Elephant Murders: Starbuck

Elephant

Murders

Starbuck

By Susan Hunter

Hudson Run Press – New York

Hudson Run Press

Publishers since 1999

Lake Luzerne, New York 12846

Copyright © 2015 by Susan S. Hunter

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Cover Design by Sharon Bolton

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hunter, Susan S.

Elephant Murders | Starbuck / Susan Hunter

eISBN 978-0-9702932-1-3

1. Elephant Poaching

2. International Environmental Crime

3. Female Detective

4. Kafue National Park (Zambia)

My Thanks

To many elephant researchers and conservationists, who will recognize the fruits of their tireless work in this text but bear no responsibility for how I have interpreted their work.

To the folks at Mukambi, my Zambian friends, the people of Zambia, and my dear husband Arlin Greene. I first fell in love with Zambia in 1990, and have lived and worked there many times since. Gifted with more good leaders than bad, it maintains its dignity and pride in the middle of a continent ridden by conflict and chaos. I only hope that I have represented it fairly, and continue to do so through the other books in this series.

To my editor, Joyce Devine. To my readers: Margaret Bellucci, Kathy Cheney, Joyce Miller, Jim McCauley, Linda Mason, Callie and Randy Curtis, and Sharon Bolton, who read early versions of this book and contributed mightily to making it better. Sharon, a nationally recognized artist and graphic designer, designed the covers for all three volumes in this series. None of these lovely people are responsible for anything that survived the editing process.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locates is entire coincidental.

Every tusk, piece and scrap has been steeped and dyed in blood.

Every pound weight of ivory has cost the life of a man, woman, or child.

For every five pounds a hut has been burned;

for every two tusks, a whole village has been destroyed;

every twenty tusks have been obtained

at the price of a district with all its people, villages, and plantations.

It is simply incredible that, because ivory is required for ornaments or billiard games,

the rich heart of Africa should be laid waste,

that populations, tribes and nations should be utterly destroyed.

Whom after all does this bloody seizure of ivory enrich?

Only a few dozen, who, if due justice were dealt to them,

should be made to sweat out the remainder of their piratical lives in the severest penal servitude.

Henry Morton Stanley

In Darkest Africa, 1890

This book is dedicated to finding

justice for humans and animals everywhere

The killings are on-going, brutal, and must be stopped.

They are as ugly in reality as they are on the written page.

I know. I’ve seen the carnage up close.

Elephants don’t deserve this kind of punishment and we must do everything in our power to protect them.

I hope the three books in Elephant Murders contribute to that end.

1 | Before the Fall

The old matriarch was still standing. Barely.

She moved her head slowly side to side, her magnificent tusks gleaming in the dappled sunlight. Fully two meters long or longer, her tusks were perfect specimens, undamaged by years and years of digging and fighting, sixty-five years or more. She had stopped counting after the last great meeting of families, subfamilies and clans, when her progeny numbered almost two hundred.

The herd’s twenty-three members moved silently through the green velvet carpet of feathery grass, thickened by the first rains, pausing from time to time to rip a bunch of leaves off the top of an acacia or grab a bundle of long grass and shove it into their mouths. The mud caking their skins, foreheads, and long eye lashes was an earthy mix smelling of hay and manure. In the early light, her immediate family group looked like specters moving softly toward the river.

Elephant-getting-fat time was coming with the rains, a time of great joy and contentment, peace among the groups. There would be no more meeting times of the families before she died, that she was sure of. Elephant families, like whales and dolphins, move fluidly through a large three dimensional space. With the rains approaching, groups were dispersing, no longer dependent on the food resources that were tightly clustered at the river’s edge.

As they glided by, moving in the direction of the rising sun, the soft shuffle of their footsteps belied their four-ton weight. They were of her, born of her, a sublime and magical sight. She sighed and grabbed distractedly at a tall bunch of grass, hoping it was still soft enough for her to chew. She’d been losing weight, her last set of molars shaky and painful in her mouth.

The matriarch looked around her, content at what she saw. She was their leader, a storehouse of knowledge about predators, water, food, making decisions constantly to ensure that the herd would survive and thrive in the bush.

