Fetish (22 page)

The phone call came only half an hour after Makedde had flopped on the bed, exhausted from her four-hour modelling job that had lasted well over seven. She’d spent the day in wispy little asymmetrical dresses and smudged eyeliner, hanging off gritty window ledges in a disused Surry Hills warehouse. All in the name of
ELLE’s
new fashion outlook. It had been a relief to close her eye-shadow-greased lids when she got home, but soon the phone beside the bed had rung, robbing her of that moment of peace.

“Hello?”

“Makedde?” a man’s voice politely inquired. “This is Book Model Agency.”

Yet another one whose voice she didn’t recognise.

“Makedde, I’m sorry it’s such short notice but we need you at a casting in the city in thirty minutes.”

Thirty minutes!

“It’s very important that you get there on time. It’s for a pantyhose commercial, so show your legs. Heels would be best. Make sure your feet look good.”

She didn’t bother to complain. She was used to
last minute appointments, which often meant cancelling other plans.

“When is it shooting?”

“Uh, next week.”

“What does it pay?”

“Thirty thousand.”

Wow. That was exceptional. An average commercial would generally pay ten or fifteen thousand to a noname model like her. That sort of money would cover text books and tuition, and then some.

Makedde took down the address and thanked the booker. She was grateful that her legs and feet were already smooth, moisturised and unmarked, and she had her portfolio again, too, although it was still incomplete. All she had to do was change into something appropriate and get there on time.

Nineteen minutes later Makedde was in a panic.

Not now!

She turned the ignition of her rental car again, but there was nothing. She gripped the key hard, inserting it with deliberation, turning it…

Nothing. Dead.

I don’t have time for this!

She hopped out of the driver’s seat and popped the bonnet. Mak squinted at the greasy tangle of wires and steel, eyes running over the hoses and metal curves,
but she couldn’t see the problem. She was inexperienced with a car’s inner workings, and the low light certainly wasn’t helping. She ran around to the boot to check for a flashlight, but there wasn’t one.

She had gotten ready as quickly as physically possible, choosing a brief dress and high shoes to show her long legs to full effect. She had barely taken the time to fix the make-up from her morning photo shoot, and yet still, here she was, no closer to arriving at the appointment on time. Damn agency. Disorganised. Or maybe the client was the one to blame? It wouldn’t be the first time. Either way, it seemed that Charles was too busy to deal with her these days. She was being fobbed off to any old booker. Maybe she should have changed agencies after all.

A pale blue van passed by, then backed up alongside Makedde, and a young ginger-haired man leant out of the driver’s-side window. There was something vaguely familiar about him.

“You need any help?” he asked casually in a soft, friendly voice.

“Oh, I’m fine, really, thanks,” she said.

He looked down at the open bonnet. “Are you
sure
you don’t need some help?”

What do I do?

Ed Brown waited patiently as Makedde made up her mind.

The unmarked police Commodore tore down William Street, its siren wailing with an urgency largely ignored by the rush hour traffic. They were quickly stalled by a mass of waiting vehicles; men and women returning from work with no idea that blocking the road could result in another violent murder. Andy leant out the passenger window and screamed, “Move it! Get out of the fucking way!” His outburst had little effect apart from frightening a young mother whose car was jammed up beside them. The sleeping infant in the back seat didn’t stir.

“Hang on,” Jimmy said, turning the wheel hard to the right and sending them over the median strip. They accelerated up the right-hand side of William Street, the siren screaming out its loud, flashing warning to the cars speeding up from the opposite direction. Once they passed a set of traffic lights Jimmy took them across the divider again with a thud and a squeal of tyres.

Andy sat with both feet hard up against the footwell and one hand clenched tightly around the
grab handle above the door. “Tell me about this Ed Brown guy. Who the hell is he?” he asked is partner.

“A morgue attendant. A regular at our bar. You’d recognise him if you saw him, Andy. He was the attendant the day Makedde came in to identify Catherine Gerber.” Jimmy’s eyes never once left the road. “I think the malaka must have seen you two together after that, and he got jealous. Cassandra was his way of getting you out of the picture. He chatted me up at the bar a few days ago, real casual-like.” He stopped talking for a moment to honk and curse at some drivers who weren’t getting out of the way. “He asked me about you. He knew about Cassandra and he knew you’d disappeared. He said he thought you’d killed your wife. I didn’t agree, but there was something unsettling about the guy. He was just so insistent to talk about you and the case. Were you suspended? Were you the main suspect? All that.”

