Fall (17 page)

Frank Bennett: not a chauvinist.

But there was no physical violence here, and that was what Eden and I were interested in. George had mainly collected and compiled shots of female runners, particularly the curvier variety, their breasts and backsides. He seemed very interested in the women's motion, the way their bodies reacted to the impact of their gait as they ran, the rise and fall of flesh. All my feminist teachings aside, I understood George's fetish. There wasn't a man my age who hadn't been captivated at one time by Pamela Anderson's long-legged stride along Los Angeles
County beaches every Sunday evening at 7.30 on Channel Ten back in the 1990s, hormones making mush of our brains. I remembered as a teen rewinding and playing and rewinding and playing Yasmine Bleeth's beach run in the show's title sequence. The way her delicate foot hit the sand, the way that landing seemed to ripple up through her body, her powerful thighs, her taut belly, her immaculate breasts. Pam underwater, pearl white, lips taut. The reflections of the water, lightening white fingers, shimmering up the muscle of her arms, super-slow motion.

George Hacker had created his own personal
Best of Baywatch
compilation out of female runners. It wasn't right. But that didn't mean I didn't get it. It was only when I noticed Eden staring at me that I realised I was humming.

‘Is that the
Baywatch
theme song?' she asked.

‘It is.'

She gave me that look.

‘I note your revulsion. And yet,' I raised a finger, ‘it would have been impossible for you to recognise my humming as the
Baywatch
theme song without you yourself having watched
Baywatch
enough times to recognise the tune.'

‘Can we do some police work?'

‘Am I wrong?'

‘Pull any and all images of suspicious characters,' she told the tech nearest to us. ‘Email them straight through to me.'

We left. I was disappointed. The day felt long already. We left five men sitting in a computer room watching some Redfern idiot's softcore porn. There was nothing except the minor sparkle of hope that George Hacker, while he had been stalking Sydney's parks fuelling nothing but his erotic interests, might
have caught something on his camera that would assist us. My shoes smelled like fish-tank water, and they were my favourite pair and it was entirely my fault. I tried to fill my mind with glittering beaches and Pamela Anderson as we headed back out into the day.

Ruben sat in the kitchen of the house near the park and read over his translations of the newspaper stories he'd found in the upstairs bedroom. Donato had been fairly uninterested in the stories Ruben pored over, texting beneath the table and sighing at the ceiling as the teacher took them through sentence structure and résumé writing in English. Donato put Ruben's interest in the attic room and the strange dark presence in the house down to nothing but childish fantasy, a Scooby-Doo mystery. But Ruben felt in his gut, somehow, that he was very close to something he needed to unravel, something he had been charged to put to rest. His father believed in callings and life missions, small tests set by God or whatever was in charge up there, tests that if Ruben failed he would be presented with at the end, whenever that came. Ruben didn't shy away from adventure. He let his curiosity lead him. It had taken him to wonderful and terrifying places.

It had been some time since he'd heard any noise from the attic room. The television behind the door was silent, and when he looked up at the window facing out across the park from the street he saw that the curtain was drawn. He had a feeling that whoever was up there had sated whatever restless desire drove him or her, that the pacing and whispering he sometimes heard
before had come to a peak. Something had happened, something had been tamed or driven away as tangibly as a vicious stray dog. Ruben also had the idea that whoever it was there left the attic when he wasn't around. He found food missing from the meagre rations a mysterious someone stocked the kitchen with, and a white van parked at the garage at the back of the property showed signs of being driven – there were spider webs on everything else in the garage, and its tyres weren't flat-bottomed the way his had been when he left his little Hyundai outside his girlfriend's place to tour Germany the summer before. Whoever it was, it was the same person who left an envelope of cash under the coffee pot for him every Tuesday.

Ruben hadn't seen another staff member on the property, but he assumed someone other than the person in the attic trimmed the tiny garden beneath the sitting-room windows, kept the dust off the porch and the vines off the side of the house. He wondered sometimes about trying to track down the gardener. Ruben had even gone so far as to drive by on Thursdays and Fridays to see if he might catch the person in action so he could ask about the house's owner. But he wasn't sure he could make himself understood in English yet. His spoken English was pathetic.

Donato told him he was becoming obsessed. Ruben doubted Donato had ever thought about anything long enough to become obsessed with it.

