Fall (32 page)

Caroline Eckhart had my number from the obscene number of times I'd tried to ring her to get her to call off the running festival. When I saw her number flash up on my mobile at the Harper house crime scene, I was sure she was calling me to offer some bullshit apology couched in a bunch of backhanded clues that it was all my fault. I was holding a coffee in one hand and the phone in the other, and Ruben Esposito's dead head was at my feet. All around me, forensics specialists snapped pictures, dabbed fingerprint powder, laid out little measurement stickers and exhibit numbers alongside interesting bits and pieces. I was waiting for Eden to get back to me, or for one of the squads to tell me they'd pulled over a white van, perhaps the one that I was hoping was missing from the empty garage. I would probably have taken a call from anyone at that moment, so tense was my entire body with longing to hear something about the monster that had obviously flown this very room only minutes before we arrived.

When Caroline called, I was overcome with distaste for her. I couldn't imagine her helping me comb my hair let alone helping me solve this case.

So I cancelled the call. It's possible I contributed to what happened to her when I pressed that button. I was lucky, when
she called a few seconds later, that curiosity overcame my prejudice and I answered.

‘Detective Be–'

The call ended. I looked at my phone. She sounded puffed, like she was on a run, though her one-and-a-half words were on a higher octave than she usually spoke. I felt a little queasy and called her back immediately. The phone was off.

I stood thinking about the voice. Running it over and over in my mind. Detective Be. Detective Be. Why would she call me in the middle of a run? So that I could be impressed with her?
Caroline Eckhart only has time to field calls from nobodies when she's improving her blood-oxygen saturation capacity and when she's on the john.
Sounded about right. What hadn't sounded right was the background. It didn't sound as if she was outside. Was she on her treadmill? Why hadn't I heard the machine in the background, thrumming away as she plodded towards perfection?

I sucked air between my teeth, clicked my tongue against the roof of my mouth. Was I really prepared to leave my current crime scene to make sure Caroline Eckhart of all people hadn't fallen down the stairs while she was on the phone to me and was now lying in a pile of taut, cellulite-free limbs at the bottom of a fire escape somewhere? I tried calling her three more times. Then I gave the biggest sigh in human history, drawing the attention of three forensics freaks nearby.

‘I'm popping out for a minute. I'll be back,' I said. Of course I didn't let anyone know where I was going.

 

Caroline lived near the end of the Woolloomooloo Finger Wharf, arguably Sydney's most envied address. There was
nowhere else a creature like Caroline could live – she needed to demonstrate the success, the prestige, the perfection that her public image was all about, so it was here that she took interviews with magazine journalists, doing crunches under the gaze of the cityscape. It was here that she shot ‘Caroline at Home' spreads for
Woman's Day
, lounging on her pristine white leather couches – both she and the furniture hard as stone and constructed with all the care of a master sculptor. She breakfasted here on egg white and kale omelettes with her neighbours – the few ridiculously powerful shock jocks and Hollywood actors Australia boasted of – when they were home.

I parked on Cowper Wharf Road between a Porsche 911 Turbo and a Bentley Mulsanne, with an arm over the back of the passenger seat and sweat beading in my hairline, pretending it wasn't the most important reverse park of my life. Harry's Café de Wheels hotdog stand was crowded with late-night drinkers with the munchies, a series of young, pot-bellied men who dropped their papers and cardboard boxes when they'd had their fill for the seagulls to swoop up.

Two suited goons on the door stopped me as I tried to enter the huge open cavern of the wharf, once a wool factory and a migrant processing centre. I imagined the scared refugees milling and huddling around the postmodern sculptures that adorned the glossy foyer, children in blankets, barefoot. I flashed my badge and the goons parted. I glanced back and saw the valet scrambling for his phone. The media would be on speed dial, the apartment I accessed noted for the next edition of
TheTalk
.

It was eleven. When I pounded on the door of Caroline's fourth-floor apartment, a man in the flat next to hers popped
out of his front door, a weathered zombie-creature kept alive on fame alone. He shouted some abuse, fluffed his wispy white hair. I glanced at him, still knocking.

