“Morning, sir.”
Bright peered into the ditch. “Interesting,” he said. “Seems we’re always in the mud these days.”
After quite some discussion, Bright and his men got down in the ditch and began to maneuver the corpse onto a sheet of tarpaulin.
“Hold on!” Bright said suddenly. “Wait. There’s something wrong.”
His assistants stood back, muddy, wet, and breathing heavily from their exertions.
“What’s the matter?” Dawson asked.
“Is this the front of him or the back?” Bright said, staring at the body.
“What are you talking about?” Chikata asked.
“His face is facing upward,” Bright said, “but…”
“He’s on his belly,” Dawson finished.
“Ewurade,” Chikata muttered.
“His head is on backward,” Bright said.
In the morgue, Dr. Biney shook his head in disbelief. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
The boy was lying on his belly, yet he was faceup. He was about sixteen. His wiry physique told of years of hard manual labor.
“There’s a stab wound to the lowest one-third of the right thorax,” Biney said. “This squared-off mark here is from the hilt of the knife, which means it was plunged deep. See these bruises around it? A bit tough to make out, but I call them satellite bruises. What do they tell us? They show the assailant rocked the knife around to inflict maximum damage. On internal examination, I think we’ll find a collapsed lung and possibly a damaged diaphragm and lacerated liver.”
“Is that the probable cause of death,” Dawson asked, “or is it the broken neck?”
“Hard to say. If there was any life left in him after the stab wound, breaking his cervical spine made certain he was finished off. Or vice versa, for that matter. A violent death, for sure.”
“By knife,” Dawson said. “Like Musa.”
“Are you connecting the two murders?”
“Speculating.”
The murdered boy didn’t have Musa’s repulsive putrefaction, but the sight of a broken neck caused Dawson to cringe just as much, or even more. It shifted his thoughts to his brother, Cairo, rendered paraplegic at the age of thirteen. Mama had sent him to the corner kiosk to buy a tin of sardines. As he started across the street, she remembered one other item and called out to Cairo, who turned at her voice. He never saw the oncoming car, which hit him hard. He went up over the roof and down the back, severing his spinal cord. One moment he was the athlete of the family, who could outdribble anyone at soccer, the next he was a paraplegic totally dependent on the care of others.
“You’ll want to look at the victim’s belongings,” Biney said, bringing Dawson abruptly back to the present. Moving to the counter by the sink, he showed Dawson the boy’s clothes: a pair of brown trousers, a greenish shirt with only one button, and athletic shoes worn down beyond the sole.
“And there’s this,” Biney said. “It’s still drying off, but I think it could be very useful to you.”
He showed Dawson a business card, crumpled, moist, and soiled by mud, but still legible.
STREET CHILDREN OF ACCRA REFUGE (SCOAR)
Genevieve Kusi, Director
No. 2 Goodwill Road, Accra New Town
There was a phone number as well, which Dawson entered in his mobile. On the reverse side of the card, written several times in a halting scrawl, crossed out, and rewritten, as though the inscriber had been trying to perfect his signature, was the name Ebenezer.
21
SCOAR was in a slate-colored, two-story building. At the ground-floor reception, Dawson was asked to have a seat while waiting for Mrs. Kusi. Although the area had open windows on both sides, no air was moving through. The afternoon was as thick and warm as soup. Adult supervisors and kids of all ages went back and forth and in and out. The long bulletin board on the opposite wall carried community announcements, notices of job opportunities, and photos of smiling young men and women who had made it to the mainstream as seamstresses, carpenters, or wood carvers. A poster said:
Refuge Room Hours: 0800-1700. NO SMOKING,
DRINKING, FIGHTING, OR STEALING
“Inspector Dawson?”
He turned at the sound of her voice, and his breath caught. She was only an inch shorter than he was, which made her tall for a woman. In her early thirties, she was beautifully dressed in sleek black slacks and a white silk blouse that clung possessively to her succulent breasts. Her skin was flawless molten dark chocolate. She had smooth, impossibly aligned braids and little or no makeup.
He stood up.
“Good morning,” she said, smiling. Brilliant teeth. “I’m Genevieve Kusi.”
They shook hands. Hers was soft and slim, nails short but manicured. Dawson’s eyes begged to drop to her neck and below.
“Welcome to SCOAR,” she said. “Please, come this way.”
They went a short way down the hall to her office. Genevieve offered Dawson water, which he gladly accepted. It was a small but immaculate room. He noticed two small speakers above the door, facing her desk.
She sat opposite him in one of the three chairs in the room. He caught sight of her painted nails on perfect toes and tore his eyes away.
“So, how can I help you, Inspector?” Her voice was rich and warm.
“A young man was found dead in Jamestown this morning,” Dawson said. “There was a business card on his body bearing your name, so I thought you might know him.”
He handed her a photograph of the boy-just the face.
Her hand shot to her mouth in shock. “Oh, my goodness. That’s Ebenezer Sarpong.” She looked up. “You say he’s dead? How? What happened to him?”
“He was murdered some time last night or early this morning.”
“Murdered.” She gasped. “My God.”
“Did he work here?”
“No, he was a street kid-a shoeshine boy. He hung around with a group of boys who called themselves the Brooklyn Gang. Ebenezer came to the center once or twice a week. At first it was just to get some rest in the Refuge Room, but recently he had joined our computer classes.” She shook her head. “This is the kind of nightmare we dread.”
“How so?”
“We provide a refuge for homeless children here at SCOAR during the day, but we are closed in the evening. That means they’re all on their own at night. There are thieves out there and fights over territory, possessions, and girls. We always fear that something like this might happen.”
“I noticed you have all ages of children here, from babies up to late teens. Where are they all from?”
“From the more than sixty thousand homeless street children of Accra. Some of them travel from all parts of Ghana to find work here. There are also kids who make a conscious decision to leave their homes right here in Accra to live on the street-perhaps because of abuse. And then there are the children born on the street. We call them Second Generation.”
“Sixty thousand,” Dawson echoed. “And how many kids do you deal with here?”
“We have an average of about a hundred and twenty. A drop in the sea, I know. The problem is far bigger than we are.”
“Was Ebenezer from Accra?”
“A village in the Western Region, I believe.”
“Is there anyone who might have wanted to kill him? Maybe a turf rival?”
“I don’t personally know of anyone, but we should talk to Patience, my main fieldworker. She knows so many of the street children. I’m not sure if she’s here right now-she may be out in the field.”
Genevieve put her head round the doorway and asked a teenage boy to find out where Patience was.
“Yes, madam,” he said, scampering off.
A few minutes later, a plump, bespectacled woman appeared. Her face was round, open, and accepting. Dawson liked her at once.
“Come in, Patience,” Genevieve said. “I’m glad you’re here. This is Detective Inspector Dawson. There’s some bad news.”