Something Coming Through

36. Cold Store

Mangala | 30 July

The constable of the county, Karl Schweda, was waiting for Vic at the airfield. As they drove towards Winnetou in his powder-blue Land Rover, Karl told Vic that he’d taken Skip to the site of the shootout and to the morgue where the bodies were laid out, and then had driven him back to his motel.

‘I have witnesses who saw him in the café at about six, six-thirty in the evening, but what he did after that I do not know,’ Karl said. He was a lean blond young man with a brisk competent manner, trim in his olive-green uniform. ‘I know now that I should not have left him on his own, but did not think he would be in any danger.’

‘He shouldn’t have come out here alone,’ Vic said. ‘And that’s partly my fault. So I’d say we’ve even on that score.’

‘First the shootout, and now this,’ Karl said. ‘I could never imagine such a thing could happen here.’

‘You had five killed in the shootout.’

‘Five that I know about. Five that were left behind. Your partner told me it was two gangs fighting over an Elder Culture site.’

‘Site 326. You know it?’

‘It is a long way downriver. Nothing but wild country between here and there. I supposed that was where the people who won that shootout had gone. To claim their prize. It did not occur to me that they would come back so soon.’

‘Maybe some of them never left.’

‘I thought of that too.’

‘And they might still be here.’

‘Yes. It is not a good thought.’

They drove past a couple of Quonset huts hunched under a tall wind turbine, the old kind, its three blades spinning at full tilt, drove past houses — clapboard shacks, really — strung alongside the road. Washing streaming out on a line. Two women hammering a sheet of plywood over a window. At the crossroads in the middle of town, a dozen trucks and articulated lorries parked nose to tail on the road to the docks, waiting for the ferry.

‘Farmers have been stripping their fields and greenhouses of produce ahead of the storm, sending it upriver to Babylonia,’ Karl said. ‘The forecasters say that the edge of the storm won’t reach that far.’

‘A lot of people passing through town.’

‘Exactly. I don’t mean it as an excuse, but it is perhaps why we did not see trouble coming.’

Karl said that his husband, Chris, was out in the country, finding out who had left and who was staying, checking that they had sufficient supplies and a working radio. ‘The front is only a day or two away, and soon the night-year begins. If there is anything you need to do here, you should do it before then.’

The No Tell Motel, where Skip had checked in and never checked out, was a single-storey string of rooms with a few pickup trucks and 4x4s parked in front, a white-painted cabin with a vacancy sign lit behind its plate-glass window. The motel’s owner, Derla Ragahaven, told Vic that Investigator Williams had checked in and had almost immediately driven off, said that she’d thought nothing of it. She hadn’t seen anyone lurking round the motel, or a car or truck that wasn’t registered to any of her guests, either.

‘I already tell Constable Karl this. My night clerk has already run off, and also his wife, who was my maid,’ she said. ‘So I must do everything myself. How long did you say you were going to be here?’

‘I didn’t. Do you have a spare key for Investigator Williams’s room?’

‘Constable Karl has it. You might ask him when I can have it back, and when I can start renting the room again.’

Karl Schweda stood with his back to the closed door, watching patiently as Vic prowled around Skip’s motel room, opening and closing the drawers of the chest of drawers, looking under the bed, checking the bathroom. Vic didn’t expect to find anything. He was trying to get a feel, a psychic trace, of where Skip had been and what he had been doing.

‘I put his clothes and travel bag in storage,’ Karl said.

‘His phone and spex, too?’

‘His phone was found with him. If he had a pair of spex I didn’t find them. Here or in the car.’

‘So either Skip was carrying them and the bad guys took them, or the bad guys came back here to check out Skip’s stuff, and found them.’

It would be nice to put either Danny Drury or Cal McBride in the room, but Vic was pretty sure they would have sent one of their goons to toss the place.

‘I look for footprints and fingerprints, and vacuum for hair and other traces,’ Karl said, ‘but what can I tell you, it’s a motel room. We have not yet attempted DNA analysis. Our budget is unfortunately quite small, and unless we know what to look for it is not worth it.’

‘My department can help you out, if you need it. I’ve seen everything I need to see here. Perhaps you could take me to my partner.’

They drove to the cold store in Karl’s Land Rover and were met by Winnetou’s general practitioner, who was also the town’s coroner. The bodies lay in green rubber bags on the floor of the bare windowless room. Six of them. One was Skip; the others were from the shootout, all but one burned beyond recognition. The doctor knelt and unzipped the bag containing the unburned body, a man found shot dead near Winnetou’s docks. Vic had been hoping it would be either Danny Drury or Cal McBride, but he didn’t recognise the dead man. There was a tattoo on his right shoulder: wings backing a balloon, with a crown and a lion above it. Two gunshot wounds in his chest.

Karl said, ‘We have not yet done DNA, but we check fingerprints against the central database. No hits.’

Vic didn’t ask to look at Skip’s body. According to Karl, he had been shot in the face and was badly burned. The shape of him curled up in the green bag, like an alien embryo in an egg sac. Horrible to see. Vic signed off the paperwork that would allow the release and transport of Skip’s body back to Petra, and said, ‘Show me where my partner was killed.’