NIGHT MOVES: The Stroll Murders

by Gar Mallinson

  Harry took a sip of coffee, licked some sugar off his fingers, and glanced at Sabina, who nodded.

  “We do have some ins in Chinatown, he said. “You know we’ve worked with them before, but this girl’s from Singapore, and how much we can get is limited by how much the relatives know. The girl was a visitor and eighteen or seventeen, and you know how secretive girls are at that age. Moms don’t know the half of it, the relatives less. We’d have to get to siblings or peers, and I don’t know how far we can get.”

  Sabina leaned forward. “I can talk again to Olivia, girl to girl, and see what I can get. She’s the only source we’ve got here.”

  “I’m not getting much there. Maybe something will drop that I missed. Spence is on the Kylie murder talking to as many of the girl’s peers as she can find. She doesn’t miss much and she’s one of the best interviewers the department’s got, with men at least. Maybe she’s as good with young guys too. I don’t know.”

  Harry got up to get another donut. Sabina sat pulling thoughtfully at a curl of hair, and Alan got up, stood uncertainly for a moment or two, then nodded. “I have to go, but that reporter’s around a lot, and I can’t let him see me either come here or leave. He already knows we’re working with you, so the less contact the better.”

  Harry came back, half a donut in one hand and a fresh cup of coffee in the other.

  “He tried up here, but nobody gets past Izzy unless she wants it to happen. But you’re right, we should get together somewhere else.” He paused for a moment and took another bite. “How about we meet somewhere out on River Road? Doesn’t have to be far out, say the Colliery Damn Park or the Morell Sanctuary. Not much happens there.”

  Alan nodded. “The sanctuary sounds good. Let’s do that. Say tomorrow at eight. Bring coffee and donuts and I’ll meet you at the back of the lot. I should know by then whether we get the profiler. If you come up empty, give me a call and we’ll do it the next day.”

  “I suppose you mean in the a.m.? We’re functional then, but barely. Make it eight thirty, and I guarantee the donuts.”

  “Done.”

  XVII

  Alan and Spence were both in the squad room at seven when Josie called them into her office.

  “Close the damn door!”

  Alan did.

  “We got anything on this prick yet? Anything?”

  “We’ve got all the reports and we’re re-interviewing everybody, but we have nothing solid. Whoever he is, he’s careful, methodical, a planner. He doesn’t leave anything to chance, and the sites are all forested, so trace is difficult. Autopsy reveals no likely sexual interference, same cut marks, same instrument probably.”

  “Likely, probably? That’s it? We can’t do much with likely or probably, now can we? You got anything else?”

  Alan looked at Josie for a minute.

  “We’ve got a profiler if you approve the request. This is serial, but he isn’t escalating at all. He’s not going to make mistakes. We can do everything again—interviews, forensics, lab work, autopsy—and it’s not going to make any difference. We need help on this one. We need the profiler.”

  Josie sighed. “It’ll wreck the fuckin’ budget, but we got in-house experts, so okay, I’ll approve it. There’s a lot of heat on this one, especially with the visitor, that Singapore girl, and I’m taking a beating so you’re going to get one.

  “Report to me every day first thing. You come up empty much longer, you’re gonna get a task force rammed down your throats, and it’ll leak like a sieve. Then the papers nail our asses to the nearest wall. Anybody gets nailed, it’s gonna be you two, got it? How long’s this profiler gonna take?”

  “We get stuff to him today, he has to study all the reports, everything. It’s all in the package, so a couple of days probably before he’s ready.”

  “VICLAS give you anything?”

  “Nothing. He’s not in the system, and there are no similar cases. I sent everything in. So there’s no match.”

  “Can we get the damned profiler here? Speed it up?”

  “I can ask,” Alan said. “But it won’t shorten the time. I’m going to request a geographic profile as well. We’ve got two sites, so we might be able to get an idea of where he’s coming from, what his anchor point is. There are a couple of software programs, Crimestat and Dragnet. They’re recent and pretty good. They can cut down the physical area we have to cover to about five percent. Sad to say, but the more crimes there are, the better the program results.”

  “If it’s software and we’ve got it, the budget can take it. So go for that one too. You been on to Singapore?”

  “Done already. The authorities are looking into her background and will forward anything they get. We already know a bit about her family, schooling, vacation plans, and we’ve checked thoroughly here and in Chinatown. We can trace her movements up to the time she disappeared, and we have the lead on the truck we think took her.”

  Josie sat back and looked at her detectives. They were both dedicated cops, she knew. They weren’t slackers. Nobody she had worked scenes better. But the pressure was building fast, and the fuckin’ politicians were already yapping to the press about justice and crap. She nodded at them.

  “You’re two of the best I’ve got. You two can’t find anything, there’s nothing to find. Keep at it, somethin’s gotta break soon. And rush that bloody profiler stuff. Push hard. Now get outta here. Remember, reports daily.”

  Alan and Spence, both looking relieved, got out fast. They’d expected worse.

  “Spence, find someone to run the geographic software, somebody who knows what he’s doing, and I’ll get this stuff off fast. If we can get a profiler in a day or so, maybe we can get ahead of upstairs and a task force.”

