by Dale Mayer
When the phone rang beside her, she just glared at it.
“See? That’s one of the things here,” Rodney said helpfully from beside her. “When the phone on your desk rings, it means somebody is trying to call you.”
She shot him a look, picked it up, and said, “Detective Morgan, what can I do for you?”
It was Audrey, the new clerk out front. “Somebody here to see you.”
“Who is that somebody?” Kate drawled. “Santa Claus?” As Audrey went off on a gale of laughter, Kate pinched the bridge of her nose.
“Oh, I do love your sense of humor,” Audrey said, “but, no, he just came in off the street. He wants to talk to a detective.”
“If he came in off the street,” Kate said carefully, “he’s not looking to talk to me.”
“The sergeant said that anybody new coming off the street was supposed to talk to you first.”
Kate took a long slow breath. Of course he did. “Fine,” she said. “I’ll be there in a minute.” She put the phone down very quietly. Even then, the members of her team all around her were smirking. No way they weren’t, and honestly—if she weren’t the low man on the job—Kate would be too. Still, she would put in her time and do the job. A job she was damn glad to have finally gotten.
After making whoever it was out there wait for ten minutes, she stood, grabbed a pad of paper and a pen, and stepped out of the room. She heard the bullpen conversation as she left.
“She’s in a great mood, isn’t she?”
“Clearly she didn’t get laid last night,” Lilliana said in a delighted whisper that made all the guys perk up and smile.
As Kate walked past the Colby’s office, he called out to her, “Kate, what’s up?”
She looked at him and said, “Just going to talk to somebody out front, a walk-in with info.”
“Good,” he said. “I’m glad you’re settling in.”
She nodded and kept walking. She was patient. That the team hadn’t clicked yet just meant it would take a little longer. Chet had been well loved—the wound only scabbed over, not fully healed. She had put her time in on the streets and had worked damn hard to make detective. Now she was here; she was one of them. She should be happy that she was doing the drudgery because it wouldn’t last. Besides, even being new was better than still trying to make the grade.
As she stepped toward the receptionist area, she saw one man sitting on a bench. Could already tell he was tall and fit, his dark hair immaculately groomed. He was dressed in a silvery-gray suit, and he wore it like it had been tailored directly on him. Rich guy.
Instinctively she didn’t like him. Something was slightly familiar about him, but she couldn’t place it. Something about money, something about the posh style, it grated on her. But then she was from the wrong side of the tracks. Born there, she had never found a way across to the other side. This guy looked like he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. As she approached, he stood and reached out a hand.
“Thank you for seeing me.”
She noted the faint French accent. Probably a Quebec transplant. Not a Vancouver native, like Kate was. She shook his hand, wearing the same professional air that had gotten her where she was, and said, “Let’s step into this room, where we can talk.” She then led him into an empty interview room nearby.
As he sat down on the far side of the table, she closed the door, dropped into her seat, pen in hand, facing her notepad, and asked, “What can I do for you?”
He just sat here, without saying a word.
She looked up at him, folded her hands in front of her, resting them on the pad of paper, and waited. She found that waiting often made even the guiltiest of suspects nervous. But not only wasn’t he nervous, it was almost like the waiting helped him to settle. She frowned.
“You are the one who came here,” she said gently, struggling for patience, when what she really wanted to do was get up and walk out. Files were stacked up on her desk; the backlog of work was never-ending, and she always had her private work that she kept secret, though she knew it really wasn’t. Only she was so damned busy that she hadn’t had a chance to look into that particular cold case. Keeping Timmy’s file on her desk was a constant reminder to not forget her brother. As if that would ever happen.
The man across from her finally spoke. “I’m probably just wasting your time.”
“Good to know,” she said. “In that case, we are done here because, sadly, I have no time to waste.” With the pad and pen in hand, she stood, opened the door, and motioned for him to leave. But he hadn’t moved. She looked at him and asked, “So which is it? Are you wasting my time or not?”
He leaned forward and said, “I guess I need to tell you, so you can figure it out.”
She cocked her head to the side, disappointed that she couldn’t return to her desk; still, he intrigued her. He wasn’t here because he wanted to be here, and she didn’t think much could force this man to do anything. Shutting the door with a little more force than necessary, she walked back over and sat down.
Now she waited again.
He grinned at her, a lightning-fast sexy smile that immediately had her back up. “Are you always this difficult to talk to?”
Her left eyebrow shot up. “How do you know I’m difficult to talk to?”
“Because you’re sitting there, trying really hard to not boot my ass off this chair and out of the station,” he said. “And I really appreciate that you’ve given me some time to work through this in my mind.”
She felt like a heel, but, from the look in his eyes, she knew he’d done it deliberately. She tossed down her pen, slouched in her chair, crossed her arms over her chest, and said, “Anytime.”
“I’m having nightmares.”
“We’re not shrinks. You know that, right?” she said in a droll voice.
