It was a long distance call to Nelspruit, but not quite as expensive as the one to Jeffrey. If only the cell phone chip had worked, it would be so much simpler. Tabitha held the line while someone searched for Police Constable Rian Minnaar. She listened to the clicks of time come off her calling card. Finally, he came on the line.
“I’m glad you got hold of me today. We heard the news from the park.”
“So you know Mhlongo is dead?”
“Yes, they’re being very forthcoming about the investigation of him.”
“That’s a relief. Do they know more about who he was working with than they told me?”
“That’s not clear yet. We’ve only just had a phone report. I’m trying to worm my way into the investigation. I saw my friend in animal control this morning. He’d been away on holiday. Did you think I’d decided to keep your slide too?”
“I was beginning to wonder. That’s why I called, actually. What’d you find out?” Tabitha asked.
“He wasn’t familiar with the kind of enclosure they were using. Said it was their own peculiar cage. Maybe order made for them. What Mhlongo saw in the slide is unclear to me.”
They held the line in silence, each thinking. Tabitha said, “I wonder, if I could get more pictures of the cages, if we could figure out if there’s any significance to it.”
“You’d better be careful. Look what happened to your uncle.”
“But his death doesn’t have any connection to Vandenblok. Right?”
“Not that we know of. The man may be spit-spot clean, but until we know the whole story it pays to be extra cautious.”
Rian agreed to find out more about the investigation of Mhlongo, if he could, and drive out to the park in the morning. “I’d like to see you again anyway under less stressful circumstances than the other day. Kiss you goodbye and all that.”
Rian’s sudden flirtatious comment left Tabitha uncertain what to say. She still hadn’t really mentioned Jeff. She hadn’t wanted to put Rian off, since his help had been so valuable, but she didn’t want to deceive him either. After so much time the sudden introduction of a fiancé would look invented. Then again, the fiancé title was in question. After an awkward pause Tabitha said, “Uhm, yeah. Sure. That’d be good. I’ll be at Lower Sabie.”
“Okay, tomorrow then. Don’t go poking around. We can do it tomorrow. Please try to stay out of any scrapes until then.” His sincere concern hit Tabitha across the kilometers, but she was done waiting for others to help out. She was done living in ambiguity. If she wanted more information, she’d go get it with or without Rian’s or Daniel’s approval.
Everyone’s warnings and cautions did little to boost her confidence. She would not let uncertainty keep her from finding out the truth. She only had two days until her plane took off. It was time for action.
Taking a look at the giraffe enclosure involved no danger anyway. It was only a matter of more information. So why had a nervous anxiety settled into her stomach?
Perhaps Mpande was back in his office. He might have the whole truth, and just wasn’t telling. She pulled the bakkie around and headed to the offices, beginning to feel her concerns could be laid to rest with just a little more information. Kindness Radebe greeted her and shyly covered her grin with a hand.
“Ah, Miss, the director is not back yet.”
A pile of boxes in one corner distracted Tabitha. Michael Waggener, the hospitality director, came around the corner with another box he planted on top of the others.
“This is the last of Mhlongo’s things, Kindness. Security will have to find something, if there’s anything to find. I certainly can’t see anything significant.” He greeted Tabitha. “I s’pose you’d be thinking of leaving now? Sorry you’ve had such a bad go in our country.”
“Everyone’s been really kind to me here. Seems like they think Mhlongo killed my uncle. Though I’m not sure I see how it all fits.”
“Maybe he had a touch of some fever from the veldt that affected his mind. You never really know, do you?”
Souli came in behind Tabitha and asked Waggener a question. Tabitha peeked in the top box on the stack of Mhlongo’s things. Shirts and clothes. Very disappointing. She wasn’t sure what she expected, but this was so ordinary. The man was a killer, after all. Waggener and Souli seemed intent on their conversation, and she thought she could risk lifting the lid on the next box.
Her eyes honed in on a camera. Digital, and it looked new. She gasped.