  Criminal investigative analysis, which is what profilers did, required a lot of stuff. Alan had already prepared a dossier with crime scene photos, autopsy photos, crime scene sketches, and the autopsy reports on both girls. The toxicology reports, all interview material, and detailed notes on the victims’ movements were also included. He sent it off with a request for priority and sat back.

  Alan looked across the desks at Spence. He watched her finish her request and sit back too, a questioning look on her face.

  “You get anywhere with the three kids?”

  “I found two of them, Jimmy and Jen. Billy’s in the wind. Those two didn’t know where he was or they wouldn’t tell me. Something’s a bit off about that one.

  “Kylie was the center. They all used her, and according to Jen, who was closer to her than the others, she loved it. She loved the sex and was overjoyed at being involved in the group. She was definitely bisexual, and she was promiscuous. Billy ran that little bunch like a cult. Lots of ritual stuff, like the special place by the river, the reefers, and the tattoos. She was definitely attracted to Bomber, the biker who did the tats, and according to Jen again, she was always trying to get out there to have sex with him.

  “One thing they all think, and so do I, is that that’s where she was going when she left the house on Prideaux. She had no car, so we’re not sure how she was doing this, but Jen thinks she had a ride lined up, another biker. Wouldn’t surprise me if she was doing him too. I’m trying to find him. And that tattoo she had, the special one, that’s an interesting thing. I got Jen to sketch it for me along with the one they all got. I got a copy here.”

  Spence bent down, opened her bottom drawer, and took out a piece of eight by eleven paper. The tattoo had been drawn on the figure of a girl. Jen had some talent and the drawing was detailed and well executed. The teardrops were certainly suggestive.

  “We got ritual comin’ out our ears here,” she said. “Think about it. We got the little cult of four, the special place, the markings, the drugs, then we got a killer or two, the special places, the repeated posing and mutilation, and we got the ink drawings. We’ve even got that stuff from the church. This whole thing seems to hang on pattern, repetition, indoctrination even. Cult stuff. We need some
body who knows about this kind of thing, somebody who can maybe help us understand what the hell’s goin’ on. Add somebody like that to the profiler or whatever the hell we call ‘em.”

  Alan looked up from the sketch. “Criminal investigative analyst, that’s what we call them. I asked the other two to find us a cult guy. Let’s see what they come up with. We gotta remember, though, that the Chinese girl wasn’t in any cult that we know of. But she got taken from the same area.”

  Alan called Isabella, learned that Harry and Sabina weren’t in yet, and reminded her to send them out to the Morell Sanctuary and to bring any dope they had on cults. He and Spence would be waiting.

  Spence drove. On the way, they talked about the two cases.

  “We don’t have anything more than we had a few days ago. And we’ve been over and over what we’ve collected. Whoever this guy is, he isn’t getting rattled at all. There’s been no escalation in violence, no shortened interval, nothing to suggest he’s losing control of anything. If the timetable holds, we can expect another girl within the week.”

  “And in the bloody bush again,” Spence added. “What is it about the bush? Why there, beyond the fact that it’s private? It’s difficult to get to where the bodies were, and any girl taken that far out would react, I’d think. But there were no signs of resistance, no defensive wounds that we could find.”

  “And the tox screens came back negative, so they weren’t drugged. Makes you think they went willingly. Or they were taken to the bush after the fact, maybe killed somewhere else, then transported. But if that were the case, we would have had some indication like too little blood, given the evisceration. And that wasn’t the case. So if they were taken to the bush after, they were still alive. And the ME found no indication that either girl had been beaten unconscious or molested. It’s hard to be definitive about it, what with the predators and the length of time the bodies were in the bush. If they went somewhere voluntarily and were somehow subdued and transported to the bush from wherever that was, we haven’t gotten a whiff of it anywhere.”

  “Shit, Alan. We got nothin’. Let’s see if the privates dug up anything useful.”

  The Morell Sanctuary was a large wooded area full of ponds and bogs and forested ridges that backed on to Westwood Lake, a popular lake in the summer and even used in the winter by joggers and dog walkers. The lake had a trail all the way around. At six to seven kilometers, it gave everyone who used it a good workout.

  The parking lot of the sanctuary was just a gravel area that was a bit soggy in the rainy winter months, but serviceable. Late summer and fall, it was dry and hard-packed. Spence downshifted and hit the drive, parking at the far end away from the trail entrance.

  ◆◆◆

  Harry and Sabina parked in the lot across from the office. It originally serviced the adjacent building, but since its conversion to a professional building, only part was required for the offices. The rest was rentable, and Harry had had two spots for a long time. Some of the remaining spots were filled with white Mercedes vans that were left overnight. No one knew who owned them. What they also didn’t know was that this was the lot Mary had used at night to transform herself into Cat, and that the killers lying in the grass above had watched her do it.

  Isabella heard them coming and was at her desk waiting as they came in the door.

  “I got those detectives calling again. They want to meet at the sanctuary now, and you’re to take all the info you have on those cult guys you were supposed to find. They’re out there waiting. You were supposed to get there half an hour ago, so you’d best get at it. You got anything at all, I’d be happy to print it.” She smiled that predator smile of hers, index finger tapping the desk blotter.

