Christina rolled her eyes but didn’t complain about how that always seemed to happen and maybe it had something to do with Margie’s choice to join the Calgary homicide department. Maybe things would have been quieter if she’d taken a different position, or moved to a small town instead of somewhere busier.
“I know. I’m saying that too often. Did you have something good for dinner? Was there enough in the fridge?” Margie opened the fridge and then the freezer, hoping to be inspired about what to make for her own dinner. The only thing that looked appetizing was the ice cream, and she had to be the adult and not be a bad example for her daughter. Eating ice cream for dinner was the wrong standard to set.
Christina grunted. “This and that. There was some leftover pizza.”
Margie looked in the fridge. Christina had finished it off. Which was probably a good thing. Margie should eat something that was good for her. Lots of fruits and veggies. A salad, maybe. She shut the doors of the fridge again.
“There’s pasta in the cupboard,” Christina suggested. “Or, you could have a sandwich.”
Probably the same things that Margie would have suggested to Christina. Kids were good at reflecting back what they heard from their parents at inopportune times. Margie opened the cupboards and eventually settled on a bowl of raisin bran. Christina watched as she poured a bowl and added milk.
“That’s breakfast, not dinner.”
“Today, it’s dinner. Give me a break this one time.”
Christina was silent, looking back down at her homework.
“How’s it coming along?” Margie asked. “What are you working on?”
“Just… English… math…”
“You need any help?”
“No.”
“Okay.”
Christina didn’t look up as she scratched out some math equations. “Are you going to tell me about the new case?”
“I can’t really say much about it. A body was found at Ralph Klein Park.”
“Is that near one of the other ones?”
“No. It’s not far from here, actually. Driving, that is. Walking, it would be too far.”
“Yeah? What’s it like?”
“Wetlands. Lots of ponds and water catchments and canals or streams. There is a playground with a zip line and an education center to teach kids about the wetlands.”
“Cool. We could take Stella there. She’d think it was great!”
Margie thought about Stella jumping into the big basin around the education center and shuddered. She wouldn’t be able to jump in to pull Stella out if something happened to her.
“There were signs up that there aren’t any dogs allowed in Ralph Klein Park. We’ll take her to Glenbow one of these days. And go into Cochrane for ice cream.” Margie glanced at the closed freezer door. She was definitely hung up on ice cream tonight.
“Yeah! I want to do that. I was talking to Stacey about Cochrane, and she says MacKay’s is awesome. They have ice cream flavors like you never even thought of there, and it’s always changing, so you can try new things.”
“It sounds really cool. I want to see it too.”
“Cool,” Christina repeated with a grimace, picking up on the unintended pun.
Margie laughed. She continued to munch on her raisin bran.
“So, what else?” Christina asked.
“What else?”
“About your case. It was at Ralph Klein Park. Closer to us this time. But not anyone we know, right?” she asked lightly.
“No one we know involved in this case,” Margie assured her quickly.
They didn’t need more nightmares.
“Was it… like the others? Another stabbing?”
“No. I didn’t see any marks on the body. The medical examiner will have to do the postmortem and report back, but it was probably a drowning.”
Nothing that Christina wouldn’t read in the news in the morning. If it hadn’t already been reported.
“Do you know who did it?”
“No. We have some suspects. First, we need to conclusively identify the victim. We think we know who it is, but it takes some time to be absolutely sure. In the meantime, we’re investigating all leads.”
“You’ll find him?”
“Calgary homicide has a very good solve rate. We’ll find him.”
“At least you didn’t have to go in the water.” Christina looked up from her notebook. “Right?”
“No. Not in the water.” Margie couldn’t suppress a shudder. “Just… close. And… over bridges.” She didn’t describe the walkways around the education center. She didn’t want to picture them or remember them in any detail. She tried to block as much of that experience out as she could. Maybe, as Cruz said, the only way for her to get over her anxieties was through exposure to them, but that didn’t mean she was going to dwell on them any more than she already had to.
“You went over a bridge?” Christina asked.
“Yes.”
“In the car or on foot?”
“On foot. Actually, I had to go over one in the car too. But that was easier.”
“Wow. Good for you.” While Christina would laugh and tease Margie about her unreasonable fear of the water at other times, she always encouraged Margie to be brave and face her fears and try new things. Margie tried to do the same with Christina, encouraging her to do the things she was afraid of.
It was always easier to tell someone else to face their own fears than it was to face her own.
Chapter Nine
The next day Margie had a report from the medical examiner’s office on her desk indicating that their victim had not had water in her lungs. She had not been drowned in the stream out at Ralph Klein Park.
Margie took a few deep breaths, her heart racing and stomach feeling queasy. Even though the medical examiner said that the woman had not died of drowning, she still couldn’t help but imagine that cold, dark water flowing over her face, sealing off her mouth and nose, blinding her. She imagined sinking farther and farther down into the muck at the bottom of the stream, trying sluggishly to move, but being trapped like in a nightmare. Frozen, too afraid to even fight back against the water.
“Detective Pat…? Margie?”
Margie tried to break free of the vision. She wasn’t drowning. The victim hadn’t drowned. There wasn’t any point to imagining it. She didn’t want to see it, so why was she?
