A Madness of Sunshine

by Singh, Nalini

  “Just follow the track back.” Will had his mind on the mental map. “I’m going to check out something.”

  Neither man turned around; they were probably afraid he’d lost it and would wander off into the wild unless contained.

  The SOCOs stayed silent, but fell back so that they were walking pretty much alongside Will.

  Five minutes later, he stopped. “There’s your crime scene.”

  The two detectives moved past the rest of them, the younger one saying, “Well, fuck!”

  “Shit, Will”—­Robert took a stick of gum from his ­pocket—­“there’s a goddamn plaque commemorating the spot where the water bottle was found.” He crumpled up the gum wrapper.

  “Yes, anyone could’ve chosen the location to lead you on a ­wild-­goose chase,” Will said, but he didn’t believe it.

  The killer had returned to the location of his past glory.

  52

  Will made a quick stop to call Anahera after he was out of sight of the police presence at the dump site. “Be very careful,” he told her. “You’re a couple of inches too tall, but otherwise, you fit the same profile as the missing hikers.” It had been her laugh last ­night—­he’d seen it then, the vital wildness of spirit evident in those other women.

  Even with that, it had taken him until the conversation with Robert to realize the dangerous similarity. He didn’t think of Anahera as ­petite—­she had too big a presence. But in a purely physical sense, she was only ­five-­six and weighed less than she should. She also had the right skin tone and hair color. “I know you’re tough,” he added, “but this guy is a psychopath.”

  “Don’t worry, cop,” she said. “I’m staying with Matilda, helping her with whatever she ­needs—­right now, that’s making sure the iwi liaison officer knows what’s important to her. She kicked Steve out a couple of days ago, so he’s not an issue.”

  Exhaling silently, Will leaned his head back against the headrest. “As far as I know, no one else in town matches the profile.” Most fell outside the height or weight range. The ones that didn’t either had significant tattoos, smoked, or had short hair, traits not shared by any of the three hikers.

  “If you think of someone,” he told Anahera, “pass on the warning.” Will didn’t much care if he got disciplined for sharing unauthorized information with civilians; if it kept a woman alive, he’d wear the punishment.

  “Matilda knows everybody. I’ll get her talking, find out who we need to ­warn—­she’ll feel better if she thinks she’s doing something to help.”

  “I’m driving to Christchurch.” To the forensic mortuary where Miriama had been taken. “I need to find out what Miriama has to tell us.”

  Her response ­was… unexpected. “You be careful, too. It looks like the rain is finally going to come down.”

  “I will,” he said before hanging up.

  It had been a long time since anyone cared what happened to him. He wasn’t sure quite what to do with it, but it didn’t feel like a burden or a cage. Anahera, he knew, would never seek to hold on. She might invite him in, but the choice to enter or not would be his.

  He pulled out just as the rain began to hit his windscreen, had gone only a few meters when Tom Taufa’s plumbing van appeared heading in the opposite direction, into Golden Cove. The bearded man raised a hand to him in greeting as they drove by one another.

  Will considered what he’d learned of Tom’s past and made a quick call to Kim. “Keep a quiet eye on Tom Taufa, the plumber. He should be stopping at the café within the next five minutes.” Tom always did when passing through the Cove’s main street.

  “You want me to head on over there and strike up a conversation?”

  “Yes.” Kim had the ability to talk to anyone and, underneath her stolid exterior, was good at picking up nonvocal cues. “Bring up the find at the dump, gauge his reaction.”

  “Person of interest?”

  “I don’t know.” It was the timeline that bothered ­him—­one ­long-­ago summer, Tom had experienced shame and humiliation because of a young woman. The next summer, three young women disappeared. “Call me if he sets off any alarm bells for you.”

  “I’m on it.”

  Hanging up, Will began the nearly ­four-­hour drive toward the hopeless scent of a beautiful young woman’s death.

