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CHAPTER 1

THE SOUTHERN CROSS marked the spot where Jonathan Rogers laid his dinner jacket and prepared to lay Penny Jones. Stretched out side by side, just their elbows touching so far, they could see the constellation framed directly above them by a small, wavering gap in the wattle trees surrounding Trekkersburg Country Club. And it seemed somehow so much more romantic than the moon.

That was the secret of the thing, after all — making out this was the Big Romance, soon to be filmed in fabulous Technicolor on a wrapround screen. Even if you, for one, knew nobody would be out fooling with a glass slipper come morning. Even if you were doing it only because they said it had never been done before. At least to Miss Jones.

Jonathan found her hand, gently broke its clasp on a paper tissue, and mated his fingers with hers. Then he had his thumb describe tight, tickling circles on the moist little palm.

"Don't!" she whispered.

Instantly he went limp as a scolded spaniel.

"I'm sorry," she said. "It was just I —"

"Never to worry."

"No, honest. I don't want you to be cross."

"I'm not."

"Promise?"

"Take your time, Pen."

She squeezed and sighed happily.

But don't take all night about it, darling — they had put a deadline on this one. The singles play-off would begin at nine sharp and the team were expected back in town at the hotel by midnight. Jonathan lad, they had said when they fixed him up with her, Jonathan lad, we give you until eleven-thirty, okay? They were a good bunch of blokes in the team, but never liked having any of their traditions broken. In fact, it was considered an ill omen if they were not all gathered together again for a final round before leaving. And as the law dictated that no female might venture into a South African bar, it meant Jonathan would have to get it all over and done with outdoors. Pronto.

He set his thumb to work again.

"What's it like?" she asked timidly.

"Hey?"

"Being a tennis champion."

"I'm not really that."

"You will be, though — tomorrow."

"Going to watch again?"

"Of course!"

His turn to give a squeeze, sigh, and say nothing. It worked.

"What's wrong? Don't you want me there?"

"Got to keep my eye on the ball, haven't I?"

She laughed.

"You say you've seen me spectating all last week?"

"Gave me a hard time of it, you did."

"Where was I sitting, then?"

He gave it a pat.

"Jonathan!"

Silence — the kind judges use before calling for a verdict.

"Now you're cross, Pen. Aren't you?"

"No."

"Sure?"

"I'm not."

"Can I kiss you then?"

"If you want to."

He tried another. It was no better than the first half-dozen; her lips were soft enough but they parted wrongly so their teeth clinked together and she had pretty hard teeth.

"Oh, Jonathan ..."

He sat up slowly and looked about while he wondered if he dared risk his tongue.

It was surprising how bright it seemed inside the forest once your eyes had adjusted from the fluorescent blaze of the ballroom. He could see very well, in fact. The wattle trunks rose quite distinctly above the bracken ahead of him. He could even pick out spiders' eyes glinting in tiny clusters on the invisible webs strung between them. And a strip of rag left on a sapling as a marker in some cross-country run. The moon was lurking about somewhere, that much was obvious, and doing its best to curry favor. Only he was impatient for it to edge its way through the trees and do miracles with a pair of bare, if otherwise unremarkable, breasts. He closed his eyelids to see what his imagination could find to project onto them.

That was the moment, as he so often said later, when he should rather have glanced back over his shoulder into the undergrowth. Just a quick glance and everything would have been so different. Horrible, of course, but not in the same way. Then he would shudder and think of Miss Jones, while his friends would try to make of their embarrassment a silent tribute to her memory. Poor old Penny Jones, spinster of the parish. Forevermore.

"What's the matter?"

He kept his eyes shut and his slight smile turned away.

"Nothing."

"You've gone all funny, Jonathan. Why are your eyes closed?"

"I was listening."

"Oh? Is there someone ...?"

"I told you we'd be all right here; there's not a wog for miles. It's something else — can't you hear it?"

"Music?"

"Yes."

"It's coming from the clubhouse."

"That's right. And the tune?"

Trust old Steve. Every team had its funny man and he had the ability to be funnier than most. Right now he was up on the bandstand doing a takeoff of Sinatra, belting out a ballad, and making damn certain it would reach his doubles partner in the woods. No doubt the rest of the crew were falling about the place busting a gut.

"Don't know it. But I never listen to the radio much, just the 'Hit Parade' when my sister's got it on."

Which was as well, perhaps. Steve was giving with the oldie "Have You Met Miss Jones?"

"It's our tune." Jonathan chuckled.

"Really?"

More than that: it was a challenge. On court or off, the lads depended on their captain to boost morale by doing the impossible. There was no going back now with his shirttail between his legs.

Jonathan began peeling the bark from a fallen branch, slyly twisting his body so that she could see nothing but his back. He waited. The singing petered out. He waited some more.

"There is something the matter!" she said.

He shrugged.

"You must tell me. What is it?"

"Hell. I suppose it's because you're different."

"In what way?"

