Dark Traces

by Martin Steyn

  He swallowed the last of the brandy, took the glass to the kitchen, and sat down at the dining table. On the buffet, Karlien’s drawing was perched against the wall. He would have liked to have seen it framed. The tree trunks. The rays of light filtering down. The disturbance among the flowers and leaves as if someone had passed through it. It changed the entire scene.

  The revolver was already in his hand. He and Emma had had a bitter argument the day he’d brought it home, an argument he’d finally won by claiming it was for her, and particularly for Hannes’s, safety. Because a mother’s instinct to protect her child was stronger than anything else. Twice she had allowed him to take her to the shooting range, to learn how to use the revolver, and thereafter she would not touch it.

  He looked at her photo. She was standing in front of the low wall on Signal Hill, an orange scarf wrapped around her head, the Atlantic Ocean bright and blue and endless behind her. The crutches she had used to get to the wall were not in the photo, and he’d had to run to support her after the camera had clicked.

  She smiled.

  His eyes burned and he stroked her face with his thumb.

  “I want to be with you, Em.”

  She would have looked at him, placed her hands on his cheeks and nodded, told him she knew. And then she would have said, “But ...”

  But Emma was not here to complete the sentence.

  “Two for me,” he said, removing two bullets from the box. He placed them upright on the table, swung open the revolver and fed them into opposite chambers.

  “Two for you.” Two chambers remaining empty.

  “And one joker.” Because the Smith & Wesson had five chambers.

  He removed another bullet from the box, placed it flat on the table between him and the photo in the frame, looked at Emma’s eyes, and spun it. The metal scraped against the wood. The light bounced off in copper flashes onto Emma’s face. It spun more slowly. And stopped.

  The tip was pointing just past him.

  He picked up the bullet and fed it into one of the open chambers.

  Spun the cylinder.

  Raised the revolver and pressed the barrel against his temple.

  He looked at Karlien’s drawing. All he wanted was to follow Emma’s path through the flowers.

  He pulled the hammer back with his thumb.

  Took one last breath.

  Closed his eyes.

  Sometimes at a crime scene in the veld there was this quiet, a stillness. There was just a light stirring of the air, just enough to feel it against your skin. It was as if the life that had expired at this place had taken everything with it.

  His index finger curled around the trigger.

  Emma was propped against the pillows on their bed. Everything had been said. She looked at him. He looked at her. This was the last time they would look at each other. He held her hand. Her fingers were cool. His were warm and sweaty. “I’m sorry,” she said. A single tear spilled from the corner of her left eye, slipped down her cheek, seeping into the white pillow. His throat was constricted. He kissed her for the last time. “Blow out all the air.” She emptied her lungs and waited while he opened the cylinder’s valve, pulled the Glad roasting bag over her face, down below her chin past the rubber hose. He positioned the elastic band around the bag against her neck, just the correct length to leave a small gap so the carbon dioxide could escape. Her eyes waited for him. He nodded and she started breathing again. He held her hand in both of his, the fingers he knew so well, the bones that had become so prominent. The helium sighed softly. Her head lowered completely to the left. He kept looking into her eyes, even though she didn’t see him anymore. Her arms and legs contracted and relaxed a few times. Her breathing stopped. Her pulse was still. He held her hand and waited. He shut the valve and removed the bag from her head. Rested his face against her chest and, for the first time since she’d become ill, he cried in front of her without restraint.

  The hammer snapped down. There was only a metallic click. Behind him the refrigerator started groaning.

  He opened his eyes. Emma was standing in front of the low wall. Her dress hung loosely on her withered frame. Her thin strands of hair were hidden beneath the scarf. Her cheeks were hollow. But she smiled.

  “Why, Em? Why!”

  He started pulling the trigger. The next chamber contained what he wanted.

  Pressure against his index finger as the hammer lifted.

  The bang echoed against the walls. There was a dent in the table where he had slammed down the pistol.

  I know it hurts. I know it feels as if something inside you has been broken forever. As if you’ll never feel better again. But you will. Not tonight. Not tomorrow. Not next week. Maybe not even next month. Nothing hurts like losing someone you love. You’re bleeding now. But it will form a scab. You will pick at it—you always do. You’ll tear it off, or it will catch on something, and it will start bleeding again. But it will form another scab, because the body can’t help it. And eventually it will heal. You’ll have a scar, because the heart always forms a scar. But you will heal.

  He had stood outside in the passage in silence while Emma had spoken softly with Hannes in his room. Hannes had been in Grade 11. He had had his first girlfriend and they had been together for four or five months. Hannes had fallen for her like a dove that had been shot, the way you probably always fall for your first real love. And then she had broken up with him.

  How long will it hurt so much, Mom?