  53

  Anahera sat watching the rain from the covered back stoop of Matilda’s house, occasional droplets bouncing off the walls to collide against her skin. She’d finally gotten a ­worn-­out Matilda to rest by telling her it was no use her rushing to go to Miriama if she collapsed when she got there. Which left Anahera free to think about the past, and a horror that had marked Golden Cove without anyone ever admitting to the darkness beneath the sunshine.

  She remembered that summer, remembered the clear sunlight and the heat that had built in fine ­sky-­blue layers.

  Their group, they’d all been down on the beach as often as not. Josie, Anahera, Vincent, Daniel, Nikau, and Keira. Tom and Christine and Peter had floated in and out, but the six of them had been the core.

  “You lot are as thick as thieves,” Anahera’s mother used to say with a laugh. They’d been close enough to venture into the water even when it wasn’t quite safe, when it was an adventure on the edge between safety and danger. Close enough to build bonfires on the beach after dark.

  Close enough to make out under the stars.

  Her lips curved. She’d almost forgotten playing truth or dare and being dared to kiss a blushing Vincent. She’d taken the dare, and he’d gone red to the very tips of his ears. Daniel had teased him endlessly about it, but back then, there’d been no malice to the teasing, all of the laughing words and shared memories weaving the threads of their friendship ever tighter.

  There’d been no malice in any of them. They’d just been teenagers growing into adulthood, coltish and full of dreams. It felt awful to think it now, but even the discovery of the water bottle and the possibility of a lost ­hiker—­then ­two—­hadn’t really changed things.

  Yes, they’d talked about it and those with experience in the bush had helped with the search, but it had seemed like a distant thing. Not only were the two women strangers, they were adults. In their mid to late twenties, from what Anahera remembered. She and the others hadn’t identified with either one, never worried about themselves, not seeing anything of their youth in those two adult faces.

  Then Tom and Josie, sneaking into the cave to make out, had found the bracelet.

  Their group had disbanded naturally and inevitably in the ­aftermath—­Daniel and Vincent off to their private schools; Josie attached at the hip to Tom, her official boyfriend by summer’s end; Anahera so desperate to get out of Golden Cove that she’d begun to study as hard as Nikau always had, while spending every spare moment on the piano; Keira flying back to Auckland because the school terms were her mother’s, the summers her father’s; and Nikau, writing letters to Keira alongside intricate essays for school that won him awards and scholarships and pride.

  ­Peter… Anahera frowned. She couldn’t remember what Peter had been doing. Probably because she’d kept her distance from him even then, but she had a vague memory of Christine’s fists bunching and her face going hot and hard when Peter’s name was mentioned, so it was possible the two of them had hooked up over the summer and it had come to a bad end.

  Looking back, that had been the last summer they’d all been together and all been friends. After that, it had splintered piece by piece, so slowly that Anahera hadn’t truly noticed at the time.

  Her phone rang in her hand.

  Seeing that it was Josie, she answered it. Her friend had heard about the find out by the dump. It wasn’t surprising that she didn’t know about Miriama. People had been focused on the dump by the time the second forensic crew came in, would’ve assumed it was all connected.

  No one in the Cove expected so much death in the space of a single day.

  “They’re saying Shane
Hennessey found a skeleton,” Josie said. “Did Will tell you anything?”

  So, it had already gotten around that Will’s SUV had gone out toward her cabin last night and not returned till morning.

  That was the town Anahera remembered, the town that had suffocated her, the town where there were no ­secrets—­and far too many hidden things. “Not about that,” she said. “There’s something else, though, Josie, but you can’t share it.” She knew her best friend loved gossip, loved the very things about Golden Cove that had threatened to stifle Anahera’s spirit. She also knew that Josie would never betray her.

  “You know me, Ana,” her friend said. “I never tell your secrets.”

  Veiled in between those words was a secret Anahera had shared with Josie fifteen years ago. That same hazy summer. A secret only the two of them now knew because Anahera’s mother was dead, and with her, the name of the man she’d loved while a married woman.

