The Beast in the Bone

by Blair Lindsay

  Staci, dead. Did nothing work in this world? Was nothing ever right or protected or fixed?

  As soon as Decker departed, Keller had pulled out her phone and fashioned a reply to Robin’s text.

  Be careful. Bad things happening. A girl’s body was found in Kananaskis. Police say it might be Staci. You safe?

  She was still waiting for an answer.

  Kayla was in foster care. No way to contact her. She hoped someone was watching out for her, but that would all depend on whether Decker and his pals thought Staci’s death was a coincidence.

  And why wouldn’t it be?

  Lifestyle.

  All three girls had spent time on the street. She knew cops would see it that way, or at least factor it in. Hell, Robin was still out there, with “u of c” friends, if her message was true. Keller had the feeling Robin was, as the saying went, a child of the streets. Was that better or worse than being in the foster-care system?

  In the last few years several younger children had died while in foster care. There was talk that Alberta social workers had impossible caseloads, that children—especially Indigenous children—were falling through the cracks. Since “overworked” and “falling through the cracks” fit Alberta’s EMS system equally well, Keller had no trouble believing it.

  “Good boy,” she said to Groot as they rounded the corner of her parcel farthest from her house. Groot looked up at her and barked approval and she smiled.

  Then she saw the anomaly and skidded to a stop, her heart dropping into her stomach.

  Beneath a set of thick trees and just off the path, some of the grass was pressed flat in a wide area, with six or seven cigarette butts in a loose pile beside it.

  Groot nosed his way in and Keller pushed him away, examining the area more closely. There were three shallow depressions in the ground, each about a half inch across.

  Tripod.

  Someone had sat out here and smoked and watched her.

  She shuddered, a cold feeling running down her spine. Call Decker? She still had his card. She pulled out her cellphone but hesitated. What would she say? Someone is watching me? What if Decker were the one watching? That seemed a little crazy, but who knew?

  Compromise. She snapped a picture of the marks and cigarettes. After supper and a glass of wine, she’d decide.

  Drunk-text a cop with paranoiac evidence someone’s stalking you. Great. Philby would love it.

  Dusk was passing into twilight. Keller let her gaze travel a wide circumference around her as Groot watched, all puzzled dog energy, impatient to get back to running. She saw nothing but waves and waves of barley rippling in the wind and the play of light in the rays of the setting sun.

  She pulled Groot close and ruffled his fur. “Good thing you’re a vicious beast of a guard dog.”

  Twenty-Nine

  The Fixer let the phone ring five times, the ringtone echoing in hollow beats in the interior of his car.

  Kapp and Hunt deserved to sweat a little—a lot, actually—after shopping around like Christmas bargain hunters. That wasn’t the way it worked. They could use his services only, take his advice only—or their business was ended. What’s more, they seemed to think the Fixer worked like a McDonald’s drive-through, that they could simply call anytime they wanted, special order something and get it immediately.

  Unlike eating at rival fast food chains, using another’s services could blow back on the Fixer himself. Could in fact place the Fixer in an eight-by-ten concrete cell eating PB and J sandwiches with a little spit on the side, courtesy of the guards, every lunch for the rest of his life.

  So, no, you little asshole. You don’t get to shop around.

  Proof of this danger was what was going to happen later this evening or early tomorrow at the latest. The media was going to get hold of the Staci Jensen story. A girl once saved, twice kidnapped, now dead.

  Hunt was used to having complete power over his employees. The old “jump / how high?” deal, the way things worked in politics. But neither Kapp nor his master had any power in this relationship, and it was time to remind them of that.

  He punched the Answer button. “Good morning.”

  “Good fucking morning to you too. I’ve been calling you for hours.”

  “And I’ve been busy. I have a day job, remember?”

  “Hope you’re better at it than the job you do for us.”

  The Fixer hung up, laid the phone down on the passenger seat, and stared out at the corner of 9th Avenue and 4th Street, between the old King Eddy Hotel and Studio Bell, Calgary’s National Music Centre.

  He had cruised Staci Jensen several times. She was easy to track. Even after everything that had happened to her, she’d been terribly unguarded, staring down at her cellphone while walking home from school and the like. He had a line on Kayla, too, but she was a little more wary. Straight home after classes, always walking with friends.

  Robin Wolf Child was an entirely different matter. She’d disappeared from Drumheller Hospital the same night Oakes’s farm burned. No known friends, no family that would have her, no foster home to track her to.

  But once upon a time, before her uncle began abusing her and her mother started covering it up, Wolf Child had been a promising high school music student. Rumour had it she’d been absolutely enthralled with the Studio Bell Centre and visited it whenever she could. The Fixer was betting that she’d gone to ground in Calgary and that old habits would reassert themselves eventually as they did with most people, even those in fear for their lives, and he would find her there.

  As luck would have it, the head of security at Studio Bell was an old colleague, fired from CPS for doing what the Fixer was now paying him to do—keep an eye out for a person of interest and pass on the info post-haste.

  The phone rang again and this time he almost let it go to voice mail, but he was anxious to be done talking to Kapp, as long as he’d learned his lesson.

  “Go.”

