“Like what?” Traverse asked.
“In Spence’s case, there were scratches, cuts and bruises on her face, neck and hands. And second, she was throttled. In other words, there’d been a struggle, and her assailant used his hands to strangle her. And as you recall, we found fibres, pebbles and concrete chips and dust on the body. In the case of this woman, we don’t see any signs of a struggle, and whoever killed her went to quite a lot of trouble to wash the body. We didn’t see that kind of care with Spence.”
Frayne removed his gloves with a snap and set them on a tray. He looked from Shelter to Traverse. “But it doesn’t mean it’s not the same person. Perhaps he’s got a taste for it? Refining his technique.”
When the detectives stepped outside, a storm had come and gone. The rain had cooled the city, and it was bathed in late afternoon sunshine. As Traverse waited for Shelter to pop the door lock on his side of the Crown Vic, he checked his messages. “We’re still nowhere on identifying her,” he said. “Ident came up empty on her fingerprints, and there’s nothing from missing persons.”
Driving away from the Health Sciences Centre, Shelter remembered the day Monica Spence was found. He’d gone with Traverse to a little bungalow on Langside Street, where her mother lived alone. He remembered it was a cool day, and Rose Spence wept quietly as Shelter told her what the police had found. When she’d put on her coat and was ready to leave for the morgue, she’d asked Shelter if he had children.
“A daughter. She’s fifteen.”
Rose Spence had taken one of his hands in both of hers. “I hope you never lose her.”
Back at the office, Shelter retreated to his desk to make a call to his father-in-law’s house in Gimli, an hour north of the city on the west side of Lake Winnipeg. As he dialled, Shelter thought of his daughter, her blond hair blowing in the cockpit of her grandfather’s fishing boat. He was a commercial fisherman, and this was the third summer Kelsey had been helping him.
Joan and Sig Arnason had been a rock of support when Christa fell ill, and Shelter was trying to juggle visits to the hospital and hold down his job. There just wasn’t time for Kelsey. They’d kept her in Gimli during the summer months, bringing her down often to see Christa until it was over. And then Joan had come to Winnipeg to stay with them through the autumn and the dark, frigid months of the winter, helping him get Kelsey through the school year. He knew he couldn’t ask her to do that again this year. How was he going to handle the needs of a fifteen-year-old by himself?
As always, his mother-in-law answered the telephone. Shelter knew it was her habit in the summer to go through sliding doors onto the deck while talking and look out over the vast, grey lake.
“Hello, Mike. How are you?”
“Not so bad, Joan.”
“Sig and Kelsey are out fishing.” She had a gravelly, low-pitched voice, even though she’d given up cigarettes years before.
Shelter pictured his father-in-law with his full head of white hair, his gloved hands gripping the steering wheel, Kelsey stationed beside him in the Plexiglas shelter at the rear of the boat. He was looking forward to getting out of the city and seeing her.
“I thought they might have stayed in today,” he said. “It’s been stormy down here. I hope they haven’t gone too far.”
“They’ll be back soon.”
Joan Arnason was keeping the tone light. Lake Winnipeg was shallow, like a saucer. Storms could whip up waves high enough to easily capsize a small boat.
“There can’t be much fish this late in the season.”
“No, less and less.” Joan paused. “I wanted to talk to you about something. Kelsey has been asking about staying with us when school starts in the fall.”
Shelter was shocked. Even though he’d been worried about taking care of her alone when she returned to the city in late August, he’d never considered the possibility she’d stay in Gimli. Where would she go to school? What about her friends in the city? And, more important: why didn’t she want to be with him?
“We were surprised too,” Joan said in response to the silence at the other end of the line.
“When did she come out with this?”
“The other day. We said we’d have to talk it over with you.”
Shelter was reeling. Kelsey was going into grade ten, a critical time in her education. Shelter shook his head at the thought of her going to a small, rural high school far from her friends. “What’s the high school like up there?”
“It has a good reputation,” Joan said. “But let’s not talk about the details now. I just wanted to warn you.”
