Fall

Book 3: Archer and Bennett Thriller

by Candice Fox

Genres: General Fiction; Thrillers

Synopsis

If Detective Frank Bennett tries hard enough, he can sometimes forget that his partner Eden Archer is also moonlighting as a serial killer. Thankfully their latest case is proving a good distraction.

Someone is angry at Sydney’s beautiful people and the results are anything but pretty. On the rain-soaked running tracks of Sydney’s parks, a predator is lurking and it’s not long before night-time jogging become a race to stay alive.

Release date: August 29, 2017

Publisher: Pinnacle Books

Print pages: 352

Sample

The Victims of Crime support group of Surry Hills meets every fortnight. The only reason I started going was because my old friend from North Sydney Homicide, Anthony Charters, goes there. If I hadn’t had a friend there, I’d have never bowed to my girlfriend Imogen’s demands that I get counseling for the “stuff that had been going on with me” the last few months.

That vague collection of terms, the “stuff” and its propensity to “go on with me,” had come between the beautiful psychologist and me in our first few weeks of dating, when she realized she’d never seen me sober. She said she couldn’t imagine me “relaxed.” Privately, I argued I was a lot more relaxed a person than Imogen herself. Imogen takes an hour and a half to get ready in the morning, and the first time I farted near her, she just about called the police. That, ladies and gentlemen, is not “relaxed.”

But, you know. You don’t tell them these things. They don’t listen.

Imogen liked me, but I was an unpredictable, volatile, and difficult-to-manage boyfriend. She couldn’t count on me to turn up on time, say appropriate things when I met her friends, drive her places without her having to worry that I was about to careen the car into the nearest telephone pole. She couldn’t be sure when I ducked out of the cinema that I wasn’t going to down six painkillers in the glorious solitude of the men’s-room stall, or that I wasn’t going to lose myself in thought and just wander off, turn up back at her apartment at midnight drunk and stinking. I was a bad beau, but I had potential, so she didn’t give up on me.

Imogen took me on, and Imogen started nagging me to get help. So, I started trudging, with all the huffing melancholy of a teenager at church, to a basement room of the Surry Hills police station every Sunday to sit under the fluorescent lights and listen to tales of horror and fear. It made Imogen happy. It made Anthony happy. I considered it my community service.

Somewhere, sometime, somebody set up a support group in a particular way and now all support groups are set up like that, whether you’re trying to get over being sexually assaulted in a public toilet or you’re addicted to crack. You’ve got the gray plastic folding table pushed against one wall, the veneer pulling away from the corners and the top stained by coffee cups set down, midconversation, to indicate concern. You’ve got the two large steel urns full of boiling water for coffee and tea. If you go anywhere near them, even to fill your name in on the sign-in sheet, they will burn some part of you. There’s no avoiding the coffee-urn burn. To this you add a collection of uncomfortable plastic folding chairs forming a circle just tight enough to inspire that quiet kind of social terror triggered by things like accidental knee-touching, airborne germs, unavoidable eye contact . . . and voilà! You’ve got a support group.

There were fifteen chairs set out tonight on the industrial gray carpet. Anthony was sitting in one when I arrived. I responded to his presence with a wave of paralyzing nausea. Getting over a painkiller-and-alcohol addiction makes you respond to everything with nausea. You get nausea in the middle of sex. It lasts for months.

I’d worked with the bald-headed, cleft-chinned Detective Charters and his partner for about two weeks after my former partner committed suicide and the bigwigs were trying to find me someone else as a playmate. I’d have liked to have stayed with him. He was inspiring; somehow still enthusiastic about justice and the rule of law and collaring crooks like it was a calling, even though his own seventeen-year-old son was in prison for five years for accidentally leaving a mate with brain damage from a one-punch hit at a New Year’s Eve party. If Anthony could keep on keeping on after everything that had happened to him, maybe I could get over all the women I’d failed in my life.

Anthony had been powerless to save his own son. And yet here he was, smiling at me as I came to sit by his side. Maybe being powerless was okay.

When I’d asked him, Anthony had put his unshakable spirit down to the support groups. He attended one for drug addiction, one for victims of crime, and one for anxiety. I thought I’d give it a whirl. It would shut Imogen up.

“Francis,” he said. I cradled my coffee and licked my scalded pinkie.

“Anthony.”

“How’s the come-down?”

“I think I’m past the shakes.” I held out my hand for him to see, flat in the air before us. My thumb was twitching. “I’d still murder you for a Scotch, though, old mate.”