  “Don’t you ever hang up on me again.”

  Lesson not learned. The Fixer hung up.

  As distasteful as spending more time on Kapp was, a protocol had to be established. Just as with a new puppy, discipline was necessary or sooner or later they’d be running the house.

  The phone rang again, but he caught sight of a dark-complexioned girl with long black hair walking past the Bell. He raised his binoculars. No. Too old.

  He answered the phone. “Go.”

  “Don’t hang up.” This time Kapp’s voice held worry.

  Much better. “You have thirty seconds to tell me why I should carry on doing things for you. And that better include an assurance this won’t happen again.”

  Kapp was silent.

  “Your time is running out,” the Fixer prompted.

  “We had to take precautions,” Kapp said. “That girl—”

  “No. That isn’t how this works. I know you’re used to cruising through a Starbucks drive-through one morning and McDonald’s the next, but I don’t work that way. You know why?”

  Again, Kapp was silent.

  Maybe he does have some smarts. “It’s because when a customer decides to change from Starbucks to McDonald’s, there’s no chance that’ll send Starbucks to jail for the rest of its life.”

  “I don’t—”

  “You use me. No one else. Or I’m out.”

  “You have to—”

  “Was it Sechev?”

  Sechev was the Fixer’s best guess. Over the years, Hunt had employed several bodyguards who were former eastern European soldiers. As Hunt moved from the fringes to becoming a legitimate political candidate, those people had been quietly paid off, paid to vanish. But not Sechev. Sechev remained as Hunt’s chief bodyguard… and anything else Hunt wanted him to be.

  “You never had a problem with Sechev’s… duties before,” Kapp said.

  “That was before. Everything changed with Oakes. I told you we had to lay low. No selling girls onto boats to China, no killing the ones you can’t sell,
and definitely no fucking dropping them where any motherfucker can find the corpse. It’s amateur night and it’s going to get us all fucked.”

  “Easy. Easy, you—”

  “No. No fucking ‘easy.’ You need to understand that you did a very stupid thing. What happened on Oakes’s farm? That was gone, fading away. Now you’ve stirred it all up. What you’ve done might get people asking questions again.”

  “He said the… he said she was hidden, well hidden.”

  The Fixer heard sweaty-palmed fear in Kapp’s voice now. Better late than never.

  “It wasn’t. Some photographer followed a bear behind the wrong tree and it’s about to make a shitstorm. CPS will be shooting off a media release in a few minutes.”

  “Nice of you to warn me.”

  “Why should I warn you about mistakes you could easily have avoided? I specifically told you to leave them alone.”

  “I’m not the only one making decisions.”

  “Slap some sense into Hunt, then.”

  “Never mind that,” Kapp hissed. “Can you exercise some control over where CPS goes with it?”

  “Maybe. It’s possible I can push things in certain directions, for a price, but no guarantees.”

  “Why should I pay you if there are no guarantees?”

  “How much did you pay Sechev for this guaranteed failure?”

  Kapp was silent, rapid breaths whistling through his nose. “We need this to go away. Any help will be appreciated, I assure you.”

  “Appreciation comes in allotments of ten thousand in my world.”

  “Forty thousand help you jam things up?”

  Desperation in Kapp’s voice now, like a cash register chiming.

  “I told you not to move on any of the girls. I told you it was too soon. Unnecessary.”

  “Sixty. Sixty and you still have to find the other two as well, in case we have to do something about them.”

  “You don’t.”

  “You’re naïve,” Kapp said. “And you don’t know everything. Staci Jensen had started writing a blog. All about what happened, all about her… mistaken suppositions and conspiracy theories.”

  The Fixer cast his memory back. Staci Jensen squirming in his arms as he carried her blindfolded from the van into Oakes’s house. A fighter. She hadn’t quit fighting and it had killed her, or Sechev had.

  “It was still stupid. Who reads that shit?”

  “We’ll never know. We have an expert scrubbing it off the internet now. But that was the ‘why’ of what happened.”

  “Fine. You just used the wrong person to make it happen.”

  “Because you wouldn’t.”

  “For good reason, you idiot,” the Fixer said. “Most of these things blow over, and if not, they have to be taken care of quietly. Hidden, forever. You’re not a mob boss. Don’t try and act like one.”

  “I know.” Kapp sighed. “The… the candidate wanted things taken care of quickly.”

  “Aren’t you in charge of exercising his better judgment?”

  “Have you located the last package?”

  Translation: We killed Staci, we know where Kayla is, so just Robin remains.

  The Fixer’s turn to sigh. “Amazon won’t deliver this one in two days, but I’m working on it.”

  “We paid you a shitload of money and I just agreed to sixty grand more, so you’d better make this happen.”

  The Fixer thought about hanging up again, but he was beyond tired of Kapp’s nasally whine.

  “Fire me. We can be done anytime you want.”

  “Really?” Kapp said. “Your gambling get all better suddenly? Your debts all gone?”

  The Fixer’s breath caught in his throat. Kapp knew about his weakness.

  “I have an internet guy who’s pretty good,” Kapp said. “Blackjack is definitely the best game in a casino, so I’ve heard. Too bad you like poker, too bad you think you’re so good at it when you’re not. Now… how soon till you have the last package in your sights?”

