“I’ll go back and see what I can find,” Jade said. “While I’m out, I’ll also stop by the police station and report the accident. I should be back by lunch.”
They exchanged phone numbers, and when she left, she saw him outside, talking on his phone again. Botha obviously didn’t want her to hear whoever was on the other end of the line.
Botha was still keeping secrets; was he protecting Jade or using her to achieve his own ends? She drove off with a frown.
Chapter Twenty-One
Mweli’s to-do list didn’t look any shorter or simpler when she finally left the evidence room and locked it behind her.
She’d notified Organized Crime about the car bomb and bribe left under her windscreen, and a representative from the department would come through later that morning. She would have liked to have confirmed the ID of the mystery blonde by the time he arrived, but that wouldn’t be possible.
The woman’s hands had appeared injured, so the detectives had placed evidence bags over them and waited for the pathologist to pull prints. These would then be entered into the system, and if they had a match, Mweli would be the first to know. In, say, four weeks or so.
She sighed heavily. There were only so many favors one could call in from the forensics department; she had to pick her battles with care. And since only criminals with previous convictions had their prints stored in the South African Police Service database, she honestly wasn’t hopeful.
The woman had seemingly appeared out of nowhere and gotten herself bludgeoned to death in that damned room. And where the hell was the car? It could have been a treasure trove of trace evidence, but the likelihood of that evidence remaining undisturbed was declining sharply by the minute.
Mweli pressed her lips together as she imagined garage mechanics opening the doors, clearing out all the clothing and possessions inside. From experience, she knew such items tended to disappear. When asked for their whereabouts, heads would be shaken, brows furrowed, hands spread in a gesture of wide-eyed innocence.
Ashveer’s Auto. Mweli flipped through the phone directory, and within two minutes, she was speaking to Mr. Ashveer himself. “I’m calling about a car that came in last night,” she said.
Ashveer sounded quiet and competent. “Would that be the red Jetta or the white Nissan bakkie from the accident on Piet Kruger Road? Or the black Renault Laguna that lost control after a hijacking?”
“No. This was a silver Land Cruiser. Front-end collision with a pole.”
There was a short silence.
“We had no Land Cruisers come in last night. Two vehicles were signed in at around three p.m.: a blue Mercedes-Benz and a white Fiat Uno. Then, at nine p.m., the Jetta and the bakkie were brought in, and the Laguna came around midnight.”
Mweli took a moment to absorb this bad news. “So you were open all last night?”
“We’re open twenty-four hours to receive vehicles. One of the few places that are. Most of them close at six.”
“Please, can you give me the names of the others that were open?”
Ashveer provided her with two names and phone numbers. “They’re nowhere near here,” he warned. “One’s south of Jo’burg, and one’s on the other side of Sandton. Otherwise, the car must have been taken somewhere overnight and towed elsewhere in the morning.”
“Thank you,” Mweli said. She put the phone down gently. Slamming it into the cradle wouldn’t help. The stupid thing would only jam up and become unusable until Phiri came in and coaxed it back into working order with his screwdriver.
Two phone calls later, she had established that the Land Cruiser had not been towed to either of the other twenty-four-hour garages.
Where, then, had the wrecked SUV disappeared to?
The tow truck driver could surely answer that, but when she tried the cell phone number on the business card the Best Western manager had given her, she received a recorded message informing her that the number she had dialed didn’t exist.
She tried three times. Same message. Either the recipient’s cell provider was having a serious glitch this morning, or the driver had mistakenly printed an incorrect number on his card. Neither of these seemed likely, but she didn’t want to think about the alternatives.
The card was printed in black capital lettering on plain white. It read J. Oberholzer, followed by the phone number. Nothing about towing services. You’d think a tow truck driver might want that information on his card.
Mweli adjusted herself in her chair, hearing its usual squeak of complaint before her thoughts were interrupted by a loud knock at the door.
“Phiri?” she called, suddenly nervous of whom it might be, given the trickery she had been battling lately.
Her fears were dispelled when the detective peeked around the door. “There’s an update on the Robinson Dam dredging operation, ma’am. It’s all confirmed for tomorrow, eleven a.m.”
Mweli dragged her focus back to her other major case. “That’s good. We’ll need to be on-site with the team.”
“I’ve already briefed the others. I’m heading to the lab now to observe the autopsies from yesterday’s motel murder.”
“They’re doing those so soon?” Mweli asked, surprised. She was well aware of the backlogs, the piles of bodies in refrigeration waiting their turn.
“These have been prioritized because an ex-government minister is involved,” Phiri explained.
“Call me as soon as you have any info,” she said, relieved that they’d been fast-tracked. “Who’s doing them?” she asked as an afterthought when Phiri turned to leave.
“Williams,” Phiri said. “We got lucky. They assigned him specially.”
Mweli nodded, relieved. At least one thing was going right on this confusing, frustrating morning. Williams was the best, most thorough pathologist they dealt with.