“I reckon Scotch might be on your trigger-words list, mate.”

“Probably. It’s a big list.”

Some recovery groups don’t let you say particular words, “trigger words,” because the level of addiction some people are getting over is so great that even the sound of the name of their drug can send them into a relapse spiral. Even if you’re not an addict, but you’re in a support group parallel to addiction groups, like Victims of Crime, or After Domestic Violence, or Incest Survivors, you have to acknowledge that some members of the group might also be enrolled in addiction groups, so, for their benefit, you don’t say the words.

The first step of Drug Recovery Group is that you do not talk about Drugs at Recovery Group.

It sounded like bullshit to me. I wasn’t sure all the tiptoeing around helped anyone. I’d tested my trigger-happiness, said “oxycodone” loud and slow alone in my car, like a little kid whispering the S-word at the back of class. I had not gone and started popping pills. But I was a rule-follower by nature, so I didn’t say “oxycodone” in or anywhere near the meetings I attended. I didn’t say “Scotch,” or “bourbon,” or “cocaine,” or “ecstasy,” or “Valium”—all guilty pleasures of mine at some time over the previous months. I’d mentioned that I had a variety of “drugs of choice” at my first meeting when I introduced myself, but I hadn’t shared anything since.

In fact, I hadn’t said anything else. Imogen had told me to “go” to the meetings. She hadn’t told me to “participate.”

People stopped milling around the treacherous urns when the facilitator, a hard-edged little blonde named Megan, came into the room with her large folder of notes and handouts. I had about twenty-five of her photocopied handouts in the bottom of my car, boot-printed and crumpled, hidden in a forest of take-out containers and paper bags. The handout titles peered at me from beneath old newspapers and cardboard boxes. Six Ways to Beat Negative Thoughts. How to Tell Your Friends You’re in Danger of Self-Harm. When “No” Means “No.” Sometime after the first meeting, I’d lost my eight-step grief diary. I hadn’t even put my name on it.

Diaries are for little girls.

When Megan was in place, the people around me joined in the opening mantra in a badly timed monotone reminiscent of the obligatory “good morning” we used to give our teacher in my primary school.

“I am on my way to a place beyond vengeance, a place beyond anger, a place beyond fear. I am on my way to a place of healing, and I take a new step every day.”

I didn’t recite the Victims of Crime mantra. It was way too cuddly for me.

“We’ve got a couple of new members with us tonight,” Megan told the group, as Justin, the group kiss-ass, brought her a paper cup of green tea. Justin had been gay-bashed to within an inch of his life on Mardi Gras night when he was twenty-one. Victims of Crime was his life. “This is Aamir and Reema.”

The Muslim couple next to me nodded. Reema was looking deep into her empty paper cup as if she’d found a window out of the room. I was jealous. She adjusted the shoulders of her dress, and her husband sat forward in his seat, a big man, his hands clasped between his knees.

“Hi, Aamir,” everyone said. “Hi, Reema.”

“Now you don’t have to share,” Megan assured them. “No one has to share in these groups. Sometimes it can be healing just to listen to the stories from those around us and to recognize that the trauma we have experienced in the wake of serious crime is not unique, and neither is the journey to wellness.”

“We don’t mind sharing,” Aamir said. I could see the anger, tight in his shoulders and jaw. You get to know the look of a man on the edge of punching someone when you’re a young cop wandering between groups of the homeless in the Cross, Blacktown, or Parramatta. Bopping around the clubs on George Street while groups of men hoot and holler at ladies in cars. It becomes like a flag.

“Well, good,” Megan smiled, “that’s great. Like I said—there’s no pressure. Some of our members have never shared.” She glanced at me. I felt nauseous. “This is a supportive environment where we have in place attendee-centric mechanisms—”

“I’ll share.” Aamir stood up and moved to the center of the group. No one bothered telling the big man that standing wasn’t part of the group dynamic—that in fact it intimidated some of the rape survivors. He rubbed his hands up and down the front of his polo shirt, restless, leaving light sweat stains. “I’ll start by asking if anyone here in the group knows me. If you know my wife.”

It was great. I hadn’t felt anything but nausea and boredom in the group in all the sessions I’d attended, so this was a novel start to the night. The group members looked at each other. Looked at Aamir.

“No? You don’t know me? You’ve never seen me before?” Aamir’s stark black eyebrows were high on his sweating brow. He did a little half-turn, as though someone might recognize his back, the little tendrils of black hair curling on the nape of his thick neck. His wife wiped her face with her hand. No one spoke. Anthony examined the man’s face.

