“How did you get these photos?” he asked. “I didn’t see you at the scene so early on. I thought you arrived after I did.”
“This is the way it happened,” Helmsley said, turning slightly in her chair toward him. “We were out early that morning to take pictures of workers coming to their respective mines. We do this with their permission. However, on this occasion, we heard that something was going on at Mr. Liu’s site.
“So we rushed over there to find that a body was being dug up, and at that point, we decided we would retreat to the cover of the surrounding fringe of trees and take some shots with a long telephoto lens.”
“Why?”
“Because we thought onlookers or Wei Liu would take offense at our presence. People are skittish about cameras. We stayed there for a couple of hours until you showed up and asked everyone to leave. That’s when we came down and you met us.”
Dawson was angry. “This could all be evidence in the case, Akua. How could you keep these from me?”
“Well, actually, Chief Inspector,” she said rather coolly, “I’m not journalistically obligated to hand over material to the police unless it’s by court order.”
“Obligation is not the point,” Dawson snapped. “It’s what is right to do.”
“Okay, okay,” she said, flushing. “I agree it would have been helpful to do so in this case. Anyway, here you are. Full access. Better late than never.”
Dawson felt awkward as he cooled off. “Sorry,” he muttered. “I think I flew off the handle a little bit.”
“No worries,” she said, now looking unperturbed, but Dawson suspected she was hiding her emotions well. She slid the laptop over. “Here you go. Take a look through them. I need to get something from my room.”
He continued to look through them from where they had left off. As he clicked through quickly, the images became a time-lapse movie. At the beginning, the galamsey boys and their Chinese boss crowded around the site where Bao’s head had been first spotted. There was Kudzo Gablah, and then the workers Dawson had never met. They were digging, along with Wei Liu, and quickly a crowd of onlookers began to gather. Urban area or rural outpost, bystanders at a murder scene were universal.
Little by little, Bao’s head was unearthed-becoming his neck, then chest and back-as others joined the dig. Dawson noticed that one or two people abandoned the area quickly, probably not able to stomach the sight. Gradually, Bao’s impossibly arched body emerged, and the crowd looked on in fascination, drawing even closer.
Dawson made out that now Wei Liu was frantically trying to drive people away and that gradually, some of them complied while others loitered. As the space between them cleared, Dawson saw something-someone-that made him sit up straight. Yaw Okoh was among the observers.
He came back to the scene of the crime, Dawson realized with a jolt. Yaw had not mentioned that. And then Dawson’s blood turned to ice, and he erupted into a cold sweat as he realized he had made a terrible mistake.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
If Yaw had murdered Bao, it meant he had returned to the scene of the crime, as the photos showed. If he had not murdered him, however, might he have been able to “confess” to the murder by mentally reconstructing it at the scene? In several of Samuels’s photos on Akua’s laptop, Yaw was staring at Bao’s dead body, apparently engrossed by it. Dawson cast his mind back to which questions Yaw might have been able to correctly answer by his having been at the crime scene. Certainly, How many pieces of rope did you use to tie Bao? And, In which direction was Mr. Bao’s head facing when you buried him with the excavator?
But some other aspects he couldn’t know from merely observing the scene. For instance, that after arriving at the mining site to help fix the excavator, Bao had called Someone-or tried to-at some time after four. Yaw had to have been there to witness that. And what about the fact that Bao wasn’t strangled? How could Yaw know that without being present at the crime?
As Dawson examined the photographs, his mind swung back and forth. One moment he thought, Of course Yaw is the murderer, but in the next, a panicky feeling seized him as he questioned himself, Are you sure? Now he was seeing something else in the images that nagged at him like an itch he could not scratch. Kudzo was standing next to Yaw, and in one photo, he seemed to be addressing Yaw, and although Yaw did not seem to be responding verbally, he did appear to be listening. Had the two young men known each other before this occasion?
He stared again at another picture in which Kudzo was talking to Yaw and pointing to his own face as if demonstrating something, but what?
Akua returned. “Everything okay?”
Dawson looked up. “Did you film any of the activity at the crime scene?”
“Actually I did a couple of two-minute videos on my phone while Samuels was taking photos,” she said. “Why do you ask?”
He pointed at the image in which Kudzo was gesturing toward his face. “I want to get an idea of what he’s saying here. A video might help.”
She located the two videos and played the first. It showed the final minutes of Bao’s body being removed from its burial place by Wei, Kudzo, and one of the other galamsey boys. At one point, Akua had panned to show the entire body of onlookers, and it appeared that Yaw had not arrived by then.
The second video was taken about ten minutes later. Wei was kneeling over his brother, hysterically crying and pawing pathetically at Bao’s dead body, while Kudzo stood by in shock. Dawson held his breath, praying that this was the moment he was looking for.
He saw it. “There. Pause it, please. Run it back a little and then replay.”
She did that and Dawson watched.
Kudzo was standing about a meter away from the body. He looked shocked. At one point, he circled around the body and peered at Bao’s face. He pulled back with revulsion. From within the cluster of onlookers, Yaw appeared at Kudzo’s side. He nodded to Kudzo, but didn’t speak. Kudzo pointed at Bao’s face and replicated Bao’s widely gaping mouth. Kudzo took a few deep breaths while making a scooping gesture with his right hand close to his mouth. Then, as quickly as Yaw had arrived, he disappeared as if he had melted away.
“What does Kudzo’s gesture mean?” Dawson muttered.
“Looks like a scooping action.”
“Play it back one more time, please?”
He watched again, and then he nodded. “I get it now.”
“What do you get?” Akua asked him.
Dawson stood up to leave. “I can’t say yet until it’s confirmed.”
He called Kudzo, who didn’t answer at first, but Dawson tried again and got a response. Kudzo sounded tentative, probably worried that he was once more in trouble, but Dawson hastened to reassure him.
“But I need to ask you a question,” he said. “Do you know a certain Yaw Okoh?”
Dawson heard a hesitation before Kudzo answered. “No, please.”
But his voice set Dawson’s left palm tingling.
“Kudzo,” he said quietly. “I know you know him.”
“Did you say Yaw or Kwao?” Kudzo said quickly.
“Yaw.”
“Oh, sorry-I thought you said ‘Kwao.’ Yes, I know Yaw.”
Beautiful recovery. “From where?”
Kudzo cleared his throat, and Dawson could feel his nervousness over the phone. “One day when Mr. Bao was still alive,” Kudzo said, “Yaw came to the site looking for work. He say he can operate excavator, but Mr. Bao say he don’t need someone like that at that time. Then Yaw also went to Mr. Chuck’s place and look for work, but they too, they didn’t have. I took Yaw’s phone number in case I hear of some excavator job, and he also took my number.”