The Monster's Daughter (49 page)

“The one from across the street.”

“And the boy?”

She shook her head. “Never seen him.”

“When was the last time you saw her?”

“I don't know. Maybe a week ago? When little Tina went missing, I suppose. Ursula hasn't been the same, never comes out now. It's bad, losing a child, hey.”

“Thanks for your help.”

“You come ask me anytime, hear?” she said, smiling.

Adriaan smiled back, an understanding passing between them. He'd known her kind before. She wouldn't be the first white trash who tried to get out of here by spreading her legs for a policeman. It was always good for amusement. God knows, with Gerda taking Alet and threatening divorce, he needed it. Adriaan tucked the photograph into his pocket as he walked away. De Beer wasn't living with the woman, so what was he doing there?

Two more squad cars pulled up to the house. “Turn over the house,” Adriaan yelled at the men who got out. “Get prints. Statements from
the neighbors.” As a constable drove him back to the station, he studied the two faces in the photograph again.

“Was she one of the victims, sir?”

“Keep your eyes on the road, Constable.”

“Sorry, sir. She just looks—”

“Yes, like an angel.” Adriaan smiled.

The Dutch Reformed church on Adderley Street seemed anachronistic, standing between two modern buildings. People in shorts and T-shirts crowded the sidewalk in front of it. Behind the iron fencing, its imposing gray walls were interrupted by barred windows and a heavy wooden door. From where Alet stood, it was easy to imagine it as a fancy prison, designed to keep the congregation in a purgatory of psalm-singing until everyone had handed over their tithes.

Patchy sunlight invaded the city's shadows. Alet pushed up her sweatshirt's sleeves, glancing at her watch. As if on cue, a man in a gray suit opened both church doors, then kicked at the stops. The
dominee
appeared behind him in black robes, taking up his post next to the door. Families in suits and knee-length dresses sauntered out, men stopping to shake hands and exchange a few words.

Alet searched the faces, locking eyes with Koch as he walked down the church stairs. A short frumpy woman in mauve walked arm in arm with him, her graying brown hair teased into an eighties-style helmet of hairspray. Alet yawned, waiting for Koch to cross the street, while Mrs. Koch talked to a woman who Alet presumed was the
dominee
's wife.

“You could have called.”

Alet was unfazed by Koch's irritation, her own taking precedence. “I did,” she said. “Your
ousie
told me where you were.”

Koch crossed his arms. “Well?”

Alet mirrored his defiant stance. “Tell your wife you're going to be late for lunch. You and I have a few things to discuss.”

“This can wait.”

“Actually, it can't. You're going to tell me the truth about you and my dad. Right now.”

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

“No? I know about your employment history, Professor. What you did back then for the government.”

Koch stiffened. “I am a scientist.”

“Doesn't give you the right to kill people.”

“I didn't kill anybody.” Koch waved a finger in her face, his mouth pulled taut.

“Look, you're going to tell me, or I'll go to the university board and tell them who they have in their employ. Maybe the papers would find it interesting too. You influencing the young minds of the country and all.”

“You wouldn't.”

“Try me.”

Koch met Alet on the corner after briefly talking to his wife. Alet followed him to Greenmarket Square, the streets bustling and breathing with tourists. She waved off a very dark-skinned man holding a wooden hippo statue as Koch marched straight ahead into an old hotel bar that overlooked the square.

“So, what do you know?” Koch placed two Black Labels on the table, taking the seat opposite Alet.

“You did research for a government front company that supplied death squads with chemical weapons. And my dad was in charge of one of those squads.”

Koch looked at her in surprise, eyebrows raised in an unspoken question.

“I only just found out.”

“What do you want from me?”

“The truth. I need to know how it all fits in with this murder investigation.”

“I don't understand,” Koch said, the fight out of him.

“Did they experiment on people?”

“Tests were done on animals—primates, pigs, dogs.”

Alet raised an eyebrow. “You're sure about that? What use would they have for a man like you?”

