The Beast in the Bone

by Blair Lindsay

  “Seriously? If you weren’t already fixed I’d cut your balls off myself.”

  Imagining he looked aggrieved at that, she rolled her eyes and crooked a finger at him. “Come on, guard dog.”

  She checked all the locks and settled back into bed, her heart still pounding. Sleep came eventually, but almost inevitably nightmares pulled her awake twice more in the early morning hours: choppy scenes of twisting, darkened hallways with some malevolence always lurking around the next turn. Each time she lay restless afterward until the soft drum roll of the rain against the roof lulled her back to sleep again.

  She woke in darkness an hour before her alarm, bleary-eyed and groggy but knowing she was done with sleep; or more rightly, it was done with her.

  Shivering in a long jacket, she sipped coffee on the back deck still wet with the rain, watching the full moon fall toward the western horizon, the rising sun chasing it from the opposite side of the sky through scattered cloud. The night rain accentuated leafy odours of decay that she endlessly associated with October, and in the dawn light, she saw that the trees surrounding the field were solidly yellowed now, leaves falling.

  Halloween would shriek by, and then there’d be Christmas decorations in stores and Rudolph playing on the radio. What would Christmas dinner look like this year? Her cousins would send a card, but they were too far away and distant in every other sense as well. She might’ve just lost her best friend, and Nolan was long gone.

  She looked at Groot. “Just you and me, maybe, huh, dickhead? I get a drumstick and you get the rest of the bird?”

  Groot wagged his tail as if he thought this a fine idea. She threw ball for a few minutes, then dressed while eggs simmered on the stove. Eggs done, she folded them onto toast and wolfed them down. She checked all the locks obsessively before heading out.

  Her route to work took her past the Copeland farm, and she glanced up the drive as she drove past. And braked… her car skidding to a stop on the empty gravel road. She reversed until she was parallel to the driveway, which was paved from a few feet off the road right up to the house.

  In the six feet of dirt—mud now—between the gravel highway and the drive proper, were fresh tire tracks.

  Her heart beat faster, fear a feathery sensation in the back of her skull. She backed up a tad more, then turned and pulled into the driveway. Destroying tire tracks, her father would’ve said… but it wasn’t as if Decker was going to come out and take casts, was it?

  She got out of the car and crouched to look at the driveway, shivering, but not because of the autumn chill. The sun was high enough that she could see pretty well now. Dust and leaves covered the drive but they’d been disturbed recently. Tire tracks came up the pavement and halted about twenty feet in front of her. There were more where the vehicle had turned around and exited.

  She tried to remember when the rain started the day before. No earlier than ten in the morning, she thought. Someone had driven in and out of the driveway after that. The Copelands? Maybe, but that would’ve been out of character. Once the snowbirds flew south for the winter, they generally didn’t reappear till April, earliest.

  She walked toward the house, scanning the tarmac.

  No footprints in the dust, and none of the leaves scattered in random patterns nearer the house seemed disturbed. Same on the porch, and there were no tire tracks anywhere near the triple-car garage. She took a slow walk around the house, looking everywhere. There were no outdoor cameras, though she could see signs for an alarm service. Nothing looked disturbed and all the windows seemed intact. She walked back to her car, turning it all over in her head.

  At some indeterminate time after the rain began yesterday, someone had driven into the Copelands’ driveway. This someone had not gone into the house, nor entered the garage. Just parked, right about where she was standing.

  Right here.

  Through the trees was a perfect view of her own house, less than a kilometre distant. Then she caught sight of depressions in the long grass, as if someone had walked through it while it was thick with rain. She thought of Groot barking at phantoms in the night—so she’d thought then, at least.

  Someone? There were no actual footprints. It could have been a deer or coyote. But the depressions in the grass began right where the hypothetical car had parked. And led in the direction of her house.

  Well, fuck.

  She took out her phone and paused.

  Just who are you going to call?

