Teeth of the Wolf

Teeth of the Wolf ebook-12

CHAPTER 7

- Pandora -

“It’s through here.” His head ducked to avoid the branches, Tanner holds back the foliage. Slipping by him into the clearing, its trees draped in yellow tape to keep out the rubber-neckers, Penny gets her first look at the body. A Jane Doe. She stifles a gasp.

It’s a bog body! Like the ones discovered in peat marshes all over Northern Europe. Penny’s heart does a little leap. She damps it down quickly. No matter how historical and thrilling the find, the corpse was once a living, breathing person. She needs to treat the site, and the body, with professional respect.

She takes a breath and examines the scene.

Curled up in a newly-excavated hollow, the dead woman is lying on her side. She’s perfectly preserved. Her leathery skin is as dark as Guinness and, in places, folded in on itself like an apple wrinkled with age. She’s not wearing any clothes, and there’s no jewellery or other adornment to point to her age. Still, something in the woman’s features, perhaps the small ears and the delicate nose, suggest she might have been younger, possibly in her thirties. That’s all Penny can see for the moment, her view partially blocked by a man wearing waders, crouched beside the body. His back to Penny, he prods gently at the cadaver, trying to lift the woman’s head with a wooden spatula.

With a start, Penny recognises the set of his shoulders. She’d been warned, knew he might still be here, but even so her heart races. Beads of sweat spring up on her palms, and her face flushes hotly. Bloody autonomic nervous system. At least he isn’t looking her way. But then he does, and his mouth twitches.

I used to kiss that mouth.

With his usual infuriating air of studied nonchalance, Noah Cordell stands up and pushes the fringe of wavy curls off his forehead with the back of his arm.

“Noah.”

“Pandora. How nice.” His tone suggests it is anything but nice. With a brisk snap of his Nitrile gloves, Cordell turns his back on her and addresses the detective. “What’s this about, Tanner? I thought we agreed I’d be the lead scientific consult on this case.”

“That’s not exactly how I remember it, Cordell. Anyway, you already have fifteen, sixteen cases on your books.”

Cordell shrugs. “We could have double the caseload and still handle it. LysisCo has the capacity. My staff are well-trained and our labs are state-of-the-art. We get results…”

Did he always talk like this? As if he were an advertorial?

One arm still holding back the mangrove like a traffic lollipop, Tanner lets the branches go, closing the three of them in the clearing. He folds his arms across his chest. “I see,” he says. “So you’re implying Ms Pandora here isn’t up to the work, is that it? Because you were the one who recommended her. Didn’t she do her internship at LysisCo?”

“Well yes, she did,” Cordell backtracks smoothly. “I’m certainly not casting aspersions on the validity of Pandora’s qualifications, it’s just…” He raises an eyebrow. “Shall we say, a lack of experience?”

Penny karate-chops the air between the pair of them. “Um…seeing as I’m here, would you mind if I took a quick a look?”

Tanner puts his hands on his hips. “Dr Cordell?”

Cordell heaves a sigh, then gives a theatrical sweep of his hand as he steps to one side. “Be my guest.”

Taking care not to cave in the hollow, Penny steps closer to the body.

Tanner hovers behind her. “I’ve got to admit, in all my years of policing I’ve never had a body look like this one. I’ve seen them come out the water all blown up like balloons, but this is…”

“It’s a bog body,” Cordell interrupts. “Naturally mummified. Amazing really.”

Slipping on her gloves, Penny drops to her haunches. “How was she discovered?”

“The tide made a channel, which uncovered the sink hole, and then someone’s dog dug it up. I think she was buried deeper, but the mutt dragged her out of the ditch,” Tanner replies.

Penny nods. One of the woman’s arms shows evidence of an animal bite. The same arm sports a small tattoo at the wrist. Unlike the one on the body in the park, this tattoo is hard to make out, the ink barely discernible against the woman’s darkened skin. Nevertheless, the pattern is unmistakeable: concentric whorls and a central motif resembling an eye. Coincidence? Tanner doesn’t think so…

Taking care not to damage the limb, Penny moves to check inside the other wrist.

“There’s nothing there. I looked,” Tanner says as his phone rings. “Where the hell are you?” he barks. Lifting the tape over his head, he steps out of the clearing to take the call.

