Sabina nodded. “He’ll expect your call. I’ll feed him what you’ve got here if that’s okay.”
Alan and Spence both nodded and they returned to their cars. They followed each other back into town, and Sabina peeled off to drive the stroll on the way to the office.
◆◆◆
“We’ve got a third one,” Spence said to Alan as she hung up the phone. “The manager of the Modern downtown just reported his waitress missing. The desk sent it up here. She’s been gone for two days. He says he’s checked her apartment, no answer there, and she’s never missed work before. With the missing girls all over the news, he’s worried something’s happened to her. Wants us to file a misper.”
Alan held up one finger and stayed on the phone. He nodded, said thanks, and hung up.
“The profile’s on its way, and the profiler himself is right behind it. We’re to meet Harbour Air around dinnertime. He’ll call. Okay, what about this girl?”
“The sheet’s downstairs. Her name’s Dina Onetree. She’s here from Tofino, worked in a bar there. She’s been at the Modern for a few weeks. The manager said one of his girls told him she also worked nights at the jazz bar over on Front across from Pacifica. You wanna start with the manager or the apartment? It’s on Prideaux, just down the street at Franklyn.”
“The apartment, then the manager, and the girl if she’s at work today.”
Spence got the unmarked from the lot, Alan climbed in the passenger seat, and she booted it down Prideaux. The building on the corner had its front entrance on Prideaux and Spence left the car in front beside a hydrant.
“You do that on purpose, don’t you?”
“Hey, we’re cops. It’s one of the few perks.”
Alan sighed, shook his head, and climbed out. They rang the super’s apartment, announced themselves, and waited. A man in his sixties came to the door dressed in a green coverall carrying a ring of keys. He pushed open the front door and the two detectives entered.
“Do you know Dina Onetree, a Native girl, maybe seventeen, eighteen, lives on the ground floor? In 103, it says on your directory.”
“I’ve seen her going in and out, don’t know her though. She’s only been here for a couple of weeks. I’ve got her lease in the back office if you want to see it.”
Alan nodded. “We’ll need a copy, but we need to see her apartment. She hasn’t turned up for work and her manager’s worried. We want to make sure she’s not in there injured or sick.” He gestured toward the hall and the super led them down to the apartment door.
“Don’t I need a warrant or something? I don’t want to do anything I shouldn’t.”
Spence glared at him. “We’re the police and we’re askin’ you to open the door. We’re being polite here. You want to do it another way, we can do that too.”
“No, no. No need to do that, I can open it. I just thought, you know, that I’d check. I gotta answer to the owners you know.”
“We know that, and we appreciate your problem, but the girl might be hurt or worse. You don’t want to be responsible for that, do you?” Alan smiled and motioned toward the lock.
The man sighed, shook his head, and opened the door. Spence looked at him and he stepped back, hands out.
“We’ll let you know when we’re finished. Stay here and make sure no one else comes in.”
The two detectives slowly walked through a small living room towards a narrow hallway and checked the kitchen off to the side. Everything looked neat and ordered. They checked the bathroom. Nothing looked out of place there either. Alan left the bedroom for Spence while he checked a small desk for notes or a diary. Nothing. They retraced their steps and began another light search, but they didn’t care much about that. They wanted the girl, and they had to move fast if she’d been abducted. There was nothing indicating she had packed for a trip. They took one last look around, then left.
“Thank you for your cooperation. She’s not inside, so we can eliminate the apartment. You were right to let us make certain.”
Before they left, Spence and Alan went to the office with the super, picked up a copy of the girl’s lease and the credit check the company had run on her, and gave the super a card with instructions to call if he saw her.
They drove to the restaurant. Spence left the unmarked in a delivery zone, slapped the police sign in the window, and grinned at Alan.
They talked to the day manager at the Modern and learned that he’d called the night manager and she was on her way in. The girl, he said, was at a table in the back and they could all talk there.
