Alan was about to add something when his cell rang. He pulled it out, listened, and glanced at Spence. “When? Who phoned it in? What law office? Okay, well, we’re in the bush. Put a copy on my desk and text me the basics—name, age, the usual.”
Alan stuffed the cell back in his pocket. “We got another one. Missing girl, seventeen, visitor from Singapore, been over a day already. We’ll pick it up soon as we’re finished here. Misper’s already out. It got flipped to us because of this one.”
Spence shook her head. “If it’s this sick fuck, we’ll get another bush scene, if we even find her. Maybe we’ll get lucky and it’s just some kid off for a bit of fun. Who called it in?”
“The sister, a paralegal at Sinini. Girl didn’t come home. She thought the same thing you did, young girl on vacation, out clubbing, which she liked to do. But she’s been gone over twenty-four. The sister’s worried. It might be nothing. Got the basics, wanna see?”
Alan handed his cell to Spence.
“Mary Chan, seventeen, five-seven, one ten, brown and black. What doofus sent this? Ever seen a blond Asian? Got a shot of her, though, pretty girl. Here, take a look.” She handed the phone to Alan.
They were still talking about the girl when the forensics team filed down the ridge and back to the staging area. Georgie waved to Alan and pulled off his suit. “It’s all yours. Suit up though. There’s lot of trace in there. Markers are in place, route’s marked. Coroner coming?”
“He was supposed to be here by now, but it’s old Harding, so he’ll be a while, I’d guess. What do you think?”
“I’ll leave that stuff to you guys, but it’s a strange one, that’s for sure. Don’t think I’ve ever seen one like it. Looks like the perp played around up there for a bit, there’s lot of weird stuff. The lights are on.”
Georgie turned back to his team, and Alan and Spence started in. On the way, Alan thought about calling Will, but since it was so late already and would be pitch black soon, he put it off. He’d call from the office.
They spent the better part of an hour with the body, studying everything carefully. It gave them a feel for the crime, made it personal. They both needed that to bring the paper to life.
Just as they were working their way down the face of the ridge, they saw the coroner. John Harding was over sixty, a touch overweight, and a bit prickly at the best of times. He was inching his way through the salal toward the bottom of the ridge.
He looked up. “What, you want me to climb that? Bloody hell, you can’t find bodies on the level? Why don’t you just tell me she’s dead? I’d believe you. You want me to have a coronary, add to the count? Okay, you perverse bastards are gonna help, so don’t you move, hear me?” Harding struggled up to the base of the marked trail and waited.
Behind him, Spence and Alan could see two young medics carrying a stretcher over their shoulders and grinning from ear to ear. One nudged the other and whispered.
“Old bastard’s worse than ever,” Spence muttered. “And that pair, we’re gonna be comic relief pushing his fat ass up that trail.”
Once up and through the opening, Harding looked into the hole. “Jesus, that’s a mess all right, and it’s dead. Haul it away.”
He glared at Alan and Spence. “Get me the hell out of here. I got a long trip back. You buggers find me better corpses and make ‘em closer to a road. Damn chief coroner should have his ass out here too! But no, he’s too bloody delicate. Stays in his cushy lab and plays around.”
It took the better part of another hour with the young medics pulling up the rear to reach the trail head and site control. Alan had closed the site down, killed the lights, and phoned ahead, so the group was met by a bunch of uniforms with lots of flashlights. They helped the complaining coroner up the trail to the road. The medics in their light helmets scooted up with their black bag first, then forensics began their thankless task.
Alan and Spence sat on a pair of rocks and waited for the trail to clear. They reviewed their notes with their pen lights open. “It’s already late, be pitch black soon. When we get back, let’s set up the murder book and call it a day. Then take a look at the report on the new one.”
“Fuckin’ day was over long ago. Leave the damn book ‘til morning and let’s get a drink. Be midnight before we get home anyway.”
Alan nodded. “You’re right. Let’s get out of here. I’ll buy, you drive, get us there faster. We’ll come back out in the morning and bring Will and the others for a quick look and get another look ourselves.”