  Harry looked at Sabina, flipped up his eyebrows in question, and grinned. “You’re up, Sweets. I’ll go make coffee.”

  Sabina stomped off to her office. Isabella heard the two of them through the door.

  “I made the coffee already, and those donuts are reasonably fresh, brought ‘em in this morning, probably before you were up. So you got nothing to do until she gets her ass in gear, unless you wanna do something useful.”

  “I think coffee and a donut would be good. Are they cinnamon?”

  “I ever bring anything else?”

  “Well, sometimes when we have visitors and have to put on an appearance of diligence you sort of mix them and I don’t get as many as I’d like. But I forgive you for that since you’re just trying to help.”

  As he said that, Harry wisely closed the office door. He really didn’t have anything to do before Sabina got her stuff, so he drank coffee and ate donuts, three of them. Licking his fingers to get the sugar off, he sat at his desk and wrote a note about the Vancouver trip and Red, so the data could be entered in the file. He ignored the intercom and walked to the door.

  “Give us a copy of this, will you, Izzy? I’ll take it with me when we leave. Oh, and I licked the pages so there’s no sugar to make them sticky.”

  Harry ducked back into the office and closed the door again.

  A moment later, he went to see what Sabina had dug up. He leaned against the doorframe and watched her for a moment while she pulled up screens and printed stuff. “You got nothing to do, H, you can gather up the stuff from the printer and organize it. I’m almost finished.”

  Harry gathered the printouts and read as he organized. “So we got a guy at Simon Fraser who can help? We should have seen him while we were over there.”

  Sabina shrugged. “Didn’t know he’d be in-house until we got back. Besides, he sent a pile of stuff for us to read and a bloody bibliography. That’s what you’ve got there. We can message him anytime, he says, so we can do that when we meet Alan and Spence. Okay, I’m done. We’re outta here.”

  Isabella had the printout ready when they were leaving the office. She sat at her desk holding the printed notes in one hand and her head in the other while she looked with some amusement at her two wards. That’s how she saw them. She knew they were good at what they did, but they were fuck-ups as well and needed someone to keep them organized and focused. She was better than he was, but then she was a woman—well, mostly anyway. How she lived with Harry, Isabella had no idea.”

  Harry leaned down, grabbed the typed copy, planted a big one on her forehead, and headed for the door. Sabina was already on the stairs.

  He followed her across the road to the car. As she opened the driver side door, she pulled him back, pointed to a box containing a carafe of coffee, paper cups, and more donuts. “This is for them. You’ve already had yours.”

  She drove, so they got out of town faster than usual.

  The drive out River Road was uneventful. They passed only three cars, and Sabina turned into the lot in good time. The Camaro was at the far end and they parked beside it. All four of them got out at the same time and walked up to the deserted specimen building, Harry carrying the box to an outdoor table with attached benches. They each grabbed a donut and Harry poured coffee.

  “You get anything useful on the girl in Chinatown?” Alan asked.

  Harry nodded. “We got a kind of confirmation about what she was doing on her holiday. She partied every night, and hard. We found a witness who saw her at two different private parties on the two nights she was in town. Apparently, she was sexually active with whoever picked her up, and a lot did. And she dressed the part, short skirts, lots of cleavage, heels. We think she was into soft drugs, nothing hard that our source knew about anyway, and into both men and women. Our witness is available, but antagonistic to being questioned. We got what we got because of Sabina, and of course our contact in Chinatown. I’ve summarized everything here.”

  Harry passed over what he’d been holding, and Alan put it in his briefcase.

  Spence looked at Sabina and thought that maybe that’s part of the question answered. She knows the street. Had to know the party girl somehow, otherwise she’d be dry.

  “You guys were supposed to get somebody on cults,”
Spence said. “Anything happenin’ there? We need that input now. We’ve got a profiler coming and any data on that, he needs yesterday.”

  Sabina smiled at her, knowing she had Spence’s attention given what Harry had said. She could actually see the satisfaction in Spence’s body language and figured she had a bit of leeway with the woman now.

  “We’ve found a contact at Simon Fraser. His field is primarily myth and ritual. He was a student of Joseph Campbell, the famous one, but he’s now considered an authority on cults, rituals, and symbols. He sent over a bunch of stuff and a bibliography that’d choke a horse. He’s willing to come over and brief us if we cover his fee. I sent him the little we have. He’s dealt with the police before, most of it in the States because he was teaching there. He says he’s interested in this case and has dealt with some similar cases. If you guys can pay him, I’ll call him. He’s the best I’ve found.”

  Alan nodded. “We’ve sent for a profiler and he’s got everything from autopsy reports to forensics. Maybe our best bet is to get both the profiler and your cult guy here as soon as we can.”

  Alan opened his briefcase and handed Harry a file. “Here’s a copy of the material I sent our guy. You’ve already got most of it, but it’s summarized a bit better. Our boss has already authorized the profiler and I’ll submit a request for this other guy. Once I get the okay from her, I’ll talk to the professor. Can you set that up for me?”