Hounds of the Underworld (The Path of Ra Book 1)

by Dan Rabarts

  “Yeah,” says Tanner, “him with the tats. He’s not one of ours.”

  Damn. She knew she should’ve made Matiu wait outside.

  Like you could ever make Matiu do something he didn’t want to.

  “Um, he’s my driver.”

  “Driver, eh?” Tanner lifts an eyebrow.

  “Yes.”

  “You two married?”

  “No!”

  “Really? Because the look you just threw him was like the one my wife gave me this morning when I took the three-day-old sweats out of my gym bag.”

  Penny stifles a grimace. “It’s just…he’s my brother.”

  “Really?” That eyebrow again. Good one. Consultant brings baby brother to crime scene. Penny can just imagine how that will go down in the department lunchroom. “He doesn’t look like your brother.”

  “Same mother, different father.” Not exactly true, but Penny isn’t about to give a genealogy lecture at a crime scene. Tanner scrutinises them with his detective gaze, first Penny, then Matiu, then he shrugs. “That figures…” he says. “Yeah, what is it, Clark?”

  “Sorry to interrupt, Sir, but Ms Taylor was wondering when she might be able to leave? She says she has to meet a client. She’s getting quite agitated. I told her that you wouldn’t be long, but that was before you got on the phone…”

  Tanner heaves a sigh. “OK, let’s go talk to her.”

  Originally, Penny had thought the woman was in her forties, but on closer inspection, she revises her estimate up a decade. It looks as if a good percentage of the agent’s sales commissions have been spent—along with her lunch hours—in one of Auckland’s drop-in enhancement salons. With her mustard pantsuit and over-teased mane, Patisepa is vaguely leonine. Not to mention roaring mad.

  “Detective, I’d like to help you, but I really must go.”

  “Just a few more questions, if you don’t mind, Ms Taylor.” Tanner’s tone is smooth. “You say, you found the room locked?”

  “That’s right. I already told Officer Clark everything.”

  “It was locked, you say?”

  The agent rolls her eyes. “I keyed in the code and it wouldn’t let me in.”

  “Did you consider that someone might have changed the code?”

  Now Patisepa folds her arms across her chest. “Why does it matter how I got in? If you must know, I have the master code. It’s supposed to override any other code, and this is just a storeroom, after all. When it didn’t, I assumed it was jammed, so I got someone and we broke in. And that’s what we found. Over there. All that blood! And my vendor, Mr Fletcher’s clothes sitting in a pile right there!” She exhales pointedly, through flared nostrils, like a highly strung race-horse.

  Tanner isn’t intimidated. “How do you know they’re his clothes?”

  “It’s his polo shirt.”

  “This is an Auckland Blues Super Soy polo. Thousands of people must own this shirt.”

  Taylor shrugs. “I don’t know. It looks like his polo. He was wearing one just like that the last time I saw him.”

  “And when was that?”

  “Four days ago, I think. I’d have to check my diary. I dropped in at his office to set up today’s viewing.”

  “Sir?”

  Penny and Tanner turn to look at Clark.

  “Well?”

  “I’ve had the department trying to track down the building owner—this Darius Fletcher that Ms Taylor refers to—and it turns out he was reported missing by his sister…” Clark consults his notepad. “…a Miss Rose Fletcher on the first of November. Seems Darius planned a late supper with his sister on Halloween but he never showed up.”

  “Why didn’t I know this?” Tanner storms. Penny has to admire the way Clark doesn’t wince.

  “Sir, the person in question was an adult. Uniforms on the desk figured Fletcher got a better offer than dinner with his sister. And maybe that better offer extended to more than one evening. The Desk didn’t think there was anything to investigate, so they…they filed it.”

  Tanner’s stare fixes his junior. “So, at this point what we have is enough blood to fill a small aquifer but what we don’t have, is any idea of whether Fletcher is missing, or dead?”

  Patisepa taps a patent court shoe. “What’s the difference? All that blood? I imagine my client will be put off buying now.”