Souli and Waggener stopped and stared at her. “You oughtn’t to go poking around in there,” Waggener said. He added, “Though you’ve obviously seen something more interesting than I did.”
“The camera.” She couldn’t get out more, so she pointed. Souli came over and peeked around her shoulder.
“You think this is your uncle’s camera that went missing?”
She nodded. Her heart thumped. This could be huge, not only for knowledge of what happened, but also for Phillip’s work to appear again. Feeling like she was waking up, she reached out, but Souli held her hand back gently.
“First, we must let the security people go through everything. If it is your uncle’s, you will have it.”
The make and model was right. Tabitha felt positive this was Phillip’s. She wanted to snatch it and run away, but her civilized side took control. She took a deep breath and shook herself. “I have the serial number in his diary. This is the digital. Please don’t erase anything. It’s very important. You do understand, don’t you?” It was her turn to grab Souli’s arm, trying to make her point.
“I assure you. You will have it.” His dark eyes promised her he was sincere. The phone rang and they all turned to watch Kindness answer. She nodded and muttered.
Waggener turned to go, but Kindness gestured for him to stay.
She slowly put down the phone. “Mr. Mpande asked me to inform all the department heads that they found out who set the fire on Wednesday.” She looked soberly between Souli and Waggener. “It was that young man from the Schopenhauer group. Christopher.”
Souli and Waggener both made tut-tutting sounds.
“I’m sorry. Do you mean the conservationist guy? He was so adamant about the park and preservation and…” Tabitha let it trail off.
Souli shook his head. “We were concerned that someone in the group had created incidents to make a point environmentally, but we weren’t sure. That’s really too bad for Elizabeth and the group. She means well for the park.”
Waggener slapped the small African on the back. “I suppose that will end some more of your tracking problems, Souli. Good for you, man.”
<><><>
Tabitha, buoyed in her spirits with the promise of Phillip’s digital camera, decided to drive out into the park and perhaps happen past the giraffes’ last known storage location. Everyone thought they were scheduled to move out in the next day or so. She’d drive down to procure a room at Lower Sabie first. The smaller, more relaxed camp appealed to her after all the hubbub of the past few days. Plus she still wanted a chance to shoot the sun going down on Sunset Dam, with all the animals drinking just before dark.
She checked into her cabin, aware of the day ticking onward. Tabitha got out the laptop and finished a story that would be due the day she got home. It’d be faster to email from the airport or from home when she touched down than to fight with finding a line right now. Who at home would believe that Tabitha the procrastinator worked with such speed and efficiency under deadline pressure? She tweaked the story about Mhlongo further. Hopefully someone would buy it. It helped her think through the situation to write it, though.
Maybe she should give up the wild goose chase—or, since she was in Africa, perhaps she should call it the wild guinea hen chase—after Vandenblok. Leave the man alone to do his job. Surely the rangers would have caught him if he’d been smuggling all the years he’d been doing transports.
Still, something didn’t feel right. Something smelled of decay. It didn’t hurt to look anyway.
What if Vandenblok and Mhlongo were in something together? What if they were the ones doing trafficking in the park? She couldn’t face herself if she hadn’t looked for truth under every rock in Africa that she could possibly turn. If it was a dead end, so be it. But at least she would try to find truth for herself, and for Phillip to rest peacefully.
All the people who could perhaps solve the riddle of what was going on were conveniently dead. Uncle Phillip. Mhlongo. Daniel could have been dead, and he didn’t even fully know why. Just for taking an ivory certificate.
Tabitha loaded up the camera bag and walked out to the car. The angle of the sun in the sky told her she would need to hurry to make it to the camp and back in time to shoot at Sunset Dam.
As she approached the road she thought the Vandenblok camp was on, she saw cars with placards on the sides blocking the side road. The signs said things like: No Relocation, Keep Kruger Pure, Animal Rights. Tabitha realized she must have the right place and the relocation must be imminent. The Schopenhauer people beeped their horns as Tabitha went past. They weren’t letting Christopher’s arrest stop them. She wouldn’t disrupt their protest just so she could go wandering into Vandenblok’s camp.
