Hounds of the Underworld

CHAPTER 1-1

CHAPTER 1- Matiu -

The place smells wrong. Not even bad, nothing Matiu can put his finger on. Just plain wrong, yet also, inexplicably, quite perfect. Spread out before him in shades of blood and bone he can see the shape of human history to come. Gradual decay and violent collapse all rolled into one brutal augury which he, for all his cursed vision, is too blind to comprehend. Like rot and sand and despair, and this stink of death just a distraction. An afterthought.

Moving away from the babble of voices—his sister, the detective, the uniform, the real estate agent who found the remains—Matiu walks a long, slow arc around the mess in the middle of the room, hemmed in by its sagging border of yellow crime scene tape. In some places, the tape droops into the muck, the edges turning up in the draught. Like something out of a B-grade horror flick.

It’s not his business, nothing the f**k to do with him. He’s just a driver, the moody Māori with the ink on his cheek, his nose, his chin, drawing those mildly suspicious glances from the cops. Wouldn’t even be allowed in here if Penny wasn’t the consult, if he wasn’t her de facto bodyguard.

But he can’t look away. They’re convinced someone died here, because there’s a puddle like someone dumped a barrel of offal and rotten vegetables soaked in red wine across the floor. But try as he might, Matiu just can’t see a body in the muck. The only thing in there he can recognise is the bowl. It’s one of those carved wooden pieces of junk they sell at the Pasifika markets over in Manukau, soft light wood with figures carved on the sides and detailed in black ink, trying to make itself look all authentic as if it actually came from the islands and wasn’t just churned out in some South Auckland garage by kids whose parents should be sending them to school but are sweatshopping them instead. The bowl sits there in the muck, soaked in red, rivulets of dried blood clinging to its sides like spider webs. Like some fool thought they could catch all that mess in a goddamned fruit bowl.

“Bet they got a shock,” Matiu mutters. He kneels near the crime tape, drags a finger through the congealed blood, sniffs it. Wrinkles his nose. He doesn’t know what a dead body should smell like; meat and s**t and stale blood, probably. This is all that, and something else. Something sweet, fruity. Almond? Something he really doesn’t want to put his nose into any further, in any sense of the word. He rubs his fingers together, feels grit on his skin. Dirt, maybe, or sand, in the old blood.

He stands, wiping his hand on his coat, looks about. The rest of the building was pretty clean, swept and vacuumed and ready for potential buyers. Until the real estate agent had forced the locked door, thinking it was stuck. She’d entered the room and found the pool of gore; stepped into the scene of a murder, maybe, or something worse.

Interesting s**t.

But it’s not any of his f*****g business.

His eyes fall on the bowl. It’s inside the tape, not far, but further than he can reach. He’ll have to step over if he wants to touch it.

None of your f*****g business.

That would really piss off his sister. Penny gets funny about s**t like disturbing the scene of a crime. But the bowl knows. It’s the thing that doesn’t belong. Hell, none of it belongs, not the cold spill of mortal remains, not the blood-spattered crime tape, not the creeping sense that something happened here, something more than just someone dying, someone being blended to a sludge, something rank and corrupt. It’s the bowl.

“Go get it.”

“Piss off,” he replies to the shadows, to the voice at his shoulder.

But he knows he will.

- Pandora -

Penny can hardly wait to get inside. Hitching up her satchel, she nods to the uniform on the door. It’s all she can do not to grin, although that would hardly be professional. Nothing for months, and now she’s offered lead researcher on a case? Not just an assist either, but lead researcher. And in her own right, for her very own company. Instead, she gives her ponytail a cheery tug. Maybe things are finally picking up. Then she remembers Matiu.

Yeah, things are just peachy.

Penny can’t understand why her parents insist on treating her like a twelve-year-old. She’d called for a driver, not a damned babysitter. The last thing she needs is Matiu tagging along like a piece of soggy toilet paper stuck to her shoe. She clamps her lips shut and glances back. And just look at him: head down, shoulders slumped, hands stuffed in the pockets of his leather jacket. He’s the one behaving like a sulky teen. Why does he have to go talking to himself when they’re out in public, anyway? Mumbling under his breath to his imaginary friend…

She steps through the doorway, noting its splintered frame, and is confronted by a human wookie. Two metres plus, with oversized hands, and long overdue for a haircut.

“Who the f**k are you?” it bellows.

Penny jumps, startled. “I was called…”

Get a grip, Penny. You’re not here to audition for Miss Muffet. You have a right to be here…

“You the lab girl? The one that Noah Cordell recommended? Pandora somebody? Cordell swore you were reliable; I expected you half an hour ago.”

Penny tries not to bristle at the slight. After all, this is work. And apart from a few tests—some simple DNA analyses to resolve a private paternity suit and routine monitoring of the blooms stinking up the city’s beaches—there hasn’t been much cause to turn on the fumehood since she left LysisCo. She squares her shoulders, extends her hand.

Suck it up, girl.

“Yes, I’m from Yee Scientific Consultancy. Although, I prefer to be called Penny, if you don’t mind. You must be Detective Tanner.”

No handshake. Instead, the behemoth raises two gloved hands. “Yeah, and in an ideal world, I prefer His Lordship, but hey, I can’t have everything. That over there is Senior Constable Toeva Clark,” he says, indicating an officer with a backwards jerk of his head. Behind him, Clark is taking the statement of an expensively dressed woman in her forties. He acknowledges Penny with a wave of his tablet. “You’ll work with Clark; he’s the uniform on this case, and your liaison with the department. Anything you need to tell me, you tell him.”

