Oware Mosaic Page 2

  Two white-bibbed swallows flew by me, one chasing the other. One of them slammed into a tree and startled me.

  My mind-phone rang.

  “Yeah, Xo, here,” I said, answering, still out of breath.

  “It’s me,” the voice said. It was Samora Lamp.

  “I know, Lamp—can see your number. Can’t talk right now—”

  “I need your assistance, Examiner.”

  “What’s going on, eh?

  “You heard about the threats?”

  “No, what?”

  “Some kid in a Xhosa spirit mask keeps hacking into radio and neural streaming broadcasts warning the people of Kumasi that they will be punished for not standing up to the government.”

  “Instead of going after the powerful Ghanaian government, the kid preys on the weak and oppressed? That doesn’t sound like a psychopath, does it?”

  “Anyway, I think this victim we found this morning is connected.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Well, I haven’t gotten there yet, but responding officers said that the victim smells of fish.”

  “Yeah, and that’s is significant because?”

  “Boy, you really need to tune in more to neural news, you’re totally out of the loop.”

  “Just cut the crap, Lamp. Why do you like this hacker-kid as a suspect?”

  “I didn’t say the kid’s a suspect, but I do think there’s a connection. He, or she, I can’t really tell the difference, goes on and on about how the villagers stand around and do nothing while the GAF abducts children right in front of their faces and then traffics them to work in slave labor for the fishing industry.”

  “Wait, I do remember hearing something like that. And this victim fits the profile of having been one of the child slaves.”

  “Now, you’re cooking with peas and rice! You can meet me, yes?”

  “Um…Yeah, yeah. Neural-text me the address.”

  ~

  Besides me being able to play a thirty-something-year-old, what I loved about playing the House of Oware game was that many of the cases Lamp and I had were based on cold cases in real life, but this one was, unbeknownst to us at the time, being investigated in real-time. It gave me such a rush to know that we had potentially solved crimes that real investigators hadn’t the wits to accomplish.

  Lamp wanted to go to the GAF to tell them what we’d discovered but I had a gut feeling that if we did, it would expose to the world that someone mistakenly programmed the game in our neural implants and we’d be forced to delete the most comprehensive virtual reality RPG that was ever made. He thought that bringing slave traffickers to justice was more important than us playing the game. For every trafficker GAF officers imprisoned, it seemed two more came up the ranks, he always said. He was right.

  It was a good thing I wore my black jogging suit. Dark clothes were the best at crime scenes in case of blood spatter. There was a lot of it on the ground, too. Not human blood, though. Enhuman blood. The enhumans, a word derived from enhanced humans, weren’t bloodsuckers as told in the urban legends. However, we did gain our sustenance from feeding off blood, but we did it within the confines of the law.

  There are many old wives tales about how we came into existence. Some of our ancestors said we were borne from a curse through the magic of ancient Egyptians, others say we were born in a laboratory, centuries ago. The truth is, no one really knows since all documentation about it was lost or destroyed.

  Scanning the area with curious eyes, I stood in the center of the abandoned water and sanitation plant, not far from a fishing community along the Lake Volta. There was a sea of men and women from the forensic science unit collecting evidence, GAF officers fielding the area and a neural photographer placing yellow markers around the crime scene.

  Unused water pipes, some painted blue, others white, most tainted with rust, ran through the plant like tentacles of some great dead beast. There were massive water tanks and rusted metal storage units standing beside the steep hills and brown tufts of weeds that poked out of the cracked pavement.

  Patches of dust and dirt had gotten on me from when, I brushed up against the pipes or something, I wasn’t sure. Over my jogging suit hooded top, a shoulder holster held my Kahr CW9, 9mm Luger, or what I’d nicknamed Chucky. I’d put it on when I got back to my car after my jog.

