Hounds of the Underworld

CHAPTER 1-2

Nothing.

A stray wisp of hair has escaped from her ponytail. She brushes it back awkwardly with the inside of her arm. Careful. Don’t want to contaminate the scene.

Or myself.

The offending strand out of the way, Penny rests her satchel on her knee and flips it open. She’ll need to bag up the bigger items later, but for the moment, she takes out some adhesive specimen tape and begins her sampling.

Working again. Penny almost hums, but stops herself in time. Not that she’s ashamed or anything. There’s no rule that says a person shouldn’t enjoy their work, but it wouldn’t be appropriate here. Most people think crime scenes are sad, wretched places, and they’ll do whatever they can to avoid them. The suit on his way to the office. Students meeting outside a coffee shop. Call it superstition, but most will look away, cross the road, take another route, afraid the victim’s misery might somehow settle on them. It’s as if where there’s betrayal, Misfortune lingers, conveying Her despair on the passing breeze. Even a wallet, snatched at random in the street, can leave a sense of loss that will haunt passers-by long after the offender has pocketed the plastic and gone on his way. But Penny loves crime scenes. Not the suffering, of course. Or the ugliness. Only a psychopath could take pleasure in that. No, Penny loves their matter-of-factness; the way they reveal themselves in logical yet exquisite patterns, like the interlinking of bases in a DNA polymer. And when a crime scene is chaotic like this one, then Penny loves it all the more. The thrill of teasing out the tangled bundles, each newly uncovered node leading into the next. It’s like a dance, a beautiful dance of discovery.

“Hang on, who’s that guy?”

Miss Muffet caught out again, Penny leaps up and just manages to avoid compromising her sample. Matiu. What the hell does he think he’s doing, lurking at the edge of the tape, poking his nose in where it doesn’t belong? She told him to keep out of the way. Penny throws him a dirty look, to back off. Not that he’s looking at her. “Him?”

“Yeah,” says Tanner, “him with the tats. He’s not one of ours.”

Damn. She knew she should’ve made Matiu wait outside.

Like you could ever make Matiu do something he didn’t want to.

“Um, he’s my driver.”

“Driver, eh?” Tanner lifts an eyebrow.

“Yes.”

“You two married?”

“No!”

“Really? Because the look you just threw him was like the one my wife gave me this morning when I took the three-day-old sweats out of my gym bag.”

Penny stifles a grimace. “It’s just…he’s my brother.”

“Really?” That eyebrow again. Good one. Consultant brings baby brother to crime scene. Penny can just imagine how that will go down in the department lunchroom. “He doesn’t look like your brother.”

“Same mother, different father.” Not exactly true, but Penny isn’t about to give a genealogy lecture at a crime scene. Tanner scrutinises them with his detective gaze, first Penny, then Matiu, then he shrugs. “That figures…” he says. “Yeah, what is it, Clark?”

“Sorry to interrupt, Sir, but Ms Taylor was wondering when she might be able to leave? She says she has to meet a client. She’s getting quite agitated. I told her that you wouldn’t be long, but that was before you got on the phone…”

Tanner heaves a sigh. “OK, let’s go talk to her.”

Originally, Penny had thought the woman was in her forties, but on closer inspection, she revises her estimate up a decade. It looks as if a good percentage of the agent’s sales commissions have been spent—along with her lunch hours—in one of Auckland’s drop-in enhancement salons. With her mustard pantsuit and over-teased mane, Patisepa is vaguely leonine. Not to mention roaring mad.

“Detective, I’d like to help you, but I really must go.”

“Just a few more questions, if you don’t mind, Ms Taylor.” Tanner’s tone is smooth. “You say, you found the room locked?”

“That’s right. I already told Officer Clark everything.”

“It was locked, you say?”

The agent rolls her eyes. “I keyed in the code and it wouldn’t let me in.”

“Did you consider that someone might have changed the code?”

Now Patisepa folds her arms across her chest. “Why does it matter how I got in? If you must know, I have the master code. It’s supposed to override any other code, and this is just a storeroom, after all. When it didn’t, I assumed it was jammed, so I got someone and we broke in. And that’s what we found. Over there. All that blood! And my vendor, Mr Fletcher’s clothes sitting in a pile right there!” She exhales pointedly, through flared nostrils, like a highly strung race-horse.

Tanner isn’t intimidated. “How do you know they’re his clothes?”

“It’s his polo shirt.”

“This is an Auckland Blues Super Soy polo. Thousands of people must own this shirt.”

Taylor shrugs. “I don’t know. It looks like his polo. He was wearing one just like that the last time I saw him.”

“And when was that?”

“Four days ago, I think. I’d have to check my diary. I dropped in at his office to set up today’s viewing.”

“Sir?”

Penny and Tanner turn to look at Clark.

“Well?”

“I’ve had the department trying to track down the building owner—this Darius Fletcher that Ms Taylor refers to—and it turns out he was reported missing by his sister…” Clark consults his notepad. “…a Miss Rose Fletcher on the first of November. Seems Darius planned a late supper with his sister on Halloween but he never showed up.”

“Why didn’t I know this?” Tanner storms. Penny has to admire the way Clark doesn’t wince.