At the next dirt and sand track, she turned off, bouncing the bakkie in the ruts. Maybe she could peek down on the camp. Since she wasn’t sure where she was going, she slowed the truck to a crawl, keeping the dust from kicking up clouds. Maybe this was better than actually driving into their compound and announcing she wanted to inspect their facilities.
The dirt road ahead crested on a hill. Tabitha pulled the emergency brake. She wiped sweat from her palms one at time on her pants. She grabbed a camera and got out.
She walked several paces to the top of the hill. She glanced around, searching for signs of malevolent creatures in the bushveld, waiting to attack. Nothing. Or nothing she could see anyway, an unwelcome thought. She heard only the wind in the dry grasses shooing her away. Tabitha turned a long lens on the valley below. Was this the right area?
In the distance, she saw the tents and the frames that indicated the giraffe cage. She looked at the truck and back at the campsite. Rian’s words of caution echoed in her mind. It was warm. Perhaps the heat of the day would keep the bush quiet while she moved further away from the safety of the vehicle. She bit her lip and plunged ahead into the crackly grasses. Her gray shirt and khaki pants gave her a good cover in the dead tones of the winter landscape just thinking of giving way to spring green.
Tabitha tightened her grip on the large lens that doubled as binoculars for the moment. She crouched behind a low boulder and perched the camera on the edge. Her eye found the viewfinder. At first nothing looked out of place. A few tents, a pen for giraffe. No signs of life. She squeezed off a few frames of film. She raised her head, surveying the landscape.
She saw a cloud on the track below, indicating the approach of a vehicle from further out in the bush. It turned off into the camp. Two men emerged. One was lean, with the blond hair of Vandenblok. The other was a beefy man who showed his Boer roots. She wondered if he could be the white man in the slide Uncle Phillip had shot of two people carrying a carcass in the bush.
Tabitha looked through the lens again and shot a few frames. The men had every right to be at their campsite. Her stealth observance of them did not turn them into criminals. She zoomed in as tightly as she could as they approached the truck. They turned away and her frame was filled with the back end of the truck and the license plate. KGR 798. That sounded familiar. Odd.
The hair on Tabitha’s arms stood up. She remembered the scratching in the side of Phillip’s diary. It had said KGR 79. He hadn’t got the last number in the sequence. As she watched, the men opened a compartment in the giraffe pen along the floor of the enclosure. Her mouth hung open and she forgot to press the shutter release on the camera for several moments.
The large man rolled a case from the truck they’d driven and approached the giraffe pen. He opened a rather slim compartment in the base. One by one he lifted tusks of ivory, padded them carefully and secured them into the slot beneath the giraffes. Tabitha heard the speed advance motor as the film ran through the camera. It sounded unnaturally loud and mechanical in the veldt.
She felt a chill, despite the spring sunshine touching her. It could be these men were moving ivory through a legitimate means. It was possible. Vandenblok was an importer/exporter after all. The mode of transport seemed odd though. Tabitha didn’t want to be here anymore. She snatched up the camera and headed back for the truck. In her rush, she tripped but caught herself without falling. Her commotion aroused some birds, and they burst from the ground cover with squawks of protest. She dropped the keys to the truck and fumbled to pick them up and get to the relative security of the cab.
Chapter 63
Pieter aimed a gun but didn’t shoot. He set it down and swore. He pointed to the crest of the hill.
“What?” Johanne couldn’t tell what he was pointing at. He squinted toward the eastern hill.
“There’s a plume of dirt being kicked up by a vehicle, you idiot. Someone was up there.”
“So? There’s a trek up there.”
“We just added merchandise to the pen. They may have seen. Go find out who it was.”
“Baas, I bet there’s dozens of lodge bakkies and cars on the road at this time of day. They all get out for a final game viewing before the camp gates close. You’re worried after what happened to Mhlongo.”
“I don’t pay you to tell me things I already know. Hurry. Get to the main road and see who that was.”