“I don’t think they underst—” Megan chanced.

“My son Ehan was abducted one hundred and forty-one days ago,” Aamir said. He returned to his chair and sat down. “One hundred and forty-one days ago, two men in a blue car took my eight-year-old son from a bus stop on Prairie Vale Road, Wetherill Park. He has not been seen since.”

He paused. We all waited.

“You don’t know me, or my wife, because there has been little to no coverage of this abduction in the media. We’ve had one nationally televised press conference and one newspaper feature article. That’s it.”

Aamir was a lion wrapped in a man. The woman across the circle from him, who’d been in a bank holdup and now suffered panic attacks, was cowering in her seat, pulling at her ponytail. Megan opened her mouth to offer something, but Aamir raged on.

“If Ehan was a little blond-haired white boy named Ian and we lived in Potts Point, we’d be all over the national news.”

“Oh, um.” Megan looked at me for help. I said nothing as Aamir went on.

“We’d have a two-hundred-thousand-dollar reward and Dick Smith flying a fucking banner from a fucking blimp somewhere. But we’ve had nothing. Two days the phone rang off the hook, and then silence. I forget sometimes that he’s gone. Every night at eight o’clock, no matter where I am, no matter what I’m doing, I think, ‘It’s Ehan’s bedtime. I have to go say good night.’”

Megan widened her eyes at me.

“What are you looking at me for?” I said. The sickness swirled in me.

“Oh! I wasn’t!” Megan snapped her head back to Aamir. “I wasn’t. Sorry, Frank, I was just thinking and you were in my line of sight and—”

“Are you a journalist?” Aamir turned on me. I didn’t know how I’d been brought into the exchange until Megan buried her face in her notebook.

“No.” I looked at Aamir. “I’m not a journalist. My girlfriend was murdered. I’m the only other person in the group who’s here for murder-victim support. That’s why she’s staring at me. She wants me to say something hopeful to you.”

“Our son wasn’t murdered,” Reema said.

“Well, Megan sure seems to think he was.”

“I never said that!” Megan gasped.

“Your girlfriend was murdered.” Aamir hovered, legs bent, inches from me. His huge black eyes were locked on mine. He knew his son was dead. And he was angry.

“She was murdered. Yes,” I said.

“What was her name?”

“Martina.”

“And what happened after she was murdered?” Aamir asked.

“What do you mean?”

“What happened?” he insisted. “What happened then?”

“Nothing,” I shrugged. Everyone was looking at me. I licked my lips. “She was murdered. She’s gone. There’s nothing . . . afterward, if that’s what you mean.”

Aamir watched me. We could have been the only people in the room.

“Nothing happens afterward,” I said. “There’s no . . . resolution. You go to work. You come home. You come to these groups and you,” I gestured to the coffee machine, “you drink coffee. You say the mantra. There’s no afterward.”

Everyone looked at Megan to deny or confirm my assessment. She opened her folder, shuffled the papers, and collected her thoughts. One of the urns started reboiling itself in the taut seconds of silence. I heard the spitting of its droplets on the plastic table top.

“Let’s look at some handouts,” Megan said.

Anthony was waiting for me by the vending machine after the meeting. We walked up the stairs and onto the street.

“That was a bit harsh,” he said.

“What?”

“The whole ‘there’s no afterward’ thing.”

“Reality is often harsh,” I said. We paused to watch Aamir and Reema walking to their car. The big angry man glanced back at me as he opened the passenger-side door for his wife, and his expression was unreadable. The rage was gone, replaced by something else. His shoulders were inches lower. I didn’t know what had taken over the boiling-hot fury that I’d seen in the meeting room, but whatever it was, it was cold.

“Do you really believe that?” Anthony asked me. “That it means nothing?”

“Yes,” I said, “I do. You don’t get over it. You don’t realize the mystical fucking meaning in it. You don’t accept that it, like everything, happens for a reason. Come on, Tone,” I scoffed at him. He exhaled smoke from his cigarette.

“Every night at eight o’clock that guy tries to say good night to his dead kid.” I nodded at Aamir’s car as it pulled into the street. “And he’ll be doing it until the day he dies.”

She always felt better when night was falling. The darkness folded over her like a blanket, protective. Light had never been a friend to Tara. It seemed to fall on all of her at once, to wriggle into her creases and folds and dance around her curves, to expose her every surface. There had always been plenty of surface to Tara. She’d never been able to keep track of all there was of her. Joanie was always handy to point out to her the parts she’d forgotten, those bulges and bubbles and handles of flesh that slipped and slid from under hems and over belts.

