Ivory Ghosts Read online

  Ivory Ghosts is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  An Alibi eBook Original

  Copyright © 2015 by Caitlin O’Connell

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Alibi, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  ALIBI is a registered trademark and the ALIBI colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  eBook ISBN 9781101883471

  Cover art and design: Scott Biel

  www.readalibi.com

  v4.0

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  By Caitlin O’Connell

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  White dust settled like a fresh layer of snow on the gray bushes lining an infinite stretch of unpaved road. The place would have looked every bit like Yellowstone in winter, had it not been ninety-five degrees.

  The base of my spine ached from a long day of driving, and I was desperate to get out and stretch my legs. Hypnotized by the monotony of the scenery, I’d missed the turnoff and circled back. Coming from the opposite direction, I found a hand-drawn sign demarking Susuwe Ranger Station in a break in the vegetation and turned left.

  In the distance, the land dropped away as far as the eye could see. Golden-tufted reeds lined the tannin-colored Kwando River etched within an expansive floodplain below. Rust-colored grass rolled out to the horizon as the river snaked south on its way to Botswana to feed the great Okavango, the largest inland delta in the world.

  The road got steeper and steeper as I descended the rise, making the potholes harder to navigate. Each bump challenged the poor welding job I’d done on the roof rack—the metal gas can, spare tire, and solar panel creaking in their brackets as the back tires hit the bottom of the potholes.

  I couldn’t swerve quickly enough to avoid a small piece of sharp metal in the road. Suddenly, the car pulled right. “Damn it!” I was prepared for two flats—accumulated along the road through the Chobe—but not three.

  I got out and looked at the tire. It was shredded beyond repair. “Shit!”

  Driving my ’74 VW Bug all the way up to the northeast corner of Namibia from South Africa was probably a bad idea. But I had an emotional attachment to it, and I couldn’t afford a four-wheel drive on a month contract funded in Namibian dollars.

  I fell against the passenger door and took a breath. Cicadas shook their insistent maracas from patches of dense bush. A massive baobab tree looked as if a giant rodent had gnawed through the middle, leaving a stump like an apple core. From the look of the overly pruned vegetation, it was clear I was back in elephant country—a welcome change after traveling the long dusty gap between the Chobe and the Kwando rivers with many villages and not much wildlife—but not so welcome on foot at this time of day. Elephant country meant wild country—where I was part of the food chain.

  My hands started shaking; I hadn’t eaten since the crackers I’d had for breakfast before leaving Victoria Falls in the early morning. I hadn’t wanted to stop driving since. I took a warm swig from my water bottle, poured some onto my bandana, and wiped my face, taking a moment to enjoy the sensation before digging around the backseat for the crackers and peanut butter.

  Eating on a rock next to the car, I struggled to keep the cloud of accumulating sweat bees out of my mouth and eyes. I pulled out my map and drew a line from the main road up to the border of Angola, seven miles north. The road wound through a canopy of gnarled acacia trees that formed a seam with the floodplain and then carried on straight north following the river. The ranger station was supposed to be somewhere along that seam, probably about an hour’s walk away.

  Judging from the height of the sun, I had just about an hour of daylight left. I had to choose between walking to the station or staying with the car and hoping for a lift. Since there hadn’t been a single car on the road in several hours, it seemed like a better idea to walk. Having already spent a night in the backseat of the Beetle, I preferred not to repeat it.

  Feeling stronger with some food in my stomach, I grabbed my water, my useless cellphone—out of range for the past two hours—the map, a headlamp, more crackers, and a light sweater and stuffed them into my backpack. I reached into the glove compartment for my holster and strapped my .45 around my waist. I grabbed six rounds of ammunition from the box, opened the cylinder, and loaded the revolver. If I ended up surrounded by elephants after dark with no trees to climb, I could at least make a noise.

  I put my pack on and headed for the ranger’s station. The road became sandy and flattened out for a while. I passed the tracks of a large herd of buffalo crossing the road, heading toward the river. Clusters of yellow butterflies fluttered above damp urine patches here and there. A baby tortoise swam through the deeper sand along the shoulder. Despite the lack of traffic, I followed my instinct to pick it up and move it out of the road.

  The terrain got steeper, the road turning sharply left and then changed in consistency to hard-pack clay again. Cicadas were back at it with their brash rhythmic calls. Termite mounds rose up amid the mopane trees with enormous white mushrooms sprouting out of the bases.

  The ruts got deeper as I made my awkward descent down another steep hill. Metal debris was strewn about on the road along with a piece of rubber—maybe from a bumper. As the road bent around again, I saw an old Mercedes sedan pulled off at an angle. Through the back window, I could see that the front windshield had been shattered. It wasn’t clear whether there was anyone still in the car.

