Glass House (7 page)

“What do I need to know right away?” Megan
asked.

“His depo’s a few days away,” Natalie
replied. “Jeremy said he mentioned the dates to you, and that’s the
first one. We haven’t done the prep for that. I was gonna start
tomorrow, but that’s off, obviously.”

“Discovery’s up to date? Nothing
outstanding?”

“No. Just the deposition, maybe a couple
evidence motions, then you’re off to trial.”

“Wish me luck?”

“In spades, because you may need it,”
Natalie replied. “For what it’s worth, though? I think he can win.
I’m pretty sure there’s some way to do that, actually. But better
you than me in trying to figure out how.”

_______________

“He took them, right?”

Paul McCallum was stirring sugar into his
iced tea. The spoon clinked against the glass.

“I’ve told you this story before,” she
replied.

“Tell me again. What do you mean when you
say
took them
?”

“I mean took them,” his client answered. She
shifted in her seat. She’d seemed comfortable before, very
matter-of-fact and focused, a little angry. But her eyes darted
away now. She narrowed her shoulders and crossed her arms, hugging
her elbows.

“A big guy. Someone I hadn’t seen before. He
came up to me in a parking lot on Twenty-Third. A little strip mall
where I was getting my dry cleaning. It was later in the day, not
too dark but dark enough that a guy just showing up as I was
unlocking my car scared the hell out of me.” She looked over at the
attorney. “I’d have run if I could. I should’ve tried. Would have
been the right thing to do. Isn’t that what they tell you to do in
those self-defense classes?”

McCallum ignored the question. “What’d he
say again?”

“He said, ‘He wants them back.’”

“He wants them back?”

“Yeah.
He wants them back.
I didn’t
understand that. Not at first. I’m sure I got a confused look, and
I just said
who
. ‘Who wants what back?’”

McCallum set the spoon down. “And?”

“He said, ‘Those,’ and he pointed to my
ears.” She reached to touch them by impulse, one hand on each side
of her head. “The earrings,” she said. “He wanted the earrings
back. Then I understood. And I was angry. I said, ‘You tell him he
can…’.”

She didn’t finish. McCallum waited a
moment.

“Go ahead,” he said.

She didn’t want to go ahead. Didn’t want to
say it out loud. “It wasn’t the smartest thing I’ve ever said,” she
told him.

“Tell me what it was.”

“I said he can kiss my fucking ass.”

“And the reply?”

The woman smiled grimly. “He told me I could
give the earrings to him, or he could break my neck so far backward
I’d be able to kiss my ass by myself just fine.” The tight smile
went away. “He said it was my choice.”

McCallum set the glass down. He picked up a
pen and started to write. “And you didn’t know him?” he asked.

“I didn’t,” she answered.

“That’s okay,” he replied. “I think I do
now.”

On
the Shore of the Diamond Coast

Detective Warrant Officer Neria Motaung
studied the small man in front of her. She’d been told his name was
Kofi and that he was 59 years old. That age was lofty enough that
the people in his nearby town called him the Elder – another
fact offered up by the young and soft-spoken SAPS constable
reporting to her. The constable was shifting from foot to foot,
clearly nervous from having to speak with a SAPS warrant officer,
and a detective no less. He talked about Kofi as though the older
man were not there.

“He says he found the body past there.” The
constable pointed to the ocean shore, toward a point lost behind a
short bluff that rose from the Atlantic, below them.

“He can tell me,” Neria replied. She turned
to Kofi. “With respect. Where?” She spoke in IsiZulu, then she
repeated the question in Setswana.

Kofi raised an aluminum cane and pointed the
direction the constable had, muttering and nodding his answer.

“I do not recognize all his words,” the
constable confided to her, leaning in and speaking quietly. “I do
not know the dialect.”

“It’s Northern Sotho,” Neria replied.
“Moletši Sepedi.” She turned to the constable. “Leave,” she said,
waving him away. She took Kofi by the hand, and they faced the walk
down toward the ocean.

“Tell me,” she said to him.