  Haeata had let it slip one night while she was ­drunk—­such a rare thing that Anahera couldn’t remember any other time she’d seen her mother with a drink in her ­hand—­and she’d said enough that Anahera had hoped her father wasn’t her father. Such a false dream that had been; the mirror showed her too many echoes of the brute her mother had married.

  “I know,” she said to her best friend. “You’ve never let me down.”

  “I’ll never forget how you held my hand when we sneaked off on the bus to buy”—­her voice ­dropped—­“­you-­know-­what.”

  Anahera felt a fleeting smile cross her face at the memory of that secret trip out of town to get condoms when Josie decided to sleep with Tom. It had always been Josie who’d set the milestones in her relationship. Tom might be big and strong, but he was putty in Josie’s hands and always had been. “Here’s the thing,” Anahera began. “The remains might have something to do with the missing hikers back when we were kids.”

  “Good lord. Imagine that, she’s been lying out there all this time.”

  Anahera knew what Josie wasn’t yet ready to see. She’d thought back to the map pinned up inside the fire station, realized searchers had combed through that area while looking for Miriama. And the idea of no one passing through there in more than a decade simply didn’t hold water. It was too close to the dump, too near a favorite trail used by hunters.

  The remains had been placed there for an unlucky walker to find.

  And how strange that all of the summer kids were back in Golden Cove when it happened. Anahera, Nikau, Vincent, Josie and Tom, Daniel and Keira. Even Christine and Peter. They’d all, but for Josie and Tom, traveled the world, seen cities that had been ancient before the first rock was broken in Golden Cove, and yet here they were, back home as the ghosts of the past began to rise.

  “Do you know anyone in the Cove who looks like me?” she asked Josie. “Same height, skin tone, hair, that kind of thing.” Matilda hadn’t been able to think of anyone Anahera hadn’t already considered and warned. All probably fell outside the killer’s preferred profile for one reason or another, but Anahera had thrown a wide net. Just in case.

  This time, Josie sucked in a breath. “Oh, my God, I remember now. Those women, the way they ­looked… you grew up to look like them.”

  “You see why I’m asking. I’ve already called around to a few women.” She listed the names.

  “Okay,” Josie said through shallow breaths, “let me think.” A long pause before she said, “This isn’t connected to Miriama, then, is it?” So much hope in the words. “I mean, she doesn’t look anything like you.”

  It seemed a huge coincidence to Anahera that a beautiful young woman would go missing in the same small town that might’ve been a serial killer’s hunting ground, and the two not to be connected, but none of it fit. All three hikers had vanished off the face of the earth. Miriama had been found. And no one could control the ocean.

  “Hold on, I’ve got to serve a customer.” Josie was gone for two minutes and when she came back, her voice shook. “It was Evelyn. She said there were police down by the beach, too, and she saw them load something on a stretcher into a big van.”

  Anahera knew this news wasn’t hers to tell. And Matilda wasn’t ready to handle an avalanche of sympathy. “He’s still a cop, Josie,” she said instead of answering the implied question. “He doesn’t share everything.”

  “And here I thought you were going to be my new source of fresh gossip.” Josie’s voice continued to tremble.

  “Take a breath,” Anahera said gently. “Another. One more.”

  When Josie could finally speak again without breaking, she said, “The good news is, I can’t think of anyone else in town who really ­fits… what do they call it? The victim profile, that’s it. All those years of watching crime shows have finally come in handy.”

  Anahera tracked a fantail as the small bird with its showy tail hopped from branch to branch. “That’s good.”

  “No,” Josie cried, “it’s not good! It means that you’re the only possible target in Golden Cove.”

  54

  Will walked through the familiar corridors that led to the forensic mortuary. It was always cold here, as if all the death that passed through had permanently stained the building.

  He met no one on his journey; hardly surprising when the world outside was fading to darkness. But he knew Ankita would be waiting. Pushing through another set of doors, he clenched his gut, and went to enter the room where his friend and colleague probably had Miriama on a cold metal slab.

