Bad Seeds

by Jassy Mackenzie

  “How so?” Jade asked, pleased to be so sincerely complimented.

  “Last night, an anonymous caller tried to warn me against even attempting to find out who she is. It was a veiled threat.”

  “Oh, really?” Jade asked, surprised. “You should have told the caller not to dump crime-scene evidence in garbage bins, then.”

  “Probably,” Mweli agreed. “Now, Ms. de Jong, please update me on last night’s situation.”

  By the time Jade stopped talking, Mweli had filled four notebook pages with her fast, neat handwriting.

  “Thank you for coming in. I’ll let you know about any important developments,” she said, closing the book with a gesture of finality.

  Jade wanted to offer her unpaid services as an investigator, but now Mweli was glancing at her watch. “I’m sorry, but I have another meeting now. Somebody from Organized Crime is coming here, in connection with the car bomb last night.”

  The words “Organized Crime” made Jade tense as her thoughts immediately turned to David. Of course, a police superintendent wouldn’t come to this godforsaken part of the world himself . . . He would be far too busy. He’d send one of his subordinates, wouldn’t he?

  Wouldn’t he?

  Jade’s worst fears were realized when she walked down the shallow concrete stairs and saw David Patel’s lanky frame unfold from the unmarked white Ford next to her Mazda.

  The man she hated. The man she loved. The man she’d spent far too much time and energy thinking of for the past few months.

  She’d made a resolution not to contact him again. Seeing him in the flesh, tall and grim with that trademark frown darkening his otherwise handsome face, felt like a punch to the chest.

  He was wearing a red tie that she’d given him—she’d given him—some years ago. He looked distracted and preoccupied, running a hand through his spiky black hair before reaching into the back of the car to remove the shabby leather briefcase she’d constantly teased him about needing to replace.

  In the end, the briefcase had lasted. It was Jade who’d been replaced.

  One mistake on David’s part was all it had taken.

  He’d been planning to leave his wife, Naisha, but hadn’t stopped sleeping with her. Now she was pregnant, and Jade was one of the few people who knew that the baby probably wasn’t David’s.

  Naisha had divulged her plan to a trusted colleague, whose daughter Bhavna had overheard the conversation. A couple of months down the line, a fallout between Naisha and her “friend” had led to the woman losing her job. Angry about her mother’s predicament, Bhavna began leaving cryptic notes on David’s car in an act of revenge. Jade had investigated, confronting Bhavna, who told her everything: Naisha had gotten artificial insemination to use the pregnancy to keep David, and it had worked.

  The fury Jade felt toward Naisha was unmatched in her memory. And she was livid with David, too. How could such a high-ranking, experienced detective not pick up on a deception taking place in his own home?

  Worst of all, despite the promises she’d made herself, she couldn’t tell him.

  Because—and this hurt her the most—he would be happier if he never knew.

  David glanced up and noticed her; she watched the harried expression on his sharp features tauten into consternation. His icy blue eyes widened when he saw her.

  “Jade,” he snapped. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  She couldn’t wipe the scowl from her face. She stood with her shoulders square, feet slightly apart, hands on hips, as if they were about to engage in hand-to-hand combat.

  “You make it sound like I’m stalking you!” she retorted. “I haven’t seen you for two months, David. And you know what? They’ve been two of the happiest months of my—”

  “Sorry,” he interrupted, holding a hand up. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that, okay? I was just surprised.”

  “I’m here on business.”

  “Business?”

  “A client of mine was nearly killed by a car bomb last night,” she told him, watching his eyes widen at the realization that despite his best efforts to break ties, their jobs had thrown them together again.

  “That’s your client?” he asked.

  “Unfortunately for you,” she said.

  “Oh, Jesus,” David muttered. “Jade, how do you always get yourself into these situations? What’s going on?”

  With supreme effort of will, she managed to contain her anger. Yelling at David wouldn’t help her or Botha survive. Truthfully, she was lucky to have David on the case. She’d get a lot more information from him than she would from Mweli, but not if she carried on like this.

  “I’ve told Mweli everything I know,” she responded coolly. “Right now, I’m doing my best to keep my client and myself alive. I have no idea how things ended up this way. It was supposed to be a simple surveillance job. But the more I learn, the better chance I have of surviving this.”

  His face softened at her words, and she couldn’t help but feel a tiny flame of hope flicker inside her, because he still cared. Of course he did.

  “You know I’ll do whatever I can to help you,” he said.

  “I’ll call you,” she told him.

  She thought she’d exhausted all of her self-control, but she had to draw deep from her last reserves in order to walk past him and climb calmly into her car. And she did, without losing her temper again, or screaming or hitting him or kissing him.

  Without telling him that there was almost no chance the child Naisha was carrying was his.

  She drove away from the police station without looking back. By the time she reached the main road, her hands were trembling, and her eyes prickled with tears.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Sergeant Phiri hated autopsies. Not because of the usual reasons; it wasn’t the smell, which could be horrific depending on the state in which the corpse was found and the length of time that lapsed before the procedure was done. With the mortuaries so overcrowded, delays could often be substantial.

