Arcand opened up another browser window, this one for Alberta Health Services. He ran his hack and within minutes was prying apart the door on their digitized patient records. Of course there were no digitized records from six decades ago, but over the course of treating Herzog for various ailments in more recent years, his current physician had occasion to note that Herzog had undergone minor surgery for an inguinal hernia in his teens.
Arcand leaned back in his chair and tipped the rest of the beer down his throat. He’d been looking for the culprits so long that now he almost felt paralyzed. But there wasn’t much thinking to do, really. He’d been planning next steps for years.
In his storage locker in the parking garage was a bag containing various items that the police would have labelled a rape kit, except for the bolt cutters. They were Arcand’s own special addition.
He threw the empty beer can into the waste bucket and plucked another out of the fridge. He found himself anxious to begin, but he knew he had to be patient. He wasn’t in this alone anymore.
Ash Keller had killed one of his demons and thereby brought this one to his attention. It was only right that she share in Herzog’s downfall too.
Arcand punched keys, logging into the confidential server of the Alberta College of Paramedics, then the office of a psychologist named Ramona Philby, trolling through files he’d already viewed several times before, looking for updates.
His browsing convinced him that Keller was getting better, overcoming her own demons. She should be back on the job soon.
Perfect.
He had waited this long. He could wait a little longer.
Twenty-Five
A black Ford Taurus was parked in Keller’s driveway when she arrived home a little after 1400. The lone driver looked up when she pulled in, and he got out of his car as she brought hers to a halt. He was maybe forty-five with a weather-worn face, salt-and-pepper hair that was still mostly pepper, and a receding hairline that looked all right on him given his close-cropped hair. He wore grey dress pants and a dress shirt.
There was something familiar about him that she could not immediately place, but it wasn’t as though she had so many friends she could have forgotten one, so that narrowed possibilities right there. Then she spotted his comfortable black shoes. They might pass as dress shoes at a distance, but Keller saw you could run in them if the occasion arose.
Cop.
Her father’s friends had all worn similar footwear, even when they were off-duty. It seemed they liked the idea of being able to move fast too much to ever give it up.
She stepped out of her own car and heard Groot barking from the living room.
“Ashleen Keller?”
He closed the car door and she spotted the badge riding his belt. CPS. Calgary Police Service.
“You’re a ways from home, Officer.”
He followed her gaze and half smiled. “I guess I am. Detective Harry Decker. Sorry to surprise you. Was hoping I could ask you a few questions.”
Keller winced before she could stop herself, though Decker did not seem offended or surprised when he noticed. She doubted he was sorry to surprise her, either. Cops quite liked surprising people. It was a good part of what they did for a living, after all.
“What about? I thought that whole thing”—she waved a hand generally in a north easterly direction, toward Oakes’s farm—“was all RCMP shit.”
Decker nodded, hands on his hips. “It’s not about that. One of the three girls you got out that night, Staci Jensen? She went back into the foster system. She’s missing again.”
Keller felt the colour drain from her face. “Jesus, no.” She must have looked unsteady now because Decker’s face softened and he stepped toward her, a hand out as if he thought she might faint.
Oh, please.
“I’m all right,” she said. It was almost true. She might cry later, scream even. Just not now. “You’d better come inside.” She glanced toward her living room window, where Groot was painting abstract snot art on the glass with his nose.
Decker flashed a thin smile. “I’m good with dogs. Unless he’s a stone killer, I should be okay.”
True to his word, Decker fended off Groot’s enthusiastic greetings with head scratches and a few “good boys.”
In the living room, Keller felt her face flush. She hadn’t gotten around to cleaning and the place was still filled with plants that looked in desperate need of last rites. Lang was a friend, but now this stranger was getting a glimpse of her disaster movie of a life. Fresh angst to disclose to Philby at their next session.
“Sorry about the mess,” she motioned to the couch. “Have a seat. You want a Pepsi or something, some water?”
“Water would be g—”
She saw something shift in his expression then. Saw him realize she’d caught it. She could tell what he was thinking, could read his mind in that moment. Her voice went frosty. “The water out here’s good. Hardly any fentanyl in it at all.”
That same tight smile. “Pepsi’s fine.”
She brought two sodas and Decker settled in the easy chair while Keller slid onto the couch. They cracked the cans almost in synchrony.
“Sorry about that,” Decker said, eyes down. “Water would’ve been fine too.”
Keller almost liked that it was perfunctory, no real sincerity in it.
“Don’t worry. Doubt even my friends will be asking me to mix them drinks ever again.”
That bought her a chuckle and an Okay, we’re both yanking each other’s chains kind of grin.
Staci was missing. Not like she’d had contact with the girl afterward, but she still felt a connection to all three of them. They’d saved each other’s lives that night. But she wasn’t going to cry, not in front of a cop. Her father had never cried.
Well, not in front of me, anyway.
“What happened to Staci?”
