The Shaman of Kupa Piti Read online

  “Yeah, there were strips of hide tied to them. Some of the strips were still intact and tied from one peg to another, but most of them had been broken or chewed through. I dunno what had been at it—dingoes maybe—but it was a mess. I’d fucken hate to be Doris in this situation.” He chuckled. “Actually, I’d hate to be Doris in any situation.”

  Chapter 2

  AUSTRALIAN FEDERAL Police Agent Leon Armstrong set aside the international arrest warrant issued for alleged murderer Pavel Bobrinsky to once again examine the crime of which he was accused. The accompanying report suggested there might be involvement with the Russian mafia, but what Leon saw was ritualistic in nature, not execution style.

  Maybe the Bratva boys were getting bored with making money and decided to branch out to less lucrative lines of entertainment. But then, what would he know? He was on the other end of the world to the nefarious activities in Northwestern Russia—Murmansk Oblast, to be precise.

  The crime-scene photo depicted a frozen landscape containing a shallow grave surrounded by a rudimentary frame made of bare tree branches. Despite having examined the information when it first came in, Leon once again read the description to refresh his memory.

  Although they looked like twigs, the strips that hung from the frame were rawhide, with feathers and bones hanging from them. Their peculiar appearance stemmed from the fact that they were frozen in place and sat at odd and varying angles. While the grave’s accoutrements were unusual and suggested ritualism, it was the state of the body that confirmed it for Leon.

  The decapitated head had been buried in anatomically correct formation with the body, and its orifices had been sewn closed—eyes, nostrils, mouth, and ears, the last pulled forwards and sewn to the cheeks with what was identified as sinew. The thing that struck Leon as odd was that all those openings had been sewn closed but the neck remained open. Logic would suggest the intent was to seal off the senses. But he could think of no reason the neck would be left open.

  Lars Andersson, Leon’s European law enforcement contact for the case, had informed him that Europol had as little idea as the Australian Federal Police as to what would bring Pavel Bobrinsky to Australia. However, his entry into the county had been confirmed by both agencies—if not the man himself, then someone using his bona fides.

  Leon had sent out Pavel Bobrinsky’s information and a copy of the arrest warrant to all Australian state and territory police forces, and now he turned to look through the latest cases of ritualistic-type murders and body dumps matching his criteria that had filtered in.

  He flicked to the next crime-scene photo, which depicted the characteristic bullshit that had been the bulk of what he’d received in answer to his request—the typical pentagrams, sacrificial altars, goats’ heads, chalices, bones, and decorated daggers.

  Given the geographical spread and the commonalities, he couldn’t help but wonder at how unimaginative people were and kept having to remind himself that each religion had prescribed rituals and objects. Little wonder he was seeing the same thing repeatedly—regardless of how unusual the submitting station thought their case was. After all, exactly how many cults and religions actually performed ritualistic sacrifices these days? Not many would be his guess. And of those, most would be attributable to good old Beelzebub—hence the requisite pentagrams and goats’ heads.

  In the last few weeks, he’d learned more about Satanism than he had in his entire life—which wasn’t saying much since religion of any sort had never been of interest to him.

  Only one or two of the cases seemed to veer from the norm, and although they might’ve been strange, they didn’t display the sheer bizarreness of the murder allegedly perpetrated by Pavel Bobrinsky.

  Next photograph. Ugh, another bloodied pentagram with what appeared to be animal legs strewn around it. The following picture showed a gory mess that turned out to be a human body turned almost inside out, legs and arms at odd angles. A smaller picture on the same page showed a clump of what looked like partially digested food and feathers. Trying to understand why he’d been sent this particular case, he found the accompanying description.

  The clump was apparently neither partially digested nor food. It was an almost two-metre-long strip of kangaroo hide with feathers and bones attached. The report stated that beneath the body, which was in an open shallow grave, was a defleshed kangaroo. The bones that were largely undisturbed by the body having been laid upon it suggested they had been arranged as the kangaroo would have been in life.