Pull your shirt down, Tara. Pull your pants up, Tara. Pull your sleeves down, Tara. Jesus. Everyone can see you.

Everyone can see you.

She’d sit at the dinner table and Joanie would grab and pinch and twist a slab of flesh she didn’t know was exposed, a roll above her jeans or the tender white flesh of the backs of her arms. You couldn’t cover Tara with a tent, Joanie said. She could feed an African village. Getting downstairs to dinner became a journey she couldn’t make, so she began to take her meals up in her attic bedroom, staring at the park, the runners going round and round between the trees. Sometimes getting from the bed to the computer was too much. Tara lay between the sheets and dreamed about African people cutting her up and sharing her, carving down her thighs in neat slices like a Christmas ham, until there was only bone—gorgeous, strong, light bone. Bone that shone, redemptive and clean.

The girls at school had giggled at her bulges, the blue bruises that peppered them. Though decades had passed, their voices still bumped and butted around the attic room, floating red balloons of hatred.

Why do you call your mum “Joanie,” Tara? Doesn’t she love you?

Tonight Tara stood by the windows looking over the park and watched the night falling, the bats rising, and remembered her mother. Tara could still hear her voice sometimes, her footsteps in the hall as she readied herself for some party or dinner or charity function, as she pulled on her silk-lined coat and checked herself in the hall mirror. Joanie, with her elegant ash-blond hair falling in filigree curls.

In time, all the light of the warm day dissipated, replaced by a wonderful darkness. Tara watched the runners in Centennial Park recede into shadows, only blinking lights indicating their jolting journeys as they continued round and round, as the hours rolled away.

Tara hugged herself in the window, let her fingers wander over the new landscape of her body. Bumps and ridges and flaps of flesh as hard as stone, lines of scars running up her arms where the fatty flesh had been sucked dry, cut, pulled taut, stapled. Bones poked through the mess at her hips and ribs and collarbones.

Her face was a mystery. She hadn’t looked at herself since waking from the coma six months ago. She’d spent the first month in the hospital in silence. Neurologists came and confirmed that she could, indeed, understand them. Then a nurse had emerged from the fog and told her what she’d done to herself. Tara had made the first sounds since waking. To her it had been laughter, but to the nurse it had sounded like snarls.

I stood in the kitchen of my house in Paddington and looked at the burnt walls, the fingers of blackness reaching up the bricks to the charred roof beams. The tiles had fallen and disappeared, revealing blue sky and orange leaves. I smiled. The oven had been cleared away, the cupboards stripped off, and the sink unscrewed and discarded, leaving black eyeholes in the wall. The flames had warped the floorboards leading down to the bathroom and tiny courtyard. I folded my arms and looked at it all, smelled the plastic taint of melted things.

As first houses go, I’m well aware that they’re traditionally purchased by much younger people than me, and in much better condition than this one. The row house on William Street had been a write-off from the start, advertised for developers who might be tempted to knock it over, put in a flashy deli, and be done with it. The kitchen was a bombed-out shell, the backyard was a wreck, and the upper floor wasn’t safe for human habitation—the elderly owner had let the place go for decades, and the floorboards had taken it the worst.

By order of the Sydney city council, I wasn’t even supposed to be sleeping in the building, and I was supposed to be wearing protective gear while inside. But I’d ignored that. My home base was the front bedroom, where I’d dragged a mattress and a few laundry baskets of clothes, my phone, and some snack food. The bathroom still worked. I still had the apartment in Kensington, and there was always Imogen’s place. But for a couple of nights a week I had been sleeping in my new house, just so I could drift off listening to the creaking and cracking of the building, city ambulances racing for St. Vincent’s, drunks singing as they wandered home. Rats scuttling somewhere close by. It was dingy, but I owned it. I’d committed to something. That was big for me.

Committing to things. Listening to my girlfriend. Getting off the drugs and the booze. Yes, I was going somewhere, even if it wasn’t some mystical place beyond anger that couldn’t possibly exist. I believed what I’d said to Aamir. There is no “after murder.” There is no reasoning, bargaining, or manipulating with murder. When someone close to you has been slain, something enters your life that will always be there, a little black blur at the corner of your vision that you learn to ignore as naturally as you do your own nose. Stained as you are, you have to go on and learn to see again. Build things. Change things. Own things. Martina wasn’t coming back. It was time to return to life.

