“Have a seat,” she told him, indicating the single chair. She handed him his mug before perching on the edge of the bed. Now that they were locked in her room, she felt more composed and in control.
“What do you want?” she said again, taking a sip of the steaming brew. Cheap coffee, bitter. It begged for sugar, but the motel had not provided any.
“I want to hire you,” he said, and Jade nearly choked on her mouthful.
She swallowed hard. “Hire me?”
“You said you’re an investigator.”
“I am.”
“If you’re available, I could use your services.”
Jade hesitated. This request had caught her off guard. The safest answer would be no. But saying yes would allow her into Botha’s world.
“Why do you need my services?” she asked eventually.
“I came here today for a meeting,” he said.
Once again, she found herself surprised by his response. “And?”
“The man I was supposed to meet is dead,” he said, and Jade felt her skin prickle into gooseflesh. “His name was Mr. Wouter Loodts, and he was staying in room number twelve.”
Chapter Ten
Warrant Officer Mweli had hoped to get an early night. To drive back to her single-story house with the leaky roof in a backwater suburb of Randfontein, close to the edge of nowhere. After the storm, there might be water to mop up and buckets—placed permanently below the two main leaks—to empty.
She wanted to settle down in front of the TV with a family-sized bucket of drive-through chicken and a can of Coke. To eat and drink her way mechanically through both while watching Gold Rush and Deadliest Catch recordings. She adored reality TV shows, especially Deadliest Catch. Captain Sig Hansen of the Northwestern was a hero in her eyes. He was her secret crush, in fact. Decisive, quiet, with wicked humor, steely integrity and a sharp edge to his personality that she loved. Damn, the man ran a tight ship—tough but fair, navigating safely despite everything the elements threw at him.
But thanks to the murder, Mweli’s fast food and viewing schedule would have to wait.
“Double murder. Or one murder, one accidental death?” she muttered, swinging her battered Isuzu into its allotted parking space at the back of the station. The faded white lines that demarcated the bay were too close together to accommodate her vehicle’s bulk, in just the same way that Mweli’s office chair was too damned narrow to accommodate her butt.
She wedged herself into it nonetheless, hearing the customary creak as the chair accepted her weight.
Wouter Loodts. Gray-haired and plump. Wearing a white dress shirt and a charcoal suit. Blood-spattered as they were, his shoes looked expensive, and so did his briefcase . . . and the BMW 7 Series parked outside the motel room door was last year’s model. A wealthy man with a much younger woman in a dilapidated motel. The story was beginning to offer up a possible explanation. But unfortunately, only five rooms in the motel were occupied, and none in the same row as number twelve. There were no ear-witnesses who might have heard raised voices or the sound of an argument turning violent.
Time to discover who Wouter Loodts was.
Mweli started up her computer and scribbled the beginnings of a list on her notepad.
1. Notify next of kin about death.
The only spark of light on an otherwise bleak horizon was that this could well be a case of domestic violence. She hoped the pathologist’s report would confirm what the detectives had hypothesized from the time they had spent on the scene.
Mweli added to her list:
2. Who is the woman? Is she his wife, girlfriend, hired entertainment?
There had been no ID for her, and none of her possessions were in the room. But Mweli was trying hard not to worry about that particular problem. The ID and luggage had probably been in the trunk of the car.
The way Mweli saw it, they’d argued, it had turned violent, and the woman had made a run for it. She hadn’t seen the metal post and had sent the car careening into it. Damaged it so it was no longer drivable.
And then she’d done the worst possible thing.
She had gone back inside. Gone back to him.
Perhaps she’d started to feel sorry for him. But he’d been furious. He’d armed himself with the bat, and he was waiting for her.
And then what?
Had he slipped on the tiles and fallen, hit his head on the corner of the desk, been unlucky? Or in the heat of the moment, perhaps he had suffered a heart attack or a stroke. This was a possibility that felt all too personal to Mweli most days, when she climbed up the short flight of stairs that led from her garage to her front door and felt her heart laboring in her chest in a way that told her if she didn’t make some lifestyle changes soon, they were going to be made for her.
Diet and exercise sounded like foreign words. South Africa might have eleven official languages, but this was a twelfth, and she was reluctant to learn it.
And as for the car . . .
Mweli huffed out another frustrated breath as she wrote:
3. Find out where the silver Land Cruiser came from. And where the hell it is now.
The car hadn’t had any numbered plates, and things had gone from bad to worse when it had been towed while they’d been trying to vacuum up the flooded crime scene, before she’d had the chance to note down the particulars on the license sticker.
“I didn’t know it was evidence!” the motel manager told Mweli defensively after she’d stepped out of the musty-smelling room for some air and realized to her dismay that there was only an empty space in front of the solid pole, which had survived the impact with barely a scratch. “It was obstructing the entrance, and a tow truck driver offered to remove it.”
“What driver? Where did he tow it to?”
