We’re both too hyper to really bother covering our tracks, so we simply go into Macy’s dad’s office and lock the door. I take off my sweater and boots, and park in front of the computer. Then Finn closes his eyes briefly, and the world swirls back into that reassuring mix of movement and heat and noise that people call “reality”.
The computer takes forever to start up, but I don’t mind that when I see that it’s set to “Remember password”. I give a little relieved laugh; I’m in immediately. Finn is pacing up and down as I skim through the icons on the desktop. It takes me about two seconds to get into the “Clients” file, and I actually feel the hairs on my scalp rising as I scroll through the list of names.
A name jumps out at me almost at once: Dawid Frederik Rademan. I open the file, click print.
The sound of the printer starting up and then printing is ear-splittingly loud in the silence of the early-morning office. Within seconds we hear a pair of high heels click-clicking on the marble floors towards the locked door. Then we hear a high female voice.
“Dr Bowers?”
I scroll further down the list of names as the woman on the other side starts knocking.
“Dr Bowers? Is that you?”
It takes me a bit longer to spot the second name: Nandipa Sheila Kunene.
I open the file, print it out.
The woman outside is beginning to get a bit worked up.
“Whoever’s in there, open this door immediately! You’re on private property!”
I’m back at the alphabetical list, scrolling. It’s astonishing – there are literally thousands of clients. The woman starts banging hard against the door.
“Open this door immediately!”
I can’t find any evidence of Skeletor at first, but then I remember that she used to model under the name Cooper.
Gotcha. Nadine Cooper.
I open the file, click print. I can’t believe how much noise the printer is making. And I’m obviously not the only one bothered by the sound.
“What are you doing in there? You have no right! Come out of this office immediately!” By this time the woman on the other side is hysterical. “I’m calling security now! I’m warning you!” A further round of banging.
“Take a chill pill, lady,” I mutter under my breath. As soon as the printer stops whirring, I switch the computer off.
I nod at Finn. He gives me a second to grab my coat. The sudden silence is such a relief after all that fuss that I don’t even mind the cold.
We take the printouts, neaten the office, unlock the door, move the woman gently out of the way, put her back in the exact same position, close the door again and leave everything just the way we found it. That poor PA will find out pretty soon that the office is empty, the computer off, and that the door she was banging on wasn’t locked after all.
She’ll feel like a right idiot then, I tell you.
On the uncomfortable sofas in the reception area we read through the files. We don’t speak.
Sheila Kunene, I see, originally came to Dr Bowers for a nose job. Dawid Rademan (senior) is a regular customer – manicures and massages, just as I thought. And Nadine Cooper (aka Skeletor) has been here for life coaching, facials, manicures and pedicures, Botox, colonic irrigation and liposuction. ugh.
One phrase is repeated almost word for word in all three files: “Personal circumstances a great drawback to client’s well-being. May require DS.”
I underline these phrases with a red pen, then pass the files to Finn.
“It’s a clear link,” he says.
“Uh-huh.”
“I don’t like the sound of it.”
“Understatement.”
“Let’s go.”
We drive to Macy’s Camps Bay home in complete silence. I remember Macy’s dad from that day he spoke to us at school. I remember thinking then that he was a bit crazy. Fanatical.
If I’d only known.
* * *
Dr Bowers is getting the treatment in our basement. But holy cow. Macy’s dad is a real piece of work.
You can tell by his face that he knows he’s been busted – his expression is an uncomfortable mixture of self-righteousness, defensiveness and pure insanity. But he refuses to crack, absolutely convinced that his “enemies” have put him on hallucinogenic drugs. He stays in control. He refuses to answer any of our questions.
This man knows what happened to Mandi, and he won’t say anything. He just won’t crack.
We don’t have an hour of real time to waste on him.
So I tell Finn to do what he needs to do. And then I leave the room.
* * *
I wait outside for forty-six minutes. I know it’s forty-six minutes because we’re in real time, and I can see the numbers on my watch tick-tick-ticking by. I’m standing outside on the street, looking out at the beach below. It’s another perfect day in Clifton, sunny and warm with clear blue skies, turquoise seas, powder-white sand. But in spite of the waves breaking and people laughing and the birds singing, it all looks like a movie set to me. Flat and unreal.
I’m trying not to think about what is happening down there. Finn is very good at getting information out of people. I don’t know where he learnt his skills, but it certainly wasn’t from Veronica Mars.
I’m trying to think how Dr Bowers – a man with a daughter, with three children of his own – could have taken Mandi. And why.
This is taking very long.
Then, just when I think I can’t take this any longer – bam! – it’s suddenly deathly cold again, and I’m running back to the basement, pulling on my coat as I go.
When I first see Finn I’m shocked; he looks so pale and so forbidding and so cruel. He looks like someone I don’t know.
When he sees me he doubles over, then he throws up into the rose bushes.
Not a good sign.
* * *
“Are they alive?” I ask, once he’s ready to talk to me.
“Yes,” he says, “they are.”
Something inside me sags in relief. Thank you thank you thank you.
