by A. Nybo
“Thomas Goodwin,” George contemplated. “Do we have a picture of him?”
Charlie handed over a page from the file. “He had a claim out in the Leaf Sector.”
George examined the picture. “Oh yeah, I remember this guy. A real loner. He spent most of his time out at his claim. You could tell that by the way he stank. I don’t know if he even had a place to shower.”
“If he was a loner, that would explain why no one missed him,” said Charlie.
“The Leaf Sector, where’s that?” asked Leon.
Charlie curled a beckoning finger at him. Leon rose from his desk and followed into Charlie’s office. He came to a stop next to where the big cop stood before a wall map. Charlie traced an outline on the map that looked like… well, a leaf.
“The Leaf Sector,” he said. His finger traced north. “These are Jovanovic’s and Menshikov’s claims.”
“What’s the distance between them?” Leon looked for a legend on the map to determine scale.
“About five to ten kilometres as the crow flies. A lot further by road,” said Charlie.
“Okay, well, let’s go and have a look at his claim.”
“Take Rodney, I’ve got—”
“A call coming in from Adelaide,” Leon supplied, directing an accusing look at Charlie.
Charlie leaned towards him and muttered, “The kid has to learn somehow.”
“Shouldn’t you put him on traffic or something first and see how he deals with that?” Although peak-hour traffic in Coober Pedy probably only consisted of three or four cars. “Instead of keeping him on front desk? Or sending him out with me?”
“Traffic he can do, but he’s spooked about this case, and Sergei Menshikov doesn’t help. Mention it and Rodney almost runs. It’s the first murder case we’ve had since he’s been here, and since you’re in charge of this case, there’s little point in me being there.”
“If one of us gets shot, do ballistics on his gun first,” sneered Leon. “Could save you a lot of time.”
“What are you two whispering about?” George stood at the door eating a sandwich.
“Nothing,” said Charlie. He turned to Leon. “Oh, and by the way, we got back the print results from the steering wheel of Jovanovic’s vehicle—two sets, neither on record. We suspect one set of prints was Jovanovic’s, but we don’t have a comparison set.”
“Helpful,” muttered Leon. He took a deep breath. “Okay, well, Rodney”—he glowered at Charlie—“and I will go out to Thomas Goodwin’s claim and see if there’s anything there. We’ll call into Sergei’s mine on the way back and then maybe stop at Soda Bob’s, see if either of them knew Goodwin.”
“Doubt Soda Bob would know anything,” said George. “Like I said, Goodwin was a loner.”
“If you picked him up for DUI, then he had to get his alcohol from somewhere, right?”
“More likely from the drive-thru. That way he wouldn’t have to interact with anyone other than the attendant,” suggested George.
“Okay, we can try there too.”
“Take the camera and some battery spotlights with you so you can take scenic pictures if necessary.” Charlie grinned. “No point having to go back out there if we don’t have to.”
Together Leon and Rodney collected the necessary equipment and headed off to Leaf Sector. When Rodney navigated almost straight to Goodwin’s claim, Leon figured he’d earned a gold star. Left to himself, Leon would have taken hours to figure out which track led to claim LS3727.
Leon parked the four-wheel drive beside another vehicle that looked like dust held together by some invisible force of nature.
He took the bag from the back seat on his side of the car. “Looks like you get the camera,” he said to Rodney, who’d opened the back door on the passenger’s side. Leon slung the battery bag over his head and shoulder so he could slide it around and carry it on his back when he climbed down into the mine. He clipped the spotlight onto the strap, out of the way.
Before entering the mine, they did a preliminary search in the vicinity, which revealed a well-used campfire with a billy hanging on a swing arm off to one side. Leon took the lid off, but if there’d been water in it, it had evaporated long ago.
When Rodney returned from his search over the other side, all he had to report was that he’d found Goodwin’s loo. Leon silently congratulated himself for picking the correct side of the shaft to search.
