Breeders (7 page)

Bruce shrugged, looking at the rest of the group. Moolman and de Vos did the same. “We don’t know.”

Alexa picked up their gear and slipped her BC back on. “We need to get down there again. There’s a container full of bodies.”

Bruce nodded grimly. “I suspected as much. The feet usually detach from the body with the onset of decay. If the feet were wearing sneakers with rubber soles, they would float to the surface.”
 

Eben de Vos moved closer, concern etched on his weary face. “How many?”

“More than forty. Closer to fifty.”

Moolman sucked in a sharp breath, and Bruce’s eyes narrowed into slits. Eben looked at her without any visible reaction. “You sure?”

“We’re sure,” Neil said as he stood up and started gathering his gear. “Let’s get some backup; I’m going down again.”

“But you’re injured,” Alexa said.

Neil shrugged. “Like you said, I have a tough nut.” He turned to Alexa with a challenging stare. “And I’ll be damned if I don’t figure out how those kids got down there.”

Alexa nodded. No use arguing with a concussed, hard-assed US Marine. Pain is weakness leaving the body. Oorah.

She turned to Barnes. “Do you have any underwater welding equipment?”

The skipper nodded then scampered to the side of the vessel and clipped open a storage compartment. “You’re in luck, I brought some extraction equipment.” He looked up and shrugged. “You know, we didn’t know what we would find.”

Alexa heaved the equipment bag onto the deck then dumped it overboard. “OK, let’s get going. Dad, could you call for some backup? I don’t want to be surprised again.”

Bruce nodded and punched a number into his phone.
 

“Gentlemen,” she said and gave a two-finger salute as Neil splashed into the water. “Prepare yourselves. This is going to be nasty.”

Alexa hesitated among the body bags that had been stacked side by side on the harbor wall, then stepped carefully over them and turned to look for Neil. He was sitting with his back against a metal oil drum. Bruce crouched next to him, his hand on Neil’s knee, speaking to him earnestly, probably consoling him, Alexa thought. Neil shook his head then leaned his head back against the drum, closing his eyes. She turned back.
 

There were five rows of small bodies laid out next to each other, ten bodies per row, their recovered skeletal remains packed neatly into white plastic bags and wrapped tight. Alexa shivered and rubbed her arms. Why she and Neil had packed them that way she didn’t know, five feet apart horizontally, two feet vertically, perfectly lined up.
 

They hadn’t discussed it, they just did it. Man’s irrepressible need to create order out of chaos, to rationalize the incomprehensible. See, neat little rows, they look better that way.
 

She pursed her lips then tried to swallow away the lump in her throat. She had only seen so many bodies once before—attending a rescue mission in Haiti after an earthquake had shaken the island.

There had been mass graves. But this was different. These were all kids. Young girls, aged between twelve and seventeen. Four baby boys, couldn’t have been older than a couple of months. One of them could have been hers.

Alexa and Neil had meticulously removed the tiny bodies, doing their best to keep the limbs intact as they wrapped them up and brought them to the surface. The skeletal remains were falling apart, loosely held together by decomposing pieces of skin and flesh. She stepped over a row of bodies then trudged toward where Neil was sitting.

He looked up and smiled when Alexa greeted him softly. She knew that smile, the one that only touched his lips, not his eyes. It had been gruesome work; they were both in a state of shock. “How you feeling?”

Neil chuckled, rubbing his eyes with his palms. “Numb.”

“Need a blanket?”

He looked at her with blank eyes. “Why’s everyone asking me that?”

She guessed he wasn’t cold. She rammed her hands down her pockets, shivering uncontrollably. She had to clamp her mouth shut to keep her teeth from chattering. The sharks had been the worst. They had become arrogant, attacking the pair of divers each time they had surfaced with a body. Neil later resorted to swimming with the blowtorch while Alexa brought the bodies up, waving it at the sharks when they came too close. She sighed and slumped down next to Neil, pulling her knees up to her chin, taking his hand in hers and resting her chin on it.
 

