No.”

“You want to eat, you do as I say,” the French Man grunted, showing teeth. The two front ones were gray as steel. The boy looked down the hall at the front door, so far away the darkness swallowed it, giving only a slice of silver at the bottom where the moonlit street blazed. “We’re friends, aren’t we, boy? Good friends. Friends don’t argue with each other.”

The camera flashed again. Now the pictures were falling on the floor. The boy picked his shirt up. His fingers were numb, the blood raging in his ears. Embarrassed, somehow. The French Man’s fingers flashed out, ripped the cloth from his fingers, and flung the shirt by the pile of pictures. The boy’s face stared up from the photos. Afraid.

“I’ve got to go.”

“You’re not going anywhere.”

“I said, I want to go!”

The slap came like a burst of heat, soundless, before the boy knew what had happened. His ear pulsed, hammering against his head. The French Man shook his head slowly, sadly, then reached up and took the boy’s face in his cold hand.

“Don’t disappoint me, pretty one.”

The boy turned, twisted, tried to scramble away. They collapsed to the floor, the man a dead weight. The air was squeezed out of him. His stomach churned, clenched, tried to suck oxygen into his lungs. His mouth was on the floor, lips collecting dust.

“You do what I say, when I say.”

The French Man pinned his neck against the boards, righted the camera in his other hand. The boy kicked out, struck the table leg, pain flooding his bones. The man snapped another shot, then placed the camera beside his face.

The boy reached out, sweeping it into his arm. In the same movement he rolled beneath the weight of the man and used the momentum to swing the camera up and over, into the side of the man’s head.

Then the Silence came.

He had felt the Silence only once before—on the Night of Fire and Screaming, when he had stood in the street motionless and watched the people burning. It felt something like being underwater, sounds pinging softly, all else an endless nothingness, slowed by numbness, decaying moments, the dripping of time.

The boy was on top of the French Man, the camera in his hands, beating it down on the man’s face over and over without sound, without sensation. The face was breaking, losing shape, becoming wet. The man’s hands were fumbling at his face and neck, scratching, wringing, twisting, punching. Time passed. The camera fell away. The boy used his fists.

When the door of the terrace opened the boy was standing by the table, looking down at a picture of himself standing by the table. When the men’s voices broke the Silence the boy lifted his head. There were shadows in the hall, one larger than the other, a great hulk of a man whose shoulders scraped the narrow walls and head ducked beneath the ornate frame of the kitchen door naturally, as though he’d been here before. A smaller man walked in front, cast in shadow by the beast. The boy wiped at a tickle on his upper lip. He looked at his hands. The blood was smeared to his elbows.

“Jean? Jean? You fucking frog prick. I know you’re here. Time’s up. I want my money, you hear me, cocksucker?”

The first man was wearing a suit the color of gray ocean. Beneath the suit, old muscle languished to fat, making him look like an elderly retired war captain, his once-powerful frame ruined by peacetime. His hair was gray and a deep groove was cut into his chin from a clean knife wound that had split his bottom lip in two. The giant was not as well dressed but gave the same impression of darkened skies and old wars, a bearded bear with a nose that dominated the front of his face, broken and twisted, a fighter’s nose.

The boy and the two men looked at each other, before all eyes fell away. The men took in the smashed and broken thing that had been Jean the French Man, lying twisted at the boy’s feet. There was a gun in the old captain’s hand, hanging by his side, forgotten. No one spoke. The boy lifted his palms and examined the blood on them, the mangled knuckles swollen twice their size, the wet and watery almost-orange blood sliding down his wrists.

“Well, would you look at this, Bear,” the Captain said.

The Bear said nothing as the Captain wandered forward and crouched beside the boy. He lifted a photo from the floor and flicked the blood from it. The boy standing. The boy with his biceps bared. He looked at them all, considered each in turn, laid them in a neat pile. Jean wasn’t breathing. The Captain stood and looked down at the boy.

Slowly, a smile crept across the Captain’s face. Then he began to laugh. The Bear wasn’t laughing. He wasn’t even smiling.

The Captain laughed and laughed, and then cocked the hammer on the pistol and put two bullets into the French Man’s face. Jean’s body bucked twice as though electrified. The boy thought of the burning bodies on the Night of Fire and Screaming, the way they spasmed and shook. The Captain laughed again, a gentle snort, and walked into the short hall that led to the other rooms.

“We’ll deal with him in a minute,” he said to the Bear. “Put him in the car.”

Hades woke thinking he’d been shot. The great weight that seemed to fall and then wrap around his chest, the noise, the pain. He’d taken a bullet before and this was how it felt. But the thump on his chest was only the cat. The pain was his old man’s bones snapping into action, the noise his perimeter alarm sounding, an old fire alarm screwed to the wall above the door. Someone had entered his property. Hades groaned and rolled onto his side, flopping out of the bed like a swollen fish. The cat weaved around his stubby ankles, suddenly full of affection after the terror of the alarm. It was usually a bitch of a thing. Hades kicked it away and slipped his flip-flops on.

