I stood outside the house in Ashfield and took phone calls, one after the other, hoping at some point to be able to stem the stream of information coming from Juno and the forensics team and get to the door hidden behind dozens of bags of rubbish and cardboard boxes, beyond the waist-high grass of the tiny lawn. Four underling detectives were heading to Perth to liaise with the department over there to see if there was anything to Jackie Rye’s tale about Ashley Benfield taking off with her boyfriend.
Captain James was threatening to take Eden out of the field if there was, because it seemed to him that a possible double homicide, with the potential for more, wasn’t as critical as a triple. Eden’s field play was worth three bodies, apparently, not two. Of course, the captain hadn’t said as much in as many words. But it was clear. Everything Eden had done would be scrapped if Jackie turned out to be just another double killer and not the kind of glorious sicko serial job that made the department headlines.
I warned the captain that Eden was in a very delicate place and any disturbances to her work would put her life in danger. She’d already been threatened by one victim’s father turning up and almost making her in front of the very suspects we were interested in. I hadn’t mentioned that Michael Kidd’s recognition of Eden had been my fault, that I’d mentioned her name in front of the families out at Narellan, that he’d worked out that “Eadie” had been ingeniously concocted out of “Eden.”
When the forensics girl came on the line I moved into the shade of a tree to listen to her report. I knew it would be long. The sun was blazing on my shoulders, making my shirt stick to my ribs.
“There are two sets of female DNA present on a total of forty-two different items of clothing,” she began.
“Forty-two?” I scoffed. “The stuff you picked up on the riverbed barely filled an evidence bag.”
“Fire is generally pretty good at reducing the size of items, Detective Bennett. Big pile of clothes, plus fire, equals small pile of clothes.”
“All right. I’m the idiot. You’re the scientist.”
“Uh huh.”
“I was just surprised.”
“Some of these items, like the bras for example, have been reduced to nothing but a portion of a strap. A hook, in one case. That’s all we’ve got, but if we need to we can reconstruct from fiber analysis, find the brand, the size . . .”
“You’re true wonders.”
“Luckily, some of the items are almost fully intact,” she continued. “The pile was burned carelessly. One of the items interests us very much. There’s back spray of blood on the rear of a cotton tank top. We don’t have a report yet, because we’re rushing this through at an extraordinary pace—”
“I realize you are.”
“But on sight, a consultant said it’s consistent with some blunt-force patterns he’s seen. Someone gets hit hard enough and the skull casing is split in the first blow. Flecks of blood travel upward as the object comes back over the attacker’s shoulder and then downward as the attacker goes in for a second blow. The victim is usually down by the second blow so you just get this upward-downward pattern and nothing else. We’ve also got scissor marks on some of the items. Jeans.”
“Scissors? Not just some sort of blade?”
“No, the deliberate cuts of scissors, uneven and frequently changing direction. Upward along stretched seams. The jeans were on someone when they were cut off.”
“Christ. Well. Good evidence of violence. Sexual element to it, too. Might get us some more time in the field.”
“Uh huh,” the woman said again.
“Any idea who’s been hit?”
“No. We don’t have any names on our files. We’re scientists. We’re impartial. You’ll have to wait for the report.”
“Yeah.” I’d known that and asked the question anyway. Looking like an idiot in front of this woman seemed to be a compulsion. “Thanks for all your help, Nicky.”
It’s a strange sensation to be glad that evidence has arisen suggesting someone has been hurt, that they’re probably dead. Obviously it wasn’t what I wanted. I had no malice toward those girls. I felt awful for their families. But from the moment Eden had sat me down and explained the situation, I’d known somehow that they were dead. It had happened, completely out of my hands, and I was more passionate about uncovering what had occurred than feeling unhappy that it had. As hungry as the new evidence had made me, I had to put that aside and think about Hades’ case. Each night he was getting closer to killing Adam White. I wasn’t sure if White had a death wish, but he was sure playing the game like he did. He couldn’t know that the fall of his dice would affect so many people—not only Hades but his daughter, and through her, me.
I’m not a religious man, but I walked toward Rachael Cricket’s house with some kind of plea running through my mind, to whatever universal power was listening, that she could tell me something about what had happened to Sunday—that out of fear maybe, or love, she’d kept that secret all these years and was somehow willing to give it to me, a stranger.
I’d managed to track Rachael “Jiminy” Cricket down fairly easily from her extensive dealings with Center link. Not Jimmy, or Kimmy, but Jiminy, named after the wise little green sidekick of Pinocchio I’d watched as a kid on VHS. The green bug in the top hat tattooed on her arm. Maybe she’d been there when Sunday went missing. Maybe she’d helped. Maybe she’d share her endless wisdom with me.
I was on the porch when I caught the first smell of what was inside the house. I couldn’t get to the front door through the bags and boxes and rusting items piled up there. From the rust stains on the tiles beneath the windows, I could see this clutter had been there for some time. A troupe of dogs struck up a cacophony as I glanced in the window. I could see nothing but darkness beyond the heavy drapes. Flies tinked and bumped against the window, trying to find a way out.
“Don’t be dead in there,” I murmured. I knocked on the window and one of the dogs squealed with excitement.
“Rachael? Rachael Cricket?” I breathed deeply through my mouth to cope with the stench. “I’m with the police.”