Since he carried the light, Leon descended the ladder first. When he shone it around, he decided this was the best of the mines so far. Far roomier than the other two he’d been down. Using the light to scan from one side to the other, along the ceiling, and on the floor, he searched for more than one set of footprints.
Once Rodney had descended to stand beside him, he started forwards. “Keep your eyes on the ground. You see these footprints here?” He pointed to a heavy-tracked sole print. “There are partials everywhere, so I’m guessing they’re Goodwin’s. If you see a different track pattern, stop me.”
“Okay,” said Rodney, with such enthusiasm that Leon shook his head.
Leon kept his eyes ahead in case something came at them. They’d only gone a few metres when Rodney reported that the footprints were fading.
“Must be dust fall,” said Leon, shining the light onto tracks so shallow they’d almost disappeared. “Just keep looking. You never know.”
Further into the mine, a junction of three drives confronted them. They took the left drive, which after a short passage opened out into a room.
“Oh God,” said Rodney.
Leon assumed he was talking about the stench. Bad as it smelled, he decided it was related more to the death of vegetables than the death of a person or animal. The few items within suggested Goodwin had used the space as a makeshift kitchen, with a small burner and the makings for coffee. In a bag was the stench culprit—a few partially liquefied potatoes. He guessed being underground had kept their rotting process to a slow creep. If they’d been left on the surface, they’d probably be burnt chips by now.
With the first drive investigated, they returned to the junction and went down the middle drive. Catching the scent of rotting meat, Leon stopped and sniffed. Perhaps Goodwin had kept a meat locker down here.
“This isn’t going to be good,” he said to Rodney. “Hope you have a strong stomach. Smells like he had an entire side of beef down here. One steak can’t give off a stink like that.”
They progressed down the passage, the density of the smell increasing until Leon suspected he’d soon be wading through it.
“Jesus,” Rodney muttered from behind him. “I think I’m going to chunder.”
“Breathe through your mouth as much as possible.” Even as he gave the advice, Leon wasn’t sure it was a sensible suggestion. It wouldn’t surprise him if there were chunks of smell that could be swallowed.
This was what hell smelled like—he was sure of it.
The passage opened out, and Leon shone the light around the area. “The bedroom, maybe?” he said, resting the light beam on shelves covered with a sheet. Before investigating it any further he cast the light around the rest of the room. “What the fuck?” He shot the light back to the bed he’d skimmed across, and yep, he had seen a kangaroo’s head lying on the pillow. The bulge of the blanket suggested there was a body attached to the head.
Leon scanned the rest of the room with the light before returning to the bed. “I guess we know the origin of the smell now. Get some holiday snaps for Charlie.”
Rodney took pictures from various angles while Leon shone the spotlight on it to lessen the effects of the flash and give a more pervasive light.
“Wait a second. I’ll just remove the blanket.” A sense of the surreal overcame Leon as he held his breath and leaned in to lift the blanket, taking care not to disturb anything that might be beneath, like a magician’s slow reveal.
The smell seemed to increase tenfold, and Leon was vaguely aware of the oddity of the bones before he turned and dry
retched. How the hell a porous blanket could muffle such a stench he didn’t know. Maybe it was the flapping of the material. As he had the thought, Rodney began to vomit, holding the camera off to the side. The breeze from the blanket must have reached him.
Glad he hadn’t eaten since breakfast, Leon retched a few more times before his body decided it’d had enough. Now that he could get air, he chuckled. “Enjoying the summer breeze over there?”
“I just chucked up on a crime scene,” Rodney said apologetically.
“To my knowledge, putting a kangaroo to bed isn’t a crime, no matter whether it’s dead or alive. So until we decide whether a crime has been committed here, we won’t declare it a crime scene just yet. At worst, you’ve vomited at a potential crime scene.”
Closer inspection revealed the kangaroo, bloated by death, had its top half relatively intact. Hips down had been opened, and skin, flesh, and bone had been folded up to the body. In amongst the mess, Leon noticed something didn’t look quite right about it.
