Molten Mud Murder

by Sara E. Johnson

  Titiwai. Glowworms. Light of the enduring world, Cooper had said.

  She stood up, crouched, and followed the emerald dots through a slippery gap. The green points disappeared around a turn, dot to dot leading her to safety. The cave. A Do Not Enter sign was hammered into the ground, and a rope hung across a slim entrance. She ducked below it and stumbled inward, turning sideways to slip inside, joining the spirits of Maori women and children hiding within the womb of Mother Earth from marauding warriors, hiding from pain and torture, from boiling water and stepmothers with hardened eyes. A thrashing. Dittmer was passing, hadn’t noticed the green lights, missed the turnoff, and was speeding down the path to the falls, the one she had explored on her first run along the Kaituna.

  He would turn around as soon as he saw it dead-ended. That the platform was empty. A plank into an abyss.

  She pulled her phone out, saw one bar, and stabbed 111. “Help,” she screamed into it. “Okere Falls.”

  “What is your emergency? This connection—”

  The phone screen went blank. Alexa thrust it back in her pocket and made a decision: No hiding. No being a victim… again. She backed out of the crevice, pried the wooden Do Not Enter sign out of the ground, and crept toward the falls.

  The roar. The roar of foamy whitewater dropping seven meters deafened her approach, her heart, the pounding in her ears. Dittmer was climbing the three steps to the platform when he spotted her, his mouth opening in surprise.

  “Why did you kill Herera?” she shouted, halting.

  Dittmer stepped onto the platform and turned, looming above her, the club held at an upward slant. Rain started, sudden, heavy. “A fool,” he screamed. “Hoarding treasures to keep them safe. I saw him watching me from the pā. Had to return and roll him off the cliff like the munted drunk he was. And now you.” With a guttural war cry, he leaped the three steps from the platform, thrashing the greenstone club like a blade, his eyes popping madly out of their sockets, his magnified body flying at her.

  The wooden sign sliced the air, hitting the tip of the club with a clack before Alexa knew she had swung. The war weapon arced backward out of Dittmer’s wet hand, suspended between days to come and days swallowed up, landed, clattered across the slick platform, hovered over the edge, balanced between earth and water.

  Alexa swung again, hitting air, and watched, dismayed, as the warning sign flew from her cold grip and whirled through space. Her weapon. Gone.

  Dittmer scrambled back, pulled himself up the platform, his hot desire for greenstone blinding him to anything but greed when Alexa rammed into him. They slid across the wet platform, Alexa clawing for traction on slimy wood, Dittmer breaking through the flimsy railing, his white hair disappearing into detonating darkness.

  And then she was alone in the rain.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Deep in an armchair, Iris and Echo on either side, a mug of hot tea warming her hands, Alexa explained again the series of events between leaving the station (or being ordered to leave) and banging on Sarah Ingall’s front door. DI Horne’s eyebrows were bunched, his blue eyes gone navy as he stood looking down at her, waiting for her to finish. Rangiora rocked on the balls of his feet beside him.

  “Good on ya,” Rangiora interrupted. “We heard him come after you. You left your mobile on.”

  “I what?” She sat straight. The sound of crashing water still filled her head.

  “That was smart, eh. We heard Dittmer say he rolled Herera off the cliff. ’Course he didn’t mention suffocating him first. Minor detail.”

  Her cell was still on when she stuffed it back in her pocket. She sank deeper into the chair, let it support her full weight. Her shoulders, up near her ears in a stiff hunch, eased downward. She wouldn’t have to defend her actions.

  Rangiora held up a plastic evidence bag. Inside, catching the light from the gas fire Sarah had lit, glinted the greenstone war club. “It was just hanging there, over the edge practically, like water over the brim of a cup. Miracle it didn’t drop. Bet it will match Jenny’s wound.”

  Alexa’s mouth parched as she stared. Dittmer had attempted to demolish her skull with it. She averted her eyes, sloppily sipped tea.

  “Your bedroom window was wide open,” Rangiora burst on. “That’s how Dittmer got in.”

  With a jolt, she remembered her nightmare, thrusting the window open in the middle of the night, gasping for cool air.

  “The room was tossed. His car was past your driveway, tucked into the woods.”

  “He was searching for the teacup.” Alexa’s grip tightened on the mug, the steam and scent doing little to assuage her tremors. Iris knew and pressed her muzzle firmly, warmly on Alexa’s thigh.

  Horne took over. “Emirates Airline confirmed Dittmer sat next to Koppel on the Dubai-Wellington leg from Marrakesh. That’s how they met and hatched their scheme.”

  Alexa shook her head at Paul Koppel’s bad luck and weak character. “Any sign of Dittmer?”

  “It’s impossible to reach the river from the platform. Just sheer cliff down to a narrow sluice,” the DI replied. “The search and rescue team are stringing a wire net across the river downstream of the rapids.”

  “Is there a chance Dittmer survived?” Alexa asked, her voice cottonmouth hoarse.

  “Slim,” Horne said. “If no body is snagged in the net, we’ll start a search at dawn.” He looked over at Sarah, who was hovering at the doorway. “Can Ms. Glock spend the night here?”

  “Of course,” Sarah said. Iris barked, making Alexa jerk. Hot tea burned through her wet khakis.

  Even drained of energy, Alexa bristled at Bruce making plans for her. But she didn’t want to go back to Trout Cottage.

  Ever.

  “Come to the station in the morning,” he said. “We’ll finalize your statement.” His eyes caught and locked with hers, sending a spark daring her to flicker.

  Alexa turned away.

