Crocodile's Kill by Chris McGillion

Author:Chris McGillion
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Babies are being abducted from their homes in the mountains along East Timor’s southern border with Indonesia. Local villagers believe the babies are being taken by demons and sacrificed in order to appease ancestral spirits disturbed by development projects encroaching on traditional land. FBI Agent Sara Carter, on secondment to INTERPOL, is assigned to investigate the case which is suspected of involving an illegal international adoption racket servicing childless rich American couples. She is assigned a Timorese police colleague, Vincintino Cordero, whose family escaped East Timor after the Indonesian invasion and who grew up and was educated in Australia. But the two have personalities, policing styles and agendas that clash complicating the investigation. Assisted by a young female Timorese police officer they must nonetheless find a way to work together to hunt down those responsible for the abductions before the villagers’ fears boil over and they take matters into their own hands. It's a dangerous investigation, as the discovery of two dead bodies attests. And nerves are on edge after the local police kill a crocodile, the totem central to Timor’s creation myth. Time is running out before anger over the treatment of the crocodile adds to popular unrest about the missing babies and erupts into widespread violence.
Publisher: Epicenter Press Inc.
Published: 2022-01-06T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 15

“You shouldn’t have gone there,” Cordero snapped after they told him about Beko.

“You shouldn’t have split us up,” countered Carter.

Cordero pushed his hands deep into his trouser pockets. “I shouldn’t have left you on your own,” he conceded.

“No—you should have thought the whole thing through more carefully,” she corrected him.

He sat down on one of the beds in their room in the nuns’ house. Estefana stood quietly in the corner of the room. Cordero stared at the floor. “You don’t think much of my policing, do you?” he said to Carter.

“What makes you say that?” she asked, surprised.

“You’re always telling me to hurry up, stay focused, questioning my training. And now this.”

“I could say you make a better gin and tonic than you do a policeman,” Carter sniffed, letting the comment sink in. “But I won’t.”

“You just did,” complained Cordero.

“No I didn’t. I offered a proposition not a statement,” Carter replied. “These things happen and we were fine,” she added knowing she’d won the argument. With that settled, she reported what they had learned from the boy, Julio da Silva.

“And you believe him?” Cordero asked.

“Yes, I do,” insisted Carter. “The facial expressions are hard to fake at that age.”

“Well it’s circumstantial but the strongest lead we have,” Cordero said. “Did the boy describe the woman?”

“Not in any helpful way,” regretted Carter. “We asked him to compare the woman to Estefana in the hope that would make it easier for him. He said she was older than Estefana but then he calculated Estefana’s age at sixteen. At first he said the woman was bigger but it was unclear if he meant taller or fatter and we couldn’t get a straight answer. His arms went out in an attempt to measure what he meant but then they came back in and went up and out again.”

Carter paced the room. “The only definite thing he knew was that her hair was the same colour as Estefana’s and the same texture but cut short. That might have been because the woman kept it in a bun. As for the clothes she was wearing, he thought a blue top and a black skirt. That was it but at least he was consistent about it.” She paused, thinking. “But I get the feeling people are holding back, as though they are edgy about something. Not Julio. He was only afraid of getting another whack from his mother for doing something wrong. But people generally seem tense and frightened.”

Estefana looked at Cordero. “Well, many of them are very traditional,” he said. “Being interviewed by police officers, especially ones they don’t know, can be intimidating. You being a foreigner wouldn’t help either, if I can say that.”

“May I make a comment?” Estefana asked.

Cordero looked at her but Carter said: “Yes, of course.”

“If Julio was right about the blue top and black dress that may be important. That is not the kind of thing most women around here wear. Older ones wear traditional dress. Younger ones mostly wear jeans and T-shirts.

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