Bones Omnibus (29 page)

So why have a South African passport
and
the Chinese one? It was too pat. If discovered by local law enforcement, a group that took stage direction as easily as an ingénue, no one would question which was fake. Someone had set the scene knowing the death of Charles van Lagemaat would lead here.

And Moqoma had a pretty good idea who was behind it.

“Moosa, it’s your brother,” the voice barked over the cell phone. “I need a dog.”

Moosa sighed. Not only was Inspector Moqoma not his brother, he often regretted being one of the few the ostracized cop still called for favors.

“Sorry, my friend,” the handler replied, trying to sound resolute. “All dogs on the course are currently assigned. If you get an order from your captain, I can put in for a temporary transfer of a handler’s assignment.”

“I don’t need the handler,” Moqoma persisted. “Just the animal. I have the training.”

“You know that’s not the issue.”

Moqoma sighed. “It’s the van Lagemaat shooting. I don’t have time for all the red tape. The trail is hot
now
.”

Moosa considered his fellow officer’s request. If it had been anyone else, he probably would’ve found the animal. But Moqoma? In a police force rife with bad apples, he was considered rotten to the core.

“It’s two phone calls, Inspector. You’re in your car, aren’t you? By the time you get here, it could be lined up.”

“It’s ‘Lieutenant,’ now, but you knew that,” Moqoma fumed, before lowering his voice. “And I didn’t want to bring this up, but there are bigger issues in play here. I’m just now learning who might be involved and how far this goes up the chain of command. Discretion is the watchword.”

Moosa knew what Moqoma was implying but wouldn’t have put it past him to use a reference to the delicate nature of a case to get what he wanted. But Moosa was one of the few SAPS who believed the DSO/Scorpion anti-corruption task force that Moqoma had been a part of had gotten a bad rap. Parliament formed them to root out malfeasance in government. After a two-year search, they had uncovered a vast number of crimes leading straight to the top. But before they could file charges, they themselves were accused of being corrupt. Though no charges were ever filed, the unit was dissolved, and all the officers who’d been elevated to these lofty positions were scattered back into the regular police force, but at their DSO pay grades.

This only drove the wedge between the regular SAPS and the disgraced Scorpions deeper, which was clearly what the government desired.

“I’m telling you, Moqoma. We’ve got no dogs for anything.”

Moqoma went silent, as if considering whether he should deliver the last piece of information.

“What if I tell you a girl’s life may depend on it?” he intoned.

Moosa could hear two things in Moqoma’s voice: desperation, but also the unmistakable ring of truth. Even if Moosa was skeptical a girl’s life could be saved by a dog while investigating the van Lagemaat killing, the inspector certainly believed it was so.

“What girl?”

“There was a prostitute in the car with the chief warden when he was ambushed, but her body wasn’t at the scene, leading me to believe that the shooters took her away. She’s a living witness or a missing corpse. Either way, we find her, and we may just find the shooters. I know where she was living and was going to bring a dog on site. Only, the trail is growing cold by the minute. What I fear most is the powers-that-be shutting me down for fear of embarrassing the memory of the dearly departed.”

Though this was a blend of half-truths and exaggerations, Moqoma could tell by Moosa’s silence that he finally had him.

“What if someone else calls up for a dog?”

“I only need him for a few hours,” Moqoma added quickly. “He’ll be back in his kennel before anyone even knows he’s gone.”

Moosa sighed. He stepped outside the training house where he’d taken the call and eyed the nearby kennel.

“I may have one for you. But if anything happens to this canine, no joke: It’ll be both our heads on a platter.”

“An American police dog?” Moqoma shouted when he arrived at the training grounds. He stared at Bones through the kennel wire. “Are you
befok
?”

“I thought you were desperate,” Moosa protested. “‘Any animal will do,’ right? Well, here’s ‘any animal.’”

Bones regarded the two men with curiosity, having woken from his nap to the sound of their approaching feet. His ears were at attention and his head cocked, as if listening for any clue as to their business with him.

“What about his handler?”

“His handler is sick and a bit of a dope anyway,” Moosa explained. “If anybody comes by, I can say that he was accidentally sent back into the city with our dogs or that he got sick and is at the vet, but it’s just dehydration and he’ll be fine. And I will keep to that story as long as you have him back here by tonight.”

