Bad Seeds

by Jassy Mackenzie

  “How are things going?” David asked when Fanie answered his call.

  “Work’s slow,” Fanie replied. His voice was muffled. David suspected he usually went to the restroom for privacy during their calls, but he’d never been bold enough to ask. He’d heard running water once or twice, and other sounds, too. Maybe he went outside and stood near a fountain.

  Maybe not.

  “You mean the systems are behaving?”

  “Of course. I’ve been managing them for seventeen months now. And I’m telling you, I’m on fire. I’m the reason you and everyone else in the country are still making calls.”

  “My connection dropped twice yesterday.”

  “There was a faulty tower. You know, like the old Monty Python comedy series? ‘Fawlty Towers’? That’s what happens here, all the fuckin’ time. Comedy of errors.”

  There it was, that trickling sound in the background. “Why was it faulty?”

  “Ask my predecessor. He used to watch online porn at work instead of fixing stuff. Bypassed the firewalls to do it. He was hopeless at maintenance, but man, was he a genius at hacking.”

  David heard a toilet flush in the background. He was sure of it. “Left to go and work for Eskom, did he?” David asked, and Fanie snorted.

  “So anyway,” Fanie continued, “send me the number you need. I’ll get the info to you.”

  They said goodbye and disconnected.

  Checking his watch, David saw it was time to leave for his meeting with Loodts’s personal assistant, Tina Strauss. Strauss had worked for Loodts for fifteen years, so David was hopeful she had useful information.

  They met up at Strauss’s home in Centurion. Her apartment was well-kept, with a wide view of the lake. She looked to be in her forties, with neatly styled platinum hair and an immaculate French manicure.

  “I am very shaken by Mr. Loodts’s death,” Strauss explained. “We became good friends over the years. I hope I can help you, Detective, although my life is somewhat in chaos at the moment.”

  She showed him into the neat dining room. Not so much as a teaspoon was out of place. At the table, her laptop stood open, a work planner beside it, and a full jug of freshly squeezed orange juice off to the side. If this was chaos, David wondered what order looked like.

  He sat down and gratefully accepted a glass of orange juice with ice and a sprig of mint. “I’m sorry if any of the questions I’m about to ask are upsetting to you,” he began, and Strauss tightened her lips.

  “I’ll do whatever I can to help,” she promised.

  “Firstly, the crime scene. You might have read that Mr. Loodts’s body was found along with the body of a young blonde woman.”

  Strauss gave a tiny nod. “I did read that, yes.”

  “Her name was Scarlett Sykes. Do you know if Mr. Loodts had any personal or business association with her?”

  “No, he did not. Not to my knowledge, not at all. He never mentioned that name, and I never saw any correspondence from her, or put through any phone calls.”

  David wrote a note on his pad. It looked as if Jade’s hunch was right, and Scarlett had been working with the criminals. He guessed that having a young blonde woman on the team must certainly have opened doors. Loodts surely hadn’t suspected her. He moved on to the next subject: Carlos Botha.

  “What is your impression of Mr. Carlos Botha?” David asked.

  “I don’t know him very well,” Strauss admitted. “He’s a difficult man to assess. Quiet, always polite, but I always got the impression there was a lot he thought but didn’t say. I’m an Afrikaans speaker, but I think the English expression would be self-contained.”

  “Yes, I think I know what you mean,” David said.

  “He’s very fit. Good-looking,” Strauss observed, with a slight smile. Thinking of Jade on the run with Botha, those words made David want to fling his glass at the spotless, cream-colored wall and watch it shatter onto the tasteful white tiles below.

  He resisted the urge with a concentrated effort.

  “Their interactions,” he asked, getting back on track, “how often did they meet or speak that you knew of? Was there any conflict between them? I’m especially interested in the last month or two.”

  “In the last month or two, they met more often,” Strauss said. “I also overheard . . .” Her voice trailed off, and she looked embarrassed.

  “Any information will be extremely valuable right now,” David encouraged her.

  “I overheard Mr. Loodts having a huge argument with Mr. Botha. That would have been, oh, maybe three weeks ago. I have no idea what it was about. It wasn’t uncommon for them to argue, but this was worse than usual. I actually left my office and came back when Mr. Botha had gone.”

  Another note went on the lined page, and David moved onto his third topic. “What was Mr. Loodts’s relationship with Ryan Gillespie?”

  Strauss pursed her pink-lipsticked mouth. “Mr. Loodts has known Mr. Gillespie for a long time. Mr. Gillespie’s father used to be in charge at Inkomfe years ago, when it was still called Mamba. I know that Mr. Loodts trusted Mr. Gillespie because of that existing family connection.”

  “Now,” David said, moving on to the nitty-gritty of the meeting, “I was given a folder found in Mr. Loodts’s briefcase at the crime scene. It was labeled ‘Inkomfe Classified Information: Minutes, Meetings & Memos.’ Do you know anything about this folder, or what it might have contained?”

  “Mr. Loodts always printed out the latest minutes and meeting agendas. His eyesight made it difficult for him to read on a laptop screen. He had a meeting at Inkomfe that very morning with Mr. Gillespie.”