  - Matiu -

  “You stay out of it.”

  Matiu talks into his collar. He doesn’t need to speak loud for Makere to hear him. Sure as hell doesn’t need anyone hearing him talking to himself. They already think he’s pōrangi. No point giving them any more reason to believe it.

  “I’m not getting into this. Nothing to do with me.”

  Matiu stares at the bowl, biting his lip as the voice drifts at him from the shadows of empty cabinets at his back. The stick figures carved on the bowl’s skin shiver a little, as if trying to free spindly limbs from their wooden prison, from their etched fishing poles and canoes, like they want to step away from that time-frozen sea, flee whatever lurks beneath the black ink.

  “But you want to know what happened, don’t you?”

  Matiu glances at the others, all talking, taking notes, buried in their thoughts and assumptions. Surely they won’t notice if he has a look.

  He steps over the tape, reaches for the bowl.

  A quick step here, a stretch, and it’s in his hands. A long string of black and red gore clings to it as he steps back.

  The walls scream at him.

  He drops the bowl with a clatter, and from the shouts he knows that Penny is screaming at him too, and the cop is yelling. He barely hears, the white noise ringing in his ears. Matiu staggers, skids in the muck, goes down on one knee. Then Penny’s there, dragging him back, the yellow tape tangling his shins.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” she hisses. “You can’t go touching the evidence. Now we have to eliminate you as a suspect, you moron.”

  But Matiu doesn’t hear her. The bowl rolls long lazy circles on the clean floor, catching in the sticky blood. He sees its sides coated in red. Remembers, without remembering, the hot spill. Remembers the hunger.

  “Why did I ever let you come down here?” Penny grumbles, hoisting him to his feet. For a techie, she’s surprisingly strong. Or maybe it’s just that Matiu’s bones feel suddenly thin, light as a ghost. Some days he feels like the air can just pass straight through him. Some days, he’s sure it does.

  “Go wait in the car,” Penny growls. “I can’t afford for you to screw this up for me.”

  Matiu shakes her off, casting a look over her shoulder at the cop, his thunderstorm brow. If he wasn’t her brother, and a driver, he’d be locking him up, Matiu knows. He gives him a cold grin. Can’t be worse than where he’s already been. “You don’t want to take this on, sis,” he says, keeping his voice low so the cop won’t hear. “It’s uglier than it looks.”

  Penny glares at him. “Why don’t you just leave the science to the experts? I’ll be down once I’ve got what we need to take back to the lab. Now get out of here.”

  Matiu shrugs, walks away without another word, leaving Pandora and the cops to their work. The warehouse echoes around him, and he holds his hands to his ears to keep out the hollow ringing of his own footsteps, of the screams that resonate back up from the brief moment when he touched the bowl. Felt the rush of life, death, intermingling.

  It’s his blessing, his curse, to feel the veil that lies between the worlds, to touch it as it slips and slides in his grasp, rasps along his senses, teases at his dreams. Not that Penny, with her blinkered commitment to scientific process and logical explanations, has ever been willing to accept that. She is her father’s daughter after all, just like he is his mother’s son.

  “Aren’t you glad you
did it?”

  He doesn’t bother looking for Makere; knows that if he does all he’ll see is a hunched form turned away from him, long raven hair falling over his shoulders, more figment than form, a hint of someone glanced in a crowd, never quite where you expect him to be. But there, no less. Not that anyone else can see or hear him. Makere is Matiu’s other curse, his other blessing, though some days he doesn’t think of him as either of those. Sometimes he’s just a right royal pain in the arse. Has been, ever since they were kids.