“What did you do?”

“I didn’t think much of it till I was heading home. But it got me thinking about the morgue, and that the sharp instrument the killer used might have been a scalpel. I didn’t have a lot of other leads, so I checked his background. He lit a few fires in his teens, minor offences, but it got me thinking about the ‘homicidal triad’—you know, all that stuff you were crowing about when you came back from the States—extended bedwetting, cruelty to animals,
arson. I got Colin to ask around at the morgue, see if anyone noticed anything suspicious. Colin gets back to me yesterday, says some autopsy tools had gone missing. Turns out Ed Brown was fired on Thursday.”

“Same day Cassandra was killed.”

“Exactly. I reckon the guy’s using these tools on the victims. So we put him under surveillance, and now this. He’s a slippery bastard. I don’t know how he knew we were on to him, but he figured it out pretty quick.”

The traffic wouldn’t move out of their way fast enough.

Makedde, hang on.

Makedde was clearly anxious. That was good. Her guard would be down as she tried to hurry to that non-existent pantyhose casting, with thirty thousand dollars at stake. He could see her flushed complexion and quickening breath. Her breasts heaved in and out, causing the buttonholes on her cardigan to stretch slightly open and shut. Her dress fell to mid-thigh, and she was swaying just a bit on her high, black stilettos. Her unconscious movement strained the thin heel when she rocked back, tensing her knees.

She doesn’t recognise me. No one ever does.

He knew he didn’t have much time left to get out of the city. The police, stupid though they were, would be on his tail. He wasn’t going to go down without his special prize.

“No really,” she told him, “I’ll be all right.”

Perhaps she was better prepared than he thought. Obviously the money wasn’t enough. She would take more convincing. She was probably more jaded than the others, and smarter.

He smiled at her, gentle and friendly. “Really, it would be no trouble.” He tried the clincher. “My wife had a Charade before we married. Exactly the same model, a ’93. Always gave her trouble, too.”

The corners of her mouth turned up slightly, and she looked again at the rental. “Do you know how to fix them?” she finally asked.

Ed stepped out of his van smiling and carefully slid the hammer down the back of his pants. “Oh, yes. I’m a mechanic actually,” he lied.

“Really?” She seemed relieved. “What’s your name, anyway?”

“Ed,” he told her. “Ed Brown.”

“Nice to meet you. I’m Makedde. I’m afraid I’m in a bit of a rush.”

He came right up next to her. She was tall beside him, with those shoes. The shoes she wore for him. “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather just get a ride? It’d be quicker.”

She ignored his suggestion. “Can you see what’s wrong? I know it’s a bit dark.”

He looked up and down the street. It was empty.

He leant into the engine bay, tugged at an HT lead, lifted the dipstick. “Oh, there it is. See this?” he beckoned.

She leant forward over the engine.

The hammer moved swiftly and Makedde fell forward.

With strength and practised dexterity he propped her up and carried her to the van. He crawled in with her and slid the door closed behind him, and in a matter of seconds had ripped off her cardigan and shackled her wrists.

No time.

He could hear a siren wailing in the distance. He had no time to secure the gag, but what did it matter? She was out cold, and where they were going, no one would hear her. He took one last moment to enjoy the sight of her, helpless in that skimpy black dress.

My prize.

Andy had been calling Makedde every five minutes from his mobile since they had left the station; but she wasn’t answering. He hoped that Ed would be too wrapped up in trying to save his own skin to abduct her. Maybe she was working. Out for a run.

The churning in his guts told him otherwise.

A tanned, long-haired surfer stood and gawked as the squad car came to a skidding halt in front of the Bronte building. Andy leapt out of the passenger seat and ran to the front door, with Jimmy not far behind. He thought he heard the faint sound of sirens wailing in the distance; backup on its way.

He hammered on the door. “Makedde!”

No answer.

“I’ll go round the back.” Andy ran across the lawn and up the porch steps two by two. He looked for her through the window. “No sign of anyone. Let’s do the back door,” he called out.

Jimmy appeared in seconds. They counted to three and kicked the door in together.

There was no one in the main room…the
kitchen…the bathroom. In the bedroom tracksuit pants and a sweatshirt had been flung into one corner. A couple of drawers were open, and a make-up case was spread out on the bedside chest of drawers. She must have been in a hurry. They hadn’t missed her by much.

Sirens cut out on the street outside. Jimmy let the officers in the front door and briefed them on what was happening, while Andy searched frantically for a clue as to where Makedde had gone.

