Trackers

by Deon Meyer

  In his office he picked up the manual and started to read. A black woman brought his tea on a tray, and hurried away again. He took his sandwiches from the briefcase, poured the tea, thought about how he would have been chatting with the detectives in the tearoom of the

  Provincial Task Team, enduring teasing comments about his 'gourmet sarmies'.

  He followed the instructions in the manual. Fanus Delport, the financial controller, had already opened a project file for Tanya Flint. It had a number, JF/Flint/02/10 and the first debit (.Admin expenses: R600). Joubert did a quick calculation. His two hours, plus the possible expense of R2,100 for the cellphone profile and trace brought the total to nearly R4,000. And he had barely begun. Add the three or four more hours that he would work on it today and it came to over 6,000.

  He felt that anxiety again. At this rate her money would run out long before he solved the case.

  He would have to get moving.

  To start with he drove to Virgin Active in Table View, stopped in the parking lot. He got out, walked around his Honda and leaned against the bonnet, arms folded. The parking area stretched out in front of him, half full now, with the gym behind it. To the right was the public library. Here and there people were walking to their cars. A car guard in a luminous green vest wandered between the vehicles.

  Danie Flint left the ABC depot in Woodstock at about five o'clock on 25 November. Considering the traffic at that time of the afternoon, he would have arrived here by six o'clock at best, still in broad daylight - the sun only set at around eight o'clock in late November. Flint had parked his Audi somewhere in the parking lot. According to Tanya he hadn't gone to exercise. His sports bag was still on the back seat. Had he left it there deliberately, just taken his keys, cellphone and wallet, got out and walked away? Climbed into another car? Was he robbed before he could pick up his bag? Because the Audi wasn't locked. Had he got out, been attacked, someone grabbing cellphone, wallet and keys and running away?

  Then where was Danie Flint's body?

  It made no sense.

  So close to the police station.

  Why would he leave his car here if he wanted to disappear?

  The only other alternative was kidnapping, but why here, so close to the long arm of the law?

  Had he been involved in a fight? Pulled the keys out of the ignition, picked up his wallet and cellphone. Got out, banged his car door against someone else's car ... Or saw something, an argument. What if some aggressive, steroid-driven muscle man had beaten him up, seriously injuring him. Then Muscle Man panics, stows the body quickly in the boot of his car.

  At six o'clock in the afternoon, bright sunshine, people coming and going?

  No. Surely someone would have seen it.

  The gym bag on the seat was the thing that bothered him. It meant something. If Danie Flint wanted to disappear, if he did so on purpose, he would have had a use for the bag.

  He sighed, because he knew there was only one way for him to eat this elephant. Piece by piece. Long hours of footwork. Slow, methodical, systematic. Thorough. That was always his style, because he didn't have the intuition, the instinct, the natural flair of a Benny Griessel. That was why he had asked Tanya Flint this morning to tell him everything from the very beginning. That was why he would have to go to the library and into the gym, to see if there were CCTV cameras, to find out what Virgin Active looked like.

  There were no cameras outside.

  A woman came walking past, bag over her shoulder, and went into the gymnasium. Joubert followed her, through the automatic sliding doors. Inside, he saw her stop at a revolving gate, take out a card and slide it through an electronic laser device. That must be how they knew Danie Flint hadn't gone in that evening - a computer system that recorded everything.

  He stopped. Looked around. Modern. Chrome, steel and glass. No smell of sweat or resin. On the right was a counter, a young woman on duty. She smiled at him. He grinned back, his brain busy. The computer system. It would be off sometimes, like all technology, not infallible.

  'Good afternoon sir. Can I help you?' asked the young woman.

  'Good afternoon ...' and then he hesitated, because he no longer had the power of a SAPS identification card. 'This gate is connected to a computer?' he said, pointing at the card reader.

  'Yes, sir ...' with the little frown that said 'here's an interesting one', but the smile did not waver.

  'Does the system ever go down?'