  Nor was he squeamish. The opposite, in fact. He was able to distance himself from the reality of flesh and bone parting under the pathologist’s probing blades. He’d never gotten nausea, and although he abided by the sensible rule of not eating beforehand, he’d never been put off from a meal shortly afterward.

  Not even one with meat.

  What made him uncomfortable was that in the autopsy room, the corpses were stripped of all their dignity. There was no defense against the carving away. No more secrets—in death, everything was revealed.

  It helped that the professor conducting these two autopsies, Professor Williams, felt the same way, or so Phiri suspected. They’d never spoken about it. But even though he laughed and joked outside the autopsy room, Williams always went about his work with a quiet reverence for the deceased.

  Just that morning, while the two were standing in the lounge finishing their paper cups of coffee, he’d shown Phiri a gleaming set of knives. “I treated myself to some new tools,” he said proudly.

  Phiri had admired the different lengths and shapes of the steel blades, solid and heavy and razor-sharp, set into ergonomically designed metal handles. “They’re beautiful. Didn’t they cost a fortune?”

  Williams winked at him. “They would have, if I’d ordered them from a medical supplier. These are chef’s knives.”

  “Chef’s knives?” Phiri repeated, coughing.

  “Same steel, same quality, a tenth of the price. Adding the word medical to anything makes it ridiculously expensive. While I was shopping for these, I got the wife a blender and a soup ladle . . . Why are you laughing?”

  Phiri wasn’t laughing so much as choking on his last gulp of coffee. Finally regaining his breath, he reminded himself never to take a sip of liquid when Williams was about to make a comment, a deadpan utterance that only struck you
as hilarious a few moments later.

  Coffees done, the two men gowned up and made their way to the autopsy room. And just before entering, Phiri saw the veil of gentle humor that seemed to surround Williams slip aside, replaced by solemnity.

  Before he began work on a new corpse, he would stand for a moment, facing the body, his gloved hands clasped together. Phiri sometimes wondered whether he was praying; he didn’t seem like an especially religious man. But what else could he be doing?

  Photographing her first clothed, and then carefully cutting away the garments, Williams noted down that she was fit, and in her early twenties.

  Williams turned his attention to the livid, bloody wound on the right side of her skull. “Undoubtedly, this was what killed her,” he told Phiri. “A blow hard enough to cause a depressed fracture of the skull like this would have resulted in immediate unconsciousness, followed shortly by death.”

  He noted down the air-bag residue present on the woman’s face and chest, and said that the damage to her nose had likely been caused by the sudden impact with the air bag, as she hadn’t been wearing a seat belt.

  Phiri had looked away as the pathologist sliced the skin around her forehead with one of the knives he had so proudly acquired, then peeled her face down to reveal the skull beneath. Then Phiri heard the whining of the electric saw, whose note changed to a shriek as it sliced its way through bone.

  “Some bleeding on the brain,” Williams noted. “A sizeable hematoma, but no hemorrhaging. This tells me that her heart stopped quite soon. Probably a minute after receiving the fatal head wound.”

  The weapon found at the crime scene, a baseball bat, had been bagged up and sent for forensic testing, but Williams had acquired an identical bat which was on a shelf in the autopsy room. Williams measured the dimensions of the wound before grasping the bat and placing its rounded tip next to, and then into, the depressed wound. It fit perfectly. There was no doubt; this was what had been used to kill her.

  “What about her hands?” Phiri asked. “She had hand injuries. We noticed them at the crime scene.”

  “We’ll get there,” Williams said calmly before removing the protective bags on her hands and forearms.

  “Now this is interesting,” he said after a few minutes of closely examining the woman’s limbs. “The skin on all her fingertips has been abraded. If these were inflicted while she was still conscious, there would have been a lot of bleeding.”

  “She was lying on a flooded floor,” Phiri explained. “Her hands were in blood and oil and water.”

  Williams nodded. “Difficult to tell, then. Was there anything at the scene that could’ve caused this?”

  “Such as?”

  “A cheese grater,” Williams suggested, and Phiri’s eyebrows shot up.

  “There was nothing of the sort in the motel room.”

  “It could have been disposed of after the fact, I suppose.”

  “How could you tell if it was done while she was still alive?”

  “Someone holding her down and running her hands over a sharp, rough surface would have been extremely painful. She would have struggled or have had to be restrained. I can’t find any evidence of that. No bruising, no breakage of the skin, no friction marks on her hands or wrists. The damage is very precise. Every fingertip on both hands. I think it far more likely that this occurred after death, and that it may have been done deliberately to prevent her being identified through her fingerprints.”

  “And?” Phiri asked. Williams’s tone had implied there was an and.

  “She has a broken right wrist and a dislocated right index finger. These aren’t from being held down. They look to me like defensive wounds. She was trying to protect herself from the bat.”

  Phiri nodded soberly.