  “Just the two of them?”

  Strauss nodded. “They had private meetings every month to discuss top-level issues, and at those meetings they changed the door codes for the strong room and one of the entrances into the reactor room. They were the only two who were authorized to open those particular doors.”

  David couldn’t believe what he was hearing. For a moment, he was unable to breathe. “So you’re saying Mr. Loodts had hard copies of the access codes in his possession?”

  Strauss nodded apologetically. “He usually locked them in a briefcase after the meeting, then stored them in the safe at his home. He believed that hard copies were safer than sending information online.”

  “The briefcase was unlocked when we found his body. And there were no papers inside.”

  David had no desire to mention to Strauss that Loodts had in all likelihood been tortured before his death. The motive for that was becoming clearer.

  “Please,” Strauss implored, “you must notify Mr. Gillespie about this immediately. It is essential that he knows so that he can take steps. If those codes were to fall into the wrong hands, it would lay Inkomfe wide open to the threat of sabotage.”

  David’s head was spinning as he drove back to headquarters.

  It was possible that Loodts had been tortured to give up the codes and had directed his killer, or killers, to open the briefcase and take the pages where they were written.

  David needed to speak to Gillespie right away.

  But to his surprise, when he got back to Jo’burg Central police station, he was told that he had a visitor.

  Ryan Gillespie was in the reception area, waiting for him.

  He was surprised to see Gillespie, and impressed by his physical presence—tall, broad-shouldered, good-looking and well-dressed. However, Gillespie’s handsome mouth was swollen and scabbed on the left side, and he was hiding a recently blackened eye under a pair of sunglasses, which he removed when he was inside the office.

  “Thank you so much for everything you’ve been doing,” Gillespie said. Even lopsided, his smile was warm and genuine. “I thought it might be helpful if I met with you to answer any questions and give you some background.”

  “You have a very se
rious situation here,” David told him as they sat down on opposite sides of the small, rickety meeting table. “The security codes for your doors have fallen into the wrong hands.”

  Quickly he updated Gillespie. “This points to an insider job. Somebody knew that Loodts had come from that meeting, and that he had that information with him.”

  Frown lines appeared on Gillespie’s brow.

  “This is extremely worrying,” he said. “Superintendent, I think this crisis has its roots in problems that go back a long way.”

  “Tell me,” David said.

  “I’ll give you a brief history. When I first joined Inkomfe, I was impressed by Lisa Marais, who was head of security at the time. But as we worked together, I was forced to revise my opinions.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “She was extremely stubborn. She had no concept of how to handle people, and she clashed frequently with her colleagues. The more responsibility I took on, the more aggressive she became toward me. She started working against me. It became destructive. It delayed the rollout of the new systems.”

  “Go on,” David encouraged him.

  Gillespie laced his fingers together. David noticed that they were trembling slightly. “She conducted a personal smear campaign against me . . . a character assassination, I suppose you could call it. She compiled a dossier of information that could have been very damaging if it was taken out of context. Luckily, Mr. Loodts had worked with my father, and he was prepared to give me the benefit of the doubt. Lisa became angry, and she resigned.”

  “What was in the dossier?” David asked curiously.

  “It’s embarrassing to have to admit.” Gillespie looked down at his clasped fingers. “She followed me during non-working hours. She took photographs of me doing what I do to relax.”

  David wondered what that was. Prostitutes? Bondage? Worse? He was expecting a lurid confession and found himself slightly disappointed when Gillespie said, “I enjoy going to casinos in my off time. I think Lisa assumed that would damage my reputation in Mr. Loodts’s eyes, because he wasn’t in favor of gambling. But luckily, her attempt was unsuccessful.”

  David nodded.

  “It was humiliating nonetheless to have my private life dragged up like that, and I think Lisa was furious when her attempt didn’t work. Unfortunately, it backfired. It discredited her in the eyes of everyone who knew her.”

  “Go on.”

  “I thought that nobody would take her seriously after that, but I was wrong. I should have checked more carefully on whom she was speaking to before she left. I didn’t realize that she had been meeting with Botha outside of work. He must have believed her stories and bought into whatever she was planning.”

  “Oh, really?” David felt his pulse accelerate.

  “I don’t know whose idea this sabotage could have been. Lisa was a rational woman. But note, Detective, that I say ‘was.’”

  “What do you mean?” David felt his guts plummet into his shoes. It was a sick feeling that had everything to do with Jade.

  “I have tried,” Gillespie said softly. “Believe me, in the past few days, I have tried very hard to get in touch with her. She was a difficult person, but even when we fought, even after she resigned, she would answer her phone, even if she ended up slamming it down after swearing at me. I went to her house this morning and saw it was burned down. Detective, I fear the worst has happened.”

  “What do you think happened to Lisa?” David’s mouth had gone dry.

  “I think she got in over her head, and in her quest for revenge, she became involved with people whose goal is to destroy Inkomfe.”

  “Who?” David asked through cold lips, but Gillespie shrugged.

