Bad Seeds

by Jassy Mackenzie

  But she was a detective, and she would find another way.

  There was a witness who said he’d seen a car; he showed them where he thought it had parked. He described what he’d seen in the half-darkness, how the body had been lifted out of the car and carried swiftly to the bank of the dam.

  The killer had driven here, gotten the body out. It had clearly been premeditated.

  What had he been thinking? Mweli decided to go with he as the killer, because that had been the witness’s impression, and also because lifting a dead body required a fair amount of raw physical strength. More likely a man, then.

  He’d been confident. Practiced. He had clearly thought this through—dumping a corpse in wastewater so acidic the body would quickly become unidentifiable.

  Driving a car into a fenced area and carrying the body up to the dam wall was a brazen act. It indicated a certain amount of arrogance, perhaps even hubris.

  Pride could sometimes be a man’s downfall.

  Had he been careless? Left just one tiny clue behind?

  “Phiri!” Mweli called, and despite her nausea, she was surprised by how strong her voice came out. “Bring the team here. We’re going to comb this area flat. Search it until we find some evidence. I don’t care how long we spend on this. I’m not leaving without something.” She spread her hands as if to encompass the whole of this large, treed area. “Anything that can tell us who this killer was.”

  Walking away from the beslimed dredging apparatus, Mweli slipped and angled her way down the steep bank, stopping to pick up a pair of gloves and an evidence bag before heading for the grassy field beyond.

  She started with the car tracks, planning to trace them to the place where the vehicle had stopped. Lifting a body from a car would not have been an easy thing to do. It would have required pulling, fumbling, maneuvering. Perhaps one of the victim’s possessions had fallen out, unnoticed, in the darkness.

  First prize would be finding a driver’s license, although even Mweli acknowledged that was somewhat optimistic.

  She felt better now that she was breathing in fresh air. In front of her was nature, a vista of grasses and stunted karee trees. Relatively unspoiled, give or take the occasional discarded chocolate wrapper and cool drink can near the trodden pedestrian path that wound its way from the gap in the eastern fence to the gap in the western fence a ten-minute walk away.

  She followed the tire tracks carefully, imagining the car driving through here in the darkness. It must have been a high-riding vehicle, an SUV or a truck. The ground was uneven, and there were small rocks and other hazards hidden in the grass that could easily have damaged a lower-slung car. She stumbled over a termite mound as she walked. It was ankle-high, camouflaged by the greenery.

  Glancing up, she saw Phiri and another detective combing the stretch of grass between where the body had been dumped and the area the car had been parked.

  Something flashed in the sunlight, but bending to check, she found it was only a shiny candy wrapper. She straightened up with some difficulty. Her legs were already beginning to ache from scrambling through this rough terrain. She was going to have to get back into shape. Really, she should be walking this distance daily, from the eastern fence to the western one and back again. Doing that was something to think about—a goal to set for next year, perhaps.

  Or even next week?

  And then Mweli’s head shot up as she heard Phiri shout and saw him wave his arms. The young detective was standing near the edge of the trees

  Pointing down at the grass, he called. “Come quick!”

  Mweli’s legs forgot their tiredness as she broke into a run.

  Chapter Forty-One

  As she and Botha drove away from the warehouse, Jade felt lighter. Perhaps it was that she had a gun now, which gave her a fairer chance of fighting back. Or perhaps it was that she knew they couldn’t be tracked any longer. The device sat on the dashboard, its SIM card dislodged. The sun was high in the sky, it was a beautiful day, and Jo’burg was a huge city with thousands of cars on its roads. The odds of their hunters finding them by chance? They’d have better success looking for a specific grain of sand at the beach.

  “Are you hungry?” Botha asked.

  “Starving,” Jade said.

  “Do you think there’s time amidst all this running for our life to stop somewhere for a quick breakfast?”

  “I’m sure there is.”

  They found a diner near the Turffontein racecourse. It looked like a greasy spoon, which suited Jade, because right then she was hungry enough to scarf down every fried dish on the menu and call for more. And it was busy. There were some gray-haired men clustered around a table together, speaking earnestly in Portuguese accents, and a couple of short, fit-looking jockeys in jodhpurs and riding boots sitting outside. They were drinking black coffee and eating plain scrambled eggs without toast, and as she passed them, she heard one of them complaining bitterly to the other about his love life.

  “You’re twice the man her ex is,” she heard the other jockey reassure his friend, and Jade suppressed a smile.

  She and Botha sat at a corner table inside. They ordered large coffees and three-egg omelets with cheese and tomato and mushroom and green pepper, plus a double helping of toast and butter on the side.

  “Are you a vegetarian?” Jade asked him curiously.

  “Nope.” He shook his head. “I eat meat. Just not often. And you?”

  “I’m the same,” she said.

  She watched the street, enjoying the sight of the traffic passing by, the Mazda safely parked in the courtyard behind the eatery. Looking at the sheet glass, she saw the faint reflection of herself and Botha.

  A bystander might think the two of them were a couple: sitting close together, talking in low voices. But a bystander would be wrong. Impressions could deceive.