Nothing. I rapped on the window again. The smell wasn’t necessarily something dead, I reassured myself. I didn’t get that telltale biological perfume the body gives off in the days after it expires, the gasses that build up and swell in the stomach, the fluids that are released. This was rotting vegetables, dog feces—human feces maybe. I walked around the house and was hit with the reek of empty gas cans stacked in a pile as big as a car under the bathroom window, decorated here and there with a variety of hubcaps. Two sheds along the side of the house were stuffed full of hubcaps, in teetering stacks under the spider-webbed ceilings, thousands of space-age pizzas dripping rust and grease.
I pulled some boxes and bags away from the back door. Drenched my socks in what I hoped was rainwater but knew wasn’t.
“Rachael? Police. I’m coming in.”
I don’t like things that crawl. I’m happy to admit that. Plenty of men don’t like spiders, cockroaches, any half-squishy legged things you might encounter in a lush backyard garden. Things that come wriggling out of the soil. I’m a homicide detective. I’ve seen more maggots than most people have had handshakes. Men of my type just puff out our chests and clench our teeth and carry on when faced with creepy crawlies, because that’s what you do when you’re scared and you know you shouldn’t be. But when I forced open the door of Rachael Cricket’s kitchen I was faced with more crawlies in one room than I’d ever encountered together. And I was alone, so I indulged myself in letting my shoulders rise up near my ears, my hands come out from my sides, my lips draw back from my teeth, and my eyes bulge from their sockets. Generally, to freak the fuck out as much as a man can standing in one place.
What stole my attention was a large glass salad bowl atop a pile of pots and plates and cups on the counter, a quarter full of orange grease and three-quarters full of large, black dead cockroaches. Here and there shiny survivors of the salad bowl massacre wobbled and shuffled over the piles on the floor, waist-high mounds of everything imaginable. Packets of plastic cutlery. La-belless cans. Papers. Bric-a-brac of every variety, assembled according to no scheme—not what room it might belong in, or how old it was, whether it was organic, plastic, chrome. A baby’s rocker. A jar of thumbtacks. An empty fish tank full of moss-covered pebbles and a wooden cross as long as my arm. More hubcaps, a box of waffle ice-cream cones chewed through by mice and sprinkled with their feces. The flies were in their hundreds, most of them gathered around the windows and the microwave, some rushing over to examine me, my neck and forearms and ears, as I came in the door.
Be dead, I thought. Don’t be alive and living like this. I drew a breath to call Rachael again, coughed, swept flies out of my eyes. I waded through the rubbish, pushing bigger items out of my way, crunching others beneath my boots. There had been a path through it all at some point but the piles had collapsed. The hall was filled with books and newspapers to waist height, and then things lost their way with stuffed toys and plastic plants, a collection of umbrellas in their cloth cases that went for as far as I could see, rows of them like wrapped bodies lying in the dark waiting to be buried. A two-meter-high papier-mâché flamingo that looked like it had come off an old Mardi Gras float fell as I passed and slid down my back, blocking the exit through the kitchen, if you could call it that. A wave of claustrophobia rushed over me. The dogs in the front room were going mad.
Rachael Cricket was sitting propped against a mass of yellowed pillows without cases in the far corner of the front room, barely illuminated by the glow from behind the drapes. She was a meter off the floor on a mound of items—cushions and boxes and plastic tubs, books and stuffed toys. I stood in the doorway and wondered if she was dead. She looked it. Her skin was jaundiced, the way people get in the first couple of days, and her head lolled to one side. She was all layers—layers of skin folding over each other around her arms and neck, two bony legs poking from beneath a gray blanket. The smell here was worse. I knew from the treacherous path to the kitchen that she was incapable of making a journey down there, and I’d only seen one bathroom off to the right on my way. I tried not to imagine what was in the green plastic bags tied and littered all around the room. There were packets of two-minute noodles here dumped in piles as high as the windowsill. No bowls.
The dogs broke free of the second front room and came crashing over the mounds of newspaper toward me. I picked one up as a gesture of goodwill and held it wriggling in my arms. Its fur was matted with dried hardened shit.
“Rachael, um,” I felt strangely teary. I cleared my throat. “I’m Detective Frank Bennett. I’m a police officer.”
Rachael said nothing. I jogged the dog up and down in my arms like a babe.
“I’m here about a girl named Sunday White. You used to be good friends with her sister, a long time ago. I got your name from a . . . a shoplifting case back in seventy-seven.”
Some reaction occurred, though it was difficult to measure. It was mainly in her eyes, fixed pupils that reduced and then flared with what looked like terror.
“You knew Lynda. She was your friend. Until recently, she’s been trying to find out what happened to her sister. You probably don’t know what happened to Sunday, or you would have told your friend. But maybe you remember something now. Something that could help me. Lynda thought it was Hades. But maybe there was someone else who was dangerous. Someone else you girls were afraid of.”
“Plishman,” Rachael said. Her mouth moved, and nothing else. The words came through black teeth and sagging lips. “Plishman.”
“Yes, I’m a policeman.”
“Plishman.”
“You’re not in trouble,” I said, patting the dog while the others snuffled and licked my boots. I needed to go back. Start at square one. “Do you remember Lynda? Do you remember Sunday?”
“The plishman. The plish.” Rachael’s eyes moved to me, locked on my face. “The plishman.”
I squeezed the dog and felt sad, watching as she frowned back at the window, said the word over and over, seemed to ponder what it meant. I said that I would go, but that I would call someone to come back and help her, help the dogs. The hardest part was putting the dog back among the others, identical fluffy things that had once been white but were now different shades of brown and black and the rusting red of over-chewed limbs. I straightened and headed for the kitchen.
“Sabbet,” Rachael said. I stopped in the hall to listen. “The plishman, Sabbet.”