Penny continues her observations. The woman’s face looks too serene for her to have suffocated, although it’s a possibility. There’s a blackened mass in the lower abdomen area. Had the victim been eviscerated? Was that how she’d died? Maybe she’d been tortured before death. Or perhaps she’d attempted to carry out her own Caesarean. Penny shudders. She hopes that wasn’t what happened. The mass doesn’t look like a baby and there’s no sign of a skeleton. Not that that means anything. The same highly acidic conditions that preserved skin and internal organs would likely have resulted in the break-down of any bone salts. Given that mineralisation of foetal bones peaks late in gestation, the lack of an obvious skeleton wouldn’t necessarily rule out an aborted foetus. Penny would have to sample the mass to know more.

“Look, Tanner,” Cordell says when Tanner reappears. Engrossed in her work, Penny had forgotten Cordell was there. “I was here first and I’m your lead consultant. My company has both the experience and the means to get the job done. You can’t deny, LysisCo gets results.”

“Experience,” Tanner echoes.

Cordell frowns. “I just said that.”

“So, you’ve carried out analyses on one of these…” Tanner waves a frypan-hand at the corpse in the hollow.

“Bog bodies,” Penny and Cordell say together.

“…you’ve worked on bog bodies before, then?”

“Well, I…” Cordell smacks at an imaginary sand-fly on his neck. “Well, no. Not exactly. No one has. This is the first example of its type ever uncovered in New Zealand.”

Taking a sampling bag from her satchel, Penny turns it inside out and scoops up a handful of the substrate surrounding the corpse, speaking while she works. “It’s true,” she says. “Instances of bog bodies are extremely rare, less than 100 uncovered worldwide, because only a few bodies of water provide exactly the right conditions. Even recreating them under laboratory conditions is problematic. Not only does the substrate need to be anaerobic, it has to be saturated with organic acids and aldehydes, making it highly acidic. Normally, rotting peat provides the organic material. It’s what causes the acidity: humic acid released as the vegetation breaks down. I wonder if the decaying mangroves serve the same purpose here…” she says out loud. “But I always thought conditions had to be cold, much colder than New Zealand, typically less than 4ºC. That’s why bog bodies tend to be found in northern Europe…I’d take an internal temperature reading…” She shakes her head. “Too risky. I’d hate to damage a specimen as scientifically important as this one. Anyway, the site’s been uncovered for a while now…”

Tanner turns to Cordell. “So,” he says slowly, “what were you saying about there being no experts?”

“Now look, Tanner—”

But Tanner raises his palm, stopping him. “The thing is, Cordell, there’s a possibility this body is connected to another one discovered at North Shore.”

“The case from this morning? The homeless guy?”

Tanner nods. “The one you were too busy to handle…”

Cordell’s eyes narrow. “Not too busy, Tanner. I never said we were too busy, just that the North Shore case didn’t require any specialised expertise…” He pauses. “I can’t see how this bog body could have any connection to a death that occurred in the past 24 hours. Most bog bodies date from the Iron Age. For all we know, this one might have died before Kupe rowed up in his waka.”

Tanner’s mouth drops. “You’re f*****g kidding me.” He turns to look at Penny. “Is that true?”

“I’m sorry, what?” Using a pair of tweezers, Penny is concentrating on putting what looks like hair into a sampling bag.

“Could this body really have been here since the Iron Age?”

Her eyes fixed on the fibre, Penny nods. “That’s right. The oldest known bog body is Koelbjerg Woman from Denmark. She lived in the Mesolithic period.”

“Mesolithic?”

“The Stone Age,” replies Cordell.

“Jesus.”

“But she was only a skeleton,” Penny murmurs. “The oldest fleshed out example dates from the Bronze Age. The thing is, just looking at this body in situ, we’ve no way of knowing how long she’s been preserved. It could be as little as one year or as much as a thousand. It would’ve helped if she’d been wearing clothing, or if she’d been buried with some personal items to give us a hint to her era. I could look at her teeth for dental work, and examining her stomach contents might help.”

“But look at her: she’s got skin and nails and everything. Can’t you just do a DNA test?” Tanner demands.

Sealing the bag, Penny slides the sample into her satchel and stands up. “Assuming her DNA was catalogued somewhere, but I’m guessing they didn’t have DNA profiling as far back as the Iron Age. In any case, it’s unlikely any DNA will have survived the preservation process. Radiocarbon dating would work, providing the age of the cadaver doesn’t go back more than 10 half-lives.”

Tanner gives her a blank look. “Ten lives. What is she, a cat?”

Cordell cuts in. “What Pandora is trying to say—and doing rather a poor job of it—is that radiocarbon dating is only accurate up to 50,000 years.”

A poor job. A poor job? Penny could happily stab him in the eye with her tweezers.

“LysisCo can handle the carbon dating,” Cordell goes on. “I’ve just upgraded our equipment to include a model 2035 benchtop Quantulus spectrometer.”