The day manager was a young guy named Stan and the waitress was Sandy. Spence got their full names, addresses, and phone numbers.
“Okay, what can you tell us about this girl, Dina?” Alan asked. “What was she like, how well did you know her, where did she like to hang out, stuff like that. Sandy, how about you start, since you probably knew her better and talked to her more.”
“We hung out together a bit, you know, but I really didn’t know her very well. She liked working here, and she liked the jazz bar too. She’s pretty private, you know, doesn’t do clubs or hang out anywhere, and she spends her off time wandering around in the south end down past the factory, at least that’s what she says. I know she came from Tofino and worked in a bar there, I just can’t remember the name of it. She’s great, you know, she always shares stuff, like late work and stuff, but I don’t know anything personal about her really. Some of the other girls, though, they don’t much like her because she gets better tips and some of the customers ask for her, so they kind of resent her, you know. She always helps out. Besides, our tips are shared, so if she gets better ones, we all do better too. She’s never late for work and she doesn’t miss, ever, so when she didn’t turn up for her shift twice, I talked to him.”
She nodded at the manager. “I don’t know any more than she does, but she’s right. Dina never misses and always pitches in when we need help,” he said.
Stan looked at the floor. “She has something, that girl, something special. She brings customers back, they all like her. But it’s more than that, she has a kind of flavour about her, I can’t describe it, but you can’t help noticing her. I hope she’s alright.”
“There’s no reason to think she isn’t, is there, that you know of? Nobody who paid more than normal attention to her, nobody who tried to pick her up or anything like that?”
Spence glanced at Stan and Sandy, who both shook their heads.
“It gets busy around here sometimes, so I can’t be a hundred percent, and everybody notices her, hard not to, but I can’t think of anybody who created a fuss, you know. Sandy, what do you think?”
“Never happened. I mean guys really look at her, you know, but just because they like her a lot, and not just the guys. The only people who don’t like her much are a couple of the girls here, but that’s just, you know, resentment because she’s a terrific waitress.”
“There’s Charlotte,” Stan said as a dark-haired woman walked in the front door and made her way back to them. Alan introduced himself and Spence and asked about Dina.
“She started on the night shift with me, but one of the other girls complained about her, so I shifted her to days to avoid any problems. I only had her on for a couple of nights, so I can’t tell you much about her. Why? What’s happened?”
“She hasn’t been in for two days and we can’t find her, and with what’s been going on in town, we got worried and called these guys.” Stan nodded at Alan and Spence.
“You think something’s happened to her? I mean, you guys are plain clothes, so what? You’re detectives or something?”
Spence looked at Charlotte. “Or something. We treat all reports like this seriously until we find out what happened, but most of the time there’s a logical explanation.”
None of the three could add anything more. Alan and Spence probed until they were sure they had what was there, then thanked them and left each with a business card. Outside, Spence wal
ked up the street a bit away from the restaurant windows and turned to Alan.
“The jazz bar isn’t open for hours yet, and we know damn near nothing about the girl. That was next to useless. The apartment super knows dick. Where do you want to go from here?”
“We get her face out to the troops, keep looking for her. We got a photo?”
“I’m tracing her in Tofino, calling the bar owner and the manager. She’s got no car, so no licence photo, not that one’d be any good anyway the way those things look. I’ve got her apartment lease stuff, and I got her employment form from Stan. The Tofino bar she worked in was… I got it here.”
She pulled the paper from the Modern from her pocket. “Jack’s Waterfront Pub, and the night manager’s a guy named Earl, so I gotta get on to them. If we get anything there, we can move on it today. Let’s grab the car and go back, get the paperwork started and I’ll make these calls.”
They walked back to the illegally parked unmarked, and Spence took off up Fitzwilliam to the station.
The profile had arrived and was waiting on Alan’s desk. It was thick, and Alan wondered what could be in it that required so much paper. It looked thicker than his murder book. He shook his head and with a sigh, sat down to read.
