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

by Dan Rabarts

  Evidence!

  Penny needs to take a photo. Cerberus erupts in a fit of barking as Penny scrambles for her phone, remembering too late that she entrusted her satchel, including her tablet, to a passerby.

  “Hey, you. Pandora. Science girl,” a voice bellows. It’s Tanner. The detective stalks towards her, oblivious to the building smouldering alongside, his hulking frame blocking her view of the retreating sedan. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

  “Um…I was following up on a lead,” Penny babbles. “We…that is…I discovered that Dr Buchanan was Fletcher’s physician, and I thought I’d take the opportunity to interview him. Buchanan may have ordered blood work, which could corroborate the forensic evidence collected at the crime scene.”

  “Bit late in the day for an interview,” Tanner says.

  “You said you have seventeen cases, sir. And that you needed a quick solve. I decided to come straight here when I finished up at the warehouse. It was just on the off-chance really.” Penny fiddles with Cerberus’ lead. “Seeing as Officer Clark expects me to be collecting samples at the Hanson farm in the morning.”

  “Yes, the bodies do seem to be piling up on this one. I call you in to help with the backlog of bodies and next thing I know, there’s a frickin’ mountain of them.” Like an old school detective, Tanner pulls out a notepad and tiny pencil, both dwarfed in his huge hands. He flips to an empty page. “So, you’re saying the medical centre was still open when you arrived?”

  “No, sir. It was closed, but the door was open,” says Penny, feeling her face go hot at the lie.

  Tanner cocks an eyebrow. “Open. Right. So you just waltzed on in?”

  “Well, yes.” She looks at her summer sandals; one of the buckles is nearly torn right off.

  “You and your brother?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Matiu Yee, isn’t it?” The detective shifts his weight to his back foot.

  Penny looks up sharply. “Yes. Is there a problem?”

  Tanner rubs his chin. “You forgot to mention that your brother has some history with the police. Bit of a naughty lad in his day.”

  Swallowing hard, Penny lifts her chin, meeting his gaze. “I didn’t think it was relevant. Matiu did his time, Detective Tanner. He’s not the same person he was then. He’s moved on.”

  “Uh-huh. I’m sure he has. It didn’t seem odd to you that the front door was open?”

  “A little bit.”

  “I see.” Tanner doesn’t see. He doesn’t see anything. Or if he does, all he sees is Matiu’s rap sheet and the time he did inside. Penny straightens, pulling Cerberus to heel.

  “Actually, it was lucky Matiu and I arrived when we did. We were able to pull a man out of the fire.”

  “He died.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yes, we’ll need to confirm it—dental records and next of kin and so on—but at first glance it appears to be the doctor.”

  Penny nods. “I wondered. He was in there a long time. There was so much smoke, it was overwhelming.”

  “Oh, he didn’t die of asphyxiation. Buchanan was battered. Mutilated.”

  Mutilated? How? By who?

  Penny hadn’t seen anything when she was getting him onto the gurney, but then she’d been in a hurry and the room had been full of smoke… Oh my God, please, please don’t tell me his brains had been scooped out from behind. She covers her mouth, coughing to cover her anxiety. The explosion, the fire, must help because her act seems to satisfy Tanner, who waits for her to regain her composure.

  “Had you ever met the doctor before?”

  “Me? No. Although I’d heard of him. His name came up in a case when I was working for LysisCo.”

  Flipping back a page or two in his notebook, Tanner checks his notes, and purses his lips.

  “What about your brother? Did he know the doctor?”

  “Matiu? Why should he know Buchanan?”

  “I don’t know. I’m asking you.”

  “What’s this about?”