‘Caroline!' I smacked the door with an open palm, the sound echoing about the huge hall. ‘Oi! Car-o-line!'

I stood at the door and called her phone another three times. I tried the door and found it locked. Then I turned and started to leave, the old guy glaring at me with his sagging lizard eyes and snarling with wet lips. I'd only turned on my heel when I heard a double thump from inside Caroline's apartment.

I drew my gun and the old man clambered inside his apartment.

In my policing career, I've kicked down about three doors. Two of them were very successful, dramatic knock-downs that got me plenty of cheers at the station afterward, and on the third, I went crooked at the last second and sprained my ankle.

I knew the old man was at least listening, so I didn't want him to hear me (a) having to have multiple shots at the door or (b) howling in agony on the floor after I'd snapped my Achilles tendon. Equally as threatening was the possibility that Caroline Eckhart was fine in there, that she'd simply overdosed on whey protein and was lying paralysed watching me trying to get into her apartment. I didn't want her telling
Woman's Day
what a pussy I was. In the three seconds I prepared for the shot, I reviewed all my academy training on doors and their tenuous relationship with feet. And then I gave it my best.

The door slammed open, knocking over a huge ornate vase, which shattered on the spotless cream tiles. I was overwhelmed, momentarily, with self-admiration.

All the lights were on. I stood in the doorway and dialled the
Officer Assistance number on my phone, then put it back in my pocket. My colleagues would triangulate me via GPS and send a team, probably the same team that had crawled all over Tara Harper's house at Centennial Park. I actioned my weapon and listened. A deep, gravelly voice said, ‘Close the door.'

I did what I was told. A small hall led off the front door. On the left was what was probably a bathroom door, and to the right was a huge living area with a glass wall that looked out over the navy ships docked at Garden Island. A frigate was directly across from us, lit gold with a hundred yellow lights. To the left, another glass wall looked out over the black harbour. I had seconds to take in the view before I assessed the scene in front of the huge balcony.

Caroline Eckhart was flopped like a rag doll on the floor by a weight machine. I could see that she'd taken a good knock to the nose and forehead. Her lip was split in the front and her forehead was just beginning to work on a huge blue egg right near her hairline. She was lying as though on a bed with her head on a pillow that was much too high. The pillow was a set of black steel weights on the bottom of a pulley exercise machine. On either side of her face, two chrome bars kept the weights in line as they slid up and down. Above her head were suspended six weights all in a row, solid blocks of steel I guessed weighed about thirty kilos together. The line pulling the weights ran up through a pulley, down through another pulley, and up into the hand of a woman standing by the machine.

The Sydney Parks Strangler was indeed a woman, but I could only see that because I was standing seven metres from her and I'd heard her voice. From the shape in the black tracksuit, there was no telling her sex. The hood was pulled up around her face,
so that I could only see two brightly twinkling eyes in a mass of black shadow and a widely stretched mouth. She stood with one hand by her side and one arm outstretched, fist gripping the rubber handle of the steel-weave line holding the weights.

‘Step any closer and I'll let go,' she said.

‘Okay,' I said.

‘Put the gun down.'

I did. I even kicked it away a little out of good faith so that the weapon slid under a side table stacked with dozens of Caroline Eckhart's ten-week weight-loss program DVDs. The woman in the hood and I stood in silence for a minute or so, each carefully examining the options. I was trying to recall a list of poorly written checkpoints I'd seen on a whiteboard more than a decade earlier in an overheated classroom in Goulburn while the crisis negotiation specialist prattled on about hostages he'd rescued over the years.

Step one
: Prolong the situation.

Step two
: Ensure the safety of the hostages.

Step three
: I couldn't remember. I was probably checking out the female recruits.

Step four
: Foster a relationship between the hostage-taker and the negotiator, and the hostage-taker and the hostages.

‘That weight's going to get heavy in a minute,' I said. The wide smile in the hood remained rigid. I was beginning to notice a lopsidedness to it, a kind of menacing Joker quality to its edges that seemed to curl too high, as though the skin from the top had been folded and tucked and now shadowed that on the bottom. A puppet smile. ‘Why don't you put it on the hook and we can talk without me worrying about you crushing Caroline's head like a watermelon?'