  * * *

  Dittmer’s body was snagged in the net before daybreak; cause of death had been blunt force trauma, his head smashed against rocks in the gorge. He was posthumously charged with Paul Koppel’s and Ray Herera’s deaths and Jenny’s attack.

  After giving her statement the next morning, Alexa had driven through pouring rain to Trout Cottage only to pack and thank Sarah Ingall, who, along with Iris, graciously went with her. “These are for you,” Sarah said, handing her a pair of greenstone trout-shaped earrings. “Do you always get tangled in messes?”

  Alexa thought of the tedious lab work she’d done the past couple of years in Raleigh, all teeth, no bite, her safe fellowship in Auckland teaching future odontologists, and laughed, surprising herself.

  “Hardly.” She hugged Sarah and then bent down and scratched behind Iris’s ear, even though she didn’t like dogs.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  A week later, in an Auckland coffee shop, Alexa was poring over the New Zealand Herald. Mud pot murder news had faded. “Maori Celebrate as Chief ’s Skull Returned” was today’s front page news. According to the article, an international smuggling sting, headed by Customs Agent P. E. Wilkie, confiscated a skull in Singapore and returned it to Rotorua during freak gale force winds. There was a photograph of Agent Wilkie. Alexa looked.

  And then looked again.

  Still in ball cap and shades, Agent Wilkie looked suspiciously like Philip from the spa.

  Bare butt guy was an undercover customs agent.

  Alexa laughed and went back to reading the article. The distinctive facial patterns, smoked to permanency two and a half centuries ago, made identification easy. Respected Maori leader Lee Ngawata was quoted: “A traditional ceremony will reacquaint our ancestral chief with his pito and whenua (umbilical cord and placenta) so that his spirit can sleep the sweet slumber of eternity and then the gales will cease.”

  Reunification with the rest of the skele
ton and ultimate burial would take place in a secret location.

  Alexa sipped her flat white coffee and considered Ngawata’s words: only then will the gales cease. She whipped out her phone to check Rotorua weather: severe nor’easters battering Bay of Plenty area; many without power.

  A gust of wind blew the café door open. Three hours north of Rotorua. They had better hurry up with the reburial.

  Maybe it’s time to bury some of my own baggage too?

  Alexa picked up the paper to finish. Other items, including human bone fish hooks and greenstone clubs intended for the overseas black market, had been recovered and also would be returned to local iwi.

  She kept reading. Detective Inspector Bruce Horne was quoted, “Individuals in Rotorua, Auckland, Wellington, and Singapore were participating in criminal activities including conspiracy, trafficking in and possession of stolen antiquities. We are proud to have worked together with national and international agents to end this assault on New Zealand’s rich cultural history and to have solved the connected murders of Paul Koppel and Ray Herera.”

  Buried treasure had lured William Dittmer to kill two men and attempt to kill Jenny. But what about Paul Koppel? Why had he risked his cosmos for a few thousand dollars? Didn’t he realize the riches of his ordinary life?

  Alexa finished the article and set the paper down. She took a last sip of her flat white and thought about the message she had received two days ago.

  “Horne here. Er, I mean Bruce.”

  Alexa had laughed. Finally, we’re on a first-name basis. The message had ended with a brief “About that rain check. Give me a ring.”

  She thought of the glacial eyes and hard body. The man had his own buried treasures and woes. She wasn’t sure she wanted to dig them up and so far hadn’t returned his call. Her fingers brushed over the numbers, but then she dropped her cell into her tote and looked down at dirty Keds.

  Tomorrow.

  Time to go. She had an interview with Dan Goddard, Mr. Red Sneakers, at the Auckland forensics lab. Fingers crossed, she headed for the door that New Zealand had flung wide open.

  Acknowledgments

  Many thanks to the following people who helped shape Molten Mud Murder:

  First to my agent, Natalie Lakosil of Bradford Literary Agency, who “was intrigued from the start” and “couldn’t put it down,” and to my editor, Barbara Peters of Poisoned Pen Press, who showed me the beauty of the Oxford comma.

  It is a pleasure to work with these smart, responsive women. I wrote Molten Mud Murder while in the outstanding Nancy Peacock’s writing group. Thank you, Nancy, and to Denise Cline, Lynn Davis, Lynn Harris, and Linda Janssen, all of whom provided guidance and inspiration.

  Experts rock! Thank you to Angela Oliver of the Christchurch Writers’ Guild, my Kiwi expert. Thank you, Arapine Walker, Poutiaki Rauemi, of the National Library of New Zealand, my Maori expert. Thank you, Janie Slaughter, Department Head/ Criminal Justice at Wake Technical Community College, my forensics expert.

  Beverly Koester, my friend, always had keen and gentle suggestions.

  Triangle Sisters (and brothers) in Crime provided fellowship and inspiration.

  Cheers to all who came to visit while we lived in New Zealand: my children, Scott, Phillip, and Sally Weiner; my niece, Juta Fowlkes; my stepson, Rob Johnson; my sister, Jennifer Fowlkes; and my mother, Sally Freeman.

  Some of the places in Molten Mud Murder are real and some are made up. All the mistakes are real and mine alone.

  Molten Mud Murder exists because one day my husband said, “How would you like to live in New Zealand for a year?” Thank you, Forrest, for that and for being my best friend and best adviser.

  About the Author

  Photo by Morgan Henderson Photography

  Sara E. Johnson lives in Durham, North Carolina. She worked as a middle school reading specialist and local newspaper contributor before her husband lured her to New Zealand for a year. Her first novel, Molten Mud Murder, is the result.