Not so much a hide-and-seeker as a blizzard victim frozen in the middle of placing her last call, and one of the most surreal crime scenes Leith had ever stared down upon.
JD had slipped into the room, glancing at the open window that was letting in gusts of December air. From behind Leith, she said, “And that’s Maria, right?”
As if in response, the phone in the dead woman’s hand pinged.
Leith straightened to let JD take a look at the body squeezed into place by the sofa.
“She had time to consider jumping out the window,” JD theorized. “But too far to fall. So she hid instead, trying to call for help. The killer took a running shove, pushed the sofa against her, knocked her out. Maybe the impact killed her? Is that possible?”
Leith didn’t think getting crushed by the sofa — even one this weighty — would have killed her, or caused all that blood. Knocked her out, maybe, restricted her movements, sure. Cause of death would have to be determined in the morgue, but he was betting that bullets would be found along with the impact injuries.
Leaving JD to maintain continuity, he beckoned to Dion, and they went back to the cold outdoors, to Leith’s vehicle.
“Are you all right?” Leith asked, as he and Dion shed their bunny suits.
“Yes.” Dion sounded surprised, maybe offended. He tamed the ends of his necktie, which were trying to flap loose in the breeze. “Why?”
“You knew the lawyer, right?”
“Not well. We were on opposite sides of the fence. We weren’t friends.”
“Still, you knew him. It’s a shock, when somebody you know dies. Especially like this.”
Leith persisted only because he had the feeling Dion was reining in some heavy emotion. Maybe not grief so much as shock, but whatever it was, sharing was probably a good idea. But Dion wasn’t the sharing type. He shrugged off the suggestion, agreed to meet up back at the detachment, and strolled away to his unmarked car.
* * *
It’s only hunger, Dion told himself. He felt light-headed and queasy. Breakfast had been light. Too light, apparently. In the dim privacy of his vehicle, he checked his eyes in the rear-view mirror and said aloud, “I’ll stop in Horseshoe Bay, grab a bite.”
The ferry terminal settlement of Horseshoe Bay was just minutes away. He pulled in and drove through the village, but couldn’t find a parking spot, and gave up the plan of stopping for a bite. He wasn’t in the mood for food, anyway. Still queasy, and for some reason perspiring. The case spiralling out of control was getting on his nerves. Just needed to ground himself. Driving through the community, he decided not to head straight back to the highway, but to proceed westbound into Whytecliff Park, take a brief break.
Whytecliff was a giant rocky outcrop with beaches fanned out at its base and woods all around. He turned into its shady entrance and rolled forward. The park was nearly empty in the winter chill, with only a few cars at the far end of the generous lot. His plans were vague, and his mind seemed emptier than usual. He would stretch his legs, release some of that crime-scene tension. Maybe stand on the cliffs and take in the sights, breathe in the briny air splashed up from the breakers below, put life back into perspective.
In the end, the idea was hijacked by physiology. Bile rose to his throat, and he steered at a wild angle into the nearest parking space, managed to switch off the engine, fling open the door, topple from the driver’s seat, and barely make it to the bushes to throw up his last meal.
He leaned, then, hands on his knees, and spat till the taste had left his mouth.
He rinsed his mouth with coffee from a paper cup in the console, a leftover from an earlier drive, spat again, and felt worlds better. But embarrassed. He straightened and looked down the lot. Nobody had seen. He looked at the sky. It was red.
Thirty-Five
MOVING TARGET
December 29
THE FIRST FORTY-EIGHT had passed since the deadly shots rang out in Lions Bay. A lot of detail had been filled in since, but not the main one, the whopper detail: the killer remained nameless.
Leith studied the chart. A rough time of death had been added. At around 11:00 p.m. on Boxing Day evening, Karl Gold-Seton, his wife, Maria, and his stepson, Scott, had their lives ended in swift consecutive order — at least that was the safe assumption — ending up as figures on a diagram in a police incident room, alongside the crime-scene photographs. Leith looked again over each element of the wall display. He had just finished his lunch — cramming it in, not tasting much — and now was immersed in the gore affixed to the wall like an ill-conceived art show. He crossed his arms and thought about life, death, and ruthless twists of fate — but not for long. He was here to consider the facts, not philosophize.