◆◆◆
Will got the call the next morning while he ate a couple of burritos from McDonald’s, a large coffee balanced precariously on the dash. He dumped the remains on the floor, grabbed at the coffee, and drove to the office. He wasn’t that far away, only up Terminal a kilometer or so. A few minutes later, he pushed open the door and found Isabella at her desk. She raked a thumb over her shoulder, and Will walked into the room. Harry and Sabina were perched on the edge of the desk, coffees in hand, looking at something.
“Been waiting for you, Will. We got the same call you did. Let’s get out there. Those two homicide jerks will meet us at the gate and take us in. I’m sorry, Will, we knew this is what we’d find, but it’s still hard. We’ll take my car. Want a coffee to go?”
Will walked over and poured another one, stirring in sugar and milk. “We need to see where they found her, get the reports, follow up.”
Alan and Spence were waiting for them at the yellow gate on River Road. They too had coffees in hand. All of them stood around the gate while Alan explained in detail what they’d found.
“Body’s at the morgue, but the place is still a crime scene, so we go in with you. We need another look anyway. You ready? Let’s go.”
They tossed their cups in the trash barrel and set off down the gravel road. The trip down was a lot easier since the crew had cleared out many of the obstacles, but it was steep in places and the fallen trunks still gave them some trouble.
They reached the perimeter, signed in with the same uniform that had been there the day before, and walked up the Trans Canada to the staging area. The tent was still up, but the site was deserted. When they had threaded their way through the salal to the huge decaying trunk at the bottom of the ridge, they found another uniform. Alan took the lead and they all squeezed in through the opening. He went over the scene with them and answered their questions as well as he could. Then they trekked back out and returned to the car.
“Crime scene crew will finish up this morning. We’ll bring you guys up to date later in the day. Give you a call. We can meet at your place. We got a lot of paperwork to get through first.”
Harry nodded, thanked them, and the three of them left. Sabina drove.
“When we get back, I’ll download all the data from the IP trap and we can set up our own case file. We’ll be up to speed before those guys get back to us. Whoever did this is one sick bastard.”
Once in town, Will and Harry left to see how Alicia was holding up now that she knew Kylie was dead. She’d had a visit first thing that morning from Superintendent Paul Gottlieb and the head of homicide, Inspector Josie Atardo. Both Harry and Will knew that was Charlie’s doing and was purely political. The man had influence, even if he was a prick. Will suspected Alicia would be a real mess, and Charlie would be using his clout to make demands as far up as he could reach. Charlie knew a lot of secrets in the town and knew how to use them.
XI
Sabina hit the office, threw Isabella a distracted “I’m back,” and once in her office, began downloading reports and photos. She also picked up the misper on the new girl and opened another file. She checked her email and found a short note from Jim with an attachment from Mamma Jing to One Sigh, the matriarch’s name for Harry. He’d been shot in the side on a previous case involving Ling, Mamma Jing’s daughter, and that’s the tag she’d given him because, she’d said, the name was more in keeping with his nature. Harry belonged to the island, One Sigh to Chin
atown.
Sabina didn’t open the attachment; she didn’t dare. She’d met the great lady and not even at this distance would she fool with the kind of power the matriarch wielded. She ruled Chinatown, and her web of informants kept her miles ahead of the police. She had her own code and used her people to enforce it, especially when law enforcement failed to satisfy her. She balanced the scales in her own way. Sabina would leave the message for Harry.
She fired off an acknowledgement to Jim, her Eastside hacker friend, and concentrated on the data from the RCMP. The material on the girl, Mary Chan, was skimpy, not much more than the misper and a thin file detailing what the Mounties had so far. She printed the file and left it on Harry’s desk.
Sabina sat back in her chair and thought about the girl. Mary Chan was from Singapore; her relatives were in Vancouver’s Chinatown; Mamma Jing had left a message for Harry; and the girl had been reported missing by her sister. What was going on?
