The thought was tempting.
“We need to get somewhere out of cell phone range and hide there while we search your clothing and belongings.”
“You have anywhere in mind?”
“Actually,” Jade told him, “I do. I know where there’s a dead zone. It might not be the most comfortable place to spend a night, but it’s about as safe as we’re going to get.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
Scarlett Sykes’s sister Abigail lived on the outskirts of Roodepoort, in an area where forlorn-looking mine dumps and small, semiderelict farms were being invaded by high-density, cheaply built townhouse complexes.
Abigail was the closest next of kin that Mweli had been able to track down. When she’d phoned, Abigail had asked why Mweli was calling. Mweli had refused to be drawn out, apart from saying it was a very serious matter concerning her younger sister, and it was necessary to give her the news in person.
So basically, she’d prepared Abigail for the worst.
She dressed in a dark pantsuit with a white blouse. It was what she always wore when breaking bad news to relatives—and as one of the few female detectives in the police service, Mweli felt she’d put on this outfit too many times. She placed her jacket on the passenger seat and drove out to Randfontein with a heavy heart. This was her responsibility: to break the news, and if necessary, to spend time with the bereaved so somebody was there for them. So she could answer their shocked questions, reassure them or listen while they spoke of the dead. In this case, listening would be important, because Abigail might know what her sister had been involved in and with whom.
Abigail’s apartment was on the second floor, accessible from a narrow stairway. Mweli knocked on the flimsy door, and Abigail snatched it open as if she’d been waiting behind it.
Mweli could see the resemblance. Abigail, too, was blonde, with similar features. She was plumper than her sister; her hair was longer, and she wore it back in a frizzy ponytail.
“Please come in,” she said, welcoming Mweli into the small living area—kitchen, lounge and dining room combined in a space with just enough room to swing a cat. Furniture was crammed in, everything decorated in a bohemian style. Colorful drapes and curtains, bright antimacassars over the upholstered chairs, framed drawings and paintings covering the walls. Sketches of animals plus landscapes and seascapes in strong, bright colors.
Abigail gestured to the nearest chair. “Detective, if this is bad news, please give it to me straightaway.”
Mweli nodded, appreciating the directness of her words and the appeal in her blue eyes. Neither of them sat. Abigail faced Mweli, twining her fingers together nervously.
“I’m afraid your sister Scarlett was found murdered yesterday.”
Abigail’s hands flew to her mouth. “Oh, shit. This is what I feared. Oh, hell. I . . .” She blinked rapidly. Mweli reached into the pocket of her too-tight suit jacket and passed her a pack of tissues.
“Thank you.” Abigail collapsed down onto the chair behind her, ripping the tissue pack open. “What happened?”
Mweli took a seat opposite. She sat quietly, her gaze fixed on the coffee table where she saw a nearly empty glass of wine. In a quiet voice, she summarized the scenario, giving the barest outline and sparing the grimmer details.
She listened to Abigail’s gasps and sobs, which quieted as she collected herself. Then her hand closed around the wineglass, and she downed the remainder in a gulp. “Do you want . . . do you want anything to drink? I thought from your phone call I might need the wine, and now I need more.”
“Nothing for me, thank you.”
Abigail reached behind her, grasped a bottle of merlot from the mantelpiece and upended it into her glass until it was brimful.
“I can’t say I didn’t see this coming,” she told Mweli. She was more together than Mweli had expected. A strong woman who clearly knew her sister had been on a destructive path. “For years, I guess I’ve been expecting something like this to happen.”
“Why is that?” Mweli asked.
Abigail gulped down the wine. “Bad choices,” she said.
“In what way?”
“Every way.” She gave a tight smile. “She’s been in rehab a few times over the years. For drugs and other things. Most recently prescription medications. Tranquilizers and the like. She also has a criminal record for stealing cash from somewhere she worked. She didn’t get jail time, only community service, but it’s a record nonetheless.”
Mweli nodded, thinking of the woman’s damaged fingertips. Somebody had known about that record and taken care to remove the evidence of her identity. “Did she relapse after her last time in rehab?”
Abigail nodded sadly. “Of course. People don’t change, do they? I sent her money a few times—I don’t know what she used it for. I didn’t really try to stay in touch, but every so often she’d call me up to tell me about her life, her crazy boyfriends . . . I wish now I’d listened better, done more. I should have forced her to come and stay with me, tried to get her into rehab again.”
“I don’t suppose you had the chance.”
“But I did, just a few weeks ago. She phoned me in tears—she’d had a fight with a new boyfriend. I didn’t know him, but from what she said, he was her usual type. Dangerous, she told me. He’d gone out of town, and she wanted me to come and fetch her.”
“You went?”
Abigail nodded. “In the middle of the night, I drove into a run-down part of Jo’burg and found her. She was crying, terrified. Paranoid, I think. She kept saying he was going to find her and kill her, that she’d gotten herself in too deep.” Abigail twisted her fingers together again as she remembered. “She spent the night here in my flat. We didn’t really speak. She was exhausted, and I didn’t want to ask her too much.”
“In case she told you the truth?”