  I’d tried other guns, the Glock 43, Sig Sauer P238, but found my Chucky to be more accurate. Lamp once asked me why I called my gun that. Well, it was a little thing but dangerous as all hell, like Chucky from the horror films. Yeah, it had a stiff recoil spring, but unlike some concealed weapons, it wasn’t bulky under my clothes. A brown leather medical satchel with evidence bags, bioswabs, lifting tape, and other forensic tools, completed my outfit.

  Samora Lamp, the Detective Chief Inspector (DCI) and head of Ghana’s Anti-species Trafficking Unit, was standing over the dead body when I spotted him. Lamp’s charcoal gray suit gleamed under the warm sunlight. His black silk tie flew over his shoulder from the breath of the mild wind, and his expensive shoes had collected dust as they crunched over the gravel on the uneven pavement. He had a peculiar gray streak of hair going from his widow’s peak to the right side of his head. I thought it gave him a lot of character.

  There was a black sheet covering the corpse. The forensic photographer, also wearing gloves, lifted up the cover and twisted his face as he took neural pictures of it. He placed the cover back over the still body and shook his head. There were several yellow photo evidence markers placed around the body.

  Lamp was short but a little taller than me. His jawline was strong. His skin was yellowish-brown like honey butter and he could use a little Ghanaian sunburn to bring his complexion a little more color. His hair was cut short, and the tips of his sideburns revealed a bit of gray, typical of a man in his mid-forties. In real life, I had no idea how he looked. Just like if he passed me on the streets of Kumasi, he’d pass me by without knowing who I was. However, I did use an avatar that looked like me, but just about fifteen years older.

  “What have we got, Lamp?” I said, looking down at the corpse. My sneakers crunched over the uneven gravel as I took a step closer to the corpse.

  “Female ennie, thirteen, maybe fourteen,” he said, tugging at the fingers of the latex gloves on his hands. “Damn things always make me itch.”

  I retrieved a pair of latex gloves from my satchel. Ennie was local jargon for enhumans.

  He continued. “Her teeth were removed, her fingertips singed, and—”

  “We’ll have to identify her through a face recognition program?”

  “That might be a problem.”

  “Why’s that?” I reached in my satchel for some evidence bags. “Hey, you’re leaving when, next week?”

  “Nope, this weekend. Jinni can’t wait. It’ll be just the two of us.” He gestured at the body. “Take a look.”

  “Any CCTV footage?”

  “No, this plant hasn’t been in use for two decades. The surveillance cameras are all covered with filth. Everything’s to shit.”

  I stooped down, and uncovered the top part of the body, and flinched. “Shit!”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Never seen anything like that. Her head’s smashed in like it was run over.”

  I shut my eyes and fought with all my might not to vomit so that all the GAF could give me a hard time because the big bad coroner tossed her salad looking at a corpse. There was no mistake, however. She had been run over. It was the girl I’d hit.

  This is not a cold case! How’d it get into the database so quickly?

  Lamp had a smirk on his face. “You, uh, okay there, Examiner? Don’t tell me after all these years of us working together it’s starting to get to you?”

  “Don’t be silly,” I said. “It’s not that. I had some Waakye that been upsetting my stomach since I first ate it.”

  “Uh-huh, sure,” Lamp said, and glanced up and around.

  I leaned in. “Hmph. There’s fluid leakag
e in her ears.”

  “What could’ve caused that?”

  “A number of things, an ear infection…disease control already swept the area, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It can’t be a pathogen that killed her, or we’d already be in HAZMAT suits.”

  “Or dead.”

  “Yeah, you just keep the pessimism to yourself.”

  I took a bioswab out of my satchel, smeared a dab of the pinkish substance on the tip and swabbed it in a small glass vial before securing it and placing the sample into an evidence bag.

  “Signs of compression and nail scratch abrasions on the front and side of her neck are consistent with asphyxiation via manual strangulation.”

  “She wasn’t killed by a hit-and-run?”

  “No, she was dead long before that.”

  Thank you, God! But who killed her if I didn’t?

  “Okay,” Lamp said. “So she was lazy at catching fish, and they choked her to death?”