Ruben put the articles in chronological order. He smoothed out the first, a page from the social section of a newspaper that mainly dealt with the married lives of American celebrities. There was a small column on the right side of one page devoted to Sydney socialites and their divorces, parties and drug habits. At the top of the column was a photograph of a broad-shouldered
man with a beautiful but fierce-looking blonde woman on his arm, both dressed in party fineries: ‘Australia's corporate elite gathered today to pay tribute to Michael Harper, celebrated CEO of Vota Media and chairman of TrueCare Research Foundation, who died last Sunday after a long battle with pancreatic cancer. In attendance were members of Mr Harper's favourite NRL team, the Manly Sea Eagles, as well as news identity Daniel Sutherland and Victoria's Secret model Saskia Kehz. Harper is survived by his wife Joan and daughter Tara, who was unable to return from studies abroad to attend the ceremony. “It'll be lonely in the house without him,” Mrs Harper commented, before a family representative asked the press for privacy.'

There was another article, this one from a cheaply printed glossy magazine, the pages littered with yellow stars and collages of local celebrities pouring themselves out of limousines and cheering in the front rows of sporting events. A panel at the bottom of the page featured a shot of Joan Harper with her head in one hand, sitting with a girlfriend at a golden-lit restaurant.

The final piece was a small news report wedged between two articles, one about the drowning of a young surf competitor and one, Ruben guessed, about the opening of a new hospital. There were no pictures to accompany the article. The headline read ‘New laws sought after high-profile surgery mishap'.

As the sun began to set, Ruben took his articles up the stairs and crept to the door of the attic room. All was silent within. Holding his breath, he closed his eyes and knocked on the door three times, the third soft enough not to be heard – his courage already failing him. No answer came from within, not a whisper or a footstep. Ruben slid silently down against the door and kneeled beside it, looked at the crumpled and sun-dried papers in his hands. Somehow he felt sad for whatever being was beyond the door, its part in the terrible history he held in his fingers. After some moments, he cleared his throat.

‘Are you Tara Harper?' he asked. There was a moment of silence, and then a terrible thundering on the door, so sudden and so loud Ruben fell back against the stair banister, his heart in his throat. The person behind the door was bashing on it, kicking on it, and when the noise diminished, he heard a low whisper on the other side of the wood.

‘Stay away.'

Ruben struggled to breathe.

He ran down the stairs and out of the house.

There were two things Ian Buvette didn't see a lot of in or anywhere near Skytree Industries – swearing and beautiful women. But one average Thursday night, with Kent Street crowded with late-night shoppers on their way to cool their heels down by the harbour, Ian stepped out of his office building, letting the door close behind him, and found a beautiful young woman standing on the street swearing. Ian hitched his shoulder bag and paused, watching her rummage through her expensive little briefcase-style leather handbag, then stare up mournfully at the windows above him, her hands falling dejectedly at her sides. Ian was puzzled. He even turned and looked at the windows himself.

‘Shit,' she said. She seemed to consider her predicament for a moment, find that it was in fact even worse than she'd realised, and then seethed again. ‘Shit!'

The woman stepped into the light of the sign beneath the windows, a gigantic ‘103', for 103 Kent Street. She was a strange-looking woman, now that Ian could see her clearly. Smooth, caramel-skinned – Vietnamese, he guessed – but with hair cropped short, almost buzz-cut, and peroxide blonde. Heavy-framed red glasses rimmed her eyes. The dress was expensive looking, although Ian didn't know anything much
about fashion. His mother had dressed him until he was twenty-five, and there was nothing so much as could be called ‘style' going on upstairs at Skytree. Pear-shaped, middle-aged, single technology consultants – the entire staff of Skytree – stuck to grey trousers and business shirts. The woman set her bag down on the ground and started rummaging through it in the light of the sign. Ian swallowed twice before he spoke.

‘Can I help you?'

The girl looked up at him. From down there, she looked like a beautiful, helpless child.

‘Oh god, I'm sorry,' she sighed, laughed. ‘I didn't even see you. I'm just. Urgh, I can't believe it. I've left my pass up there.'

She gestured towards the windows. Ian looked up.

‘Up there?'

‘Wilkins and Co. Seventh floor.'

‘You work here?' Ian hadn't seen anyone exit the lifts at the Wilkins and Co law firm on the seventh floor who was under the age of seventy. Ever.

‘As of today, and maybe only for today.' The girl gave another tired little sigh-laugh, an uneasy noise, like someone trying to find the humour in a cancer diagnosis. ‘I've left my pass and the new client reports I'm supposed to have done tonight up there on my desk. It's alright. It's fine. I'll just … I can call security. Maybe.'