Moqoma considered this a moment longer. He didn’t know how long he’d need the dog, but he didn’t want to alienate one of his few remaining allies.

“What’s his name?”

“Bones. He’s whip-smart and driven. One of the best animals I’ve seen.”

“But trained in the States?”

“This one seems to know what it’s doing.” Moosa shrugged.

Moqoma regarded the shepherd one last time. The animal rose to all fours, expectant and at attention.

“You have a chain?” the inspector asked.

Moosa placed one in Moqoma’s hand and nodded at the dog. “It’s all right, Bones. Moqoma may seem like a bad guy, but that’s for the humans. I’ve never seen him look cross-eyed at a dog.”

Moqoma stepped forward and clicked the leash onto Bones’s collar. He bent down and looked the dog in the eyes as he stroked his snout.

“I need this nose for a few hours. I also may need you to be an intimidating
brak
. But then back here to treats and relaxation and fun. Acceptable?”

Bones stared back at the inspector without moving. Nonetheless, he seemed to be giving off the tense, kinetic energy of one ready to be fired from a cannon.

“Good enough,” Moqoma replied.

By the time the inspector and his new partner made it back to the oceanfront brothel, several more officers had arrived and were milling about. Though a couple were higher on the food chain than Moqoma, he parked, off-loaded Bones, and hurried into the house with no explanation. Sibulele was in handcuffs now, but it appeared that the girls had been allowed to leave. He imagined they hadn’t gone too far. When Sibulele caught sight of him, she offered up her weariest look, wanting him to know that management had deemed her expendable. Moqoma turned away.

Sorry, ugogo.

He ushered Bones to Li’s bedroom and was gratified to find it empty. As he suspected, however, all of Li’s clothing and that of her roommates had long since been bagged and removed. This was a big case now, though it had little to do with the shooting of the Pollsmoor chief warden. A brothel this connected with the underworld meant a lot of handouts would be forthcoming to get the genie back in the bottle. Given the circumstances of van Lagemaat’s death, no widow was likely offering a reward for the apprehension of his killers.

For his part, Bones seemed to be enjoying the field trip quite a bit. There were all new smells to smell, sights to see, and people to interact with. After being out in the country for so long, the bustle and move of activity excited him.

“All right, Bones, get over here,” Moqoma quietly instructed, indicating Li’s lower bunk.

The shepherd obeyed as Moqoma pushed the blanket aside and slowly stripped the sheets and pillowcase.

“Unfortunately, this is as good a scent article as we have to work with. The upside is that the clothes were probably just washed before they were put away and smell more of detergent than the target, while it’s clear no one’s washed the sheets for weeks.”

Bones disinterestedly sniffed the sheets and pillowcase, seeming to isolate a scent. His nose bobbed from wrinkle to fold, as if trying to locate a hidden source.

The sight recalled to Moqoma the last dog he’d worked with, a shepherd named Robin. German shepherds in South African law enforcement recalled to many the bad old days of apartheid when white authorities would use the shepherds on blacks and coloreds, much the way they were used in the American South during the Civil Rights movement and, of course, in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. Still, when the opportunity to become a handler arose, Moqoma leapt at the chance, as he’d already had more than his share of personality conflicts with his first human partners.

But Robin was special, a keenly intelligent dog with better instincts than half the officers on the force. They’d worked together for three years and helped crack several cases. Many had been drug-related, Robin discovering caches of narcotics or weapons, but they’d also used her like a bloodhound to resolve missing persons cases.

But then, Moqoma made a decision he would regret for the rest of his life: He took a vacation. Really, it was just a seven-day leave to take a training course in Pretoria. He found out on day three that Robin was dead, killed in a raid on a hijacking ring while Robin was temporarily attached to the robbery squad.

When Moqoma returned, no one would tell him who Robin’s handler had been that day. He never was to find out. But the shooter was arrested the day of the raid. Moqoma hunted the man down in his cell, asking for “five minutes” with the prisoner. The man seemed to know who Moqoma was but didn’t have any idea as to what would come next.

Moqoma quickly went to work.