  'As long as you can show your Virgin Active card you can always get in, sir. Are you a member?'

  'No,' he said. 'How often is the system down?'

  The frown intensified and he realised his approach was too direct perhaps. 'Why do you ask, sir?'

  'I was just wondering.'

  She didn't answer immediately, first looked him up and down. 'Can I call a consultant to talk to you?'

  'No, thanks,' he said. 'Thank you ...' He suddenly felt self-conscious and stupid. He should have followed another tack, pretended he wanted to join, or something. But it was too late now. He turned and walked out.

  No SAPS force behind him to rely on any more. He would have to learn to lie.

  But at least he knew now: the gymnasium's computer system did not always work. Danie Flint might have come to exercise on the twenty-fifth after all. The time of his disappearance could have been at least an hour later.

  For what that was worth.

  He battled to find the Flint house in Parklands' maze of crescents, so that he was ten minutes late. It was a young neighbourhood, property speculation houses squeezed together, three bedrooms and a double garage on a small plot, leaving space only for a tiny lawn in front.

  He parked on the pavement, got out, carrying his leather-bound writing pad, and knocked on the door. She opened almost immediately, inviting him in with her weary half-smile. She had taken off the jacket she had worn that morning. In the short-sleeved blouse, her arms seemed exceptionally thin. He wondered how much weight she had lost since November.

  The living space was open plan - kitchen, dining and sitting room with TV, chain store furniture, but in good taste. Her laptop was on the dining-room table, next to the three folders arranged neatly and precisely beside each other.

  'Shall we sit at the table?' she asked.

  He nodded.

  'Something to drink?' She moved towards the kitchen.

  'No, thank you, I'm fine ...'

  For a second she was undecided, as though she had not foreseen the possibility that he would say 'no'. She gathered her thoughts. 'Please, sit down. I've got all the documents organised ...'

  He recognised a self-consciousness about her, an unease, as though she was not used to a strange man in her house. He sat down at the table, a combination of cane and wood. The chair was uncomfortable, too small for his body.

  Tanya Flint took her place opposite him, picked up the first folder, bright yellow.

  'These are Danie's cellphone accounts ...' She opened the file, took out a document and pushed it over the table to Joubert. 'I found the IMEI number, it's at the top here. And I wrote beside each number who it was that he phoned.'

  Joubert looked at it. Written in a neat delicate handwriting and blue ink, a name beside each number. It must have taken her hours.

  As though Tanya Flint could read his mind: 'I did it in December. There was nothing else ... Here's a spreadsheet that I made, the numbers, and how many times he phoned each one. He phoned me the most. And his drivers. There's nothing odd.'

  He was impressed, and relieved, because it would save him time, and her money. 'This is very useful,' he said.

  'I had to do it. I looked ... I looked for anything. In any case, you can take the whole file, if I can just get it back when ...'

  He filled the awkward pause with a hasty 'Of course.'

  'This file is our finances. We used Moneydance ...'

  'Money dance?'

  'It's software for personal finance. You download your bank statements from the Internet, the
n you can do all sorts of things: draw graphs, reminders of payments, budget... It gives you a very good picture ...'

  'I understand.'

  She held out a stapled document to him. 'These were our expenses, it's in chronological order. Oh, it's for the whole of last year, up to November. I arranged it according to category, the trouble is, the American software, their categories are sometimes ... you know ... It's for all our accounts, we each have our own cheque account and credit card, but you can put it all together.'

  'This will help a lot...' He scanned the documents quickly. 'This is for both of you?'

  'Yes.'

  'Could you give me Danie's separately?'

  'Of course. I... it will take a while. Do you want graphs as well?'

  'No, thanks, this is perfect. If I could just get Danie's separately. His cheque account and credit card ...'

  'OK.' She got up, sat down at the head of the table, behind the laptop. 'But I can tell you now already, there's nothing out of the ordinary.'

  'Oh?'

