The Monster's Daughter (57 page)

“It does not prove anything by itself.”

“What about the Skosana incident the other night at Zebra House?”

“Mr. Wexler said Skosana was angry that he had not arranged another buyer. He wanted to get paid a second time for the same child, a six-month-old girl.”

Alet felt alarmed that the baby was still in Skosana's possession. “Where are they keeping her?”

“Mr. Skosana has a girlfriend on the Terblanche farm.”

“Magda Kok.” Alet could kick herself. She remembered the cradle. It had been right there in front of her. Magda looked after the children while they were waiting to be sold off. “Did you send someone out there?”

“Child Services has taken custody of the baby and the older child. There is a warrant out for the arrest of Gareth Skosana and his associates.”

“Ngwenya?”

“I will interview him when you do your pointing-out.”

“Oh.
Ja
. That.” Alet had forgotten about the witness statement she was scheduled to give at the scene. The charges against her would not be dropped until her hearing. She had to convince a review board of the events of that night. If Ngwenya could be implicated in the Braverman killings, her shooting him might be viewed as justified.

“I need to talk to Wexler.”

“Constable—”

“Please, Johannes. He knows the truth about Trudie. I know I can get him to talk.”

A brief silence. “Perhaps you are right.”

Alet hung up the phone, a heaviness settling over her as she emptied her glass. Theo motioned to refill it, his hands poised on the wine bottle. Alet waved him away. “No. I … I need to go to sleep.” She sank into the couch, her head too heavy to hold up any longer.

“I'll get you a pillow and a—”

Theo's silhouette fractured in her vision. She fought the depths pulling at her, trying to keep up conversation, but sleep enticed her to its molten core, and she gave up.

A persistent buzzing clawed at Alet's inertia. She tried to find the cause, her senses muffled. Her fingers found her phone on the ground next to the couch, its vibration sending an unpleasant tickle up her arm. Its journey between the floor and her ear was glacial.

“Hallo?” Alet was met with silence, the call disconnected. She tried to pry her eyes open. Theo's name came up as a missed call; in fact, there were several missed calls, two from Koch. Alet noticed the time on her phone. “
Fok
.” It was ten-thirty already. She was supposed to have met with Koch at nine. She sat up, realizing she was only wearing her T-shirt. Her jeans lay neatly folded on the coffee table.

Alet pressed the redial button on her phone.

“Alet?” Theo aspirated her name, relief in his voice. “I've been calling all morning.”

“I just woke up.” Alet tried to clear the fog from her mind as she dressed. “Last night … I must have been exhausted.”

“You were pretty out of it.”

“What's going on?”

“Turn on SABC 1.”

Alet reached for the remote on the coffee table. The screen sprung to life after a few seconds, the image of a black female reporter in a beige suit jacket jerking onto the screen.

“… death toll on the roads now nearing eight hundred for December. I'm here, on the outskirts of Khayelitsha Township, where a car veered off the road hours ago and crashed into a convenience store.”

Behind the reporter, men were working on the crumpled wreck of a blue sedan, its nose smashed into the wall of a small square building covered in bright advertisements. Groceries lay scattered on the sidewalk. The frame cut to a prerecorded clip. A man, dressed in a hotel porter uniform, gestured toward the wreck, other brown faces looking over his shoulder at the camera. “I had to jump to get out of the way. Others too!”

The reporter's face appeared on the screen again. “The cause of the accident has not been confirmed yet, but it is believed that the driver, identified as a professor at the University of Cape Town, lost control of the vehicle.”

Alet felt cold.

“It's Koch,” Theo confirmed. “They've been running the story for
the past couple of hours. I spoke to the police. He's in critical condition … Alet?”

Alet took her hand away from her mouth. “We were supposed to meet today, Theo.” Alet grabbed her jeans from the pile on the coffee table and finished dressing. She lost her balance, one leg in her pants, and banged her knee against the table. “
Eina. Fok
!”

“Are you all right?”

“
Ja
 … I don't know.” Alet sat down on the couch and took a deep breath. “You think this might be the killer? That he found out Koch was onto him?”

