by Kurt Ellis
Grey finally broke the silence. ‘That’s a great theory, Nick, but I need you to focus on this case.’ He tapped the folder in front of him. ‘This is our first case, and this is where I need your brain and profiling skills. We have the eyes of everyone in the SAPS on us at the moment, including the Commissioner, and we can’t mess this up.’
He turned to the professor. ‘Cho, I’d like you to complete the post-mortem as soon as possible. Process that shirt and confirm for me a cause of death. Zwane and Reshmee, I need you to review all missing-persons reports that came in for a description that matches that of our vic. Call police stations in the south and ask them to let you know of any new reports for missing black females that match our vic’s description. We need to get an ID for her as soon as possible. Steenkamp and Meyer.’ Grey sighed. His gaze moved briefly from Steenkamp to Creed, then settled on Steenkamp. ‘Bring Albert Erasmus in for more questioning. Press him, and I mean press him hard. I want a confession out of him before lunchtime, gentlemen, so you can then focus on this case. That’s an order.’
7
‘What would you like to talk about?’
‘Whatever you’d like to talk about.’
‘But what if I don’t want to talk about anything?’
‘Then we won’t talk about anything. This hour is your hour, Nick. You can do with it whatever you’d like.’
Creed sat back in the chair. Facing him, across the low coffee table, Dr Andile Tlau looked at him with soft, kind eyes. Her hair was cut close to her scalp. Her legs were crossed at the knee and an examination pad rested on her upper thigh. She had a warm smile and dimpled cheeks.
‘You have cute dimples,’ Creed said.
‘Thank you.’
‘Do you know dimples are a birth deformity?’
‘Would you like to spend this hour talking about my dimples?’
Creed smiled and let his eyes wander around Dr Tlau’s large office. The floor was covered in a grey carpet that looked to have been freshly cleaned. He thought he could smell the hint of chemicals beneath the vanilla air freshener. To his left stood a glass-topped desk; an Apple laptop, a few thick books and stationery lay on it, each item neatly in its place. Beyond the desk was a bookshelf with dense volumes of medical and psychiatric journals. On two of the shelves were framed photographs of Tlau with her parents, Creed assumed, and with a man, potentially her husband. He glanced at her left hand and saw a wedding ring on her finger.
The two sat at the other end of the room, Creed in a comfortable yet low leather chair. It felt as if an invisible border separated the office space from the counselling area. A wall clock was ticking behind his right shoulder – where she could see it easily. His eyes drifted across the wall to a framed photograph of Dr Tlau and a man with greying hair and a wide smile.
‘Is that Dr Vroom?’ he asked.
She smiled and nodded. ‘You know him?’
‘I took one of his classes at Wits.’ She nodded but didn’t respond. Creed sighed hard. ‘This is a waste of my time.’
‘If it’s a waste of time, then why are you here, Nick?’
‘Because I promised my sister I would come. And Eli.’
‘And you understand why Major Grey wants you to see me?’
Creed laughed. ‘Because he wants me to rejoin SAPS, but needs to make sure I’m capable of doing so. Psychologically.’ Creed tapped his temple. ‘Make sure I’m not nuts or suicidal. Make sure I pass that psych evaluation.’
‘And do you want to rejoin SAPS?’
He shrugged. ‘I’m not sure. I mean, I need to have something besides my soapies and whisky to fill my days, don’t I?’
She made a note in her pad, then looked up. ‘Do you have a problem with substance abuse?’
‘Not at all. I abuse substances very well. Substances love me. There’s no problem.’
‘Why do you abuse substances?’
‘Why not?’
‘Are you not concerned about the dangers? Don’t you fear death?’
‘No more hazardous than the dangers you face every day.’
‘Do you believe you are at risk of overdosing?’
Creed let out a bitter laugh. ‘Come on. Have you ever heard of any one ODing on marijuana? That’s the only thing I use.’ He left out that he occasionally shot up heroin when the buzzing in his head got too loud.
‘How do you sleep?’