The girl flipped out her phone. Ian felt his stomach shift.

‘Oh, um. I'm the last man out. They have private security here. First round isn't until midnight. I know, because I'm always the last man out. And often it's at midnight.'

Ian thought that was a pretty good line, stuffed his hands in his pockets and leaned back on his heels to prove it. Made
him sound like a hard worker – and knowledgeable, too, about the building and its security, the nuances of his workplace. Her new workplace.

‘Shit,' she said.

‘Yeah. Shit.'

‘You couldn't –' She looked at him, pressed her painted lips together until they disappeared, a humble, inside-out smile. Ian felt himself smiling. He wasn't a man who ever held power. So when the tiniest tastes and whispers of it nudged his life, he felt them as keenly as sexual release.

‘I couldn't lend you my pass?'

‘You couldn't, could you?'

‘Well,' he smiled smugly, ‘I don't know, lady. I've never seen you before.'

‘Oh please.' She was really laughing now. He made her laugh. ‘Do I look like a thief?'

‘A cat burglar, maybe.' Where was this incredible charm and wit coming from? This was not Ian. Pudgy, video game–obsessed, mother-worshipping Ian. Something about her inspired him. It was like he was role-playing on a stage he'd been performing on for years. He knew the lines already. They were just … natural.

‘I'll be three minutes.' She held up three perfectly manicured fingers. Her palm looked soft but firm, like satin over brick. ‘Three.'

‘I'll make you a deal,' Ian said. He had no idea where this confidence was coming from. She seemed to draw it out of him on a string. ‘You're three minutes or less, or you have to buy me a drink down the road at the Stanton.'

‘The Stanton?' She cringed. ‘I'll have to rush then.'

She swiped the pass out of his hands and beeped herself through the foyer doors with all the familiarity of someone who had worked at 103 Kent Street for a decade. Ian glanced at his watch once every five seconds, cold and uncertain somehow in the wake of her, the funny little firecracker who'd turned up in his life suddenly. His face felt hot, but a chill was growing in his spine. He hoped he wasn't sweating through his shirt. At two minutes and fifty-one seconds, she burst through the doors to the elevator and ran across the dark foyer, pushing the large green exit button frantically.

‘Ha!' she grinned. ‘Made it.'

‘Aww, too bad for me,' Ian said, without an inch of false sentiment. The girl was laughing to herself, tucking a manila folder into her briefcase bag.

‘Maybe I'll lock myself out tomorrow.' The girl winked and Ian felt the gesture stab him right in the sternum. The sincerity in her words. The joke that Ian knew, somehow, felt deep in his heart, was not a joke. ‘See ya.'

‘See ya,' Ian said.

He stood in the street and watched her walking away. His heart aching, Ian turned towards the Stanton, glancing at his watch. There was no need to be disappointed, he told himself. A drink on the first night of meeting would have ruined it. Yes, they'd meet again. She'd deliberately lock herself out. It was perfect. A romantic little game he could think about all that night, all the next day. Who was she? He hadn't even caught her name. But wasn't that perfect too? He'd try to guess it. Wonder at it. Try to fit different sounds to her face. Where had she come from? She'd just been there – perfect woman, perfect scenario, like a tailor-made dream. Cliché almost. A wonderful cliché.
She needed the card that he possessed, and at the very moment he'd walked out the doors. Minutes earlier and she'd have caught someone else. Minutes later and he'd have been gone. It was a little Jane Austen, if he was honest with himself. It was very Jane Austen. Ian looked at the starless sky between the buildings above him, marvelled at the world and its symmetry.

 

Hooky walked up the block to Town Hall, stood looking at the huge ornate building lit electric pink and yellow from floodlights in its filthy gardens. On the corner, a preacher asked crowds waiting at the huge intersection whether they were ready for God to return, because he was returning, and when he did he'd be merciless on the unprepared. A group of youths ebbed around her suddenly, then continued down George Street towards the cinema, slightly too loud and slightly too deliberate, carrying shopping bags. The lights changed and a hundred people flooded the great intersection, passed each other wordlessly like trained soldiers on the march, eyes averted.