The manager handed over a business card. “I don’t know who he was, but he said he’d take it to Ashveer’s Auto. It’s down the road.” She gestured in the direction of the main road, which, as Mweli recalled, was long and flanked by innumerable mom-and-pop motor businesses, crammed shoulder to shoulder beyond the litter-strewn sidewalks.
An unidentified car, now missing. An unidentified murdered woman with no ID and no luggage. An older man, whose cause of death still had to be determined, but whose name they knew.
Wouter Loodts. It was a common enough Afrikaans name. Perhaps that was why Mweli had thought it sounded familiar, and why it had taken her so long to make the connection.
“Oh, hell,” she muttered, staring in consternation at the results on the screen as her mind raced.
Wouter Loodts.
He wasn’t a John Doe. Mweli had indeed heard of him.
Mr. Wouter Johannes Eugene Loodts, age seventy, was an ex-government minister. He had been the Minister of Science and Technology under President F. W. de Klerk, and had retained his portfolio for another term under the new African National Congress government. He had been on the management committee of the Mamba nuclear plant while it was manufacturing bombs in the 1980s and had overseen South Africa’s nuclear weapon disarmament process in 1989. Loodts was still on the board of the Nuclear Industry Association after having recently stepped down as chairman, and played an active role in the management of the Inkomfe Nuclear Research Center.
“Hell,” Mweli said again.
Loodts’s closest surviving next of kin were two sons who had immigrated to Australia and a brother who lived in Tucson, Arizona.
She’d need to contact the embassies of those countries to track them down.
There was no way she was going to be able to contain this news for long. The media would home in on it, and she and her department would be in the glare of their spotlight. Questions would be asked . . . and she desperately needed to have the answers. She might only be the acting station commander, but the responsibility still fell on her shoulders.
She
reached for the phone and dialed hurriedly. “Phiri?” she barked out. “Get hold of the pathology lab. We need to fast-track those autopsies and find out what the hell’s happened here.”
Chapter Eleven
Jade sat on the bed, facing Botha, trying not to let her face betray her frantic thoughts.
She’d thought Loodts’s death might have been accidental. But Loodts had been going to meet with Botha, who’d gone AWOL from work after a sabotage incident and had unknown intruders waiting for him in his room. Now accidental death was looking like a big coincidence.
Botha drank his coffee. She noticed his hands were steady. He looked extremely serious, but he didn’t look rattled. He remained composed.
She, on the other hand, was feeling uncharacteristically jumpy. Everything about this assignment seemed to be catching her on the back foot. She needed to follow Botha’s example and draw on her own reserves of calm.
“Why were you meeting with Mr. Loodts?” she asked him.
“If you take the job, I’ll tell you.”
He could have played poker for his country; his face gave nothing away.
Jade sipped at her coffee. “Who’s the woman?”
“She shouldn’t have been there. Nobody else should have. I was supposed to meet Loodts alone. I have no idea who she was.”
Jade watched him for a few moments. “Why do you need me?” she asked. “What needs investigating?”
“I’ll tell you if you agree to work with me,” he said.
This was an impossible situation. Ethically she was in a very gray area. She desperately needed more information, but she wasn’t about to get it. “I can’t work with you,” she said.
“Why?”
“It’s too risky.”
“I know,” he said. “I can’t deny that.”
“You need to be careful, Botha.”
“I’m trying.”
“Not hard enough.”
“Why do you say that?” He leaned toward her, his gaze unfaltering.
“Because people have broken into your motel room. They’re still in there, waiting for you.”
Cracks finally began to show in Botha’s controlled façade. The changes were subtle, but Jade was looking for them. His lips tightened, his eyes narrowed, his posture tensed. “How do you know?”
“I saw them through the window when I came back from the pub. Two men, I think, but there might have been three,” Jade said. It was a lie, because she hadn’t seen them arrive, just heard the sounds. “I thought it was odd because you weren’t there. And I didn’t see them turn any lights on.”
“You serious?”
Jade nodded. “You want to check for yourself?”
“I—no, of course not, it’s just that . . .” He looked helplessly from side to side. “Are you sure? People went into my room?”
“Yes. I’m positive. They jimmied the lock somehow and got in. It made a noise. Your room’s not locked anymore. If you go and try that door now, it will swing straight open.”
Botha swallowed.
“You need to decide what to do,” Jade said. “If they get impatient, they may start looking for you. And if they’re clever and observant, they’ll be here soon.”
Botha glanced at the door with its flimsy bolt. “If you’re right, I’m in trouble,” he said.
“You are. You should get out of here.”
“What about you? You said that if they were clever, they’d be here soon. That means you could be in danger, too.”
“Don’t worry about me,” Jade said.
Botha’s frown deepened. “I am worried about you. I can’t leave here knowing they might come looking for you. What if they try to force you to tell them where I am? No, Jade. I’m not going to let that happen.”
Jade hadn’t expected Botha to be so concerned about her—he seemed to feel as responsible for her predicament as his own. Surprising as this was, it was also helpful. It would be easy for her to follow Gillespie’s instructions and stay close to him.