Mweli’s suggestion was met with a shaky smile. “Exactly. That was my one opportunity, and I missed it. I should have gotten her help. She seemed to have money then, lots of it. I don’t know how she’d earned it—she didn’t say, and that worried me. She looked harder. Quieter. She gave me a wad of hundreds as a thank-you. She wanted to fly down to Durban, to get away and make a clean break. But wouldn’t you know it, just as we were about to leave for the airport, her phone rang. She spoke for a few minutes, and a little while later, a big silver SUV pulled up outside, and that was it. She was gone. Back to him.”
“I’m sorry,” Mweli said.
Sympathetic as she was, there was always a part of her that was on the alert for false notes in the response of grief, or suspicious behavior in the questions that were asked. Random as the crime might seem, murders were often set up by spouses or close relatives.
But Abigail was not a suspect in this particular case, and her words rang true.
This visit had also been useful for Mweli; there was one aspect of Abigail’s story that provided a promising lead. This boyfriend with the silver SUV, the one who had spelled trouble. “Do you know the boyfriend’s name?” she asked.
Abigail shook her head. “Scarlett never mentioned his name. Perhaps she did that on purpose. I don’t think he wanted people to know.”
“You went to pick her up. Do you remember the address?”
“Scarlett didn’t really give me an address. She just told me where she was and how to get there. Which exit to take, which way to turn. I think I remember that okay, and also what the place looked like. I’ll write down what I remember, and I can draw you a sketch of the front of the building.”
Noticing Mweli’s surprised expression, she explained, “This is what I do for a living. I’m an art lecturer at the University of Johannesburg.”
Mweli nodded. “The paintings?” she asked, looking at the walls.
“All mine,” Abigail said. She fetched a notepad and sketchpad from another room and sat back down on the couch, he
r wine forgotten as she applied herself to her task.
The directions and sketch were done in a few minutes. She put them in a large white envelope and handed them over.
“Thank you,” Mweli said, struggling out of the chair’s cushioned embrace. “Once again, my condolences. Do you have somebody who could come and stay with you for a while?”
Abigail nodded. “My fiancé lives here with me. He’ll be home in the next half hour.”
“That’s good. We’ll contact you if any progress is made on this case, and I’ll let you know as soon as Scarlett’s body is released.”
Swallowing hard, Abigail thanked her, and a minute later, Mweli was making her way down the stairs and out into the fresh night air.
In her car, she ripped open another pack of tissues and blew her nose noisily. This part of the job never got any easier. It was beyond question the worst thing she ever had to do. She would go home now, with a box of chicken nuggets and chips, and watch two Deadliest Catch episodes back-to-back. She could only hope that Captain Sig’s icy blue Nordic eyes would distract her from the tear-filled ones of the woman she’d left behind.
Chakalaka would sleep on her bed tonight, she was sure. He’d leap on when the light was off and curl up in the crook of her legs, purring loudly, turning himself into a miniature furnace as he pinned the covers down, making her legs hot and sweaty and meaning she couldn’t move for fear of upsetting the stupid cat.
It was funny how he did this whenever she’d had a really bad day.
Uncomfortable as his presence was, it was also comforting, and she always felt better in the morning. Somehow it was as if Chakalaka knew what to do.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Jade and Botha reached the highway, and she directed him onto the M2, heading into Johannesburg. Driving toward an unlikely refuge—a place she’d hoped she would never have to visit again.
It was more than a year ago that she’d been called by her connection. “Jade,” he’d said, his voice sharp and assured.
“Robbie.” Her heart sank when she heard his voice. She wouldn’t have answered the call if she’d known it was him, but Robbie changed his phone numbers frequently. Plus they hadn’t spoken for months. She hadn’t had any reason to suspect it was him calling.
What did he want? Was he going to try and draw her into another of his deadly ventures? She knew Robbie believed she owed him, even though it was her opinion the debt had been more than paid.
“I called to say goodbye,” he’d told her, and her mind had spun with confusion. “Or rather, au revoir,” he’d said into her silence.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, baby, I’m going up into Nigeria for a while. Things have developed there. There are opportunities we need to take advantage of.”
Jade had no idea what those opportunities might be but knew better than to ask any more questions. “I hope it works out for you,” she’d said hesitantly. “Be careful.”
“You know me.” He’d laughed. “I’m never careful. I prefer to be lucky. Who knows how long we’ll be gone? Maybe a few months, maybe longer. I put a key for the warehouse into your mailbox.”
“The warehouse?”
“Yeah, you know. Where we were doing business. I thought it might be handy for you. There’s a piece of equipment in the safe that you could use one day if you needed to.”
He’d laughed.
Shivers crawled down Jade’s spine. She’d understood what Robbie was referring to. He’d once dealt in illegal firearms, but had given it up as being too risky and not profitable enough. But he hadn’t sold all his stock, and now one of his weapons was in that safe.
At the time, she’d been in possession of her Glock, a Glock which, ironically, she’d bought from Robbie. She hadn’t envisioned herself ever needing another firearm.
“Thanks,” she’d said, trying to shrug away the crawling sensation under her skin when she thought of Robbie stopping outside her house, checking to see if her car was there, confidently slotting the key into her mailbox.