“It was a car crash, Alet. The policeman I spoke to said it looks like he swerved to miss a baboon in the road. They're all over the place that side of town.”

“This stinks, Theo.”

“I know.” Theo sighed. “Listen, I ran prints against that partial. It's not Jana Terblanche.”

“What about Mynhardt?”

“Corruption is one thing, Alet, but murder—”

“You read the TRC testimony. Just because Mynhardt was never prosecuted doesn't mean a thing. If he was involved with a death squad, he's capable of this. He's been making a lot of money with this baby thing. If Trudie threatened to expose him … Don't tell me he wouldn't have done whatever it took to keep her quiet.”

“I thought you were looking for this weird serial-killer guy.”

“This is all connected somehow, Theo. Please. Rule Mynhardt out, then, if nothing else.”

“Okay, okay.”

“I'm going to the hospital. I'll see you after.”

Alet had learned a long time ago that if you looked confident in what you were doing, people rarely questioned you. The same was true when she walked into intensive care and announced at the desk that she was Koch's daughter. The receptionist directed her to a waiting room where the other family members had gathered. Alet slipped down the hall to Koch's room. She could pick out the familiar smell of blood masked by disinfectant. Koch's wispy gray hair was pasted to his scalp, and his frozen face had a sallow color. A gash ran from his forehead down the side of his nose and right cheek, and a
plastic brace enfolded his neck and back. Wires attached to hidden places on his body, springing forth from his hospital gown in a tangled web. A huge plastic tube snaked from his mouth, the respirator beeping with reassuring regularity. It was hard to reconcile this damaged body with the peculiar little man who had given her such grief.

Alet opened the locker next to Koch's bed. His glasses were sealed in a plastic bag, the right lens cracked, the frame bent, resting on a shelf next to a pair of shoes, a watch and a wedding ring. It was a miracle they weren't looted off his body at the scene. A tan briefcase had been slid into the top shelf of the locker. Alet reached for it.

“Miss Koch? You shouldn't be in here.” The nurse smiled sympathetically. “I know it's hard. I promise we'll let you know if there is any change.”

Alet quickly closed the locker door, the briefcase tucked under her arm. “I wanted to take his things home before they …”

The nurse nodded. “That's probably a good idea.” She touched Alet's arm. “There's always hope,” she said. “Remember, your father is in God's hands.”

“They ran a toxicology report, didn't they? What did they find?”

The nurse's hand froze, a confused frown nestling into her homely features. “I don't know if the results are back yet.”

“Do you know how it happened?”

The nurse shook her head. “I'm sorry.”

“Thank you.” Alet walked past the waiting-room door and out of the hospital, her heart racing. Only once she was on the road did it feel like she could breathe again. She couldn't accept that it had been an accident. Koch had found something and he was going to tell her, she was sure of it. Someone wanted to make sure that it didn't happen.

Alet turned into the university's empty parking lot and reached for Koch's briefcase. It contained a wallet, keys, a half-eaten ham sandwich carefully rewrapped in cellophane, folders with grade sheets for the semester and three rolls of cherry-flavored sweets. Alet went through everything, desperate to find a clue as to why Koch wanted to meet, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary. She cut through the campus, Koch's keys in her pocket. The grounds were eerily quiet, the quad empty in the lazy afternoon sun, the academic staff on vacation.
Only the truly dedicated would be here now, instead of spending vacation time with their families.

Alet had found Koch's key card in his wallet. She went up the nearest stairwell to the third floor, but she realized she'd made a wrong turn somewhere when she hit a dead end. She traced her path back to the stairwell, the sound of her footsteps exaggerated on the tiled floors. Koch's name was on a door at the end of the next passage. She reached for his keys in her pocket and tested a couple before finding the right one. Koch's office had no windows, so she flipped the light switch, dreading the fact that the fluorescent lights might be seen by a zealous security guard.