  I wish I had an answer. The heart has its own time. And it doesn’t follow instruction. But it doesn’t give up easily, either. Your dad told me if you cut out a person’s heart and put it in a certain solution, it will continue beating for a long time.

  Magson had heard that from a pathologist, who’d been holding a victim’s heart in the palm of his left hand at the time.

  That’s gross, Mom.

  When he had told Emma, she’d grimaced and thanked him for sharing this grisly image.

  It is. But it is also an amazing display of spirit.

  Actually, it was a pathetic image. An organ lying in a bucket filled with fluid, continuing to beat simply because it was receiving the requisite nourishment. Without the insight to realize it was no longer serving any purpose.

  I was able to feel safe for a while. Karlien Pretorius. Standing at the gate, looking up at him in the dark. As the taste of coffee and pancake still lingered in his mouth.

  While the heart kept on beating, a doctor could remove it from the bucket and transplant it to a new body.

  He looked at the revolver on the table, Emma’s photo, and behind her, the prescription for the antidepressants.

  “All right, Em. I’ll give the psychiatrist a chance.”

  Twelve

  May 19, 2014. Monday.

  The girl lay on her back. She was wearing dark blue denim jeans, a black top and jacket, all of it soaked from the rain that had started falling during the night. Discarded bubblegum was stuck to the bottom of her left shoe. Her long hair was a mess of untied, wet tangles, her head turned to the right. Her eyes were open halfway, her tongue dark and protruding from her lips. A deep furrow went around her throat.

  Magson looked up at the sky. The rain had been a constant drizzle all morning. The drops fell softly onto his face. Onto the girl’s as well, but she hadn’t been able to feel it for quite some time.

  Who was she?

  Two boys had found her. Children of the area’s farm workers. Who’d come to try their luck fishing despite the light rain, and had discovered the girl among the reeds instead.

  “She looks fresh, Doc.”

  “Body and environmental temperature are the same,” said Doctor Sinette Killian. “At least twenty-four hours, depending on how long she’s been lying here. That’s if it rained throughout the night, otherwise I’ll add a couple of hours. Rigor mortis
is still present. In this weather it could take anything between thirty-six and forty-eight hours until it disappears.”

  “So yesterday morning or Saturday, then.”

  The pathologist nodded. “But between you and me, I don’t think she’s been lying here that long.”

  “She’s pretty close to the road,” said Menck. “He didn’t put in the same amount of effort this time.”

  “Why would he? He probably thinks we’re a bunch of arses.” This kind of killer would follow the newspaper reports. He would have seen the identikit, and still he’d snatched another girl. And had dumped her next to the Vissershok Road some distance from Durbanville. Just like Maryke Retief. As if he was mocking them.

  Magson glanced at the police tape that had been tied here and there to whatever the uniforms could find to tie it to, the yellow bright against the green background. He looked around. With Maryke everything had been brown and dead. Now the hills were green. And the rain had washed the tall grass in vivid hues, almost like one of Karlien’s pastel drawings. Above, everything was gray and nebulous, as if the color had seeped from the sky, pooling on the earth below.

  The air was cool against his wet skin, heavy with the earthy smell of rain. He was still waiting for the antidepressants to take effect—Doctor Hurter had told him it could be a couple of weeks—but he did seem to be a bit more ... “switched on.” Had to be his imagination.

  He looked down at the girl.

  “Why don’t we know about her?” he asked. “She didn’t come off the streets. Someone has to wonder where she is.”

  “Well,” said Menck, “either they have no reason to wonder yet because they think she is safe somewhere, or it simply hasn’t reached us.”

  “If there was a gap in communication ... shit, man, all the stations know we want to hear about every teenage girl that goes missing.”

  “I’m phoning right now to find out.” Captain Henz Kritzinger had just joined them. “We have to identify her as soon as possible.” He dug out his cellphone. “And don’t worry,” he told Mags. “If someone at a station was remiss, there will be hell to pay.” He walked off, the phone against his ear.

  “She doesn’t have dark brown hair,” Menck finally said out loud.

  “No.” The stringy wet locks were likely to be dark blonde when dry. “Maybe hair color was never important.”

  Two forensic pathology officers crouched next to the girl. They unfolded a cream-colored body bag and lifted the stiff body on top. One tore off the strip to expose the glue; they folded the bag over and sealed her inside.

  May 20, 2014. Tuesday.

  Magson parked in the first open bay in Durham Avenue and jogged to the guard at the gate, then along the stretch of tar and into the Salt River Forensic Pathology Laboratory, signed the register and bounded down the corridor to the cloakroom. A few curses were required to get the temperamental rubber boots onto his feet, but then he was out and around the corner into the dissection hall. The floor was covered with a layer of bloody water.

  Doctor Killian was bent over the wooden table she always used when dissecting organs and intestines. Magson sighed. She had already started cutting, then. But then he noticed the dark skin of the person on the trolley.