She could tell the other females where water had been found twenty years ago during a drought. She was skilled at distinguishing the calls of friends or strangers, elephants known and unknown, elephants more closely or distantly related. She could discern the number and sex of lions from their calls and maintain order in her herd if they approached, calmly drawing her family together before the lions could cull out the sick, the young or the f rail.

She snorted and lowered her huge bulk to the ground. She was tired. Fighting with the matriarchs of competing families had taken all her strength. They asserted their dominance by picking on her babies, kidnapping and killing them, grabbing them and throwing them in the air, to the ground or against the trees. Yes, protecting them had made her strong and her family prosperous, but had worn her down. Her family – daughters, granddaughters, young males – lifted their heads and began slowly drifting toward her, grazing as they came.

A four-year-old calf, born to the matriarch’s daughter, followed his mother across the grassy enclave. He had stopped nursing but his tusks were still nubs. He had plenty of time to eat and grow and sleep before he left the females for the bull herd at age fourteen. His closest relatives – his six-year-old sister, a dozen aunts, and all his cousins – walked nearby, sampling the grasses as they went. It was a quiet afternoon, balmy, peaceful, food plentiful and tasty. They’d even found one of their favorite foods, a marula tree, which they’d stripped clean of fruit.

And then the air erupted. A sound louder than the young male had ever heard ripped through the sky and hurt his eardrums. He looked up and screamed. A helicopter, flying low, was circling above him, above his family.

The matriarch pulled herself to her feet and trumpeted, circling wildly to keep her eye on the copter. When the first shots hit her, the young calf knew. Not by the sound – the gunfire couldn’t be heard above the infernal roar of the helicopter – and not by the sight of blood, which oozed slowly from the deep wounds in his grandmother’s side. No sound, no sight, no smell. But he knew in an instant that the mysterious bird had taken her life.

She stopped trumpeting and the very line of her body altered. She was infinitely older, stricken, shrunken and paralyzed, although she still loomed large above the gaping calf. He watched for several seconds and then, with no notice, she sagged loosely to her knees. She slobbered, losing control of her bladder and bowels.

The calf jumped back to avoid the splashing discharges and to give her room as she struggled gamely back to her feet. As other members of her family fell, her outrage grew. She stood shakily and raised her trunk to trumpet a threat, but was hit by another round of bullets. She trumpeted one last time, but the bullets ripping across her body knocked the last remnant of strength from her legs.

When she fell for the second and last time, it seemed to the calf that she was rising for a moment. As her hind legs collapsed, the front part of her body rose upward in slow motion and her trunk reached skyward once more. Then she collapsed, her belly toward the calf, with a crash that shook the ground back to the tree line. The calf screamed, his shrieks melding with her terrible cries. He pushed at her to rise, but she would never do so again. She breathed with great difficulty, long rattling gasps escaping on the exhale.

He pushed again with his trunk against the great mound of her side, still rising and falling in painful slowness, then stuck his trunk into the pale pink cavern of her throat. The thick blood welled out of her mouth like red velvet. She was dying, very slowly and in great agony, and the other members of the family group circled despite the noise, dust, and smell of the helicopter. They came and touched her gently as her tortured gasps died away.

The roar of the helicopter increased, and the elephants defending her body raised their trunks as if to bat it from the sky. The family bunched along the river bank, trapped by repeated gun fire. Several of the mothers reared and squealed, bunching around the babies. The big gray beasts were helpless. They raised their trunks and heads and rolled their eyes in panic at the helicopter hovering overhead, distributing fear and pain without remorse.

There were more noises, sharp cracking noises, like the sound of a tree trunk made when the bigger males pushed them over. His aunt stopped suddenly and tottered in a tight circle, and then collapsed on the ground, almost killing him. All around him, his family was dying – his brothers, his sisters, his cousins. He cried out in grief and confusion, huddling against his grandmother’s remains. His cousin lay next to her mother, silent.

His mother gathered him to her with her trunk and began running for cover, but the helicopter’s noise and the dust it stirred confused everyone. She threw her trunk over her head and trumpeted, then grabbed him again and pulled him hard toward the edge of the forest, seeking a path of escape. He resisted her, overwhelmed by his grandmother’s death and the milling panic of the herd. A big male, his father, pushed him from the rear and he gave in, following his mother’s disappearing form into the bush. They ran fast, putting as much distance as they could between them and the massacre, sensing that death would find them unless they moved quickly out of its reach.