  The door opened from the other side.

  “Will.” Ankita was still wearing her scrubs, though she’d removed her gloves and apron, and the smell that clung to her was of death gone to rot. “Perfect ­timing—­I just finished the postmortem.” The harsh fluorescent lighting caused an appearance of pallor even in the dark brown of her skin. “Come on, we’ll talk in my office.”

  Will had no desire to see Miriama cut open. Not that laughing girl who’d brought him cake and told him she’d be back in a couple of days with another piece to tempt him.

  He followed Ankita down the hall.

  Once inside her office, she went to the coffee carafe on a side table, touched her hand to it. “I need to give a certain forensic tech a raise.” She poured two mugs. “We can go outside if the smell’s bothering you.”

  It coated the insides of Will’s nose by now, the rot and the loss. “No, let’s talk here.” Miriama deserved the respect and Will had smelled death before, survived it. At least it wasn’t the smell of burned flesh.

  His stomach turned.

  Placing one mug on his side of the desk, Ankita carried hers around and sank into the battered black leather of her chair. Will took off his jacket before he sat down in the visitor chair.

  In front of him, Ankita’s desk was as meticulously organized as always. Her compulsively neat nature was partly what made her such a good pathologist. Ankita never accepted anything at face value. With her, Will could be certain every suspicious bruise would be examined with a critical eye, every indication of a toxic substance analyzed.

  She would do Miriama justice.

  “How was the drive?”

  Will shrugged. “Rain,” he said. “You know what it does to otherwise sane drivers.”

  “Yes, I caught a bit of that on the way in, too.” Putting down her coffee after taking a long drink, the pathologist leaned her forearms on the desk. “You know the problem with a body that’s been submerged in water. Added to that, there was a significant delay before I had her on my table.”

  “Did you manage to find anything?”

  “The water did so much damage to your girl that there wasn’t a lot for me to find. The bruises, cuts, abrasions, the chunks missing from her flesh, it can all be explained by the waves crashing the body against rocks, and by animal predation.”

  Will would never forget Miriama’s body lying on the beach, her beauty eradicated by the ­sea—­and by the person who’d put her there. “Bones?”

 
; “Badly shattered. Her face looks like a cracked eggshell.” Ankita pushed across an X-­ray that, when Will held it up to the light, told a violent story. “Impossible to determine if it happened ­peri-­ or postmortem.” Putting down the pen she’d picked up, she leaned back in her chair. “But, I’m suspicious about a pattern of fractures and breaks along the ­left-­hand side of her body.”

  “As if she fell or was thrown against a hard surface on that side?”

  Ankita nodded. “If someone threw her from the cliffs and onto the rocks below, and she landed this way”—­the pathologist used the flat of her hand to demonstrate the ­angle—­“it could conceivably have caused the pattern.”

  She took a sip of her coffee. “I wish I could tell you more, but with the body being in the sea that long, it makes things difficult. I’m going to send the details through to one of my colleagues who has more experience with ocean damage, get a second opinion. The rest of what I’m about to tell you is pure conjecture based on over a decade of experience and my gut.”

  Will put the X-­ray back on her desk, a sudden cold invading his blood. “She drowned,” he said quietly, all the while hoping Ankita would tell him he was wrong.

  But she nodded. “I’m going to do a diatom test, but even if it comes back positive, I won’t officially be able to call it a drowning. Still, all the broken bones aside, that’s how I think she died.”

  “Tell me you have something else.” Because both a fall and a drowning could be explained away as accidental, but Miriama simply wouldn’t have made that kind of a mistake.

  “Your victim was pregnant. Three months, give or take.”

  Will sat motionless for a long minute before reaching forward to put his coffee on the desk between them. “You’re sure?”

  “The decomposition hadn’t quite destroyed her uterus.” Ankita picked up the pen again, clicking and unclicking it. “I’m certain.”