Hades (13 page)

“Please,” she whispered. “Please, God, please.”

The doorframe cracked, wobbled on its long thin nails as she rocked the broom handle back and forth. With clawing fingers she dropped the handle, ripping at the frame as it hung by the very tips of the nails holding it to the wall. Martina screamed as the frame tumbled to the ground. She pushed the cage forward and giggled hysterically.

One more doorframe and she could fit the cage into the room that held the steel-top tables. The key to the cage had to be in there somewhere. If it wasn’t, there was no hope.

I
was in a foul mood the morning after our meeting with Cameron Miller. The kind of mood where having to part your lips to mumble hello to someone is enough to piss you off. I felt stale all over standing at the coffee station trying to figure out how to use the machine. The mug I had grabbed was stained at the bottom and read “Only Gay in the Office!” I’d left the station at 1
AM
and had only driven home because the very sight of the place was making me furious. I’d showered, watched some early-morning religious programs that told me how my soul was going to burn in hell and returned worse off after a fevered half-snooze at the kitchen table.

Eric, wearing Armani and smelling of Boss, slapped my shoulder so hard and so suddenly that the sugar was launched off my spoon and across the counter like a spray of glass.

“
Good morning, Fran-kie
,” he sang. “
The world says hell-o!
”

“There are guns in this place, you realize,” I said. “They’re everywhere.”

“Well, if you’re going to go on a shooting spree, friend, let me know. I’d love the recognition of bringing you down.”

He slapped me again and wandered away, whistling. I was about to spew some abuse over my shoulder when I noticed Captain James standing by the door to the smoker’s balcony, admiring our apparent camaraderie with a moustachey smile. Things seemed on the up-and-up when I sat down at Doyle’s desk and picked up the glossy funeral booklet sitting there. Eden and I, it seemed, had been invited to celebrate the life of Courtney Turner.

The booklet actually made me feel a little better. It reminded me of how trivial my lost sleep was in the scheme of things. I was flipping through the booklet when Eden walked in, wearing black jeans and a pair of heeled boots you could cripple someone with and a grey hoodie with the sleeves rolled up. She looked tired too. The braid down the back of her head was crooked.

“Another day in paradise.” She yawned as she passed. I grunted in response and burned my tongue on my coffee.

The booklet was artfully presented. There were photos of Courtney opening Christmas presents and proud on her first day at school, her arms behind her back and her birdcage ribs thrust out. The back page was dedicated to a class photograph surrounded by messages written by her classmates.

I sighed and kept flipping. There was a picture of Courtney and Monica sitting together on a bed with their arms around each other. Monica was slightly older and her hair slightly darker, but otherwise they were almost identical. Crooked smiles and big, glowing, excited eyes. Monica was holding a caramel teddy bear under her arm. The bear was wearing little green scrubs, a bouffant cap and a stethoscope. Doctor Bear.

I tipped my head and held the paper a little closer to my nose.

Monica’s feet were bare and the bed was unmade, white sheets pulled back behind the girls.

“Eden,” I said. She wandered over holding her booklet in one hand and a mug that read “World’s Best Dad” in the other.

“Hmm?”

“Where do you reckon this picture was taken?” Eden sipped her coffee and turned to the page I was on. Her eyes were bloodshot. I kept a finger on the photograph.

My heart began to pound. Eric was leaning back in his desk chair with his hands behind his head, feigning sleep. Eden’s coffee was frozen in the air, inches before her lips.

The sensation growing in my stomach was like that of something forgotten, some important thing that I knew needed to be recognized, now, before chaos erupted. My mother had called that kind of feeling
the hoo-has
—the unaccountable knowledge that things were not as they should be. I had
the hoo-has
bad.

I got up and wandered over to Eric’s desk. He let one of his eyes open to a small slit and watched me pass like a snake eyeing a mouse.

“Has anyone seen Monica since Courtney went missing?” I asked. Eric frowned. I paced in front of his desk, waiting for him to answer. He let his hands drop down from his head and crossed his legs on the desk before him.