“This isn’t the first time I’ve worked a crime, Detective.”

“Yeah, that’s what Cordell said. He also said you were cheap, and with this latest round of frickin’ budget cuts and seventeen serious crimes to solve—”

Penny cuts him off. “I get it. You need a result. So what do we have?”

“You tell me, because I’m stumped.” Tanner sweeps a meaty arm about the room. “Firstly, we’ve got this storeroom painted top to bottom in black, which, if you ask me, looks more like the inside of a nightclub than an office block. We’ve got a guy’s clothes, a pool of blood, a cereal bowl, and not much else. The real estate agent, Patisepa Tayler—that’s her with Clark—turned up with a client this morning, found the door jammed, and it wouldn’t open with her so-called ‘master key’. So she crossed the road and got a construction worker to come over and prise it open with a crowbar. We already interviewed him. Said it was bolted from the inside.”

She glances at the sludge of gore on the floor. Messy. “No body?”

Tanner stares at her. “Do you see a body, Ms Pandora?”

Penny’s cheeks burn, but luckily, the detective’s phone rings and he turns away to answer it. While Tanner is barking at the poor sod on the other end of the line, Penny moves away to survey the scene. Now, the important thing here is to ignore the gore. She’s made that mistake before, getting dragged in by the horror. And in some cases, there can be enough blood and offal to make a meat worker blanch. Head, not heart, is the key here. Separating out the emotional. Making objective observations.

Vaguely aware of Matiu’s dark form hovering near Clark, Penny pulls out her phone to record her observations and, trying not to feel too self-conscious, makes a tour of the room. “November 4, 2045, 10:12 am. Vacant industrial premises owned by Fletcher Enterprises, second floor, crime scene. It’s large for a storeroom: I estimate forty metres square. A couple of cabinets along the northern wall. Windowless. Cool, stop.” And relatively clean, if you exclude the jus. Environmentally controlled? She presses record again. “Suspect the black paint on the walls and ceiling is recent: the smell of volatised organic compounds still noticeable, stop.” If she had a portable flame ionisation detector, she could measure the concentration of aerosolised solvent particles still in the air, and then extrapolate back to determine the date the room was painted. Penny almost snorts. Chance would be a fine thing! Even if she could stretch to a piece of equipment that pricey, those things are dangerous. And judging from the way Tanner’s people are traipsing in and out of the room, the result wouldn’t be accurate anyway. Penny rejects the idea, but it’s OK: she’s just warming up, and there are other clues. Like this slight bubble in the floor. Bringing the device closer to her face, Penny minutes her observations: “Irregularities in floor, stop. Question possibility of a false floor, stop.” Penny steps on the bubble and lets it bounce back. Perhaps this room used to house an old data centre? Back in the late 2020s, a lot of companies put in their own after the big US data SNAFU. They drilled it into her at university, even though she never studied a single IT paper. One-oh-one grand f**k-ups. Caused a huge backlash against the use of public clouds and people—companies—figured it would be safer to operate their own data storage hardware locally—like they used to in the old days. That could explain the lack of windows here. And a false floor, because a large data centre would require a cooling system, somewhere to run the ducting, cables. Well, there’s an easy way to determine whether it’s hollow. Dropping the phone into her satchel, Penny pulls out a pair of gloves and snaps them on. Then, still outside the sagging yellow tape, she crouches, rapping her knuckles on the floor. It would help if Tanner wasn’t still bellowing, she might be able to hear. Instead, she lowers her ear to the floor.

Low frequency sound.

Yup, sounds like it could be hollow. So, if her hunch is correct, the original under-floor grid cavity has been covered by a false floor allowing the room to be used as a basic storage area. It doesn’t look like the false floor has been removed, so there’s little chance a body—if there was a body—could’ve been stowed there, but Penny makes a record to have Clark pull up the floorboards later, after the scene is cleared away. Actually, come to think of it, she’ll have him check the overhead vents, too. If a body was taken out that way, she’d expect to see a disturbance in the dust.

Tanner is still yabbering, his face is reddening. At least she isn’t getting the brunt of it. Should she wait for him? No. Best not to bother him. He’s already made it clear that where she’s concerned, efficiency is the key criterion. Penny pockets her phone, steps over the tape, and almost ruins her shoes in the congealing pool of blood and gristle, a macabre version of Bunol’s La Tomatina. Lucky she’s not squeamish. Stepping around the pool, Penny doesn’t bother to calculate the likely volume of liquid. There’s a lot; certainly enough to have been fatal, although, to be fair, a little bit of blood can go a long way.

From the looks of the blood spatter, a major vessel was involved. But unless the victim was a child, surely there’d be some drag marks? Even then, it’s unlikely an offender could remove the body without leaving some kind of trail. And these clothes are adult sizes. A polo shirt and pants. She flips the collar out. Size L.

Then there’s the little bowl. It’s odd. Why would a bowl be here? And how did it come to have blood in it? Do these things belong to the murderer, or the victim? Tanner probably already had Clark search for identification, but Penny rechecks the pants’ pockets anyway. She can’t risk getting egg on her face for not being sufficiently thorough.