“Kia ora, Matthew.”
Putting a dented tin cup in front of Will after waving off his thanks, Matthew took a seat at the wooden table—not across from Will, but to the right, next to the window. “So, you want to talk about the lost hikers.”
Will drank down a third of the hot, strong tea heavy with sugar and dark with caffeine. “Anything you can tell me?”
“Those girls didn’t just disappear,” Matthew said bluntly while rolling up tobacco into a thin cigarette. “I tramped through that part of the bush day in and day out, and didn’t see no sign of the girls until I found that water bottle.”
He finished sealing his roll-up, but didn’t light it. “Piri found the pack that belonged to the second wahine later—in the same spot where I stopped for a breather the day before. I got eyes in my upoko. I would’ve noticed a pack. Got put there after.”
“Did you tell this to the original investigators?”
“Sure.” A shrug. “But most of the city cops, they think we’re pÅraki, nÄ?.” He circled a finger by his temple. “Living out here in the bush.”
Unfortunately, Will couldn’t disagree with Matthew’s take. Hell, if he hadn’t been assigned to Golden Cove, if he hadn’t gotten to know these people, he might’ve been the same. The brain shied away from the sanity of making a home out here in this primeval wildness. “Did the locals have any suspicions at the time about who it might’ve been?”
“People did look at each other funny after they found the bracelet of the third girl, but it was just fear, eh. We didn’t have anyone acting like a perv or anything.”
In a town this small, someone inevitably ended up a scapegoat. That Golden Cove hadn’t fixated on a single individual told him exactly how difficult the case must’ve been for the cops who’d investigated it. A water bottle, a pack, an identity bracelet. No remains. Not even a single bone fragment.
“What about you?” he asked. “You ever wonder about someone?”
Finally lighting his roll-up, Matthew politely puffed toward the open window rather than Will’s face. “Interesting question, that.”
Instincts prickling, Will just waited.
“You’re a good listener.” Matthew gave an approving nod from behind a plume of smoke. “Would’ve made a great enemy interrogator.”
Will wasn’t the least surprised to learn the other man was a veteran. He got that haunted look in his eyes sometimes that Will had seen in the eyes of others who’d come back from war. “It used to drive my mother nuts,” he said. “For the first few years of my life she worried I was mute.”
Laughing uproariously at that, the older man slapped at his knee. “Ka mau te wehi!” When he finally calmed down, he said, “You’ll think I’ve lost my mind alone out here.”
Will held his gaze. “I’ve learned things during this investigation that make me question everyone in the Cove, so whoever you name, I’m not going to be surprised.”
The name Matthew spoke made the hairs rise on the back of Will’s neck. “Why? I need to know why you suspected him.”
Matthew took a while to think about that, smoking his roll-up halfway down before he said, “Just… too perfect, eh.” Another thoughtful puff. “A man—he was a boy back then—who never makes mistakes has got to have a madness trapped inside. And, there was the punua kurÄ«.”
“A puppy?”
Matthew nodded, then went silent.
“I didn’t grow up here, Matthew,” Will prodded. “What about the puppy?”
After taking a last puff, Matthew crushed his roll-up in the ashtray balanced on the window ledge. “Kid’s father gave him one for his ninth birthday, I think it was. Maybe it was eight, or maybe it was ten, eh? Tamariki all look the same to me.”
The hunter coughed, his chest sounding clogged up. “Then one day, I see him running out of the bush near their place, saying his puppy had run away. He was crying, all red-faced and scared.” Another hacking cough. “I knew that pup wouldn’t survive out there all alone and I had Ripper with me—good hunting dog, never used to get distracted. I figured he could track down the punua kurÄ« quick enough.”
Will had the feeling he was about to hear something that wouldn’t ever leave his memory. “Did Ripper live up to his reputation?”
“Yeah, he found the puppy, what was left of it. Someone had bashed its brains in using a rock.”
Matthew looked at Will with sharp, dark eyes. “I couldn’t believe a boy that young could’ve done that, eh, so I just buried the puppy and told myself to forget it. But, I kept seeing that pup with its brains bashed out every time I closed my eyes. So next time I saw Trevor Baker down at the pub, I told him maybe he shouldn’t give his boy another puppy.”
“What did he say?”
“Nothing, but that boy never again got a kurÄ«.”
As Matthew got up to pour himself a cup of tea, Will worked out the logistics in his head. “Vincent would’ve only been fourteen at the time the hikers went missing.”
“He got his growth early, that boy.” Matthew topped up Will’s tea. “Was as big as a man by that age. As big as he is now.”
Which wasn’t huge by any estimation, Will thought, but it was plenty big enough to overpower a woman of average size. He’d looked up the files on the missing hikers, knew they’d been small boned and ranged from five-one to five-four in height, their weights on the lower end of the scale. A strong fourteen-year-old boy could have taken each one.
Especially if he came at them with a rock from behind.
One blow to disorient, the other to incapacitate. And more to smash in their skulls just like the lost puppy’s.
“’Course, Vincent wasn’t the only strong boy in the Cove that summer,” Matthew added without warning. “Back when he was younger, after I told him I couldn’t find the pup, he started crying harder and said another boy in town must’ve stolen the punua kurÄ«, that he was jealous of Vincent’s gift.”
“He ever name the other boy?”
“I never asked.” Matthew drank some of his tea, then put down the mug and began to roll another cigarette. “Needed a beer after what I’d seen, just wanted to get down to the pub.”
“You think it’s possible another child was involved?”
The hunter took his time answering. “Rich, good-looking boy with all the nice toys living in a flash house? Ä?e, another boy might see that and get a hot head.” Sealing the roll-up closed, he said, “No way to hide a stolen pup in Golden Cove.”
This time, every single tiny hair on Will’s body rose up. What kind of a child would bash in a helpless puppy’s brains rather than allow another boy to possess it?
45
Will drove back into Golden Cove as night was falling, not sure what he was going to do with the information, or even if he believed all of it—because Matthew didn’t only smoke tobacco. Will had smelled weed on him more than once, but since there was no indication the hunter was cultivating or selling… and because of those haunted eyes, he’d let sleeping dogs lie.