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

by Dan Rabarts

  Penny’s stomach flips. She’d forgotten about the chips. She pats her pocket with her free hand. Empty. She must have dropped the bag when she heard the shot and ran from the shed. Maybe it was just as well she did. Could she have left any prints on it? Possibly. She’d been in a hurry.

  “You still there?” Clark asks.

  “Yes, yes. Sorry. It’s just, I’m just taking it all in. Three deaths.”

  “You’re telling me. You should see the mess. It isn’t exactly a garden party. Two bodies with the backs of their heads blown out, and another one reduced to blood and pulp. Been policing a long while, and this is the first time I’ve seen anything to rival it…Look, I’ll get someone to run the wallet out to the sister tomorrow, confirm she recognises it, but the ID inside says it’s Fletcher’s. And with a bit of luck —actually we’d need a lot of luck—but the microchip for the butchered dog just might be in this baggie and the information salvageable.”

  “Right.”

  “Since the cases look like they’re connected, we’ll need you out here tomorrow morning, first thing, to do your sampling. I’ll forward you the directions. You’ll need to drive right down to the house. Whatever you do, don’t park at the gate: for the moment that pack of dogs is still on the loose and they’ll tear you apart as soon as look at you. If you see them, stay in the car.”

  “Right,” Penny says again, resisting the urge to ask if there’d been a little Staffie with a limp somewhere in that pack. “I’ll do that.”

  “Did your assistant tell you that we’re pulling out of the warehouse?”

  “Yes, thank you, he did.”

  “Sorry, couldn’t be helped. Patisepa Taylor got her lawyers in, demanding that the police compensate her for the disruption to her business. Seems Fletcher made prior arrangements for her to show the site to a representative from the museum. Extra storage, or something, and Taylor doesn’t want to miss the opportunity. Anyway, Tanner says the department isn’t paying, so we have to wrap it up. You’ve got until end of the day today. Shoot, gotta go. The coroner’s here. See you tomorrow.”

  “We better head straight off,” Penny announces when she gets off the phone. Matiu calls Cerberus to him. They’ve made it halfway to the door when Penny sees Beaker’s shoulders slump, deflated.

  “Was there something you wanted me to look at?”

  “It can wait.”

  “No, that’s all right, Beak. We can spare a few minutes.” Penny ignores Matiu’s pointed glower.

  “It’s the Breadmaker.”

  “I thought it was OK?”

  Please let it be OK.

  “Yes, I think the machine is fine. That is, I ran a couple of calibration tests and it seems to be functioning normally, running through the correct cycles and with reproducible outputs. But I found a manual read-out in the machine when I was decontaminating the apparatus after the…” He glances uncertainly at Matiu. “After the egg incident this morning. The paper was jammed in the feed and I had to prise it out. I didn’t want to lose it if there was a chance we could salvage the results, you know, in case the machine had completed its cycle before the implosion. As it was, the paper was close to disintegrating.”

  “Let’s take a look, then.”

  Beaker scurries away to his workstation, returning seconds later to hand Penny a crisp white sheet. She looks at him, her eyebrows raised.

  “Oh,” Beaker says, as understanding dawns. “It’s a copy. By the time I got the original out, it was barely legible. I enhanced it.”

  Penny considers the graph. Looks again. Carrying the paper to the lightbox, she clips it up and peers at the sequence of nucleotides listed underneath the multicoloured peaks. Those bases! A threose sugar backbone. TNA? But TNA is only formed under strict laboratory conditions, which the bloodbath at the warehouse was not. Finding TNA in the sample would mean it was made up of a different kind of genetic material altogether. Some other form of life. Penny shakes her head in disbelief.

  “That’s not possible,” she breathes. It can’t be. It has to be an aberration caused by the implosion.

  “What’s not possible?” Matiu says, his head snapping up.

  “I agree, it has to be a glitch,” Beaker replies.

  “Absolutely,” Penny says.

  “Caused by the implosion.”

