Blood Rose (19 page)

‘Lazarus,’ gasped Clare, the shock of recognition a body blow.

‘Lazarus Beukes,’ said Tamar. ‘He’s got a record for petty thieving so long you could knit a jersey out of it.’

‘What’s his story?’ Clare wished that she had heard it earlier.

‘He had a mother who loved him when she was sober enough to remember he existed,’ Tamar said, ‘but she disappeared a few years ago. He’s lived at the dump ever since.’

Tamar circled the body, resisting the urge to close the lids on the dulling eyes, to wipe away the fluid seeping from his forehead, eyes and slack mouth. The cold eye of her camera flashed on Lazarus’s shattered face. The rope, a nylon washing line around the wrists, had been knotted, so that it would pull tighter as the victim struggled. It had been cut through in the middle, and the boy’s hands lay between his knees, bloody tracks scored deep into both wrists. Clare envisaged the moment Lazarus had realised it wasn’t a game, when he had fought for his life.

‘Have a look at that rope,’ she said. Tamar lifted the jaunty blue and white nylon. The ends around the wrists were cut clean through.

‘This is frayed,’ said Tamar, pointing to the longer piece that would have held his hands tight behind his back. ‘Cut with a different knife. The same as Kaiser Apollis.’

‘Two weapons,’ said Clare. ‘Two places. Two people? Or just one crime in two parts?’

‘There’s no blood here,’ said Tamar. ‘This isn’t where he was shot, so there’re your two places.’ She put her hand against the boy’s skin. It was cold, his body flaccid. She tried to move one of his fingers. He was starting to stiffen.

‘It doesn’t look like he’s been dead long enough for rigor to reverse,’ said Clare. ‘There are no visible signs of decomposition. Looks like he was shot yesterday evening.’

A week since Kaiser Apollis had climbed into a vehicle and
been driven into the desert to be displayed on a Monday. Now there was this one, Friday’s Child. Loving and giving. Clare checked his left hand. The ring finger ended in a bloody stump. ‘The signature,’ she said. ‘He’s taken his trophy again.’

Tamar pointed to the pullover. ‘This’ll be the second signature,’ she said, pushing back the bloody fabric, revealing ribs concaving into the stomach suspended between delicate hips. The flesh, as smooth as a girl’s, had been ribboned by a series of sure, deep knife strokes. Tamar dropped the fabric.

‘One with nothing, a 2, a 3 and now a 5,’ said Clare.

‘Please, God, there isn’t a fourth victim waiting to be found,’ said Tamar, supporting her lower back as she stood up. She turned to Karamata. ‘You looked for a gun?’ she asked.

‘I did,’ he said. ‘I checked both their hands for residue. Nothing. It would last four hours on the hands of a live person after they’d fired.’

‘Unless they washed their hands,’ said Clare.

‘I checked,’ said Karamata. ‘No sign that anyone washed their hands.’

‘Knives?’ asked Clare.

‘Just this.’ Karamata held up a small penknife. ‘It had scraps of biltong on the blade, nothing else.’

‘Who found him?’ asked Tamar, walking over to the forlorn couple.

‘Me.’ It was the girl. ‘I called the police too.’

‘Your name?’ Tamar pulled out a notepad.

‘I’m Chanel,’ the girl replied. ‘That’s Clinton.’

Tamar turned to the man. ‘Why didn’t you phone?’

‘He was afraid to,’ said Chanel, giving the man a look of withering post-coital clarity. ‘He wanted to leave, but the bike’s not working.’

Van Wyk walked over to the bike. ‘This isn’t going anywhere,’
he said. ‘Someone cut your fuel pipe. You’re lucky you didn’t end up with brain splattered across the desert like him.’ He gestured to Lazarus’s body.

The girl shuddered and Tamar put a blanket around her shoulders. Still a child under the smudged make-up, her face was drawn, foxy with fear and cold.

‘What were you doing out here?’ asked Tamar. ‘This is a restricted area.’

‘He wanted to come out here.’ Chanel pointed to the ashen man.

‘Why here?’ Tamar addressed Clinton.

‘Old times’ sake.’

‘Why here and why now?’ Clare persisted.

‘No reason really.’ Clinton looked besieged.

‘So let me get this straight: you just decided on the spur of the moment to bring an under-aged girl to a restricted military site?’ asked Clare conversationally.

Clinton shrugged, a failed attempt at cockiness. ‘I saw an old army connection the other day and it made me think about this place. We used to come here in the old days. Then Chanel wanted to go somewhere, and I thought, why not here? Seeing as we can’t go anywhere together in town.’