“I’ll be there tomorrow. I’ll talk to her then.”
“Try not to worry.”
He ended the call and sighed. Kelsey preferred to stay with two old people and go to a strange high school? He couldn’t fathom it. Shelter had come to expect Kelsey to be cold and distant to him; it had been that way since Christa died. But he couldn’t accept her moving away from him. He would need Joan’s help in talking sense to her. He’d always had a warm relationship with his mother-in-law, whose caring nature made up for Sig Arnason’s distant, aloof personality. Shelter had grown even closer to her over the months when Christa was in treatment and afterward.
Christa had collapsed one night in the kitchen, cleaning up after dinner, her muscles twitching and contracting. She’d even stopped breathing for a few terrifying seconds. Kneeling beside her, Shelter had been at a loss to know what to do. He could only hold her hand as Kelsey looked on in horror. When Christa came to, she was confused and suffering from a terrible headache. She’d wanted to go to bed, but the ambulance was already on its way. A brain scan the next day found a malignant tumour, and the cancer had already spread to other organs. Shelter had told her he should have made her go to the hospital when she’d complained of blurred vision and headaches, but Christa shook her head and hugged him. “It’s nobody’s fault, Mike.” She was dead within a year.
Shelter stared out the window at rush-hour traffic flowing south on Main Street toward the intersection with Portage Avenue as he refocused his mind on the investigation. He needed to go over every detail of the Spence investigation, looking to fit them together with this latest murder to establish a connection or rule it out.
He realized Detective Jennifer Kane was calling to him from her desk. “The officer working the front desk says there’s a woman who wants to talk to someone about the woman at Omand’s Creek.”
Shelter took the stairs down to the main floor and followed a long hall to a narrow rectangle of a room, where a uniformed officer sat behind Plexiglas. Beyond, three people sat in a public waiting area. Two Indigenous men were off to the side and, almost directly in front of the officer’s station, sat an elderly white woman. She wore a pair of dark-framed, rectangular glasses. Her silver hair was cropped close to her small head. Her knees were drawn tightly together and her feet pulled under the steel chair.
“It’s her,” the duty officer said with a nod to the woman who sat clutching an umbrella across her lap. With just a small turn of the head, the woman could have watched Shelter and the officer talking, but she kept her eyes fixed on a spot on the wall in front of her.
“Her name’s Violet Rempel,” the officer said. “She says she might know your victim. She wants to talk to someone investigating it.”
“What’s the connection?” Shelter asked.
“No idea. She wouldn’t say anything else. I tried. Believe me.”
The lock on the door to the waiting area gave way with a loud click. “Ms. Rempel? I’m Detective Sergeant Michael Shelter. Will you come with me, please?”
Her dress was green, with a design of tiny white daisies. The neckline was high, and the hem ran below her knees. In the windowless interview room, Violet Rempel took a seat and placed her handbag and umbrella on the floor beside her.
“Now, Ms. Rempel, you told my colleague you know something about the woman who was found this morning?”
“Yes. I saw the news at no
on, and right away I got ready to come up to Winnipeg.”
“Come to Winnipeg?”
“My husband and I live in Steinbach.”
Shelter knew the prosperous farming centre of Steinbach well. About sixty kilometres southeast of Winnipeg, it had been settled, beginning in the late 1800s, by successive waves of Mennonites, conservative Anabaptists who spoke the Plautdietsch or Low German dialect and been much persecuted in Europe and Russia.
“You drove in from Steinbach this afternoon?”
“It’s about Crystal. She called me. She was very upset.”
Shelter interrupted her. “Crystal? I’m sorry. I don’t understand. What does this have to do with the woman at Omand’s Creek?”
“She may be my daughter.”
THREE
Violet Rempel muffled a dry cough with her hand, reached for her handbag, undid the golden clasp, and rummaged until she found a handkerchief.
“Why do you think the woman we found is your daughter?” Shelter asked.
“Crystal telephoned me two days ago. She was very upset over the death of her birth mother. It was a terrible thing. She killed herself here in Winnipeg.”
