"This is trespassing," Dave says as I lift Sloth over the fence.
"Don't worry. I was here earlier. It doesn't count as trespassing the second time round." I hold the ruby fingernail gently cupped in my hand. The thread is thicker now. We're close.
We scramble up the slope of the dump, the fine sand swallowing our feet to the ankle with every step. Away from the shelter of the trees, the wind is even more capricious. Eddies of dust whip and spiral around us, sandblasting exposed skin. I pull my hoodie up over Sloth, but it offers only scant protection. He ducks his head behind my neck and squeezes his eyes shut.
"Shit," Dave says. "I don't have the right lens protection for this."
"Here." I was hoping it wouldn't feel as bad the second time round. But the same mix of nausea and dread rises in the back of my throat. Dave raises his camera automatically and then lowers it again without taking a shot. "How did you find this?"
"It sort of found me."
The Sparrow boy/girl is sprawled akimbo on the sand, looking blankly up at the sky. There is dust embedded in every hollow and fold of her body, in the scooped palm of her hand, banked up against her lower eyelids like unshed tears, encrusted in the bloody gashes over her arms and legs and stomach and head. Her nails are broken, as if she'd tried to defend herself. Acrylic. Ruby-red with sequins. They must have matched her shoes.
Dave opens his mouth and closes it again. There's nothing to say. He takes cover behind the lens. The wounds are approximately three inches long, gaping like red mouths. It's hard work to hack someone to death. Ask the Hutu. Whoever did this had a lot of enthusiasm for the job.
"Notice anything missing?" I say as he stops to switch to a new memory card.
"I- No. I don't know. Is there something missing? Wait. There's not much blood. Which might mean she was killed somewhere else."
"And her animal isn't here."
"How do you know she had an animal?"
"She worked my street. It was a Sparrow."
"A Sparrow? That's tiny. You could miss that easily."
"Trust me. It's not here." I know this because I have searched this dune sideways and backwards for the corpse of a small brown bird with matchstick legs clenched up under its breast. But also because I can feel it. "It's lost."
When the cops finally rock up, only an hour and a half after I call them, they are pissy. It's the dust and the wind and the dead boy/girl staring up into the sky as if she's cloud-watching. It's the paperwork. The evidence. It's the fact that I'm involved at all.
They send me up to the interrogation room for another two-hour session with the good Inspector Tshabalala. This time she cuts straight to the chase.
"How did you know where to find the body?"
"It's in my file. My shavi-"
"Your shavi is finding lost things."
"And I found her body."
"How?" she presses.
"I followed a connection."
"How did you know the victim?"
"I didn't. I'd seen her on the street. She is, was, lekgosha. A sex-worker. But I don't think it was a client who did this."
"You don't think? Were you involved with the killing?"
"No."
"Where were you on the morning of Tuesday 22nd March?"
"Isn't that a different interrogation?"
"You tell me. Where were you?"
"As I said before, at the time Mrs Luditsky was stabbed
to death, I was at home in my flat. Apartment 611, Elysium Heights, Zoo City, Hillbrow. Postal code 2038. With my boyfriend Benoît Bocanga, who I believe has made a statement corroborating such."
"Benoît Bocanga. We've been reviewing his papers."
"Which are in order."
"But his refugee status application is due for renewal."
"If you want to blackmail someone, blackmail me. I'm sure you can dig up something."
"Indeed." She changes tack. "Ms December. You – and your magical shavi – have been peripherally involved in two murders in the last week. How would you explain that?"
"Phenomenally bad luck, Inspector."
"Do you own any knives?"
"I have a kitchen. It's small and dirty, but it does come equipped with assorted cutlery."
"Can we search your domicile?"
"You'll need a warrant."
"That can be arranged."
"So can a lawyer, Inspector."
30.
It takes committed former addicts to drag their sorry asses out of bed at ten in the morning. Or, judging by the faces, perhaps people who don't know how to sleep anymore. Pass the Midazolam.
I help distribute polystyrene cups of truly disgusting instant chicory-coffee mix to the patrons of today's early bird meeting at New Hope, using the opportunity to show round the photocopy of the burned man's ID at the same time.
The problem is that all anyone wants to talk about is Slinger, and how he's not the real makhoya after all. They're passing round a copy of The Daily Truth.
"Fo sho, darkie's Hyena was a fake," a very tall, very nervy guy says with telltale ringworm patches in his hair. He is carrying a funky old baseball cap upside-down with a Hedgehog curled up in it.
"This whole time?" says a lanky redhead with drawnon eyebrows. "And no one noticed? Don't you people have a way of telling if an animal is real or not?"
"'You people?' 'Real or not'?"
"Ag man, you know what I mean."
"It's not like being gay. We don't have some magic zoodar to detect other zoos."
"I think it's sad. That man was doing a lot for zoo relations."
"That man was doing a lot for his own publicity. Playing Mr Big Tough Gangster Zoo Guy to stir up controversy."
"Can I see that?" I ask, indicating the newspaper. The guy with the Hedgehog thrusts it at me and launches back into lecture mode. "Man like that knows how to work the media and rile up parents. You check his album sales. Same with Britney Spears. And Eminem and that freaky vampire guy with the weird eyes? They're just going for a reaction."
There are two photographs side-by-side dominating the front page under the headline CIRCUS ACT. The first is of Slinger holding an Uzi, posing tough with the diamondcollared hyena and a veritable posse of pussy in gold micro-bikinis with assault rifles of their own. It's contrasted with a harried man in a dark green tracksuit with a jacket over his head, fleeing the paparazzi towards an SUV with the door open to reveal a woman twisted round to hide her face.
I flip through, past the page-three boobs and the story about the people who have been so hard hit by the recession that they're hunting house cats until I find the report on the Sparrow's murder. Dave promised it would be front page, but Slinger's dirty has pushed it to a narrow block on page six, just another police file item.
The Daily Truth
POLICE FILE
Hate Crime Hack Job
The body of an oulike young boynooi was found yesterday afternoon on one of the Crown Mine dumps in the deep dark south of the city. After a hot tip-off, our photographer was first to discover the hacked-up body. The victim, said to be a ladyboy of the night, had apparently had magical and surgical alterations done before the madman killer did a little altering of his own, cutting he/ she/it to bloody ribbons with a panga. Was it a hate crime – a dissatisfied customer complaint taken to the extreme? The Gauteng police say no comment.