  “Morning, Doc. Sorry I’m so late.”

  “It’s all right. I skipped her, because I knew you’d want to observe.”

  “I appreciate that.” He watched her studying the second lung on the cutting table. “I must’ve driven over a nail yesterday. So this morning I had to change the tire.”

  “Not the way you want to start your day.” She placed the lung, its twin and the heart into the bucket.

  “Especially not on such a cold winter’s morning. My knuckles still feel as if they need some grease.”

  She weighed the organs and wrote each one’s weight on the greenboard. Meanwhile, her assistant, Lungelo Saphetha, had removed the next block of organs, placing it between the man’s legs on the trolley.

  Doctor Killian returned and started with the stomach. She slit it open and a mass of rice spilled onto the cutting table. It seemed the man had eaten his last meal not long before his death, because the kernels had barely been digested.

  “Hmm, last night I tried an extremely tasty chicken jambalaya recipe.”

  “What is jambalaya?” asked Magson.

  “It’s a lot like paella. This recipe is rice with chicken chunks and chorizo sausages and tomato, everything sort of cooked together. Nice and spicy.” She raised the table to let the stomach contents flow onto the trolley.

  “Sounds nice. My wife used to make a great chicken paella.”

  “I can give you the recipe. It’s not difficult to cook.”

  Doctor Hurter had told him to start with the small pleasures. And she had specifically mentioned food. And then he would have something to say when he slunk back on Thursday. “Maybe I should try it.”

  Once the autopsy had been completed, Kennedy Zihlangu wheeled the next body to the pathologist’s station.

  Photos were taken and Doctor Killian studied the furrow in the girl’s throat. The rope’s twisting pattern was clearly discernable on the skin. “In each case, the knot is at the back, in the center. Everything has to be just right.”

  She opened a sexual assault kit and went through the process of collecting swabs and samples. After removing the paper bag from the girl’s hand, she turned the wrist to the side. “The abrasions and contusions to her wrists are more severe than those on the previous victims. They also go all the way round. Each hand was tied individually.”

  “Why the change?” wondered Magson.

  “In the previous victims, the abrasions were on the outside, as if the insides were tied firmly together, the rope going around both wrists.” Doctor Killian demonstrated with her own hands. “Here there are abrasions on the insides of the wrists as well. It may be that he simply tied her hands together in a different manner, or each hand could’ve been tied to something separately. But what is clear is that she strained against it. She fought to free herself.”

  Zihlangu assisted in removing the girl’s clothes.

  As they turned the girl onto her side, Doctor Killian’s eyebrows drew closer together, her eyes narrowing. “Here’s something.”

  Magson walked around to her side of the trolley. The pathologist indicated a mark, although it really wasn’t necessary. A rather large triangle, the two longer sides of equal length and convex.

  “Burned,” she said.

  “Looks like an iron,” said Magson. “Shit.”

  “It was in contact with the skin for quite some time.”

  “The rest isn’t enough. He had to torture her, too.”

  “Okay, Kennedy.”

  The auxiliary service officer nodded and they removed the rest of the girl’s clothes. There were no other burns. And no underwear beneath her jeans. Doctor Killian resumed collecting evidence for the sexual assault kit.

  “The damage to her rectum is more severe. Her perineum is torn. I wouldn’t be surprised if he used an object. But someone washed her. Or she did it herself.”

  “Maybe he forces them to wash before he hangs them,” said Magson.

  Once the sexual assault kit was done, they washed her and started documenting all her injuries. With the girl now on her stomach, Doctor Killian pointed to bruises on the left buttock. “Five oval-shaped contusions.” She turned her left hand around, holding it beside the girl’s buttock, thumb to the outside, the other four fingers in a semicircle to the inside. “Fingermarks.”

  “To pull her buttocks apart,” said Magson. “While he sodomized her.”

  Doctor Killian nodded.

  “The marks are very ...”

  “Pronounced?”

  “Ja.”

  “It was done with considerable force.”

  “He’s becoming more
sadistic.”

  Doctor Killian measured the fingermarks with a ruler—a white one with Shatterproof on it. They had been using the thing for years and it had always bothered Magson a bit. One of the pathology officers was very interested in photography and consequently took all the pathologists’ photos. The close-ups always included the Shatterproof ruler. It just seemed a bit tactless.

  Next was the burn on the girl’s back. “Two hundred and twenty by one hundred and fifteen millimeters.”

  “He burned her with a fucking iron,” said Magson.

  The photographer took more photos.

  Meanwhile Magson watched the pathologist preparing for the internal investigation. She removed one of the two blue latex gloves on her left hand and put on a glove of chainmail so she wouldn’t accidentally cut herself. The latex glove went back over and she picked up the scalpel.