by Kwei Quartey
“How many pieces of rope did you use to tie Bao?”
“Two.”
Correct. “After that, what did you do?”
“He was still suffering from that blow I gave him, so he was only moving a little bit. I dragged him to where his galamsey boys used to dig, and I put him there. Then I went to Mr. Chuck’s site and drove one of the excavators to where Bao was.”
He’s on the right track, but he’s not there yet. “How could you drive it?” Dawson asked.
“At Mr. Chuck’s site, one of the excavator operators, he sometimes used to leave the key in the ignition when he goes on his break around noontime. On that Wednesday, I hid in the bushes and waited for him to leave and then I went and stole the key.”
That might account for Chuck Granger’s missing CAT key, Dawson thought. “Continue.”
“I drove it to the place where I was going to bury him. By that time, Mr. Bao had woken up and was trying to shout for help, but because of how I tied him, he wasn’t able to breathe well, and he couldn’t shout. I operated the excavator and took some soil into the loading bucket. Then I turned it and dropped the soil on him. I did it eight times until he was buried very well.”
“Before you dropped the soil on him, did you strangle him?”
“Strangle him?” Yaw frowned slightly, as if puzzled. “Please, for what? He will try to breathe inside the soil and die like that.”
Solid. But Dawson wanted to be completely sure. “In which direction was Mr. Bao’s head facing when you buried him with the excavator?”
“If the pit is here,” Yaw said, making a circle on the desk with his index finger, “then his head is here and his body is here.”
He was correct and his account was accurate. “Why did you bury him alive?” Dawson asked. “Why not kill him on the spot?”
“Why?” Yaw asked indignantly. “He made my brother suffer by drowning. Shouldn’t I make him suffer too?”
“Why bury him in the earth instead of drowning him in the pit water like Amos?”
“Because the gold he has stolen is in the earth, not in the water. What you have destroyed returns to make you suffer.”
“What did you do after you buried him?”
“I reversed the excavator and dragged the bucket over the tracks to cover them.”
Dawson threw a test at him. “Does the excavator have reversing lights?”
“Yes, and a reverse camera in the cab too.”
He knows the excavator inside out.
Dawson, searching his brain for something more, looked at Chikata to see if he had any questions.
“Mr. Yaw,” Chikata said, “after you buried Bao, where did you go?”
“By that time I was staying at the place in the forest where you found me. I took the Chinese man’s lantern and went back there to sleep, and I slept well because a heavy load had been lifted from my shoulders.”
Dawson gazed at Yaw Okoh. The man seemed to be truly at peace with himself, and ready for the charge of first-degree murder to be pronounced.
KUMASI, ASHANTI REGION
SEPTEMBER
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
On a Saturday afternoon, Dawson and Christine sat with Daniel Armah and his wife, Mercy, while Hosiah and Sly spent time with the Armahs’ grandchildren in the backyard.
The adults commiserated over the terrible state of the economy. In order to bring in some more income, Armah, who was mostly retired and had a head of gray hair, was considering going back to his private detective company. Prices of fuel, food, and lodging were soaring on an almost weekly basis.
After weeks of searching, Christine had found a part-time job at a school and was earning a little money at last—not enough, but better than nothing.
“How are the children doing in the new school?” Mercy asked. A gentle, bespectacled woman, she had an idiosyncratic stripe of gray like a lightning bolt on the left side of her pulled-back hair.
Dawson exchanged a glance with Christine.
“Hosiah’s been having some adjustment difficulties at school,” she said.
Dawson nodded. “He doesn’t do as well with change as his older brother does. He missed the home environment in Accra as well as his schoolmates, and he had a brief period of behavior problems both at home and at school.”
“Oh, sorry to hear that,” Mercy said, looking concerned. “I hope he’s straightening out now?”
“Yes, little by little,” Dawson answered with a smile of relief, “but not without trying our patience.”
The conversation drifted until the women were having one conversation, the men another.
“So you got your murderer,” Armah said to Dawson. “Congrats on a job well done.”
“Thank you. I owe thanks to Christine for that.”
“Really? How so?”
“She pointed out to me that Yaw Okoh might be trying to punish his father psychologically for forcing Yaw’s brother Amos to go to farm with him.”
“A great husband-wife collaboration,” Armah said.
Dawson’s phone rang and he stepped out to take it. It was Akua Helmsley. She had reported two stories about Bao’s murder. Dawson had found her accounts to be factual and fair.
“Chief Inspector,” she said, after exchanging pleasantries, “I wanted to do a profile on you and how you solved the mystery of the Chinese man’s murder. Would that be possible?”
“Well, yes, I suppose so,” Dawson said doubtfully. He had never had a profile done, at least not in depth.
“If Mr. Samuels could have one or two photos of you in a couple different settings, then I’ll do the actual interview. It will just be about your background, what made you want to become a detective, your inspirations, and so on.”
Dawson told Helmsley that Commander Longdon would need to authorize an engagement like this.
“Of course,” she said at once. “I understand. When will you know?”
“I can ask him on Monday.”