  So far, the woman’s body confirmed the initial theory of a domestic dispute; she had been staying in the motel room with Loodts, and things had gone wrong between them. The woman had used the bat to fight Loodts off, then fled. But she’d crashed her car into the motel sign and then decided to go back into the room, where an angry Loodts was waiting to finish the job. He had grated away her fingertips and disposed of the tool somewhere before meeting his own accidental death.

  Which was just about plausible, as long as you didn’t ask why he hadn’t disposed of the bat as well. And why would an ex-government minister carry a cheese grater around with him in the first place? Phiri couldn’t think of a single reason.

  The media was going to have a field day with this one.

  Williams noted that there were no signs that the woman had engaged in sexual intercourse in the hours before her death. No other evidence was forthcoming from her body, but Williams told Phiri her bloodwork showed traces of diazepam metabolites as well as alprazolam.

  “In English, doc?” Phiri asked.

  “She took prescription tranquilizers. Valium and Xanax. The levels of both are high, pointing toward recent use and also a possible dependency.”

  Phiri nodded, unsurprised, as Williams completed his notes.

  Next it was Loodts himself who submitted to the slow exploration of the blades.

  Williams unzipped the body bag to commence his work, photographing, examining and carefully removing Loodts’s chinos and collared shirt, now stiff and stained with blood. Phiri noted that, especially in comparison to the woman’s toned frame, Loodts’s body lacked muscle and was overweight. His pale belly bulged, and the excess fat around his jaw gave his face a rounded appearance.

  His hair was short and his hairline receding, so it was easy to see the bloodied mark on his left temple.

  If this had been a domestic dispute, then Loodts must have slipped and fallen on the treacherous floor, coming down headfirst onto the corner of the wooden desk. An unlucky accident, but under the circumstances, surely not impossible?

  Phiri watched as Williams examined the wound, swabbing at the bloodstains before bagging the swabs, using forceps to probe the broken skin. “Splinter,” the pathologist murmured.

  Phiri could barely see the tiny fragment of wood. “From the desk? Or the bat?”

  One meant a simple explanation, an unlucky accident, a case neatly closed.

  The other meant a whole lot of trouble.

  “Impossible to say. It’ll have to be analyzed with samples from each item.”

  Phiri let out a breath he only now realized he’d been holding. Nothing would be resolved today, then. They would have to wait until the lab results came back. That would take longer than a week. Probably closer to a month.

  And then the pathologist made a surprised sound. “Look here,” he said.

  With his initial examination of the body completed, he removed the protective bags the police had placed over each of Loodts’s hands at the crime scene.

  He pointed to Loodts’s left hand, and then to his right, and Phiri felt his heart quicken as he saw.

  There were abrasions on the inside of each of Loodts’s wrists.

  “What you were saying about wrist restraints—would that apply here?”

  “It might. I would have expected a breakage in the skin or actual bruising, unless a soft restraint was deliberately used.”

  “Maybe a sex toy?” Phiri hazarded as he envisioned his afternoon media briefing turning from acrimonious to downright embarrassing.

  “Possibly. At this stage, we can’t rule it out. No other marks on his body, though.”

  Mystified, Phiri watched as Williams turned his attention to the corpse’s fingers. “What are you looking for?”

  “Ah, found it. I’ll show you in a minute.”

  So Phiri waited, his questions unanswered, while Williams set up the x-ray machine and took multiple images of each hand.

  It was only when the results were displayed against the backlight that Phiri could see, in dull black and white, the damage that Williams’s s
ensitive eyes and grasp had picked up.

  There were hairline fractures in three of the fingers on Loodts’s left hand, and two on his right. Only now did Phiri notice the small grazes on the skin that correlated to the injury points. “Could he have held a bat with those fractures?”

  “It would have been just about impossible, for two reasons. First, the damage would have been extremely painful. And second, if he’d wielded a bat with enough force to cause the woman’s head injury, these fractures would have been displaced. As it is, they are clean, almost unnoticeable breaks. No disturbance around them. I can say with certainty that Loodts didn’t hold anything after these injuries occurred. Not even a cheese grater.”

  And just like that, the domestic violence theory was out. In its place was something much, much worse.

  This was evidence of torture.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Jade drove away from the police station feeling contaminated by her own emotions, as if she were covered in a tangible layer of anger and resentment. She wanted to hide for a few quiet hours and lick the wounds which her encounter with David had reopened.

  But there were important things to be done; this was no time for self-pity. Especially not with her phone ringing as she reached the main road.

  She didn’t recognize the incoming number, but when she answered, Gillespie was on the other end of the line. “Jade, I must apologize.” His voice sounded muted and slightly nasal.

  “There’s no need to,” she reassured him. “No need at all.”

  “I put you in an impossible situation last night. What I asked of you was completely unfair. You made the ethical choice by walking away. I can only say that I’m sorry, and that I acted out of desperation.”

  “I understand.”

  “I hope you had some rest after you left.”

  “I didn’t. I had to run from the hotel, because the people chasing us almost caught up.”