Josie wasn’t in, but he was sure she’d have her own copy. Probably at the brass table again for something. That’s usually why she was out. Politics, always politics. Probably about this case. No, definitely about this case. It was already headlines in the local rags and the rest of the BC papers. It’d go national soon if it hadn’t already. Alan started on the profile and left Spence to trace Dina’s history.
XVIII
Dina had left Skidegate in the Queen Charlotte Islands, now known as Haida Gwaii, when she was seventeen. She’d travelled south by fishing boat to Tofino on the west coast of the big island. She was out of school, which she never liked anyway, and was picking up odd jobs at the inns and local restaurants waiting tables. She was staying with a relative, an old man who lived by himself in a small house at the tip of town near the water off Main Street. When she wasn’t working, she’d walk down to First Street past Fisheries and Oceans to the Common Loaf Bakery for coffee and buns. Then she’d walk to Tonquin Beach and sit on the rocks and look out over the Pacific. She loved the quiet.
Dina was eighteen. She was beautiful and slender, with glossy dark hair. She had a presence that was hard to miss. She had a kind of sensual aura, like a subtle perfume permeating the air around her; it came not just from the way she walked, the way she carried herself, but from something inside, something quiet and dark. She wasn’t shy though, even if she did seem unaware of the mark she made.
She liked the looks she got working the late shift at Jack’s Waterfront Pub on Campbell Street. She liked the men there whose eyes followed her around the tables, especially the young quiet ones who drank beer and left her big tips and got drunk without getting rowdy and hitting on her. She liked them best. The older ones, the ones with roaming hands when she served their tables, she could handle. The hotheads didn’t last long because Curly threw them out. He was a big, black- haired, taciturn Native, over six feet tall and solid. He didn’t talk, just walked over to tables when there was trouble and looked at the offenders. That was enough. It was his eyes; they were black in the center and merciless. They were dead eyes without any kind of humanity. If you were too drunk to understand that, he’d simply pick you up and drop you outside the front door. Dina liked him too.
She’d been in Tofino over a year now, and although she liked the town enough, she was getting restless again. Something inside her wouldn’t leave her alone, something drove her away from places she loved like the beaches and the great forests. She knew she’d have to go soon or she’d go strange again, like when she’d left Haida Gwaii. That time, she’d gone missing for a week, truant from school, out of Skidegate, buried in the forest at a lone cabin with one of her uncles who didn’t care about things the white man had brought.
Now it was starting again, she knew, and she’d leave once more for another place that was away from here. Dina wasn’t happy with any of it. This thing inside her took her to places she didn’t know, places where she’d have to learn all over again, find work again, settle again. Somehow, she knew she’d be doing this all of her life.
She had walked all the way to Middle Beach past the end of MacKenzie Road trying to tire herself enough so she could think without being distracted. Beaches always helped her that way, gave her the peace she couldn’t find inside herself. She climbed up a huge boulder that rested at the beach end, using the gnarled roots that hung down around the rock face like fingers. Her toes found holds in the veiny crevices the sea had made in the soft part of the rock. She watched the Pacific rising and falling in a swell, so it seemed as if the sea were breathing, its watery lungs filling with each undulating rise and emptying with each long trough. She heard the water’s sighing exhalations, soft and slow, like someone sleeping. She felt herself in rhythm with the water, and she lost herself in what she saw and felt. She sat that way for a long time. The Pacific was not often in this mood.
When Dina left Middle Beach before dark and in plenty of time to take her shift at Jack’s, she knew she’d say her goodbyes. She’d talk to her uncle, explain it to him, pack her small bag, and with her tips and her wages in hand, catch the late morning bus to Harbour City on the other side of the island. She’d never been there, never left the west coast, so the idea both excited and frightened her.