If the bodies held any secrets, Mweli was confident that, under Williams’s probing blades, they would be brought to light.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Jade’s first stop was a nearby shopping mall with a basement parking lot fronted by a gym. It was three-quarters full, and it didn’t take her long to find what she needed—her rental was a common make and model. When she’d spotted another, slightly newer white Mazda in the garage, she parked nearby, and after checking to make sure nobody was watching, took a screwdriver from her car’s toolkit and removed the other Mazda’s rear license plate.
Doing private investigation work meant you were more paranoid than the average person, and with reason. The average person wasn’t followed while they went about their daily job. They weren’t poisoned by their spouse or murdered by colleagues. You learned to question everything that everybody told you, because people lied for many reasons, and the most dangerous lies were the ones they themselves believed. And you learned the importance of camouflage, of changing your appearance and blending in, to throw hunters off the trail.
Quickly she took both plates off her car. When another shopper passed by, she had to stop and pretend to do post-gym stretches against her hood. When the person walked into the mall, she finished the job and stashed her original plates under the front seat.
Now her car had a different license plate. But it wasn’t enough; one unremarkable white Mazda was a lot like another. Same as the guy with a black beanie: Take the beanie off and reveal a weird hairstyle, and that was all people remembered. Maybe she could use Robbie’s wisdom to her advantage.
She jogged upstairs to the mall, where she found a stationery store. A quick search and she had what she needed. Five minutes later, the car’s new look was complete.
A stick figure family of a woman in gym gear, two young boys, a girl with pigtails and a small dog adorned the bottom left side of the back window. On the right side of the bumper, she’d affixed a sticker that said in pink lettering, Supermom, and in the center, another one, with a picture of a dog’s h
ead, declared, My Yorkie Is Smarter Than Our President.
She scuffed at the edges of the stickers with her nails and rubbed over them with the car key to make them look worn.
The car told a new story now, and with this disguise in place, Jade felt more at ease going out onto Jo’burg’s streets.
As she drove into Krugersdorp, she noticed it was trash collection day. She remembered seeing a few of the black plastic garbage bins parked on the curb the previous night. This morning, the streets were lined with them, and the bins were being rummaged through.
Garbage bins contained all sorts of unsavory and even dangerous throwaways. Rotting food, cans with sharp edges, broken glass, dirty diapers. But occasionally hidden among these were items that were still usable or sellable. They could also be treasure troves of recyclable goods.
And so it was commonplace to see the less wealthy appear in the streets on collection day, picking through the trash before the garbage truck came by. The men in this part of Randfontein had fashioned homemade carts with rickety wheels and sides lined with white burlap. She saw two of them working the street, pushing the cart with some difficulty to the next bin.
The cart looked heavy and unwieldy, and Jade was struck by how hard life was for the impoverished people of her country. She wouldn’t have wanted to open those bins, much less rummage through them without gloves on. The stench was strong, even in passing. But faced with poverty and starvation, these men risked injury and infection every day as they went about their unpleasant work. Most astonishingly, they did it with a smile. One of the two waved at her cheerfully as he balanced his wobbly cart.
Jade suddenly had an idea.
There had been items missing from the motel room. Loodts’s murderers might have dumped some of them in a roadside bin, knowing they would be emptied the next morning.
Might they have abandoned the woman’s purse?
She was the only one who’d seen it. She knew what it looked like, and would certainly be able to recognize it again.
She parked the car near one of the makeshift carts and climbed out before greeting the men pushing it. “Hello! Have you seen a black handbag?”
The men proved to be Zimbabwean immigrants whose English was iffy, but after a few moments of confused back-and-forth dialogue combined with pantomime gestures, she had overcome the language barrier sufficiently to be understood.
“We have seen nothing like that,” they said. “But you can ask Godfrey and Tshabalala, who are working two streets down.”
Jade drove on to the next road, where in the distance she spied another pair of garbage reclaimers hard at work. She introduced herself and asked their names.
This time, when she repeated her question, the response was different.
Silence greeted her words. Then Godfrey, in a torn red overall, exchanged glances with Tshabalala, who wore a white shirt that was more holes than fabric.
Jade realized they had it. But the purse was a valuable item, and they were reluctant to give up something which they believed the owner had thrown away. Especially without compensation.
“It was stolen during a crime,” she explained, and now understanding replaced the suspicion in their faces. “There’s a reward,” she added, reaching for her wallet at the same moment that Tshabalala leaned into the depths of his cart.
Her heart skipped a beat as he pulled out the black canvas purse. Whoever had hidden it must have buried it in the bin, because it looked scuffed and had a suspicious smear of something along its side. He handed it over, and Jade took it gingerly by the handles, noting that the odor of rotten banana clung to it.
This material wouldn’t hold prints, so she wasn’t contaminating evidence—no more than the bananas had done, anyway. “Was it open when you found it?” she asked.
“No. It was closed,” Tshabalala told her.
She unzipped it and peered inside. She saw a matching canvas wallet, the glint of keys, a few papers, pepper spray and a small bag she guessed contained toiletries.
“There was cash in the wallet,” Godfrey said reluctantly. “I took it out.”
“How much?”