As night came on, the four-year-old calf stood huddled with his mother and father far to the west, shivering uncontrollably. He felt colder than he’d ever felt in his life, and shifted from foot to foot to keep warm. He finally lay down and after a time started to kick.

His bad dreams would pursue him as body memories and nightmares for the rest of his days, alleviated only when he was able to attack the creatures that had taken his family and his childhood, when he was finally able to take his revenge. In the morning, he stood and wandered off, grazing at the green nibs of grass near the marshland.

2 | The Holiday Begins

Deputy Police Inspector Malinga Mutende could barely contain her laughter.

Do you think she’s awake? Shiko whispered, poking gently at the blanket Malinga had pulled over her head. Do you think it’s time?

In her mind’s eye, Malinga could see his small forehead wrinkled with worry. She could sense Katanga shrug, the way she always did when her brother asked a question she couldn’t answer, her broad face open and unconcerned. I don’t think so, Shiko. But if you promise not to bother me later, I’ll make you breakfast while she finishes sleeping.

Once her children had disappeared down the stairs, Malinga sighed happily and stretched, nearly filling the bed. Tall, lithe, and supple, Malinga’s honest attractiveness drew people to her. Especially the men she didn’t want, she thought. Especially them.

Katanga’s offer meant she could stay in bed for another half hour. Malinga relished a rare sense of contentment and peace. A month ago, she thought she’d never live to see her children again, never mind go on a ten-day camping trip in Kafue National Park with them.

She and the children had packed the night before so they could be on the road early and beat the workday traffic as they threaded through the commercial center of Lusaka, Zambia’s capital city, then drove west through dew-covered farm lands glittering in the rising sun’s light. They’d reach Mukambi Lodge by lunch time.

It was worth every penny, she thought. Time away with the kids after the grueling case in Chobe, on Botswana’s border, when she was barely home for three months. Like the parents of many Zambian working women, her mother and father had stepped in to take care of her kids. Now her caseload was absolutely clear, at least for the next ten days.

As the highest ranking woman in Zambia’s police force, she was exactly where she’d always wanted to be. She loved serving her country, an island of stability in the middle of a continent in breakdown, but it was a challenge to stay close to her kids. Graycoat Security had left yet another message yesterday and she wondered if she should accept their offer. No doubt it would be safer and pay a lot more money.

She threw back the duvet. Not only did she love her job, but she knew that Zambia needed honest civil servants, especially police on the front line. Their role in bringing the country into the twenty-first century was critical. Thankfully, she was not alone.

She made a mental note to phone her partner, Deputy Inspector Wilson Mwiinga, from Mukambi. He was headed for Mulungushi, in the center of Zambia’s commercial farming zone, to meet his Special Forces team, and would soon drop out of cell phone range.

She pushed herself reluctantly out of bed. I’m glad it’s him and not me, she thought. Wilson was Malinga’s principal competitor as well as her professional partner. Although he hadn’t been in the Criminal Investigation Division long, she liked him. It would be tough to break in a new partner if anything happened to him. And happen it might. He was chasing a ruthless band of serial killers, Zambia’s first in thirty years.

It’s Wilson’s problem now, she told herself, ducking into the steamy shower. She smiled impishly. I’m going on safari, a far better way to see the bush than scrapping through dry, rocky, snake-infested ravines on foot in the company of six Special Forces men.

She dried off and stood before the mirror, poking the wild tendrils of her natural into place like a soft crown around her head, inspecting the high cheek bones of her triangular face. She smiled at herself, pleased that the tooth whitening regime was working. She did little to draw attention to her looks, but the crispness of white teeth set off her coffee-colored skin and coal black eyes. None of the makeup or braided hair extensions customary among mature Zambian women. She’d always found them matronly rather than attractive.

Heading down the stairway toward the kitchen, she promised herself that after the call she would stop thinking about Wilson for the next ten days. Not my problem, she thought, rounding the hall corner into the kitchen, where the children were just finishing their cereal. She grinned. Are you ready? she called, and they both hooted in pure delight.

Mommy! Shiko cried. Have your breakfast and let’s go. I want to see the elephants!

Katanga crowed. Me, too, Mommy! Let’s hurry and go!