“Thank you.”
“I don’t feel quite comfortable about the photographs,” Dawson added, after a moment’s thought.
“All right then. That isn’t a problem.” She paused. “There’s something else. We have another set of photographs that you’re not aware of, and they might be useful for you to have a look at. Also, I’d like you to indicate which of them I can use for my online article.”
He said yes, and they ended the call.
“Who was that?” Christine asked
“Someone who wants to interview me for a newspaper.”
“Ooh,” Christine said teasingly. “So famous now.”
“Not really,” Dawson said, laughing.
“Is that Akua Helmsley, by any chance?” Mercy asked.
“Yes,” Dawson said.
“Who is she?” Christine asked.
“She writes for The Guardian online,” Mercy answered. “I’ve been reading her work. Very interesting. People say she’s just a pretty face, but I think they are being sexist. Her reporting is solid.”
“Oh, really, she’s attractive?” Christine asked with interest.
Dawson wished Mercy hadn’t said that.
“You always used to avoid the press,” Christine said slyly to him. “No wonder you’re so eager to cooperate this time.”
He felt his face getting warm. “Don’t be silly,” he said with studied nonchalance.
Christine burst out laughing. “I’m only teasing you, Dark. Don’t get so flustered.”
Commander Longdon okayed Dawson’s interview with Akua Helmsley. In another time, the answer might have been no, but the GPS was trying to launch a new era of good relations with the press, including the construction of the brand-new and Internet-ready GPS press relations building in Accra. The only proviso Longdon had for Dawson was that he couldn’t go into detailed de
scriptions of police procedure or inside politics, and that he take no longer than two hours for the whole meeting.
Early on Tuesday morning Dawson met Helmsley in a meeting room at the Golden Tulip Hotel conference center. She had invited him to have breakfast, but he had declined. He did not want to have to tell Christine that he had had breakfast with the attractive Akua Helmsley, or lie about it.
She used a small digital device to record their conversation, asking about his childhood and what life had been like for him. He was evasive about his relationship with his father and told her that he preferred not to discuss it, but he did tell Helmsley about the disappearance of his mother when he was a child, how that had shaped his desire to become a detective, and how Daniel Armah had inspired him.
In talking about the Bao Liu case, Dawson gave light details only and emphasized Yaw Okoh’s presumed innocence until he went to trial in several months and was proven guilty.
“Here are some of the pictures we have,” Helmsley said, opening up her laptop after the interview was over. “Some are of the crime scene and I want you to feel comfortable about my putting them up on The Guardian website.”
As she clicked through them, Dawson realized with shock that Helmsley had not a few, but dozens of pictures showing the progress of the unearthing of Bao Liu’s body, from when his head was first revealed through to his complete removal from the soil.
“How did you get these photos?” he asked. “I didn’t see you at the scene so early on. I thought you arrived after I did.”
“This is the way it happened,” Helmsley said, turning slightly in her chair toward him. “We were out early that morning to take pictures of workers coming to their respective mines. We do this with their permission. However, on this occasion, we heard that something was going on at Mr. Liu’s site.
“So we rushed over there to find that a body was being dug up, and at that point, we decided we would retreat to the cover of the surrounding fringe of trees and take some shots with a long telephoto lens.”
“Why?”
“Because we thought onlookers or Wei Liu would take offense at our presence. People are skittish about cameras. We stayed there for a couple of hours until you showed up and asked everyone to leave. That’s when we came down and you met us.”
Dawson was angry. “This could all be evidence in the case, Akua. How could you keep these from me?”
“Well, actually, Chief Inspector,” she said rather coolly, “I’m not journalistically obligated to hand over material to the police unless it’s by court order.”
“Obligation is not the point,” Dawson snapped. “It’s what is right to do.”
“Okay, okay,” she said, flushing. “I agree it would have been helpful to do so in this case. Anyway, here you are. Full access. Better late than never.”
Dawson felt awkward as he cooled off. “Sorry,” he muttered. “I think I flew off the handle a little bit.”
“No worries,” she said, now looking unperturbed, but Dawson suspected she was hiding her emotions well. She slid the laptop over. “Here you go. Take a look through them. I need to get something from my room.”
He continued to look through them from where they had left off. As he clicked through quickly, the images became a time-lapse movie. At the beginning, the galamsey boys and their Chinese boss crowded around the site where Bao’s head had been first spotted. There was Kudzo Gablah, and then the workers Dawson had never met. They were digging, along with Wei Liu, and quickly a crowd of onlookers began to gather. Urban area or rural outpost, bystanders at a murder scene were universal.
Little by little, Bao’s head was unearthed—becoming his neck, then chest and back—as others joined the dig. Dawson noticed that one or two people abandoned the area quickly, probably not able to stomach the sight. Gradually, Bao’s impossibly arched body emerged, and the crowd looked on in fascination, drawing even closer.
Dawson made out that now Wei Liu was frantically trying to drive people away and that gradually, some of them complied while others loitered. As the space between them cleared, Dawson saw something—someone—that made him sit up straight. Yaw Okoh was among the observers.