There were plenty of facts to mull over, each with its myriad sub-facts that the forensics people would have to sort out, the lands and grooves and residues and spatters. The weapon had been a semi-auto pistol. The ammo was .45, the rifling a possible match to the slug that had punctured Craig Gilmartin. The bullet count, all told from all three floors, was twenty-two, so likely more than one reload. Twenty-two shots, but oddly enough, only a few had landed inside the victims. The walls had received most of the killer’s wrath — low shots fired seemingly at random.
Aside from the chaotic wall shots, the shooting had been fairly focused. If the order of attacks followed logic, then the young male adult, Scott Mills, had died first. He had caught one bullet in the face, two in the chest.
The lawyer, Karl Gold-Seton, had died next, maybe on his way downstairs to find out what the hell the commotion in the foyer was. Probably he had been on the verge of changing his mind and retreating. One bullet in the gut had toppled him forward. His body had thudded down the smooth marble stairs, dragged by gravity — the blood smear said it all. A bullet to the back of the skull had dispatched him.
His wife had fled upstairs. Her slippers left behind on the second-floor landing were a good indication of where she had been when she turned to run. In the upstairs library she had likely flung open a window, either to cry for help or jump to safety. But there was no one to hear her, and nothing below but a deadly fall. She was trying to dial 911 — a safe guess — when the sofa she had taken refuge behind was pushed into her with force. As she lay pinned and helpless, she was shot in the torso four times from above. Meaning the killer had jumped up onto the sofa and fired down on her, probably using up the last of his ammo.
Forensics assured Leith there would be evidence, saying that with this kind of rampage, there always was. Leith knew better. In his past, he had worked on a few rampages that had never been solved, cold cases that he hoped one day would be closed. He looked at the pins flagging bullet holes. He looked at the photographs of gouges riddling the Gyproc wallboards, mostly in the foyer. More holes in the wall upstairs in the library, where the woman had been killed. Maybe the killer had lost control of his trigger finger. Maybe the gun was faulty. More likely the shooter was firing as he proceeded through the place just to scare his victims. Brazen, cruel, sadistic. This man — Leith assumed it was a man, and a powerful one at that, the way he had rammed the poor woman with that sofa — had a serious grudge against the family. Where had the killer gone after he was done here, and who else had he left mown down in his wake? Wrath like this didn’t just stop.
Dion appeared next to him, a cup of coffee in hand. He gestured at one photograph of the bullet-riddled wall. “Shows what kind of sharpshooter he is,” he said with contempt. “Not great with moving targets.”
Leith looked at him. Was that some kind of dark joke? “What d’you mean?”
“Not even winged,” Dion said. He gave Leith a searching gaze. “The dog.”
The dog! “Hm, oh,” Leith said. He eyed the chaotic line of holes in the Gyproc. “He was trying to shoot the dog. That’s a good hypothesis.”
Dion frowned at him.
Leith breathed out a sigh of relief. Calling it relief might be overstated, but now that the barrage of low shots had
a reasonable explanation, he could worry less about a cruel and vindictive killer on the loose, offing people at random. He turned to the photographs of the cottage where Scott Mills had been living. A mess, but no apparent violence. A wheeled suitcase open and half filled with clothes. What was known about it? Nothing but a series of guesses, which he summed up now. “Mills was packing to leave town. His mother concocted an alibi for him. The two of them, at least, were involved in something. He was running from our inquiries. Somebody didn’t want him to leave — or to live. Maybe Maria was a target, too. Maybe the killer wasn’t just clearing the house of witnesses, but had a bead on her as well.”
Dion indicated the latest person of interest tacked to the board. Somebody with a sense of humour had printed out a blank Facebook avatar for a mug shot. Dezi’s Grey Man seemed like a good prime suspect.