  “Just taking your statement, that’s all.” He waves his notebook in her face as if to emphasise his point. “Lucky for you, it seems to check out. Your brother just gave me the same story, and a couple of witness statements bear out your version of events, too. Plus, I have the time you called the fire service, and a witness photo posted on the net just minutes later of your dog there pulling the two men out of the building. He’s quite famous already. You’re in the background. I won’t show it to you because it’s not the most flattering photo. In any case, not enough time had elapsed for you to have inflicted those wounds on Buchanan. Someone cut the poor shit’s eyes out. Did you see that when you were dragging him out of the fire?” He slips the pad into his pocket, pushing it down with an enormous index finger. Penny swallows. The hair on her arms stands on end.

  “Someone cut his eyes out?”

  Tanner examines her face, his eyes narrow. Is he checking her reaction? Her reaction is what anyone’s reaction would be on hearing that. You’d have to be sick, completely sick, a total psychopath to even contemplate doing that to another human being, and if Tanner thinks, even for a second, that either she or Matiu are capable of doing something so gruesome, so horrific, then—

  “It’s usually symbolic,” Tanner says. “See no evil. Anyway, you and your brother should go home, Ms Pandora. Get some sleep. Like you said, Officer Clark is expecting you at Hanson’s farm first thing in the morning.”

  Penny grabs his arm, her grubby fingers smudging his shirt. “Hang on. You can’t seriously think we killed Buchanan? Cut his eyes out! That’s crazy. You engaged me to consult on this case!”

  “Yes, that’s the conclusion I’ve come to, too,” Tanner says, staring at her hand. Penny snatches it back as if it were scalded. “Otherwise, why would you have risked your life to pull the doctor out of the fire? Any sensible murderer would have let the body incinerate. Oh, I believe this is your satchel.”

  Handing her the bag, the detective turns and lumbers away.

  CHAPTER 22

  - Matiu -

  Matiu pauses when they reach the car, resting his arm on the roof with the back door open, and takes a deep breath. Penny is lowering herself with excessive care into the passenger seat, like she’s hurt all over. Inside and out. Even Cerberus isn’t exactly bounding as he slinks into the back seat and settles down. They’re all shattered, in more ways than one. It’s just been that sort of a day.

  Closing the back door, Matiu drops heavily into the driver’s seat and starts the engine. For a minute they sit, the engine idling, fire engine lights scrolling across the nearby buildings, a light ash drifting down to coat everything. He pulls on the windscreen washers and flicks on the lights as the wipers scrape across the glass, smearing twin rainbows through the powder.

  “So,” he says, coughs, his voice a harsh rasp. “You as hungry as I am?”

  Penny looks straight ahead. “We just dragged a dead body with its eyes torn out from a burning building, and you’re thinking about food?”

  “Pretty much. How about falafels?” He puts the car in gear and cruises away from the scene, hoping to draw as little attention from the gathered crowd as possible.

  “I could go for a vego option,” Penny cedes. “I’m not really feeling up to meat right at the moment.”

  “What?” Matiu croaks. “A little blood, and suddenly you’re a vegetarian?”

  She glares at him. “Something cut his eyes out. I think that gives me licence to appreciate a salad instead of a burger.”

  Matiu turns on the aircon and relishes the artificial chill as it caresses his windpipe. They drive for a while in silence. Auckland rolls by outside the windows, looming and alien. The streets fold around them. How has this city, so familiar, suddenly become so strange? So hostile? He sc
oops up Penny’s water bottle and takes a long pull. Normally, she’d hit the roof over something as lame-arse as sharing a drink bottle. The fact that she barely grunts her disapproval tells him just how hard she’s been hit by everything that’s happened. She’s probably in shock. Maybe not the blood-loss kind of shock, but she might very well be sinking under layers of trauma, nonetheless. Matiu’s seen it before, with boys on the streets, and it never ended well.