“We don’t know,” Decker said. “One day she just didn’t make it home from school. Now, according to her teacher, she isn’t on track to win any awards for attendance, and it’s possible she’s just crashing at a friend’s house, but it’s been nearly a week and given the circumstances…” He was watching her intently. “I’m wondering if she’s tried to contact you. Sometimes kids in tight situations like that develop bonds with the people that rescue them.”
“And sometimes kids who’ve been in tight situations get properly protected afterward.”
“The foster parents are devastated, I assure you.” Decker’s look was genuinely pained, his eyes downcast.
“I haven’t heard a thing from her.” She pulled out her phone to double-check. Email was full of junk. No new calls or texts.
Not from Staci, anyway.
Decker hadn’t asked about Robin, who Social Services—what Alberta termed “Human Services”—might be hunting. Could someone else be hunting Robin too? She ought to tell Decker.
Then something else occurred to her about Decker’s pained look, and her blood ran cold.
No, please no.
She bit at her lip. “They sent a detective forty minutes out of his jurisdiction to follow up on a runaway?”
She hoped he would immediately dismiss her apprehension, but he just stared at her for a long moment. “Your father was a cop, right?”
“That’s right.” She met his gaze, saying nothing more, unwilling to be distracted.
He took a deep breath. “Two days ago a hiker in Kananaskis found a body. A young girl, about the same age as Staci.”
Keller heard herself gasp. She remembered that small, frightened face lit by firelight, remembered them all hugging each other on the grass as the house burned behind them. All saved. All safe.
She couldn’t stop the tears from flooding out of her now, even as Decker dissembled, saying they couldn’t be sure yet it was her. Groot whined and tried to lick at her face, looking from her to Decker as if imploring him to help. Thankfully, he didn’t, lapsing into respectful silence as she grabbed at the box of tissues
she kept on the side table.
“I’m sorry to have to tell you.”
“How… did she die?”
“Maybe it’s best not to get into details.”
She shook her head. “I’d rather know, if you can say.”
He looked away. “I’m afraid it’ll be in the papers tomorrow, anyway. Autopsy results aren’t in yet, but it looks like someone sliced her neck. She bled out. We think her body was dumped— sorry, left there three or four days ago.”
Keller had hiked in Kananaskis, had always appreciated it as the immense and beautiful wilderness it was. Something like four thousand square kilometres of pristine mountains, forest, and rivers. Now she could see the other side of it, that all that room meant lots of places to discreetly dispose of a body.
Decker continued, watchful. “It’ll be a few days before we verify her identity.”
She was about to ask why and checked herself, wiping away the last of the tears. Kananaskis was full of predators: big cats, wolves, bears—lots of smaller opportunistic scavengers too. If the cops were reduced to checking DNA or dental records, then animals had rendered the body unrecognizable.
“She was nearly twelve, I think.” Keller had vague memories of exchanging such details as they talked in the hospital, girl-talk between rape kits.
She imagined Staci alone and frightened beyond belief, in the clutches of some two-legged killer far more pitiless than any forest predator. At the end, would she have realized she was going to die alone, that there was no one coming to rescue her this time?
“Just shy of thirteen.” Decker’s voice was low. He reached down and rubbed Groot’s head. “She hadn’t contacted you, then? What about the others? Robin and Kayla?”
Guess it’s time to figure out if I’m a liar or a snitch.
She was about to give it up, to show Decker Robin’s text, but something held her back.
Staci had been “safe.” Except she hadn’t been, really, had she? And Robin was in the wind, not safe… Except maybe she was.
Keller shook her head. “No. Nothing.” Liar, then. “Are they okay?” What she really meant was, Is Kayla okay? But she could hardly say that, so... “Are the other girls with good families?”
“Kayla is still with her foster family. Robin is out of contact with Human Services.” He seemed to watch for her reaction and looked satisfied with the blank stare she gave him. “She walked out of Drumheller Hospital that night. No one knows where she is, and that’s worrying, too, of course.” He was still eyeing her. “I guess I can understand why she might not be eager to be found, after what she went through.”
Such an archetypal cop gambit. I understand… I can see why… Anyone would have… But Keller wasn’t walking through that door.
“I guess,” she said.
He arched an eyebrow at her and reached into his shirt pocket, plucking out a business card that he set on the coffee table in front of her.
“Maybe you can call me if you think of anything else.”
She took the card and examined it. Major Crimes Unit. Name, rank, no serial number but an office phone number. “Of course.”
You still have time to change your mind. Not all of your instincts are good ones. Addict, after all.
But she was sober now, and keeping quiet felt like her old instincts reasserting themselves, the ones leavened by caution and fear but not driven by them.
“It’s not just this murder,” Decker said, “bad as it is. In homicide we watch for patterns. We’re a lot better at it now than we were in your father’s day. Not ’cause we’re smarter,” he hastened to add, “but we have computer algorithms now, databases.”
Keller knew this to be true. She had heard a U of C professor was building an exhaustive serial-killer database that police services across Canada had expressed interest in using as a resource.
“About a year ago an Indigenous girl named Natasha Janvier went missing,” Decker said. “There are similarities. Natasha was being fostered in Edmonton and was about the same age as the girls Oakes kidnapped. Without getting into details, the whole thing has the same sort of feel about it. Natasha turned up dead in Kananaskis too.”
