by Dale Mayer
“He’s good,” Owen stated. “A bit like a terrier with a bone, honestly. So at least you can rest easy with that part in his hands.”
“I know. It’s just frustrating. As soon as I found out where the crime scene was, all I could think was that it was Candy. And even when the DB was found in the same room, where I found Candy earlier to interview her, something was wrong with the entire picture.”
“That’s because you were convinced it was Candy,” Rodney said.
“I know, and I get that, but it still feels wrong. And, yes, another young woman is dead, and we need to look after her and find out what the hell happened to Paula, but still, I was really expecting it to be Candy.”
“And now you’re afraid that both of them are dead?” Andy asked her.
“Yes, that’s exactly what I’m afraid of. It was stunning to discover Candy’s room had been stripped. I doubt she packed it all up herself, as she made no mention of that when I was interviewing her. In fact, she wanted to go back to her douchebag boyfriend Brandon, so why would she leave college and her access to him? So, who did pack up Candy’s stuff and put it in Paula’s dorm room?” She looked to her team members. “And now where are Paula’s possessions?”
“Between RCMP and Forensics, their teams will find out what they can and will share it with us. Then we’ll go from there,” Lilliana said.
Kate nodded, and just then Colby came in and called everybody into a meeting that included discussions about vacations and overtime. Taking a vacation was something she couldn’t even begin to contemplate, when she was working all these cases.
When Colby’s meeting with the team was finally over, and everybody was back at their desks, Kate turned to Rodney. “How do you handle leaving for a holiday, when you know so much shit is going on?”
“Easy. Because I accept that it’ll still be here when I get back, along with a whole pile of new stuff too.” He gazed at her. “Remember. We have to be rested, nourished, and ready to fight the good fight, or we’re no good to anybody else. You have to take these breaks when you can. Vacation time is also to remember that you have a family and a larger reason for your existence. More is out there that’s worth fighting for.”
She nodded. “I get that in theory. I guess I’m still struggling with figuring out how to solve all these cases.”
“One at a time and we’ll get there.” Rodney patted her arm. “Actually this case is moving along at a good clip. We might get this sorted and closed in ten days, a week even.” At her snort, he continued, “Faster than the pedophile case, for sure. Even faster than the jumper case. Remember how long it took us to see those were assisted suicides? We’re farther along here in a matter of three days than one week into the jumpers’ cases.” When she remained quiet, Rodney said, “Right?”
“Okay, I’ll give you that, but …”
“No buts. You care, and that’s good, but you must keep it in check. Otherwise you’ll burn out.” She frowned, but he shook his head. “Don’t even look at me like that. We all care. Don’t think we don’t,” he muttered. “But, at the same time, you also have to understand that there’ll always be another case.”
She sagged in place. “I know. I just don’t want there to be.”
He nodded and smiled. “That’s what makes you a good cop. You come from the heart, but remember that everyone here does. And the bad guys will eat you alive if they find out you’ve got that weakness.”
“I’ve been told that a time or two,” she said quietly, “but never at work.”
“That’s because you don’t ever let people get close to you. Here, things are raw, and, when they go bad, they go bad in a big way. We all feel it, and that’s what happened with Chet. We cared. We cared a lot, and we were a strong team. We worked well together, and he was my friend, even the godfather to my son.” Rodney turned his head to look away.
“He also had a huge heart, and he’s missed, and it’s important that he’s missed. It’s important that his existence isn’t ignored and that we find reasons to say his name once in a while and to honor his memory and to believe in the good Chet did while he was here because the reality is that it could be one of us tomorrow. Unfortunately the reality is, it could even be one of us today.”
His words were harsh, but they also rang true. She wasn’t a workaholic. She winced at that. Okay, so she was a workaholic. But only because she was working for the people.
What Rodney spoke of was the need for balance. There had to be a time when you backed off and gave yourself a break, so that you come back the next day and could do this all over again. Something she was coming to understand all on her own. When she came on the job as a detective, she was fired up to solve everything right now. But there was no such thing as solving everything, much less solving anything right now. It took days to find and to interview witnesses, to scout crime scenes, to read reports from assisting units. It took days to get information from forensics; it took days to get an autopsy done. Even longer to get certain information back from the crime lab, like tox screens and DNA runs.
There seemed to be a constant lineup of traffic down at the morgue, so you had to wait on autopsies. She couldn’t even bear to think about all the DBs that went through the system without one. An autopsy was rare, probably less than two percent of the cases that went through the morgue, in fact. And that was just the reality of it.
Still, it was frustrating, because, as much as Kate had more access and more time and more tools available to her, there was also a time lag in areas that she just couldn’t get away from. Even though she tried hard, she found a bottleneck at every turn. That’s because, in a big city like this, there were too many cases, too many murders. She slowly rotated her head, realizing that she’d bolted out of bed too fast this morning, and even now a kink in her neck started to ache. Tired was one thing, but she was still functioning, so, with that in mind, she turned to her computer and dug in again.