  'I mean, there are no expenses that I don't know about. And even if there were ... I would have picked it up. We sat down with our statements every two weeks. We had to, last year, with the business ... It was a difficult time. We were entirely dependent on Danie's salary. His biggest expense was petrol, on his garage card, which ABC paid. I did most of the shopping.'

  She manipulated the mouse, then got up. 'I have to fetch the printer in the bedroom ...'

  'Sorry for all the trouble.'

  'It's no trouble.'

  She disappeared down the passage.

  He sat staring at the statements in his hands. All this work she had put into it, all the detail, the tables, the tracking of numbers. I mean, there are no expenses that I don't know about. That meant that she had considered the possibility that her husband had disappeared of his own volition.

  Which begged the question: why?

  What was it that she wasn't telling him?

  86

  The third folder contained photos of Danie, and a list of contacts that Joubert 'might possibly need', she said. 'People at work, his mother, our friends, the detective, everyone I could think of. And here's the flyer that I put under everyone's car wipers at the gym.'

  An A4 colour printout, with a large photo of Danie, the same one that she had showed him that morning, and a caption: 'Have you seen Danie? Underneath in smaller print was a short paragraph about his disappearance on November twenty-fifth, and her cellphone number.

  'And nobody phoned about it?'

  'Lots of people phoned. But nobody who'd seen anything.'

  He nodded, because he could imagine the strange calls she must have got. Then he told her about the tracking of the cellphone: 'If Danie's SIM card is still in the phone ... If a cellphone is stolen, the suspect usually uses all the available airtime on the card, and then takes it out. We have two choices now. We can track the phone on Danie's number to find out where the phone is now. But it's been three months, the chances that the SIM card is still in the phone are slim. That means we could be wasting 600 rand. The alternative is to get a profile on the IMEI number. That means they determine what SIM cards have been in the phone since November, and particularly what card is in it now. Once we know that, we can trace the new number, and try to track the phone down. Unfortunately the profile is a bit more expensive. It's 1,500, plus 600 for the details of every SIM card that the profile gives us.'

  She listened attentively, thought about it before she asked: 'Do you think it's worth the trouble?'

  It was all they had at this stage, but he didn't say that. 'An investigation like this ... in fact, any investigation, is as much about the elimination of possibilities as the collection of information ...'

  'What are the possibilities?' she asked, with sudden intensity.

  Joubert shifted on the uncomfortable chair. 'Do you mind if I take my jacket off?' to gain more time, because he didn't know how honest he should be with her.

  'Of course not.' While he stood up, she said solemnly: 'Mr Joubert, I read the statistics on the Internet - 1,500 children disappear every year...'

  'Eighty per cent of those are found by the police,' he countered instinctively.

  'And that is exactly the problem. The police and media focus on the children, but what about the adults? Last year more than 2,000 were abducted ...

  He shook his head as he sat down again, because it was a misrepresentation of the figures, but she got in first, her voice full of emotion. 'All I'm trying to say is that I realise Danie could ... I mean ... there were 18,000 murders in the country last year. You ... just be straight with me, that's all I ask. I've already been through every possibility.' Her hands were tightly interlaced, the veins on her skinny arms standing out with the effort.

  He saw the brave attempt she made to keep control. In her thin body and passionate expression he saw the loneliness and suspense and the uncertainty of three consuming months, the exhaustion she was fighting against now. He remembered how hard it was for him, when he was still doing detective work, to be the messenger, the bringer of bad news, he never could distance himself. The past five or six years he had been insulated from that. Now he wanted to reach out to Tanya Flint to help her bear it somehow.

  He took a deep breath. 'I want you to know that I understand what you've been through and what you're still going through ...'

  'I'm OK,' she said, but without conviction.

  'I don't think Danie ... disappeared willingly,' he said, with a fleeting worry that he was talking too soon.

  'Do you really think so?' Her eyes fixed on him, hungry to believe.

  'It's ... unlikely. It doesn't fit.'