As I was standing in the sunshine from the informal skylight, I heard the front door open and close, and then Eden’s uneven gait on the unpolished boards. She was walking with a single aluminum crutch with an arm cuff and a handle, having worked her way down from two of them. I’d seen her at the station gym a couple of days earlier trotting awkwardly on the treadmill, somewhere between a jog and a walk, now and then reaching for the console to steady herself. The problem was her core strength, I thought, but I wasn’t sure. A pair of serial killers had slit her open from sternum to navel, on their way to cutting her right in half. She’d lost most of the hearing in her left ear from having a gun fired in her face, and her nose wasn’t straight anymore. But despite all her new little imperfections, to look at her now, it was hard to imagine how close she’d come to dying in my arms.

“Oh look, it’s the invalid,” I said. Eden had to be the world’s most beautiful cripple, but I knew that underneath her whippet-lean frame and deep gothic eyes hid a creature that could hardly be described in terms of beauty. I had no doubt, standing in her presence, that though Eden couldn’t run yet, was easily wearied, and had lost some of the sharpness of her dry wit, there was a very dark power residing in her still. She was as much a threat to me as she was to the killers, rapists, and evildoers she spent her nights hunting. She came up beside me and took in the black walls, raised her head and looked at a pigeon as it landed on the edge of the roof hole.

“Why didn’t you just tell Hades to keep the money?” she asked, sighing. “He’d have been smarter with it.”

Eden’s father, Hades Archer, ex–criminal overlord and World’s Cleverest Body Disposal Expert, had given me a hundred thousand dollars to find out what had happened to the love of his life. Sunday White had gone missing before I was born, and Hades had hired me as much to get one of her relatives off his back as to know himself what had become of the lost young woman. I’d put the cash together with my inheritance and bought the row house on William Street. Eden shifted papers around on the floor with one of her fine leather boots.

“I can’t believe you, of all people, fail to see the potential in this place. Things of beauty are made of forgotten places like this, Eden.” I started mapping the kitchen with my hands. “Stove there, stainless steel counters here, big kitchen island with one of those cutting-board tops. You know the ones? Drawers underneath. Rip all this out and put a big window in. Fucking brilliant.”

“Stainless steel is so 1990.”

“Marble, then. Wine rack over here.”

“You’re a recovering alcoholic.”

“My cooking wine, Eden.”

“Who do you think’s going to do all this?” She squinted at me.

“Me.”

“You can’t change a lightbulb without adult supervision.”

“You, then. Come help me. You’re handy.”

“No.”

“You’re just jealous.” I shook my head. “There’s no need to be cranky, Eden. You can come visit my brilliant new house whenever you want. Take photos of yourself in it to show your friends.”

The pigeon sitting on one of the roof beams ruffled its feathers and crapped on my floor. We both looked up at it.

“We’ll have dinner parties,” I said.

“Look at you. Less than a year ago, your plates were getting dusty from disuse and the local Indian take-out guy had invited you to his wedding. Now you’re planning soirees.”

“I like the word soiree.”

“It’s a commitment, I guess, even if it is a shit hole,” she sighed. “That’s a big deal. Congratulations.”

“I’ve been a big deal for a while now, Eden. You just haven’t noticed.”

“You could go on a commitment streak—marry that mindquack and have freckly children with abandonment issues.”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

As though she’d heard herself being spoken about, my girlfriend, Imogen, opened the front door and clopped into the hall in her second-favorite lavender velvet heels, her upturned nose wrinkled at the smell. She had an Ikea bag in each hand. What a sweetheart.

“Sorry, Frank, I didn’t realize you had company,” she said. “How are you, Eden?”

“Dr. Stone,” Eden said. The tone had no warmth in it, I noted, and then reminded myself that, like an old gas heater, Eden took hours just to get to room temperature. Still, something passed between them. Eden’s eyes fell to my missing kitchen cupboards and Imogen’s stayed on Eden, searching, almost, for something.

I coughed, because I’m like most men—completely ignorant of women and their looks and tones and inferences and what they mean. The two could have been about to launch into a midair Kung Fu battle or hurl each other onto the ground in a passionate embrace. I didn’t know. Imogen excused herself to wash her hands.

Eden stood playing with a live wire hanging from the ceiling, twisting the plastic casing around her finger.

“What’s wrong with you?” I jutted my chin at her. “Someone asks how you are, you don’t say their name and qualification.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. Should I have responded with a list of neurotic compulsions I may or may not exhibit?”

“You’ve been colder since Rye Farm, Eden. Weirder, if that’s po. . .