  There was a dark swath leading off into the bush, like an animal may have been hit and wounded—the only explanation for the impact on the front and side of the car, other than a collision with another vehicle. If an animal had hauled itself off the road, it was very large, and perhaps still alive. I reached into my holster and pulled out my gun. The last thing I needed was to be confronted by a wounded buffalo.

  As I got closer, what had looked like a branch was a motionless arm hanging out the window. I moved slower. “Hello?”

  The air was dead still but for the buzzing of flies, the first responders to an accident in Afri
ca. The thick, iron-sweet scent of nearly fresh blood assaulted me. But there was something extra, something I was familiar with in the wildlife business. The aroma of a fresh kill was a cocktail of blood mixed with rumen and a hint of anal scent gland.

  I looked down to see the tracks of another vehicle, probably a 4x4 pickup truck. There were boot prints of at least three people, and a scuffle of tracks around the trunk. The plates of the car were from Zimbabwe.

  There was no sign of life in the car. My throat tightened as I approached the driver’s side. I had seen a lot of dead animals in my days as a ranger, but I wasn’t accustomed to seeing dead people. The driver, a woman, was slumped over the steering wheel. She’d been shot in the head, and the wounds on her back indicated that she was shot in either the chest or back, I couldn’t tell. Part of the passenger’s head had been shot completely off. The man in the back was facedown, with a blood-soaked head and back: two men and a woman.

  I took quick breaths, fighting the reflex to vomit as I reached into my pack for my cellphone and dialed Craig’s number, but was greeted by the dreaded bleep, bleep, bleep of no reception. I threw the phone on the ground a little too hard and it bounced, smashing on a rock.

  “Shit! Shit! Shit!” I put the now-broken phone into my pocket and swallowed hard. Craig would have to wait for an update. Not that I thought my boss could rescue me from my current predicament, but I was hoping to hear a voice—to be connected to another warm body—and not be alone among the dead.

  I walked to the slightly opened trunk of the car and cracked it open farther with the barrel of my gun. The smell of putrefaction bludgeoned my senses. In the corner, the carcass of a scaly anteater lay in a soupy mess, its scales falling off rotting skin. From the scrape marks and dirt in the center of the trunk, it looked as if something very heavy had been removed.

  I rifled through the dirt with the edge of the barrel of my gun. There were some small white jagged pieces of what looked like slivers of tusk. I looked closely at the dried smears of blood and mud covering the thin broken ridges of elephant incisors that had been pulled out at the base. There must have been a good amount of ivory here.

  I picked up a chip and as I inspected it, I heard a slight movement in the bush and took a quick step back. I put the piece of ivory in my pocket and held my revolver tightly in both hands. Trying to avoid thorns, I walked slowly into the bushes. A guttural noise stopped me in my tracks.

  I stood on my toes to peer above the bush. Not ten steps away, a lioness crouched behind a body, her golden eyes locked onto me, looking ready to pounce. Walking backward, I shifted my gaze from her eyes to the man slumped in a pool of fly-covered sticky blood. The skin had been removed from his face, and his skull was sliced off three-quarters up like a soft-boiled egg. Inside, it was empty. The brain had been removed.

  Chapter 2

  I pointed my gun at the lioness and continued walking backward through the thorny bush as fast as I could, badly scratching the backs of my legs. Where there was one lion, there was likely to be more. An ambush would be more difficult back on the road, out in the open. But it was hard to focus after seeing a person so horribly mutilated. Whoever had done this was a much more menacing threat than lions.

  As I stood on the road, pointing my gun in every direction, the clacking of a diesel engine neared. A tan Toyota Land Cruiser approached from the rise where I had broken down. Although company would normally be most welcome in the presence of lions, I panicked and stood frozen in place. Were they the ones who had left tracks at this site? Could they have circled back somehow? Were they returning to burn the evidence? If so, they were about to pass my vehicle and would know there was a witness. Or perhaps they’d had nothing to do with it, and here I was standing at the crime scene with a gun in my hand.

  The vegetation on the other side of the road looked lion-free, so I darted behind a bush, catching my new nylon shirt on a hooked thorn. I was momentarily stuck in place and needed to walk backward to get unstuck. The sudden silence in the distance indicated they had stopped at my vehicle to have a look. Though I was sure they’d see my footprints next to the road, I took another few steps into the bush and crouched down. I needed to see who was in the truck before exposing myself.