Neil put his arm around her shoulder but said nothing.

They heard hasty footsteps, and the chief inspector appeared, jogging up the crumbling concrete stairwell of the harbor wall, clutching on to the rusted handrail for balance. He looked around uncertainly, saw them, and walked briskly toward them, wringing his hands. “This place is cursed,” Moolman said, glancing sidelong at the bags. He made a face as if he had eaten something rotten before turning back to face them.

They kept quiet. She glanced up at Eben de Vos, who was standing on the wooden quay. He stood with his hands by his sides, his shoulders slumped forward. He probably thought that as mayor of Slander's Peak he needed to be there for moral support. Alexa thought differently. “What was his daughter’s name?” she asked Moolman.

“Alida.”

Alexa nodded.

“She was only eighteen.”

“What happened?”

“She was murdered up at Mueller’s Dam. She was found with her stomach cut open and her internal organs removed.”

“Some ritual?” Neil asked.

Moolman frowned at Neil, closed his eyes, and shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said with an almost imperceptible lift of his shoulders. “I don’t know anything for sure anymore; everything’s going to shit.”

“You think these events are related?” Neil asked.

Moolman turned to them, wisps of condensation drifting from his mouth as he spoke. “In my line of work, there usually aren’t coincidences.”

Alexa nodded, watching a tall, wiry man having an animated discussion with a teenager on the harbor wall. He slipped something from his pocket then handed it to the boy. He waved the boy away then walked toward them. He was clutching a flask beneath his arm and a stack of polystyrene cups in the other hand. He strode up to Eben and offered him a cup, then he poured a steamy brown liquid into it. Eben accepted it with a curt nod then continued to gaze out over the ocean, sipping his drink.

“Who’s he?” Alexa asked.

“Henry Theron, proprietor of the Howling Moon Pub.”

The man approached them and offered a cup to Alexa. He was all gangly arms and legs with an elongated head on a thin neck. He reminded her of a grasshopper. “Coffee?” he asked with an amiable smile.
 

Alexa took the cup he offered.

“I spiked it with some brandy,” he said, and the sides of his eyes crinkled into crow’s feet as he smiled. “For the nerves.”

Alexa sipped the strong broth. It burned her throat and heated her belly. “It’s good, thanks,” she said, meaning it. “Was that your boy?” she asked.

He cast Alexa an uncomprehending glance then smiled. “Nah. That’s Freddie, our waiter. We’re out of damn milk again. We should buy a cow; it would be cheaper.”

Alexa nodded.
 

The other men accepted their cups, and they sat or stood in silence, sipping. The man stood around uncomfortably for a few seconds then nodded apologetically and loped away.

“How are you feeling?” Moolman asked Neil, concern in his eyes. “You’re awfully quiet.”

Neil looked straight ahead. “Headache. Slight concussion, nothing much to say. Any idea who the guys in the chopper were?”
 

Moolman shook his head. “We visited the private airfields in the area. No sighting of any unmarked Robinsons.” He held the cup to his lips pensively. “And of course all the official airfields wouldn’t let an unmarked craft land.”

Alexa drained her cup then said, “A Robinson can travel more than two hundred nautical miles, so halve that distance to get here and back, and that should be the potential search area.”

Moolman whistled. “That’s huge.”

”They need to be close to an airfield to get low-lead aviation fuel,” Bruce said.

Moolman nodded. “I’ll get my deputy to check it out.”

Eben de Vos trudged toward them, a resolute look on his face, big blasts of moist air billowing from his mouth when he spoke. “Fancy a sherry?”
 

“Why not?” Moolman answered, looking at his watch. “I guess there’s nothing better to do until forensics arrives.”

Neil stood up and put his arm around Alexa’s waist. “Let’s go get smashed.”