JD walked in. “Well hey, guys! Our canvassing efforts have paid off. We’ve got a witness. A local resident. She didn’t see or hear gunshots, or see anybody coming or going from the estate, but a car pulled out in front of her, coming off Bayview. She followed it to the highway, where it turned left, then she lost sight of it. Boxing Day, almost midnight, not a lot of traffic in that neighbourhood — that’s the only reason she remembers.”
JD tapped the spot on the blown-up map of Lions Bay, and Leith saw that any car leaving the Gold-Seton home would have no choice but take this route. There was no other exit. “Fantastic!” he said. “We’ve got a description?”
JD shook her head. “About all our witness can say is that it was a car, a darker colour, one occupant, who she only saw from behind, kind of an anonymous bump above the headrest.”
“Well, look at me,” Leith snapped. “I’m just covered in goosebumps. You call this a tip?”
JD wasn’t one to grin, but she did now. It was a suspiciously coy grin, too, and he realized she had been holding back. “I almost forgot,” she said. “There was a distinguishing mark on the car.”
“Damage?” Dion asked.
“Better than damage. A business name plastered across the rear trunk hatch. She recalls the name clearly because it was ‘cute,’ she says.”
“Cute?” Leith echoed. Some words didn’t mesh with murder, cute being one of them.
“And it is being followed up as we speak,” JD added. “But there’s more. The business name she mentioned actually pinged something in my mind.” She turned to Dion. “Remember Tom, our pilot who’s afraid of heights? Remember that custom-made sling he had for carrying his plane and gear to the lookout?”
Dion stared at her. “I remember a bag, sure.”
“It looked professionally made. I didn’t think much of it, except that the business name sewn on the shoulder strap was kind of clever, if the proprietor’s name happened to be Taylor.”
Leith lost patience with JD as he had lost patience with Urbanski and every other riddler on the North Shore — and there seemed to be a lot of them. “Do me a favour and tell me what we’re looking at here. This is a murder inquiry, JD, not a guessing game.”
She pinned a piece of paper to the board, then slapped it proudly. “I had our witness sketch it for me.”
Leith studied a pencil drawing of the rear of a vehicle. Their witness was an even lousier artist than himself — and that was saying a lot — but he felt the first warm ray of hope as he viewed the highlight of the masterpiece. Across the back of the car’s trunk, written in block letters, were the words Taylor-Made Custom Upholstery. Below Upholstery were seven smaller X’s.
“What are the X’s?” he asked, though he could guess.
“A phone number,” JD said. “The witness couldn’t remember a single digit. But the team’s all high-fiving anyway. I know, what kind of killer would drive a car to the scene with his phone number and logo on display? I know it’s bad luck to celebrate too soon, but we’re getting so little — hang on,” she interrupted herself as her phone buzzed at her hip. “Fingers crossed.”
She took the call, listened, and gave a thumbs-up to Leith and Dion. Her smile said it all; the individual who ran the business called Taylor-Made had already been tracked down.
Like the pessimist he was, Leith worried as the team gathered around for a briefing that JD had done just what she’d suggested — celebrated too soon. This lead, linking a car at the Lions Bay murder scene with Thomas Frey, would prove false in the end, and their killer was still on the move. Possibly the distraction would do nothing but allow Grey Man to vanish for good, leaving no clue to his identity except for one scary nickname.
Thirty-Six
UNSTITCHED
AS JD HAD SAID, would the killer be so stupid as to drive a car that could be picked out of a lineup, thanks to the distinctive wording on its trunk? Without that sign it would likely have gone unnoticed in a world that teemed with cars, so many of them much of a muchness. Even makes and models were indistinguishable to most people, at least in passing. Like trying to pick one sardine out from its school.