  The truck resumed its journey, then slowed to a stop in front of me. Three local men in uniform stared at the scene from the cab. Their uniforms looked similar to the one I wore as a ranger in Kruger, except these were khaki instead of forest green.

  They jumped out with semiautomatic rifles in hand—R1s by the looks of them. The driver, a San Bushman, focused on the ground and followed the drag marks into the bush as the larger man lifted the trunk lid and slammed it down. “Kak, man.” He swore in Afrikaans.

  The man in the bush called the others over; I could hear mumbling in reaction to the gory scene before they came back onto the road. The third one reached for the radio above the passenger’s seat.

  “Katima five-one, Katima five-one, come in, Jon. We found target. Come in.”

  The radio crackled.

  “Katima five-one. Come in, Katima five-one.”

  It was only a matter of time before the rangers would find me. Feeling extremely uncomfortable, I holstered my gun and stepped out of the bush. At the rustle of vegetation, the rangers spun around and aimed their weapons in my direction.

  I held up my hands. “Musuhili,” I said, greeting the sullen faces with the local Lozi hello. My voice wavered. “I realize this is an incredibly awkward way to meet.”

  The three men stared at me suspiciously as they lowered their weapons.

  “The VW Bug?” The ranger that had called in on the radio looked at me knowingly.

  I nodded. “My third flat.”

  The larger man interrupted. “Did you see anyone on the road?”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  He turned to the others. “We need to get her out of here.”

  The radio operator approached me. “I’m going to have to take you to the station. We are in the middle of a very serious investigation.”

  “Of course.” I held out my hand. “I’m Catherine Sohon—with the Wildlife Investigation Agency. I’ll actually be staying with you at the station.”

  The three men glanced at one another.

  The large man looked annoyed. “You cannot stay here.” He looked me up and down with contempt. “This place is not safe for a woman.”

  I smiled nervously. “We can sort out the details later. I don’t want to hold you up.”

  The young San Bushman stared with the quiet sadness of someone who had seen more than he should have for his age. He seemed cowed by the larger, more aggressive man, who was shaking his finger at me.

  “We don’t have tourists staying with us.” He pointed toward the crime scene. “Can’t you see? There must be a mistake.”

  “Eli,” the radio operator whispered, as if to calm him down.

  “I’m actually not a tourist. I’ll be working with you to help with the elephant census. I’m a pilot.”

  Eli spat. “A census pilot coming here? Here, to stay at Susuwe?” From his larger stature relative to the other two, I assumed he was an Owambo, from the north of Namibia.

  “Look, that doesn’t matter right now. I’d like to help if I can.”

  The radio operator looked hesitant. I guessed he was Caprivian, given his fine facial features, the kind I had seen on an Angolan queen’s mask in the cultural museum in Vic Falls. He crouched slightly, clapping one hand over the other in the local greeting. “Hello, madam. Gidean Siloka.” He shook my hand. “Has Mr. Jon Baggs arranged for your stay?”

  “No, I will be meeting with him tomorrow. I was assigned the biologist barracks by the WIA.”

  Gidean looked disquieted. “Oh, I see.”

  “I don’t want to get in the way. Perhaps I could man the radio while you continue the investigation? Get a message through to someone? I was a ranger in Kruger.”

  Gidean responded, “That won’t be necessary. I�
�ll show you to your barracks.”

  “No, she must speak with Mr. Jon Baggs before she can stay here,” Eli insisted.

  “Eli,” said Gidean impatiently. It was clear that Gidean was used to having to manage this guy. “Jon is not answering the radio. We will at least put her up for the night.” He turned to me. “Is there anything you need from your vehicle?”

  “If I could get my bedroll, that would be great. But I don’t want to hold you up.”

  “We only have one vehicle at the station,” Eli snapped.

  “I’ll be fine without it,” I lied. “And I’m happy to stay with you until you’re ready to leave.”

  Eli narrowed his eyes at Gidean, and they stepped away.

  I turned to the Bushman and shook his hand, but could tell that shaking a woman’s hand was not familiar to him. “I’m Catherine.”

  “Natembo.” He nodded with faraway eyes.

  “Nice to meet you, Natembo.” I smiled as we both listened to muffled arguing through clenched teeth as Gidean tried to placate Eli.

  Gidean stepped back over. “Come, we will collect your things and go to the barracks.”

  “Thank you.” I nodded a good-bye to the others and got into the truck.

  Gidean started the truck. “I am very sorry you had to see this.”

  The others continued to inspect the ground around the Mercedes as we turned around on the road and headed back to my car. “Looks like ivory had been removed from the trunk,” I said.