  'Thank you,' she said, and her hands relaxed and her shoulders drooped, as though a great weight were lifted off them. And then the tears began to flow.

  She fetched a box of tissues from her bedroom, came back, and told him all her fears. That she was afraid she had driven her husband away with her perfectionism, with her urge to control, to make a success of her business. Because it had been a very difficult year, she had worked so hard, such long hours, she had neglected him sometimes, she was often spiritually and physically absent, and too careful with the finances. Since his disappearance she had wished a thousand times she had let him put in his little bar, the sound system in his Audi, because with his job he lived in that car. All the while the tears ran down her cheeks and she sniffled and blew and crumpled up tissue after tissue, laying them all in a neat row beside the laptop.

  He told her again he understood, but he didn't think she need worry

  about that.

  Then he described other possibilities, as he had tried to figure them out in the parking lot. Just a theory, he said, she must please understand that. He suspected something had happened outside Virgin Active, just after Danie had got out of the car, and before he could pick up his bag. Or, after he had finished exercising and had just put the bag back, because he suspected the card system was sometimes faulty.

  There were a few things that suggested it wasn't robbery in the parking lot - Danie's disappearance, the car and the bag were still there, the constant presence of people, car guards, and the proximity of the police station. It left them with two possibilities. The first was that Danie might have walked to the shopping centre to draw money, or something. And in the process was lured away, or drawn into something.

  The other possibility was that someone had been waiting for him, someone who, for some reason, meant to do him harm. Perhaps someone who knew him, someone he trusted enough to get into another car.

  She shook her head at this suggestion.

  'You don't agree?' he asked.

  'Danie had no enemies,' she said with absolute assurance.

  'He had to fire some bus drivers ...'

  'Have you been to see Neville?'

  'Yes. And he says Danie was very popular. But it's a strange world. It only takes one unstable person ...'

  She thought about it. 'Maybe,' sh
e said.

  'I want to request access to ABC records. I want to search Danie's office. They might not like that.'

  'Let me phone Mr Eckhardt,' she said. 'He's been very sympathetic all along.'

  'Then I would like to take a look at the Audi.'

  He saw her glance at her watch. 'I... can I show you how the garage door works? I have to get back to work. There are a few orders ...'

  'Of course. Have you used the car since ...'

  'Not at all. It's just the way it was when I fetched it. I'll get the keys for you.'

  Before she left, they agreed that she would phone Mr Eckhardt, the head of ABC, to get permission, and he would go ahead with the profile of the cellphone. She took him to the garage, showed him where the automatic door mechanism was. Then she stood stock still for a moment, turned to him, put a hand on his arm and said earnestly, 'Thank you so, so much,' before her heels click-clacked quickly across the concrete floor to her Citi Golf.

  Deep in thought, he watched the car reverse out, head down the road. Then he came back to the present, went over to the small workbench right at the back of the garage, and stood a while studying the space. Danie Flint was not a handyman. The garage was storage space, not a workshop. Cardboard boxes against one wall, steel shelves against the other, old paint tins, yellowed Sunday newspapers, a broken kettle, half a bag of old braai briquettes, a few tools, the wheel of a racing bike.

  Joubert took out his cellphone, unzipped his writing pad to find the number, and phoned Dave Fiedler.

  'Dave, it's Mat Joubert, from Jack Fischer.'

  'Yip, Boetie?'

  'We want to do a profile on a IMEI.'

  'Hit me with your rhythm stick.'

  Joubert read the number slowly.

  'Gotcha. I'll call you, hopefully by tomorrow, late afternoon.'

  He zipped the writing pad closed, turned and studied the Audi.

  It took him a few moments to realise he was not prepared. He would have to find his murder kit at home, the one with rubber gloves, plastic evidence bags, tweezers, scrapers, cotton wool, sticky tape, the black and white fingerprint powder. Margaret would know where it had been stored for the last five years. For now, he would have to make another plan.