“I’m no expert,” said Leon as he took a closer look. From what was visible, the circumference appeared to be too big for a kangaroo leg. “But these bones might not belong to this body.” He otherwise wouldn’t have thought much about it—apart from the oddity of a mutilated kangaroo in bed—but the killer’s propensity for bone removal demanded caution. “I think we’d better process this. We’ll take shots now, but we’ll need to come back with better lighting before moving it to get a better look to see what’s going on.”
Leon shone the light on the floor, the only footsteps there, their own. “Take a few shots of the floor.”
“Why? There’s nothing there.”
“I’m about to disturb it, and I don’t want to lose something a photo could have preserved.”
Rodney took shots, and then Leon did as he’d seen Charlie do: he scraped the surface dust away but found nothing.
Having collected several photo albums’ worth of pictures, they moved on to the next drive, which had collapsed a few metres in. Not knowing whether it was a fresh collapse or not, Leon decided to preserve as much evidence as he could to offer up for local knowledge. “More holiday snaps,” Leon told Rodney, who obliged. It might have to be excavated if it was recent and if anything of note was found in the mine—other than a bedded kangaroo.
Leon had never been so happy to reach the surface as he was then. He breathed hot air, using his teeth to strain the flies out, and it was that action that caused him to wonder at the oddity of no flies in the mineshaft. The poor underground ventilation had definitely kept the smell from reaching the surface, but he would have thought the flies would have picked it up.
He took the battery pack off and slung it into the back of the vehicle. “Don’t flies go underground?”
“I… no, I guess they don’t.”
“We’ll call into Sergei’s claim on the way and then take these photos back to the station to see what the others think about those leg bones.” There had to be a hunter amongst them. Wasn’t there always a hunter out in isolated places like this?
Sergei’s ute wasn’t at his claim, so they continued on to Soda Bob’s, thinking they might be able to kill two birds with one stone if Sergei was there—even though it was only early afternoon.
They entered Soda Bob’s to the “Doris” chant performed by all of three patrons. The trio were unable to infuse it with enough derision to make it rate above pathetic.
At the bar, Leon waited for Soda Bob to come to their end. He put the photo of Thomas Goodwin on the bar. “Do you know this bloke?”
Soda Bob studied the picture. “He’s come in here a couple of times, but I haven’t seen him for months. I know he has a mine out just this side of the Breakaways, but that’s about it. Not much of a talker.”
“Wasn’t much of a talker,” corrected Leon. “He was the man found out by the golf course.”
“Oh,” muttered Soda Bob. “Poor bugger.”
“When he was in here, did you see him talking with anyone?”
“Nah. He came in a few times and bought some takeaways, but he never sat and had a beer with anyone. I think he was happy with his own company. There’s a few of those around here.”
“Right.” Leon put the photo in his shirt pocket. “Have you seen Sergei around?”
“He hasn’t been in since Friday evening.”
“Isn’t that a little unusual?” Leon had gotten the impression Soda’s was Sergei’s second home.
Soda Bob chuckled. “Sergei isn’t your usual sort of customer. The only time he can be expected here is happy hour on Fridays; other than that, it’s a hit-and-miss affair. He’ll come in and drink whisky at eleven in the morning, but happily drink coffee in the evening while everyone else is working at getting their shine on—no matter how much the others take the piss. Sergei’s a good bloke, but he’s nothing if not his own person.”
They left Soda’s and tried the drive-thru with similar results—Thomas Goodwin came in semiregularly, bought his takeaways, and left with little to no conversation unrelated to the immediate transaction. “Maybe we should try some of the opal buyers,” suggested Rodney.
“Good thinking,” said Leon. “Let’s try Sergei’s first. He might be able to shed some light on the mysterious Thomas Goodwin.”
Leon had been trying not to allow himself to think of Sergei, but just being on their way to see him, with some certainty he’d be home, had Leon’s heart rapping out a beat of excitement and anticipation.