Keller cleared her throat. “One of the things Oakes said to me… It was something about liking brown skin, or me not being dark enough for him.” She shook her head, angry about her spotty memory. “I was concussed pretty bad so everything’s a little cloudy, but I’m certain Oakes at least implied someone else in the mix.”
Decker nodded. “Kayla and Staci said so as well, but the RCMP haven’t had much luck following up on that. Oakes had no known associates except a few other security guys he had beers with after shift sometimes. I’m told none of them panned out. When was the last time the RCMP talked to you?”
Keller shrugged. “Before I went into rehab. Weeks ago.”
Decker didn’t blink at the rehab thing. Of course he would know. “Sometimes we like to come back a few weeks after a witness makes a statement. Things settle. Details get remembered.” He was prompting her.
She frowned. “Sometimes I feel like my brain’s trying to sew things together… but I don’t think there’s anything new.”
He remained quiet, waiting in case the silence drew something else out of her. She held back on rolling her eyes. Homicide cops.
“I read through your initial statement,” he said finally, “and I actually thought it was fairly detailed, even with the concussion.” He shrugged. “It’s always worth asking again.”
Groot had climbed up onto the couch beside Keller and now stuck his head under her arm. She stroked his back as she searched her memory. Jonas collapsing as the bullet struck his head. The sounds of the girl being strangled in the adjacent room. Oakes, banging his big ugly ring against the chair arm and grinning at her as if she were a bargain-bin piece of meat. Poisoning him. The fire afterward.
“I’m sorry, there’s nothing.” Her headache was back and she rubbed at her temples. “If I think of anything, I promise I’ll call.”
“Right, you have my card…” Decker tilted his head and for the first time his smile was open and relaxed. “You don’t remember me, do you?”
Keller looked him over anew and bit at her lip, trying to make the memory come.
His smile widened as he ran a hand through his hair. “Imagine me with a little more of this. Darker, too.” He rubbed at a thin scar that started above his right eye and went up well into his hairline. “My face was pretty bloody.”
Now she had it. What would it be, a decade ago? More? Just past midnight she and Lang had been called out to a downtown Calgary alley on a drug overdose that had turned into a DOA, the victim already stiff with rigor. Because the place was a known drug den, cops had come in with them and things had quickly gone sideways. Keller wound up bandaging Decker’s head afterward.
“Oh wow, I was barely out of school,” she said.
“Me too,” he said and chuckled. “The lesson I learned that night was not to get too close to assholes with beer bottles.”
She leaned forward to look at his scar critically. “How many stitches?”
“Lucky thirteen.”
“They got you good. Healed pretty well, though.”
“I have a thick skull.”
Keller would’ve found herself almost charmed if not for the news about Staci. Decker was a few years older, but he had a symmetrical, rugged face that looked good with the five o’clock shadow. He was obviously smart—no one who worked homicide could be anything else—and he had a placid confidence that was a refreshing change from Nolan’s borderline arrogance.
She returned his smile. “Job requirement, I guess.” But the pleasant feeling soured a little when she considered the whole of their encounter. She looked outside at Decker’s car. “It was still a long drive for you, just to come ask me if I’ve heard from someone. Especially if that someone might be dead.”
Decker dipped his head, acknowledging the point. “I’m a face-to-face guy. Don’t like to do thi
ngs over the phone if I can help it. Besides”—his eyes narrowed—“I kind of wanted to meet you. That was pretty brave what you did, rescuing those girls.”
“Thank you.” She looked away, not wanting him to realize she knew he was lying.
Maybe Decker had wanted to meet her. Maybe. But wasn’t it more likely he wanted to get a feel for the kind of person who could so casually poison her kidnapper? Maybe that kind of crazy addict wouldn’t help the police with runaways. Maybe she would shelter them, having—as he’d suggested—developed some kind of bond with them.
Murder cops—hell, all cops—were suspicious by nature. Their job, after all. She could understand, but that didn’t make it any more palatable. Best to get this over with so she could go back to triaging mortally wounded plants and cleaning dead flies off the windowsills.
“Want to see the place?” This was a test. He shouldn’t. Murder police were busy guys—always. So if he wanted to look around, he’d come to look around.
Decker’s smile faltered, perhaps in reaction to the sudden coolness in her voice, but he recovered well. “Sure. That’d be great, actually. I’ve thought about buying an acreage one day.” He glanced out the window. “Nice and quiet out here.”
They stood and Groot, always hopeful a session of ball toss might be in the offing, bounded off the couch as Keller turned toward the back door.
“Mind if I use the washroom?” Decker said.
Keller met his gaze, crossing her arms over her chest. “Sure. Down the hallway to the right…” He turned but she wasn’t done. “My bedroom’s on the left and I think everything’s out where you can see. Other rooms, you might have to slide the closets open to make sure there’s no runaways hiding there.”
Before he could frame a reply, she walked through the dining room and out the back door.
“Meet you outside,” she called over her shoulder.
The Beast in the Bone Page 12