The Monster's Daughter (20 page)

A Joubertina constable dropped Alet off in Unie around one o'clock that afternoon. Her flat seemed desolate. She tried to take a nap on the couch, but her thoughts kept bouncing between the woman lying on the side of the road and the burned body on the mountain. In desperation, she walked over to the main house and knocked on Trudie's door to see if she needed anything from the store. After several attempts, Alet realized that it was Sunday. Trudie usually drove off by herself in the early afternoon and only came home late. She suddenly wondered where Trudie went on her weekly outings.

Alet decided to walk to the station. The charge office was empty, April on duty at the service desk. April was a cheerful coloured bloke, fresh out of police college. He looked up from his paperwork when she walked in, a mock expression of shock on his face.

“
Eish
Kwagga! Is going to be hard to find yourself a man looking like that, hey.”

Alet held her hand up. “
Ja, ja
, I know. But you should see the other guy.”

April laughed. “I thought you were booked off.”

“You don't like my company?”

“No, it's sharp, hey. But I'd be knocking back a few brews and putting my feet up if I was you.”

“Can't.” She pointed at her face. “Pain meds.”

April made a grimacing face, drawing air in through his teeth.

“So, I see you're working yourself to death.” Alet leaned on the counter. “What's going on?”

“Not much. Hit and run. Couple of domestics.”

“Anything on the Terblanche farm?”

“No. There was a double whammy on the highway this morning and we got called out.”

Alet shook her head in commiseration. “Is Mathebe here?”

“Knocked off at noon.”

A thin middle-aged black woman walked into the station clutching a blue plastic shopping bag with both hands. Her clothes were varying shades of worn, but clean. She had a sense of urgency about her, hesitating just inside the doorway.

April turned his attention to her. “Afternoon. Can I help?”

The woman walked up to the service desk. She took a stiff new green ID book out of the bag and placed it on the counter in front of April. “My daughter, she did not come home,” she said in broken English.

April looked at the front page of the ID. “She's sixteen?”

The woman nodded.

“When was the last time you saw her?” Alet chipped in, her heart beating a little faster. The woman squinted at her.

“She's police, don't worry,” April said. “Do you know?”

The woman took a moment to think. “Lunchtime. Yesterday.”

“You're sure?” Alet tried to hide her disappointment.

The woman nodded. “She made mess, that girl. Always made mess. Always running around.”

April turned the page to open a new docket, copying the name from the ID.

“Hey, April?” Alet tried to get his attention. “You think I can take the patrol car?”

“Sorry, Madam, “April said to the woman. “One second.” He looked over at Alet, his brows lifted in a question.

“My car is buggered up, man. In the shop till next week.”

“Sharp-sharp, Letta. But it's for official business if anyone asks, right?”

Alet winked at April. “Of course,
ja
.”

The woman put her finger on the small photograph in the ID book. “She a good girl. She run around but she never not come home.”

April nodded. “I understand.”

Alet cleared her throat. “Keys?”

April reached under the desk for the keys and tossed them at her. “Get it back before the captain rocks up, okay?”

The woman shoved the ID book in front of April's face. “You find her.”

April took it from her and returned to the docket. “We'll try, Madam.”

Alet parked the patrol car near Magda Kok's house and hiked up the mountain. The sandy path rose over rocks and dipped between boulders, the climb tougher than it seemed from below. Trees clumped together at the base of the apex, their leaves varying shades of green and brown. Alet took photographs of the area, scouring the dry grass and hardened bushes for anything that might be useful. Her progress was slow, but the task had the blissful side effect of taking her mind off the early morning's events.

Alet sat down in the shade after an hour, taking a break from the relentless afternoon sun. Resting her back against a boulder, she steadied her camera on her knee and took a shot of the valley below. She could just make out the hill that cast its shadow over Unie in the distance. Alet zoomed in on the words “Unie 4 Jesus” laid out in painted white rocks. The Dutch Reformed Church had raised money to erect a lighted cross next to it. It could be seen from miles away at night. “So you can always find your way,”
Dominee
Joubert had told her solemnly. She had to fight a gag reflex.