  Also in the description was that there was some evidence at least one ear had been sewn to the cheek with what appeared to be sinew, but forensics had yet to confirm the assumption.

  Urgency gripped Leon, and seeing the date on the transmission, a surge of annoyance raced through him at his laxness in following up the cases over the last few days. The onslaught of reports involving Satanism had brought with it a complacency he shouldn’t have allowed to creep in.

  According to the transmission, the South Australian Police were the issuing sector. He immediately rang the SAPOL contact and requested all available information be sent through to him.

  Leon returned to his study of the initial report, trying to discern as much information as possible while he waited for the rest of the data to come in from SAPOL. Investigators stated that not much could be gleaned from the scene itself, as it had been compromised by both animals and humans. Early indicators suggested numerous scavengers including foxes, a medium-sized dog, and ravens had interfered with the corpse. Two wedge-tailed eagles were present at the scene when police arrived. Jesus, no wonder the body was such a mess—the wildlife, and possibly a domestic dog, had feasted on it.

  This might be the clue he needed to pick up Pavel Bobrinsky’s trail, which had stopped abruptly after he’d paid for a hire car and withdrawn a large sum of money from an ATM two days running. The account hadn’t been accessed again. And like Pavel himself, the car had disappeared and hadn’t been spotted anywhere since.

  Tom, a colleague, approached Leon’s desk, slowly shuffling through papers. “When are you leaving?” Tom asked.

  Leon looked at his watch. “It’s only 2:00 pm.”

  “Dickhead.” Tom threw the papers onto his desk. “To go to Coober Pedy?”

  “Coober Pedy? Why would I go there?” He scanned what he could see of the faxes.

  “Isn’t that where your grotesque murder is?”

  Leon snatched up the fax pages. “I haven’t had the chance to see this, never mind read it. When did these arrive?” He waved the pages in silent accusation.

  “What?” asked Tom, as if disagreeing that his behaviour was less than professional. “It just came in.”

  “Well it obviously came in long enough ago for you to read through it and mess up the order. I didn’t know it was in Coober Pedy. My only info was South Australia.” He flicked through the papers for page one. “If it’s not your case, then stop interfering with the information.”

  Tom shrugged and wandered away. Leon dismissed the pang of guilt he experienced at snapping at Tom, but frustration was part of the job, and they all had their moments.

  He spread the random pages on the table and ordered them before starting at the beginning.

  By four thirty that afternoon, Leon was convinced the Coober Pedy murder had strong similarities to the Murmansk Oblast murders. He rang the Coober Pedy police, alerted them to the possibility that Pavel Bobrinsky was in their area, and sent through a photo of Bobrinsky and the details of the hire car.

  Folding the papers within the file he’d created, he went to his superintendent’s office and knocked on the door.

  “Enter,” Sybil Larkin called, clearly preoccupied.

  Leon went in, sat in the visitors’ chair, and waited for her to finish typing whatever was so important that she didn’t have time to look up to see who’d come in.

  Finally she leaned back and, with elbows propped on the armrests of her chair, interlaced her fingers across her stomach.
“What can I do for you, Leon?”

  “Pavel Bobrinsky, wanted in the Russian oblast of Murmansk for murder and a person of interest for seven more. Entered Australia on the eleventh of September and disappeared after hiring a car and withdrawing large sums of money from an account that hasn’t been used since. The MO of the crimes was of a ritualistic nature with unique identifiers. A similar type crime was committed in Coober Pedy—”

  “Go,” she said. “How long do you need?”

  Flummoxed at her rapid decision, he floundered. This was a government department; nothing ever happened that quickly. “I… I don’t know. It’s Thursday, so I imagine most places will be closed over the weekend. Probably not worth going when people are possibly away for the weekend and—”

  “Leave Monday, back here Friday.” Her mouth twisted in a sly grin. “I imagine by then you’ll be itching to escape Coober Pedy.” She straightened in her seat and her hands went back to the keyboard. She looked up at him. “Anything else?”