“Three hundred and fifty-three rand,” he told her.
“Did you take anything else?”
He shook his head.
“Keep the money,” Jade said. “And here’s another five hundred for finding it.”
The men pocketed the money with grateful smiles, and Jade walked off with the purse.
Back in her car, she high-fived an invisible partner with her right hand, because one of her hunches had finally provided her with some hard evidence.
Then, in the relative privacy of the Mazda, she slid open the black zipper again.
Botha wanted to know who this woman was. Perhaps she could now give him that answer.
The toiletry bag smelled faintly of perfume, and she saw a half-used glass bottle of fragrance inside—Tom Ford’s Sahara Noir. She’d received that same fragrance two or three years ago as a gift from Robbie after the completion of a successful job. She’d never worn it; it still sat unopened in her cupboard. Too many bad memories, and in any case, she suspected that it had fallen off the back of a perfume delivery van into his light-fingered grasp.
In a zippered compartment, there was also a pack of cigarettes, a lighter, a plastic vial of headache tablets with one remaining and a transparent box containing a number of other assorted pills whose purpose Jade could only guess at. Certainly this mystery woman had been fond of her medication.
Nothing else. No phone, which was a blow, though she had guessed that it wouldn’t have been dumped along with the purse, but destroyed or kept.
And then her final hope: the wallet.
No credit cards inside, to Jade’s disappointment. But just as she was about to give up, she noticed a nearly invisible card compartment in the cash pocket. Jade felt another self-five coming on as she eased out a card.
A South African driver’s license.
“Who are you?” Jade muttered, squinting at the card.
The license was current—due for renewal the following year, and the photo was indisputably the same woman.
Scarlett Sykes.
“I’m going to find out what happened to you,” Jade promised, looking down at Scarlett’s blurry photograph.
Apart from that, the purse yielded no other clues, but this was enough. She decided to keep the pepper spray. It wasn’t a gun, but at least it was usable. The police could have the rest.
She put the driver’s license card back into the wallet and the wallet back into the bag, then locked it away safely in her car’s trunk.
It was only a short distance to the Best Western motel.
Somebody had swept up the broken glass under the motel’s signboard, and the debris was cleared away. Botha’s ruined car was gone from the street; only a dark shimmer of oil remained.
In the light of day, the motel looked shabby, peaceful and unassuming. It was difficult to believe that it had been the scene of such a grisly murder.
Jade’s first stop was her old room. She arrived at the same time the cleaner was leaving. A short, stocky woman, she was hardly visible behind the wheeled laundry basket piled high with bedding.
Glancing inside, Jade saw that the bed had already been stripped. The pillows, and whatever had been underneath them, had been moved.
“I left a recording machine under the pillow,” she said to the cleaner, who looked at her blankly. “A small machine. Silver.” Jade showed its approximate shape with her outstretched fingertips.
The cleaner shook her head. “When I came in, the pillows were on the floor,” she said. “So was the duvet.”
Jade hadn’t left them that way. But she’d left the key in the door when she had fled last night. The men who were after them must have come back and searched her room.
She felt
a cold fist close around her heart. They would have listened to the recording—and they would have heard themselves on it. They would assume Jade had bugged the room to protect Botha. She was a target now. There was no going back.
She looked into Botha’s room. The intruders had indeed forced the lock, which was now loose and rattly, and ransacked the room.
The clothes she’d seen last night, so carefully packed away, were now strewn on the floor, sliced and torn. She’d hoped to bring them back for Botha, but nothing was in wearable condition. One of the cupboard shelves was hanging down, its support splintered. Botha’s toiletry bag had been broken and its contents scattered around the bathroom. The pictures had been ripped from the walls, pillows from their pillowcases. The mattress was off its box spring and lying on the tiles.
They had discovered her bug.
It was destroyed now, broken into a pathetic heap of plastic. Jade let out a slow breath.
Deflated, she turned away, trudged back to her car and headed for the Randfontein police station.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Warrant Officer Mweli assessed Jade over the tops of her frameless glasses. Her desk was ordered chaos. Piles of papers and files, a cordless phone and a cell phone, a large plastic bowl containing a higgledy-piggledy assortment of pens, pencils, paper clips and elastic bands, and two framed photos—one of Mweli arm in arm with a round-faced, smiling man, and the other of the ugliest tabby cat Jade had ever seen, glowering yellow-eyed at the camera.
“Nice—er—nice cat,” Jade said, by way of an icebreaker. No use in pointing out it resembled the Antichrist.
“His name is Chakalaka.” The acting commander didn’t smile.
“Ah. Spicy relish. You’re fond of it, then?”
“No. I dislike it,” Mweli retorted, and Jade wasn’t sure if there was dark humor lurking behind that stern expression. But Mweli warmed to her when Jade explained where she had just been, and the evidence she’d found.
“Thank you very much,” Mweli said with a grin of relief when Jade handed over the black canvas purse with Scarlett Sykes’s ID inside. “This is good investigation work. It could prove critical to the case.” She looked as if she might be ready to give a high-five.
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