“Margie.” There was a hand on her arm.
Margie opened her eyes and looked into Detective Jones’s concerned blue eyes. She drew a deep breath. She could breathe just fine. She wasn’t drowning. No one was drowning.
“It’s okay. I’m okay.”
“Are you sure? You were kind of… wheezing. Are you asthmatic? Do you need an inhaler?”
“No. I’m okay. I was just…” Margie trailed off, not wanting to have to explain it. “I’ll tell you about it later. It’s just… a distraction.”
“You got the ME’s report?” Jones nodded to it.
“Yes. Not drowning.” Margie studied it for more details. “Several blows to the head. Subdural hematoma.” She shook her head. “A fight… someone really got angry with her.”
Jones sighed and shook her head, eyes closed. Margie thought about Finkle. Could he have snuck up on Patty? Approached her when she had been deep in thought or busy with something. Maybe not something quiet, like Margie had been picturing, but something noisy. The noise would distract her, cover up Finkle’s footsteps. And then…
She couldn’t see him sneaking up and bludgeoning her. That didn’t make any sense. She tried again. An argument? A disagreement over something that had resulted in Patty throwing one of her insults in Finkle’s face? Not behind his back, this time, but face-to-face, so that he couldn’t deny it. Couldn’t pretend that his staff respected him.
A slur or insult that had pricked him to act. It was too much, and he had just picked up the nearest possible weapon and slugged her with it. Repeatedly. Or he had knocked her down and conti
nued to beat her.
In those scenarios, Patty would have to have been the last one there with him at the end of the day. So that no one else had seen or heard what had happened, or observed him disposing of the body.
Would Finkle have disposed of the body in the waterways of his beloved park? Would he have thought it fitting to return her to nature and to bury her in the water that she too had been so passionate about? Or would he think that was polluting the waters that they were trying to purify by running through the natural filters of the wetlands?
“They were both passionate about nature,” Margie mused aloud. “What could they have fought about?”
“Who?”
“Patty and Finkle.” Margie closed her eyes, thinking about it for a minute. It wouldn’t have been because Finkle had propositioned Patty, something that happened in many workplaces. If she and the others thought that he was in the closet, then he clearly wasn’t sexually harassing the women who worked under him. Unless it was to overcompensate. To make them think that he was just as big a pig as any other man who had ever abused them.
“Did we get the ID?”
“Dental clinic near her house. They’re sending over x-rays. ME should have a positive ID by the end of the day.”
“Good.” Margie was relieved about that. She didn’t want Patty’s family and friends to be wondering any longer than necessary about what had happened to her. They deserved to have a little peace, knowing that she was not suffering. Knowing was better.
“Multiple blows,” Jones mused, skimming the ME’s report over Margie’s shoulder. “Torn nails and defensive bruises on her hands. Broken finger. It was a fight. She didn’t just go down with one blow.”
“No.” Margie pictured Finkle. Had he had any scratches or bruises on his hands? He’d been constantly wringing them. Margie had spent a lot of time looking at them, winding and squeezing each other. She was pretty sure she would have noticed if he’d had any bruising on his hands.
But then, if he’d used some kind of an object as a bludgeon, he wouldn’t have bruised his hands.
There could have been someone else at work, someone who had propositioned her, or someone she had been having an affair with. Someone bigger and more explosive than Finkle.
“We need to talk to her family and friends. See if she and Warner had marital issues. See if they knew about the situation at work. Or if she’d been under more stress lately. Finkle said that she had been moody. Why?”
She remembered what else Finkle had said. He’d thought that maybe she was hormonal. Maybe pregnant. She flipped through the pages of the ME’s report, scanning the rest of the information. She shook her head. No pregnancy. That was something, at least. It would have been worse—or at least, felt worse—if Patty had been pregnant when she was killed.
“I’m going to make some calls,” she told Jones. “I know we don’t have a confirmed ID yet, but I want to start talking to others before they know too much. People start to make things up. They start to imagine the reasons things happened the way they did. I don’t want confabulation. I want the facts.”
“Sure. Do you want me to make some calls?”
“We’ll start with Mom and Dad. They can let us know who else we should be talking to.”
“All right. The contact details we were able to pull are in the workspace. Interview room is yours as long as you want it.”
Margie appreciated Detective Jones taking care of these little details and smoothing the way for Margie’s investigation.
“You want to sit in with me?”
“Sure, if you want. That won’t be too many people?”
“No, I don’t think so. I think they’ll feel better if they feel like more people are involved in seeing that justice is served.”
Chapter Ten
Because Patty was estranged from her parents, they hadn’t known she was missing before Margie’s call. Margie invited them to talk to her, telling them as little as possible. Certainly not that she was with the homicide department. Let them think, at least for a little while, that Patty had just not gone home for one night. There could be a perfectly reasonable explanation for that.
Their eyes were wide and frightened when Margie met them in the reception area. She took them to the interview room. Nothing between the lobby and the interview room indicated to the couple that they were dealing with homicide rather than with missing persons. They were both housed in the same building and on the same floor. Only the room numbers gave it away to those who knew those little details.