Leith and JD discussed the question on the drive to Ms. Corinne Taylor’s bungalow off the Mount Seymour Parkway. Even before leaving the car, climbing the stairs, and pressing the buzzer, Leith knew a few things about her, thanks to a combination of Google and social media, PRIME-BC, and ICBC records. Taylor was in her fifties, self-employed, had no criminal record, owned a recent model Ford Focus sedan, and was married to Thomas Frey, who happened to be the model airplane flying club president who had assisted Leith with his RC knowledge.
Frey was fifty-two, had no criminal record, had previously worked as an engineer in northern Alberta, but was now employed by Pacific Blue Cross as a group service representative — whatever that was. The only alarm bell going off about Frey right now was the decal on his wife’s car. Just one bell, but a damn loud one, as Leith had told JD.
Taylor herself answered the door. Tom wasn’t home, she explained, but was due back any moment. He had just gone to the store for cigarettes.
She was visibly nervous — who wouldn’t be? — as Leith and JD took seats in the living room, which was chaotically colourful, bolts of fabric and textiles everywhere. Leith explained that this was a murder investigation, and he needed to know where she had been and what she had been doing on Boxing Day.
“Murder?” she said.
“We have to follow up every lead,” Leith said, reassuringly, letting her know this was probably nothing, nothing at all. Which really, it was anything but. She balked at first, but accepted his smile at face value. “I was at home,” she told him, with a blank-eyed stare. “I wouldn’t go out there if you paid me. It was Boxing Day.”
Leith nodded. North Van traffic was bad enough without Boxing Day madness, the sales and gift exchanges, the traffic snarls and fist-shaking, goodwill and peace on earth blown to heck as Christmas shifted gears. “Didn’t go out at all?”
“Other than a neighbourhood walk early in the morning, no.”
“What about Tom?”
“Tom was home all day, too.”
“All day, all night?”
“Yes, of course.”
At the mention of her husband, the woman had become slightly defensive. Leith wondered why. And why the of course? It was like a pianist striking a wrong key, discordant but interesting. He put it aside for the moment, and asked her about the lead-grey sedan he had passed in the driveway. “That’s your car, the Ford Focus?”
“It is,” she said.
“Taylor-Made,” he said. “Your business, I take it?”
“Yes. As you can see” — she waved a hand at the fabric bolts, pattern charts, sewing machines around the room — “I do custom upholstery for people. I have a workshop, but when things get busy, it kind of spills out here.”
“Great business name, anyway.”
“Thank you.” She smiled through her nervousness. “Eye-catching, d’you think?”
“It caught my eye,” he assured her.
Taylor did her best to return his smile. “Good thing I kept my maiden name,” s
he said. “Frey would hardly do for a seamstress, would it?” Leith’s reassuring smile broadened. “Though I would have been going back to Taylor anyway, by the looks of it,” she added, and her mouth flatlined again. “Anyway, my marriage is not your problem, and I talk too much.”
She mime-zipped her mouth.
Leith liked people who talked too much. It made his job easier. “That’s all right, really. Does Tom help in the business at all?”
“Not a bit. He’s got his own work. We’re like two separate planets, lately. I don’t know him anymore. Oh god, there I go again. I’ll say nothing. You ask your questions and I’ll try and help.”
“I’m pretty much done with my questions. We’re really here to see Tom. So … what’s the strangest custom upholstery job you ever got?”
His clumsy attempt at casual, ice-breaking conversation failed, and her response was terse. “My business is strictly by the books. I pay my taxes. I fall below the GST amount, so I don’t have a registration number.”
“You’re really not in trouble over your business,” he assured her. “I just noticed the decal on your car, and JD and I were saying it’s pretty clever.”
“Yes, well.” She relaxed slightly. “Work’s been slow lately, so a friend suggested I start advertising. So far I’ve gotten all my business through word of mouth, but it’s true — it’s time to get more professional. That, plus I was trying to show Tom that I’ve got brains, too. He thinks he’s the only one who can think for himself. So I went out to the stationery store and stuck Taylor-Made on the back there. The phone number’s quite small, though, isn’t it, under the word Upholstery? Maybe kind of hard to read?”
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