Trackers (60 page)

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, then 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?

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.