[Detective Allan Stanton 03.0] Sorrowful Road

by Alex MacLean

  “It’s something you take home with you. You hear the screams of anguished parents. You see the faces of the dead. They haunt you. They invade your dreams at night.

  “I’ve seen many police officers turn to alcohol or drugs to deal with the tragedies they face. I’ve seen them question whether the job had any value, and they’d eventually leave the profession. I’ve seen a few who have even committed suicide.

  “We’re not paladins or heroes. We’re human beings, like you.”

  The sudden shrill of Audra’s pager rang out in the gymnasium, making her flinch and some students perk up at the sound. Instinctively, she reached down for the button to stop it.

  “Bullying has gone far beyond what I dealt with in school. In my day, you had to deal with rumors or face-to-face encounters. We never had Internet. Cell phones were coming out, but they belonged to rich men. They cost about four grand and were as big as a brick.

  “The Internet and cell phones have made the world a smaller place. The playing field for bullies has changed. They can reach children right in their homes, at any time of day on their cells and computers. They post bad stuff on social media for the entire world to see.

  “If you’re being bullied, silence is your worst enemy. Same thing if you witness another child being bullied. So tell someone. Your parents. Your teachers. Principal Scinto. Don’t be afraid. This behavior needs to be reported. It needs to stop in our schools.”

  Pausing, Audra gazed out at the audience. The alert on her pager had pulled her attention away from really focusing on the students. Someone in the city was either dead or dying under suspicious circumstances, and she had to respond.

  “Work is calling me,” she said, “so I’ll wrap this up by telling you that your education isn’t just about learning math equations or the periodic table. Education trains you to think, to make good choices. Your education is a lifelong process. At times, it can be hard and disappointing. But it can also be exciting and enriching.

  “I’ll quote the great Nelson Mandela. ‘Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.’

  “Remember, it only takes a moment to make memories, good or bad. It takes a lifetime to forget them. So please, be good to one another. And thank you for listening to me today.”

  For a moment, there was silence. Then the applause started as a few scattered claps, slowly building, until it passed through the entire crowd. To Audra, it was the sound of respect.

  She looked over at Daphne and gave her a smile. Daphne shot her back a smile that was wide, proud.

  Audra walked away from the podium. When she reached the edge of the stage, she took out her pager and read the display.

  Major crime alert.

  Point Pleasant Park.

  3

  Halifax, October 18

  10:44 a.m.

  The power had gone out shortly before Hurricane Juan rolled into Halifax with a brutality not seen in over a century. The storm came ashore just after midnight on September 29, 2003, packing one-hundred-mile-per-hour winds.

  Detective Allan Stanton remembered the amazing noise, like a locomotive hurtling past the door. It seemed the house would come apart at any moment—the howling wind, the rafters creaking and straining, the attic hatch banging steadily.

  He and Melissa rode it out in the living room after rearranging the furniture away from the windows. Allan lay on the sofa, his body stiff with tension. He worried about the roof coming apart, about the safety of his family. Melissa sat in the swivel chair, rocking Brian to sleep.

  From a battery-powered radio, the voice of a lone announcer filled the room. Between songs, he invited Nova Scotians to call in and relay their stories live on the air.

  “Our big apple tree that’s probably like seventy feet fell over on our neighbor’s house...”

  “Akerley Campus, the roof came off...the part by the YMCA...”

  “The house is shaking, and flying things are hitting it. Even the support wall is shaking...”

  “Have you ever seen anything like this?” Melissa asked.

  Allan looked over at her. In the candlelight, her face was sculpted, her eyes blackened.

  “Never,” he said.

  “I didn’t think it would be this bad.”

  “Wasn’t supposed to be. Someone dropped the ball.”

  They both settled their eyes on Brian, their sleeping angel of a baby boy.

  Melissa patted his back, touched her cheek to the top of his head. “He’s out like a light.”

  “I can’t believe it,” Allan said. “How can he sleep through this?”

  Melissa smiled. “Because we’re not.”

  They survived the night with minimal property damage—leaves plastered to the windows, a huge branch broken off the elm tree out front. Other parts of Halifax had been walloped. Thousands of old-growth trees were uprooted. They’d toppled on houses, cars, and power lines and lay across many streets. Shingles and siding were sheared off buildings. Wharfs were ripped up, sailboats sunken. The sounds of generators and chainsaws filled the city.

  Hurricane Juan left its biggest mark on Point Pleasant Park. Seventy thousand trees had blown over like matchsticks. Allan remembered his first trip to the park after it reopened to the public. The devastation he saw broke his heart. There were gaps and wide-open spaces punctuated by dead trees. Seventy percent of the forest had disappeared.