“There’s a team ready to go in to Ed Brown’s flat,” Jimmy said. “We’re working on dispatching a search helicopter to spot the VW. What next?”

Andy could sense the abrupt change in attitude. He was one of them again. They believed him.

Screams. Hellish screams stretched out into space and snapped like an elastic band pulled too far. They sounded distant, removed; but through the nausea and confusion, Makedde knew it was her own mind creating the terrifying sound. Unconsciousness floated towards her, an endless void beckoning her away from the pain, and she had to struggle with all her will to break free from its temptation. She was on her back, wrists shackled together and secured to something. Hard steel jarred against her back as she was flung up and down. Sluggishly, she tried to take in her surroundings, but there was noise and movement, and not enough light.

Her left ear felt sticky where it was rubbing against her upper arm. Her arms were stretched so far above her head that her shoulders cried out with pain at every bump. She couldn’t move or relax them. The thumps and swerves pulled her back and forth. Through one squinting eye she saw that she was lying on the floor of an old van.

She remembered the red-haired man.

He was going to help her with her car.

Tilting her head back, she tried to make out what was holding her wrists—it appeared to be heavy metal cuffs, chained to the wall.

The van swerved.

Makedde’s legs swung back and forth, her stilettos rolling loose along the floor. She was aware of an odd smell, not unlike disinfectant, that drifted up from the blanket she was lying on, the walls, from everywhere. It filled her nostrils and entered her lungs, forcing out a sneeze. And there was something else…tea-tree oil? Distantly familiar.

The face of her mother Jane flashed into Makedde’s mind. Smiling as she gently rubbed tea-tree oil into Makedde’s tiny wrist, soothing the little scrape she’d earned falling off her skates.

Another flash…Catherine. Dead. Wrapped in a shroud of cloth. That smell, tea-tree oil, and the underlying odour…decaying flesh.

Makedde could smell death in the van where she lay.

Through half open eyes she could see the back of the driver’s head through a part in the curtains. She had met him in her nightmares these past two weeks. He killed young women just like Makedde, and now he was going to kill her.

Just over an hour after the phone call, Andy Flynn stood outside the decrepit, three-storey block of flats in Redfern that Ed Brown had shared with his disabled mother all his adult life. Dead weeds and grass poked out between the bricks. Electrician’s tape held together a few window panes. The entire structure seemed to lean slightly to one side; the side that held flat number eighteen.

An APB was out. Every patrol cop, every hospital, every point of departure alerted. A search helicopter had just been scrambled. Ed Brown was on the run. They had finally put a face to the Stiletto Killer.

But Andy knew it wasn’t enough.

If he had been on the case, would it have come to this? If he had continued to keep his eye on Makedde, would this have happened? Would he be standing outside the killer’s flat hours too late?

Makedde’s flat had turned up nothing. Book Model Agency confirmed that she was not on any known assignment or audition since she had finished a shoot for
ELLE
magazine earlier that day. She couldn’t
be considered missing for another twenty-three hours, but no one knew where she was.

“The place is already crawling with D’s,” Jimmy said, interrupting Andy’s train of thought. Andy recognised a few of the detectives milling about; Hunt, Reed and Sampson had just arrived. They still looked like a bunch of rookies.

Jimmy stuck close to Andy as they entered the building and climbed the stairs to the third floor. Ed’s mother was a paraplegic. There was no lift. They immediately spotted Mrs Brown in the busy third-floor hallway. She was sandwiched into an old, standard-size wheelchair, huge rolls of flesh spilling out in all directions. She waved her white, flabby arms about and yelled at an unfortunate young officer who was attempting unsuccessfully to calm her down. She looked unusually haggard for someone Andy had been told was under fifty. She had painted herself in heavy make-up that settled roughly in the creases of her worn face. Andy took in the garish red lips and fingernails, and the revealing top that barely held heavy, stretch-marked breasts. A blanket partially covered the fleshy stumps of amputated legs. She wasn’t wearing pants.

Mrs Brown didn’t appear embarrassed at her state of semi-dress, nor did she seem particularly saddened or frightened at the chain of events; just angry. In an irritatingly high-pitched voice she cursed loudly,
making outrageous threats. A pot-bellied man with a sparsely furnished head of white hair and a nose like a rotting tomato gripped her shoulder protectively. He was the building’s superintendent; a married man by the name of George Fowler who was in his late-sixties. Flynn guessed that George may have taken his building duties to a new level with Mrs Brown, and he wondered what hold such an overbearing and unattractive woman would have over a married man. Viagra gone wrong, perhaps.