For some reason, the question felt as if it had touched an exposed nerve. He almost blurted out that he didn’t sleep because of the nightmares. Nightmares of her. Nightmares of him. Visions of Rumples, too, popping up where and when he least expected him.
But the reason he smoked cannabis and drank was so that he didn’t see her face when he closed his eyes. He fought the urge to tell her this.
‘I sleep well.’
She was silent for a second, then asked, ‘Are you lying to me?’
‘Probably.’
She made a note.
‘You just said that the reason you’re seeing me is because of Major Grey. Tell me about your relationship.’
‘What do you want to know?’
‘Start with how you two met.’
There was a glass of water on the table between them. Creed took a sip. ‘We met at university. I’d seen him around before, on campus. I didn’t know him but I knew I hated him.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘The first time I saw him, I was getting out of a taxi while he was parking his black Porsche 911 convertible in the students’ lot with a gorgeous girl in the passenger seat, that’s why. He was a rich, arrogant fuck. I didn’t need to know him to know that. I could just see it.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Neither did I, until I got to Wits. Where I’m from, in Sydenham, in Durban, I didn’t encounter wealth. We were all poor, so I didn’t see how the rich lived until I got to university. And then I saw boys and girls my age driving the latest cars, throwing around money as if it was confetti, and then I thought about my friends back home, who were just trying to survive. To put food on the table. To pay their parents’ rent or pay medical bills by doing menial jobs. It pissed me off. It’s fucking unfair, and Eli Grey was the personification of that unfairness. The moment I saw him, I wanted to smash him … knock his teeth down his throat.’
‘I still don’t understand. If your feelings were so strong, then how did you two become friends?’
Creed smiled. ‘I got the chance to knock his teeth down his throat.’
She waited for him to elaborate.
‘I had joined the boxing club on campus, and a few weeks later Eli swaggers in to join too. And he had the nerve to smile and greet me. The coach wanted to see what he could do so he had the two of us spar. And I thought, perfect. Here’s my chance to make this rich boy hurt. It was supposed to be a light sparring, but I nailed him hard with my first punch. He hit the floor with a look of surprise that almost made me laugh. But then he did something I didn’t expect. He got back to his feet. And he hit me back, hard. Damn hard, in fact. We began to pummel each other. The coach liked what he saw because this short sparring session became a proper ten-round fight. It was absolutely brilliant.’
She touched her bottom lip. ‘I’m still wondering how this led to a friendship.’
‘I thought he was a pampered boy, but Grey proved me wrong. He proved he had some iron under his gold. I still didn’t like him after the fight, but I did respect him. But once I got to know him, I was shocked to learn that he was actually a nice guy. Although we came from two different worlds, we had a lot in common, so we’ve been friends ever since.’
‘I see.’ She scribbled once more. ‘Do you think perhaps your initial dislike of Major Grey was also the result of your father and his history with the apartheid government?’
Creed tensed. ‘It could be.’
‘Let’s talk a bit about your father. Do you …’
‘I think I’m done for the day.’ Creed stood.
She looked at her watch. ‘It’s been o
nly ten minutes. But we can end our session now if you like. When can I expect to see you? Tomorrow?’
He turned and walked towards the door. ‘You’re more than welcome to expect me, Dr Tlau. Whether I will arrive, though … that’s another matter entirely.’
8
She watched him pull out of the underground parking lot and stop at the entrance, waiting for the boom to rise. But she was still not entirely convinced that it was him. Reaching across to the passenger seat, she lifted the file with the glossy photograph that sat on top of her other notes. She studied the man in the picture, then the man in the car. It could be him, she thought. He had lost a lot of weight, his hair was a lot shorter. And the beard … but it could very well be him.
Tracey Wilson tossed the documents back onto the seat and started her Volkswagen Polo. After a quick glance at her wing mirror for oncoming traffic, she slipped into the street and behind the white Opel Astra with blue police markings Creed was driving. Her heart rate increased, ever so slightly. She felt the slow dance of adrenalin through her veins.