Sabina opened the photo files and looked at Kylie’s body. The full shots were bad enough, but the close-ups she couldn’t stomach. The girl was lying behind huge boulders in a tiny depression on branches that had fallen there over the years, and the wide-angle shots caught it all. Sabina studied the photos carefully, noting the position and the evisceration, what she could see of it. If there had been any pattern in the entrails, it was long gone, but part of the major cut was still visible. Three days in that hole in the cliff had given the predators lots of time and the damage was severe. There were bits of her all over the place. The eyes were gone, the lips almost, the tongue mostly not there. The rest was mauled. That was the only way to describe it.
Sabina got out a magnifier and looked at the arms and part of the chest. There was something there, some sort of discolouration that seemed almost like a pattern. She looked closer. The marks weren’t tats. They were something more abstract. She pulled out some of the close-ups. They damn near made her gag. It wasn’t so bad when you got in real close, she thought. You couldn’t see beyond the tiny area you were focussed on.
There, right there in that spot, there was something. It wasn’t ink; some sort of applied colour? Maybe one of those things you could apply to your skin that would wash off? No, couldn’t be. Still, no rain in the last while, so maybe a transfer. Sabina studied other areas that had the suggestion of colour. There was bruising and decomposition, but nothing definitive showed in the photos. She put them away and sat back again.
Sabina’s forehead creased as she kept thinking. Where had she seen something similar? One of Rory’s guys had sent some photos. Yeah, she thought, at the church. What had she done with them? Man, what was that guy’s name?
“Isabella! What the hell did we do with those shots from the church, the ones Rory’s guy sent in?”
“The intercom busted again? Maybe we should get one of those tube things, you could send me messages. We filed that one under the guy’s name, Leonard. Just a bunch of screwy photos and that altar cloth he brought in. I put that in with the paper copy in the file room. You want I should look or do you think you can find it, being a detective and all?”
Sabina shoved down the button. “Touchy, aren’t we?”
“That from a switch hitter who can’t find the Kleenex in the john before ten.”
“Point me in the right direction, I can find anything. Come on in and let’s get a coffee first. Fuck the customers.”
“You fuck ‘em, broaden their horizons a bit. Be right there.”
Isabella and Sabina sat around Harry’s desk, cups in hand, and Sabina went over the Kylie case with her and her suspicions.
“So we could be looking at a serial, and if we are, with this sick bastard we’re gonna find more mutilated girls. Man, I hope I’m wrong.”
“You’re not wrong, Hun. You hardly ever are. If what you found is paint or ink or whatever, and if it’s a design, there’s a link to the events at the church. You sure about the marks on Kylie?”
“No, I’m not. It’s a maybe at best. Something’s there, I think, but there’s not enough to tell for sure. What there is, well, it’s been four days or so. Maybe King will find something more.”
“I’ll get the file.”
They spread the altar cloth on the desktop and fanned out the photos. The designs were intricate and carefully executed. In one case, there were designs in some kind of blue paint or ink as well as in the blood. It was hard to identify the substance. The photos showed an animal’s entrails arranged below the slit in its belly, similar patterns drawn in blood.
“There are similarities and this isn’t animal. Still, there’s something. We gotta get the chief coroner to look specifically for something like this. Wonder if the cops got anything. There’s nothing in their files as of this morning.”
They heard someone coming up the stairs, assumed it was Harry, and sat with their coffees. They heard him come in “Where the hell is everybody?”
They waited. Harry’s head came around the door.
“Maybe the coffee pot was a mistake. You two actually do anything while I’m not here? I mean, you don’t do that much when I am. Not that I do either but then, I’m the boss.”
Both women rolled their eyes, set their coffee cups on the desk, and pointed in unison to the altar cloth and the photos.
“What’s this, then?” he asked.
They went over the case together again, and Harry was impressed.
“We gotta get this idea to the cops if they don’t have it already. They can get King to look for stuff like this. Alan and Spence should be coming over in the morning, but that may be too late. Let me make a call.”