  Lang? Keller had given her trauma enough this week. Maybe when she and Atchison visited later she’d bring it up, if she thought Lang was steady enough.

  Decker? What was she going to say? Someone drove into my neighbour’s driveway yesterday. I think. And walked up to my house in the dark. Maybe. Fuck, fuck fuckity fuck.

  She got back into her car, cued up Dire Straits on Bluetooth, and drove on south. A glance at the dash clock told her the stopover at the Copelands’ was going make her late for work and she pressed hard on the accelerator.

  EMS Research division was a tiny, windowless corner in Stonegate headquarters, but they were rightly proud of what they did. It was too bad she was going to doubly disappoint them. First by being late, then…

  The computers in EMS headquarters were part of the Alberta government. That meant they were trusted by the government, or more rightly by other government computers. The assumption was, anyone cleared for work on the AHS EMS network was using it for legitimate purposes.

  But Keller’s list of fears no longer included abuse of computer protocols. Well…it hadn’t really ever, come to think of it. In one way, Grainger’s punishment had thrown her just where she might have wished to be.

  If Grainger had yanked her off car to do research, then by god she was going to do some.

  Fifty-Seven

  0830 hrs

  Decker was scrolling through an autopsy inventory of personal items at his computer when Sanders wandered in and placed a coffee in front of him.

  “They completed the inventory of that safe in Herzog’s garage?”

  Decker rubbed at his unshaven face, then sipped at the coffee. “Yeah. Nearly four thousand photos, all underage kids engaged in sex acts. Most have the adult’s face obscured. They’re pretty sure Herzog’s in some of them. Others, who knows?”

  Sanders swore under her breath. “These guys trade all the time.”

  “No kidding. There are a few Croutier thinks we can track. We’ll have to liaise with Interpol.”

  “How many of Herzog?”

  Decker’s jaw tightened. “At least sixty. Some of them show him using a belt. One or two of the kids looked dead.”

  “Fuck. No matter how many times… it’s fucking mind-numbing, you know?”

  “Yeah.”

  She squinted at the inventory on the screen.

  “That Herzog’s?”

  He shook his head. “Oakes.”

  “Darryl Oakes? Why?”

  “Ash Keller called me last night.”

  She eased into the chair beside him. “You have the weirdest social life.”

  He smiled. “Yeah, maybe. She remembered Oakes was wearing a ring.” He punched at the keyboard and a new file sprang up. He scrolled down until a picture appeared of Herzog’s severed ring finger, with a thick, silvery ring still encircling the digit. “Like this one.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Okay… You call the RCs?”

  He looked at his watch. “Talked to them this morning. The GIS guy who worked it didn’t remember a ring. I looked up the medical examiner’s inventory and there’s nothing there either.”

  “Doesn’t mean he wore it all the time. Could it have been somewhere else at the scene?”

  “Maybe. But Keller was only with him for a few minutes, right? An hour at most. Why would he choose that particular time to take it off?”

  Sanders tilted her head. “And he wasn’t planning on letting her go, so he wouldn’t have cared if she recognized it.”

  “Agreed.”
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  “Doesn’t make sense, then. She’s mistaken.”

  “She must be.”

  “Bullshit. I know that tone. You’re not convinced.”

  Decker rubbed at his chin. “There’s something there. I can feel it.”

  “Oh baby,” Sanders deadpanned. Decker rolled his eyes and she carried on. “Keller might’ve been imagining things. She’s under a lot of stress, not to mention in recovery, right?”

  “Yeah. Maybe that’s it.” He tapped at the keyboard again. Another file opened on the screen. “This is Oakes’s autopsy. Like Ressler said, no ring in the inventory.” He scrolled down to photos of the body. Oakes’s cause of death was officially listed as smoke inhalation. Drugged by Keller, he had nonetheless still been breathing as his captives escaped and the house burned. The ME had found particles of smoke deep in his lungs.

  Decker flicked through the many photos of Oakes’s body until he came to the hands. There was no ring.