  Penny nods. “I should probably calibrate the machine again. Not that I distrust you…”

  “No, no, you should,” Beaker says hurriedly. “It’s what I’d do.”

  Matiu peers at the results on the lightbox. “How do you read this goobledy-gook?” he asks, tilting his head to the right as if he were a tourist at the Leaning Tower of Pisa, before the demise of the iconic building in the late 2020s. “What does it say?”

  “Nothing,” Beaker mumbles.

  “It’s a mistake,” asserts Penny. She puts a hand on Beaker’s arm. “I’ll calibrate it again later. In the meantime, you head off, Beak. You’ve done enough, and heaven knows I can’t afford to pay you overtime.”

  Beaker blushes violently. “I wouldn’t ask for overtime. You know that.”

  Behind her assistant, Matiu rolls his eyes and clasps his hands to his chest. Seriously, if she could reach him, Penny would hit him.

  - Matiu -

  Winking at Beaker, Matiu snatches down the printout and makes for the door, Cerberus at his heels. Actually, he thinks, Cerberus seems to be following Penny to the car, not him, but Matiu doesn’t let that irk him. Dog’s probably sensitive to the bad juju he’s been feeling, and wants to keep his distance. He runs his eyes over the scanned, enhanced printout from the Breadmaker™. Mostly letters and numbers, but here and there, a few incongruous characters. Like that stupid Wingdings font, but not quite the same. He’s seen printers spit out crap like this when they’ve been fed corrupted data, or the drivers have been compromised, or the machine it’s hooked up to has had a virus go through it. Something definitely went wrong with the Breadmaker™ during that sample process, and Matiu might be inclined to think it was just a software glitch—if not a malware attack—except that doesn’t quite fit with the symbols scattered through the alphanumerics on the page.

  Putting on his practised, relaxed grin, Matiu slides into the driver’s seat, dropping the sheet into Penny’s lap. “That’s fucked up.” He starts the engine and pulls out of the alley.

  “The machine glitched. We can’t trust anything it generated.”

  “Correction,” Matiu stabs a finger at the sheet as he brakes for a red light. “You can’t trust anything it’s generated since that result.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Whatever was put into that machine—something from the crime scene—the hardware didn’t know how to deal with it. Screwed with its logic boards or something.”

  “It’s DNA, Matiu. Nucleotides and base pairs. You can’t put anything organic into the Breadmaker that it can’t recognise. There had to be something volatile in the sample, some inflammable contaminant.”

  Matiu pulls into the intersection, checking his mirrors as he goes. “Mister Clean let a dirty sample get into the machine? Whatever.”

  “It might’ve happened. He’s been working long hours.”

  “Yes, and all for you.” He resists the urge to make kissy faces at her. “He wouldn’t slip up, not like that. Never has before, has he?”

  “Well, no, but there’s always a first time.” Penny lifts the report, slips on her glasses, and tries to examine it more closely.

  “There’s another possibility, but you don’t want to hear it.”

  She scours him with a glance. “I’m sure I don’t. Just drive the car, and leave the science to the scientists, all right?”

  Matiu runs a hand over his forehead, suddenly hot. She’s right, of course, as far as she knows. She hadn’t seen Hanson, no
t like Matiu had seen him. Still, he can’t keep a lid on what’s bubbling towards a boil in his gut. “That’s only DNA as we know it. Right?”

  Penny is silent for a moment. Matiu isn’t sure if she’s trying to decide just how crazy he’s become, or if what he said has put a serious chill through her. “Science is backed up by evidence, and there are decades of research that confirm what we know about DNA.”

  “OK, OK, don’t get your tits in a tangle,” Matiu says, raising one hand in surrender. “But if it was a contaminant, why did the machine still put out a complete result, and not just shut down mid-operation? You know, just worth asking.”

  Penny doesn’t answer. Honestly, Matiu isn’t sure he wants her to.

  CHAPTER 17

  - Pandora -

  Tanner didn’t muck around: the police vehicle is already gone and the sun just beginning to wink behind the buildings when Matiu pulls the Holden into the ground-floor car park in the warehouse.

