Zoe touched Kuyeya’s shoulder. “We need you to talk to us. Please talk to us.”
Leaving St. Francis, Zoe dropped by her flat and made two brown-bag lunches. Then she drove to the golf club to meet Joseph. She parked at the edge of the lot beneath a jacaranda tree. The spot gave her a view of the gate and the clubhouse—a compact, single-story building with the familiar blue crest above the entrance. She scanned the lot and saw at least a dozen SUVs, including one that appeared to be silver sitting in the far corner.
Joseph arrived just after noon and parked in the space beside her. “Dominic confirmed it,” he said, joining her in the Land Rover. “It’s the symbol he saw.”
Zoe nodded. “How do you want to do this?”
Joseph surveyed the lot. “I’m going to walk around. You stay here. Your face is too memorable.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment. There’s a silver SUV on the far side.”
“I noticed,” he replied, and slipped out of the cabin.
Zoe watched as Joseph canvassed the ranks of parked vehicles, angling toward the silver SUV. He barely glanced at the vehicle before entering the clubhouse. A minute later, he returned to the lot with keys in hand, as if he had remembered something.
“It doesn’t have a sticker,” he said, climbing in again. “I only saw a couple of them in the lot. The lady in the club said they don’t make them anymore.”
“That’ll make our suspect easier to find,” Zoe replied. She reached into the back seat and handed him a brown bag. “I made you a sandwich.”
His lips widened into a smile. “That’s very kind of you.”
The gift of food seemed to unlock something in Joseph. Suddenly, he became a conversationalist, engaging Zoe about everything from his childhood in the Southern Province to the issues at stake in the election. As the afternoon deepened and the sun traced out its westward arc, at least two dozen automobiles came and went. Zoe kept watch for another silver SUV but saw only rainbow colors in the parade.
Around four o’clock, their fortunes turned. A silver Lexus RX270 pulled into the lot and parked in their row. Two Zambian men—one tall and trim, the other shorter and muscular—collected golf clubs from the trunk and strolled toward the clubhouse.
“I’ll check it out,” Joseph said, leaving the cab. He wandered down the lane and continued into the clubhouse, emerging five minutes later with a troubled look in his eyes. He took out his camera and snapped a photo of the Lexus. Then he returned to the Land Rover.
“The crest is there, but it’s on the wrong side,” he said, showing her the photo and Dominic’s sketch from his notebook. The boy had placed the crest to the left of the license plate. On the Lexus, the crest was to the right.
“Maybe he misremembered,” she said. “It was dark.”
Joseph frowned. “Right now his memory is the best evidence we have. There’s something else. I talked to the men. I asked if they’d played over the weekend. The tall one said he was in Johannesburg on business.”
Zoe sighed, dejected. “We should confirm that. We also need to double-check Dominic’s recollection.”
Joseph nodded. “I’ll run the plate.”
chapter 6
The Lexus, it turned out, belonged to the son of a bureaucrat at the Ministry of Finance who worked for Barclays bank. Joseph called his office and confirmed that he was, at least ostensibly, in South Africa on the night Kuyeya was raped. Dominic, too, seemed certain that the crest on the perpetrator’s SUV had been situated to the left of the plate. The child even drew a sketch in Joseph’s notepad. In a flash of insight, Joseph drew the emblems of the popular automobile manufacturers above the plate, and the boy circled the three-pointed star of Mercedes Benz. But of this fact he had been less certain.
Joseph returned to haunt the Lusaka Golf Club in search of another silver SUV. Zoe, meanwhile, spent her days at the office, whittling down the stack of legal work that had piled up. New case files had to be reviewed and status reports delivered to Mariam; two research memos she had written for Sarge and Niza required editing; and a brief Sarge had drafted for the Zambia Supreme Court needed footnotes with citations along with substantial grammatical polish. She checked her iPhone obsessively, hoping for a text from Joseph. But the time passed without incident and she found herself wishing that she had pushed Mariam to authorize the Livingstone trip despite Joseph’s reluctance. Whatever the merits of her theory, searching for Kuyeya’s family was far more interesting than being handcuffed to a desk.
On Thursday after work, Zoe vented her frustration, doing thirty laps in the pool without pause. Afterward, she sat on the edge and dangled her feet in the water, breathing steadily until her pulse—and her mind—stopped racing.