Alet moved the camera's focal point up the snaking mountain path, noticing a straight edge between the branches of a tree. She zoomed in. From the path, trees and foliage had obscured it, but here from above she could make the outlines of something man-made in the rock face. High bushes scraped her bare legs as she retraced her steps and veered off the path. A wide vertical crack marred the otherwise smooth surface of the rock, leading up to what looked to be an old war lookout. Alet slung the camera over her back, found a secure foothold in the crack, and hoisted herself up, grabbing a jagged outcrop. On STF exercises, Alet always outran and outclimbed the beefcakes in her unit, their sheer bulk putting them at a disadvantage on rugged terrain. This climb was a piece of cake in comparison to some of the obstacle courses she'd had to face. Despite being out of shape, she reached the ledge with little effort, her foot only slipping once as she struggled for a decent foothold. She clung to foliage that hung down the side of the shale as she inched her way forward, noticing the broken branches and roots where other people had climbed up before.

Mazelike turns led her to the dim interior of the lookout. The small holes in the red stone wall must have been used by the British to fire on approaching Boers. Or maybe it was the other way around? Besides the Big Trek and the concentration camps, she remembered little from high school history. Judging by the trash on the ground, the lookout was a regular haunt for vagrants and teenagers. Alet took a twig and dug through the pile, finding strips of singed newspaper, chips packets, beer cans and cigarette butts.

Alet turned the camera flash on and took a picture. Bright white light bounced off the walls, momentarily filling the claustrophobic space. A dark patch on the wall caught her eye. Alet lifted the camera and reviewed the picture on the digital screen. What looked like an indent or a shadow on the dark wall had flattened out into a reddish stain. She moved closer, her pulse quickening as she focused the camera on the area. The glare of the flash illuminated the stain again. It was blood.

Dr. Oosthuizen stood squinting in the doorway for an uncomfortable few seconds before inviting Alet in. He lived next to the Unie clinic, a
stone's throw away from the invisible border between town and
location
. Oosthuizen was a lanky man in his mid-sixties with gray, greasy hair and a patchy beard. He always looked like he had just woken up from a nap.

“Please, sit,” Oosthuizen said. The ramshackle living room of his four-room house was littered with medical magazines, files and dirty teacups. He pointed to a couch camouflaged with underwear and socks. He scooped clothes and files onto the floor. “It's clean. Laundry day, you know.”

Alet chose not to speculate on the source of the brown stains on the couch's armrests. Oosthuizen's wife had died a few years earlier and he obviously had not adjusted to keeping house for himself.

“Tea? Coffee? I have a box of biscuits in the kitchen still.”

“No, thank you.” Alet turned the camera on, forwarding the display to the picture. “I need you to take a look at this, Doctor.”

Oosthuizen leaned in, his bony limbs barely disturbing the seat next to her. Alet handed him a small evidence bag into which she had scraped some of the brown substance on the rock.

“I think it's blood.”

“There is a simple test.”

“Would you be able to match it to the victim?”

Oosthuizen shook his head. “I don't have the equipment for that sort of thing.”

Alet sank back in her seat. “Give me something, Doctor. We still have no ID on the victim.”

“Off the record?” Oosthuizen played with one of the hairs of his scraggly eyebrows. “Her morphology doesn't match that of a black woman.”

“What does that mean?”

“The bones. As far as I can tell from the X-rays, the nasal bridge is high and pinched, not low and broad like with negroids. The nasal cavity is also tear-shaped, not rounded and wide.”

“She was white?”

“Of European descent.”

“So, not black?”

“Caucasian or mixed race, with Caucasian features at best. It's not a foolproof indicator.”

“How do I find out for sure?”

“DNA testing. Also the only way to positively match this scraping with your victim. I have to warn you, though, labs are slow over the holidays—some of them close until January. Even if they were working at full capacity, it's going to take time.”