  “Looks like Clark’s boys have already cleared out,” Matiu says.

  Penny grits her teeth. “Damn it. I hope the cleaners haven’t been in yet.”

  Well, Penny isn’t mucking around either. Leaving Matiu to lock up and deal with Cerberus, she scuttles across the parking lot, skirting a large grate in the concrete, and up the stairs, her heels clattering and her satchel banging against her hip.

  She flings open the splintered door. Flicks the switch. Yellow light bounces off the shiny black walls. The room is quiet. It smells of fresh paint, faded now, but still noticeable. Plastic DO NOT CROSS tape still sags from the cones surrounding the blackened tarn of blood. A couple of fat blowflies buzz contently at the edge of the pool. For a fly, that’s got to be the definition of nirvana. If the insects have their way, there’ll be no need for cleaners. The only thing that looks different from yesterday are the three floorboards partially removed from the north end of the room—where Clark’s men have checked for a body stowed in the crawl space.

  Penny breathes out. The site is as it was, still uncontaminated—well, relatively uncontaminated. Apart from the flies. And Matiu—puddling his big fat foot in it yesterday.

  Speak of the devil.

  Matiu appears on the sill of the door.

  No Cerberus. Good. He’s already had his muzzle in one cadaver today.

  Matiu is hesitating at the door, probably expecting Penny to bite his head off for cluttering up her crime scene.

  “No cleaners, then?” he ventures.

  “No, thank goodness.”

  He enters the room, each step slow and cautious, as if he expects the bogeyman to pop out and frighten him half to death. She must have really put the wind up him when he touched the bowl yesterday.

  “Try not to step in anything,” Penny warns anyway.

  His shoulders tense, Matiu arches an eyebrow. “Says the girl who had a lie-down on a dead body earlier,” he quips under his breath.

  Ignoring him, Penny circles the site, examining it for any clues she might have missed the first time. Stepping gingerly over the missing floorboards, she crouches to peer into the pool of congealed blood.

  Dog blood.

  There was that bag of microchips at Hanson’s. Could that be the reason for all this? Was someone removing a dog’s identity chip here? Was that what the bowl was for? Penny stands up, edging around the bloodied mess. But if that was the case, why risk doing it here, where there was a chance of the dog ring being detected? Something doesn’t quite balance in this equation. Surely it would’ve been prudent to keep those activities away from the city, to keep them out at the farm?

  She looks at the ceiling. Blast. She forgot to ask Clark to have the vents checked. He might have done it anyway, but in case he didn’t, she should probably look herself. Only, she’s going to need some way of getting up there, a ladder or something large to stand on. She steps out onto the landing. Matiu follows her.

  “So what do you think, now you’re back here?” he asks.

  “About what?”

  “About what I said in the car?”

  Penny sighs. “Matiu, you said a lot of things in the car. Can you be a little less cryptic?” Ah there, in the stairwell on the landing between flights: an old wooden pallet. Perfect. “Here, help me with this, will you?”

  Obliging, Matiu lifts the pallet onto his shoulder, stabilising it with one hand. Penny heads back up the stairs to the crime scene, beckoning him to follow.

  When they’re back in the storeroom, he says, “Remember I said this case had all the trappings of a sacrifice. Look at the evidence: you’ve got your locked room with the blackened walls, discovered just days after Halloween. Then there’s Hanson and the dog connection. Even that little bowl. And no sign of any bodies. Then, today, at the lab, your Breadmaker readout—”

  Turning on him, Penny cuts him off. “Don’t be ridiculous, Matiu. This is the 40s for heaven’s sake. People don’t believe that kind of superstitious mumbo-jumbo nowadays.” She points at a spot against the wall.

  Matiu sets down the pallet. “You’d be surprised what people believe. Our mothers’ people used to make sacrifices to the war god Tū, for example: usually amonga tapu, people from neighbouring hapū, but sometimes a dog was offered.”