Sometimes you needed to forget your past. You didn’t want it calling you up and dropping by to give you access to its warehouse.
Even so, the good news was that Robbie was leaving the country for a while. With the life he led, he might never come back. The thought troubled her, but also filled her with relief. Robbie had been her accomplice when she’d murdered the man who had killed her father. He knew her secrets, which made her uneasy.
Sometimes she wondered what would have happened if she’d gone into business with him. He’d asked her to, more than once. No investment needed, just the contribution of her skills from time to time in exchange for generous amounts of cash. She’d always refused. The money was tempting, of course. Who wouldn’t want to spend eleven months of the year on a palm-fringed beach in exchange for one month of work?
The problem was, that month of work would stain her soul so deeply not even the tropical sun could bleach it clean again. She knew which skills Robbie wanted her to use. There were always people who wanted someone else killed and were prepared to pay top dollar for it. Especially here in South Africa, with its high crime rate and overworked police force. Even if you were caught, chances were that you would walk free. Murderers had. Many still did.
She’d told him no, which was perhaps why Robbie hadn’t asked her to accompany him on this new business venture in Nigeria. At any rate, the key had been in her mailbox when she’d returned home. She’d toyed with the idea of throwing it away, but good sense had prevailed. Who knew if she might need the warehouse for something urgent one day? Or what if Robbie demanded the key back on his return?
Eventually she’d strung it onto her key ring and forgotten about it. Just another item, in between the long key for her security gate and the beaded charm, now scratched and chipped, that David had given her. Now it might finally come in handy.
The area where Jade directed Botha was even more run-down than she remembered. The concrete arch of the highway bridge was patterned with graffiti and papered with advertisements for penis enlargements and witch doctors who promised everything from better job prospects to finding love. The pages were yellowed and peeling, drifting down from the walls to add to the flotsam of litter on the sidewalks.
At this hour, the industrial suburb was quiet. Traffic had come and gone, and she saw only the occasional other vehicle as they sped along the dark roads.
Was it this one?
She strained her eyes in the gloom. No, the next one.
“Here,” she said.
“Here?” Botha echoed as he pulled into the driveway she was pointing to. The car jounced over uneven paving. The tall steel gate was closed. She saw that it was locked from the outside by a thick chain and a huge padlock covered in rust. The headlights shone onto a cracked expanse of tarmac and the large warehouse beyond.
Jade climbed out of the car, and after killing the engine, Botha did the same. From far off came the noise of traffic on the highway, and from closer by she could hear the clanging of machinery and the hissing of compressed air. No sounds came from the building they were facing. Grass had pushed through some of the cracks in the paving—the only sign of anything living.
“This place is abandoned,” Botha said.
“Yep.”
The gate and the fence were crowned with thick, sharp coils of barbed wire. At some earlier stage, somebody had tried to deface the steel bars with graffiti. Now only faint traces of red paint remained.
“What was it?”
“Officially, an auto parts business. It made a pretty nice front for dealing in other things.”
Like guns.
She never thought she would have needed that kind of help from Robbie again. But she knew—never say never.
Robbie might have said that, his dark eyes glinting, the skull-and-crossbones earring in his ear catching the
light as he shook his dreadlocked head and grinned at her.
She fitted the key into the lock. It didn’t want to go in, and then it didn’t want to turn. The rusty padlock resisted her efforts, but after a while, she felt it give. It didn’t so much spring open as unwillingly come apart, freeing the chain it had held.
Botha helped her with the gate, which screamed on its hinges. They brought the car in and refastened the lock carefully from the inside.
“If you drive around the side, you’ll find a place to park,” Jade said.
She jogged ahead of him around the right-hand corner of the warehouse. Here was the parking area, a spacious garage whose walls and roof were reinforced with galvanized steel.
The air outside was tinged with smoke and melted plastic, smells wafting through from a factory elsewhere. Inside, everything was stale and dusty, flavored with a hint of old oil.
Where was that light switch? She didn’t know if Robbie had arranged for someone to keep paying the bills while he was away. She found the switch and flipped it, and a fluorescent bulb high above flickered into reluctant life.
Its neon glow shone onto the space she remembered. The workshop had been a hive of activity in the past. Its walls had resounded with the sound of drilling and hammering, the hiss of the welder and the shriek of metal on metal.
Now it was quiet. A layer of dust had settled on the floor and every other surface, even the handle of the steel door that led through to the office.
The thick-walled, solid-roofed office.
“They were serious about cars here,” Botha said, his voice brightening as he gazed around at the shelves of neatly stacked spare parts, paints and tools now covered in dust. In the middle of the large space were several hydraulic lifts and pits, long unused. “Looks like they did more than just sell spares.”
“I think it was a chop shop,” Jade observed. “Repurposing stolen cars or hijacked ones. It’s why there’s no signal anywhere inside. Nothing can be tracked here.”
She left him staring at the deserted workspace and walked through a doorway, finding a security door before the office. It was locked, but she remembered how to open it. Robbie had reached under this shelf—pressed something . . .
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