While Harry called, Isabella went back to the front desk and Sabina put stuff away. She waited until he was finished and asked about Alicia. She’d let him unload before she told him about the email.
“The cops’re onto the possibility of markings of some kind on Kylie, but they didn’t know what we found at the church. Autopsy’s tomorrow sometime. Will and I saw Alicia and she’s a mess, of course. She won’t believe the body’s Kylie, won’t listen to us or the cops. She got a visit from the big wigs, a superintendent and the head of homicide, Josie somebody. She wouldn’t believe them either. She just shakes her head and cries. She’s not ready to believe it. Will’s staying with her. We sort of thought Charlie would be there, but he’s in the wind. Making waves though, gotta be. There’s no other way a superintendent’s gonna show up on the doorstep.”
Harry looked at Sabina. “What?”
“You got an email from Mamma Jing. Jim sent it. Zhi sent it to him, I left it for you because it was addressed to you. No way I’m touching something like that.”
Harry sat and booted up his computer. “Let’s see what she says.”
Sabina edged on his desk and waited.
The message was short and clear. Zhi had written it for Mamma Jing, and it contained simply a request to look into the disappearance of a girl, a distant relation named Mary Chan. The message was written in that rather formal way Ji Zhi had when he was speaking, and Harry thought how different the message would have been had he sent it to Sabina. The two programmers were good friends from a previous case they’d worked and had their own way of communicating. That it was so formal and in an English Harry could understand meant only one thing: Mamma Jing had sent an order.
He read it to Sabina. “Let me see what Alan has,” he said.
While Harry made the call, Sabina went back to comparing the markings on Kylie’s body with those on the altar cloth. It was an interesting puzzle.
Harry came to stand beside her. “Alan and Spence got the call on Mary late yesterday. They’re so busy on Kylie, they haven’t been able to look at anything, and mispers are not their bailiwick. Any thoughts?”
“Not sure. We need to know more. Like how and when. After seeing Kylie, this gives me the creeps.”
Harry frowned. “Alan gave me the basics: Seventeen, visiting from Singapore, staying with her sister. Went out clubbing, didn’t come home. S
ister reported it. Works at Sinini’s.”
“Let’s call the sister,” Sabina said.
Harry yelled for Isabella, who came clomping down the hall.
“You called? See that little box on your desk? You know what that’s for? Because she sure doesn’t. Save you yelling like that. What do you want now I’m here?”
“Give Sinini a call, will you? See if you can get us a visit with an Olivia Chan, either there or at her home. We need to get to her today.”
A few moments later, the intercom clicked and Isabella’s tinny voice rolled out at high pitch. “Eleven o’clock, ten minutes from now, at the office. You need the address or can the two of you manage to find it unaided?”
Harry turned it down and yelled, “We got it, Sweetness. As you probably heard.”
◆◆◆
Harry and Sabina left immediately. They walked over to the Sinini law office on Front a few blocks away. Olivia was waiting for them inside the door and took them to the firm’s library.
“We can talk in here. Nobody will bother us.” She shut the door.
They sat at one end of the long table in the center of the room. “Thanks for seeing us, Ms. Chan,” Harry said. “We need you to tell us as much as you can about your sister. What’s she like? Where would she go? When did you get worried about her and why?”
“Olivia, please. I’ve been over some of this with the missing persons officer, but perhaps I didn’t tell him enough about Mary. There’s a lot that’s not really facts, just things I know about her. She’s like I was when I was young, her age. She’s headstrong and a bit out on the edge. She’s here for a vacation and then she goes back to Singapore via Vancouver. She’ll spend a day with relatives in Chinatown, then fly out.”
Sabina put her arms on the table and looked at Olivia. “What do you mean when you say she’s on the edge?”
“Well, she’s active, sexually active, at least I think she is. No, I’m sure she is. And she’s away from our parents for the first time.”
NIGHT MOVES: The Stroll Murders Page 14