“Great,” he said. “I’m trying to pour out my soul here, and you’re not helping any.”
“That’s because I’m not a shrink.”
“Ha, ha, ha,” he said. “I know perfectly well where I am. I’m at the police station, and I need to get something off my chest.”
Kate grabbed her pen, leaned forward, her gaze intent, as she studied him. “What did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything.”
She studied him for a moment, slid the pen back down again, and slouched, resumed her arms-across-her-chest position. This time she crossed her legs too. “So why are we here?”
He gave a startled laugh. “You know what? You’d make a great doctor.”
She stared at him in confusion.
“Your bedside manner is perfect.”
She just upped the voltage of her glare.
“Look. I don’t want to be here either,” he said in frustration. “I’ve come to this police station three times and walked away each time, before I ever made it inside.”
“Congratulations, you made it inside,” she said. “Are we done now?”
He stared at her and then laughed. “Of all the things I ever thought I would come up against, not even having a chance to talk wasn’t one of them.”
“You’ve had lots of chances to talk,” she said, “but you’re not talking.”
“Same nightmares over and over again over the years, but now really concentrated in the last week,” he snapped. He clasped his hands together in front of him, a small yellow ball squeezed in between.
She studied the child’s toy, wondering why it was firing in her memory. There were thousands all around the city just like it. Forcing her gaze back to stranger, she studied his stiff back and rigid jaw. “Not helpful,” she said, and she managed to keep her tone completely flat.
He shook his head. “Same little boy every night.”
Her gaze narrowed. “Do you like little boys?”
He fisted his hands on the table, leaned forward, and said, “The same little boy being walked down Hastings Street under the shadow of the lights, a little boy not more than five, maybe six, years old, holding the han
d of some old guy, who scares the crap out of me.”
“Interesting,” she murmured. She studied him closely for any signs of deception, but nothing was really there, as far as she could tell. He was telling the truth, as he believed it to be, but, so far, he hadn’t said anything definitive yet. “Can you identify the little boy?”
“Only that he’s got some lollipop in his free hand, and he’s wearing a little Burberry coat,” he said. “I can’t tell what color it is.”
“Why is that? You said there were lampposts.”
“He is walking under the lampposts, yes, but everything is in shades of grays.”
“Your nightmares are in gray?”
“This one is, yes.”
“So then what happens?” she asked, intrigued in spite of herself. She didn’t know what it had to do with the police, but she could imagine that a dream, nightmare, as he’d said, that would happen over and over again would really piss off a guy like this. That fascinated her as much as anything.
“I just hear this voice that calls out, ‘Timothy.’”
“Timothy?” she said, questioning, her body stiffening at the name.
He nodded.
“Timothy?” she snapped, her feet flat on the floor. “Is this some sick joke?”
He looked at her in surprise. “No,” he said. “What are you talking about?”
She stared at him and then gave a hard headshake. No, he couldn’t know. Besides, her Timmy had gone missing during the day, not the evening, and had happened a long time ago. “Look. I don’t know what your nightmare is all about,” she said, “or why you think you need to tell me about it. I’m a homicide detective, in case you didn’t know.” She stopped, took a deep breath. “But if you don’t have anything else, then this interview is over.”
“This is an interview?” he asked curiously.
“Look, sir,” she snapped. “Do you have anything else you feel like you need to tell me?”
“Yes,” he said, “I just know that—because of the styles of clothing, the shades of gray—this happened a long time ago.”
“Know?”
He stared at her.
Yet he seemed more confused than mad. “And?”
Her fist clenched on her lap, she stared at the half-moons that her fingernails had embedded into the palm of her hand in order to stop the scream from reaching up her throat. She wanted nothing more than to grab this guy by the throat and to shake the truth from him.
“The trouble is, it goes from that image to another image within a little room,” he said, “with toys and a toddler’s bed, but no child is there, just a blanket. But it’s got some plastic wrapping around it that’s a different color, not so dark. Unfortunately then it goes to an absolutely beautiful little girl in a fancy little bed.” His tone was heavy. “The little girl in the bed is crying her eyes out. She’s in a basement. It looks like a basement or maybe a cellar. I don’t know,” he said. “She’s got just a blanket, and blood’s on the bed. She is crying, as if her heart is breaking.” And then he fell silent.
She sat back and looked at him. “And it’s the same nightmare over and over again?”
“The same one for a week now,” he said bitterly. “Until last night.”
“What about last night?” she asked, but inside she knew. Dear God, inside she knew.
“Last night, another child was added to the sequence,” he said. “A little boy, a little bit older, like six, maybe seven. I don’t know children’s ages. Skinny, curled up in the bed, but he wasn’t even breathing. In the nightmare I zoomed down, and he was just lying there, and I couldn’t see him moving or breathing. There was like a weird outline to him.”
“Did you see anything that can identify these children? Or where they are located?” she asked lightly. But she was gripping the pen in her hand so hard that it was in danger of breaking.