_______________

When he’d come to the shore in the morning,
Kofi hadn’t moved as well as he once would have. All the time now,
he was stiff, he was sore, and he was old, and those things showed
in his careful and paced, deliberate movements. His hair was
smoke-gray, with clumped and tight curls and weathered, chocolate
brown skin that shone through in the many places where the hair had
vanished.

His watery, yellow-tinted eyes had searched
out a path that, in truth, he knew well enough to find with the
tired eyes closed. He’d carried the aluminum cane in one hand. The
cane’s tip once was rubber, but that cap disintegrated long ago.
The end now was only the tip of the aluminum shaft itself, dented
and scratched from the man leaning on it. His weight had decreased
in that time, but the cane bore the brunt of more of it with each
passing day, and the toll was clear.

He’d reached the coast and picked his way
down to the shore, heading toward the spot he considered his. The
karoos
were behind him. This far north of the Cape, they
were small and not as grassy, more a series of stair-step terraces
than the true plateaus found farther south along the Atlantic.

There had been a fog this morning. With the
crashing coast to his left and the bank of moist white air all
around, Kofi had felt the dampness everywhere, like a living thing
that swallowed him, and he couldn’t see far. He knew the Orange
River ended in the ocean a distance ahead of him, at the border to
Namibia. The river’s delta was brackish, with the waters of the
Orange mixing with the salt of the Atlantic waves. The flamingoes
were thick there, feeding among the tall grasses. If startled, they
might loft into the sky in great coral pink washes.

He could pick out the dun hills above the
fog. The Namibian mines had piled their diamond tailings flush to
the sea, where they rose off the beach as though God Himself simply
put them there as small mountains. They were high enough to show
over the fog and big enough even for Kofi’s nearsightedness to
find.

The first mines in this region were beach
mines, positioned where the rivers flowed into the ocean. Far back
in time, when the seas were higher, the rivers had carried diamonds
from the interior, tumbling them along the river beds. The heavier
stones had dropped in caches, but the Orange and a few other bigger
waterways sent the smaller ones farther out, into the ocean
depths.

When the waters receded, the larger stones
were found in deposits along the coast. Mining companies staked
their claims, built their facilities, and sent their trawlers out
to sea. The companies dug the shores and sucked beach and seabed
sand up by vacuum, combing the material for diamonds and dumping
whatever didn’t pan out. The work of the mines resulted in the
hills that lined the seaboard north and south of the Orange, and it
gave the area its name.

The Diamond Coast.

Kofi could get nowhere near the old beach
deposits. The easiest of the treasure long ago was taken, but the
claims were still staked and maintained. The mining companies,
searching harder or digging deeper or waiting for new technology
that would spill more carats into their coffers, allowed no one
else to explore their sites.

All his life, he’d come instead to this slip
of coast not claimed by the mines. It was an old streambed, a place
his father pointed out to him when the Elder was just a boy,
telling him about the rivulet of water that had shifted away from
this spot years before.

Kofi had carried the cane as he paced
carefully about on the sand, searching out a good place to work. He
liked washes, areas where rain or waves had smoothed the sand and
moved it around. His beaten hands, with their dirt-covered, half
nails, would dig into the soil and pan it and finger through the
wet sludge to search out a stone or two.

He would collect them and take them into
town, where he would sell them for a pitifully low price that was
the best he could manage. He’d found pebble-sized rough and
sand-sized rough. Once, he’d picked a piece of rough from a pan and
found the diamond was as big as his fingertip.

He’d found something even bigger today.

Coming around a large, water-rounded stone
and setting his cane down, Kofi had knelt gingerly on the coarse
sand and soil. He was starting to dig when he glanced toward the
ocean. His weak eyes struggled to see through what was left of the
fog. He watched as the water slipped toward him, up over the
beach.

It had washed over a dark form nearby, and
Kofi put the pan aside. He crawled a few feet forward and pulled at
the shape. It didn’t roll over and he pulled again, feeling the
ache in his shoulders but managing to move the form this time.

