Sand diggers skull, p.1
Sand Digger's Skull, page 1
The Sand
Digger’s Skull
East Timor Crime Series No2
Chris McGillion
Kenmore, WA
Coffeetown Press books published by Epicenter Press
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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 any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, events and village names are creations of the author’s imagination.
The Sand Digger’s Skull
Copyright © 2023 by Chris McGillion
ISBN: 9781684920532 (trade paper)
ISBN: 9781684920549 (ebook)
LOC: 2022936037
Printed in the United States of America
Dedication
For Raji
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Raymond Harding and Bill Blaikie—partners in crime (writing)—long-suffering witnesses to my schemes Milton Cockburn, Alan Mitchell, and Ross Gittins, my Timorese accomplices Francedez Suni and Silvano Rodriguez, and the folks at the Esplanada—the best little hideout in Dili.
1
A little while longer and that would have to do it. The sun was now above the hilltops to the city’s east and leaching color from the sky. Heat was reflecting off the sand like light from a mirror. It had been a long, hard night. His arms and back ached and could not be pushed much further if he wanted to come back and work again this evening.
Beto Correira was working a stretch of the Comoro River, south of the old bridge that carried traffic from the sleepy airport district of Timor-Leste’s capital, Dili, to the congested commercial and administrative sector in the city. During the rainy season, the monsoons drench the Comoro catchment in the mountainous regions to the south; the run-off becomes a huge wall of water that roars through the city and can sweep people and vehicles off the bridge along with it. But in summer, the Comoro presents a much thinner, more placid flow snaking through eighty yards of dry sand and river pebbles on either side of the main channel. This is what brought sand diggers like Beto to work each night. In the cool dark hours, they shovelled sand through make-shift wire filters for use in the many construction and re-construction sites around a city emerging from the turbulent birth of the nation a decade before. Each morning, trucks would drive down to gather the piles of sand and tally what each digger was owed.
A few more shovelfuls and Beto Correira would be done. He wiped the sweat from his forehead, replaced the rag in his trouser pocket and sliced the shovel back through the sand.
That’s when he found it.
At first Beto thought it was a piece of driftwood washed down from the mountains. When he noticed the eye sockets and the teeth on the upper jaw line, he knew it was a skull. He dared not touch it for fear of exciting the spirit of the dead person whose skull it had once been or inviting another evil upon himself. He called over to a fellow sand digger who was also packing up for the day and the two of them stood over the skull without speaking. Eventually Beto muttered that they should call the police and he looked down at the cell phone in the other’s hand. The man nodded and made the call.
Investigator Vincintino Cordero of Timor-Leste’s elite Scientific Police for Criminal Investigation unit was at home, tying the laces on his new black leather shoes, when his cell phone rang. He finished a knot, looked at the result with satisfaction, and only then answered. It was a dispatcher from police headquarters.
“Bondia maun, diak ka lae?” the voice said, greeting Cordero with a polite inquiry into how he was feeling this morning.
Everyone in law enforcement knew everyone else in a small city like Dili and Cordero recognized the voice as Officer Arao Beixo of the regular Timorese national police force. “I was doing fine until you rang, Arao,” he replied. “Do you know what time it is?”
“Well, that’s the problem, you see,” Arao said and laughed. “It’s peak hour, there’s been a big traffic accident in Vera Cruz and there’s not one available police officer to deal with this in the entire city. Not one. That’s why I—I mean we—called you.”
“Deal with what?” Cordero asked with little interest.
“Down on the Comoro. East side of the channel roughly in line with the back fence of the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries compound. A sand digger rang in to report a skull he found this morning.” Arao was rushing to finish before Cordero became angry with him for calling. “Well, the man who called didn’t find it; another sand digger did a”—there was a pause and Cordero could hear the ruffling of paper—“a Belo Correira. No, wait a minute. Beto Correira. Yeah that’s it. Beto. That’s who found the skull. There’s no one else we can send.”
“What about Lucas Rama or Manuel?” Cordero said, trying to hide annoyance. The two men shared his office in the special police unit. “Why am I the one who’s always asked?”
“Lucas isn’t answering his cell and I’m told Manuel is away sick,” Arao said. “Anyway someone needs to get down there and secure the scene until we can free up officers to attend. It shouldn’t take too long.” And with that Arao hung up rather than have to argue the case any further.
Cordero swore to himself and gazed through the window at the purple bougainvillea that had grown into a kind of shrubbery shield for his small house against the dust and grim of the street outside. His car—an old SUV supplied by the office but only kept serviceable with the help of several innovative mechanics who owed him favours—was parked in the concreted front yard between his porch and the fence. He checked his wallet quickly for money, checked it again more thoroughly in the forlorn hope of finding more, and put it, his cell, and the police badge he rarely had occasion to show in his trouser pocket. He felt in his jacket for a notebook and pen and picked up his car key from his bedside table. He let out a deep breath of frustration, ran a hand through his hair, and walked to the car. He lived alone but never bothered to lock the door because burglary was rare in Dili and especially for houses owned by police.