The room was pristine, the way she remembered it, the faint smell of body odor lingering in the stagnant air. She sat down behind his desk, bumping her foot against the backboard. It was cheap, probably not designed for tall people. Koch's computer wasn't password-protected. Not a good sign. Digging around on his hard drive, it was obvious that he didn't keep anything of value there. Koch was old-school, from an era of paper and filling forms out by hand. Alet sighed as she eyed the mammoth row of locked filing cabinets against the wall.

She unlocked the cabinets with a small key on Koch's key ring and started searching for the obvious first.
UNIE, POLICE
 … she even looked to see if there was a file under her own name or that of her father, but came up empty. She realized that she would have to go through each and every one of them, A through Z. The files were mostly administrative, student papers, exams, grade sheets. Koch, for all his neatness, was a pack rat. Curious, she flipped through the file marked
ENGELMAN
. It contained a research proposal, something about radiation and the mutation of virus DNA when present in a host organism. She wasn't sure what it meant, except that dead rats and bunnies were probably involved.

A noise came from somewhere down the hall, an unintentional stumble. Alet dashed to switch the light off. She listened as faint footsteps grew more distinct and stopped just outside Koch's office. The door handle wiggled, resisting the intruder's attempts to open it. There was a pause. At the sound of someone fiddling with the lock, Alet darted to Koch's desk and ducked under it, folding herself double to fit the small space. The fluorescent lights sputtered to life again.
The intruder was a man, judging by his sure, heavy step. He stopped in front of the desk, his brown
vel
shoes inches away from her. Alet heard him page through the calendar on Koch's desk and then drop it without ceremony. He walked over to the filing cabinets and started to pull paper out of the files. He wasn't trying to be neat, that was for sure.

Alet's phone vibrated in her pocket. She fumbled to find it, adrenaline flooding her veins. For a moment the room froze in silence, Alet sure that the sound of her furious heartbeat would betray her presence. The intruder took two steps, then veered toward the bookcase next to the desk. Alet tried to see under the backboard, but the space was too narrow. She could barely make out the hems of a pair of jeans.

The man was dumping books from Koch's shelves. Alet heard a metallic clicking sound. She stuck her head out from under the desk, craning to see what he was doing, and realized with a shock that the man wasn't standing next to the bookshelf any longer. Alet put her arms out just in time to stop her skull from slamming into the side of the desk as the man grabbed her from behind. Alet screamed. He pulled her by her hair, his other hand wrapped around her neck. She fought for breath, struggling against him, managing to push him off. He tried to grab hold of her again, but she stomped on his instep. He cursed and let go. Alet tried to stand up, but he thrust her back to the floor and ran. She grabbed the desk and pulled herself up. Her legs shook so badly that she could barely stand.

“Come back here,” she yelled as she reached the door, the hallway empty. She realized the absurdity of her words. What was he going to do? Turn back and duke it out with her? By the time she reached the stairwell there was no sign of the man.

Theo had raced over to Koch's office after she called him, his face ashen when he laid eyes on her. “You should have brought me with,” he said, visibly shaken. “We have to get you to the hospital so a doctor can check you out.”

“I'm not going to a hospital.” Alet got up from Koch's chair. She felt a little dizzy, but the feeling passed. Paper and folders formed a carpet on the office floor, books stacked knee-high.

“Alet.”

“Theo, I'm fine.” Alet touched her throat. It felt bruised, swollen.

“You could have internal injuries.”

Alet held her hand up, motioning for him to stop.

“Quit being so pigheaded,” Theo said through clenched teeth.

Alet went over to the gaping hole in the bookshelf. “He obviously knew about the safe.” Attached to the wall, no more than fifteen centimeters deep, was a flat rectangular steel box that nestled perfectly behind the books on the shelf. Alet had found the key to it in the bunch from Koch's briefcase. Inside was an envelope thick with R100 notes, a folder, and Koch's passport.

“What was he looking for?”

“Maybe this?” Alet removed the folder from the safe box. A wave of nausea washed over her and she had to hold on to the bookshelf until it passed. Theo gave her an I-told-you-so look. He helped her back to Koch's chair and took the folder from her.