A Beautiful Place to Die Read Free Page B

and felt a familiar surge of adrenaline—the excitement of the first lead in a new case. They could track the killer to his door and finish this today. With luck he’d be back in Jo’burg for the weekend.
    “No farm,” came the reply. “Mozambique.”
    “You sure, man?”
    “Yebo. Mo. Zam. Bique.” Shabalala repeated the name, long and slow, so there was no mistake. The syllables emphasized that across the bank was another country with its own laws and its own police force.
    Emmanuel and Shabalala stood side by side and looked across the water for a long while. Five minutes on the opposite shore might give up a clue that could break open the case. Emmanuel did a quick calculation. If he was caught across the border, he’d spend the next two years checking ID passes at whites-only public toilets. Even Major van Niekerk, a canny political animal with connections to burn, couldn’t fix up a bungled visit across the border.
    He turned to face South Africa and concentrated on the evidence in front of him. The neatness of the scene and the sniper-like targeting of the victim’s head and spine indicated a cool and methodical hand. The location of the body was also a deliberate choice. Why take the time to drag it to the water when it could have been left on the sand?
    The brother’s smuggler theory didn’t hold water, either. Why wouldn’t the smuggler cross farther upstream and avoid all that attention and trouble? Not only that, why would he compromise his path between borders by murdering a white man?
    “Did the killer come out of the river?” Emmanuel asked.
    The Zulu policeman shook his head. “When I came here the herd boys and their oxen had been to the river to drink. If the tracks were here, they are gone now.”
    “Detective Sergeant,” Hansie said, walking toward them, pink skin flushed with exertion.
    “Anything?”
    “Nothing but sand, Detective Sergeant.”
    The dead man floated in the river. A spring rain, gentle as mist, began to fall.
    “Let’s get the captain,” Emmanuel said.
    “Yebo.”
    Sadness flickered across the black man’s face for a moment and then it was gone.

2
    T HE COFFEE WAS hot and black and spiked with enough brandy to dull the ache in Emmanuel’s muscles. A full hour after going in to retrieve the captain, the men from the riverbank were back at the cars, shoulders and legs twitching with fatigue. Extracting the body from the crime scene proved to be only slightly easier than pulling a Sherman tank out of the mud.
    “Koeksister?” asked old Voster’s wife, a toad-faced woman with thinning gray hair.
    “Thank you.” Emmanuel took a sticky pastry and leaned back against the Packard.
    He looked around at the gathering of people and vehicles. Two black maids poured fresh coffee and handed out dry towels while a group of farmworkers tended the fire for the hot water and milk. The wheelchair-bound Voster and his family, a son and two daughters, were deep in conversation with the Pretorius brothers while a pack of sinewy Rhodesian ridgebacks sniffed the ground at their feet. Black and white children ran zigzag together between the cars in a noisy game of hide-and-seek. The captain lay in the back of the police van wrapped in clean white sheets.
    Emmanuel drained his coffee and approached the Pretorius brothers. The investigation needed to move forward fast. All they had so far was a dead body and a killer walking free in Mozambique.
    “Time to go,” Emmanuel said. “We’ll take the captain to hospital, get the doctor to look him over.”
    “We’re taking him home,” Henrick stated flatly. “My ma’s waited long enough to see him.”
    Emmanuel felt the force of the brothers as they turned their gaze on him. He held their stare and absorbed the tension and rage, now doubly fueled by alcohol and fatigue.
    “We need a medical opinion on the time and the cause of death. And a signed death certificate. It’s standard police procedure.”
    “Are you blind as well as