  Sanders leaned closer. “Look at that.” She tapped at the screen. “Zoom in, there.”

  Decker did as she asked. There was a slight circumferential indentation on the left ring finger that he hadn’t seen at first. The indented area looked cleaner than the rest of his hand.

  “A ring,” Sanders said.

  “A ring that disappeared right after he died.”

  “Well isn’t that fucking interesting.”

  Fifty-Eight

  0910 hrs

  As predicted, Keller was ten minutes late when she walked into Stonegate and wove her way again through the maze of mostly deserted cubicles to find Simon Hodgeson, who expressed his displeasure at her tardiness with a withering look and a pointed glance at his watch.

  Medics usually arrived for work a full half-hour before shift change. It helped ensure that the crew finishing a twelve- or fourteen-hour shift went home as soon as possible. Hodgeson would rightly expect her to carry the habit into office work.

  He peered down at her through thick glasses that cut across his face and left him looking as though the top of his head was a removable lid. Her brief interactions with him over the years had convinced her that while socially awkward, perhaps with a touch of Asperger’s, he was clearly brilliant. A good street medic, from what she’d heard, but she could understand how research, the analysis of facts and figures, might appeal to him.

  She waved at a couple of friendly faces that peeked up from behind cubicle walls. A few of those working here were on light duty due to injury. There might even be a few like her—well, not quite like her—who were diagnosed with PTSD and needed time away from the street.

  “Good morning, Ash. Good to have you working with us,” Hodgeson said dryly as he waved her to an empty cubicle near the back of the room. It sounded like a rote phrase memorized along with the twelve cranial nerves. “Drew said you’re familiar with database work?” His look was doubtful, though whether about Grainger’s reliability or her own, she was unsure.

  “A little.” She’d done some university coursework that involved constructing databases in what seemed like another lifetime now.

  At this Hodgeson winced, as if she’d asked to juggle priceless Fabergé eggs. But he rallied and spent ten minutes showing her the program, then ran her through accessing the main AHS databank and what information she needed to transfer to their own research database. She immediately recognized the project as something immensely valuable, correlating patient outcomes with ambulance response times.

  “Isn’t there some set of… macros, or whatever, that you could write to do this automatically?” she asked.

  Hodgeson looked at her with an odd mix of frustration and embarrassment. “It’s a good idea.” He scratched at his head. “But there’s no money in the budget for it.”

  She sensed something else behind the frustration. “But you could do it, couldn’t you?”

  Hodgeson’s mouth became a thin line. “I could, but AHS would want a professional programmer.” He rubbed thumb and fingers together. “Money.”

  “Yeah, gotcha.”

  Hodgeson departed as Keller settled behind her desk. The cubicles on either side of her were mercifully empty. Privacy of a sort.

  Good good good when you’re about to be a bad girl.

  But for the first little while, she was a good worker bee, a data-transfer demon, guessing that Hodgeson would check back on her often in her first hour or two. And she was right. Four times over the next forty-five minutes she sensed a shadow looming behind her and looked up to see the man scrutinizing her efforts. The last time he smiled at her and tapped her on the shoulder.

  “Doing good.”

  After he’d left her alone for thirty minutes, she guessed he was confident enough in her abilities that she wouldn’t see him again for an hour or two.

  She darted between the cubicles to the opposite end of the bank, where she’d observed a grouping of empty workstations—just what she needed. She entered one, powered up the computer, and steeled herself to do something that would get her fired if AHS found out about it.

  AHS would tolerate a lot. They’d tolerated Keller’s addiction, for example, helping her get back to work. Likely would’ve done the same even if she’d been stealing drugs from work. They’d helped people through alcohol issues, PTSD issues, conflict management… a lot of things that would get you shown the door elsewhere.

  But what they would not tolerate—not ever, no how, no way—was employees looking through other people’s health records. It was one of a short list of things that would get you immediately fired.