  Outside, the sky is as hard a blue as ever, the temperature quickly climbing as the sun gets up. It’ll be another hot one, and it’s not even December. The bloom in the harbour will start to stink fairly soon, and the wind off the Hauraki Gulf will spread it over Auckland’s hills and suburbs. But the stink of death seems to hang on Matiu, the stink of everything that’s so wrong about this scene, hanging around and refusing to leave him alone, just like Makere. Crossing to the car, he leans against the door and runs his hands through his thick dark hair, lank around his neck, sweating in the sun beneath his leather coat. The tainted factory looms against the perfect sky, its face cast in shadow and quietly mocking him.

  Something happened here, something dark and deadly that crept up from the earth and crawled among the shadows. Maybe murder, maybe not. Maybe something Penny shouldn’t be getting caught up in. For all that she’s a pedantic pain in the arse, her worldview hemmed in by their parents’ expectations of her and her own misconceptions of reality, she’s still his sister. He has to keep her from this shit as best he can, and if she’s too stubborn to walk away, then he’ll have to hang on her like a bad smell so that when it all turns sour, he might be near enough to do something. That’s what family’s for, right?

  Yeah, right.

  CHAPTER 2

  - Pandora -

  Penny wishes she didn’t have to come straight back to the lab. Grubbing around in the detritus at Fletcher Enterprises has left her feeling grimy. Crime scenes always do this to her. A shower would’ve been nice: a good scrub using a shower brush and a decent dose of 4-chloro-3,5-dimethylphenol soap, with its antibacterial properties and distinctive pine smell. She sighs as she pushes open the door to the lab with the back of her hand. She’ll just have to make do with a box of antiseptic wipes instead. Inside, she deposits her satchel and the bagged samples on the bench, taking care that the little bowl doesn’t roll off onto the floor. Just a glimpse of the bowl’s crudely carved rim reminds her of Matiu, and instantly her hackles rise. That idiot. What did he have to go and touch it for? Penny could’ve throttled him. She’d said stay out of the way.

  Stay. Out. Of. The. Way.

  What’s not to understand? But no, Matiu can’t even get that simple instruction right. And what was the deal with his ridiculous paranoia over this little bowl…?

  Penny stomps to the cupboard and takes a lab coat off the hook. Too big. This must be Beaker’s spare one. Jeepers. What is it with guys today? How many times has she told him to hang his lab coats on the right? Replacing the lab coat on the correct hook, she slips on her own, just as the coat-hook culprit comes out of the chemical store.

  “Hey, you’re back.”

  “You know, Beaker, some days you astound me with your powers of observation,” she says, laying it on, but they both know there’s no malice in her words. Why berate poor Beaker for her problems? Truth be told, it’s lovely to come home to the lab and find him here, like a loyal sheep dog, waiting on the porch. And Beaker is loyal: the only one who really supported her when the shit hit the fan. She knows that kind of devotion shouldn’t be exploited: it could come back to bite her. Besides, Beaker deserves more. It’s not his real name, of course. A scientist called Beaker? Hardly original. Grant Deaker is the name on the payslips, but Beaker’s passion for bench-work, together with a striking resemblance to the century-old cult figure, made freshly famous by the animated show that ran on MTV in the 2030s, means no one calls him anything else, not even his mother.

  “So, how’d it go? Did we get the contract?”

  Penny can almost see his tail wag. Pulling her lab stool over to the bench, she sits down and leans on her elbows. “Seems like it.”

  “No way. How?”

  “Gee, Beaker,” she says wryly. “Thanks for the confidence.”

  “I didn’t mean it like that. You know I didn’t. I meant how did they—”

  “Find us? Cordell, apparently.”

  Beaker’s eyes widen. “You’re kidding me.”

  Penny shakes her head. “Nope.”

  A frown. “You sure there isn’t a catch? There’s got to be a catch. Cordell doesn’t do anything for nothing. He’s so…calculating. I can’t believe that you—” Beaker breaks off, his blush as red as his hair.

  Pretending not to hear his last comment, Penny makes a show of sorting through the labelled samples on the bench. “I don’t think Cordell was doing us any favours. It’s more about taking some heat off LysisCo. Apparently, the department has seventeen—no, make that eighteen—cases on at the moment. And that’s just on the southern side of the city. The way the police super told it, there’s an epidemic of brutality going down, and only his department to hold back the floodgates of hell.”