“I would have said no,” he said. “I would have said it could be any child, anywhere in the world. That’s one of the reasons I never came in to the cops before. Although I’ve had these particular nightmares for the last few weeks, I’ve had them off and on in various forms for years. I’ve always just ignored them, but now I can’t ignore them anymore.”
“Why is that?”
“Because this newest little boy has a name on the bed above his head. It read ‘Jason.’ No last name, just the first name.”
“And you can’t give me any physical description of him?”
“Emaciated to the point of being starved,” he said bluntly. His tone still easily portrayed the horror of what he had experienced in his nightmares. “He’s drawn, skinny, like you could see inside him. His skin was almost translucent.”
“And, if the child were dead, how long has he been dead?”
He shook his head. “I got the impression it was recent. But I don’t think he was—” And then he stopped, shook his head, and looked away. “I don’t put any credence into this,” he said. “So you probably shouldn’t either.”
“Well, I don’t have anything to put credence into yet,” she said drily. “So why don’t we just go down this mythical pathway and see if anything is there?”
“Have you had anything to do with psychics before?”
“Hell no,” she said forcibly. “I only believe in what I can see and hear and feel.”
He stared at her. “Of course I would be talking to you.”
“Do you consider yourself a psychic?”
“Hell no,” he said. “But I can’t help but wonder if these nightmares don’t have some kind of fact-based realism.”
“Fact-based realism?” She had never heard that phrase before. “If you had given me anything to identify any of these children with,” she said, “I could look them up in the files.”
“It’s the first time I saw a name on the bed,” he said, “but I definitely got the impression the child had been there for a while.”
“Starved to death?”
“I’m afraid that was probably the least of his problems,” he said softly.
She studied his face, seeing the pain, the tired lines in the corner of his eyes, the faint anger masked around his lips, as he clenched them tight. “It makes you angry, doesn’t it?”
He glared at her, not liking the sound of that. “I didn’t do anything to these children,” he said, “but whoever did hasn’t stopped.”
She sat back. “Why do you say that?”
“I think, when I saw the first nightmare,” he said, “since it seemed to have been such a long time ago, I ignored it. But then I had another one and then another, and each time they came back around, another child had been in the group.”
“If that’s true,” she said, “then whoever this person is has taken four.”
Then he shook his head. “No,” he said, “because it’s quite possible he’s taken a lot more, and I just haven’t connected.”
“Connected?” she pounced. “So you are thinking along psychic terms?”
“No,” he said quietly. “I’m not thinking on any terms. I just know these damn nightmares won’t leave me alone, and last night I saw the name Jason. And the child maybe was six, and I can’t give you any more than that.”
“Well, it’s not much,” she said, “but I’ll need your contact details.”
He just stared at her.
“If it does turn out to be something, I obviously have to contact you again,” she said. “Not to mention the fact that every visit here is recorded.”
He swore softly.
“Is that a problem?” she asked. And again she studied him intently. Everybody gave away so much in their body language that they weren’t aware of. But, in his case, no, he kept his cool, even as the small tic in the corner of his jaw pulsed away. She watched it, fascinated, because she never understood if it was a muscular thing or a nervous sign. But, in his case, it was neither.
He was thinking hard. He turned to look at her, nodded, and said, “My name is Simon St. Laurant,” and he went on to add his phone
number and address.
“That’s a pretty high-end area for you to live,” she said, staring at the False Creek North address she’d written down.
“For me to live?”
“For anybody,” she said smoothly. “In other words, it takes money to live there.”
“If you say so,” he said curiously. “Money comes. Money goes,” he added. “I try not to worry about it too much.”
Her pen stopped in the act of writing down his address. “Isn’t it nice that you can say that,” she said. “Most of the world can’t.”
“I’m not most of the world,” he said, once again settling back into that arrogance she’d seen in him when he’d first arrived.
She nodded, stood, and said, “I’ll see you out.”
“Will you check?” he asked abruptly, as they reached the entrance door, where he would walk back out onto the street.
She nodded. “I’ll check.”
He flashed her a brilliant smile that had her stopping still in amazement. “That’s all I can ask,” he said, and he turned and walked out.
Behind her, the Audrey, from the front desk said, “Wow.” In a lowered voice Audrey added, “He’s gorgeous. Did you see the way he moved? Like a panther, so smooth.” She giggled. “And you got to talk to him too.”
Kate said in exasperation, “Well, I had to, obviously.”
“You’re just lucky I’m here to run interference for you,” Audrey said, with a cheeky grin. “In his case, I’m more than happy to. I wonder if he’s married?”
“Don’t know. Don’t care,” Kate said and headed back to her desk. Anything to do with psychics made her back away. Charlatans, the whole lot of them.
But the one thing burning in the back of her mind now—well, other than the mention of her brother, Timmy—was how the hell this Simon guy had heard about Jason, a six-year-old boy who’d been missing for six months and whose emaciated body had just been found.