Face-Off. Chris Karsten
and looked for the number of Dr Verhoef at the Hartebeesthoek Radio Astronomy Observatory. He was the expert who’d looked through Abel’s telescope in his house at Dorado Park and revealed that it had been fixed on the coordinates of the red giant star Betelgeuse.
“Yes?” Dr Verhoef sounded brusque, rushed.
As if the stars could disappear at any moment, Ella thought. As if he didn’t want to miss Betelgeuse’s spectacular implosion.
“Ella Neser here,” she said, tilting her head to look at the black paint on the lens of the CCTV camera.
“Ah, Detective Neser! Still star-struck?”
She was surprised by the change in tone, surprised that he remembered her at all.
“Alas, yes.”
“Still Betelgeuse?”
“You have a good memory, Doc.”
“I don’t often get a visit from the long arm of the law. When a beautiful detective from Murder and Robbery comes to my office, I remember her.”
She let the compliment slide. “This time it’s not Betelgeuse. Or perhaps it is. I don’t know.”
“How can I help?”
“I don’t know how to pronounce it, so I’ll spell it: F-O-M-A-L-H-A-U-T and then a lower case b. Does it ring a bell, Doc, does it have anything to do with the stars, like Betelgeuse?”
“Fomalhaut?” Foam-a-lot, he pronounced it. “You mean the star?”
“A star?” She hesitated, then: “I’d like to come and see you, Doc, if you could spare the time?”
“I always have time for stars.”
“I’m on my way.”
She went back into the hotel room, intending to speak sternly, because she’d learnt that in this man’s world you had to prove you had balls. “Rabie, you may go. I’ll keep you informed.”
“But my room –”
“Thanks, Rabie. I’ll take it from here.” She turned to face him and he scurried out. “Good work, Sergeant,” she said, phoning Col. Sauls and sealing off the room. “The bottle with the skin, was it dusted for prints before you took it to the lab?”
“Er . . . no, but Const. Xala was wearing gloves.”
That was a relief. In the lab they would also have handled the bottle with gloves.
“It could be important, any prints on that bottle. Have Const. Xala take it to Fingerprints. I’ll send for Forensics and Crime Scene Management.”
“What’s going on, Warrant? You’ve found something?”
“Just a suspicion, Sergeant. This room must be processed – every centimetre of it. I want every hair in the bath or in his bed, every fingernail or toenail clipping found. Every fingerprint, every drop of human or animal secretion must be tested, the contents of the shower and bath and basin outlets too. Thanks for your help, Sergeant. We’ll take over the scene now.”
“But what about me? This is my case.”
“Mitzi the cat is your case, not the Nightstalker of Alberts Farm. I’m the investigating officer on this one. But I’d appreciate your help. If you and Const. Xala could start questioning the . . . residents of the Sleep Inn. We’re putting the place under quarantine, Sergeant. No one comes in, no one leaves before we’ve spoken to all the guests. Staff as well, especially the cleaners.”
“What is it you’re looking for?”
“Talk to anyone who had any contact with Mr Fomalhaut, even if they just caught a brief glimpse of him in the passage. If he spoke to someone, I want to know what he said. If someone saw him spit, I want the saliva.” She thought for a moment. “I’m especially interested in whether he asked any of the women about tattoos.”
The sergeant whistled through his teeth. “Rabie won’t like it, his hotel in quarantine.”
“With respect, Sergeant, fuck Rabie. He doesn’t know the man I’m looking for, and neither do you.”
She steered the sergeant from the room by his thick elbow, her fingers already on the keys of her cellphone, calling Lt. Jimmy Julies at Forensics. With the phone against her ear, she reminded the sergeant: “The prints on the jam jar, if you don’t mind?”
* * *
It was Dr Verhoef who had enlightened Ella about the astronomical significance of the skins Abel collected from women. He’d helped her unravel the symbolism of the tattooed peacock cut out of Mia Vermooten’s shoulder, and the hare from Emma Adams’ bosom. Pavo and Lepus, both constellations.
She knew about Abel’s special interest in celestial bodies. It explained her own narrow escape, when he’d begun to cut out the tattoo on her stomach, her shooting star. The tattoo had been for practical and not entirely aesthetic purposes: it had masked an unsightly scar where her appendix had been removed, so that on the beach it was a shooting star that was visible just above her bikini line, not an ugly scar.
But after what Abel had done to her, she no longer wore a bikini. She’d had a close brush with death: first on his butcher’s bench, then as a result of the raging infection caused by his unsterilised instruments.
In his office Dr Verhoef said: “Betelgeuse, as I told you last time, is an old star. Ten billion years old, at the end of its life, a red supergiant in the constellation Orion. And, Detective, don’t believe everything you read on the Internet. Betelgeuse may be at the end of its life, but it could still continue to exist for millions of years. Everything about the stars is relative. Now this one, Fomalhaut, is a youngster. About two hundred million years old, only sixty-four light years from the earth, the brightest star in the constellation Piscis Austrinus.”
“And the b?”
“Fomalhaut b was discovered in 2008 – a candidate planet orbiting its solar star, Fomalhaut, just as our planets orbit our own sun. Is that what you wanted to know, Detective? Have you become an amateur stargazer since our last meeting?”
“Not exactly.” She hesitated: “What does the b stand for?”
“It’s technical. How much time do you have?”
“Never mind, it’s not important. I just had a suspicion . . . Fomalhaut is new to me, but not to someone with knowledge of astronomy. Abel Lotz is an unpredictable, complicated character. If he’d wanted to hide behind a pseudonym, he wouldn’t have just plucked a name from the sky.”
“Well, evidently he plucked one from outer space. But something is still bothering you.”
“A lot of things are bothering me. What does he do with the skins? It’s well known that serial killers often collect mementoes from their victims: jewellery, items of clothing, or something more personal, like locks of hair. Jeffrey Dahmer even kept his victims’ skulls. A piece of skin I can understand, but why specifically tattooed skins with an astronomic significance? And why that size? The forensic pathologist found that the measurements of Mia Vermooten and Emma Adams’s wounds were identical, as if the killer had used a tape measure: 154 by 230 millimetres. Mine was measured too, the area he intended to remove had been marked out with a purple permanent marker: 154 by 230 millimetres. Abel was meticulous and precise in what he did.”
Dr Verhoef’s fingers tapped on his computer keyboard and then peered at the monitor. “Standard paper size for A5 is 148 by 210 millimetres.”
“That’s what we gathered as well: Abel was looking for A5 dimensions, more or less, bearing in mind that there would be shrinkage during the tanning and drying process. Dr Koster says it’s the size of a cheap paperback novel.”
“Paperback novel? In his house, where the telescope was found . . . did you find any documentation,