Teeth of the Wolf

Teeth of the Wolf ebook-6-1

CHAPTER 1

- Pandora -

“Well, what do you think? Can you do it?” Tanner demands.

Penny has hardly had time to take in the scene, let alone open her satchel and get out her sampling tape, but as to whether she’ll do the work? No question. Over the past month since Sandi Kerr went on her sacrificial killing spree, the only contracts on offer have been some discreet chlamydia testing for one of the inner-city brothels and a bit of algal bloom monitoring for the local council. While the humdrum work allows her to cover the payroll, those withdrawals leave next to nothing in the coffers. Coffers. Ha! Chance would be a fine thing. Only one employee and things are that tight, she’s getting close to checking the back of the sofa for spare coins. She needs the work. Desperately. Although Tanner doesn’t need to know that, and nor do her parents for that matter. Heaven forbid, she could do without that particular lecture.

“Right now, we need the extra hands,” Tanner is saying, his bellow startling an approaching jogger, who veers away in fright. “What the hell are these people doing here?” He directs his question at a couple of uniformed policemen milling near the pathologist and his technicians. “Close the ruddy park, will you? Use some common sense!” They scuttle away, like slaters from sunlight.

Tanner turns back to Penny. “My own science guys are completely swamped. This godawful heat doesn’t help. Impossible to concentrate. Have you ever known it to be this f*****g hot in January? At this hour?” To make his point, he picks at his shirt with his fingers, pulling the damp fabric away from his skin. Just 8:30am and the park is like a hothouse. Penny checks her watch for the temperature, then does the conversion in her head: 35ºC…that would make it…308.05K.

“Can’t stand the heat myself,” Tanner goes on, his question obviously rhetorical. He lets his shirt droop. “Bloody awful. And this humidity! It makes everything a thousand times worse. Not to mention the speculation. The way they’re telling it at the station, it’s the weather that’s fuelling the crime wave.”

Penny nods. She’s heard that, too. Among other things. According to the news media, it’s our wasteful environment-polluting bourgeoisie coming back to bite us. The online tabloid, Dish-It—always economical with the truth—had gone a step further, proclaiming that the climate change apocalypse was upon us.

“Look at us, we’re drowning in our own sweat,” its news presenter had gushed only a couple of nights ago. “The worst recorded heat wave since 2032. Fresh water sources are becoming unpotable,” she’d said. “Sorry, someone’s talking in my ear. What’s that, George? Non-potable. Well, I don’t know, do I? Oh, OK. That was my producer, George, telling me that non-potable means our water isn’t suitable for drinking. Wow, that’s terrible. If you’re one of those people who prefer water, then that’s going to be a problem. What? The teleprompter? Oh right…Experts agree that the increased temperatures have contributed to the unprecedented algal growth in and around the harbour area with algal mats expected to continue expanding if temperatures persist. It’s symptomatic, it seems, of the ongoing eutrophication of our water courses. The lines are now open for your comments… What’s that, George? You want me to keep talking? But the words are… Oh yes, well, this eutrophication is worrying, isn’t it? I, for one, am interested in what our callers have to say about the Europeans’ involvement in all this.”

Penny had turned the report off.

It isn’t just the temperature that’s risen, tempers are heating up too, with people looking for someone to take their frustrations out on. Even the more respectable pundits—more respectable than Dish-It anyway—believe citizens are on the verge of rioting. Sensationalist reporting but with a smidgen of truth. Penny had done an online search and found a number of studies linking a hike in temperatures to people’s testosterone and adrenalin levels, with corresponding peaks in the violent crime statistics. Some of the research had pointed to associative causes, with people gathering for social activities in warmer weather, but that wasn’t the whole story, because most crimes tended to occur at night.

Like this one: the victim’s body discovered a little over an hour ago, in the early morning, by a passing jogger.

“The heat does tend to make people a bit crotchety,” she concedes. It’s an understatement. Several of Penny’s neighbours have been arguing into the night. Delivery men have been more curt than usual. Even poor Cerberus has been fractious, the Labrador barking at the slightest provocation.

Penny flicks her ponytail off her neck, hoping a breath of air from the harbour might cool her.

“My department has fifteen suspicious deaths on the go,” Tanner says wearily, “this one’ll bring us to sixteen. Sixteen investigations! It’s crazy. My go-to science consult is up to his ears in backlog.”

Penny’s head snaps up in spite of herself. That ‘go-to consult’ would be Noah Cordell, Penny’s former lover, former boss. Formerly, she’d thought he was wonderful too, but that was a long time ago. Months.

“That’s right, you know Cordell, don’t you?” Tanner remarks. “Apprenticed to him, weren’t you?”

In a manner of speaking.

“Uh-huh.” She purses her lips, resists the urge to say more. It isn’t professional to diss a colleague—even a dork like Noah—and he had been the one to recommend Yee Scientific to the police, which had led to Penny picking up her first solo case as lead researcher. That contract had been timely too, her little company stumbling before it got properly out of the blocks. Of course, she isn’t that naïve. She knows she’d only been awarded that first case because LysisCo had rejected it—Noah was hardly magnanimous, he’d been throwing her the crumbs—but still, Penny hates being beholden to him.

If the big detective notices her discomfort, he doesn’t show it. Instead, he steps up to the yellow police tape and, without stepping over it, puts his hands on his hips. Penny sidles over to join him and they take in the scene: a man in grubby clothes sprawled on a park bench, a bare foot, deathly pale, dangling.