"Just different, that's all. Not like the others."

"Who?"

"The girls at these dances for us — you know what I mean." "No, I don't."

"No, I don't."

"Then you must have a very sheltered life. Haven't you heard why most of them come? It's like being a pop star. You know."

"You mean ...?"

"Yes."

"I see."

Count to ten slowly.

"No, you don't. I'm not talking about that. Not exactly."

"Oh?"

"Pen, I think I love you. Isn't that crazy?"

One, two, three, four, five, six — "Why should it be?"

"Why should it be?"

Seven, eight, nine, ten.

Seven, eight, nine, ten.

"So you don't think it's crazy? Even if we only met tonight?"

"I — I cut your picture out of the paper last year."

"Why?"

"Because you're different, too, Jonathan. I've told everyone that."

"How could you tell?"

"I know."

He flipped the branch away into the bracken.

"Are you going to lie down again, Jonathan?"

"No."

"But you said —"

"You're different, Pen. Different. It makes me scared."

"What does?"

"The way I still want to — kiss you, and that."

"Perhaps I'm like them."

"Don't be sick! I told you the way I felt. Never happened to me before."

"I meant ... I love you, too, you know."

"It's a bloody mess."

Her hand stirred from the leaves at her side.

"I've taken them off, Jonathan."

Hell. Without her spectacles, Penny Jones looked suddenly very unlike a trainee schoolmarm. Now her thick, long lashes came into their own and so did the pert nose with its dusting of cute freckles. Myopia lent the finishing touch by introducing a wide-eyed, trustful innocence.

The total effect was really quite appetizing.

So Jonathan made a slow-motion descent, took the first part of the kiss with a wary pucker, worked gently at her jaw with his fingertips the way he did when giving a worm pill to his dog, and gained entry to her oral cavity.

For one terrifying moment he thought he would have to learn to talk with his hands. And then she abandoned herself to her first adult sensation and took his breath away.

Literally.

Using every muscle in his athlete's torso to subdue a coughing fit, he went straight into the next stage. Once again his superb fitness was of paramount importance as it allowed him to rest himself gently on top of her right half while taking the weight on his offside limbs. All he had to do now was keep her lips occupied while his body heat sneaked across.

She melted rapidly right down the middle and his knee sank into her warmth. He began a restrained rhythmic movement. Her thighs clamped on his leg so hard he involuntarily broke the embrace.

"You're strong," he murmured.

"Riding," she said. "I'm in the pony club."

God, you had to laugh. They both did. Only she apparently found humor in the absurd, while he saw it in the unwittingly apt. His laughter was also the release of tension caused by a final anxiety — if she had been pounding about on a saddle, then there would be no need to deflower and that was always a relief. Especially if you had a date with the lads.

"I love you, Pen," he said.

"Do you really?"

"All of you. Every bit. Can I look?"

Before she could lift her head, he weighed it down with his mouth and sent his left hand down the front of her quasi-Regency dress to twitch the long line of buttons free. His right skillfully disengaged her bra hooks through the thin material at the small of her back.

Then he sat up — startled.

Never, never look a gift horse in the saddle blanket. Underneath, she was incredible. Like cream poured from a jug — a continuity of changing shapes each retaining a perfection of form. It was impossible to note detail.

"You're ..."

Words genuinely failed him.

"Aren't my bosoms too big? That's why I always wear dresses like this one."

"Hey?"

"But this isn't fair, Jonathan."

"What isn't?"

"You looking at me. I can't see you — can I?"

"Do you want me to ...?"

"I mean — without my glasses."

"Pen, I'm going to, though — all right?"

She nodded.

And when he was naked to his black socks she giggled and said, "You're still just a blur. You'll have to find them for me."

"Touch me instead, Pen."

She did so, hesitantly. Then like a sculptor running a hand over a work by Michelangelo; there was awe and an urgent lust to create.

He touched her, too, selectively, and forgot to keep saying how much he loved her.

Not that it mattered any longer.

She was drawing him down into her.

It was sheer instinct.

Instinct.

Like the primeval leftover that alerts modern man to a pair of staring eyes.

Jonathan brought his chin up onto her forehead and looked into the bushes.

The eyes stared back.

There was a face, too. The face of a youth with blond hair who was smiling at him through a low fork in a tree.

"Jonathan?"

Her voice was anxious.

A terrible rage lifted him from her and he rolled to one side. She grabbed at him.

"What's wrong now? Please! We so nearly ..."

He pushed her away. He was shaking uncontrollably. His face expressed one thing: revulsion.

Before she could ask him again, he was gone — blundering through the bracken, sobbing, cursing, heading straight for the youth behind the tree.

Who never moved.

Until he was caught by the shoulders and hurled to the ground. Jonathan was drawing back his foot for a kick to the groin when something made him so dizzy and nauseated that he staggered three paces and fell over a log.

Seconds later, she came hopping, a thorn in her foot, into the glade. Bibbity-bobbing about like anything. Weeping, too.

