6

I’d taken a girl home. I do that now and then. She was someone I’d found while dropping into my local for a double scotch to put me to sleep before wandering up to my apartment. There’s an odd moment that passes between perfect strangers sometimes when, without words, their eyes meet and both have a look on their faces that says how lonely they are, despite the vague successes of their lives, despite their manufactured identities. All I’d had to say was, “Let’s get the fuck out of here.” In the morning I wasn’t lonely anymore and I don’t think she was either.

We were snapped awake by my mobile phone. I knew who it was and ignored it. It was five and still dark. The girl groaned at the noise, her sharp toenails carving lines of protest down my shins. The phone stopped ringing and seconds later there was a pounding knock at the front door. I grabbed the blanket and pulled it up over our heads, pushing the girl over and gripping her around the middle so she wouldn’t go, addicted to the heat of her body in the bed.

“Just lie still and be quiet and she’ll go away.”

“Frank! Get up!”

“Who is it?” The girl asked.

“No one.”

Eden knocked on my window. I pulled the blanket down tighter.

“Go away, devil!”

“They’ve got nine bodies for us. We need to go.”

“They’ll keep. It’s the middle of the fucking night. What’s wrong with you?”

“Bodies?” the girl sat up sharply, shoving the blanket aside. I sighed. “What are you, like, a cop or something?”

“You didn’t wonder about the handcuffs?”

“I’d liked to have known you were a cop. I don’t like cops.” She frowned over her shoulder at me.

“Only crooks say that.”

She started gathering her things and I crawled, shivering, from the sheets. That beautiful smell of warm bodies and slept-in sheets and gentle exhalations evaporated. I tore open the front door and Eden’s eyes dropped to my naked crotch, then rose to the eagle tattoo on my chest, then finally met my own. She looked aggrieved.

“Frank.”

“This is what you get, you come to my place at this hour.”

“Put some fucking clothes on and get in the car.” She shook her head and walked away. I laughed as she descended the stairs, swivelling my hips so that everything jumbled around.

“Get a good look,” I called. “You won’t do it again!”

I was still laughing as Eden passed my elderly neighbor on the level below. She was stopped by the stairs, washing basket in her arms, looking up at me. I covered myself and walked inside.

 

 

The nine bodies were laid out on two rows of morgue tables in the Parramatta District Hospital mortuary, each with a clipboard detailing the autopsy. Some had been reassembled. Others were curled up as they had been to fit the shape of the boxes, the pathologists and forensic specialists reluctant to straighten their limbs in the preliminary stage of investigations. I wandered between the gurneys, looking at each of the corpses. There were four females and five males. The youngest of the females was the girl who’d been in the first box we opened. The youngest male looked about fifteen.

I stopped by the boy’s body. His face was tucked against his knees but I could see in the shadow of his limbs that his eyes were closed. His hair was falling out around his skull as his body decomposed. The smell coming off him was unnatural in its intensity, the powerful reek of rotting flesh having been added to with toxic chemicals. I stared at his curled fists. Eden came up beside me and I shifted my eyes away. I felt strangely ashamed.

“We began with the bodies that were the least decomposed,” said the pathologist, a lanky Asian man. “There are twenty bodies. We estimate that around half will have to be identified by dental records. These are the only ones with faces.”

My stomach turned. Eden was staring coldly at the body of a man on the table next to us.

“There’s a unifying cause of death, which makes things easier for you,” the pathologist said pleasantly, pointing his pen at my nose. “All these bodies were bled out. Each of them had a surgical wound that was not closed.”

“A surgical wound?” Eden frowned. “Give me an example.”

The pathologist pointed to the boy beside me.

“He’s missing a heart.” He turned and pointed to another. “That one’s had her lungs removed. The young girl by the doorway, she’s lost both of her kidneys.”

“Christ.” I shuddered. “Some sicko’s nicking body parts?”

“This isn’t a sicko, not in the traditional sense. The person you’re looking for is a cold, calculated businessman.” The pathologist lifted a sheet from a body at the end of the row. I stared at the bloodless cavity in a young woman’s torso where some part of her had been removed. The pathologist pointed into her with the end of his pen, like an explorer following the edge of a map.

“These wounds are clean and meticulously positioned and the organs have been removed with the utmost care in the manner prescribed for direct transplant. Each of the victims has sedatives in their system. He’s been doing this for some time. He’s trained—and he’s experienced.”

Eden was chewing her thumbnail. She looked at the ceiling and let the air out of her lungs as though she was glad to have them.

“An organ thief,” she whispered miserably. “This is a new one.”