  The Desert Eagle was too big and unwieldy to be carried concealed on her hip, so Jade had moved the holster under her shirt, strapping it around the small of her back. With a jacket covering it and her bag slung over her shoulder, nobody would guess she was toting a weapon that measured nearly eleven inches in length from the tip of its muzzle to the back of its well-worn grip. And if it meant she had to keep immaculate posture while she sat waiting for her food—well, that was a small price to pay.

  “How are we going to get rid of these guys?” Botha asked.

  If Jade had been sitting with Robbie, she knew how they would have strategized, and it would have involved the gun. They would have conspired to take out the boss. That was all that would be needed. He would be the interface with the client. Remove him, and the others could run for the hills and forget they were ever brought on board.

  But she wasn’t sitting with Robbie. And she couldn’t very well tell Botha about the darker side of her past.

  “There are several ways we could do it,” she said. “But I think we should start with the simplest option.”

  “What’s that?”

  “We hand the device over to my police detective,” she said, noting Botha’s wry smile. “The car, too, if he needs it. Let him set up a sting operation somewhere suitable. He can arrest the gunmen, and we won’t have to worry about anything.”

  After some thought, Botha nodded. “That sounds sensible,” he said.

  “If David’s too busy, then we can make Plan B and Plan C. All we’ll need is a quiet location to draw them in.”

  Botha nodded, his face grim.

  David sounded stressed when Jade got hold of him and explained the situation.

  “What the hell?” he asked the moment she’d finished talking. “Who put that tracking device under your car? And when?”

  “I think it was done yesterday morning when I met Gillespie at the mall near Inkomfe,” she said. “I have no idea who did it, though.”

  There was a short silence. “So what do you wa
nt?”

  “If it’s activated, it will draw in the hit men in and allow you to arrest them. Would you have a chance to put an operation together today? It’s urgent, because the battery life is limited. I know it’s very short notice. If not, don’t worry. I can always—”

  “No!” David shouted. “You cannot always. I don’t even want to know what you were about to say. I’ll handle this today with my team. If we draw in the suspects, we’ll make arrests, and hopefully one of them will turn state witness so we can figure out who hired them. Until then, I want you and Botha somewhere safe.” He paused. “Come to the police station. I’m not there right now, but I’m going to ask my captain to book you into a residential hotel nearby—one I know is secure. You can brief him, and he’ll drive you through to the Faircity Mapungubwe Hotel, where you are both to stay for your own safety until I give you permission to leave, which will be tomorrow at the earliest. Promise me you’ll listen to me on this.”

  “Yes, David,” Jade replied meekly.

  But her fingers were crossed behind her back as she said it, just in case.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  On hearing Phiri’s shout, Mweli broke into a run, stamping through the overgrowth, clutching at her pockets to prevent her belongings and loose change from spilling out and tainting any evidence in the grass. Behind her, the backhoe clanked and rattled as the operator turned the machine away from the stinking dam.

  “What’ve you got?” she shouted. She dropped back to a walk as she approached. She was wheezing—dear God, was she unfit. Things had to change. Starting tomorrow, she decided, she was joining a gym. “What . . . do . . . you have . . . there?” she repeated.

  Phiri was bent over, bagging the evidence carefully. He straightened up and turned to Mweli. “I’ve got this,” he said.

  In the plastic bag was an ordinary-looking key. A plain metal door key on a small, round key ring. “Is that all?” Mweli asked. “There’s nothing else near it?” The disappointment hit. All this cardiovascular exertion, and for what? Just to stare down at some nameless, untraceable piece of metal?

  Looking at the faint tracks and drawing an invisible line from where the body had been found back to the taped-off area where the car had parked, Mweli was certain that this had been dropped on the way to the dam. Either by the man carrying the body, or else fallen from one of the pockets of the corpse.

  But an unmarked key like this? They could do nothing with it.

  “You didn’t find a wallet or anything?” she asked.

  “We don’t need to, ma’am.” Was there a note of exasperation in Phiri’s voice? “Here,” he said to the sergeant holding the bag. “Turn it over. Look at the other side.”

  Mweli stared down, her eyes widening.

  Now she saw what Phiri was so cheerful about. The other side of the metal disk had been engraved, and now she realized that the disk itself looked familiar.

  In tiny, worn letters, the logo read, Best Western. And there was a number under it. 19.

  The motel again? Her mind racing, Mweli ran through the ways her two murder cases could possibly be connected. She wondered if her legs could survive another sprint through the long grass—this time, in the direction of her truck.

  She hadn’t thought she’d be driving through the Best Western’s entrance again so soon. She had made the journey in record time and power-walked her way into the reception area. Holy hell, it was dark in here. Even without load shedding, the place seemed to be a few lightbulbs short, and as the big-haired receptionist slowly scooted her chair away from her computer game with a resigned expression, Mweli uncharitably decided this applied to the staff as well as the surroundings.

  “Good day, ma’am.” The receptionist’s teased style was so frizzy she looked like she’d lost an argument with a power socket. “What can I do for you now?”

  “This key,” Mweli said, holding out the bag. “We found it at another crime scene.”

  She waited for the receptionist’s puzzled frown to indicate this news had sunk in. “Oh. So you’re returning it?”