‘Who’s your connection?’ asked Clare.

‘I don’t even remember his name any more. Something foreign. Polish. Russian maybe, I don’t know. It was years ago. He was an officer in some unit that used to work out here. I was just a troepie. I saw him there in the strip club, sitting alone, as cool as ever in his cowboy boots, and it reminded me of this place,’ said Clinton, his shoulders sagging in defeat. ‘It seems fucking stupid now.’

‘How do you know him?’ Tamar asked Chanel.

‘I babysit for his wife,’ the girl replied. ‘Mrs Nel’s going to kill me. So’s my mother.’

‘Tell me what happened,’ said Tamar.

‘Can I have a cigarette?’ Chanel asked.

Clare tossed her a box of cigarettes. The girl lit one, hands shaking. Then she told them: they’d gone to sleep, she’d woken up, needed a pee, gone over to the trees, and there was the boy, staring at her like some sick joke.

‘Did you look around before you went to sleep?’ asked Clare.

‘Not really,’ said Chanel. ‘It was getting dark when we arrived.’

‘No other cars?’ asked Tamar.

‘We saw no one,’ said Clinton. ‘Heard nothing either.’

‘And you?’ Clare asked the girl.

‘Just those geckos that call at night. Listen …’ She held up her hand. ‘You can hear them now.’

Clare listened: the chill, moaning laugh of a jackal, then there it was in the distance. Tjak. Tjak. Tjak. The knocking sound that solitary reptiles make to claim their territory, to attract a mate.

‘Go and wait in the car,’ Tamar said to Chanel. The girl was shaking now. Cold and shock. ‘There should be some coffee there to warm you up.’

When Van Wyk cut the lights, the starlight washed over the scene, soft-focusing the horror. A bat swooped low along the ground, hunting. The wind rattled through the trees, then died away, leaving a silence so absolute Clare felt it as a pressure in her ears.

Like she was losing altitude too fast.

Helena Kotze kicked her motorbike into life, the sound like a volley of machine-gun fire down the quiet street. Typical that the call had come once the pulse of the clubs and bars had ebbed, allowing her to plunge into the deep sleep she craved. She did not want to think of what was waiting for her on the indifferent desert sand. She did think, as she curved around the belly of the lagoon, that she was following the path the killer had taken. There was no other way into the delta. The trees closed in on her when she turned east.

She rolled the bike into the amphitheatre of dunes. Tamar and Dr Hart stood beside the body trussed against the tree. Van Wyk sat smoking inside the double cab. A blanket-swaddled girl leant against the window. Karamata and a middle-aged man stood near a motorbike.

‘Helena, glad you’re here,’ said Tamar. ‘Let’s get started.’

Helena set down her sturdy bag on the sand.

‘You’ve got your crime-scene kit there?’ Efficiency smoothed out the edge in Tamar’s voice.

Helena nodded. ‘You got all the pictures you need?’

‘I think so.’

‘Close-ups of the gunshot wounds?’

‘See if these are good enough.’ Tamar scrolled through the pictures on her digital camera.

‘Looks fine.’ Helena palpated the boy’s unresisting flesh.

‘Time of death?’ Clare asked.

Helena took out an instrument that looked like a sharpened bicycle spoke. ‘I’m going to do a sub-hepatic probe. Taking a rectal temp can damage the tissue, making it hard to prove sexual assault later.’

Helena found the correct place just beneath the boy’s chest. She pushed firmly downwards, puncturing the skin and driving the metal deep into the recesses of his body below the liver. She jotted down some notes about air movement and the number of clothing layers the boy was wearing. ‘I need to get the weather report to check against body temp.’

‘Would that shot have killed him instantly?’ asked Clare.

‘In a child, yes,’ said Helena. ‘Looks like whoever shot this boy was taller than him, or …’ Helena stood up and clasped her hands as if she were holding a gun. She softened her knees and angled her hands towards Lazarus. ‘Or the victim was sitting or lying down.’ She turned to face Clare and Tamar. ‘Like it looks he was.’

‘The gun?’ asked Clare.

‘Pistol shot again,’ Helena said. ‘Nice and clean and efficient. Punctured forehead. I’d say it’s the same guy.’ Helena took the boy’s mutilated hand in hers. ‘Your bridegroom has left his mark again.’

‘I saw,’ said Clare. ‘Pre- or post-mortem?’

‘Very little blood here,’ said Helena. ‘Between ten and thirty minutes post-mortem, it’ll be bloodless unless a blunt instrument is used. Then you could get damage to the blood vessels. It’ll cause a welling of blood and obscure the fact that it took place post-mortem. It’s bloodless, just a little oozing. I’d say the two end joints of his finger were removed with a pair of pliers. And soon after he died.’