Johanne rolled his eyes and shrugged. Pieter shoved him from behind and he stumbled to keep himself upright.
“Move it.”
Chapter 64
Back on the road, Tabitha reasoned that the bakkie had been far back from the hilltop. The men couldn’t possibly have seen her at that distance. No way they could ever know who was up on the hill. No way what she saw was innocent. Phillip had seen them doing something too. The plates.
When she hit the tar road, she realized she barely had time to reach Sunset Dam and take some quick pictures before she needed to get to the camp gates. Her mind whirred as the tires pushed the road behind her. What she had seen didn’t lead her to think it was honest exporting. Her body might be shaken, but her resolve was not. Whether or not that was what Uncle Phillip had stumbled into she might never know. She sighed. She wondered who might believe her now? Rian or Mpande? She had some random photos and a scratching in the side of Phillip’s diary. Her airline ticket said it was time to pack her bags and go home. It frustrated her, not knowing for sure if Mhlongo had killed Phillip or if there was a bigger scenario involved. She could delay her ticket by a few more days and see what became of this new revelation. With no more to do, though, she wondered if she should just go. The money to change the ticket could be crucial to her savings account. Would she make it until some of the checks for these stories came in? Nagging doubts badgered her as she shot pictures at Sunset Dam.
The hippos, crocodiles and Marabou storks put on terrific shows for the camera, and Tabitha let the film fly. Knowing she would get some of Phillip’s digital shots took some of the pressure off her shooting. She could enjoy the moment. Her eyes teared up at the thought of Phillip and how he would have relished Sunset Dam. His life had been cut short unjustly. It wasn’t right.
She’d give the film to Rian Minaar in the morning when he came, and leave it in his capable hands. Her sense of urgency and tension remained strong. She tried to shut it out as she worked, watching the beautiful animals. Bright green water grasses punctuated the water where the hippos cavorted near the shore. The golden light of sunset kissed their backs. The sounds from the fracas reached her across the small lake. Hippos honking and snorting, all in good humor. Some moss near her on the shore moved and a crocodile slunk from the water.
It dawned on her that Vandenblok planned to ship out soon. Maybe tomorrow. She wasn’t sure what day, but the evidence would b
e across the border soon. Someone from the park should know and take a look.
Tabitha shoved the bakkie in gear and backed out onto the tar road, heading for her camp. Perhaps the office would still be open, and she could call back over to Skukuza to speak with Mpande.
Several cars lined up with the bakkie, sliding into camp just as the ranger closed the wooden gates for the night. Safe once again? Tabitha wondered. She took comfort in the thought that Vandenblock didn’t know she was at Lower Sabie, and no one else did either. She parked quickly and trotted across the camp. The office, a glorified trailer since a flood had destroyed the original building, was closed with no one in sight. Tabitha slapped the door. She walked back to the truck to retrieve her phone cards and found a pay phone. The Skukuza desk answered on the first ring.
“I have an emergency and need to speak to Mr. Mpande. Would you give me his number?”
“Oh, Miss, I’m sorry, but it is against regulations for me to do this. I can have him call you.”
“Will he call right away?”
“I’m afraid I do not know his schedule for the evening.”
Tabitha stifled a sigh. She ran fingers through her hair. “Please ask him to call. It is urgent, but I’m at Lower Sabie so it will be difficult to get a hold of me.”
“Why don’t you leave a note at the pay phone as to your whereabouts in case Mr. Mpande can call. Okay? The workers do that often.”
Tabitha recognized the futility of this line of assistance tonight. She tried the police station in Nelspruit, but Rian Minaar was gone for the day. They agreed to get him a message. Hunger ate at her, and the idea of staring at the pay phone all night in case it rang lacked appeal. She paced back and forth in front of the phones in the twilight. Would Rian get the message and call back right away? After five minutes of pacing, she admitted reluctantly there was little she could do. She thought of Daniel’s easy patience and sighed.
Killed in Kruger Page 26