  Trouble is, he’s not exactly the sort who knows how to deal with other people’s problems, unless he can fix them with a punch to the jaw or a winning grin. He doubts that either is going to help Penny. “Here’s good,” he croaks, and they pull over beside one of the dingy late-night Turkish places that pepper Queen Street. Pallid fluorescent light struggles to hold back the heavy night, dirty plastic orange tables and chairs receding into the depths of the place while tired, mirthless men in caricatured uniform hats and aprons drift behind the greasy metal counter, ready to take orders and cut processed meat and squirt up to two of a dozen sauces on your kebab of choice, with or without onions. Matiu lets Cerberus out, tipping the rest of the water bottle into the dog’s mouth. Spluttering and lapping at the liquid, Cerberus whines low in his throat. Matiu rubs his ears as he loops his lead around a streetlight, and then he and Penny enter the shop.

  “Double beef kebab, garlic yoghurt, sweet chilli, onions, thanks.”

  Penny punches his arm. “I thought we were having vegetarian?”

  He shrugs. “No, you were having vegetarian. I’m hungry.”

  She shakes her head, sighing, as the man behind the counter slices slabs of meat from the barbecue skewer and dashes them across the grill. “Half a dozen falafels with tabouli and extra hummus, please.”

  “And any chance you could get a bowl of water for the dog?” Matiu slides another crumpled banknote across the counter to emphasise his point, sharing a nod with the chef.

  Taking a seat at the back of the establishment, Matiu cracks the top on his bottle of fizz and takes a long, satisfied draught. Penny slides into the booth beside him, opening her carbonated water and sipping at it carefully, like it’s the last bottle in the city and any moment now a ravening horde will pour through the doors and try to strip it from her hands.

  “So,” Matiu says, his voice a touch smoother for the lubrication, “bad day at the office for Buchanan, then.”

  “Don’t be tasteless,” Penny growls, dipping a falafel in hummus and biting into it. “He’s dead, and the police were looking at us—both of us—as possible suspects.”

  Matiu takes a bite of his kebab, flinching as his mouth stings when he tries to open wide. Small bites it is, then. “That’d never stick,” he says, chewing on a mouthful.

  “Tanner dug up your file. I don’t think he liked what he saw. If they find out that you broke in…”

  “You saw that place go up at the end. They won’t be finding much of anything.”

  Penny rinses her mouth again, and Matiu realises she’s not trying to ease her thirst. She’s trying to wash away a bad taste, not just ash and smoke, but something worse. Something he can’t quite place, but which he can taste, too. The wrongness of it all. There’s a sourness on his tongue and in the air, as if the smoke from that fire has spread across the city, driven by the bad juju he’s been feeling since he stepped into a room full of blood and touched that blasted bowl.

  “There’s surveillance footage from around the place. And people with cameras in their pockets, and—”

  “Pandora,” Matiu raises a finger, slipping into his Father Dearest voice, “if you think a fellow of my capabilities would get himself caught on camera doing anything he shouldn’t be doing, then you’ve mistaken me for being far less professional than I really am.”

  “Great. That’s so reassuring. We just dragged a corpse from a burning building and nearly get ourselves killed in the process, and for what? To make the cops suspect us of arson and possibly murder? Matiu, we gained nothing from any of this. I should be back in the lab, where I belong.”

  Matiu takes another bite, and slides the data sliver across the table, his hand cupped over it. “Don’t talk like that, sister. Not until you’ve looked at this. A certain doctor—now deceased—sure didn’t want to let go of it, even in death.” He turns his hand over, revealing the data device in his palm. There’s a particularly nostalgic pleasure in the way Penny’s jaw drops. He can almost hear it hit the table. “You… Matiu, please, please, tell me you didn’t remove that from the body. Oh God, you didn’t, did you?”

  Matiu regards her with a slow nod. “OK,” he says, forming his words very clearly. “I didn’t pull this from the pocket of the dead man we dragged from the fire, the only one who seemed to know what happened to Fletcher, and who was trying to save this from the fire someone had set in his clinic. That’s not what I did. But ooh, look, here’s a nice random data stick I found that might be of interest in this case you’re working on. You can thank me later.”