“I might have a way to get it done faster.” Alet didn't want to tell him about the half-baked idea that she had been nursing since she spoke to her dad. Pulling it off depended on a lot of bullshitting and half-truths. She studied the scraping from the lookout, hoping that her hunch would be confirmed. “Did you find any evidence that the victim was wounded before she was burned?”

“Well, it's hard to find signs of tissue damage.” Oosthuizen said apologetically. “The blood and marrow boil in the skull and form an epidural hematoma. That's the brown substance. I can't tell if there was bleeding antemortem, but there were fractures of the femur and tibia.”

“She hurt her legs?” Alet was surprised at Oosthuizen's knowledge. He had always struck her as the type that stayed in Unie because he couldn't find work anywhere else.

“No signs of remodeling. It could have happened just before she died.” He sighed, an air of weariness settling over him. “I don't know for sure, though, Alet. I'm sorry.”

Oosthuizen led the way to the front door. He hesitated before unlocking the security gate. “It is a horrible way to die, you know. We have our problems around here, I don't deny it. But things like this … It's unthinkable that people do that to each other.”

Alet pitied Oosthuizen and the people like him who had been ignoring what was happening in the rest of the country for all these years, sure that their sheltered existence would go on indefinitely. The killer had brought a lot more than a murder to Unie. He was the harbinger of fear, ringing in an era of change.

“Don't talk to anyone about the case, please, Doctor,” Alet said. “We don't know what we're dealing with yet.”

“I understand.”

Alet drove the patrol car back to the station, formulating a plan. She had to access the database and needed to make a few phone calls. No matter how much pleading it was going to take, she had to sell Mynhardt on the idea of getting help from outside.

“Few days,
okes
!” The call echoed through the Tempe barracks. “
Min dae!
Hey, Jam-man! Few days!” The private—Frank Massyn was his name—planted himself on the bed next to Benjamin. Massyn was a crude oaf, his main ambition in life drinking. He always lagged behind and messed up during drills, no pride, no sense of duty. Massyn had survived conscription by latching on to people with influence or rank. He'd be a liability if there ever was a war again.

Benjamin folded the letter from Tessa, annoyed at the intrusion. It was his favorite, the one where she told him about her first day at the university, her excitement palpable on the page. It always made him smile to imagine her rushing home so she could write to him about her day. Benjamin had kept all her letters, written on whisper-thin blue pages, always with a dried Joseph's Coat leaf from her garden in its thin folds.

“I'm over this
kak, bra
.” Massyn ran his hands over the dark stubble on his head.

“
Ja?
” Benjamin put Tessa's letter in its envelope, tucking it into an old biscuit tin with the others. He had wanted to stay on in the army. It provided structure and discipline, and everyone was treated the same. Army pay was good too, good enough to support a wife and family, the life he wanted with Tessa. But the permanent force would not accept him, claimed there was a problem with his eyes, so his days in the army were at an end.

Massyn leaned in. “I told my missus I'm only getting out next Monday. When they hand me my last paycheck on Friday, I'm gonna have myself a whole weekend of freedom. Get me to a bar and ladies watch out!” He moved his hips suggestively. “You in?”

Benjamin shook his head.

“
Isit?
That chick of yours got you on a leash, I say.” Massyn laughed. “Poor bugger. She's gonna want a ring soon. Then your life is over. Trust me.”

Benjamin didn't want to talk about Tessa with Massyn, didn't want the slimy worm to even mention her. He looked wordlessly at Massyn until the man gave a nervous laugh, his hands fidgeting under his pillow.

“Hey, Jam-man, look at this.” Massyn produced a magazine. He flipped it open to the picture of a blond woman fastening her stockings with suspenders, her naked breasts drooping down. “Nice, hey?”

Benjamin felt himself stir. He turned his face away, ashamed at his reaction to that filth.

“You never seen a woman? How old are you?” Massyn's mocking had a hint of genuine sympathy.

“Put it away before I report you.”