We interrupt this programme for a brief message from our sponsor.

“Excellent. That’s sorted, then. When she’s ready, Ms Pandora can send a sample over.”

“But—” Cordell stammers, his face a rictus of surprise.

“I’m giving her the case, Cordell.”

Penny is overwhelmed by a rush of gratitude for the big detective.

“No need to get too smug, Yee,” Tanner says, bringing her back to earth. “You’ve got 72 hours to see if the two cases are connected. After that, our Jane Doe goes to Cordell.”

Gloating isn’t professional, so Penny smiles instead. “Is the pathologist on his way? I don’t think the body should be left exposed like this. It’ll already have started to decompose.”

“That was Mather on the phone just now. He doesn’t want anything to do with it. Something about preferring his bodies fresh. You’ll have to store it. I’ll have it bagged up for you to take back to your lab.”

“My lab?” Penny mumbles. She hadn’t expected to play host to a cadaver.

“Yes. That way, it’ll be easier for you to do whatever it is you people do. You’ve got a cool store, right?”

“Yes—”

But the detective has already departed in a flutter of yellow crime tape and a swish of mangrove branches.

Cordell snaps off his gloves. “Right, Pandora, I’ll see you in 72 hours to collect the body. Try not to completely destroy the evidence, will you? I’d like to be able to salvage a modicum of justice for the poor woman, whoever she is.”

He turns on his heel, presumably to stomp off, except with all the mud it’s more of a squelch off.

When he’s gone, Penny gets out her phone and snaps a photo of the tattoo. Hang on. She’s missed a message from Matiu. He’s sent a bunch of photographs. Penny swipes through the series. Her eyebrows knit. They’re medicine labels: Gonal-F, Suprefact, Ovidrel, and Crinone. All prescribed for a woman named Charlotte Langley.

What the hell?

Penny doesn’t recognise the others, but Gonal-F is a synthetic version of FSH. Follicle stimulating hormone! A protein that encourages ovarian follicles to grow and release ova. There’s only one reason Penny knows for taking that. She sucks in a breath. IVF. Matiu’s making plans to be a dad?

Without telling me?

But he hasn’t said a thing. He hasn’t mentioned this Charlotte woman, not even in passing.

Thigh deep in mud, Penny stabs at her phone.

What the f**k, Matiu? she types.

Then deletes it. That’s not the way to approach this, even if he is her brother. Although, maybe it isn’t Matiu who’s pushing for a family. Ever since high school, girls—Penny’s friends included—have been throwing themselves at her little brother—attracted by his decent set of abs and carefully feigned nonchalance. It didn’t stop at schoolgirls, either. Women are still chasing him, and Matiu’s recent stint in prison—the connections and the facial tattoos he got in there—have only added to his appeal. Penny doesn’t really get it. Sure, it’s well-documented that women in mid-cycle prefer males they perceive to be hyper-masculine, but not every woman Matiu meets can be mid-cycle! Still, there haven’t been any serious relationships. Nothing meaningful. Not as far as Penny’s aware.

Omigod. What if this is serious?

No, no, no. She shakes her head. If Matiu was in a serious relationship, if he was in on plans to have a baby, why would he be asking about the drugs? Why wouldn’t he already know? Something’s off. Instead, she types:

In vitro fertilisation meds? Serious chat due, little brother. Developments at this end: Jane Doe is bog body pulled from mud at Karaka. Tanner right about tattoo, identical to John Doe.

Then she adds a photo of the tattoo to the bottom of her message, as well as a Wikilink about bog bodies, so Matiu understands the significance.

Right, time to wrap up this site investigation. Penny needs to eyeball Matiu and find out if she’s about to be an aunty.

- Matiu -

“More of your dodgy mates?” Erica asks, both hands holding onto the seat as Matiu hurtles through a bend, tyres squealing round the corner, and accelerates onto the main road. Cerberus howls as he slides into the doors and the back of the seats.

“Dunno. Would you like me to pull over and ask?” The van has dropped behind, no match for the Porsche. Matiu floors the gas, weaving around a bus and a couple of trucks, a few cars whizzing by the other way. Horn blasts assail them, but Matiu doesn’t slow down until the van is gone from his rear view. Then he takes a hard right, zigzags through the backstreets at a more legally acceptable speed, and soon they’re cruising along an industrial drive, Matiu scanning the road. They pass a series of looming warehouses, now creaking with neglect, which used to be a hub for national courier companies before the implosion of the transport industry in the wake of the oil crash. He pulls the Porsche into an access way. Down the back are a number of smaller buildings, large tin sheds with roller doors, where the transport companies used to do maintenance on their fleet vehicles. Matiu taps his phone screen and one of the roller doors starts to rise. He drives the Porsche through and swipes his phone, dropping the roller door behind them. He kills the engine as the door shudders closed. For a moment, they sit there in the darkness, the silence broken only by their heavy breathing, the ticking of the engine block cooling, and Cerberus’ quiet whines.

