It was a horrible sound, that vindictive cackle … he was so close to her, only inches away … and then his face changed … it became Radzi’s … and he was standing over her, proud in his shining armour … he scooped her up in his arms, and she held onto him, relieved … then he started laughing in her face.
‘Shit!’ Radzi glanced at her from his computer. ‘Oh no, did I wake you up?’
She rubbed her eyes and checked her watch; she’d been out of it for about four hours.
‘Good rest?’
‘Yeah. Much needed.’ She squinted her eyes at him, looked at him for a little too long. ‘You got anything?’
He nodded solemnly. ‘It’s only some final information about Iyseek that I managed to screw up. This one –’ he pointed to the computer ‘– it’s gone. Virus attack. Either it’s protected by a very new system, or it’s got a really good bug on it, ’cause I’ve never seen such a virus. I got everything else printed though, so if you memorize all of it, we wouldn’t be needing this computer anyway.’
Nikki took a look at everything Radzi had printed out. ‘This is everything about the five criminals?’
‘Like you said: Andrea Kaniso, Chek Kavok, Hugo Jamber, Tallulah Printip, Jed Zhen. I’ve gone through most of them, but my memory only extends that far.’
‘Okay. Want to give me a summary? It always helps to know what I’m dealing with.’
Radzi tilted his head towards the documents. ‘You can sift through them while I recap. The first page for every person includes several close-up photographs, at different ages. Thought you might need to know what they looked like.’
She was inwardly impressed. He’d thought of everything.
‘So we already know about Kaniso and Kavok. Both thieves, both dead within year of each other. But Hugo Jamber is still alive. He was suspected of robbing three millionaires and running away with close to 5 million dollars. All he did was to sneak inside the rich houses, get a couple of collector’s stuff, like a painting or a china vase or an eighteenth-century Russian doll, and resell it on the black market. In all three cases, the police didn’t have a speck on him, his work was clean. And you’ve got to imagine the amount of security and alarm systems already installed – getting away was a ridiculous miracle.’
‘Yet, he did it.’
Radzi tapped his chin. ‘See, the 5 million was never recovered, but the police did get suspicious when the people in the mainland ghettos started coming out more, and started crowding the local hypermarkets. It happened three times, each time almost directly after a millionaire’s filed a case. One of the women they interviewed even mentioned that they called their ghetto Jamber-town, which was obviously meant to be sarcastic as well as political. No one'd call the ghettos a town.’
‘So Jamber was playing Robin Hood.’
‘Yup. And the best part was, the ghettos stood up for him, provided more than ten alibis for each case. But he’s MIA now. No one knows what happened to him, and I can’t find any leads either.’
Weeding out the papers, she studied Jamber’s pictures for little while, then held up another set of photos. ‘This one’s quite a looker.’
Rad shrugged. ‘Not the last photo. By then she seemed to have lost her mind a little. She was a high-class prostitute from 1993 to 2004, took a break in 2005, resumed work a year later. Her colleague – known only as Madam Madam – said she was never the same after that, and it shows in that last picture of her.’
Nikki gazed at the photos with a slight expression. The woman was beautiful, with cascades of nut-brown hair and a pair of deep-set, intense eyes, but in the final photo, her skin was sallow, her face hauntingly old.
‘She died. Age 29.’
‘Any thieving?’
‘Once, after her holiday in 2005. It seemed that she kept chanting, I took it from him. he’s going to find me, he’s going to kill me. But it was reported by Madam Madam, so we don’t know if it’s made-up.’
‘Well, she did die –’
‘Of natural causes. Became too depressed, fell sick, and wouldn’t take her medication.’
Nikki tapped her chin. ‘Okay. And this Jed Zhen?’
‘Constantly on the run, but he was no professional at it. He left traces everywhere, so it’d have been really easy to locate him at any one time. His thieving was a lot more random – some food from a kitchen restaurant, an unlocked car at a petrol station, a few hundred-dollar bills by threatening women who had pretty handbags.’
‘If he was so obvious, why couldn’t the police get to him?’
‘He had a kid with him. There was one particularly close call, but the police didn’t want to shoot a small-time thief, not when it would risk hurting the little girl. In fact, no one knew about the kid being held hostage until then – no missing person’s report matched her. His body turned up a few months later, in a construction site that had collapsed.’
Radzi looked away now, as if he’d talked too much about something too reprehensible.
‘What happened to the child?’
‘Don’t know. There’s nothing at all on her. Don’t know where she came from or where she went or who she was. Might have been an immigrant child, which would make sense if the parents were illegal – wouldn’t have wanted any records of her.’
She pursed her lips. ‘But what does it have anything to do with Jed Zhen?’
‘You tell me. We have four dead people, one missing Robin Hood, and an unknown child.’ Radzi leaned back in his seat and made a face. ‘I already know what you’re thinking.’
‘And what’s that?’
He sighed. ‘The cases are all so different, Nikki. And if what I think makes any difference to you - no, they can’t possibly be related.’
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