Blood Rose

twenty-nine

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?’

‘A couple of bikers found the body,’ said Clare. ‘Well, a married man and an under-aged babysitter. It must’ve seemed like the ideal place. It’s the middle of nowhere. Someone cut the bike’s fuel pipe so they had no choice but to call for help.’

‘Is there any connection between that place and the school? The other places where the bodies were dumped?’

‘If there is, I’m not seeing it yet,’ said Clare. ‘Other than whoever is dumping these kids intends them to be found.’

Need and opportunity, she thought: malevolent twin moons that guided the ebb and flow of her killer’s mind.

‘You have to find some way of connecting these boys and the dump sites,’ said Riedwaan. ‘If the choice is purely opportunistic, then what does this guy do that allows him to be in the right place at the right time? Then you’ve got a chance of finding where he’s shooting them.’

‘Riedwaan, do you know how big this place is? It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack.’ The desert rolled away from Clare, ashen in the starlight.

‘That’s your job, Doc,’ said Riedwaan. ‘Unless this killer is a spook, someone’s going to see him sometime.’

‘It feels like I’m chasing a ghost sometimes,’ said Clare, watching a moth alight on a cluster of creamy blossoms.

‘What’s the plan now?’ asked Riedwaan.

‘Captain Damases went back with the body. We’ll do the autopsy immediately. I’m going back now with the pathologist.’

‘Clare.’ Riedwaan’s tone softened. Not now, thought Clare. Not here. ‘I wanted to tell you…’

Clare broke off a flower-laden branch from the tree she was standing under. She didn’t recognise the species, but the plants that grew in deserts were unique, each evolving to fit some tiny niche. The fragile blossoms smelt of honey, a subtle fragrance as out of place in this harsh place as the delicate, pollen-laden moth that fluttered in the moonlight. She waited.

‘It’s not what you’re thinking. I just-’ he started, but the satellite moved, cutting him off.

Clare wiped her hands on her jeans. Her palms left a swirl of Van Gogh yellow against the blue. She looked at the pollen smudge. It clung to her jeans, her hands, her watch strap. It would travel with her no matter how much she tried to rub it off. She thought of the dead boys and the unchartered paths they had followed to their deaths. All the signs they might have left – footprints, hair, skin particles – had been erased by the desert wind and the tenacious insects that fought for survival. Clare looked again at the pollen clinging to her, determined to journey with her on the off-chance that it would brush against a receptive female plant. She felt her pulse quicken as her idea coalesced. If Lazarus had brushed against a tree or a flowering shrub in the Kuiseb Delta, surely the traces of these plants would have adhered to the tiny crevices in his skin or the folds in his clothes. Adrenaline surged through Clare as she thought of the invisible code encrypted on the dead boy. On the others, too: Kaiser, Nicanor, Fritz.

‘Clare.’ Helena’s voice cut through her thoughts. ‘Shall we head back? I’ll need to get to work on that boy if you’re going to have anything to take to Cape Town with you later.’

Clare went to join her, picking a branch of every flowering tree she passed. ‘I need to find someone who knows about plants.’

‘Tertius Myburgh’s your man then,’ said Helena, giving her a strange look. ‘Plant nut, works at the desert research institute in Swakopmund. Tell him I sent you.’

Helena’s bike roared back to life and Clare got on behind her, cradling her bouquet in front of her. They bumped down the track and turned onto the gravel road that would take them back to Walvis Bay. The bike’s lights flashed over objects, pulling them towards Clare: an old car wreck, a gnarled tree and a donkey cart clip-clopping along, the driver hunched against the cold, a sleepy huddle of children on the back, lulled by the regular thwack of the leather on the donkey’s withers.

Helena parked in the hospital parking lot. Clare needed a hot shower and coffee, but neither of those was going to happen any time soon.

Tamar was waiting for them. ‘Lazarus’s inside already,’ she said, leading the way up the steps of the morgue. ‘Elias has gone over to the dump to try to trace his movements.’

‘And Van Wyk?’ asked Clare.

‘At the station with Clinton and Chanel getting statements. His wife and her mother were waiting for them when we arrived,’ said Tamar. ‘They’d figured it out already.’

‘Ouch!’ said Clare.

In the antechamber, the three women pulled gowns over their dusty clothes before following Helena into her makeshift mortuary. The sheet draped across Lazarus peaked over his nose, his hands folded across his lacerated chest, over his too-large adolescent feet. In the dim light it looked like the marble tomb of a medieval crusader; then Helena flicked on the lights and he was a dead boy on a dented metal gurney again.

‘Okay,’ Helena said. ‘Shall we start?’ She drew back the sheet to reveal Lazarus Beukes, his gangly legs straightened, arms folded, eyes closed.

The scab on his knee was easier to look at than the neat cross bang in the middle of his forehead. Clare turned away, holding her hand up in front of her face. The gun here, ten centimetres from his forehead. Close enough to see each calibration of expression, but calm, contained, without the aggression of the barrel rammed against the flesh, twisting it. For the boy it was all the same, the end. The bullet tunnelling through the brain to lodge against the cradling skull at the back of his head.

Helena worked methodically, undressing and packaging the boy’s clothes, recording her initial observations, her soothing tone in stark contrast to the unsettling details she was describing. The amputated tip of the Apollo finger, the 5 scored into the bony chest, the old scars, the new ones, the mapping of a rough and abbreviated life.

‘Yes!’ said Helena, turning Lazarus over. ‘There’s no exit wound here.’ It took a second for the implication of what she was saying to sink in.

‘Are you going to open his head up?’ Clare asked, not sure how much time she had to get to Tertius Myburgh before her plane left.

‘I am,’ said Helena. ‘Hang on, Clare. Five minutes and you’re free.’

Clare felt the bile rising in her throat as Helena picked up the instruments that would tease the last secrets from Lazarus Beukes’s brain. She went over to the window and rubbed one pane clean. With intense concentration she watched the day-shift nurses arrive, ten large women spilling out of the minibus taxi. The doors of the hospital closed on them, silencing their ribald banter. Clare wished the night staff would start their exit procession so that they would distract her from the quiet sawing going on behind her.

There was a low whistle from Helena, followed by a tiny clink. A gasp from Tamar. Then another clink. Clare cursed herself for feeling faint. Helena picked up the bullet in the metal dish with tweezers, rinsing the blood and scraps of brain that clung to the lead. She dropped it into an evidence bag and handed it to Clare. Small, spent, malignant in her hand. Her skin tingled.

‘A bullet.’ Helena’s tired face was triumphant. ‘And here’s another. Two bullets, one behind the other. Means that the first bullet lodged in the tip of the barrel and was forced out simultaneously with the next shot. So when your killer fired again, Lazarus got two for the price of one.’