Finally, Erica speaks. “And what are we doing here? Wherever here is?”

Matiu rests his head against the seat, willing the tension of the past few minutes to drain away. “It’s a criminal thing, Erica. We’re illegally inside an abandoned building we have no right to be in, which I have illegal access to because people are dipshits when they buy cheap security systems and link them to the internet making them vulnerable to all sorts of hacks. What we’re doing here is called lying low, which is what we do when potentially dangerous people are chasing us at high speed through the city because they think we might’ve uncovered their dodgy dealings and they want to wipe us off the map before we cause them any trouble. Especially when we’re in a car as distinctive as this one. Those guys in the van, whoever they are, will have almost certainly called their mates and told them to keep an eye out, so we’ve got some time to kill. Hope you had nowhere else to be today.”

Erica unclips her seatbelt, the coil of it winding up loud in the car’s still interior. “What did we find back there, then? What’s going on?”

Matiu’s phone pings. He glances at it, swipes through to the message. Penny. “Dunno yet, but this is interesting.”

“What?”

“Charlotte ever say anything to you about wanting a baby?”

Erica frowns. “No. She didn’t even have a boyfriend.”

“Well, we know that’s not true. Your sister wanted something more in her life, and these were in her fridge.” He shows her the photos of the drugs. “Penny says they’re IVF meds, in vitro fertilisation. Baby in a bottle stuff.”

“I know what IVF is, lughead. No way was she doing that. It’s thousands of dollars, and she’s on worse money than me.”

“Someone else could be paying for it. Her mysterious boyfriend, maybe.”

“Why the hell would she be trying to get pregnant? She’s not even in a relationship, she’s got no money.”

“Sometimes people just…need things.”

“My sister didn’t need a baby.”

“The evidence suggests otherwise.” Christ, he’s starting to sound like Penny.

Erica sits back, arms crossed. Even in the gloom, he can see the colour rising in her cheeks. “Why wouldn’t she have told me?”

“Because she’s not in a relationship and she’s got no money and you can be an overbearing, judgemental b***h?”

“What’d you call me?” Erica growls. She twists in her seat, coming up on one knee, her small stature making it easy to move in the cramped car, and slaps Matiu clean across the face.

Stunned only for a heartbeat, Matiu’s instincts kick in and he grapples her wrists. He wants to push her away but he’s got no leverage, and the pain in his arm flares up, so instead he wrenches her closer, pulling her arms in tight so she can’t hit him again. Then her face is pressed against his, her lips striking viper-hot, the moment taking him so completely by surprise he has no response but to let her. The kiss is hard and fierce, and over almost as soon as it began.

Erica draws back, her breath coming in short, hard gasps, a glimmer in her eye. “I’m sorry, I…I shouldn’t have done that. Just…something I’ve been needing to get out of my system for a long time.”

Matiu is lost for words, but he manages to string something together as he eases his grip on her wrists. “You needed to assault someone with your mouth? Do I get to elbow you in the ovaries now?”

“d**k,” she says, but a flicker of a smile graces her lips. “I’ve wanted to do that to you for a long time. Something about you just…gets under my skin. You’re dangerous, and gorgeous, and you give me lip, and that makes me all hot inside. But you’re a client, and I’m a professional, and I can’t risk creating a conflict of interest, so that’s it. No more. I just…had to do that. We can move on now.”

Matiu stares at her, blinking like a possum in a spotter’s torch. He’s holding her arms only lightly now, but she’s not pulling away. “You’re right. This would be a very bad idea.” He releases her wrists and, after a breathy moment, she sinks back into her seat, looking awkwardly out the windows into the dimly lit workshop. “A really bad idea.” He lets the words hang in the air, like bait, to see if she bites.

She glances across at him. “Take that look off your face. We’re going to pretend this never happened.”

“Pretend what never happened?” Matiu says, then climbs from the car and lets Cerberus out behind him. “I’m going to take a look round, see if there’s anyone about. Don’t go anywhere.”

Erica glares up at him, the same old Erica he used to know, the one who will never look quite the same now he’s seen a little of the woman beneath the armour. “Don’t mind me, I’ll just be here, lying low.”