"Love me," she cried. "I'm not different!"

And she threw herself down beside the dim male form and pulled a limp hand to her breast.

Then she felt the rigor of the flesh.

And blood where manhood should be.

"Jonathan!"

"I'm over here," he gasped, "by the log."

For her last rational thought, Miss Jones resolved never again to take off her spectacles.

Poor old Penny Jones.

MURDER WAS NOT altogether a bad thing, mused Lieutenant Trompie Kramer of the Trekkersburg Murder Squad. It had its advantages. Every murderer thought as much — even if for only a second split like a tree in a brainstorm. And a surprising number of so-called victims did, too, judging by the way they egged the buggers on.

He throttled hard as his long black Chevrolet sloughed suburbia and joined the dual highway to the country club. He licked up a squelch of tomato sauce for an apéritif before beginning on the hamburger.

Then again, take the rest of the mob: ask them how much they would like to live without murder. Not much. Not at all, once they had thought about it. A man with iron in his soul did a lot for the anemic world most people inhabited; everyone from the pale justices, arranging their pens and pencils like knives and forks, to the pinch-cheeked crones with flasks in the galleries, felt better for being there — while the press boys, ever mindful of the public's needs, added it to all the other good things in the breakfast cereal spooned up over their words. And when the genuine article was not available, there were always the hundreds of murders committed for profit by writers. Yes, they kept things going, just like those pinups in Antarctic weather stations. So at the expense of one, two, say a family of persons, a large chunk of society was kept either too busy or too content or too both to cause trouble. Something that did all this could not be all bad. No, sir.

But wanton sex killings involving the young were quite another matter. Kramer sucked his sticky fingers and wondered why.

He found a partial answer in recalling the Widow Fourie's reaction a few minutes earlier to the news of his assignment. He had given it to her straight, with an apology for spoiling their plans. When she withdrew abruptly into herself, he had apologized again. It was then that he noticed she was trying to keep her eyes from the door of the children's bedroom. And that was his answer: this sort of murder was the one kind that could happen to anyone. You and particularly yours were eligible, maybe not this time but next time, no matter how much care you took to avoid sordid situations, no matter how often you slept with a cop. Just to know there was a homicidal pervert at large was to find yourself perversely cursing the fact you had four fine, attractive kids. Attractive! Man, everything sweet turned bitter when there was an animal in the shadows.

An oncoming vehicle glared before dipping its headlights, reminding Kramer of the way expert witnesses always looked down suddenly whenever he said animal. To hell with them and all that crap about mumsy-love and arsehole fix-whatsits; he knew what he was talking about. Human beings you investigated, animals you had to hunt.

And because he was a detective, not a bloody game ranger, this always niggled. So much —

His foot had jumped from accelerator to brake.

Not a hundred yards ahead a Land-Rover had emerged from behind a tarpaulined bulldozer to make placidly for the center island. At its present speed, with the bulldozer already blocking some of the road, the Chevrolet could take only one line into the next bend and that was straight through the Land-Rover.

These were the discernible facts.

Instantly Kramer confirmed his reflex decision by stamping on the pedal and careering into a tight spin just as the other driver glanced round in surprise at such an intrusion. He was that type. The sort who try to make combustion engines leap for dear life. The Land-Rover stalled. Kramer closed his eyes.

Opening them again in a sudden quiet to find himself at rest, facing the way he had come. It was a relief, too, discovering the Chevrolet had followed him round. Everything seemed intact — especially the bulldozer. Kramer uttered a short, unorthodox prayer.

But the Land-Rover driver did not linger to join him in it. All Kramer got was the registration number from the back plate. Crazy bloody farmer.

Now that, thought Kramer, as he continued up through the wattles to the country club, was what got his goat about sex killings: they were hit-and-run jobs. Time and place were merely coincidental — the only link between the participants was a single, spontaneous act of violence. And so, with no history of emotional interaction to provide the x and y of an equation, his customary reliance on flashes of analytical brilliance became totally inappropriate.

No less inappropriate, in fact, than asking the intimates of someone flattened by a rogue rhino if the deceased had ever quarreled with the beast.

Oh, ja, little wonder game rangers were such an unsophisticated bunch.

* * *

Blood in moonlight looks black.

Constable Hendriks had noted this on numerous occasions without ever making up his mind as to whether it contributed greatly to the overall effect. Sometimes it just reminded him of treacle. Other times — possibly because treacle was something you ate — it made him queasy. That was most often when there were flies about to confuse the issue, but thankfully it was long past their bedtime.

As it was his own and presumably that of the kid at his feet.

He yawned.

Then stiffened into an attitude of ostentatious vigilance at the sound of footsteps approaching. They stopped just behind the perimeter of the glade.

"All right, where do you want them?"

"Hey? Who's there?"

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Excerpted from "The Caterpillar Cop"
by .
Copyright © 1972 James McClure.
Excerpted by permission of Soho Press, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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