Helena pushed back the boy’s shirt and shone her torch on the ravaged chest. The knife had cut through the skin. ‘Looks like he used a non-serrated knife to cut the boy here. And quite
a while after death. So a non-serrated knife for the chest and a pair of pliers or something else for the finger.’

‘A strange calling card,’ said Tamar.

‘A warning, perhaps. To sinners,’ said Clare.

The ebony night had thinned to pewter, giving form to the ghostly outlines of branches. Tamar moved off between the trees, following an invisible thread through a maze of bent grasses and shifted stones. The faint marks were familiar.

‘He came this way,’ she said. ‘Carrying the boy. It’s the same pattern as the school. Same print.’ Clare followed Tamar over the stony ground along the river’s edge. There was a thin track snaking through the sand, the ancient tracery of animals migrating in single file in search of water or food. Something you’d miss in the crushing light of day.

Tamar followed until she reached a pile of animal droppings. ‘He would’ve gone back that way,’ she said, ‘but there’s not much point in going on.’ A flock of goats was moving down the riverbed. They had churned up the sand with their sharp little hooves. A couple of them stopped browsing and looked up at Clare and Tamar. They would obliterate any trail more efficiently than water.

‘I’ll send some men out later. See what they can find,’ Tamar said, as they headed back to where Helena crouched by the boy. She had spread a tarpaulin sheet on the ground and lain down Lazarus to examine him. She was moving her competent, gentle hands across the boy’s supine body, under his clothes. She had made swabs and was combing the body for a killer’s DNA, which might have confettied onto the boy.

‘Let’s get him out of here,’ said Tamar. ‘I want to autopsy him as soon as possible.’ Karamata and Van Wyk stepped forward and lifted the body as one would lift a child who had fallen asleep. Tamar closed the lids, shutting Lazarus’s dead eyes.

‘The body?’ asked Clare.

‘Back seat,’ said Tamar. ‘With me.’

The police vehicles, Van Wyk and Tamar in the double cab and Karamata on his quad bike, disappeared over the dune. The hunting bats, flying low over the ground, returned to roost in the large Ana tree where Lazarus had been tied.

‘I need to make a call,’ Clare said to Helena. ‘Can you hang on a minute?’

‘Sure,’ said Helena. ‘Let them get ahead or we’ll sit in their dust.’

Clare climbed halfway up a rise, hoping she would get cellphone reception. Nothing. She stood in the scrub, like any other predator, and scanned the dunes. A thickening of the darkness on the opposite dune caught her eye, thudding her heart against her ribs again. The shadow moved, lengthening down the swell of the dune. Then it stopped and Clare heard the eerie chuckle of a brown hyena, a rare and persecuted animal. She exhaled, and watched the animal lope, swift and sure, into the scrub. Its presence meant that people rarely passed through here. It also meant that no body would last long. Half an hour alone, and the soft bits – stomach, buttocks, face – would be gone. The small bones would be ground away, the long bones cracked open for their sweet, nutritious marrow.

The killer must have kept the dead boy somewhere. He had been able to predict where a sleepy girl would go to relieve herself. He had displayed the body just there, so that her torchlight would find his face leering at her. Clare scanned the empty gulley, the motionless trees. He had to know this place. Like the back of his hand. The phrase echoed through Clare’s mind as she moved out of the shelter of the trees, climbing to the lip of the dune. One bar. She crossed her fingers for the satellite to be around long enough for her to make her call.

‘Faizal,’ mumbled Riedwaan. Half asleep. Warm. Naked in bed. Clare pictured him, one sinewy arm over his eyes to keep the morning at bay. The unexpected ache of longing was a knife-twist.

‘Riedwaan.’ Despite herself, she listened for the muffled sounds of somebody else. ‘It’s Clare.’

‘Baby.’ Worry clear as a bell in his voice. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘What did you just call me?’ she asked.

‘I called you baby. It’s … fuck, it’s five o’clock in the morning, Clare. Get off your feminist high horse. What’s happened?’

‘Another boy, Riedwaan.’ Clare put her hand to her mouth. ‘I spoke to him two days ago. Now he’s dead.’

‘What is it now? Three? Four?’

‘Four. Four bodies. But this one had a 5 carved on his chest. I’m scared it means there’s another one out there that no one’s found.’

‘Where are you?’

‘Out in the Kuiseb Delta. Some old military site.’

‘Military?’ Riedwaan was awake now, his ambiguous conversation with Phiri making his hair stand on end. ‘What are you doing there?’