  The Fixer composed himself, counting to ten.

  When the silence stretched out, Kapp continued. “And by the way, we’ll use any of the tools we have. Maybe it’s good you know we have someone else if you’re not working to our satisfaction.”

  The Fixer felt his blood cool to sub-zero, just as it had in the rare times in his career when he’d drawn his service weapon.

  “I’ll locate the last package whenever I do. Maybe that’ll be tomorrow, maybe next week. I’ll let you know when it happens, and when it does, I’ll watch her for indications she’s doing something dangerous. I’ll bug her phone if I can manage it. That’s it. No Sechev, no more fucking bodies unless I deem it necessary. Understand?”

  “The man who’s paying you won’t like that.”

  “Like I said, fire me… But keep in mind that I know who you are too. And I’m well aware that politicians are used to exposing people, weathering scandals and tossing their friends aside to rot like garbage. Keep in mind I don’t work like that.”

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “It means you won’t see me coming. I won’t call a hotline. I won’t rat you out to the media. You’ll be getting in your car one day and I’ll come up behind you and you’ll be… fired. Understand?”

  Silence on the other end of the line, Kapp perhaps thinking about that brief narrated end to his life. I’ll come up behind you…

  “I’ll call you when I have news,” the Fixer said. “Don’t call me again.”

  “Wait.” Kapp’s voice was softer now, more subdued. “Apart from the girls, what about that paramedic? She’s involved again, isn’t she?”

  “Hardly,” the Fixer said, “and only because your man was careless dumping your garbage. Let me worry about her.”

  “But we—”

  The Fixer hung up again. Thankfully there were no callbacks this time.

  Thirty

  September 27

  Keller settled into the same chair in Philby’s office, a splash of morning sun warming her face but not quite reaching the chill deeper inside.

  “How’re you doing today, Ash?”

  She leaned back and bit at her lip.

  Well, I think someone’s stalking me, and when I called the cop whose card I had there was no answer and no call back as of twenty-four hours later. I could call the RCMP, but they gave me the distinct impression I was a nutcase after what I did, even though maybe I saved some lives… And now it looks like one of the people I did save that night might be dead. And just to top it off, Robin, who I think might be in danger, is not returning my texts.

  Week’s summary covered. She had sent three more texts to Robin since talking to Decker and had gotten no reply, but relaying all this to Philby promised to be complicated beyond measure and would no doubt provoke numerous confounding follow-up questions, so…

  “Doing okay,” she said. Experience had taught her this was a wholly solid and dependable answer when dealing with any therapist.

  “Okay” was almost universally acceptable in the world of psychology. “Great” was too much. No one who was great was in therapy. “Great” got you inquiries as to why things were so damn good, the underlying assumption being that there was a good chance you were breaking one of the rules that got you classified as unhealthy in the first place. “Horrible” was almost as bad as “Great,” an obvious invitation to even more penetrating questions, the first of which was “Have you been thinking about harming yourself?”

  No, but I think someone else has.

  So… “Doing okay.” An unimpeachable societal norm.

  “Sleeping all right?” Philby asked.

  She pretended to think about that. “Pretty darn good.” With all the doors locked, all the outdoor lights on, and a big old dog beside me that would as likely lick any burglar senseless as defend me.

  “Pretty darn good” was okay, within the context of sleep. It was okay be extra enthusiastic about sleeping because nobody ever got enough
sleep anyway and so achieving heights of success such as “darn good” were applauded in recovering addicts.

  Unless…

  “Using anything to sleep?”

  “No. I have a glass of wine with dinner.” A big glass, but still just a glass, right?

  “Have you thought any more about trying to cut that down, maybe try a week without?”

  “What say we focus on the not eating fentanyl for now?”

  “All right. How’s that going?”

  “Well, I’m not. Eating any, I mean.”

  “That’s good to hear.”

  She saw Philby looking her up and down and knew that the hollows under her eyes shone through all her attempts at covering them up with makeup. The psychologist looked as though she might press the point, but what came out was, “So you feel you’re adjusting well to living back at home?”

  “Plants watered. Place tidy. Catching up on some reading. Running in the afternoon. Netflix in the evening. Extended vacay, basically.”

  “Are you feeling any need to use?”

  “Nothing I can’t handle.”

  “That could almost sound worrisome.”

  Yes, but I haven’t thought of a middle-ground phrase for that one. “No”—Keller’s voice was firm—“just honest. When I feel like using, I take a shower, or I eat some chocolate, watch Netflix maybe. I run, eight or ten K every day. Sit on the deck after and read some more.”

  “You run every day?”

  “Yes. Eights or tens, mostly ten Ks.”

  Philby frowned. “Even running can become an addiction, you know. People can harm themselves in many ways.”

  Keller didn’t filter her irritation. “Can we just hypothesize for now that running isn’t the most dangerous life choice I’ve been making lately?”

  Philby absorbed the heat in Keller’s response without visible reaction. “I guess that’s reasonable, but don’t blame me for pressing you with all those pat answers you were giving me.”