Zoo City

'Can you take a look at a photograph?' I unfold my photocopy and put it on the desk in front of him.

'Hmm. I have to say he doesn't look familiar. But that could be because this ID was issued in 1994. No one looks like their ID photo anyway, right, especially if they've been living rough for a few years. We could ask some of the long-termers. They're out at the moment. We cut them loose between ten and five, but a lot of them hang out nearby. Let's take a walk.'

We head down to Joubert Park where the dealers are already out in force, as well as a few office workers taking an early lunch-break in the sun. Renier heads straight for the public toilets where a group of obviously homeless people are huddled passing round a silver foil papsak of cheap wine. They glare at us suspiciously, and a gnarled woman grabs at the arm of the old man standing next to her and draws against him for protection.

'Wass'matter, Captain?' the old man calls out as we approach. The lines in his face are set so deep you could go crevassing in there. 'Something got stolen? That dief back again?'

'Nothing like that, Hannes. This young lady would like to talk to you and Annamarie about a man who may have stayed with us.'

I show them the photocopy and they hand it round with the same seriousness as the papsak.

'Nee, man. I don't knows this okie,' Hannes shakes his head.

'Are you sure? He might not look the same anymore.' Definitely not after being burned to charcoal, but I won't show them that set of photographs. 'His name was Patrick Serfontein.'

'Se weer?' asks the old lady clinging to his arm.

'Patrick Serfontein. He was fifty-three years old. From Kroonstad.'

'No, lady,'' Hannes says again, shaking his head.

The old woman smacks his shoulder. 'Jong! Dis Paddy! Jy onthou! ' She grabs the photocopy with shaky hands, either Parkinson's or the drink. 'Ja, okie with a beard, ne. En dinges wat daar woon.' She makes a scrabbling gesture at her chin as if scratching at lice. 'You remember, Mr Snyman. With the Miervreter, mos.'

'So he did have an animal?' I say.

'I do remember him.' Snyman shakes his head. 'That damn Aardvark used to get its tongue into everything, especially the sugar. It drove our cook crazy.'

'And he used to feed it baby cockroaches, Mr Snyman. You remember?' She holds her finger and thumb two inches apart to demonstrate.

'That's not a baby cockroach,' a sullen man with a strong German accent corrects. He's leaning on a shopping trolley loaded with the remains of a single mattress.

'It is around here!' boasts the old lady, slapping her thigh, and even the sullen German and Snyman laugh.

'When did you last see him?' I ask.

'Must have been a few weeks ago,' Snyman muses. 'Maybe even a month. He came and went a lot, if I recall correctly.'

'He was his own man,' Hannes says, approvingly. 'The shelter isn't for everybody, hey. Some people like their freedom. They can't be dealing with other people's rules all the time.' He gives the old biddy on his arm a little warning nod.

'Jy! Don't make me laugh,' she says.

Snyman says, 'A lot of our residents come and go. They'll live on the street until it gets cold – our highest occupancy is in winter – or something happens. A fight, a beating, an accident. It's ugly out there.'

'Is there anyone else you haven't seen in a while? Anyone with an animal?

They exchange looks and shake their heads.

'How would we know?' says the sullen German guy.

Exactly what the killer is counting on.

31.

Mandlakazi is not just fat, she's enormous. Her belly rolls have belly rolls. She's chewing her way through a bag of vegetarian samoosas, one hand on the steering wheel, the other dipping into the bag and back to her mouth like an assembly line, as she drives us through to Cresta to meet the Witness. Sloth takes to her immediately, although perhaps that's just the butternut samoosas she keeps plying him with.

The Witness phoned this morning while I was checking out airline charity cases, claiming to have seen the whole thing. Dave phoned me to let me know, and I've insisted on coming along.

'Dave said you been hanging out with the juicy babies,' Mandlakazi says through a mouthful of samoosa. It takes me a second to figure out that she's talking about iJusi.

'Yeah. I was doing an article on them.'

'Past tense? Too bad, koeks. Dave tell you I was the gossip columnist past tense for the Sunday Times?'

'He mentioned it.'

'He mention why I got fired? I got so big I filled up the social pages all by myself.' She roars with laughter. 'No, I'm kidding. I got sick of it. That stuff is cancer. All that celebrity bullshit, it'll eat you alive if you let it.'

'And the crime beat won't?'

'Way I figure it, covering the celebrity beat is like dying from a nose job turned gangrenous. Or cancer of the arse. Just a stupid way to go. Give me a good headshot or a fatal stabbing. At least that's worth something. So what's your thinking on this unholy mess? Someone with an anti- animal vendetta and a panga to grind?'

'It's muti murders.'

'If only! Screw Slinger and his fake puppy dog, we'd be riding the front page for a week. How do you figure?'

'Two murders in the space of the week. Both animalled. Both bodies found with no trace of their animal in sight.'

'And you know these two murders are related because…? I mean, on the one hand we got your homeless guy, necklaced. On the other, we've got a very nasty case of the stabs. Doesn't sound like the same M O to me, and baby, believe me, I got the hots for the serial killers.'

'I got an email.'

'From the killer?'

'From the victims. Ghosts in the machine. Their own special brand of lost things.'

'Which is your bit, right? The lost things thing?'

'It's my bit,' I confirm.

'But how do you know it's not just sick for kicks?' Mandlakazi wipes her fingers on her jeans.

'I met some junkie kids behind Mai Mai with a Porcupine. They'd cut off its paw to sell it for muti. They offered to do the same with Sloth. Someone's buying.' But then, someone's always buying in this city. Sex. Drugs. Magic. With the right connections you can probably get a twofor-one deal.

'Muti from zoos?' Dave whistles appreciatively. 'That's got to be expensive.'

'Killing kids for muti is expensive,' I correct him. It doesn't happen a lot, but every year there are a handful of cases that make the papers: prepubescents murdered and harvested for body parts. Lips, genitals, fingers, hands, feet. The more they scream, the more powerful the muti, although the morgues have a brisk backdoor business going too. A hand buried under your shopfront door will bring you more customers. Eating a prepubescent boy's penis will cure impotence.

'People miss kids. Zoos, especially homeless ones, streetwalkers, the ones nobody will miss, probably won't even notice they're gone. I don't know if that's expensive.'