  “It must be somebody who wants to make a point by causing a catastrophe and endangering the lives of thousands of innocents. They are going to get rid of whoever they need to along the way. And I am sick with worry that I won’t be in time to stop them.”

  Chapter Forty

  Warrant Officer Mweli had seen enough dead bodies in the past week to last her a lifetime. What the hell was happening in this quiet suburb of Randfontein? Corpses were turning up in the most unexpected and unwanted places. And this latest looked to be the most macabre of the lot.

  Finally the dredging operation was underway. She was standing at the edge of a large body of water in a fenced-off area of Randfontein that was sandwiched between two gold mines—one still operational, the other now closed.

  The Robinson Dam was a polluted place, full of acidic mine water. This was a problem that had been plaguing Johannesburg in recent times and had not yet been properly addressed. After speaking to an expert, Mweli had learned that it was caused by contaminated water from abandoned mines that was no longer being properly managed and treated, leaching into the wider environment. Normal water had a pH of seven. Acidic mine water could be anywhere from three on the scale to as low as minus three. Mweli hadn’t known you could have negative pH values, but apparently, given sufficient contamination, you could.

  This dam was not one of those, though. Its pH was somewhere between one and two. The expert had told her about the few organisms that could survive in such a lethally acidic environment. Extremophiles, he’d called them. Enjoying the rotten-smelling water, living happily in and around its slime-coated surface.

  Nothing else could survive. The dam was dead—a toxic body of water awaiting a treatment that it had not received.

  And now, in its depths, there was a dead body.

  She shifted from foot to foot, breathing in the unpleasant stink of the polluted water and watching as the backhoe hauled up a massive bundle of detritus, cradled in the giant shovel bucket that had scraped the dam’s base. As the machine hummed and cranked and hissed, gouts of mud splashed down from its edges, further disturbing the discolored surface.

  Then the winch operator guided its thick metal arm back toward the land, and downward until it rested on the dam wall. Liquid mud dripped from the arm and gushed out of the vents in the steel cradle.

  Was there anything in there? It was impossible to tell amid the rotted remains of what had once been vegetation, the stagnant water and the dark, slimy mud. Mweli already had her protective boots on, but even wearing them, she was reluctant to go closer. She didn’t want to tread in that stuff. Foot covers or no, she had the feeling that once she touched that stinking residue, the stench would never leave her.

  “Let’s do this,” the pathologist standing next to her said, picking up his equipment bag. He was fully suited up in protective gear, including goggles and a white face mask. “Just don’t expect to get this guy a name anytime soon, okay?”

  Mweli frowned, not understanding. She followed him cautiously along the dam wall, nervous of slipping and landing butt-first. Carefully she maneuvered her weight over the uneven ground.

  By the time she neared the metal bucket, the pathologist had already begun his work. He was laying a sheet of plastic all around the base. Then, using a small spade, he gently dug at the bucket’s corrupted contents.

  Standing a safe distance away, Mweli stared at what the man had uncovered and felt her stomach do a slow, uneasy spiral. She swallowed hard, tasting acid in the back of her throat, aware that the Wimpy breakfast she’d had two hours ago—a light meal of just one egg, a slice of bacon and toast—was threatening to make a hasty reappearance.

  She supposed this expert with his knowledge of acidic mine water had been ready for what he saw. Mweli hadn’t been.

  The body was all but rotted to slime.

  There were no facial features to speak of; they had been eaten away. The eyes were empty sockets. Teeth, pitted and eroded into stubs, stood out in a mirthless, mud-stained grin.

  It was impossible to tell where decayed flesh ended and corroded rags of clothing began—if, indeed, the corpse had been clothed at all. Only the occasional bone surfaced
in response to the pathologist’s careful probing.

  The bright sunlight above them made the sight appear all the more gruesome. It seemed to mock these half-eaten bones, dragged from their corrosive resting place.

  “We’re not going to get much,” the pathologist said, sounding apologetic. “I’ll extract what I can from here; we can’t take these contents back to the lab.” He gestured at the brimming bucket. “I’ll put the bones together as best I can, but you’re not going to get an ID from this. I might be able to tell you a gender. Depends on what condition the pelvic bones are in—oh, and we do have a clump of hair. Caucasian hair, from the looks of things. I’ll try to measure it. Beyond that . . .” He pressed his lips together. “I could probably estimate height to within a few inches. Problem is that the corpse doesn’t have feet left, or ankles. From the knees down, it’s gone, and I can’t find hands, either. We can dredge again . . .” He shrugged. “Looks like the feet must have been tied to weights to prevent the corpse surfacing, so they’re down there somewhere. Far down in the slime.”

  Height to within a few inches. Mweli shook her head. She realized sweat was streaming from her forehead. She was breathing hard, swallowing frequently. Her armpits were soaked, and the sun was making her dizzy.

  Hurriedly she turned away from the water, which was still pocked by tiny ripples. She gazed out over the grassy, treed overgrowth beyond.

  They wouldn’t be able to identify this corpse from this dredge alone. Despite the pathologist’s expertise, the dam had done its work, and those damaged bones might keep their secrets forever.