  “Or killed her while having rough sex,” I said, pulling the cover completely off.

  “You say that with such an easy demeanor.”

  “It’s not the first time we’ve had a case like this, is it? Here, take a look,” I said, and pointed to her abdomen.

  He flinched upon catching the first glimpse. “What in Shango’s name happened to her stomach?”

  I held in my rage, upset at the sloppiness of my brother.

  This is how Kofi and Grunt took care of it? Do a pissant job of making it look like a dhole attacked the girl? No pathologist would ever agree with my findings if there was ever an alternative investigation on my autopsy.

  Covering the body back up,” I said, “I think the dholes got to her before we did. There are some scratches and jagged cuts that could be claw and bite marks.”

  “Every day I hear a new story about dhole attacks,” Lamp said. “They say the radiation has made them highly intelligent, and now they can communicate with each other.”

  I stood up and chuckled. “What? You mean they’re telepathic?”

  “Well, no. But more like they’re witch dogs. The villagers say that once you look into their eyes, you fall under a trance and can’t run. That’s how they catch you, even though some of them are deformed with three legs.”

  “Those are silly superstitious stories that have no basis of facts behind them.”

  “After decades of running through radiation zones, they’d become rabid four-legged beasts with insatiable appetites. I don’t see how that’s so far-fetched.”

  “I’ve got a bullet in Chucky, right now that says you’re wrong.”

  “They say one bullet never put the stubborn bastards down, and I reckon a pack of them were damn near terrifying to stop.”

  “Did you have your guys secure the perimeter to make sure they don’t return for leftovers?”

  “Yes. There’s a shooter at vantage points on all four corners of this facility. So far, no sightings of them.”

  “You guys are undermanned. You don’t have the luxury of taking guys and putting them on dhole patrol.”

  “I put in a request for more bodies.”

  “Let me guess, as usual, the Inspector General said there aren’t enough GAF officers in the region to go around.”

  “Look, I don’t need you to criticize how we do things. You’re an investigative coroner, and we have to work together, but that doesn’t mean you tell me how to do my job.”

  “What? You have something you want to say to me, Lamp?”

  For a long moment, he just glared at me, his lips rising into a smirk, and then a snarl. “Our last case,” he said, looking over his shoulder, “I would’ve gotten a promotion and double bit-credits if you didn’t rip the throat out of that slave trafficker, but you wanted to drink his blood, didn’t you?”

  “This again? Look for the trillionth time, I’m an ennie, an enhanced human!”

  “I know what you are,” he said, raising his voice.

  “You know that it’s a civil criminal act to feed blood from a human, or any living species.”

  “Be honest. Blood lust got the best of you. That’s why you tore his throat out—”

  “Blood lust?”

  “And you were abused in all those foster homes you grew up in. It was too personal, seeing what he did to those children—”

  “And it didn’t disgust you?”

  “You lost control. Admit it!”

  “Lamp, feeding blood from a human has been a crime punishable by death without a trial by the Enhuman Council.”

  “Just because there’s a hefty price to pay doesn’t mean it wouldn’t happen. I mean, no disrespect but your species does get it’s food from blood, mostly.”

  I got in his face. “Species?”

  “Aw, Xo. Don’t go trying to turn this into something racial. You know what I mean. Your people, your kind. You manufacture blood in processed foods, in beer, hell, even in energy drinks, it’s not impossible that you ennies would be tempted to bite a human’s neck or two. I get it. It’s in your nature.”

  Blood rose to my head like liquid fire, but I maintained a soft tone. “I don’t think you understand, Lamp. For centuries, that type of practice has not only been deemed sexually deviant but absolutely unacceptable. Like you humans, we are privy to flaws, mistakes, and downright fetishes. But I assure you, if I ripped out that slave trader’s throat, it wasn’t because I wanted to drink his blood, it was because I enjoyed thrashing his flesh, and making him pay with his death for all the mothers and fathers who have a black hole in their soul because he abducted their children and sold them to the highest bidder.”