“Crystal is adopted?”
“Yes. We couldn’t have children, and it was quite easy to adopt a Native child in those days.”
“Ms. Rempel, could you tell me about this telephone call?”
“Crystal was very upset. She couldn’t speak in a normal way, and she wouldn’t answer my questions. She was crying, and she asked me something in Low German. We taught it to her when she was very young, but she doesn’t use it anymore, not for years. She said, ‘Help Nicki if anything happens to me.’”
“Who’s Nicki?”
“Crystal’s half-sister. We didn’t raise her — Crystal’s birth mother did. But Crystal feels a responsibility for her.”
Shelter said, “And you heard on the radio about the woman we found?”
“Yes. I made something for dinner and called our neighbour to come be with my husband. He’s not well.”
“Crystal has been in trouble in Winnipeg?”
“Oh my goodness, no,” she said. “Crystal finished second in her class at the law school at the University of Manitoba. There was an article about her in the Free Press.”
Shelter was shocked. She wasn’t at all who he thought she was. “Do you have a picture of her?”
She opened her purse and produced a large brown envelope. The image was in a cheap black frame. It had been taken in bright sunshine on what looked to be the back deck of a house. The young woman had been caught in a moment of high spirits. Her head was tilted back, and she was laughing about something, with her wide mouth open to show a set of perfectly even teeth. She was dressed in a pink T-shirt and cut-off jeans. Her black hair was cropped at the shoulders. Shelter had no doubt it was the same woman he’d seen on Jonathan Frayne’s autopsy table that afternoon. He was careful to keep his face impassive as he examined the photo. But when he looked up, Rempel had closed her eyes and bowed her head. She raised a hand to her lips and said softly, “Oh dear.”
“How old is Crystal, Ms. Rempel?”
She turned her head so that her chin touched her left shoulder and opened her eyes. “It’s her. Isn’t it?”
Shelter exhaled slowly. “Ms. Rempel, I’m sorry to inform you that your daughter may indeed be dead. We will need you to come to the Health Sciences Centre.”
“To identify the body.”
“Yes, ma’am. I’m sorry. Would you like to call your husband?”
“No. Thank you. His mind is gone.”
Violet Rempel asked to use the bathroom after identifying her daughter’s body. Shelter and Traverse waited for her, leaning against a wall as nurses and orderlies bustled up and down the corridor. Traverse turned his head and almost in a whisper said, “So, a lawyer.”
Shelter glanced at his partner and gave a quick nod. He left unsaid how wrong they’d been in suspecting she was a prostitute.
Violet Rempel approached them, ready to be driven back to the station. She hadn’t cried during the identification or the interview afterward. She sat with her hands folded and answered in that high-pitched voice, studying the face of Shelter or Traverse when one or the other asked something.
“You say Crystal was upset over the death of her birth mother,” Shelter said. “She killed herself? When was this?”
“Quite recently, I think. Crystal had become close to her, but we weren’t, of course. We would hear things from time to time from Crystal. It had been so many years of the drinking and drugs. We were just waiting for the day, really.”
As the old woman spoke, a picture came to Shelter’s mind of her in the first row of a church choir, singing hymns in a quavering soprano. “What was her birth mother’s name?”
“Anne Alexander,” she said. After a moment, she began again unprompted. “We were happy until Crystal started school. The other children were awful. You know how they can be? I’m sorry. What is your name again?”
“Detective Sergeant Michael Shelter, ma’am. Yes. I have a daughter. Children can be very cruel.”
“Oh my, yes. Any little difference, especially the girls. And the school wouldn’t do anything about it in those days. Not really. I tried, but it was always ‘Kids will be kids.’ And the parents were no better, filling the children’s heads with all kinds of ideas about Natives.” She looked down at her folded hands and added in a quieter tone, “We couldn’t have known it would be like that for us, for her. We just wanted a baby.”
