by JT Lawrence
“You can’t ask me that.”
“I am asking you.”
“I don’t know if she’s alive,” says Robin.
“If you had to say.”
Susman looks at the captain, not blinking.
“Don’t get your hopes up.”
De Villiers closes his eyes and hunches over in relief. “Thank god.”
“I don’t know,” she says. “It’s probably nothing.”
“Believe me,” he reaches for his wallet. “It’s something.”
On the way out, Khaya calls and Devil puts him on speakerphone. "More girls are missing," the sergeant says. "Two more girls."
De Villiers’ mouth pulls down at the corners. “What do they have in common?”
“We don’t know yet,” says Khaya. Working on it.”
“Work harder,” says De Villiers.
“Yes, Captain.”
“Extend the search, and get the divers in. Rivers and lakes,” he says.
“Is alive always better than dead?” Susman asks as they speed on the highway, on their way to Marijke’s parents’ house. She says it out loud, but really, she’s talking to herself. She can’t help picturing a terrified teen somewhere far from home.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” asks De Villiers.
It depends where she is; what’s happening to her.
They drive to Devil's brother's home in the east of Johannesburg. In the suburb they visit, the front walls are low or non-existent, not like Jozi where the homes are barricaded by brick walls and barbed wire. The houses in the quiet neighbourhood are run down, and cars and playsets rust, sinking into brown gardens. Dieter's home is neat, though. The garden is well maintained, and the house has been recently painted.
"I often ask myself why I fought so hard to survive," says Robin, as she looks out of the window. De Villiers keeps quiet as he turns off the ignition, eyes trained on the narrow tarred road.
“I would have chosen death over the attack,” she says. “Why did I fight so hard?”
It’s not a question either of them can answer today, not with three girls missing.
Magriet De Villiers—Marijke’s mother—greets them at the door wearing a well-worn apron over an old-fashioned floral dress that reaches her ankles. The house is scented by the banana bread baking in the oven, which she serves to them, powdered with icing sugar, like a light dusting of snow.
“Thank you,” Magriet says. “Thank you so much for everything you are doing to find her.”
“Of course,” says De Villiers.
“Your husband isn’t here?” asks Robin.
“He’s at church,” says Magriet, wringing the tea towel in her lap. “Praying for Marijke’s safe return.”
“Have you remembered anything else?” asks Devil.
“I told you everything I know,” she says.
De Villiers keeps quiet, letting her words linger until the woman shifts uncomfortably in her chair. She hasn’t touched her plate.
Susman stands up and excuses herself, asking if she can use the bathroom. Instead, she finds Marijke's bedroom; it's as pretty as a chocolate box. Teddy bears, flowers, pink in every possible shade. The innocence—or the illusion of innocence—is almost stifling. Susman opens the dresser drawer, the closet door, looks under the mattress. Then she lies flat on the beige carpet, clicks on her penlight and searches underneath the bed. There's nothing there. But lying on the floor, she's at the perfect angle to catch a glimpse of something flashing silver from beneath the dresser. She crawls over and cranes her neck to see what's there. A razor blade is taped to the chipboard. She doesn't touch it. Taped next to it is an artful black and white photograph of a woman with protruding ribs and hipbones.
She darts into the guest bathroom and flushes the toilet, washes her hands. When she looks up, De Villiers is there.
“We’ve got to go,” he says. “Another girl is gone.”
Devil is pale and silent on the way back to the city.
“You’re angry,” says Susman. “I would be, too.”
He jabs the button of the car radio to turn it on, then immediately turns it off again.
He grinds his teeth. “If it were my daughter—”
“Yes,” says Robin. “You wouldn’t be hiding in a church.”
His knuckle-bones shine through his skin as he clutches the steering wheel.
She clears her throat. “I found a razor blade in Marijke’s room.”
“I was wondering what was taking you so long.” He stops at a red light and swears in Afrikaans. “A razor? Why? Suicide?”
“My guess is she was self-harming. Cutting herself.”
“She’s not like that,” says Devil.
“Like what?”
“She’s a good girl.”
“Good girls hurt themselves, too.”
Devil's phone rings. The ringtone is classical music—Baroque?—and Susman eyes him, then answers. It's Khaya. Usually, he's cheerful, and she's never known him not to be happy she's on a case, but his voice is heavy with dread.
“Another girl?” asks Susman.
“Another girl,” says the sergeant. “Also, they found something at Zoo Lake.”
Susman puts her hand to her stomach, which suddenly aches. "Zoo Lake," she says to De Villiers. He grimaces and turns the car around.
The clouds are pink by the time they reach the lake. There is police tape cordoning off the area, and the sight of it snapping in the breeze gives Susman goosebumps. Five girls, she thinks. Five girls gone.
They approach the officer managing the scene, thinking the worst, and are relieved to learn that it's a phone that's been found, not a body—a clue, instead of a corpse. Susman glances up at the darkening sky, muttering a prayer to a god in whom she no longer believes.
“Fits the description of Marijke’s phone,” says the officer. “We’re sending it to Betty now.”
Zinzi Mbete was their go-to tech genius. She wasn’t always easy to find, but if anyone could recover the data on a drowned phone, she could.