Take your bags to the car. Bring mine, too. She made herself an egg sandwich, and reminded the guard to feed the dog his kibble. We’ll be back at the end of next week, she told him, thinking that time would fly. They would stay at the main lodge a day or two, and then go to Mukambi’s campsite in the northern Busanga Plains. She smiled in anticipation when the kids came banging out of the door with their bags. Put them here, she said, and I’ll load them in the Cruiser while you go get mine.

She opened the hood to double check her oil and fluid levels. They would be off road today for only a few minutes, but her old vehicle had to be back-country ready. Her cell phone rang and she jerked up, banging her head on the open bonnet. Rubbing the sore spot, she looked at the caller ID and almost didn’t answer. It was Herbert, her ex-husband. She flipped it open irritably.

What do you want?

Good morning to you, too, Malinga. I wanted to tell the kids goodbye. Are they there?

You were supposed to call last night. We’re getting on the road now.

You haven’t changed your mind, then.

No I haven’t. I don’t want to hang out as a family with you.

But Malinga, I love you. We could still make up and keep our family together.

Give it up, will you Herbert? You burned all your bridges when I found that woman in your bed – our bed. Done, done, done, get it? We are divorced and we are staying that way.

But for the sake of the kids . . .

Funny you didn’t think of that earlier, before you brought your eighteenth girlfriend home.

I wish you would stop talking about that, Malinga. Zambian men have their needs. You knew that before we married.

Lots of Zambian men manage to keep it in their pants. You didn’t. You wouldn’t. You lost. No reconsidering, Herbert. I’m going to hang up now. The kids and I need to go.

You’re going to Mukambi, huh?

Yep. Ten days. You can see them when we get back.

Isn’t that a bit pricey for a mere Deputy Inspector of Police?

It is. But my mother sold off some land and . . . I don’t know why I’m explaining this to you. It’s none of your business. Go back to your cars and women and leave me and the kids alone. By the way, you still owe me five months’ child support. Any chance you could have it for me by the time we get back from the park?

Her phone went dead and she glared at it in disbelief. Closing it, she shut her eyes and grasped the luggage rack on the top of the Cruiser, trying to control her anger so the kids wouldn’t see it. Herbert had chewed up too much of her life already.

She opened her eyes and squared her shoulders, reaching up to check the straps on their baggage. She’d invested almost ten years of her life into that man. Enough! He’d hurt her and the kids plenty in the past, but there was nothing he could do to harm them anymore.

Smiling, she turned toward the house just as Shiko and Katanga came out the door. She laughed and waved them into the back seat, putting her hand on the key. Hurry! Hurry! Hurry! Fasten your seat belts! Our holiday is about to start!

3 | The Hunters Hit Their Marks

I’m a businessman first and foremost. The only reason I got into politics was to get more business, Zambia’s Minister of Defense, General George Tembo, said. A chuckle erupted from deep in his chest, sending him into a violent coughing fit, his jowls swinging with the motion of the helicopter.

There is no such thing as a politician anymore, General Tembo, the Chinese Ambassador answered, his voice low and sinuous. He clapped the General’s knee slightly harder than absolutely necessary, leaning forward to deliver his punch line. All politicians are businessmen now, just operating a higher level of profitability. A fastidious man who took care to keep his slim body youthful, he hated the thought that he was collaborating with this pig of a man.

The General started to protest, but realized that he completely agreed. "Profitability! Why you’re right! When I was a private businessman, I took the Army contracts so no one else would get them even though it took them forever to pay. When our President won the election, he needed capable Bembas in his administration, people from his own tribe he could trust.

I called him one night and told him that I already knew the Army’s business inside and out. Now I am Minister of Defense, General Tembo, probably the least military man they’ve ever had. He patted his shelf-like stomach. I intend to make my millions before this president leaves office.

The Chinese Ambassador nodded, half listening, offended that this fat black man was burdening him with confessions of corruption. He turned away, craning to look out the window in search of their prey. Once he helped the General sell the tusks from this kill, he’d be able to pay off the triad and get his granddaughter out of slavery. His worthless son had endangered the entire family with his gambling addiction, and had no money of his own to redeem her.

The Ambassador frowned. The faster he acted, the less damage the bastards could do to her delicate, fragile body — and her mind, he thought grimly. But he had to act