Leon parked the police vehicle next to Sergei’s ute. They got out and walked across the veranda and down into the sunken alcove. The door was open a few inches, and Leon knocked before calling out to him. When there was no answer, Leon opened the door a little more and peered into the depths as he called out. Unable to see more than the stairs and a few feet of the landing, he knocked once more and called out again, in case Sergei was in the shower.
Entering the house, he continued to call out as he progressed down the stairs, Rodney at his shoulder. When the small hairs on his skin stood on end, he stopped abruptly. Unclipping his gun, he called out for Sergei once more. Hearing the clip on Rodney’s gun holster release, he hoped like hell that none of the wrong people got shot. Cautiously, he continued down the stairs to the landing.
Guns leading the way, Leon and Rodney leap-frogged in and out of rooms while the other remained in the hall, checking for signs of trouble. Leon’s turn to lead into the next room, he rounded the corner and noted a bare foot protruding out from behind the three-seater lounge. He checked the rest of the room, then back at the foot.
“Watch the passage,” he said.
Leon went deeper into the room, the acidic smell of urine strong in his nostrils. He rounded the lounge and stopped abruptly. Panic tightened his chest at the sight of Sergei lying face down with his head turned to one side, his body entirely covered in a criss-cross of thin welts, some so swollen the skin had split. His hands were cuffed at his sides by some sort of fibrous belt contraption and his feet bound together. A pool of blood had amassed near his head, and a long brownish strand protruded from his mouth, like something out of Alien.
“Jeezus! Call an ambulance. And keep an eye out.” Leon stepped forwards to feel for a pulse, but the tiles were slippery with liquid, and he fell, crashing onto his hip. He scrambled to his hands and knees, crawled over, and his wet fingers penetrated the hair on Sergei’s neck in search of his carotid artery.
Rodney mumbled something about Sarge.
“Just fucking do it!” snapped Leon.
His next awareness was of Rodney’s frightened voice issuing directions, but it drifted off into the distance once more as Leon focussed on Sergei.
The weak beat beneath his fingers brought immeasurable relief. Only then could he focus on Sergei’s wounds. He brushed Sergei’s hair back from his face, his fingers glancing over the bump that was the likely cause of some of the blood, but Sergei’s beard made it difficult to determine what exactly was involved wi
th the woody protrusion amidst the blood-matted hair.
Twiggy strands were woven together, and they pierced from beneath his lower jaw up through to his mouth and came out to loop back into the metre-long length. The severed loop on the other end suggested it had been attached to something but had been cut free. Sergei had almost bitten through the loop, but his top teeth were buried millimetres into the wood. He had effectively been anchored to something by his lower jaw.
“Sergei.” Leon’s voice was tight and shaky. “Can you hear me?”
Sergei remained motionless.
Most of the blood was around his head, but a dark blue liquid, diluted by the urine Leon had slipped in, pooled beneath Sergei’s upper torso. He gently rolled Sergei a little to see if he had wounds on his front, and initially didn’t understand what he was seeing. Like his back, legs, and buttocks, Sergei’s front had been whipped mercilessly with something thin. Weals marked his entire front, across body, arms, genitals, and legs. A blue-black, bloody mess marked his left pectoral muscle, but it had scabbed over, suggesting Sergei had been lying there awhile.
“All clear,” said Rodney.
“Get a blanket.” He didn’t know if a blanket was a great idea given the condition of Sergei’s skin, but he was cold to touch and wouldn’t feel anything in his unconscious state.
Leon cut away the bindings that cuffed Sergei’s hands to the belt-like contraption around his hips, which was also made of some kind of young, pliable twigs. The bindings he cut from Sergei’s ankles were of the same fibrous material.
It was unclear if the swelling of Sergei’s extremities was a result of his hands and feet being whipped, and he couldn’t look in Sergei’s mouth without pulling on the wooden piercing. That Sergei was still breathing was enough to ease him a little, but he didn’t know whether the wound to the back of his head was the reason for his unconsciousness or if there was another cause.
“Here’s the blanket.” Rodney stood wide-eyed at the end of the couch, not daring to come nearer.