  “So you just-just execute the suspect without a trial?” He asked, in a low voice.

  “That’s what your human bounty hunters did to us for hundreds of years! Now we’re recognized and you still treat us like second-class citizens!”

  He shrugged. “Yeah, I don’t know. As with most new laws, that one needs a lot of revision.”

  “Lamp, one of the—I refuse to even say the scum’s name—one of the slave trader’s victim was only nine-years-old. You want to know why I always do so much investigative work? Your GAF cohorts are too frigging incompetent to do anything.”

  “Now, you’re crossing the line!”

  We were in a bonafide yelling match, which, believe it or not, had become a daily ritual. Lamp and I fought like family. We were family. I hadn’t met him in real life, outside of the game, but we’d been streaming together for several years. It was our way of showing mutual respect like a crested porcupine standing ground against a lion.

  I said, “You guys don’t have the manpower nor balls to face anti-species traffickers without casualties but are too narrow-minded to recruit more ennies! Just last week, two of your guys were killed investigating the human trafficking ring in Tudu.”

  That seemed to tick him off. Now it was his turn to blow off steam. “You don’t have to tell me what guys I lost in the field of duty! All right? I know who I lost, but the evidence is leaning to the fact that maybe they were attacks were by ennies.”

  “You sure it wasn’t your witch dogs?”

  He nearly blew a gasket. “Humans don’t go around biting other humans in the neck and bleeding them dry!”

  I walked away from him, seeing that we were grabbing eyes from all around. After a few seconds, I approached him, and in a calm voice, said, “Try explaining that to the people in Malawi.”

  He opened his mouth to say something, stopped, and then smiled, saying. “What happened to those victims in the Mulanje Mountains and Kadadzera is a result of superstitions and fear getting out of hand.”

  Laughing, I dismissed his claim with a wave. “Look who’s talking about superstitions getting out of hand? The point is they weren’t ennies, they were humans killing humans.” I placed my hand on his shoulders. “We’re not monsters, Lamp.”

  In return, he placed both of his hands on my shoulders. “But half the world still thinks you are. You’v
e only come out of the closet, so to speak, within the last fifty years. You’re going to have to play by the rules, Xo, for a few generations, if you really want to make a difference.”

  Turning away from him, I took a step and then shook my index finger at him. “I refuse to watch my people run back into the shadows of urban legend and Poe-esque fiction that have labeled us as savages for centuries. We are not asanbosam nor vampires—”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know. You ennies may have heightened senses, and are stronger than we are, but you’re susceptible to self-extinction just like we humans are, Examiner. Quantify your actions with excuses all you want. You had no right taking the law into your hands.”

  I got right up in Lamp’s face, not caring who saw us. Lamp did, and he eyes darted back and forth at the officers who took notice of us, until I stabbed him in his chest with my finger and captured his full attention.

  “That piece of scum was a convicted human and semi-human trafficker,” I said. “He was indicted on eleven different counts!”

  “There was never any solid proof, only a confession. One, I believe was coerced!”

  “The jury didn’t think so. Besides, eleven counts are proof enough! And because of an illegal search done by those idiot officers down at the Adansi North District, there was a mistrial and the sonofabitch was freed.” I leaned in close to his ear and whispered. “He got what he deserved.”

  Lamp stepped back and cleared his throat. “Yeah, maybe. But do something like that again, and I’ll put in for a request for a new partner.”

  “You do that,” I said, and pulled out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter, annoyed by the entire conversation. “What are you looking at?” I asked a GAF officer staring at me. He had navy emblems on his uniform. “Go on, there’s a crime scene here, that needs your attention. Go on! Nothing to see here!”

  I offered Lamp a cigarette. “Do you want a jot?”

  He shook his head. “Lung blasters? I don’t think so.”

  “Suit yourself, then,” I said, and turned away from him.