Cordero worked his way through the tangle of cars, motorcycles, brightly painted microlet buses and assorted trucks coughing diesel fumes along the main artery through the city—Avenida Nicolau Lobato. The Avenida, like the airport, was named in honour of Timor-Leste’s first prime minister who held office for less than two weeks before Indonesia invaded in December 1975. After that, Lobato took the title of acting president for three years while he led a guerrilla campaign against the invaders in the countryside. Eventually, Indonesian forces ambushed and killed him. Lobato was only thirty-two years old when he died. On most estimates, Indonesia was responsible for the deaths of one hundred thousand Timorese—ten percent of the entire population—through warfare, repression, and policies that resulted in mass starvation. Cordero was reminded of that recent history as he took this untypical route to work. He compared it to his own years growing up in a relatively comfortable exile in Australia. As always, he soon ceased to feel angry about the jobs he was sent to do in a country that was now independent and relatively peaceful.
Consequently he was in a brighter mood when he pulled the SUV up on the bank of the Comoro. Below him was a small group of curious onlookers—women going to or returning from the market, clumps of children, an office worker unconcerned about the time—who stood around two men leaning on shovels he assumed were sand diggers. A man who might have been the driver sent to collect the sand was arguing with one of the diggers and pointing to a truck parked nearby.
“Para lao hela. Sees ba sorin,” Cordero yelled from the river bank as he exited the car, ordering the group to stop walking around the area where he took the skull to be and move aside. “Ajente polisia. Ita halo laran-susar fatin nee,” he said, adding that they were disturbing what was a police scene.
He jumped down onto the riverbed. For a man of forty years of age, he was exceptionally fit and agile, but he was also fussy and he cursed as dust took the shine off his new shoes. He waved the group to move further back as he approached and asked for Beto Correira to come forward. The sand digger edged toward Cordero who was bending down to get a closer look at the skull. “You have nothing to worry about,” Cordero assured Beto, gesturing him to stop coming any further forward. “You’ve done nothing wrong. I am Investigator Cordero. I just need to know how you came to find this skull, when, and whether you moved or touched it in any way.”
Beto looked this way and that before explaining that he didn’t own a watch but said he had smoked four cigarettes since finding the skull. It was a common way for Timorese who’d moved to Dili from the rural districts to calculate time and Cordero worked it back to approximately 7am. Beto said he was completing his last pile of filtered sand when he felt the thing on the end of his shovel. He pointed to the spot. He had moved the skull about two feet from where it lay to examine it and determine what it was. When he saw it was a human skull he dropped it immediately from his shovel and hadn’t touched it since. Neither had anyone else, Beto added, but Cordero could see footprints in the sand telling him the onlookers had completel
“All right, maun,” Cordero said, addressing Beto by the customary title of ‘brother’. “I will have to take your details, then you can go home.” He rose to address the others. “Unless you know about this skull and why it is here, I want everyone to leave in a straight line from here to the river bank,” he said and gestured with his arm so there’d be no confusion.
The people looked at each other and started to peel away, first the women, then the office worker, and finally the children. Cordero took down Beto Correira’s details. “What about me?” asked the man Cordero took to be the truck driver. “I’m supposed to drive further up the riverbed and collect all the sand. I can’t drive my truck in a straight line to the bank.”
“Then you’ll have to leave it where it is,” Cordero answered, disregarding the man’s predicament and pocketing his notebook before squatting to examine the skull more closely.
“Timor is a land of skulls,” the man began to protest. “What difference does one more make?”
“I told you what to do,” Cordero said with more emphasis but not taking his eyes off the skull. “Now do it or I will arrest you for obstructing a police investigation!”
The truck driver scratched his chin and considered his options. “What if I reverse the truck back the way I came?” he pleaded.
Cordero thought for a moment. “Okay. I can live with that,” he said not looking up. “But make sure you stay in precisely the same tracks you made coming down.”
The man breathed a sigh of relief. “Obrigadu maun,” he said thanking Cordero and headed for his truck before the policeman could change his mind.
Cordero gently turned the skull this way and that with his pen. It seemed weathered by age or, perhaps, exposure to the river: light brown in color with a few darker patches on the crown. One-third of its left side plus the lower jaw bone were missing. There were molars on the upper jaw and one canine tooth on either side of its center. Cordero had no way to determine a cause of death, or the age or sex of the deceased. He imagined that it might have been a person buried in a household plot—it was common in Timor to bury the dead among the living—and that the heavy rains of the last monsoon had washed the grave into the river. But if that was the case there should be more skeletal remains and perhaps remnants of a coffin and a grave marker.
Cordero stood and examined the riverbed around him. Looking closely from different angles working the sunlight over the drifts, he thought he could discern a stretch of darker, coarser sand protruding from a slight bend in the river where heavier materials washed down from the mountains would have collected. That gave him an idea and he took his cell from his pocket and rang the Police Training Centre to leave a message for its commander, his friend Julio Freitas. He would be there about 9am. He hoped Freitas would release six female cadets from their classes to undertake a practical policing exercise he was devising.