  So… best not to be you when you did such things.

  Keller looked back and forth. The area around her remained deserted and Hodgeson was nowhere to be seen.

  She brought up the login screen and typed.

  Dgrainger

  Superman&32

  Login Successful.

  She pulled up Herzog’s health record.

  Herzog had called EMS twice before Keller’s arrival at his murder. The first call was two years prior, the second about nine months later. Both times Herzog was transported to Foothills Hospital. The most recent call involved right upper quadrant abdominal pain that looked like biliary colic—gallstones.

  Too much fat in your diet. Too much of a lot of things…

  She hoped Herzog’s gallstones had caused him prolonged and excruciating pain, but she wasn’t interested in them beyond that. She was looking for emergency contacts. The records listed a Shelly Green—sister—living in Winnipeg. Probably unimportant but Keller made note of the phone number. The other contact looked more interesting. Kapp and Associates. A law firm?

  A shame if Grainger got in trouble for nothing.

  She Googled the name and as predicted, it was a law firm, with one Timothy Kapp as CEO. It looked as though they did mostly governmental work, lobbying and that sort of thing. Maybe Kapp or someone else at the firm was a relative of Herzog’s? It seemed a—pun intended—dead end.

  She went back into Herzog’s health files and spent fifteen minutes going through them one by one, looking for any sign of a connection to Darryl Oakes or the acreage. Nothing.

  Done with her work as Dgrainger, she logged out and powered down the computer, then strode back to her assigned cubicle. Hodgeson had returned to check on her and looked puzzled, so Keller waved a hand over her abdomen, miming stomach upset. Hodgeson merely nodded and pointed toward the washrooms at the other end of the floor.

  When Keller got back to her workstation, she entered a few more records, then opened another browser window—AHS would not be monitoring her Google searches… hopefully—and searched Louis Walter Herzog. Google dutifully inquired if she meant the filmmaker Werner Herzog. She clicked again on the original name and got two matches that looked applicable. One was an obituary mentioning Herzog as a surviving son along with the previously discovered sister. The other was an archived biography on the University of Calgary’s website. She clicked on it.

  Degrees, undergraduate work, PhD
dissertation, research interests, classes taught. Missing were hobbies: child trafficking, pedophilia, murder.

  The dearth of information was disappointing but not unexpected. People Herzog’s age were not interested in Facebook or Instagram. LinkedIn? Again, a mish-mash of inexact matches. Herzog was probably a little too old for LinkedIn too.

  Decker could look through criminal databases and likely find what she was looking for in a New York minute, but if she called him again, he would tell her to mind her own business. Maybe in a slightly nicer way, maybe not. A ridiculous idea.

  Why think of it, then? She tut-tutted at herself. Maybe it was time to admit she was attracted to the guy. Only to herself, of course. Baby steps.

  Okay, go back to Herzog’s origins.

  Herzog had taught in the geology department at U of C. That didn’t help with the ring, though. Keller had seen several U of C rings up close before, and Herzog’s was markedly different. Bulkier, with three letters scrawled on the side, though she didn’t remember just which ones.

  What if U of C rings had changed since Herzog graduated? Herzog had been a little over sixty, which meant he’d been in university and graduate school in the ’70s. She looked for pictures of U of C grad rings from that era but couldn’t find anything. Nor did this seem helpful regarding Oakes, who’d been an oaf. She couldn’t imagine him graduating from university. Starting maybe, trying it out for a semester, but not graduating.

  Then she found a “Distinguished Faculty” page devoted to former U of C professors. Herzog was included—a friendly smile, a bit more hair, and a lot less dead. He looked like somebody’s kindly old grandfather, and Keller was reminded that evil wore many faces.

  Enough philosophizing.

  Hodgeson would be checking up on her again eventually and likely not be pleased she’d entered only two records in nearly an hour.

  She read through the bio again and there it was, right near the bottom. Graduate of the Harrow-Charterhouse School…