This was it, she thought. Her big comeback. She changed gear and opened her bottle of home-made fruit smoothie; still ice cold as it flowed down her drying gullet. Excitement always turned her throat arid.
Over the last four years, she had moved from newspapers to magazines and then back to newspapers, all in an attempt to gain more experience as a journalist. Her focus and speciality: crime in South Africa.
The latest official report on crime statistics released by the police ministry in 2018, stated that 57 people are murdered, 110 people report a rape, and 379 cases of aggravated robbery take place in South Africa every single day.
Crime was a speciality that would never leave her wanting. An embarrassment of riches. The challenge was finding the right story among the thousands to run with, with just the right kind of victim and the right kind of brutality.
It had only been four years earlier, at the age of twenty-six, that she had won the South African Publishers’ Association Journalist of the Year Award for her story on the kidnap and murder of Claudette Aswagen. And that led to a best-selling book, but that was four years ago – a lifetime for a writer. In media, you’re only as good as your last story. And her last couple of stories, to be brutally honest (and she always was), hadn’t been strong. Then the tip had come in from one of her police sources: ‘If you want a story, then investigate Nick Creed.’
‘Who?’ she had asked, not paying too much attention.
‘Former Special Agent Nick Creed,’ he’d whispered.
‘Like the guy in that movie?’
‘Yes, like that fucking movie.’
‘What about him?’
There was a sharp cackle on the other end of the line. ‘What, do you want me to write the bloody story for you as well? He’s a killer. He got kicked out of the FBI because he executed a suspect, in cold blood. And now he’s working for SAPS.’
‘How do you know all of this?’
Another harsh laugh. ‘Because of a tiny thing called Google. Maybe you’ve heard of it?’
The line went dead. On another day, Tracey would have simply ignored the phone call. The voice had not been too reliable in the past. His previous tips hadn’t exactly been mind-blowing. She’d been tempted to dismiss his call completely, except for the fact that she had read about former Special Agent Nicholas Creed in a corner article in her own newspaper that very morning.
The article was on serial killer Alain Joe Mooney’s escape from prison in America just over a week ago, and how Creed had led the investigation and eventually arrested him, live on camera. Tracey had seen the shaky footage of the incident, filmed by another guest at the cheap motel on his cellphone. She had seen Creed standing outside the room across the hallway from the amateur cameraman, the room where Rooney was holding a gun to a housekeeper’s temple. You could just about see Rooney’s elbow wrapped under the chin of the terrified Vietnamese woman. Creed had turned into the room, with his gun in its holster and his hands raised. The gunshot was unbelievably loud. The amateur cameraman seemed to have dropped his phone, probably ducking for cover. A second shot echoed. The phone, lifted from the floor, panned to a close-up of a door handle before turning back into the hallway and into the room. The image was blurry, but it focused in time to show Creed tossing Rooney over his hip and slamming him onto the floor. His own gun was out in an instant and pressed to the back of Rooney’s skull as the rest of the police rushed in to secure the killer and attend to the hostage, who was unharmed but badly shaken. It was this footage, shown throughout the world, that had made the name Nicholas Creed familiar to some.
She also knew a little about the Rodriguez incident, but not much. At the time, she had been too busy working on reviving her ailing career to worry about something happening on another continent. Quickly, she did some research. Half an hour ticked by without her noticing. It was clear something was not right with that story. The FBI’s version of the events that had led Creed back to South Africa didn’t add up. The Rodriguez incident reeked of a cover-up.
Tracey eased the car into the lane behind the Opel Astra on the M1 freeway, scared she might lose him but careful not to get too close. She didn’t want to alert Creed. Not yet.
9
Detective Luke Meyer was reluctant to take the Panado tablets. He had been taking far too many painkillers of late, and was concerned about the effect they could be having on his stomach lining. Instead, he poured himself a paper cup of ice water from the cooler and gulped it down. He refilled the cup and swallowed more.