*
Even before dawn, Simon had returned to his home from spending the night at Kate’s, then had a nap, which was unusual, so he woke up late to start his day. For a disorienting moment he tried to figure out what was going on, then bolted, racing for the bathroom. He leaned over the toilet, just as contents of his stomach spewed out. It was followed by waves of anger and guilt. Then more anger. Then more guilt.
Since he’d had no food in at least twelve hours, it was mostly bile and acid. He groaned, as he sat on the side of the bathtub and heaved again. With his hand on his stomach, he looked blearily around his huge bathroom, wondering what the hell had just happened.
When everything calmed down to the point that the cramping had stopped, he got himself a drink of water and rinsed out his mouth, then grabbed his toothbrush and scrubbed hard. He couldn’t even remember the last time he had puked but was pretty sure it had to do with alcohol, which wasn’t the case today—or yesterday. He didn’t feel sick either, but the reaction to waking up and darting for the bathroom had been instantaneous, and it had been all he could do to make it there in a timely fashion. He slowly made his way back to bed and sat on the edge, staring out the massive windows at the view of Vancouver.
“What the hell was that?” He ran a hand through his hair.
He could smell the vomit in here. “Oh no. No, no, no,” he cried out. “This is not a good time to have that olfactory sense on overdrive again. I don’t know what the hell is going on, but that is not the odor I want in my nostrils all day long.”
He got up and headed to the bathroom again, hoping he could do something to ease the odor, but it was not cooperating. No matter where he went in his apartment, the smell of vomit followed, even though it had long since been flushed away, and no residue was left on him.
He dressed quickly and raced from the building, lifting a hand in greeting for Harry. Just to make sure the doorman didn’t stop and talk, Simon kept up his pace all the way through the front lobby. As soon as he got outside, he inhaled several times in great gasping breaths, as i
f he had been poisoned inside the building. But still he fought that familiar and overwhelming smell, with apparently no way to get rid of it. Stumbling toward his favorite little coffee cart, he ordered a coffee and noticed they had fresh buns.
Hoping that something would settle his stomach, he ordered one of each and sat down at a small bench off to the side. A beautiful little garden was beside it, where the aromatic scent of the roses should have been overwhelmingly strong, but instead all he could smell was the vomit from his bathroom, a bathroom he was no longer in. His gaze wide, he stared at the surroundings, wondering what the hell was going on and how he could stop it. Was it a psychic thing? Like Kate had asked earlier?
If he connected psychically with live people, why the hell couldn’t he connect with dead people? That would be the best thing. Then at least maybe he could talk to his grandmother. Although, if she hadn’t wanted anything to do with his own psychic visions on this side, Simon highly doubted she would want to deal with it there on the other side either. But then why should she get a choice, when he apparently wasn’t getting one?
Realizing he sounded like a whiny little bitch, he groaned and focused on the coffee, trying hard to bring the aroma of the fresh ground brew into his nostrils and into his system. But it was not to be.
All he could smell was vomit.
Thankfully it seemed to ease up the longer he sat there, so he waited a little bit, hoping something would completely remove the horrid vomit odor, but, even though that didn’t happen, it was reduced enough that he could breathe again. By the time his coffee was gone, it was safe to stand up and to walk around a little bit. He did so gently, in case it all came rushing back, but it seemed like whatever it was had passed. He glanced around him and realized the coffee guy was looking at him sideways.
Simon walked back over, smiled. “I’ll take a second one of those.”
“You okay, man?”
“Yeah. Bad night.”
The cart owner snorted. “You know what? If you’re drinking hard, those nights just never get any better.”
Realizing that almost everybody who saw him during one of these psychic events would think he was completely hungover, he just shrugged, accepting that as the better reaction. “Sometimes it’s hard to get out of it.”
“Looks like it’s time for you to kick a bad habit.”
He agreed, but no way Simon could explain to this guy that the bad habit was this nightmare of smells.
With his second coffee in hand, he slowly turned and walked to one of the buildings he had to check on today. He didn’t have his notes with him; he didn’t have anything. He’d left it all on his dining table at home. Thank God he had his phone.
Still, as he wandered through his morning’s visits of his properties, nobody seemed to make any comment about his appearance or his actions, so he figured maybe it was fine. Only as he headed toward a sandwich shop around the corner did that overwhelming sense of smell came on again. He stopped warily at the edge of an alley, but it wasn’t too bad, at least it didn’t seem to be too bad. He crossed the alleyway and moved forward. And then the wind seemed to pick up and race around him, but he stopped because nobody else’s jackets were blowing. Nobody else was leaning into the wind, like he was.
He realized just how bizarre this new sensory issue was. He leaned up against the wall, trying to brace himself, as if buffeted by a hurricane. It was weird. He ducked into the nearby sandwich shop, but the psychic assault didn’t stop. Seeing a full crowd inside, he ducked back out again, using that as an excuse for his actions. He sat down on a bench around the corner. Thank God benches were everywhere. Convenient places to sit and hopefully to look a little less of an idiot. Or at least an idiot who blended into the rest of the world who strode quickly by.
When his phone rang, he looked down to see it was Kate.
“Hey,” he answered, his voice strained.
“What’s up?” she asked, her tone sharp. Of course she noticed. It was pretty damn hard to get anything past her.
“Just another weird symptom,” he said quietly.