“You’re actually talking to
me
, aren’t you?”

“Cut the bullshit for just a minute,” I said, thoughts snapping together in my brain. “Has anyone from the department seen her?”

Eric looked past me for a second, frowning.

“There’s not really been any need to. She’s at her grandmother’s place all the way out in Richmond. I think someone’s conducted a phone interview with her but she’s a kid. She doesn’t know anything.”

“No one’s
seen
her, though.”

“No.”

“This picture’s not that old. It doesn’t look more than a year old,” I tapped the booklet. “Look at this picture and tell me those two girls aren’t sitting on a hospital bed.”

“This doesn’t mean anything necessarily,” Eden said. “She could have visited the hospital recently for anything.”

She sat on the edge of my desk while I picked up the organ transplant waiting list. My hands were shaking. I flipped through, looking for Monica’s name. There was only one Monica, and her surname was Russell, not Turner. I felt the air rush out of me. Eden smirked.

“Jeez,” she said. “Heads would have rolled if we’d missed a thing like that.”

“Yeh,” I sighed. “It was a stupid idea.”

I scratched at my chest. My shirt was suddenly irritating me. Eric went back to snoozing and Eden wandered away. I tried to get on with checking the list of leads, running through my emails, fixing up the reports I’d written. But I couldn’t sit still. Quietly, I picked up the phone and got onto the front administration desk, got them to call through to Dr. Claude Rassi.

“Oh good, you’re back,” I said.

“Just got in this morning. How can I help?”

“This is going to sound pretty stupid,” I told the doctor. “But I didn’t know any other transplant specialist to call. I’m just curious. I’ve got a weird feeling. I want to look at the medical history of a girl named Monica Turner. Have you got access to that national database thingy?”

I heard Dr. Rassi’s leather desk chair groan as he shifted in it. His breath crackled on the phone.

“You got all her details?” he asked.

“Somewhere.” I shuffled my papers around.

I fed the doctor the details. He was silent for a long time.

“My national database thingy doesn’t have a Monica Turner with that birth date in it. Which either means she’s never been sick or she’s changed her name, and she’s not Turner in our records.”

“Changed her name,” I murmured, slowly rising out of my chair. “What, so you can have one name on your birth certificate and one name with Medicare?”

“No,” Rassi said. “Your name with Medicare has to be the same name that’s on your birth certificate. Your legal name. That’s the law. But you can
assume
a name, start using it, signing things with it, going by it, long before you change it with the registry—there’s nothing illegal about that. She could have been using Turner for a year without us knowing about it while her real name is something else.”

“Could she have changed it unofficially at school?”

“As long as she had her parents’ permission.”

“She just started a new school . . .” I stuttered. “So all her new friends would know her under Turner . . .”

“Sorry?”

“So if her mother
didn’t
change her name with Medicare, if she’d never been Turner on her medical records, they’d all still be under her former name.”

“That’s ri—”

I dropped the phone on the desk and ran into the kitchen. Eric watched me go. I skidded to a halt behind Eden as she stood looking into the fridge. She yelped when I grabbed her arm.

“What’s Eliza Turner’s maiden name?” I asked. She stared at me. “What is it?”

 

 

There was a cold, electric tension in the car on the drive back to the Turners’ house. Though we were in an unmarked car, passersby somehow seemed to sense our dark purpose. It felt like they were staring.

We had run out of the office, leaving Eric to get the warrant organized by the time we got to the Turner house. Eden’s body was rigid. Her hands, illuminated on the steering wheel by the glow of early-morning street lamps, looked white-knuckled and hard. She had barely cut the engine before she was striding up the concrete path towards the porch. I passed her in a sprint as I let the full force of my anger surge through my leg, into my foot, through my boot and into the door.

The door exploded open as our backup pulled into the drive. From the porch, I saw Derek Turner jolt violently in his chair at the kitchen table and Eliza leap up with a scream.

“Police!” Eden snarled, shouldering in beside me and covering Eliza. “Get on the
fucking
floor!”

