tossed a glance my way just as we blasted through a massive intersection, a half a secondâs worth of gap between us and a removal van passing across our bonnet. Silence lingered in the car, my words pulsing. Itâs always very present between us, the fact that Eden could at any time, and rightfully so, decide that killing me is the best thing for her future. As far as I could tell, it was only me and her father who knew what she really was, what she had done. People wonder, Iâm sure. Our colleagues, our clients, some of the journalists who have covered her career. They wonder about that hard look, about her incredible instinct for catching killers, her seemingly biological ease at physical combat. Sheâs a natural chaser, hunter, fighter. Once a man in my very position got too close to discovering who Eden really was and her brother put a bullet in his head. Her brother was gone now. Eden had killed him to save my life. But I didnât feel any safer. I couldnât afford to.
Arriving at the scene was anticlimactic. In an alley between two warehouses in Ashfieldâs industrial wasteland, the path the murdered girl had taken came to a point. Sandy black earth and bricks that hadnât seen sunlight in years. Eden parked andwe walked into the gap and looked ahead to the wire fencing at the end, the dead grass. There were a couple of boot prints beside a pair of tyre tracks. The tracks showed the vehicle had come into the gap, where the driver exited, walked around the vehicle, got in the back, exited again and got in the front. The GPS showed the van was stationary here for a mere fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes to leave the victim totally unrecognisable.
Eden and I stood close enough, but not too close, waiting for the crime-scene techs. There were plenty of cigarette butts and bits of paper around for collecting. I donât know about Eden, but I stood there still and silent because I wanted to be sad for a little moment at the sight of the footprints, the reading on the phone in my hand. The heartbeat rose. Then the heartbeat was lost. It was a lonely place to die.
âKill van,â Eden said suddenly, nodding. I looked at her. Her arms were folded across her chest, her eyes squinting in the dim light, following the footprints back and forth. âItâs a good move. Mobile, so you can grab and go at any time. Easy to acquire. Donât need to clean it. Just light it up and leave it. Ted Bundy had one for a while there.â
She sniffed and took her jacket off, crouched low with difficulty to look at the tyre prints. I felt a little ill and went back to the car to wait.
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Hades Archer was starting to feel things were getting too quiet around the house when he noticed the men gathered at the bottom of the hill. Heâd been told men his age became restless towards their twilight years and sought the company of people who didnât necessarily want to hear their stories or drink their coffee. Men his age became a burden on people when they got bored. So the trick, it seemed, was not to get bored. Always have something brewing. A project. A purpose.
The average man took up golf in his retirement years. But Hades had never been close to average.
He kept this restlessness at bay by focusing on his work. His legitimate work, mostly. Waste rates in the city were always increasing, which meant he was constantly facing the challenge of finding space in his landfill for non-recoverable garbage. He spent the months carefully considering which technology upgrades he could get government funding for, how to make use of the non-recoverables, whether there were charities that could benefit from some of the items he couldnât find buyers for â the thousands and thousands of bags of clothes, the old but still operational appliances, the building materials. He considered which landfill plots to turn over, knowing it took six or seven months for the bodies he hid beneath the layers
Serenity King, Pepper Pace, Aliyah Burke, Erosa Knowles, Latrivia Nelson, Tianna Laveen, Bridget Midway, Yvette Hines