  “No.”

  “Good. See Rhodan about organising flights and accommodation.”

  SERGEI ARRIVED at his claim at sunrise on Friday morning feeling unrested. For the past year he’d been dreaming about a man with a silver patch of hair just above his ear, but recently the dream was occurring more frequently. In the last week or so, he’d had it every night.

  Last night he’d dreamed he’d been holding the man in his arms, and he woke in the middle of an orgasm. The dream hadn’t even been overtly sexual, but it had been erotic. He found it a little disturbing since he hadn’t had a wet dream since puberty, and that one had been highly sexual.

  He got out of his ute and, as he did habitually, gave his offering to the spirits. Bieggolmai, god of the winds, had been on his mind, so he buried the offerings for him beneath his portable generator and drew a basic picture of a man with a shovel in each hand in the dust.

  He filled the genset and air compressor with diesel, started them, and then climbed down the ladder to the drive where he was chipping away at the end wall.

  Calculations showed he was close to the twin shaft that would finally allow flow-through ventilation. He donned his goggles and dust mask and took to the wall at the end of the drive with his pneumatic jack pick.

  After about an hour and a half, he thought he saw a shiny fleck. Lowering the tool, he examined the wall where he’d been hammering, but the string lighting wasn’t bright enough to pick up any potch, the grey, glassy stone that sometimes led into an opal seam.

  Once he’d retrieved his headlamp, he examined the dirt, and his heart leapt with that familiar excitement as when he’d previously hit opal. He grabbed his handheld pick and swung it at the wall, aiming far below the potch. Working his way in towards the target, he was almost done when the head came off the pick. Since he had to go to the surface for a wedge, he shovelled the mullock into the wheelbarrow and took it to the automatic bucket tipper so it could be dumped above ground.

  Up on the surface, he searched his ute for a wedge. Although he’d had a few left when he gave one to Miro, he couldn’t find them. He looked over to his neighbour’s claim and saw Miro’s 4WD ute reversed up to the shaft.

  It was quicker and easier to borrow a wedge than drive into town—even if it was Miro. He walked over to the claim and called down the shaft. Miro’s genset was so close to the entrance, Sergei couldn’t hear anything over the motor.

  He climbed over the shaft collar and was part way down the ladder when something jabbed into his fingers. Feeling around, he touched a hard object that swung with the disturbance. Catching it, he pulled it through the rungs into the light so he could see what it was.

  Little bones, maybe from a bird, held together with a waxy thread and tied to a dried strip of hide that was stiff and crusty. He pushed the strip back through and, reaching around to the back of the ladder, grabbed it and pulled the entire length out from behind the metal rungs into the light.

  The object was at least one and a half metres long, with the bone parcel attached to the bottom and small groups of feathers tied thirty to forty centimetres apart. Halfway along, an unidentifiable chunk of flesh was hooked on to the strip. A chill swept through him. Miro’s supernatural beliefs extended no further than the Christian God, and to Sergei’s knowledge, Christians no longer used objects of the natural world in their practices.

  He dropped the strip and hurried down the ladder. At the bottom of the shaft, the drone of the genset wasn’t as loud, but there was no sound coming from further in either. Subdued light from around a bend in the drive to the left filtered into the main drive. Sergei cautiously started towards it, but changing his mind, he sought out a weapon. He found a broken pick handle and hefted it in his hand a few times to get a firm grip before continuing towards the light.

  “Miro?”

  No answer.

  He looked down the drive to the right, but the darkness there was complete. He stepped closer to the left-hand drive, as far from the opening of the dark drive as he could, and followed the wall.

  The first of the string lights came into view, and he leaned his head to the right in an attempt to see further around the bend. Just as he noticed something looped over the line that connected the lights, the smell of death filled his nostrils—blood and faeces.

  Sergei inched around the bend on the balls of his feet, a clumsy undertaking in steel-cap boots. Snatching glances between the darkened drive and the drive before him, he tried to keep an eye on both, the broken pick handle raised and ready for use. A step closer and he recognised the red-pink colour of intestines, loosely looped over the lighting string like sausages hanging in a butcher shop.