“Oh Jesus!” Derek howled, crawling numbly off his chair. “Oh
Jesus!
”

There were two plates of scrambled eggs and toast on the table. The smell of roasted coffee filled the room.

“Mr. Turner,” I said. “I’m going to ask you once where Monica Russell is. You don’t tell me, I’m going to put a bullet right in the back of your skull.”

I already felt like I was burning up, my body thumping with exhilaration. There was sweat on the back of my hands. Eliza Turner was screaming. She stopped abruptly when Eden pressed a boot down on her neck.

“Please. Please. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Eden threw down the printout she had rolled up and stuck in her back pocket when we left the station. It was a copy of the waiting list. On page four, three from the bottom of the list, was Monica Russell.

Female. Age thirteen. Chronic glomerulosclerosis. Two kidneys required.

Monica had become very sick. Her family was visited by a tall handsome man with a big leather bag one dark night while the two girls were supposed to be sleeping. Not long after the family had moved houses. Monica had become sicker and sicker as the months passed but she’d still attended a new school with a new name. They’d pretended everything was fine, all according to plan. One night Monica was taken by the man with the bag to a house somewhere and given a needle to make her go to sleep. Monica lay on a steel-top table next to her sister, Courtney, who had smiled wearily and held her hand as the other girl was put to sleep too.

The rage in me was so heavy and so hot that I felt out of control, frightened by what I might do. I could see Courtney against the back of my eyelids. I crouched over Derek and slid my fingers into his hair, wrenching his head up as I knelt on his spine.

“You organized the murder of a fucking
child
.”

“Derek,” Eliza sobbed. “Don’t say anything.”

“We didn’t have a choice. Monica was going to be on the list for years. There was no time.”

“You had Courtney killed to save Monica.” Eden was shaking her head. “Why? Why? They were both yours.”

Derek started crying. I shoved his face into the floor.

“
Why?
”

“Derek, don’t.”

“Because I wasn’t going to have that
bitch
live over Monica,” Derek said, tears dropping off the edge of his jaw. “Courtney was so fucking spoiled. Monica didn’t deserve what she got. One of them was going to die anyway. One of them was going to die. We didn’t do anything wrong. We didn’t kill anyone else’s kid. We just switched them, that’s all. We just switched them. They belong to us and we can do what we goddamn want with them.”

The backup officers filled the room. One of them took Derek from me. Eliza struggled in Eden’s arms as she was cuffed. Eden stood and covered her mouth as the patrol officer took over, her eyes wandering across Eliza’s body like she didn’t know what the woman was.

“Detective Bennett,” one of the officers said, putting a hand on my shoulder. “We found the girl.”

I stepped outside with Eden and paused by the back door of the house. There was an old green-and-yellow swing set by the fence, its legs submerged in unmown grass. We were both huffing, pacing, wiping our faces in the cold morning air. I couldn’t get my heartbeat down.

In the car on the way to the house I’d hoped that I was wrong, that somehow there was another Monica Russell out there suffering, dying, that the Turners’ daughter really was at Derek’s mother’s place. But Derek’s eyes as they lifted to mine in that moment when the door had slammed open confirmed I was right. I followed Eden to the aluminum shed at the back of the yard and slid open the glass door.

The sun on the heavy curtains was weak. There was a female patrol officer sitting beside Monica’s bed, holding the girl’s hands. I let my eyes wander over the machines that surrounded her—the heart monitor and the respirator and the stand holding the intravenous. Monica looked small and frail. Her hair had thinned down to a limp curtain of chestnut brown that hung about her bony shoulders. An oxygen tube was taped under her nose.

“What’s wrong?” she asked me, her eyes wild and black. “What’s happening?”

“It’s okay, baby,” I said, a sour taste dancing on my tongue. “You’re, uh, you’re going to be out of here in just a minute.”

“Where’s Courtney?” the girl asked, looking at Eden and the woman beside her for guidance. “Are you going to take me to where Courtney is?”