“I did what I was told to do. Everything was highly compartmentalized. They recruited researchers from around the country, and everyone worked on their little part, with no idea of how it fit into the bigger picture.”

“But you knew, didn't you?”

“People were too afraid to talk. They had us sign secrecy agreements, even bugged our houses. The tests mainly dealt with organophosphates like paraoxon, paraquat, agents that could only have been used for one purpose.”

“Which was?”

“They claimed the work was to protect our troops from chemical attacks in Namibia, but most of the agents were designed for offensive purposes, all small-scale production.”

“Assassinations.”

“I think so. They had rooms full of food and liquor that were being picked up by Security Branch men. Cigarettes. Clothes, even. All laced with the stuff.” He took a gulp from his beer before continuing. “It had been in the news around that time. Opposition leaders hospitalized because of thallium or unknown agents. It's not hard to connect the dots.”

“What about breeding super wolf-dogs?”

The corner of Koch's mouth lifted in a sneer. “You read the tabloids.”

“The official documents are still classified, so I take what I can get.”

“Genetic research like that takes time, money. The company was sold and privatized before we made any real progress.”

“And people?”

“What?”

“Did you use people in these experiments? If the government was willing to experiment on humans, they may have been doing it for a long time. Longer than you know.”

“Nonsense. Look, I was just as surprised as you when I saw those results.” Koch sighed. “We didn't know anything back then. Those experiments were failures. The technology for that kind of thing simply didn't exist. It's impossible that they'd have known more in 1900.”

Alet leaned on the table, cradling her chin in her hand. “Then help me out, Professor. I don't understand how this is possible.”

“Evolution, perhaps? A different species could have evolved alongside Homo sapiens for thousands of years, living and passing as human.”

“And we didn't find out about it until now?” Alet thought about Koch's theory for a moment. “Okay, suppose that happened. There had to have been more of them, right? A single being can't evolve on its own. They had to breed.”

Koch's eyes narrowed behind his thick glasses. “I think we can presume that.”

“Where are they, then? Could they be the other victims? Someone found out about these non-humans, saw them as a threat, and tried to eradicate them?”

“No.” Koch swept his hand through the air emphatically. “The DNA evidence you sent me from those old cases was all human. No match to your victim whatsoever.”

“Dammit.” Alet rubbed her temples. It would have been a neat solution, a motive at least. Somewhere out there was a faceless killer she just couldn't get a grip on, and it was frustrating the hell out of her. “And my dad? How does he fit in to all of this?”

“I really don't know anything, Alet.” Koch fiddled with the label on his beer bottle, pulling at the edges and sticking them back down again.

“That's
kak
, Professor,” Alet said. “Why did you agree to keep this quiet?”

“I thought that's what you wanted.” A thin layer of perspiration had formed on Koch's pasty face.

“I expected you to write a paper about it. Get published. Have your name in the scientific spotlight. Unless of course you suspected that it had something to do with the work you were doing for the government, the larger thing they were working on?”

Koch pressed his lips together, the corners drooping. He looked like all the authority figures she'd ever encountered, the
dominees
, the teachers, the principals, the drill sergeants, the station chiefs, all of them asserting their authority without opposition because they were white and male.

Alet shook her head. “You can't go public about what you did back then, because you're scared you'd be found out, prosecuted. But you're desperate to get back at my father. You wanted me to find out
about what he did. Expose him to his only daughter. I just can't figure out why.”

“I really don't see what—”

Alet held her hand up to stop him. “I don't think you understand, Professor. The time for amnesty is over, the TRC went home. So help me understand why I shouldn't take everything I have to the government.”

“It's personal. Nothing to do with this case.”

Alet crossed her arms, her gaze unwavering. “You should talk to me, Professor.”

