“So you decided to demand an appointment and ask for it?”

“The shortest distance between two points is always a straight line. I didn’t think he would object, unless he were involved somehow.”

“Did you have any kind of plan coming in here or did you just wake up this morning and decide it would be a ripper good idea to piss off one of the most dangerous blokes in Jo’burg?”

“I’m out of options. I had to do something drastic.”

“You still haven’t told me why you’re really doing this.”

“The 293 innocent people slaughtered in their own homes isn’t enough of a reason?”

“What happened was an atrocity, but people don’t lose their minds over strangers. This is all too personal for you, love. Personal enough to make an intelligent woman with a formerly promising career willing to go to any lengths to find the truth.”

“I’m not crazy.”

“Maybe not, but you are suicidal.”

She glared back at him. “You don’t know anything about me. I’m not suicidal.”

He shrugged. “Your psychiatric report says that you are. Tried to off yourself after the massacre with sleeping pills and bourbon. So what? Didn’t take the first time, so you thought you’d get Angel to do the deed for you?”

“I came here for information.”

“Everyone’s heard the story of the last group of coppers who came around poking their noses into Angel’s business.”

“Yeah, he burned them alive and left the charred bodies on the steps of the police station.”

“But you thought he would be kinder to you?”

“I’m not here for him. I just want to know about the massacre.”

“Criminals don’t usually take too well to cops asking them to rat out other criminals. It’s not good business. I think that, deep down, you were hoping that you’d die today. You figured he’d save you the trouble.”

She didn’t respond. She just turned away from him and hoped that he was wrong.

“So who was it? Who did you lose?”

She ground down on her teeth so hard that she could feel her face growing red, but she finally replied, “My son. Or at least he would have been. My father was a bureaucrat during the days of apartheid. He lost his job when the new laws went into place. He lost everything eventually, after sending me to university. I didn’t know things were that bad, and he’s too stubborn and proud to let me help him. He was living in that camp.”

“But you said you lost a son, not your father?”

“Do you want to hear the damn story or not?” she said.

“You do understand that I could kill you at any moment, right?”

“I’m suicidal, remember? Plus, if you were going to kill me, you’d have done it by now.”

“That’s not up to me.”

“Who’s on the phone?” Isabel asked.

“Finish your story.”

“My father stayed with me in the city that day because he had a doctor’s appointment that I forced him to go to. When I took him home, we found …”