As Shelter took notes, he thought about the girl growing up in the small Mennonite town. He searched his mind but couldn’t think of a First Nations community in that part of southern Manitoba. She would have been alone. The old woman had gone silent. She ran a hand over the material of her dress to smooth a wrinkle that wasn’t there. When she looked up, Shelter saw her eyes were light blue behind the lenses of her glasses. Although her skin was smooth, she was older than he’d first thought.
“We didn’t know Anne until she contacted us when Crystal was still a little girl. She’d found out who we were somehow and started calling us — wanting Crystal back.” Shelter wondered how Anne Alexander could have discovered who had adopted her baby. He put it down to a bureaucratic screw-up of some kind.
“She even showed up on our doorstep once with her Nicki in tow,” Violet Rempel said. “She was crying and screaming. But we knew Crystal was better off with us.”
“How did you know?” Traverse asked. “Maybe she needed to know her sister and birth mother.” It was delivered in an even tone, but the challenge was unmistakable.
The woman reacted as if the statement was absurd. Her eyes narrowed, and for the first time Shelter heard steel in her voice.
“Just look at how she turned out.”
It was close to nine by the time they’d finished interviewing Rempel. Crystal had been twenty-nine years old. She’d worked at an Indigenous centre called Anishinaabe Awakening in the city’s North End. Her boyfriend, a man named Moses Kent, worked there too.
Rempel didn’t know much about Kent. She’d given them Crystal’s cellphone number and her address in the city centre near the legislature buildings. She also knew Nicki worked in the bar at the City Hotel.
The streets were quiet for a Friday night. Only a few other cars cruised downtown. As he steered the car across the midtown bridge, Shelter glanced down at the Assiniboine in the moonlight, gauging how much the clay-coloured water had gone down since the spring crest. The name Winnipeg came from the Cree word for murky water. The city had grown up around the confluence of the Assiniboine and Red rivers, a meeting place for Indigenous people for thousands of years. Now it was the bridges that were the essential transportation links in the city.
He glanced over at Traverse, who was playing with his phone. “What’d you make of that old lady?”
“The kid gets scooped and dropped into an alien place, cut off from her people, and this lady won’t even let
her mom see her.”
“You don’t know how it went down. The girl wouldn’t have ended up there if she didn’t need a home.”
Traverse shrugged and looked at Shelter for the first time. “Question is what kind of home. They wanted a kid, and it was easy to get this one. That’s what she said. Did they give one minute’s thought to what it means to take a child away from her family, away from her community? I doubt it.”
Traverse looked down at his phone and finished punching in what Shelter assumed would be his wife’s number.
Shelter had seen so many Indigenous kids horribly abused and left to roam the streets untethered from any authority. It was hard for him to imagine how Crystal wouldn’t be better off in a farming community with a middle-class family. But he knew so many of the Indigenous adoptions into white families from that period had gone horribly wrong — kids running away, falling into addiction, crime, mental illness and suicide. It was why they’d put a stop to it.
As Shelter drove, he listened to Traverse update his wife on his day. He was always texting or calling Janice. They’d been together since high school and now had three children, all under seven. They lived just outside the perimeter highway south of the city on a small piece of land, where they raised horses. Shelter knew the demands of the children, erratic hours at work and responsibility of keeping up the farm all weighed on Traverse, but his relationship with Janice seemed to keep him grounded.
Shelter and Christa hadn’t had the same kind of relationship. He’d call her only if he was going to be working late. He didn’t want her worrying any more than she already was. He was even more circumspect after he was shot by a teenager eight years earlier when he was still in uniform. He was covering the rear of a house in the Garden City neighbourhood, where an elderly couple had been taken hostage in a home invasion. The teenager came flying out the back door firing a .22-calibre rifle. Shelter took a round in the shoulder before his partner shot the kid dead on the deck. Shelter had been off work and in rehab for three months after the shooting. Christa took it as a blessing in disguise, having him home for that time. Afterward, he’d always said things were going smoothly, even when he’d just come off a job where he’d drawn his gun and broken down a door to make an arrest.
Omand's Creek: A gripping crime thriller packed with mystery and suspense Page 2