It had been months since he had been visited this late. He’d put the word out that he had retired, that all the problems he had once been happy to fix were to be taken elsewhere. He wanted to spend his declining years free of harassment by cops, forensics specialists, journalists, and true crime writers. During the day, the workers at his dump kept these scavengers away—Hades’ dark past was common knowledge among them and was at the heart of a brotherhood of loyalty and silence. At night he was vulnerable. His daughter Eden had insisted on installing the alarm when she had managed to walk all the way up the dark drive, into the house, and right to his bedside without waking him. Eden, always the predator, had made the alarm loud enough to induce a heart attack.

Headlights swept the kitchen. One of the few clocks in his extensive collection that actually kept time chimed an hour past midnight as he reached the screen door. He picked up a Ruger Super Redhawk that was sticking out of a flowerpot and tucked it into the back of his boxer shorts. The double-action Magnum tugged at the hem, felt cold against his ass crack. The gun was far too big to be practical, but if he was going to go out one night in a revenge attack, a shoot-out with the police, or a dance with burglars, all of which were equally likely, he was going to do it with a gun proportionate to his reputation.

The cat followed him out and bolted into the blackness. He hoped it wouldn’t be back, but knew it would. A red Barina with plastic eyelashes hanging over its headlights gripped its way uncertainly over the last rise before his shack and stopped with a jolt in the dust. If this was some kind of attack he was pleased by how undignified the approach had been. It didn’t speak of organization. When the driver slid out of the seat and came into the murky lights, he let his head hang back and looked at the stars.

“Oh God. Not you.”

“Hades!”

She fell on him, rock-hard breasts against his chest, nails in his hair, an assault of smooth limbs and wet kisses, cigarette smoke, perfume. Hades pushed her off. He resisted the urge to smile. It would only encourage her.

“Get off me, Kat.”

“I’ve missed you. God, I’ve missed you. It’s been too long. It’s been ages.”

“What are you doing here, for chrissake? I don’t have time for you. I’m retired. It’s the middle of the night.”

“I love you, Hades.”

“Go away.”

“No, Hades, I love you. I need you.”

“Oh, don’t tell me.”

“Please, Hades.” She stood back and clasped her hands like a child. “Please help me.”

He looked at her, let the silence hang the way he used to with Eden when she was a teenager, disappointment so deeply felt it could not be squeezed out into words. Kat had come in her usual getup—the six-inch heels and cheap nylon minidress, the half-dyed black hair falling out at the sides in wispy singed spikes. It was more than that though. The track marks on her ankles weren’t from smack, as she’d have you believe. Hades had seen these marks faked plenty of times by undercover cops—a little cayenne pepper and ink under the first layer of skin and irritated welts pop up like the angry sores of the addicted. The mascara was intentionally clumpy. The multiple piercings in her ears were magnets. Underneath the manufactured cheapness was a very beautiful woman, a clever woman. A seasoned killer.

Hades had caught Kat out once. She was sitting in a café in Glebe with a girlfriend, fresh-faced and vibrant, the makeup gone, her hair short and neatly bobbed, a gold watch she’d probably stolen hanging a little too loosely on her wrist. Hades had heard somewhere that she was a financial adviser or something. He wasn’t sure. He didn’t care.

Whenever she turned up, he played along with her little game because Kat was just one of many actors, hustlers, con artists, and tricksters who came to him in the night with bones to bury. Over the years Hades had been awakened by numb-headed drug mules who had waited for their moment to cut down their bosses; by lady killers in expensive linen suits, hit men with cold eyes and false charm. Wasn’t he one of them, too? Hades had spent decades crafting his tired old man image. Sure, he was getting on. He ate too much and fell asleep in front of the TV more than he actually watched it. But Hades was deadly. So was Kat. Under the stars that night they played out the roles of a worn-out ex-warlord and a skinny prostitute.

“What have you done now?” he asked.

“It was an accident.”

“It’s always an accident with you.”

“Oh, Hades!”

“Come on.” He waved at her impatiently. “Get on with it.”

She clopped back to the car, all guilty eyes and pouty lips. Hades watched her struggle with the trunk. Nickel bracelets jingled on her wrists. She thrust the trunk open and the overhead light flickered. Hades looked in and let a sigh ripple out of him.

“How many times I got to tell you, Kat?”

“What?”

“You’re not wrapping them right. I’ve told you this.”

“Hay-dees!”

“Look.” Hades leaned over and lifted the end of the tarp that contained the body. “You leave the ends open like this and you get DNA in your car. Hair. Eyelashes. Blood. Piss. Dirt and plant fibers from the tread in his shoes that will put him in your street, in your driveway. They can put a body in your trunk from a single flake of fucking dandruff, Kat. You know this.”