  “In conclusion, there’s too much work on so Cordell’s thrown us his dregs.”

  “Probably, but beggars can’t be choosers, Beaks.”

  Ain’t that the truth? The last time Penny checked it—just this morning after breakfast—her bank account was running precariously low. She figures she has enough of her savings to last maybe another month. After that she’ll have to let Beaker go. Sell off the equipment. Admit defeat. She doesn’t want to have to do that.

  And give Cordell the satisfaction? Like hell.

  “Pand—” Her head snaps up. “Sorry—Penny—what exactly are we working on?”

  “Oh, yes. We haven’t got much time. It’d be helpful to have some information before I interview the victim’s…” Is Fletcher a victim? Is he even missing? Penny doesn’t know. She trails off. Instead, she removes the adhesive samples from her satchel. “There’s this blood…”

  Beaker cocks his head.

  “You’re certain it’s blood?”

  “Uh-huh,” says Penny. “I did a presumptive test at the site: took a swab and tested it with TMB and peroxidase. Lovely blue-green colour indicating the presence of a haem group. So, at least we know it’s blood.”

  Beaker cocks his head again. Penny smiles. That consistency is one of the things she likes about him. He may not be able to tell his coat hooks apart, but Beaker is a stickler for method. There’s always a chance of false positives with indicator tests, which means the substance sampled might not be blood at all.

  Beaker is cheery. “Want me to do a crystal confirmation?” he asks.

  Slipping off the lab stool, Penny shakes her head. “Microscope’s quicker.” She lifts off the dust cover and turns on the apparatus, then sets about preparing a blood slide, chatting to Beaker as she works. “It was like something out of a TV show. Locked room. Blood—” She pops the slide on the stage and sets the clips, then corrects herself. “Possibly blood everywhere. And the weirdest thing, there was no body. I thought it was creepy, but it completely freaked Matiu out. And I didn’t think anything shocked him much.” She twists the objective into place, then fiddles with the fine focus. “Well, it’s definitely blood because we have erythrocytes, leukocytes—quite a few of them are neutrophils… Hey, Beak, look at this.” She moves aside to allow her colleague a peek down the eyepiece. “Check out the erythrocytes.”

  He steps back. “I’m not sure I know what I’m looking for.”

  Penny leans in again, adjusting the magnification up for sharper focus. “I don’t know. I guess I’m out of practice using these old light microscopes, but I thought I saw a central pallor in these red blood cel
ls.”

  “You think the sample might not be human?” Beaker edges her out of the way. “The size looks OK. Biconcave. 7μm.”

  “Possibly a dog? Their red cells are comparable to ours.” Although how a dog might be involved, Penny couldn’t say. Still, it seems the case might not be as sinister as they first thought. If the blood found at the scene is all of canine origin—and they won’t know that until they’ve checked all the samples—then it’s possible that the only victim could be someone’s pooch. Horrible enough, although in that case, it would mean that Fletcher is only missing, and not murdered, and Tanner has one less case to worry about.

  But Beaker is already off after a stick, heading towards the chemical store, delighted to have something to chase. “No sweat, Penny, I’ll check for dog erythrocyte antigen. That way we can rule it out.”

  “I’ll make a start on the clothes, then.”

  He waves his hand in agreement. “Put some tunes on, will you?”

  A minute later, the two of them have their heads down working, Gen Zedders’ latest remix blasting through the lab.

  “Penny?” Beaker says, an hour and a half later. Penny can hardly hear him over the grumbling of her stomach. Damn, she’s missed lunch and Matiu should be here soon. Meanwhile, all she’s managed to do is eliminate his dirty great thumbprint from the bowl. Although, to be fair, it wasn’t particularly hard. There were only two sets, and Penny would bet her flailing bank account the other set belongs to Darius Fletcher.