  Penny puts her face in her hands and doesn’t take the stick. “Matiu, what have you done? How can you even know if it’s of any use to us at all? Everyone carries slivers around in their pockets. You’ve interfered with evidence, broken chain of custody, oh God, oh God…”

  Matiu waits. Soon enough she’ll realise there’s nothing she can do that won’t make him look bad with Clark and Tanner, and then she’ll come around. She looks up, her eyes red. “Matiu, you know I love you, right? Because you’re my brother, and you need someone to love you.”

  Matiu sits back, frowning. “So?” There are moments, now and then, when he shrivels under her gaze. When he’s just a little boy again, cowering in the basement, crying out at the voices that whisper in his ear. This is one of those moments. Times like this, when Pandora turns those eyes on him, and he feels like he’s not the worldly-wise one of them, not the one who has seen things and done things and served his time for them. Moments like this when he wonders if he’s just an ignorant little kid and Penny, his cloistered house-mouse of a big sister, is the real grown-up among them.

  “Then you need to know that…” She stumbles, takes a sip from her bottle, replaces the cap with deliberate slowness, collects her thoughts, and then meets his eye again. “There’s a lot I can protect you from, but some things I can’t. The police are one those things, but you knew that already. You’ve been there. The other is yourself. How can anyone else look out for you, if everything you do has to spiral into self-destruction?”

  Matiu looks away, his gut suddenly burning. He isn’t hungry anymore. “I thought that doctor was alive. I didn’t go in there trying to kill myself. I thought I was saving him. This?” He holds up the stick. “This was just a bonus. I thought it was what you wanted? Another clue, so we can figure out what the hell is going on and wrap up this mess. Put an end to it before it gets worse.”

  Penny shakes her head. “But you don’t get it, do you? Everything we do that we shouldn’t, someone will eventually figure out. We can’t make a case based on breaking and entering and stealing evidence. And when they connect the dots, they’re going to put you right back inside, and probably me too, and not even Dad’s favours and connections will get us out of it. That’s not how this works.”

  Matiu lets this sink in for a moment, her words pounding against the blackened leather that wraps up his soul, the taniwha inked into his skin snapping and frothing in defiance. She’s right, in a way. In her world, she’s dead right, no argument. How does he tell her, then, that they’re not really in her world anymore? That whatever Fletcher and Buchanan were up to, whatever Hanson had to do with it, this isn’t her realm anymore. At some point, it became his, at least in part. Like there’s a shadow of the voices he’s always heard now layered across everything, and even though Makere is gone, the echo of screams in his ears is growing louder, more insistent. Hungrier.

  He holds the stick out to
her to emphasise his point. “We need to know what’s on here. So we can stop it before anyone else dies.”

  Penny sucks in a deep breath and grits her teeth. Finally, she takes the sliver from his outstretched hand. “At this rate, we’re going to be the next ones who turn up dead.”

  Matiu forces a grin and savages his kebab with a histrionic bite. “Not if I can help it, sister. You watch my back, I’ll watch yours.”

  Penny eyes him warily, pocketing the data sliver, and chews thoughtfully on her falafel.

  CHAPTER 23

  - Pandora -

  Pulling her dressing gown around her, Penny reties the cord at her waist. She takes the data sliver from the bench, her hand hovering, about to slip it into the computer.

  No. She shouldn’t be doing this.

  She shouldn’t be examining the contents of this stick. Instead, she should pick up the phone right now and call Tanner. She should tell him that after struggling to haul Buchanan’s body from the flames, Matiu found the data sliver caught up in his clothes. Or that she found it on the roadway, blown out of the building in the explosion.

  Frowning, Penny replaces the sliver on the kitchen island. She glares at it. There’s no question of her phoning the detective. She can’t. Even if her explanations were halfway plausible—which they’re not—Tanner would see through her lies in a second and the ugly accusations about Matiu would start again.

  Giving the sliver a wide berth, Penny rounds the island and switches on the kettle.