“And you can handle it or no?”
“Do I have a choice?” he asked, his voice stronger.
“No, I don’t think so.”
He had to love that about her. There was empathy but not an overly large dose of sympathy. As if he would figure out how to handle it. As he thought about it, maybe he would. Hell, maybe he had somehow brought all this on himself, and it wouldn’t stop until he’d paid a penance for whatever it was that he’d done. Again his grandmother’s voice came to mind. What the hell had she ever done that she’d had such a rough life herself? Because, damn, some things in the world shouldn’t have happened, but they did, … right before his eyes. It drove him nuts to think about it.
“Is it anything you can stop?” she asked, surprising him that she was still on the line.
“Nothing has worked so far,” he said.
“What reaction?”
He explained quietly.
“Oh. Okay, that’s gross.” He burst out laughing. “At least you’re laughing about it.”
“Only since you called,” he said quietly.
“Is it somebody? Are you connecting with somebody who might have gone out, like, was partying too hard last night?”
“I don’t know. I feel pain now, like a deep pain. I don’t know what it is.”
“Maybe that’s the problem.” Then she said something else that completely blew him away. “Maybe you need to sink into this instead of fight it. Sorry. I would talk, but I’ve got to go.”
With that she hung up, and he stared down at the phone in surprise. First, he wondered why she called him to begin with. Could she feel him in distress? He chuckled. Boy, he would not want to entertain that thought. Secondly, was she worried about him? That’s what it sounded like. As long as she was thinking about him. … He knew she cared, but it made him feel infinitely less worried to see evidence of her feelings for him.
But, third, that was a very interesting comment on her part at the end of her for-whatever-reason phone call. Sink into it instead of fight it. Interesting. Nothing that he would have expected, and yet she continuously surprised him. Just when he thought he understood some of this stuff, she said something that blew him away. It was fascinating; it was troubling, and it was also enlivening because she was probably right.
Maybe he needed to stop resisting it and to sink into it. Maybe a message was in this somewhere. Maybe a person was at the end of this, just like there had been the children who had needed help. He hadn’t seen any of the dead women cyclists so far in Kate’s current cases, but, then again, he’d done his best to block everything out, so no more dying people were in his world.
“How is that working for you?” he said out loud, with a note of bitterness. Because, while he wasn’t seeing kids in pedophile rings needing saving or suicidal folks standing on bridges, definitely something was going on.
Chapter 12
Kate picked up the phone as it rang under her hand. “Hello?”
“It’s Dr. Smidge,” said the coroner, his voice gruff. “I just sent you the autopsy report on your bike accident victim.”
“Good enough. I’ll go over it now. What about the dead UBC student?”
“Don’t get greedy. We had a four-car pileup last night.”
“I get it. I’ve also got murders happening.”
“I know, but unfortunately there is always one of those.”
She winced at that.
“Anyway, I’ve taken a preliminary look. Cause of death is blunt force trauma. She was hit over the head at the front temple.”
“Interesting, so by somebody facing her.”
“Yes, with a blunt object, but we didn’t find anything at the scene.” He gave her a TOD estimate, which put it somewhere around four o’clock in the morning.
“That’s interesting,” she murmured.
“Not really. It’s student life, all kinds of activity, all night long.”
“I get that. I guess I think more in terms of sleep at that hour.”
“You and me both, but, at her age, not so much.”
“Anything on the bloodstains?”
“Hang on a minute. I did ask them to rush that.” And he hung up. He called back almost immediately. “I just got the email in on it, and you should have a copy too. Just as you thought, they confirmed two different blood types.”
She whistled at that. “Please tell me that they’re both female.”
“Do you have any DNA from the missing woman?”
“No, but I’ll contact the family. I’ll get on that today.”
“We don’t know for sure that it’s her. Remember that,” he noted.
“No, we don’t, but she’s missing, and it’s her place.”
“But it’s been cleaned up,” he said.
“Yes, but the question is, by whom?”
“I suspect by the dead woman whose body we have,” he said. “There was blood on her fingernails, skin. And no defensive wounds.”
“What? You think that she did the cleanup after Candy was killed, and then the bullies killed her? Though it’s also possible that somebody caught her in the act and murdered her where she stood.”
“Possible,” he said thoughtfully.
“What if she was involved with the first murder with somebody else? The easy way to get rid of any witness—”
“I hear you. Now all you have to do is prove it.” With that, he hung up.
She brought up the reports in her email and quickly read through them. Not a whole lot of surprises. The woman in the apartment, her last name was Mallow.
She shook her head at that. “Isn’t that some baking ingredient?” she wondered. But her first name was Paula, and that’s where she got confused with the other one, Candy. Okay, so she had a Paula Mallow, and every time she thought of that name, it tripped her up. She quickly pulled up the details on her. She was twenty-four and had been at the university for just one year, after transferring from the University of Toronto. That transfer didn’t allow all her former college credits to carry over, so she was taking more classes to count toward her English degree. Her family was back there, and, with that, Kate picked up the phone. The parents should have already been notified by the Toronto police. When she reached the mother on the other end, she quickly identified herself. The woman bawled immediately.