“You’re sure there’s no body?” asks De Villiers.
“Yebo,” says the officer. He also looks relieved. Maybe he has a daughter at home.
In the distance, a homeless man sits under a tree, watching them. Robin strolls up to him. He stinks of body odour and sweet wine; matches and cigarettes.
“Hi,” she says. “You been here all day? Yesterday?”
He won't look at her. De Villiers approaches and hands him fifty rand, with which he seems unimpressed. Robin pulls out her wallet and peels off another hundred. He stuffs it into his jacket pocket.
“This better be worth it,” she tells the man. “Or I’m taking that back.”
Finally, he looks up at her, his eyes stained by too much booze and living on the streets.
"There was a girl," he says, and they both stop breathing. "I thought it was a boy. Black pants, black hood. But when I called her, I saw her face."
“Why did you call her?”
“She threw her phone in the lake. I told her she should have given it to me. I need a phone. Then she ran away.”
“Who was with her?” asks Susman.
“A man. I didn’t see his face. He was in a car.”
“Which way did they go?” asks Devil.
“Up there,” says the man, gesturing up the road running up the slope, towards the main road.
De Villiers takes his phone out and scrolls through some photos. He shows the man the picture of Marijke.
“That’s her.”
“You’re certain?” asks Robin. Witnesses are notoriously unreliable. The lake is at least thirty feet away from the tree, and this alcoholic looks half-blind.
The man nods. “It was her. I know people.”
Back at the deserted station, De Villiers switches the flickering lights on and pins the pictures of the five girls to the wall, over a roughly sketched map of greater Johannesburg. According to Blom, there was no evidence they had been taken out o
f the country.
“So they’re being held here, in someone’s house, or basement.”
The word “basement” made her skin crawl.
They stare at the wall. The girls were all around the same age, but that's where the similarity ended. There was no common skin colour or hairstyle. They went to different schools, belonged to various clubs, and had no hobbies in common. The phones of the other four girls had not yet been found.
“There has to be a connection,” says Susman.
“It could be random,” says Devil, but you can see by the look on his face that he doesn’t buy it.
“Kidnapping five random girls over forty-eight hours?” says Susman. “Not likely. Not unless he had help.”
De Villiers shrugs. “Maybe he had help.”
At 2 AM, Devil's mobile chirruped with an email alert. Zinzi Mbete had sent him everything she had found on Marijke's phone. He opened up his laptop, and together they combed through the data which she had retrieved. There were over a thousand photos of friends, flowers, and pets.
“Yussis, young people take a lot of photos," mumbles De Villiers, then rubs his dry eyes and sighs as if he has the weight of the world on his shoulders.
The text messages, emails and Facebook account had all been deleted or lost to water damage, but the names and details of the apps were recovered. SnapChat, Twitter, Instagram, Waifer.
"What's Waifer?" says Susman, and De Villiers shrugs. The icon is a pink bathroom scale. They access the application via Chrome on the laptop and log in with Marijke's details. Her dashboard loads and they see her username —CandySkull—and numbers.
Previous weight: 38kg /
Current weight: 32kg /
Goal weight: 24kg /
Ultimate Goal weight: 21kg /
On the board to the right of the numbers are pictures of skeletal looking women. Jutting collarbones and xylophone ribs.
“What the hell is this?”
“Thinspo,” says Susman. “It looks like a pro-Ana app.”
De Villiers’ face is blank.
“It’s an app that brings anorexics together. They can share numbers and tips.” She clicks through to the support forum. Names like “HungryHippo” and “CalCounter” come up. CandySkull—Marijke—doesn’t comment much.
Robin looks away from the screen and up at the wall with the five girls’ faces pinned to it.
“They do have something in common,” says Robin. “Look how thin they all are.”
“The witness said Marijke looked like a boy.”
Susman clicks the "groups" icon, where private chats are possible. There is only one group chat there, with seven members.
CandySkull. Coffeeandhipbones. AllCutUp. Thinskin. SlowSuicide. Anacoach. Bonesies.
They have playful icons and lines beneath them:
Count My Ribs.
In Recovery.
The Generation of Lost Girls.
Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.
Her pulse picks up. “This is it,” she says. “This is what they have in common.”
Robin’s eyes track up to the pictures of the girls again. She clicks to read the chat, but the thread has been deleted.
Devil grabs his phone. “I’ll get a court order.”
“It’s almost 4 AM,” says Robin. “The judge is going to hate you.”
“It won’t be the first time,” he says.
Susman picks up her phone, too, and dials the number she sees on the screen. It takes fifteen minutes and plenty of threats to get through to someone who can help her at Waifer.
“We don’t give out that kind of information,” says the American. “One of the reasons our app is so popular is that you don’t need an account to join. We don’t ask for any personal details.”
“But if I were to give you the usernames,” says Robin, “you’ll be able to tell me where they’re based.”
“Technically, yes, we could. But it’s against our policy. We respect the privacy of every member.”
If Susman could slap the man, she would. She pictured him sitting on a brightly coloured beanbag somewhere in Silicon Valley, brand new Nike Cortados on his feet, popping Adderall and slurping a large iced coffee.