“Well, this one doesn’t look too cerebral,” Tanner concludes. “You should be able to handle it. Homeless guy ODs. Happens often enough. Or maybe he rubbed someone up the wrong way and they slipped him a bad fix.”

Penny’s spine tingles. In science, it doesn’t pay to make assumptions off the bat. That way only leads to false starts and inaccurate results. She says as much to the detective.

Grabbing his belt buckle with one hand, Tanner tugs up his pants, gazes out across the water to the Auckland skyline. The pants immediately fall back under his belly where they were a second ago. “That might be so, although I’ve been in this game for a while; you get a nose for these things. In my experience, if it looks like smoke, then it’s probably smoke, you know?” He lifts a stubbled chin at the corpse, which is already visibly wilting in the summer heat.

“So, same deal as last time,” he says with finality, even though Penny hasn’t agreed to anything. “You’ll operate through Clark.” He inclines his head towards the constable, who’s directing the sticky beaks away from the foreshore and back to the car park. “I’ll expect you to keep Clark informed of any developments. You tell him, he tells me. I take it you still have his contact details?”

Penny nods. She likes Toeva Clark.

“And Ms Pandora?” Why must Tanner call her that stupid name? She hates it. Even if it is her given name as listed on her birth certificate, it still raises her hackles. Can’t he just call her Penny, like everyone else does? Apart from her parents, of course, and Matiu, when he’s trying to get a rise out of her. And Beaker, when he’s flustered. And… Oh, for heaven’s sake. She grits her teeth.

“Yes?”

“I hope I don’t have to remind you that you are the science consult on this case and not a sworn-in detective inspector.”

Her hackles rise. “Of course not. I—”

Tanner cuts her off with a wave of his wookie hand. “This should be an open-and-shut case, but in the event that it isn’t, I don’t want to hear a*********s of your pretty little arse being hauled out of any burning buildings. Are we clear?”

“I couldn’t help that,” Penny retorts hotly, her ponytail bobbing in irritation. “We had no choice but to follow up on a legitimate lead. Going to the surgery was vital to the investigation. We—”

“You were there after hours.”

“We were being conscientious!”

Tanner raises his eyebrows. “Ah yes, we. I forgot your brother was with you. Matiu Yee. Convicted crim.” He pulls a look of distaste as if Matiu were a piece of gristle he’d just picked out of his teeth. Penny’s relieved her brother isn’t here right now. Thankfully, he’s taken Cerberus off for a bit, the pair of them loitering at the edge of the trees on the other side of the park.

“None of that was Matiu’s fault. His counsel clearly demonstrated how Hanson set him up to take the fall. Matiu wouldn’t have been convicted if the witnesses hadn’t been too traumatised to testify. Everyone knows they were manipulated. Matiu isn’t a bad person, just impetuous and perhaps a bit easily led. In any case, he wouldn’t be the first to get himself mixed up in a bad crowd and—”

“Yes, yes, I’m sure he was innocent.”

Penny doesn’t need a net to catch his sarcasm. She squares up, pulls her shoulders back. “Matiu’s done his time, Detective, paid his debt to society. He shouldn’t have to pay again because of certain people’s prejudices. All my brother needs is a chance and if…”

She trails off. Tanner doesn’t say a word. Come to think of it, it’s been her doing most of the talking…

Damn it.

She’s only fallen for a tactic straight out of the manual. Policing 101: keep schtum, let the silence yawn outwards until your interlocutor runs off at the mouth, saying things that—in their case anyway—are better left unsaid.

Stiffening, she lifts her eyes to Tanner’s. She has to crane her neck because at over two metres, the man’s a behemoth. “Anyway,” she says with as much defiance as she can muster, “he’s only my driver, and in case you haven’t noticed, I don’t bill you for my travel.”

The detective’s eyes narrow and he grunts. “So long as you keep it that way.” Then, turning on his heel, he stalks off past a line of upturned dinghies in the direction of the parking area. “Remember, keep in touch,” he calls without a backward glance. Penny nods anyway. She wouldn’t put it past Tanner to have eyes in the back of his head.

With the detective gone, she takes a deep breath and steps over the crime scene tape.

- Matiu -

Matiu scratches his arm. It’s been weeks since it stopped hurting, but the skin under his dressing still itches like hell, and the clammy heat isn’t helping. The Harbour Bridge is a murky silhouette in the haze, lurking like the hump of some mythical sea monster. He drifts from one shady patch to the next, Cerberus padding at his heels, and tries not to rub himself raw. Tries not to think about how he earned this healing wound, hunting down that woman, Sandi Kerr, stepping into a place that should not be and screaming into the gaping maw of something eternal, and eternally hungry. So he drifts, floating along the line of the crime scene tape that hangs limp in the heavy, moist Auckland heat, kicking at stones and tugging Cerberus along with him.

Across the yellow tape that divides the public parkland, a swarm of cops are studying a corpse. Among them, Penny is taking evidence samples for processing back at the lab. Under no circumstances, she had told him very firmly, is he to cross the tape and approach the crime scene. The last time he did that had only led to more trouble than either of them could handle, and to be honest, he doesn’t want to get dragged into anything like that mess again. Hell, they’re not even cops, sure as s**t aren’t getting any danger pay for tracking down brutal criminals in a merciless underworld which Matiu has one foot in and which the police struggle to infiltrate.