Koch held his hands up in a sign of surrender, letting them flop back down on the table. “I suppose it doesn't matter anymore.” He stared at the TV screen above the bar as he talked, suddenly unwilling to look her in the eye. “Your dad … We were friends of sorts, you could say. Worked a few cases together in Pretoria, sometimes shared a
dop
while trying to reason things out. Catching the bad guy, watching the pieces come together, it was a huge rush to be part of all that. Adriaan was obsessive, relentless. I admired that, wanted to be part of it, see?” An expression of self-ridicule lodged on Koch's face.

“My daughter got into trouble because of some hippie she was seeing at the time, arrested for aiding the ANC. Known ANC sympathizers had been disappearing regularly at that point. The police would detain them indefinitely. Their families didn't know if they were in jail or dead. You have no idea what it was like back then.” Koch looked pleadingly at Alet. “I was frantic when I got the call. I went to Adriaan, begged him to help. He took care of it, brought her home, kept her name off the government lists. He even fixed it so the boyfriend wouldn't be a problem anymore.” Koch bowed his head. “The relationship changed after that. If he said anything, changed his mind, my girl would have been in a whole lot of trouble. So when Adriaan Berg pulled at my leash, I came running.”

A sourness ate away at Alet's insides. Her dad was a bully, a man who manipulated his friends and colleagues to get what he wanted. Adriaan enjoyed watching the people around him dance. It was one hell of a gene pool she'd inherited.

Koch finished his beer. “It's all well and good to say now that what we did was wrong, Alet, but I would've done it a million times over
to keep my girl safe.” He looked at her, a sarcastic chuckle escaping his lips. “After all he did, your father walked out of two trials and a national inquiry without a scratch on him. He's untouchable.”

“Things have changed, Professor.” Alet emptied her beer. “This is the New South Africa, after all.”

Mike Engelman's number flashed on Alet's cell. She hesitated for only a moment before she silenced the call, slipping the phone back into her sweatshirt pocket. She felt as if she were wading through water, her mind thick, her limbs slow to react. She finished the piss coffee from the vending machine outside Theo's cramped office and crushed the cup in her hand.

Theo hunched over his keyboard, entering variables into a database. “Jeffrey Wexler has been arrested a few times,” he said. “Petty crimes when he was younger, one charge of assault, never married, no children. Mathilda Pienaar is clean. I'll print these out for you.”

“What about Jacob Morgan's dad? Phillip?”

Theo typed, his eyes squinting at the screen. “Human-rights lawyer. Assaulted and killed on the way home one day. There were suspicions that it was an assassination, but no evidence supported the claim.”

“Of course.” Alet leaned her head back, then jerked upright when she felt herself drifting off. “What about the rest of his family?” She yawned, running her fingers through her ponytail. She had taken a shower that morning at Theo's place but she still felt greasy and awful. She got up and leaned on the back of Theo's chair, a sliding green bar tracking the progress of the report on his computer screen.

“Got it.” Theo turned in his seat. Alet moved too slowly and they butted heads. “Shit, sorry.” He touched his palm to her face, let go immediately.

Alet covered her tearing right eye with one hand, light flickering in the darkness before her. She wondered if she'd have a new bruise just as the old one was fading. “No worries.” She tried to focus her other eye. “What does it say?”

Theo turned back to the screen. “His grandfather was a Corporal Andrew Morgan. British forces during the Boer War. Seems he stayed
and married a black woman, but the marriage was declared illegal after the Immorality Act passed.” Theo scrolled down the page. “The name Theresa Morgan pops up in a few places. No idea what the relation is, though—there's no birth certificate. Could be his mother or his sister.”

Theo typed the name into the database. “No. There's a record here of her graduating from high school in Bloemfontein in forty … seven. So probably a daughter.”

Alet leaned in. “Nothing else? School or hospital records?”

“She disappears from the paper trail. Why are you so interested in Jacob Morgan, anyway?”

“Don't know. He was the only witness willing to testify against my dad. He's important somehow.” Alet noticed the time on the computer screen. If she didn't get on the road soon, she'd be late for her shift. “Call if you find anything?”