“Are they …” I don’t know how to ask the next question.
“They’re okay,” he says. “They’re going to be fine.”
“Thank God,” I say, and I burst into tears. My head is spinning around and around, so I sit down on one of the steps.
I’m so glad Mandi is okay. Is she really okay?
I am angry and I’m scared, and although I know I need to hear this, I’m afraid of what I might learn. I don’t know if I can handle this. I don’t know.
After a short inner struggle my brain seems to decide that anger is the easiest emotion to handle at this point.
“So it was him! Macy’s own dad! How could he do something like that? What a monster!”
“He insists that he was merely helping the parents out of a difficult situation,” Finn says, shaking his head in disbelief. “He believes that those children were preventing their parents from having perfect lives. And that was reason enough for them to be … removed. He provided a service.” Finn’s mouth pulls into a thin line of distaste as he quotes Macy’s dad’s words back to me.
“A service?!” I can’t believe I’m hearing this.
“That’s what the letters DS in the files stood for. Domestic surgery.”
“Domestic surgery?!”
“You can get rid of stubborn cellulite, ugly wrinkles, bad habits … why not difficult children?”
“You can’t be serious.”
“I’m only telling you what he told me.”
“But they’re children!”
“ ‘Everybody deserves a perfect life,’ he said. ‘And if a child prevents you from having that …’ ”
My mouth is hanging open. “So what … what did he do to them?”
“Each parent paid fifty thousand rand for the procedure. The money never went through the books, obviously.”
“What did he do to them, Finn?”
He sighs. “The plan wa
s to have the children adopted by rich Americans. Apparently that’s all the rage these days.”
I can’t believe my ears. “How can anyone do that? I mean, I know Skeletor really and truly hated Mandi, but Sammy …?”
“Samantha’s aunt fell in love with a rich Nigerian businessman. He was willing to marry her, but he didn’t want the extra responsibility of looking after a young child. Dr Bowers assured her that Sammy would be well cared for, well looked after. That he had found a good home for her.”
“And she believed him?”
“People believe what they want to believe.”
I can’t understand it. I don’t get how people can be so soul-crushingly selfish. “And Dawid’s parents? I saw them, Finn! They were devastated.”
He sighs. Then he sits next to me on the step, rubs his fingers across his eyes.
“Dawid’s father wanted his wife back. He loves her to distraction, apparently. He could just about deal with the fact that his son wasn’t perfect, but he simply couldn’t stand the fact that his wife spent all her time, all her energy on the boy. According to Dr Bowers, Dawid’s dad merely wanted to return to his old life. The perfect life he shared with his wife before they had what he called a ‘damaged child’.”
“Oh. My. God.”
“Dr Bowers saw it as saving a marriage.”
“The woman almost killed herself!”
“Apparently Dawid’s father has since admitted to Dr Bowers that the whole thing might have been a mistake. He didn’t realise how deeply it would affect his wife.”
“A mistake!”
“He called it an error of judgment, I believe.”
I feel sick. “And Macy? I mean, she’s Dr Bowers’s own daughter?”
He sighs. “Macy somehow found out about the other children involved … They had to keep her quiet.”
“So they had her adopted?”
Another sigh. “None of the children were actually adopted.”
My stomach falls right through my feet, crashes onto the floor.
“Finn.” I square my shoulders. “Tell me. I can take it.”
Finn shakes his head. “Once he had them in his care, Dr Bowers realised that the children could be … useful. Apparently the anti-ageing products he sells through the clinic rely heavily on a prohibitively expensive synthetic growth hormone. He realised that children secrete this hormone naturally and he …”
“So he’s, what? … stealing their hormones?”
Finn nods.
I feel my knees literally turning to jelly. I sink down to the grass.
“Put your head between your knees. Breathe deeply.”
For a while I see a lot of tiny red and white stars against the black of my eyelids. Then the world rights itself. I look up slowly.
Finn sinks down next to me. “He has to work on pre-adolescent children. That’s why he can’t use volunteers: legally speaking, children of the age he’s looking for are too young to consent to such invasive treatments. According to him, Sammy and Dawid have ‘minimal damage’ to their endocrine systems. I don’t know what that means.”
“And Macy? She’s his own daughter! How could he!”
“Macy wasn’t an experimental subject like the others. He’s ‘perfecting’ her …” Finn looks ill. “She used to be a beautiful little girl, he told me. But as she grew older she developed what he called a ‘pudding face’. . .”
I wait for him to speak. I don’t say anything.
“She refused to have plastic surgery.” Finn’s face is distorted by distaste. “When she wouldn’t let her father ‘do the necessary work’ on her, he decided to intervene. ‘For her own sake’, he told me.”
“No.”
“His wife agreed that this was the time to intervene. Especially since they needed time to persuade her to keep quiet about the other children.”
“So what …?”
“Her cheekbones have been ‘augmented’, and she has received liposuction around her chin.”
“No.”
“I’m afraid so. She’s healthy otherwise.”
I know what I must ask. I can’t postpone it any longer.