“Mr. and Mrs. Roscoe, thank you for coming in. I’m sorry to have to involve you in this.”
Mrs. Roscoe was wiping her nose with a well-used tissue. Face masks were not an option when people were crying. Margie gave them a box of tissues and a garbage can and sat at the other side of the table, her own mask firmly in place.
“Is she really missing?” Mrs. Roscoe asked. “My baby!”
“I know it must be a shock to you. This is something that no parent ever wants to hear.”
“No,” she agreed. Mr. Roscoe shook his head, blinking his eyes rapidly.
“When was the last time you saw or talked to your daughter?”
“Well… it’s been a long time, actually. I don’t know if anyone told you…” Mrs. Roscoe looked down at the table, her face pink with shame. “We were not talking with each other. Things were not good between us.” Tears escaped her eyes and flooded down her cheeks. “Why couldn’t we have made up before now? I don’t even know when the last time we talked to each other was.”
“Did you have any communication at all? Texts or emails?”
“No. I still saw her social media posts sometimes. But… well, I didn’t respond to them.”
“I understand. What was it the two of you fell out over?”
“Her husband. That Scott. Scott Warner. I suppose he told you all about it.”
“No, he didn’t have much to say about it. I think he would have preferred not to have talked about it at all. But I told him I would be talking with you, so he might as well fill me in because I was going to hear it from you anyway.”
She nodded. “What did he tell you? About how unreasonable and judging we are, I suppose. That we never gave him a chance.”
“Why don’t you tell me in your own words?”
The couple exchanged glances. Mrs. Roscoe was the one who was more comfortable talking, but maybe she felt that her husband would sound more reasonable. Logical rather than emotional like she was.
“Just take your time,” Margie urged. “I’m listening.”
Mrs. Roscoe turned back to her and began reluctantly. “He just wasn’t any good. I knew from the start that he wasn’t going to amount to anything. I can’t for the life of me imagine what she saw in the man. It wasn’t even like he was good looking, so she couldn’t say that it was his looks or love at first sight.”
But she wasn’t judging Warner.
“What made you think that he wasn’t good for your daughter? They didn’t have shared interests?”
“He’s a bum. Patty is the one who has had to support that family from the start.”
“He has a job, from what I understood.”
“Yes. A job. But no education. Patty is the one who has always made the lion’s share of the family’s income. He should have just stayed home with the kids; then they wouldn’t have had to pour money into daycare. But no, he couldn’t do that either. He had to have a career. He had to show everyone that he could amount to something.”
Margie made a couple of notes. “So, your concerns were mostly financial?”
“No, not just that. He wasn’t a nice person. Isn’t. I’m sure that hasn’t changed. I didn’t want him anywhere near Patty. Or my grandchildren.”
“In what way wasn’t he nice?” Margie didn’t want to suggest that they had argued or that there had been any violence in the family. She didn’t want to feed them anything. Let them offer it on their own.
“He was always talk
ing down to her. Like he was the one who had the university education rather than her. He acted like she was… inferior. He was more intelligent, understood politics and the world economy better than she did. He thought he was naturally smart; he didn’t need book learning. In fact, he was better without it. Less tainted.”
“Really. A know-it-all. They can be very annoying.”
“Yes. No one else ever knows anything. If you do, then you’re wrong. He has to correct everything you say, and make sure everyone knows that he is the one who gets it all, that he’s somehow… an advanced species over everyone else around him.”
Margie nodded.
“That might be an exaggeration,” Mr. Roscoe temporized. His wife gave him a withering glare. “I don’t think it was that bad,” Mr. Roscoe said. “At least… not that obvious. The two of them usually seemed to get along pretty well. She allowed him to express his opinions and didn’t try to correct him and make him feel bad about the stuff he got wrong. She was very patient with him.”
“A wife shouldn’t have to be patient with her husband. Not like that. She shouldn’t always have to tiptoe around his ego and make him think he’s better than she is. That’s just wrong.”
“It seemed to work okay for them. They didn’t fight a lot. Not around us.”
“They were never around us,” Mrs. Roscoe said. “I saw him for what he was in the beginning, and I said I wouldn’t be around them.”
Mr. Roscoe gave a nod and shrug. He clearly didn’t find Warner quite as objectionable as his wife did. Maybe because he was a man and felt a certain kinship to him in his situation that his wife couldn’t feel. Perhaps he could see how Warner might feel in a marriage with a stronger, more outspoken woman. Or maybe his wife was just better at picking up on the subtleties of Patty’s and Warner’s relationship.
“You must have seen her sometimes. Did you go to her wedding? See the children when they were born or at other times?”
“They had a civil ceremony and didn’t see fit to invite us to that,” Mrs. Roscoe said stiffly. Another problem that she had with Warner. “When the children were born… Yes, I did go by the hospital to see them when that man was not there. But the rest of the time…” She closed her eyes and shook her head slowly. “I didn’t see them. Didn’t babysit for them or have family dinners together.” She swallowed and dabbed at tears. “I should have made up with her when I had the chance. Now… it’s too late. She’s gone. Thinking I didn’t care.”
Dark Water Under the Bridge Page 5