The corridors of that side of the building were quiet, the walls lined with closed offices. Behind one of the doors he heard someone erupt in laughter. Dropping the cup into the bin, he made his way back to the IPU’s corner of the building. He didn’t notice the path he took, nor did he pay attention to anyone he may have passed. Slowly, he shook his head, still taken aback by what he had witnessed only twenty minutes earlier.
Even though Creed’s reasoning that morning had been plausible, it had sounded a lot like assumption to him. When Steenkamp had finally cracked Erasmus, Meyer couldn’t quite believe what he was hearing. The old man had broken down and spewed out the confession after Steenkamp had told him that they’d found DNA evidence that contradicted the story he had told the police.
A lie. But the lie had had the required result. The tears had erupted from him then. The apology. The standard ‘it was an accident; I didn’t mean to kill her’ excuse that Meyer was all too familiar with. ‘I did it. I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry. I did it.’ Creed had nailed it.
Meyer found that he was striding through their office. Steenkamp was seated behind his workstation with his phone pressed to his ear. Meyer looked away and entered the briefing room where he found Zwane and Patel hunched over the boardroom table.
Three stacks of files on the desk. The officers were taking a file at a time from the centre stack, opening it and reading the description of the missing person. Often there were no photographs in the files, so the written descriptions were all they had to go on. Once they decided that the description didn’t meet that of the victim, they placed the file in a new pile between them.
‘Any luck?’ he asked.
‘Nothing yet, Father.’
Meyer cringed at the title.
‘How about you and Captain Steenkamp?’
‘We got a confession. Erasmus broke under the pressure of the interrogation.’
Zwane beamed. ‘So Creed was right? I knew it.’
Meyer wouldn’t have been surprised to see the young man punch the air. To be fair, he could understand the awe. Some of the cases solved by Creed and his BAU team featured in many of the manuals that he, and more recently Zwane, had studied at the academy.
There were also the two books written by Creed and his former mentor at the FBI, retired Senior Special Agent in Charge Douglas ‘Red’ Redman, which were bestsellers. Covering some of the cases their team had solved, they could still b
e found on display in many bookstores. And then the movie, Prey, the true story of how the BAU had investigated and arrested Alain Joe Mooney, or El Pesadilla, as he was known by the Texan Hispanic community.
El Pesadilla – The Nightmare – was a serial killer who had targeted Latina women living in the Lone Star State. The brutality of the crimes had made headline news, as had the political pressure in the United States by minority-rights groups who felt the government and FBI weren’t taking the case seriously enough because the victims were all foreigners, mostly undocumented immigrants.
Enter Red and his team, in particular his confident South African protégé, Nick Creed, who’d profiled and then tracked down the killer. The real reason the case had received such worldwide media attention was the arrest of Alain Joe Mooney, caught live on cellphone camera. The footage of the gun fight had circulated the globe on social media and been flighted by almost every news channel, from America to Afghanistan, from Canada to Cape Town, over and over again.
The video clip garnered more than 14 million hits on YouTube in one week alone. After the media furore came the movie, starring Dustin Hoffman as Douglas Redman and Robert Downey Jnr as Nicholas Creed, complete with a generic South African accent.
‘I knew he’d be right,’ Zwane grinned. ‘He cracked it. Damn, the man’s brilliant.’
Patel shrugged. ‘I don’t see what the big deal is. He seems quite arrogant to me. And rude. And I thought I could smell alcohol on him when I handed out the printouts.’
When it came to opinions on Creed, Meyer fell into the Public Relations Officer’s camp rather than Zwane’s, but he kept his views to himself.
‘Nobody you like here so far?’ he asked, turning the conversation to the case at hand and the files before them. ‘No missing persons reports that match our vic?’
‘Nothing,’ replied Zwane. ‘Based on Professor Cho’s time of death, we’re looking for missing persons reported in the last twenty-four hours. Nothing so far.’
Meyer pulled up a chair and took a section of the missing-persons reports from the pile. ‘We should be going back at least a month.’