“It’s against your policy,” says Susman, anger vibrating through her.
"Yes, ma'am," he says. "Sorry, I can't help."
She looks over at De Villiers, who is still speaking to the sleepy judge; he doesn’t seem to be having much luck. She knows the link is tenuous. Her jaw begins to ache. She spits venom into the phone.
"Listen here, you bleeding-edge startup tech-wizard asshole. There are five young girls missing. They were all members of a private group on your stupid bloody app. If it weren't for your software, they'd probably all be home, safely tucked up in their beds."
“Er—”
"We're in the process of obtaining a court order. Let me tell you, when I get it, and these girls are safe, I'm going to go after you. I'm going to go after you with everything I've got. I'll find everything you're hiding. I'll strip you and your tech bare and lay your bastard bones out to dry."
De Villiers gives her a nervous look.
“And then I’m going to go to the press with this story and tell them how you wouldn’t help the authorities with the investigation, and how you and your company prey on vulnerable young girls and exploit their disease for profit. And god help me if anything happens to these girls, I’ll—”
"Okay," the American says. "Okay. Do you need their addresses? That's it? These seven people?"
Robin hadn’t finished her tirade; she’s caught mid-rebuke.
“Okay,” he says. “I’ll get Geoff to send them through to you now.”
“Thank you,” she says, then, as an afterthought: “Tell Geoff to hurry up.”
De Villiers is looking at her.
Her phone pings with the data.
“Cancel that request for a court order,” says Devil. “Make it a search warrant for the following addresses.”
They triangulate the software developer’s information with the homes of the missing girls. Five match up.
“Who are the other two?” asks Devil. Anacoach and Thinskin.
“I’m guessing ‘Anacoach’ is the ringleader,” says Susman. “She seems the most assertive on the forum. Girls go to her for advice. I wouldn’t be surprised if she organised some kind of meet-up.”
“It’s a flat in Rosebank,” says De Villiers. “No basement.”
They’re both quiet for a moment.
“She could have drugged them,” says Susman.
They both think She could have killed them, but don’t say it out loud.
“Do you want to call your brother?”
“No,” he shakes his head. “I don’t want to get their hopes up.”
They jump into the captain’s old car and hurtle through the darkness. Robin’s heart and lungs are rushing; she can hear her anxiety thudding in her ears. They park illegally in a one-way street and climb out onto the silent sidewalk, looking up at the apartment block with generous balconies.
“Go time,” he whispers.
Robin can feel how pale she is. Her fingers tingle.
Devil looks at her. “You okay? You want to stay in the car?”
“No,” she says, swallowing hard. “No way.”
They ride the elevator to the seventh floor. The light inside number 78 is on. De Villiers wants to take them by surprise, so he grabs the fire extinguisher hanging in the stairwell and bashes down the door. They run in, guns in hand, shouting to get down. They expect to find the girls, drugged or bound or both, but the flat is empty. There's a sound from the balcony.
De Villiers and Susman move quickly and quietly to the large glass sliding door. The sun is just starting to rise, and the early morning breeze blows the thin curtain that separates them from the figure standing outside on the high terrace. Devil slips through the gap in the billowing voile and points his gun at the silhouette.
“Freeze,”
he says.
Robin is right behind him. The silhouette turns out to be an unarmed woman in smart navy blue pyjamas who looks at them defiantly. Robin catches sight of the second person too late. He's pointing a Glock G40 at De Villiers. In his other arm, he clutches a silver laptop.
"Devil!" Susman shouts. When she was trained and fit, she would have given a more useful direction, like "ninety degrees" or "gun!" but her instincts aren't as sharp as they used to be. All she can manage is to shout her friend's name—one of her only dear friends—but it is too little, too late. The gunshot is so loud in the near-silent night that it shocks her whole body, and it feels she has mercury running in her veins, her heart pumping hot and cold at the same time.
In slow motion, she turns to look at De Villiers. She expects to see him clutch his chest and fall, but instead, the woman's head comes apart and red mist sprays on the wall behind her. The man hadn't been aiming at Devil; he'd had his gun trained on the woman all along. By the time Susman has dragged her eyes back to face the smoking barrel in the dawn light, the man had leapt to his death, smashing into the concrete down below, just a couple of hundred feet from Devil's car.
Susman and De Villiers are both trembling when they get back to the vehicle. Backup and forensics are on the way. At first, they lean against the side, gathering their thoughts. It’s difficult to think straight when your body is in the biochemical aftermath of shock. Susman feels numb and alert at the same time, and she can’t stop moving. The morning light paints the skyscrapers silver.
“Suicide pact?”
"Looks like it," says De Villiers. He has some barely dry blood spray on his neck and shirt, but Susman doesn't comment on it. For a gut-wrenching moment, she had thought she had lost him.
The rest of the apartment had been eerily empty, with no sign of the girls. Khaya delivered the shattered laptop to Betty, but there wasn't much hope of getting anything off it except blood and metallic dust. Every hour the girls were missing meant less hope of them being found alive. After hauling the carbon monoxide scented air deep into their lungs, they open the doors and get in.