“We both need to go,” she said. “I’ll follow you in my car.”
“Does this mean you’ll work with me?”
“We can talk about it later, when we’re somewhere safe.”
Botha shrugged. “Where’s safe?”
She guessed he didn’t expect an answer, which was good, because she didn’t have one. “We need to set a rendezvous point in case we lose each other.”
He thought for a minute. “There’s a Sasol gas station three blocks north of here on Randfontein Main Road. If we get separated, we meet there within the next hour.”
Jade checked her watch. It was exactly half past ten.
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s go.”
She let him out and grabbed her bag, leaving the door key in the lock. Checking out, Best Western motel–style. Then she climbed into her car.
The scent of pine air freshener masked the mustiness of the upholstery. She found herself remembering the odd smell she’d breathed in when checking under Botha’s car. That sharp, acrid odor had reminded her of a gun after it had been fired.
The realization hit her like a fist to the face. The intruders had rigged it, turned it from a luxury ride into a death trap. Shit, shit, she’d been too slow to realize, preoccupied and distracted, and now he would pay the price.
She started up the Mazda, but before she could reverse, she heard the roar of the Porsche making its getaway.
Gravel sprayed from under its wheels, and its headlights blazed as Botha rounded the corner. Maybe she was wrong; the car hadn’t blown up on ignition. But there was no way she could warn him it was potentially booby-trapped. She had visions of Botha stamping on his brake pedal, only to go flying into oncoming traffic. She flung her Mazda into gear and followed.
Botha accelerated onto the road, going at high speed. If they’d sabotaged his brakes, he was history. He would crash head-on into the first obstacle that crossed his path. Behind him, she flashed her high beams frantically, hoping that he would glean her message from them.
His brake lights glowed red. They were working. He slowed, waiting for her.
But she didn’t reach him.
A massive blast shook the air. The Porsche lifted off the tarmac and slewed sideways as if a giant hand had smacked it from underneath. The shock wave rocked Jade’s car a moment later. She flung her hand in front of her face. The Mazda skidded as debris ricocheted into the windshield.
When she opened her eyes again, she saw the Porsche spinning across the tarmac, tires screaming.
Jade jumped out and sprinted over to the ruined vehicle as it decelerated. Smoke billowed from the wreck, stinging her eyes. Was Botha still inside? Had he survived the blast?
She heard a shout. Turning around, Jade saw two men at the motel’s exit gate. They were heading toward her at a run.
Chapter Twelve
Nine forty-five p.m. Mweli heaved herself out of her chair. Her to-do list had been completed, tasks assigned, fellow detectives briefed and the embassies contacted. On her desk lay a cardboard folder on which she’d written Loodts, Wouter and the official case number in neat lettering. One dog-eared case folder—the item officially marking the end of a man’s life and the start of the investigation into his death.
What the hell had happened to this highly regarded ex-government minister, for his body to be found in such sordid surroundings?
Wouter Loodts had lived in a secure gated housing estate in Glen Lauriston, Centurion. Why had he died in a downtrodden motel seventy kilometers away? Mweli’s team would have to find answers without any leads. This former politician’s fame made the case critical. She could not risk compromising it through the mishandling of evidence or other police bungling.
She might be fifty pounds overweight and addicted to junk food and cable TV, but Mweli had always done her best to run a
tight ship. Every case she handled had been properly presented, and if the evidence let her down when it came to court, it was not because she or her team had done a shoddy job.
This was one of the reasons she’d heard whispers—just whispers, but still—that if the station commander didn’t come back to work soon, she might be promoted to replace him. Grobler, the commander who was currently on extended sick leave for a heart condition, had in Mweli’s opinion left the precinct in rather a mess. He blamed his health problems for his recent lack of performance. She preferred to blame the bottles of brandy stashed in his desk drawer.
A promotion would mean more responsibility and the power to set things right. And, of course, more money. It would allow her to get her roof fixed, help send her nieces to university, maybe even put down a deposit on a new truck.
There were so many changes, so many opportunities a salary hike could bring that it was sometimes better not to think about it at all, because hope was dangerous and disappointment cruel.
She let out a sigh. There was nothing more she could do here tonight. Sitting at her desk into the early morning wouldn’t move this case forward. She needed to get some supper and rest. She’d stop by Pizza Express on the way home and order her favorite, the tandoori chicken special.
Or . . .
On her way to work this morning, she’d heard two radio DJs discussing Meat-Free Monday. For one’s health, and to save the animals. Meat-Free Monday had been yesterday, when she’d pigged out on ribs. The DJs had made her feel guilty about that. So maybe she could have her very own Meat-Free Tuesday. There were all sorts of good reasons to go vegetarian a couple of days a week. It might even help her lose some weight. Perhaps a Quattro Formaggio—mozzarella, cheddar, feta and gorgonzola—would be the best bet.
As she locked her office’s security door, Mweli heard her personal landline ring.
She paused for a second, torn between the twin forces of duty and dinner, knowing that she would probably miss the call even if she decided to unlock again.
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