He thought of Robin’s terrific speed and shattered the shooter’s leg in three places. He remembered the dog’s amazing sense of smell and shattered the man’s nose. He recalled her ability to isolate sound and punched the man hard enough in the side of his head to deafen him in one ear. He was reminded of Robin’s intelligence and heart, and began kicking in the fellow’s ribcage and skull.

Though the shooter’s jailers knew what to expect, the violence the then-sergeant inflicted on the prisoner was out of bounds. Still, they let it go on for a few more seconds before rushing in to pull Moqoma out and away.

To Moqoma’s knowledge, the prisoner’s injuries were never reported, and he soon disappeared into the prison system. The next time Moqoma even heard the man’s name, it was when he was being transferred between Pollsmoor to Goodwood Prisons to make way for the inspector when he arrived, allegedly a “dirty cop,” but actually undercover with the DSO. By that point, the story of his attack on the young man was leaked anyway as part of his cover. Dirty cops were always ending up in prison, but it was never bad to go in with a violent reputation.

A day behind bars hadn’t gone by that Moqoma didn’t see himself as atoning for the death of Robin. As he worked to ingratiate himself to the target of his investigation, a low-level 28 inside Pollsmoor who was a major crime lord outside named Mduduzi “Roogie” Mogwaza, the lying and betrayal came that much easier knowing he was doing it for Robin.

As Bones finished sniffing the pillowcase, Moqoma was hit by a wave of melancholy. All that duplicity and deception for Robin, only to have the DSO disbanded under the same brand of lies and betrayal. And here he was again, trying to reach the outcome in a case that many would probably wish remained a mystery if not tied up with the simplest, most media-friendly resolution imaginable.

The dog eyed him expectantly again, as if reading his thoughts.

“Let’s go for a drive, Bones. See if my hunch is right this time.”

Jianguo Qin’s Camps Bay compound was modest by some standards. The main house was a six-bedroom affair, but with a conventional design that suggested a golf course–adjacent timeshare rather than the home of Cape Town’s most visible Chinese gangster. Though he had never so much as spent an hour in court, he had been implicated in an impressively diverse series of financial crimes involving South African real estate, banking, mining, shipping, and manufacturing interests. In one notorious and oft-cited incident, Qin found fourteen out of fifteen charges that were being prepared against him dropped, only to have the Justice Department pursue the fifteenth. It was the least of the allegations and related to environmental damages inflicted on a beach near a construction site. Qin was a majority shareholder in not only the firm doing the building, but also in the hotel whose resort was being built.

The infraction was minor and the fine negligible. Still, the Deputy Director of Public Prosecutions wanted to send a message that she would go after Qin wherever and in whatever capacity he was related to a crime. Qin sent a message of his own, but quietly. Out of nowhere, a bill was introduced in Parliament that would change the law in Qin’s favor. Before the Justice Department could even file a protest, it had been voted on and approved, soon to be signed into law. Though Qin’s name was never mentioned in connection with the bill, the primary and most immediate effects of which would be felt in Durban, there was no mistaking who was behind it.

When the Deputy Director was asked to resign a few months later after a slew of public failures, she did so without protest.

Meanwhile, Qin continued to live in his modest home, suggesting the lifestyle of a successful immigrant perhaps a couple of generations removed from tremendous wealth. In fact, the only thing that alluded to an unorthodox piece of property was the vast, walled-in backyard that took up three times as much space as the house. Rather than fill it with signs of status, there was a small pool and a guesthouse, but the rest was scrub. Though tended by a gardener, it was still an odd sight, particularly surrounded as it was by eight-foot walls.

But Moqoma understood its purpose from the moment he first saw it.

To begin with, it made the house look even smaller, as if the land had been bought before the price of construction was tallied. It appeared as if the builder, in this case Qin, had made a mistake or simply overextended himself. Who would suspect a man like that of everything the Justice Department accused him of?

Second, and perhaps more importantly, it kept any neighbors at a remove. Qin’s property took up almost an entire block. The nearest house to the east was at least a hundred meters away. To the west, easily fifty meters. There were a couple of houses across the street, but the main house was far enough back on the property that there were a good forty meters between Qin’s front door and the houses it faced.