He checked his watch—8.15am—and wondered how long it would be before regular police officers came to relieve him and he could finally get coffee. He noticed two young boys, the arms of one around the shoulders of the other, staring at him on the riverbank. He uttered a roar and made to lunge toward them and they tore off to the roadway, shrieking excitedly. Cordero smiled, brushed himself down, and rang Dr. Howard Brooks.
2
Officer Estefana dos Carvalho of the Timor-Leste National Police was caught in the traffic chaos around Vera Cruz. She was not yet used to the congestion of a big city like Dili: in her far less populated native Suai, on the country’s south coast, there were times she could drive through town and count on one hand the number of other vehicles she passed. At least it had been like that before the big development projects associated with the oil and gas fields in the sea further south had brought a lot more activity to Suai. But that was nothing like what she was experiencing this morning. Car and motorcycle horns blared out their owners’ frustration in a cacophony. Drivers hung out of their trucks swearing at nothing in particular. Children walking to school stopped and gawked at the mayhem that was unfolding.
Traffic control, Estefana was thinking to herself as she inched her unmarked police car along the Avenida Marginal on Dili’s seafront, was one of the more mundane jobs she had been given in Suai. But she now had the official title of Police Officer (INTERPOL Liaison) and she smiled, thinking of her changed good fortunes as she made what way she could from the room she rented in the crowded Dili suburb of Lecidere west toward the elegant white parliament building, and from there to the office where she worked. She also smiled thinking of her fiancé, Josinto Centavo Veddo, who had moved to Dili as an apprentice carpenter with the local coffin maker. Now they were at least living in the same town, if not the same house.
Up ahead she saw a police officer she knew, Julio Galego, and she popped her head out of the driver’s side window of her car to shout hello in as loud a voice as she could manage.
“Bondia, maun,” Estefana called out. “What’s going on?”
“Hey mana,” Julio replied, smiling when he recognised Estefana and giving her the friendly title of ‘sister’. “A truck lost its front wheel on the corner with Belamino Lopo,” he said, indicating one of the busiest intersections in this part of Dili as he walked toward Estefana’s car and lent into the driver’s window. “The thing came clean off. The truck was carrying a load of concrete pipes. Spilled all over the road. They’ll need a crane to pick them up again.” He laughed, enjoying his small part in bringing order into chaos. “But how’re they going to get that through this mess? There’s motorcycles and cars that’ve run into pipes everywhere.” He looked up the street then back to Estefana, grinning “Can you believe that: a truck losing its wheel! They’re up there now, the driver, a whole bunch of cops, a mechanic, angry truckers—all arguing about what happened and why. I heard the nuts weren’t screwed on. And this is supposed to be the new Timor-Leste.” They both stared again at the traffic up ahead. “Anyway, where are you going?” Julio asked.
“To work, of course. At the INTERPOL office,” Estefana answered with more than a hint of pride in her voice. “Started a few weeks ago.”
“I heard you impressed a big shot Timorese cop and an even bigger shot FBI agent on a child abduction case around Suai. That what got you to Dili?”
Estefana smiled. “Sort of,” she said. “The American who works for INTERPOL asked for me as her interpreter.” She stared straight ahead, thinking of the way she had been overlooked for serious police work as a twenty-two-year-old female officer in Suai. “But I help with her investigations too,” she added. “And I’m going to be very late.”
“Well, we can’t have that when you’re only a few weeks in the job,” Julio said. “Drive off to the sidewalk there and up that driveway near the pole. Leads to a kind of alley that’ll take you onto Rua de Lecidere. Your car’s small enough to make it. Just follow the tyre tracks. I’ll wave you through.” And with that Julio was gesturing her on, but holding back the cars and motorcycles behind her.
“Thanks, maun,” Estefana called back as she drove off the Avenida. After scattering chickens in the yard and making a few sharp turns around trees, sheds, and vegetable gardens she emerged on Rua de Lecidere as Julio had said. The traffic there was also at a standstill as a consequence of the concrete pipe catastrophe but not in the direction she was heading, and she was able to pull into the parking area of the building that housed the INTERPOL office in less than five minutes.
Estefana left her car in a space next to one marked “Diretor” and headed into the building and down a long, cool corridor to several offices with “INTERPOL” stamped on their doors. She knocked timidly on the first door, waited but heard no reply and entered. The room was empty, but off to its left was another where a female officer was tapping on a computer keyboard. Her name was Furaha Oodanta, and she was from Africa, but no-one had ever said exactly where. Whatever time Estefana had arrived at work in the past three weeks, Officer Oodanta was sitting at her desk using only two fingers on her computer keyboard. Each evening when Estefana left the office, Officer Oodanta would remain, tapping away. Estefana wondered if she ever left but the young woman said very little, engaged with her colleagues even less, and thus Estefana did not ask questions. It remained a mystery to Estefana who Officer Oodanta really was and what she was doing in Timor-Leste.
