Eden by Candice Fox Read Free Book Online Page B

brooded. They were all in their late teens or early twenties. One was posing with another girl at what looked like a nightclub, one was sitting on a milk crate smoking a cigarette, one was taking a melodramatic half-profile self-portrait. They were all blond.
    I didn’t feel anything, not then. I didn’t know these girls, and nothing so far told me that they were dead. I sipped my scotch and tried to memorize the faces.
    “This is Ashley Benfield. This is Keely Manning. This is Erin Kidd.” Eden pointed to the photographs in turn.
    “Uh huh.”
    “Missing sixty-four days, missing thirty days, missing four days.”
    “Any movement on the bank accounts, online accounts, or phones?”
    “No.”
    “Check the bedroom closets of all their boyfriends?”
    “They were all single at the time of going missing.” Eden shifted Keely’s photograph up above the others. “Last seen leaving her mother’s house in Narellan to meet a friend in the city. That was the story, anyway. We’ve confirmed that she was actually going to Bankstown to get drugs and go on a three-day sex binge. She wasn’t a full-time prostitute—she’d get her pimp there to rent her a motel room and she’d take as many customers as she could over the three days. Live off the money for a couple of months.”
    Keely was the curly-haired one, smoking a cigarette on a milk crate, skinny bare arms curved forward against the cold in a stripy gray and orange hoody. She was a pretty girl under all the makeup. Eden set her photograph aside and put up the photo of the profile shot.
    “Ashley was a full-time prostitute,” Eden said. “She was couchsurfing between girlfriends’ apartments when she slipped through the cracks. No one reported her missing for five days because everyone thought she was somewhere else. Last seen leaving Penrith Panthers alone at midnight after playing the poker machines there for four or five hours. A crew of locals was with her and offered her a ride but she said she wanted to walk.”
    “Silly girl,” I said. I looked at her photograph.
    “Now this one,” Eden said, moving to the last photograph. “Gave us our most promising lead. Erin was a recreational prostitute. She’s been in and out of a few different jobs over the years but she was sleeping with a couple of guys in Camden for rent just before she went missing. She was supposed to have been seen hitchhiking on the Pacific Highway out of Camden four days ago, but we can’t confirm that.”
    Erin was in a nightclub in the photograph, smooshing her face against another girl’s for the picture. Her eyes were bright and wild, the pupils huge.
    “What’s the lead?”
    “One of the guys she was sleeping with is Jackie Rye,” Eden said, flipping through the folder and extracting another photograph. “Jackie’s got a permanent girlfriend, another young girl, but they’re on and off again all the time and it looks like Erin might have slipped in there to knock boots with Jackie in the off period. She was only at his farm a short time. Over the past year Keely and Ashley have lived there, too—for a couple of months each. It’s the one thing all three girls have in common.”
    I looked at the photograph of Jackie Rye. It was a mug shot, so the pale, washed-out look was very familiar, the shadows under the eyes and in the deep hollows of his cheeks and the slight yellow tinge to his skin. He was almost bald, a tuft of hair on the very top of his head combed back and the hair at the sides of his head slicked into what might have been a curly ponytail or mullet. His lips were pouty, which suggested to me that he might have been missing teeth.
    “What do we know about Super Creep?”
    “The usual history of small-time aggressions.” Eden slipped a stapled pile of police reports in front of me. “Mostly drunken and drug related. Three sexual assaults and no convictions recorded, all withdrawn before trial.”
    “This is sounding like a good tip.” I flipped through