“Sir, the person in question was an adult. Uniforms on the desk figured Fletcher got a better offer than dinner with his sister. And maybe that better offer extended to more than one evening. The Desk didn’t think there was anything to investigate, so they…they filed it.”

Tanner’s stare fixes his junior. “So, at this point what we have is enough blood to fill a small aquifer but what we don’t have, is any idea of whether Fletcher is missing, or dead?”

Patisepa taps a patent court shoe. “What’s the difference? All that blood? I imagine my client will be put off buying now.”

- Matiu -

“You stay out of it.”

Matiu talks into his collar. He doesn’t need to speak loud for Makere to hear him. Sure as hell doesn’t need anyone hearing him talking to himself. They already think he’s pōrangi. No point giving them any more reason to believe it.

“I’m not getting into this. Nothing to do with me.”

Matiu stares at the bowl, biting his lip as the voice drifts at him from the shadows of empty cabinets at his back. The stick figures carved on the bowl’s skin shiver a little, as if trying to free spindly limbs from their wooden prison, from their etched fishing poles and canoes, like they want to step away from that time-frozen sea, flee whatever lurks beneath the black ink.

“But you want to know what happened, don’t you?”

Matiu glances at the others, all talking, taking notes, buried in their thoughts and assumptions. Surely they won’t notice if he has a look.

He steps over the tape, reaches for the bowl.

A quick step here, a stretch, and it’s in his hands. A long string of black and red gore clings to it as he steps back.

The walls scream at him.

He drops the bowl with a clatter, and from the shouts he knows that Penny is screaming at him too, and the cop is yelling. He barely hears, the white noise ringing in his ears. Matiu staggers, skids in the muck, goes down on one knee. Then Penny’s there, dragging him back, the yellow tape tangling his shins.

“What do you think you’re doing?” she hisses. “You can’t go touching the evidence. Now we have to eliminate you as a suspect, you moron.”

But Matiu doesn’t hear her. The bowl rolls long lazy circles on the clean floor, catching in the sticky blood. He sees its sides coated in red. Remembers, without remembering, the hot spill. Remembers the hunger.

“Why did I ever let you come down here?” Penny grumbles, hoisting him to his feet. For a techie, she’s surprisingly strong. Or maybe it’s just that Matiu’s bones feel suddenly thin, light as a ghost. Some days he feels like the air can just pass straight through him. Some days, he’s sure it does.

“Go wait in the car,” Penny growls. “I can’t afford for you to screw this up for me.”

Matiu shakes her off, casting a look over her shoulder at the cop, his thunderstorm brow. If he wasn’t her brother, and a driver, he’d be locking him up, Matiu knows. He gives him a cold grin. Can’t be worse than where he’s already been. “You don’t want to take this on, sis,” he says, keeping his voice low so the cop won’t hear. “It’s uglier than it looks.”

Penny glares at him. “Why don’t you just leave the science to the experts? I’ll be down once I’ve got what we need to take back to the lab. Now get out of here.”

Matiu shrugs, walks away without another word, leaving Pandora and the cops to their work. The warehouse echoes around him, and he holds his hands to his ears to keep out the hollow ringing of his own footsteps, of the screams that resonate back up from the brief moment when he touched the bowl. Felt the rush of life, death, intermingling.

It’s his blessing, his curse, to feel the veil that lies between the worlds, to touch it as it slips and slides in his grasp, rasps along his senses, teases at his dreams. Not that Penny, with her blinkered commitment to scientific process and logical explanations, has ever been willing to accept that. She is her father’s daughter after all, just like he is his mother’s son.

“Aren’t you glad you did it?”

He doesn’t bother looking for Makere; knows that if he does all he’ll see is a hunched form turned away from him, long raven hair falling over his shoulders, more figment than form, a hint of someone glanced in a crowd, never quite where you expect him to be. But there, no less. Not that anyone else can see or hear him. Makere is Matiu’s other curse, his other blessing, though some days he doesn’t think of him as either of those. Sometimes he’s just a right royal pain in the arse. Has been, ever since they were kids.

Outside, the sky is as hard a blue as ever, the temperature quickly climbing as the sun gets up. It’ll be another hot one, and it’s not even December. The bloom in the harbour will start to stink fairly soon, and the wind off the Hauraki Gulf will spread it over Auckland’s hills and suburbs. But the stink of death seems to hang on Matiu, the stink of everything that’s so wrong about this scene, hanging around and refusing to leave him alone, just like Makere. Crossing to the car, he leans against the door and runs his hands through his thick dark hair, lank around his neck, sweating in the sun beneath his leather coat. The tainted factory looms against the perfect sky, its face cast in shadow and quietly mocking him.

Something happened here, something dark and deadly that crept up from the earth and crawled among the shadows. Maybe murder, maybe not. Maybe something Penny shouldn’t be getting caught up in. For all that she’s a pedantic pain in the arse, her worldview hemmed in by their parents’ expectations of her and her own misconceptions of reality, she’s still his sister. He has to keep her from this s**t as best he can, and if she’s too stubborn to walk away, then he’ll have to hang on her like a bad smell so that when it all turns sour, he might be near enough to do something. That’s what family’s for, right?

Yeah, right.