Anthony Dikembé was killed twenty-four hours
before Kofi came to this spot. Today, Anthony had come to shore,
where the mud crabs had found him.

The
Structure of Glass and the Body Behind It

Glass has a structure of sorts, and you can
read it if you have to. It’s not like reading words running across
a page or numbers slotted into a spreadsheet, though. It’s like a
satellite picture, in a way. Like an image of Boston or Baltimore
or some other haphazard place where the streets stretch every
different direction in a shuffle of circles and lines and river
tracings seemingly laid down at random. And you have to see it and
read it that way because glass has a structure, but it’s only a
structure of
sorts.
That structure can be recognized and
taken advantage of at some level, but it really isn’t anything
people can recognize or predict.

Unlike diamonds, glass doesn’t have a
crystalline makeup that can be seen and cleaved. Instead, it’s a
kind of motion-frozen, kinetically dead liquid – a solid that
at a base level lacks anything like the order of the other solids,
because the structure of glass is disorder. When you strike a sheet
of glass that’s not bound by artificial restrictions like inlaid
plastics or wires or scorings, it breaks randomly. Strike the same
sheet of glass under the same conditions – same force, same
location – and it breaks in a different way.

That means you can manage to cut it, but the
cutting has to be precise, and it has to be mapped out. If you help
a break along in all those right ways, you can cut glass like
paper.

It was three in the morning, and Jackson
Hanley was studying the glass panel in the window at the back of
the morgue, reading it to figure his best course. Vast reaches of
Africa are poor places, and this was one of them. Hanley could see
that the particular window glass he was examining, one small sheet
in a group of nine, was fragile and thin.

As he shone a dim flashlight over it,
lighting the window along its face, Hanley figured its thickness
was two millimeters at best. He tapped a rubber-gloved knuckle
lightly against the surface, listening to the weak sound that
bounced back. He pushed on the pane’s surface, measuring its
give.

He didn’t want to break in. Alarms were like
good glass in the poorer parts of Africa. They were rare, uncommon
enough that he’d be stunned to find one even here, where protection
of the dead was an issue. But he still didn’t want the risk of
bringing this window down and facing police five minutes later.

He wanted in quietly. There were three
others with him, and he wanted them all inside the morgue without
attention being drawn.

Hanley turned to Allen Saifee, who crouched
behind him, his eyes trained on a dark parking lot nearby. Saifee
had a black leather bag slung over one shoulder, and Hanley
gestured for it.

He pulled a small box from the bag and
opened it. He searched briefly through the compartments and plucked
out a golf-ball sized suction cup.

The cup was high-quality rubber latex, soft
and perfectly round. Dampened slightly, it would stick to glass
until peeled off.

Hanley retrieved a sealed packet, too,
ripping it open and pulling out a wet towelette he’d taken from a
McDonald’s. He ran the small damp cloth around the edge of the
suction cup, dropped the towelette and its wrapper back into the
box, and stuck the suction cup squarely in the middle of the glass
pane he’d examined.

The agent threaded a silk string through a
slot at the cup’s back, so it could hang like a tub or sink
stopper. He knotted the string and slipped the near end of that
loop into his mouth, holding it between his tongue and teeth.

The box also held a glass cutter. It was a
small steel blade, rough at the tip, more scratching device than
knife. Working as quickly as he could without pushing the steel
through the glass, he cut four scored lines around the cup. When he
pulled his hand away, he left behind a powdery white, grated
etching that set out a neat square just shy of the window’s wood
framing.

Hanley passed the cutter back, and Saifee
handed a muffin-sized Tupperware container forward. Hanley thumbed
the cap off and pulled out a puck-sized package that was wrapped in
two handkerchiefs. Peeling the handkerchiefs away revealed the puck
itself. It was white, had the near-translucent glow of pure
peppermint candy, and immediately started to steam.

With the fine silk string still connecting
his mouth to the suction cup on the window, Hanley rubbed the round
chunk of dry ice over the score mark. It didn’t dampen the window.
It didn’t frost it, either – the air was too dry for that. But
the glass was cooling rapidly.