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.’
thirty
Four pairs of shoes rested on the back seat next to the labelled bundles of clothes packaged in brown paper, as neat as gifts. Clare’s desert bouquet was in the boot. She drove through Swakopmund, a quaint holiday town, thirty kilometres north of Walvis Bay. Its coffee shops displayed dripping slices of Black Forest cake, and its snow-roofed German colonial houses seemed outlandish in the desert. But the street children were the same: wheedling, coaxing or pickpocketing money from flustered, sunburnt tourists. Clare turned towards the copper-domed aquarium, tarnished a Florentine green by the sea air. It was sequestered at the end of the road parallel to the beach.
It was early still and no one was about. Clare had made her way around the back of the building to find the air-conditioned shipping container. She pushed her way into the gloomy interior. The dim, dusty windows and the narrowness of the space gave it the air of a mausoleum. A young man was hunched over a microscope. Long hair curtained his face.