The pub was bright and warm, a large, wraparound window providing a clear view of the harbor and the surroundings. A log fire crackled in a fireplace with a black chimney that went up to the roof. It smelled of smoke and sea and roast meat cooking in the kitchen. Jack Hammer softly thrummed the blues from hidden speakers, and the tones of murmured conversation quieted momentarily as they walked to a booth at the back.

Neil slid in next to Alexa, and everybody shifted into the semicircular, padded bench until Alexa was firmly wedged in the middle. Theron ambled closer on his stilt-like frame and took their drink orders—sherries and beers all round.

“Any news on your girl?” Neil asked Eben.

Eben looked up from his bucket-like hands with a grim expression. “No, nothing. The inspector over here believes that the drownings and her murder are somehow related,” he said, pulling the beanie off of his dark mop of curly hair and stuffing the knitted cap into an oversized jacket pocket. “If Interpol could send someone to get to the bottom of this sometime soon, I guess we’ll find out what happened to my Alida.”

Neil didn’t react to the doleful call to action. The man was hurting, but he wasn’t the only one. He didn’t have to extract fifty goddamn bodies from the effluvial depths of a metal tomb eighty feet below the ocean surface. Neil ground his teeth but kept quiet.

“Tell us about her,” Alexa said, obviously trying to lighten the tone.

Eben de Vos scratched at the table with a dirty nail. He looked up. “She was beautiful,” he said then lowered his eyes to the table. “Inside and out.”

Did the big man just sob? Neil berated himself. All people were selfish, according to Karl Marx. He felt a pang of guilt as he looked at the man.

Theron delivered their drinks, splashing some beer onto the table without bothering to clean it up. Eben held up a big paw toward the proprietor. “Wait.” He threw the sherry into the back of his gullet and then drained the beer with two big swallows. He clanked the glass down on the table. “Another round.” He looked at the rest of the group. “Anyone else?”
 

They shook their heads.

He held a hand to his mouth, burped, breathed in deeply, and let it out slowly. “I guess she was an introvert. She gets that from her mother. She liked to keep to herself.”

“Was she popular at school?” Neil asked.

Eben shook his head. “Like I said, she was an introvert; she didn’t mix easily.”

“But she had a boyfriend?”

Eben’s eyes hardened. “Yes, Dr. Petzer’s kid. I forgot his name.”

“Jake,” Moolman chimed in.

“Yes, the man’s new in town. They moved here a couple of months ago. His father’s the medical doctor up at the mining operation.”

Neil saw Alexa’s ears perk up. She called it a “gut hunch”: it happened whenever she thought something was pertinent to a case. He guessed it was women’s instinct or something absurd and unfamiliar to normal men. He knew the look she got. Her eyebrows rose, she flicked her long bangs back behind an ear—as if she could hear better that way—and her green eyes sparkled.

“Mining operation?” she asked, licking her lower lip like a dog smelling a bone.

Eben frowned. “Yes, they’re doing some exploratory work for Petra Exploratory Projects. PEP wants to frack for oil in the Karoo.” He looked up as Theron approached with his drinks. “Their admin offices are located here at the harbor, but the base is way back over the mountain. They bring in their supplies then they drive them over the mountain to the mine.”

Eben quaffed the glass of sherry that Theron had put in front of him then placed it back on the tray and ordered a refill. He took a sip of beer and wiped the froth from his moustache. “Slander’s Bay is fortunate to have one of the deepest harbors on the west coast, no problem for mooring large container ships.”

“So there’s an exploratory mining operation backed by big money a couple of miles from here?” Alexa asked.

“Yes, why?” Moolman asked.

“And they deliver containers and ship them up to the dig beyond the mountain?”

“I guess,” Moolman said uncertainly.

“Containers which could contain bodies that need to be buried?”

Bruce nodded slowly. “Or low-lead aviation fuel.”
 

Alexa bit her lip. “This boy, Jake, you’ve spoken to him?”
 

Eben nodded. “Yes, he said he didn’t know anything.”

“I spoke to him yesterday. He said he found a letter from Alida,” Moolman said.