  Waving away a fly, Penny says, “I’m not denying that sacrifices happened in the past, but all that is ancient history. We’ve moved on. People have moved on.”

  Matiu shakes his head. “I’m not so sure. People can resort to crazy things if they think they’re dying. Maybe Fletcher was one of those.”

  Penny has to concede it’s a possibility—people do seek solace in strange ways—but even if he were about to die, would Fletcher really murder a dog? His business persona may be fairly sordid, but he really doesn’t seem the type, given how well Cerberus has been cared for. Even his attention to his sister—the regular supper meetings—suggests the man had some compassion. Anyway, at this point it’s all supposition. Until they speak to his doctor, they’re not even certain Fletcher had cancer.

  She snaps on a pair of gloves. “I need to check the vents. Can you hold the pallet steady a sec?” Using the structure like a ladder, and with one hand on the wall, Penny climbs the rungs.

  “You’re wasting your time,” Matiu says from behind her. “There’s nothing up there.”

  “How do you know that? Did Clark already look?”

  “No. But I know there’s nothing there,” Matiu says, his voice rising, “because that’s not where bodies go in a sacrifice.”

  Penny wobbles, nearly toppling off the pallet. She holds her breath, steadying herself against the wall. That was close. She could’ve fallen head first into the hole in the floor.

  “Matiu, can you leave off with your stupid theories for five minutes?” she admonishes. “I’m trying to conduct a scientific examination here. And hold the damned pallet steady, will you?”

  Carefully, she pushes up the vents. Peeks in. Even in the low light it’s easy to see that the dust here is undisturbed. It doesn’t look like any bodies went out this way. “Hand me my phone will you? It’s in my satchel.” She waggles a hand behind her. Matiu rummages in the bag at her hip, and slips the tablet into her palm. She takes a few photos and passes the phone back.

  “Sampling tape.”

  Matiu repeats the procedure, this time putting the tape in her hand.

  Penny takes a few samples of the dust inside the vent. “You know, it smells of almond up here,” she says when she’s finished. “What do you think?”

  “Let me have a whiff.”

  Penny gets down and switches places with Matiu. Holding up the vent cover with one hand, Matiu pokes his head through the gap.

  “Yeah, you’re right. It does smell kind of fruity. Like Rose Fletcher’s baking.”

  “Almond slice,” Penny says, puzzled.
/>
  “Was it? That’ll be it then. Almond.”

  Matiu drops the vent cover, the clang startling her and making her jump.

  Bloody hell, Matiu. Getting the wind up her with his talk of sacrifices.

  They’re on their way out when Matiu points out the real estate agent, Patisepa Taylor, in the car park.

  “The vultures are circling.”

  “Yeah. We haven’t even found the body and already they’re carving up the remains,” Penny says. But with her eyes on the agent, Penny isn’t looking where she’s going and her heel gets wedged between the bars of the grate.

  These bloody summer sandals. Honestly.

  She slips her foot out of the sandal, then bends to pull the heel of her sandal out of the grill. A thought strikes her. Why is this grate here…?

  Quickly, while the real estate agent is here. Penny turns and hop-slides towardsPatisepa Taylor, putting her shoe back on as she goes.

  “Penny, where are you off to?” Matiu calls after her, exasperated.

  “Got to have a word with the real estate agent,” Penny replies, her voice as jerky as her gait. “Ms Taylor?” The woman turns, her silky mane billowing. Penny slows her limp. “I’m Penny Yee. We met yesterday.”

  The agent casts her eyes disdainfully at Penny’s sandal, still hanging half off. “The girl with the police. Yes. I remember,” she says curtly. Her face, already stiff from enhancements, hardens some more. She folds her arms across a formidable chest. “I hope you aren’t here to beg for an extension. I already told your Chief Inspector that I won’t tolerate any further delays.”

  “Oh no, Ms Taylor. I’m not here to get in your way. In fact, we’re all done. Although you might want to avoid the actual crime scene—”