The woman in the hood laughed. ‘What a pretty image. The broken edges of a green skull. All that red-pink mush.'

‘I wouldn't rely on there being too much mush in there.'

‘Good tactic. Badmouth the victim. Try to relate to me.'

‘It wasn't intentional.' I bit my tongue. There was sweat on my brow but I didn't want to make any sudden movements to wipe it away. ‘She's not my favourite person in the world, but that doesn't mean I want to see her squished.'

I took a step closer. The woman took a step back. The line twanged in the pulley, a sickening sound.

‘It's been a long time since I did this, but I think we're supposed to introduce ourselves first.'

‘I know you.'

‘Yes, good.' I opened my arms. ‘That saves us time, doesn't it? I'm Detective Frank Bennett, I'll be your hostage negotiator for this evening.'

She didn't answer.

‘And it's Ms Harper, I presume.'

‘You found Ruben.'

‘I found everything you left out for me,' I said. I was treading in dangerous territory, literally and metaphorically, so I kept my tone friendly. ‘I think you meant that.'

I took a couple of sideways steps, then stepped back the way I'd come. I wanted her to get comfortable with the idea of me moving my feet, perhaps as a nervous gesture, so that eventually I might try to close some of the gap between us without her noticing. I went sideways, and back again, and she didn't shift back. I took half a step forward as I spoke. She didn't seem to care. The gap was now six-and-a-half metres, I guessed. Negotiations were always slow.

‘Why don't you tell me what you were trying to say, Tara?'

‘Why don't you tell me what I was trying to say?' she said. Her tone had changed suddenly, from amused to annoyed, and I felt my chest tighten at the sound of it. Such a seamless emotional change mid-conversation was not a good sign. Tara was not stable. She was not going to be an easy audience. She needed to talk more. There was too much going on in her mind and not enough going on here, now, with me.

‘What do you mean?'

‘You've got me all worked out. You know me. Why don't you tell me more about myself?'

‘I didn't want –'

‘
I think you meant for us to find what you left out, Tara. I'll be your negotiator, Tara. Let's not kill Caroline, Tara. Sweetie, honey, buddy, baby! Let's be friends, Tara!
'

Her words were snarled, spittle flying off her mismatched lips, but when she finished snarling them the snarls evolved into a wet laughter so high and full of rage it made my skin tingle. My mouth was bone dry. I tried to gather some saliva, looked at Caroline. She was really out of it. Her chest inflated and deflated in little shudders that produced soft snores through her open mouth. All she had to do was wake up and slide off the machine. But she wasn't going to do it. Consistent with every interaction we'd had so far, Caroline was going to be completely unhelpful to me.

‘She's beautiful, isn't she?' Tara asked. She was back down to 25 per cent of the 100 per cent fury I'd seen in her only seconds before. Sliding up and down the rage scale the way the weights above Caroline's head slid up and down as Tara adjusted her grip on the handle. I'd been put right back in my box, so I just nodded and agreed.

‘Isn't it interesting, what's beautiful?' Tara said. The big dark hood, deep enough that it had probably got the disfigured girl all the way through the foyer and up to Caroline's apartment without garnering attention, had slipped back a little, so I could see the lower half of her face. Two long scars lined her jaw on either side, perfectly, as though her face was a mask that could be lifted off and set in the palm of the hand. One cheek was bigger than the other. She was looking at Caroline. I could see the gap between Tara's nose and mouth gave an unnatural slant, like her nose was stuck on. ‘Maybe that's how we're all supposed to be. Pure. Strong. We're supposed to be born like that, show all those bones and edges. Built for swimming. Sprinting. Climbing. She's mother nature's finest work.'

Tara crouched down, letting the handle of the weight go with her, the line feeding back into the bottom pulley, the top pulley, lowering the block of pure death that hung above Caroline's head. Tara stroked Caroline's temple with a single finger, found the edge of the bone in the immaculate, caramel-brown flesh and pressed down hard. I snuck a couple more steps sideways, back, and then forward. Five metres.