  Resisting the urge to roll her eyes, Mweli explained, “No. It’s police evidence now. What I need to know is who was staying in that room at the time.”

  “Mr. Carlos Botha,” the receptionist said, frowning down at the bookings calendar, and Mweli’s heart jumped into her mouth. “But he damaged the lock when he left, so that key isn’t usable anymore.”

  Mweli’s excitement ebbed as she remembered whom she was dealing with. “No, no. Not the most recent guest. This would have been a week or two ago.”

  “Oh,” the receptionist said. Light dawned—for her at least, if not in the gloomy room. “Yes, the previous guest never returned her key.”

  “Who was she?”

  “Lisa Marais.”

  Mweli felt her heart quicken. “Do you know why she was here?”

  She hadn’t expected any usable information, but to her amazement, the receptionist said, “Her house burned down, and she wanted somewhere out of the way to stay. She was concerned about being followed. She was quite paranoid, actually. She wanted a room at the back of the motel so her car would be out of sight. She said she was going to be here for a few days, but I only saw her the one time when she came to the front desk to post a package, and I think she only stayed two nights. She was quite rude. She complained about the lack of Wi-Fi in the rooms. Maybe she was just stressed out, but you know, guests forget that we’re people, too.” She gave a martyred sigh.

  “Do you have any details on the package?”

  “She wanted it sent Speed Services, so I wrote everything down in the book, and she paid with a credit card. I can look it up if you’d like.”

  If you’d like?

  “I would appreciate that,” Mweli said, drawing on hitherto undiscovered reserves of patience.

  The receptionist took a dog-eared book out of a drawer and paged through it slowly. “Here it is,” she said. “It weighed a hundred and fifty grams, so it went in the lightest bag, and it cost sixty-five rand.”

  “Who did it go to?”

  “I unfortunately don’t write that information down. Only the sender and the amount.”

  “And you say you never saw Lisa after that?”

  The receptionist’s brow furrowed as she considered the question. “No,” she said eventually. “No, I never saw her again.”

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Back in the car after breakfast, Jade and Botha drove into town before exiting the highway and zigzagging through the streets of Newtown—freshly paved, with clean, bright sidewalks, street art and newly renovated buildings—before plunging into the crowded inner city.

  Aware of the possibility of smash-and-grab crime, Jade opened her window an inch. Having the window open would make it more difficult for the glass to shatter if it was hit by a brick or a spark plug. Under stress, things could break more easily, which Jade supposed was true for humans as well.

  The inner city of Jo’burg had been through more than a life’s worth of changes in the last thirty years. Originally, its city center had been crammed into one of the only non-gold-bearing areas. A cramped high-rise business district, surrounded by mines. From the start, the Central Business Distict had been characterized by overcrowding and traffic jams that had grown worse over the years. It was no surprise that businesses eventually began to move out of town and into the new office developments that were springing up in the suburbs.

  Today fewer formal businesses remained, but there was no less energy in the streets. It had just changed in character, as Jo’burg’s poorer classes had claimed the city center for their own.

  With her window open a crack, sounds and smells filtered in. The throbbing beat of R&B music from a hair salon with a hand-painted sign above the door. The aroma of food cooking, rich and spicy, from the hawkers’ stands that lined the roads. Shrieks of laughter f
rom a group of brightly dressed women as they bustled their way across the tarmac carrying clear plastic bags crammed with clothing. The whiff of rot from a rusty garbage bin that stood on the street corner, followed by a breeze of fragrance from a kiosk selling soaps and bath products.

  When they arrived at Jo’burg Central police station, one of David’s captains was waiting for them in the parking lot. Jade and Botha climbed out of the Mazda, and Jade showed the detective the tracking device and explained how to reinsert the SIM card so that it would start receiving a signal again.

  “Please try not to get any bullet holes in the car,” she said as they left the Mazda in the basement parking and climbed into the detective’s unmarked. “It’s a rental.”

  “We’ll try our best,” the detective replied gravely.

  It took less than five minutes to drive to the hotel, and Jade was impressed when the captain showed them into the chic, African-themed lobby of the four-star establishment.

  “Who’s paying for this?” Botha asked Jade in a low voice as the captain conversed with the receptionist.

  “I imagine David will end up paying, if his department doesn’t have budget,” Jade said, wishing that he wasn’t so stubborn when it came to her safety.

  Botha wasn’t prepared to go along with that.

  “I’ll pay,” he insisted, stepping forward. “We can’t burden the police with it. What do you have available? Is the penthouse suitable for two people?”

  The answer to that was yes, and after signing them in, the porter showed Jade and Botha up to the luxury suite on the top floor.

  The spacious living area contained a dining room table, a lounge and a fully equipped kitchen. There were two doors on the right-hand side that Jade supposed led to en-suite bedrooms, and at the far end of the lounge was a large window.

  Walking over to it, Jade saw western Jo’burg spread out beneath her; no other high-rises nearby were so tall. She gazed down over flat roofs, onto the bustling streets far below. The clustered city thinned out into treed suburbia that stretched to the horizon, giving her a faraway view.