He came back to the scene of the crime, Dawson realized with a jolt. Yaw had not mentioned that. And then Dawson’s blood turned to ice, and he erupted into a cold sweat as he realized he had made a terrible mistake.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
If Yaw had murdered Bao, it meant he had returned to the scene of the crime, as the photos showed. If he had not murdered him, however, might he have been able to “confess” to the murder by mentally reconstructing it at the scene? In several of Samuels’s photos on Akua’s laptop, Yaw was staring at Bao’s dead body, apparently engrossed by it. Dawson cast his mind back to which questions Yaw might have been able to correctly answer by his having been at the crime scene. Certainly, How many pieces of rope did you use to tie Bao? And, In which direction was Mr. Bao’s head facing when you buried him with the excavator?
But some other aspects he couldn’t know from merely observing the scene. For instance, that after arriving at the mining site to help fix the excavator, Bao had called Someone—or tried to—at some time after four. Yaw had to have been there to witness that. And what about the fact that Bao wasn’t strangled? How could Yaw know that without being present at the crime?
As Dawson examined the photographs, his mind swung back and forth. One moment he thought, Of course Yaw is the murderer, but in the next, a panicky feeling seized him as he questioned himself, Are you sure? Now he was seeing something else in the images that nagged at him like an itch he could not scratch. Kudzo was standing next to Yaw, and in one photo, he seemed to be addressing Yaw, and although Yaw did not seem to be responding verbally, he did appear to be listening. Had the two young men known each other before this occasion?
He stared again at another picture in which Kudzo was talking to Yaw and pointing to his own face as if demonstrating something, but what?
Akua returned. “Everything okay?”
Dawson looked up. “Did you film any of the activity at the crime scene?”
“Actually I did a couple of two-minute videos on my phone while Samuels was taking photos,” she said. “Why do you ask?”
He pointed at the image in which Kudzo was gesturing toward his face. “I want to get an idea of what he’s saying here. A video might help.”
She located the two videos and played the first. It showed the final minutes of Bao’s body being removed from its burial place by Wei, Kudzo, and one of the other galamsey boys. At one point, Akua had panned to show the entire body of onlookers, and it appeared that Yaw had not arrived by then.
The second video was taken about ten minutes later. Wei was kneeling over his brother, hysterically crying and pawing pathetically at Bao’s dead body, while Kudzo stood by in shock. Dawson held his breath, praying that this was the moment he was looking for.
He saw it. “There. Pause it, please. Run it back a little and then replay.”
She did that and Dawson watched.
Kudzo was standing about a meter away from the body. He looked shocked. At one point, he circled around the body and peered at Bao’s face. He pulled back with revulsion. From within the cluster of onlookers, Yaw appeared at Kudzo’s side. He nodded to Kudzo, but didn’t speak. Kudzo pointed at Bao’s face and replicated Bao’s widely gaping mouth. Kudzo took a few deep breaths while making a scooping gesture with his right hand close to his mouth. Then, as quickly as Yaw had arrived, he disappeared as if he had melted away.
“What does Kudzo’s gesture mean?” Dawson muttered.
“Looks like a scooping action.”
“Play it back one more time, please?”
He watched again, and then he nodded. “I get it now.”
“What do you get?” Akua asked him.
Dawson stood up to leave. “I can’t s
ay yet until it’s confirmed.”
He called Kudzo, who didn’t answer at first, but Dawson tried again and got a response. Kudzo sounded tentative, probably worried that he was once more in trouble, but Dawson hastened to reassure him.
“But I need to ask you a question,” he said. “Do you know a certain Yaw Okoh?”
Dawson heard a hesitation before Kudzo answered. “No, please.”
But his voice set Dawson’s left palm tingling.
“Kudzo,” he said quietly. “I know you know him.”
“Did you say Yaw or Kwao?” Kudzo said quickly.
“Yaw.”
“Oh, sorry—I thought you said ‘Kwao.’ Yes, I know Yaw.”
Beautiful recovery. “From where?”
Kudzo cleared his throat, and Dawson could feel his nervousness over the phone. “One day when Mr. Bao was still alive,” Kudzo said, “Yaw came to the site looking for work. He say he can operate excavator, but Mr. Bao say he don’t need someone like that at that time. Then Yaw also went to Mr. Chuck’s place and look for work, but they too, they didn’t have. I took Yaw’s phone number in case I hear of some excavator job, and he also took my number.”
Dawson realized they were both speaking English, and he switched to Ewe to avoid Kudzo misunderstanding a question. “When you found Mr. Bao dead, after some time, Yaw came around and you were talking to him, is that correct?”
“Yes, please.”
“Did he talk to you?”
“No, please,” Kudzo replied. “He didn’t say anything at all to me.”
Dawson described to him the short video of the crime scene that included Kudzo communicating with Yaw. “Were you trying to show him something?”
“Please, you mean?”
“You tell me if I’m right,” Dawson said, deciding to phrase it differently. “You were showing Yaw how there was a lot of soil inside Mr. Bao’s nose and mouth.”