She counted off some minutes on her sensible little gold and leather-band watch, her ‘office girl' watch, as she called it, and then walked back down the hill and turned right into the laneway behind Kent Street. She kept her head bowed against the security cameras hanging above the loading zone adjacent to the fire escape belonging to 103 Kent Street. It was not likely her presence would be noted and the cameras searched for images of her, as she intended to take nothing from the building that would arouse suspicion. But Hooky never shied away from extra precautions. The proactive con artist was the
successful con artist. She opened the fire escape door she had left propped open when she dashed through the building with Ian's swipe card, and entered the stairwell.

Being overly cautious was only one of the many natural behaviours that made a successful con artist. Amy had discovered each in turn the hard way, because people like her – liars, cheats, shadow people – were impossible to find and were sole operators when they did reveal themselves. Tandem teams of con artists, Amy had discovered, were an invention of Hollywood. It took a being of broken, malfunctioning or completely absent morality to do what she did, and the chances of two of them collaborating successfully required each member of the team to be incapable of loyalty yet be helplessly enslaved by it. No, real con artists were loners. They were meticulous, over-prepared, adaptive and artful. They didn't look back.

 

Amy was in no way ignorant of the fact that Ian, master dead-ender of Skytree Industries, would stay up all night thinking about her. That he'd dress dangerously tomorrow – the salmon shirt he'd bought on a whim at Big'n'Tall which had looked striking and bold on the mannequin in all the ways that Ian was not. That he'd think the encounter on the street had meant something, had been the zingy pesto he'd been waiting for in the iceberg lettuce salad of his life. But Hooky didn't feel anything about this other than satisfaction, a sense of equilibrium, now that she'd gained access to Imogen's building. Checkpoint: passed. If there was one thing Hooky understood, it was balance.

As she moved through the building, Hooky thought smugly about Imogen at the counter of the police station with her
stupid lunch for Frank. Hooky would show her what this ‘child' could do, just how much Imogen should have held onto that worry she had about Hooky's place in Frank's life. No, she wasn't after Frank. The suggestion was ridiculous. But that didn't mean she was someone who could be spoken down to. Imogen had no idea what power she held. The woman had tried to strip that hard-earned power away with a single word. Well, no one got to do that to her.

Hooky could fuck up people's entire worlds. She was not a child and she wasn't going to let anyone think she was.

There are plenty of things on a personal laptop can ruin a person. Even the most measured of people. For women she found erotic photographs, letters to the ex-boyfriend, secret bank accounts, fake dating profiles. For men, unconventional porn, party photos, gambling accounts. Amy headed straight for the laptop and brought up Imogen's email account, flipped through the recent correspondence. A lot of it was client mail about appointments and referrals, mental health care plans. Some reports back to the department about police officers who had completed programs or still had outstanding sessions keeping them off duty. Amy wondered if Imogen had ever been Frank's psychologist – if in fact that's how the two had met. It made sense. She glanced at the darkened door to the hall and then searched the computer for documents with ‘Bennett' in the title. To her surprise, she came upon a file named ‘BennettArcher.doc'.

Of course. Martina Ducote, Frank's girlfriend, the one whose heart was cut out by Jason Beck. They never found the heart. Not at the scene. Not outside, where he was spotted by a garbage collector – leading to the chase that finally ended him. Amy wondered idly what happened to the woman's heart. Wondered if Frank wondered about it too. Beck was clearly off the rails at that point. It's possible he ate it. Fed it to the cat. Flushed it. Burned it. The hardest things about murder were the unanswered questions. Was she afraid? Did she fight? Did she say anything? What did he do with the heart? Confessions and forensic analysis and criminal profiles could answer some things, but not many, about murder. Amy had plenty of unanswered questions about her parents' murder. Questions that popped and popped into her mind all the time, sometimes triggered, sometimes not, coming at the strangest times, when she was eating lunch, when she was falling asleep.

What had their faces looked like in those last seconds?

There was no porn on Imogen's computer. No dating profiles in her internet history. Amy wandered through the cookie files in Imogen's browser and settled on one that piqued her curiosity – sandersinvestigations.com.au. Amy glanced at the contact email address, then went back to Imogen's email account and found a correspondence stream in the Sent folder.

Amy sat back in Imogen's chair, rapped the tabletop with her fingernails. There were five files attached: birth certificates belonging to Eden, her brother Eric, her father Heinrich and her mother Sue, plus there was a conviction report for Heinrich Archer – no middle name either – beginning with thefts, assaults and loitering charges in 1970. In the pale white light of the laptop, Amy drew her legs up beneath her on the chair and leaned forward, digging deeper into Imogen's search history.