Dead at Daybreak

∨ Dead at Daybreak ∧

28

I spent three months at Quantico, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s luxurious sprawl in Virginia. And two weeks respectively in Seattle and New York.

I won’t bore you with descriptions of abundant, bountiful America. I won’t comment on the hospitable, superficial, clever, generous people. (I’m becoming a self-conscious author. I’m seduced by the sensuality of the words in front of me begging to be used. I’m overeating at this banquet of self-description. I think it’s a natural process: once you start talking about yourself, once you’ve overcome the initial [typically Afrikaans] unwillingness to egocentrism, it becomes a furious machine, a monster feeding on itself, an irresistible seduction that adds more and more baroque decorations to the storyline, until the meanderings achieve a life of their own.)

So I must practice self-discipline.

At Quantico they taught me to use the media, showed me that television and radio and the newspapers weren’t the enemy of the police but an instrument. That you could harness a cart horse to the media’s insatiable hunger for sensation and blood (but that you had to hang on to the wagon if the horse took the bit between its teeth).

They taught me profiling, how to establish the psyche of serial killers and even deduce clothing and transport and age with an astonishing measure of accuracy.

I took a green exercise book with me, the nearest I could come to an official dossier, and I reopened the Baby Marnewick case, the private, unofficial version. My first witnesses were the SACs, the special agents in charge, members of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit – and every analyzed serial killer in America.

And then I came back.

Wendy was at the airport – “Why didn’t you write?” – but she was ecstatic because her unwilling betrothed was eventually on his way to a doctorate. “Tell me everything,” while my head was in my green exercise book.

A week after my return, I went to Klerksdorp to beg for the official Marnewick dossier, armed with a letter from the professor and the commissioner and all the manipulative charm I possessed.

It took another two weeks before I sent out the other letters because it took that long to get all the names and addresses of every officer in charge of every Murder and Robbery Unit in the country.

I rewrote the letter to them five or six times. The balance had to be right: an academic request, a pricking of professional curiosity, just another servant of justice – without insinuating that I was one of them, because I knew the brotherhood, the unique ties that were formed in a daily round of death and violence and scorn.

The letter, apart from the well-considered opening, contained the salient points of Baby Marnewick’s death and asked for information on similar murders between the years 1975 and 1985 with all the possible variations on the theme, à la Quantico.

And then I went back to the books and the notes and the theory of my thesis but merely to make the time spent waiting for information pass more easily.

“What’s wrong with you, Zet?”

I’m certain that Wendy, at the very least, had an intimation of the threat.

I hadn’t told her about my and Baby Marnewick’s past history. As far as she was concerned, it was an academic, scientific process that would lead to a doctorate and a step nearer to her dream. Professor and Mrs. van Heerden.

What would we call our children? Her father’s and mother’s names (Gordon and Shirley) and my Afrikaans surname? Not that I worried about it.

I’m losing the thread.

“Is there someone else?”

There was. Behind a wooden fence, six feet under.

But how to explain that?

“No. Don’t be silly.”