Nandi and I stood on the concrete step outside a crowded, noisy jail cell. The place reeked of urine and unshowered bodies. The police were not happy about our showing up for a visit, but they couldn’t seem to come up with a good reason to stop us, so they begrudgingly let us through to an area where prisoners were allowed to talk to visitors.
It took some time for the guards to inform Nandi’s brother that he had a visitor. As we waited, a smartly dressed woman was let in and approached the bars, dabbing at her weepy eyes. She looked at Nandi and became hysterical. “It’s the rangers’ fault that Moffit is dead. They did nothing about those elephants.”
Nandi whispered softly to the woman, trying to get her to calm down.
Nandi turned to me and explained that this was Moffit’s sister, who had been away in South Africa when he died and had only now been able to return. She wanted to speak to Nandi’s brother as well.
I nodded to her solemnly.
The woman scoffed at me. “And who is this?” She looked me up and down. “An informer for the rangers?”
Nandi shook her head and whispered, “No, she is not an informer. This is Catherine Sohon.”
The woman turned away, refusing the introduction. “That last payment was supposed to go to me. Sianga owes me that.”
Suddenly, two large female prisoners lunged at the bars and hissed at the woman with their index fingers over their fleshy mouths. They pointed to the guards standing nearby. They urgently put hands to ears and lips. One of the women hissed in a whisper, “Don’t be stupid. It’s not private here, lady.”
I nodded to the women gratefully. Whatever it was that the induna’s son was hiding, I didn’t want anything to happen to him before we were able to speak to him ourselves. Knowledge of illicit business of any kind seemed to be a liability around here, particularly when it had to do with smuggling ivory and large amounts of cash.
Nandi convinced Moffit’s sister to wait outside until we were finished. She told her that she might be too late for what she was looking for and that her brother was in grave danger—that her questions might make things worse for him. With her departure came a collective sigh of relief.
Eventually Nandi’s brother was let into the communal area. He saw Nandi and approached looking hopeful. They exchanged a few words in Yeye. He nodded over to me, and their conversation got tense. Nandi’s tone became urgent as she started to plead with him.
He turned away from her to look at me, clutching the bars from inside the cell. “Do you have a cigarette?”
A baton slammed against the bars next to my shoulder and Sianga’s hands let go of the bars. My head spun around to see a guard looming over me.
“Sorry, I don’t smoke. My name is Catherine.”
“This is my brother, Sianga,” said Nandi.
Nandi spoke to her brother again more calmly. I had explained to her on the ride over that the ivory found in his yard came from the same lot of tusks found at Susuwe in the trunk of the murder victims’ car. I had told her that he might be in even more trouble than he might have thought. It would be important to know what really happened—whether someone planted the ivory on him to frame him, or whether he knew more than he was willing to tell anyone. He’d have a better chance if he offered what he knew before the evidence came out.
After a prolonged whispered terse discussion, Sianga looked at me and shook his head. “I cannot tell anything.”
I looked at him squarely. “I understand you may know something that might help.”
Sianga stared, his face expressionless. “It is too dangerous for my family.”
I had to bite my tongue. I wanted more than anything to ask him if he was there that day—at the crime scene at Susuwe. I wanted to know why the exchange went badly. Why did they kill those people? Instead, I whispered very softly, “We can protect you if you help us.”
Nandi took a moment to look me up and down as if she had missed something about me, as if to wonder how it might be possible for me to offer her brother protection. Then she whispered as the young man stared back at me with cold eyes, “You have to ask my father first.”
“Ask him what?” I now felt the urgent need to know what this man knew, and I didn’t want to have to wait a whole week before seeing the induna. Anything could happen in a week—not to mention how many more elephants could die. And with the police not showing up in time to catch Alvares with a mokoro full of weapons, I felt as if our options for bringing all these criminals to justice were narrowing by the day. Not to mention Craig’s latest thinking. He had to be wrong about Jon. I couldn’t dwell on what it might mean if Craig’s suspicions turned out to be true. But either way, I had no choice but to put some distance between us.
And we needed to be able to gather evidence that couldn’t be thrown out. The fact that my pictures confirmed that Ernest was alive and was Geldenhuis’s smuggling partner was a big step forward, but now I knew from the genetic evidence that the second accessory to the witch doctor’s bloody quadruple murder at Susuwe might be standing right in front of me, and I wasn’t ready to walk away empty-handed.
Sianga looked at me, first uncertainly, and then with knowing eyes. “My father has to agree that I can give you what you are looking for.”
I couldn’t help but clench my fists in frustration, knowing there was nothing I could do but appear grateful for his willingness to consider talking to me. I bowed slightly. “Thank you for seeing us. I’ll be back next week.”
After Nandi and Sianga exchanged a few more panicked sentences in Yeye, Sianga fell silent. Nandi turned and walked away, motioning for me to follow. We left the prison with our eyes to the ground.
Fortunately, my mind was going to be occupied with the elephant count for the next week or I’d have been driven mad with anticipation of the importance of what Sianga might have to tell me. More delays meant more elephant deaths.