That night at work, she was especially nice to the few men she admired, to the quiet ones who drank beer at the back tables, as a kind of goodbye. When her shift ended, she helped clean up, and when Earl came out of the office to tally the tills, she talked to him.
“Earl, I gotta leave tomorrow for Harbour City, so I’m giving notice. I know it’s short, but I didn’t know until today that I had to go. Can I pick up my pay tonight or in the morning? I’m gonna need all I got to keep going until I find something over there.”
Earl looked at her in surprise. “That’s pretty sudden. Anything happen so you have to go? You got family over there?”
“I just gotta go is all. I can’t explain it, but I gotta go.”
Earl understood her need. He’d been around the Haida all his life. He looked at her and smiled in that slow way he had, his eyes kind and sorrowful at the same time. “You’ve been good here, Dina, and we’ll miss you, but if you gotta, you gotta. I guess I can pay you now.”
“Elsie’s got a cousin looking for work, I know ‘cause she told me last week, and she’s on in the morning, Elsie is, so you could ask her about it. I think her cousin’s name’s Lorna. I know she’s a bit older than me, and Elsie said she really needed something soon and she’d take evenings too. So maybe she’d be good.”
Earl patted Dina on the shoulder. “Come back to the office and I’ll get you your pay for the week and a bit extra to help out. You come back here, you see
me. You’re a good girl for this place, and I’ll take you back anytime. I’ll talk to Elsie in the morning. And thanks for telling me.”
Dina stood outside the bar in the night air and looked around. She liked working here and she’d miss it. She liked Earl too, he was good to her. She turned and looked at the bar and the dark water around it, then turned again and walked back to her uncle’s place.
◆◆◆
The next morning, Dina walked down to the Common Loaf Bake Shop and had breakfast. She lingered over coffee as she always did and watched the street from the big front window. She could see over the trees to the ocean if she raised her eyes. Her uncle had raised no objection to her leaving. He understood her need and knew she had to find whatever she searched for in her own way.
The bus stopped in front of the library. Then it would head for Port Alberni, the four-hour drive through the mountains over the big ridge and down through Cathedral Glen. Dina knew this from talking to others who’d gone there and by studying the big map in the library. She got
a couple of the large muffins to eat on the trip.
Once the bus came, the driver left the door open so whoever was going back with him could just get on anytime and wait. That’s what Dina did. She sat near the back by the window so she could watch the land pass.
Slowly the bus began to fill, and the driver returned and began to collect fares. Dina had her money ready.
The hiss of the air brakes as they were released was exciting and saddening both. The bus accelerated, travelled around the block, and moved off out of town on Campbell. Soon the road became the Pacific Coast Highway, and then at the turn inland just past Long Beach, the road became Highway 4. Eventually, it came out of the mountains and ran along the side of Sproat Lake, and on the big turn, Dina could see Port Alberni. She knew about the city from the library, but it was a different thing to pass into it. There were many more cars and a lot more houses and big malls with enormous parking lots. The bus stopped and lost a few people
and added some others.
Soon the forest came back and the road twisted and turned to avoid the great rock ridges. Dina smiled at the difficulty the road had in getting through the last of the mountain passes. The lakes had made it easy for the road in some places. The great trees and the central mountains, however, had made it bend and twist to get away.
Highway 19 was something Dina had never seen before. It was many lanes wide with grass in between them in places as if the road wanted to stretch itself. And it was powerful, this road. It ignored the forest and the rocks and went straight on its way, spanning waterways and ignoring obstacles. Then she saw the tentacles of the city stretching out to greet them, throwing up more malls and parking lots, and beside the highway, tracts of houses, more than Dina had ever seen in one place, more even than she’d ever seen in her whole life.
The bus left the big highway and plowed into the side of the city. It pulled in beside other buses lined up at special spots like piglets at a sow’s belly. Dina got off with the others and stood on the platform, wondering what to do next. This was as far as she’d planned.
NIGHT MOVES: The Stroll Murders Page 24