Gallagher contorted his mouth as if trying to hurt himself. “Do you think Osborne has found out anything?”
“Probably. But it doesn’t matter much anymore.” Timu picked up the package from the nearby chair. “I got this in the mail this morning.”
It was a bulky package, longer than it was wide.
In spite of his bandaged shoulder, Gallagher removed the wrapping and was unable to hold back a shudder. A femur. They had been sent a femur in the mail.
“This morning,” Timu said again. “Delivered to my house.”
Gallagher couldn’t take his little black eyes off the bone. It was reddish, with a few shreds of flesh sticking to it.
“A human bone?”
Timu nodded. There were dark rings under his eyes.
Gallagher’s mind was working overtime. “A man’s femur?”
Timu shook his head. “No, a woman’s.”
Joanne Griffith. She had had a bone removed before her body was thrown to the sharks. A femur, just like the others. Adrenaline rose through his arteries.
“We have to warn everyone,” Gallagher said.
“It’s already done.”
Timu’s jaws felt like lead. The idea of putting Osborne on the Melrose burglary had been Gallagher’s. A case without too many risks, according to him, especially as they could keep a close eye on him, even, if need be, manipulate him. But it was Osborne who’d done the manipulating, and Gallagher who now found himself out of action and stuck in the city hospital for an indefinite period.
Timu took the package from his hands and threw him a look full of contempt. “You’re an idiot, Gallagher,” he said, and left the room, teeth clenched.
Officers Dowd and Mertens were waiting in the corridor, leaning against the walls, like two birds trapped in oil.
11.
In endowing Maori society with many gods, the ancestors had established a worldview that was well adapted to their way of life. It was based on the primordial opposition between heaven and earth, life and death, the here and the beyond, the noa and the tapu, the ordinary and the sacred. The Maoris placed man in the middle of a hostile environment, condemning him to a bitter conflict, a logic of continuous and unavoidable confrontation between human beings. This principle of conflict was generated by the unavoidable recourse to utu, vengeance, as the sole solution to wrongs suffered. In this way, confrontation was validated by the ancestor-gods.
Osborne had understood Pita Witkaire’s message. Losing their land was the worst thing that could happen to the Maoris. Karikari Bay in this case. The utu would be commensurate with the loss incurred. Hana and her accomplices would apply to the letter the rule of reciprocity. Whether positive or negative, the response depended as much on the obligation to pay back in kind as to answer insult with insult, violence with violence, in order to recover the lost mana. According to tradition, any attack, whether individual or collective, had to be answered. A tribe that did not avenge itself lost all credibility. It was an insane idea. Like their leader, probably.
But Hana was with them. She had joined them to avenge her grandmother’s death.
Osborne suddenly had the feeling that he was falling. In his sleep, he caught hold of a branch, and at that moment he looked at the road and realized that the Chevrolet was in the right-hand lane.
He veered back to the left at the last moment, heart pounding. How long had he slept? A few seconds at most. Night had fallen, the white lines were racing past on the gray asphalt, and he was starting to lose his mind, to go off the rails, to see dead people everywhere. The countryside was empty though, lost in its dreams of wild horses.
Osborne had spent the rest of the day trying to track down Nepia, penetrating deep into the deserted lands in the north of the island, but none of the people he had questioned—an old contact, a tribal chief, ordinary members of the community—had been able to tell him anything. The old tattooist from South Auckland was someone else who had dropped out of sight. The only piece of information he had gleaned that confirmed his theories was that Nepia was said to have become a tohunga, a kind of sorcerer, both shaman and medicine man. His references to the cult of Hauhau, though, had fallen on stony ground. That kind of thing was old hat, he was told, nobody practiced it anymore.
An owl passed in the headlights. Osborne rubbed his face. Whether as an aftereffect of the accumulated fatigue of these last few days or through an excess of amphetamines, his eyes felt itchy. He was driving through the night, alone, foot down. Hana was somewhere in these isolated lands, but where?
* * *
Was it her morbid passion for corpses that had driven her into the arms of this man, or his beautiful, crazy eyes? Amelia Prescott was whistling a tune she had just invented as she stood at the kitchen sink, her hands in the remains of that morning’s breakfast—as if she liked doing the dishes! Paul. Paul Osborne. She kept repeating the name to herself, just to hear herself say it. She thought about last night with a mixture of delight and terror, she thought of him swaying over her when, after the climax of their efforts, their nerves had relaxed and he had collapsed on her and she could smell his skin and feel his gentle hands on her body, his warm sperm on her belly. Amelia hadn’t made love for months, and now she wanted to do it again as soon as possible, with him. She would say yes to anything—she was ready for anything. Above and beyond the risks she was taking for him, something had happened last night, she knew. He hadn’t left her bed unscathed either.
Midnight sounded somewhere. Amelia was just back from the institute, where she had run the first tests on the mokos, and was about to continue the postmortem in the basement. In the meantime, some leftover chili was simmering in the saucepan and she was wondering where Paul had gotten to. He should at least drop by to see the results of her labors. There was a ring at the doorbell. She hadn’t even heard his car arrive. She dropped her sponge in what remained of the foam and ran to the door.
Her smile froze when she saw two men on the front steps. The first was fat, with apelike lips, and was waving a police badge.
“Officer Dowd,” he said. “And this is Officer Mertens.”
Behind him was a tall, raw-boned man, smiling like a wax mannequin. His right eye was badly messed up, the burst blood vessels giving him a particularly sinister look. Both men were wearing old-fashioned suits, with white shirts and badly matched ties.
“What do you want?” she said.
“Osborne.”
Shit.
“Who’s Osborne?”
With one hand, Dowd pushed her inside the house. She retreated, furious at first, but said nothing. Mertens closed the door behind them and locked it. Dowd circled her, limping slightly.
“Don’t make things any worse than they are,” he said.
His piglike eyes seemed to be undressing her. If the two men were trying to scare her, they’d succeeded. Mertens folded his hands over his crotch, in the position of someone waiting to see what happens. It was a well-rehearsed act.
“You have no right to come in here like this,” Amelia said, keeping her cool. “Show me your warrant! Who sent you anyway?”