Andy and his partner left them to make their way to the doorway of flat eighteen and Ed’s mother began yelling again. “He didn’t do nothin’!”

A crime-scene officer wearing latex gloves and carrying camera equipment ducked under the chequered police tape. Andy and Jimmy followed. Flat eighteen was a foul smelling two bedroom suite with a small bathroom and split kitchen/living room. The pungent odour of smoke and hops oozed from the walls and furniture. Andy counted five full ashtrays in the one room alone. The place was a mess. Stacks of dusty newspapers and magazines sat on every surface in the living room. There were scattered bottles and even an open lipstick which had left a red stain across the carpet. A tower of second-hand books rose up to meet Andy’s eye; dog-eared romance novels and pulp fiction. Two thread-bare couches looked to be rotting.

In an instant Andy could picture Ed’s life—years of bringing home the groceries for mum; frozen dinners, beer and prescriptions. Bathing her, changing her, turning her over in bed. The only privacy in his room with the door closed.

Sitting with abject disinterest, a black cat watched them pass. Its intense yellow eyes shone in the dim room. Jimmy noticed the cat and gestured mockingly towards it. “Hello little Lucifer…” The cat hissed at him and narrowly missed him with a vicious swipe.

Andy noticed three large tubs overflowing with empty beer and liquor bottles. VB appeared to be a favourite, with any form of vodka a close second. He wondered if Cassandra’s house could possibly have smelled as bad after his drunken days there. “Good to know they recycle,” he muttered as they passed.

“Skata! She looks familiar,” Jimmy said, pointing to a large picture frame. It held an old black-and-white photograph of a young woman, and even with the heavy make-up and outdated hairstyle, the resemblance was unmistakable.

Makedde.

Mrs Brown had once been beautiful—blonde hair, light eyes, perfect nose. Any vague doubts that Ed hadn’t abducted Makedde instantly vanished. Andy could see it all. Dahmer had a thing about his dad.

Ed Brown had a thing about his mother.

The floor of Ed’s bedroom was raised six inches. Had Ed chosen the room for that reason? It was obvious that his mother would not have been able to enter her son’s room without assistance. In stark contrast to the rest of the flat, Ed’s room was obsessively clean and neat. There was a desk with a lamp, an empty wastepaper basket, a single bed and a set of shelves on one wall. There were no rumpled clothes, no loose papers, nothing out of place. You could bounce a coin on the bed.

The smell of smoke was barely noticeable. Instead, the room reeked of strange odours that irritated Andy’s nose. The crime-scene photographer set up his equipment and began taking photos under the bed. The covers were pulled back and a series of bright flashes illuminated the neatly spaced collection of shoes.

Nine single high-heeled shoes. Stilettos.

Nine.

Andy recognised a couple of them—the red, scaly, fake snakeskin shoe that matched Roxanne Sherman’s; the shiny black one with the thin ankle strap that had belonged to Catherine Gerber.

“Anyone find the missing tools?” he asked the officer outside the door.

“Not yet. Still searching. There’s so much shit everywhere—”

“He’d keep them clean,” Andy said. “Look for a sterile area, or a sealed bag or a box somewhere. We’ll cover the room.”

The officer nodded and spoke to someone down the hall. Andy doubted they would find the autopsy tools. This was not Ed’s working area, this was where he reminisced, where he fantasised. He’d have the tools with him.

The photographer’s flash turned to the set of thin wooden shelves, held up by Y-shaped braces on the wall to the left of the bed. A few books and trinkets were arranged on it, along with a nondescript shoe box inside a clear, plastic evidence bag.

“Open the box,” Jimmy said.

Hoosier obliged, trying to act important. He reached up for it while the photographer waited with his lens poised. When he lifted the lid he immediately turned his head away, screwing up his nose.

With his hand over his mouth and nose, Andy stepped forward and examined the contents.

“Jesus.”

Severed toes.

Immaculately pedicured with bright red polish. Big toes. Little toes. Different sizes and shapes. Varying states of decomposition. Andy counted at least ten. And some strange, shrivelled bits of leather. No—
nipples
, two sets.

He handed the box to the photographer who
snapped it from different angles. What Detective Flynn focused on next disturbed him even more. Directly across from the foot of the bed an enlarged photographic print was tacked to the otherwise bare wall. He recognised its subject immediately. It was Makedde, stunning in a short leather skirt and high heel shoes, posing for the camera.