“You haven’t said anything about Mandi.”
“Angel.” He puts his hand on my neck. “I need you to keep breathing, okay?”
I nod.
“Mandi is not with the other children. She was too old to be adopted. She’s also too old to produce the hormone he needs …”
I try to focus. I keep my breathing steady, deep.
“He planned to sell her to the highest bidder. Her stepmother, apparently, had no problems with that. The transaction is taking place right now. Somewhere in the harbour area. He didn’t know exactly where.”
I have a bitter taste in my mouth. I focus on my breathing.
“We’re going to stop them, Katie. We’re going to bring all those kids home safely.”
“And then we’re going to make those parents pay,” I say.
“Yes.” Finn says. “Then we’re going to do that.”
Chapter 21
We split up.
According to Finn, Dr Bowers admitted that he keeps the children ‘on site’ – the hormone he extracts is very unstable and needs to be processed immediately, so he erected a makeshift operating theatre at the back of his skincare factory in Paarden Island. We decide that I will head towards the factory to get Macy, Sam and Dawid, while Finn heads in the general direction of the harbour to look for Mandi.
Finn will text me whenever he’s about to snap out of untime, and if it’s a problem for me I can let him know. We’ve worked like this, separately but together, a million times before.
It shouldn’t be a problem.
Perfect Life Products are produced in a warehouse in the industrial area just outside of Cape Town on the N1. The warehouse and surrounding compound is enormous, about the size of a city block. It looks like a prison from the outside – two-metre-high fences, barbed wire, armed security guards – and there are two separate guardhouses blocking the entrance, the second of which has a thick red and white boom obstructing the road.
And no wonder they need all this, I fume as I drive towards the entrance, seeing that they’re experimenting on little kids in there! I drive right past the armed guard frozen at the first guarding station. When I reach the second guardhouse I’m tempted to step on the petrol and just crash straight through the boom. [36]
Let them try and explain that away.
But I guess there’s no need to leave any clues this early in the rescue, so I get out instead and open the boom manually.
I turn the corner and come face to face with a non-descript grey building. The service entrance doors are open, and men in black overalls have been halted in the act of loading boxes into a truck. The workmen aren’t armed, so I slip past them into the building.
It looks nothing like I expected inside. No glass vials with different coloured liquids, no crazy professors, no children or monkeys in cages. Just a lot of steel vats and cardboard boxes and those complicated-looking machines you see on “How is it made?” documentaries.
The warehouse is huge and confusing, a bit of a maze. But after a while I realise that, at the back, about a quarter of the building is cordoned off by those steel grids that are used at night to protect shops in the bad parts of town. Peering through the grid, I see that inside they have erected a separate prefab building, of which the outer wall is marked by a huge sign that reads: RESEARCH LABORATORY. STAY OUT – ABSOLUTELY NO ENTRANCE.
Bingo.
After I disable and lift the steel grid (piece of cake) I head straight in that direction. The front door is unlocked and leads to a bare office in which three armed guards are playing cards. Behind them is another door, and this second door is fully locked and protected by a steel security gate.
There’s another sign hanging here – this one is a bit more ominous: KEEP OUT – TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT.
Hmmm. Now that’s exactly the type of sign I’d expect outside
a child-experimentation laboratory.
I’m picking the lock when Finn texts me.
rdy in 1 min
no!
10 min
ok
I manage to get in, but it takes quite some time – whoever designed the locking system on the security gate must be one paranoid individual. The door opens onto another corridor with three doors. I open the first one: bathroom. Second one: operating theatre. A cold chill grips my body when I see the surgical instruments neatly packed in a row. I back away quickly.
I strike gold with the third try, when I find all three kids frozen in a small, almost bare room, staring at what looks like a WWF match on TV. There are no guards around. I hide behind a sofa, ready to watch and learn.
rdy?
I take my coat and my gloves off, and stack them neatly beside me.
yes
And the world comes alive again. We’re back in real time.
* * *
For a while the only sound in the room is the yelling and grunting coming from the TV. I keep deathly still, not wanting to give myself away just yet.
Then Dawid asks, in Afrikaans, “When is my mom coming?”
“Soon,” Macy answers impatiently. “I already told you.”
For a while nobody speaks. Then Dawid asks the same question again.
Nobody answers.
The room is quiet for a second as the TV cuts to an advertising break. Then a loud, overly hysterical voice begins telling us about all the amazing specials this week at Shoprite Checkers.
“I want my mommy!” Dawid sounds close to tears.
Silence. Then he starts crying, at the same time kicking the table in front of him. “I want my mommy!”
“Be quiet, okay, just be quiet,” Macy says. She sounds tired and depressed. Her nose is bandaged and her eyes are black and blue.
“I want my MOMMY!”
“That’s okay, Dawid,” little Samantha answers kindly in broken Afrikaans. “She’ll come and get you soon. Really soon. Don’t worry.”
“When?”
No answer.
“When?”
That’s about as much as I can take. I put on my brightest smile, and get up from behind the sofa.
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