  Around the final bend, Sergei found Miro, his body stretched out into a bizarrely shaped star. His widespread arms and legs had been sliced open down the front, bones removed, muscle and flesh left splayed flat. From a short distance away, Sergei leaned forwards and peered into the body cavity.

  Without the intestines to obscure their placement, the exposed organs appeared untouched.

  “Meandash River,” whispered Sergei.

  Worlds were colliding, and for long moments he was convinced he was looking at the mythical river of blood with its stones of liver and waves of lungs. For a moment, Sergei lost himself to the knowledge that lines were being crossed. Animal and man, the living and the dead—all were being merged.

  Dark blotches in the dust and up the wall were the only hint of the enormous bloodshed that must have taken place. For what had occurred, the place looked oddly normal, apart from the state of the body. Dust and earth had soaked up body fluids like a thirsty sponge.

  Noticing a few of the fingers missing off one of the hands, Sergei wondered vaguely if that was the flesh that had been hanging from the ladder.

  He briefly considered checking the other drive, but without string lights, if the murderer or murderers were hiding down there, he could well be on top of them before he saw them.

  As cautiously as he had approached, he left. The sensation of a hot breath wafted from the darkened shaft as he passed it.

  Ventilation, surely.

  His skin prickled, and his mind flooded with noaidi intuition and knowledge—shamanic skills from his Sámi roots that he’d repressed for years were scratching to get out.

  Not wanting to let go of his weapon, he tucked the pick handle into the back of his jeans while he climbed the ladder, careful to avoid the strip of hide with its trinkets of horror.

  After scanning the area on both sides of Miro’s four-wheel drive and beneath it to ensure he wasn’t about to be ambushed, he climbed over the shaft collar and headed towards his ute.

  He killed the motor on the genset at his site. If he’d had a mobile phone in his vehicle for emergencies, Sergei could’ve rung Doris. Not that this qualified as an emergency any longer. Miro was way past any assistance an emergency service could offer. Sergei threw the pick handle on the seat, climbed into the ute, and headed into town.

  The air-condi
tioning in the police station must have been on high—either that or Sergei was suffering from shock induced by walking into either the mine of horrors or the house of Doris.

  “I’m here to report a murder,” Sergei said.

  The cop at reception looked no more than a teenager. The fine fluff on his upper lip appeared soft, like down. Sergei rubbed his face, and his fingers touched the goggles still sitting atop his head. To avoid having to hold them, he left them where they sat.

  “Sarge,” the young Doris called. “Someone here to report a murder.”

  He sounded like a kid telling his parent there was someone at the door, probably because the job at hand was well beyond his capabilities.

  A big bruiser of a guy with a square jaw and thick moustache appeared from one of the rooms at the back, his air of authority worn like a body shield.

  “What’s your name, son?” asked the sergeant.

  No one had called Sergei “son” since he’d last seen his dad some fourteen years ago. He side-eyed the cop. “Sergei Menshikov.”

  The sergeant nudged the young cop’s elbow and pointed at a pad and pen. “You might need to spell that for young Rodney here.”

  Sergei was glad his name didn’t have to be recorded in the Cyrillic alphabet. Rodney appeared to have enough difficulty with his native English. The breath the sergeant held as he watched the proceedings suggested he might’ve regretted having assigned the monumental task to the young man. He looked as agonised as Sergei felt.

  “Do you know the victim?” asked the sergeant.

  “Miro.”

  “Miro who?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Where is the victim?”

  “In his claim, at the end of the left-hand drive.”

  The sergeant looked over Rodney’s shoulder, waiting for him to finish recording the information before asking further questions.

  Since the process was going to be a protracted one, Sergei glanced at the two plastic chairs sitting against the wall in the waiting area. He wandered over and sat down. When he looked back at Doris, they were both staring at him as if he’d just committed an armed robbery.