“So what am I supposed to do about it?”

“You tuck the ends in before you roll.” Hades illustrated with his hands. “Lie the body out flat, arms down. Like a burrito. Tuck, tuck, roll. Tape. Tape, Kat, not fucking bungee cords. You shouldn’t be using tarp, either. You should be using plastic drop cloths. I can give you some. Tarps have a weave in them. They’re not airtight.”

“Hades, I’m not as clever as you, okay?” she whined.

“You never rolled a fucking burrito?”

“I don’t even know what a burrito is. What do I look like?”

Hades shook his head, felt exhausted.

“The whole car will have to go. They’ll have your DNA in the front and his in the back. You need to start thinking about these things, Kat.”

“You talk too much, Hades,” Kat said, patting the side of his head, letting her fingers follow the rim of his ear to the nape of his thick neck. “You’re always talking. You’re always mean to me.”

Her breath felt warm on his face. Hades cleared his throat.

“I do it because you’re going to get yourself caught one of these days. And I don’t want to be the one who has to come after you before you testify.”

“Would you hurt me, Hades?”

“Probably not.”

“Sometimes I like being hurt.”

She was against him, kissing him, before he knew it. She’d got into his arms the way a fox will slip through a gap in a fence. Feral. Dangerous. He sighed again and surrendered. She always did this. He always fell for it. But in a way he kind of liked falling for it, knowing it was coming, wondering how she would make it seem spontaneous and wild each and every time. The concubine. Hades imagined that this was what it was like with the men she robbed and killed, leaving work and smoking on the corner, being approached by a cute, vulnerable, irresistible little whore in a painted-on dress. Cold, tired, gullible. Give me your jacket. Take me home. Play with me. Hades withdrew from her and rolled his eyes.

“Get in there.” He cocked his head toward the house. “Make me a goddamn coffee while you’re at it.”

“Don’t be long,” she said, victorious. Hades grumbled and shut the trunk. His hard-on was almost painful but he never put play before work, even when the play was just a ruse to get out of his body disposal fee. A twenty-thousand-dollar fuck. It was cheap and nasty, but he didn’t mind. It had been years since a woman had wanted to jump Hades’ bones. He wasn’t fussed. Women made things difficult, and the last thing he needed was more difficulty in his life.

First things first. He would drive the car back to the new fill grounds where the complex layers of rubber, vinyl, industrial biochemicals and trash were not yet finished. He’d slip Kat’s nameless victim in there, where the compressed layers, encouraging the development of leachate acid as a natural biodegrader of human waste, would eventually completely dissolve all trace of him as it had with hundreds of others over the years. He would grind the car’s identification off, leave the vehicle to be crushed into a cube and finished off in an industrial incinerator in the morning. Then he’d go to bed with Kat. Hades wondered gloomily if the reward would be worth the effort as he wrestled the keys from the lock. She’d take everything she wanted out of him in a matter of minutes and leave while he was asleep. He was making a mental note to put his wallet and keys away when he noticed the dark shape at the bottom of the hill.

Hades took a short wander to the crest of the hill. Stood. Listened. The car was idling, its headlights off. He felt a twinge in his chest, a leftover spasm from the fear that the alarm had generated. Hades began to walk again, a little faster this time. The car’s windows were down, blackness in the cabin, impenetrable. He got no farther than ten meters before the car began to move, passed the gates in a blur of dark gray, before disappearing between the trees.

Hades stopped, out of breath.

The television was on, but the knocking broke through the chatter of morning programs, to snap me awake. The first sensation was the wetness under my face. Cold drool. Camel mouth. The place smelled damp and reeked of kitty litter. But still bearable. I could leave it a couple more days. I sat up and felt a nudge in the small of my back. I fished around and retrieved an empty Jameson bottle. The pain—dull, heavy, everywhere.

The knocking came again. It was her. She came every day. I hung my head in my hands and groaned, long and loud, so she could hear me. She knocked again. The day before I hadn’t let her in, and she was waiting for me hours later when I went to get a pizza for lunch. Immaculate, in gray jeans and a knitted top that hugged the top of her perfect ass and fell to the backs of her cold, pale killer’s hands. Sitting on a bench in the foyer, reading a magazine. Waiting. Watching.

Eden knocked again.

“Go away!”

She knocked. I crossed the apartment in two steps, kicked newspapers out of the way, and flung open the door. Her hand was raised for more knocking. She took me in with those expressionless crow eyes, head to toe, let her hand fall, and waited for me to go on my usual tirade. I did. She listened to my swearing quietly, thinking. I don’t know what I looked like but I know what I smelled like. I’d expected the performance to get rid of her. When I tried to slam the door, her boot was in it.

“We’ve got an . . .