  As he carried his field kit through the park now, he saw the regeneration seven years had made. New saplings were sprouting up everywhere. Berry bushes appeared where there were none before. Someone had carved two wooden seals from the stump of a tree brought down by Juan.

  Allan continued down Cambridge Drive past Tower Hill Road. It seemed odd, eerie even, to walk the trails without meeting any joggers or cyclists or happy dogs frolicking off leash. Just the odd squirrel darting through dried leaves or blue jay flying from one branch to the next.

  The clouds overhead began unraveling. Soon, a blast of sunlight shot down, turning the grassy knolls an impossible green and enhancing the fiery colors of the maples. Allan welcomed the sudden warmth cutting through the autumn chill.

  A uniformed officer directed him to an offshoot trail surfaced with gravel. It led Allan into denser woodland, between spots of direct sun and leaf-dappled shadows. He followed the trail up a small hill and stopped. The crime scene loomed about forty feet away. Strung tree to tree like a boxing ring, yellow barrier tape marked the location of the body, hidden from view just off the trail. Two Ident techs, Jim Lucas and Harvey Doucette, were unpacking their equipment. Jim proceeded to shoot away with his camera. Harvey staked off a safe entry point into the scene. Both men were dressed in Tyvek coveralls with attached boots and hoods.

  Allan inhaled a deep breath, let it out in one long release. He noted the time on his watch: 10:53 a.m. Setting down his field kit, he opened it up and took out his camera. He snapped off a series of photos from the four cardinal points to record how everything looked upon his arrival.

  He knew coming into the park that the victim was dead. Sergeant Malone had given him the preliminary information when he timed in at the Tower Road entrance. The victim was Kate Saint-Pierre. Twenty-five years old. She’d been reported missing by her husband Sunday morning after she failed to return home from her run. A search team went out to look for her. But 185 acres was a lot of ground to cover in the shortened daylight hours of fall. A second search began at daybreak. They found her body a few hours later at 10:22, behind a stand of trees. The park was immediately closed to the public.

  Allan lowered his camera. For a moment, he watched Jim drop to a squat and place a numbered placard on the trail.

  “What’d you find?” he called out.

  “Impressions in the gravel. Like someone had dug in their heels.”

  “Point of attack.”

  “That’s my guess.” Jim indicated a cluster of yellowing bracken just off the trail. “Disturbance through there. Drag marks in the moss. Flattened
grass.”

  Allan followed Jim’s finger and saw a line of broken fronds leading into the trees.

  “Any footprints?” he asked.

  “Nothing clear enough.”

  “Shall we call in the dogs later?”

  “Wouldn’t hurt.” Jim flashed his camera. “There’s always that possibility the suspect dropped something that we’ll miss in the brush or weeds.”

  With a slow sweep of his head, Allan surveyed the immediate area. He tried to grasp the how and why of the murder. Two scenarios leaped right out at him: the suspect had concealed himself behind a tree close to the trail, where he waited to ambush Kate, or he had posed as a fellow jogger and taken her by surprise when he passed her.

  Harvey gave the go-ahead to enter the scene. Allan followed the entry point into a circular grove of trees. He could smell the leaves and the soil and the bark. He’d always loved those bracing scents when he jogged through the park. They relaxed him. Refreshed him. Cleared his head.

  But not today.

  His first glimpses of the body were of aqua-colored shoes with pink laces and then black tights bundled at the ankles below lean, muscular legs. When he saw the whole body, he hitched a breath, and his fingers tightened around the camera.

  Kate Saint-Pierre lay face up on the ground beside a cut log riddled with insect holes. Her arms were spread out from her sides, her hands partially covered by leaves. The black top and pink running jacket she had on were pulled up to reveal her breasts.

  Allan’s mouth felt dry. He moved closer, studying the contorted face, the eyes peppered with red starbursts, the ligature mark around the neck with the ends crisscrossed below the chin.

  The suspect had been on top of her, Allan realized. Kate had peered into his face during her final moments.

  “Looks familiar, doesn’t it?”

  The closeness of Harvey’s voice startled Allan. He glanced over his shoulder at the tech.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  Turning back to the body, he grimaced. He knew it did, all right. That chill on his skin didn’t lie.

  One year ago to the day, he’d been called to this very park. A female jogger had found the body of a young woman near Shore Road. Hidden in the trees just like this one. Posed just like this one. Murdered the same way.

  Allan had never forgotten her.

  “Mary,” he whispered.

  4

  Halifax, October 18

  11:37 a.m.

  “She’s been mutilated.”

  Allan stopped sketching on the graph paper and looked up. From the corner of his eye, he saw Audra suddenly retract her tape measure. She began walking over, the dry leaves crunching under her footsteps.

  The comment had come from Dr. Richard Coulter. The medical examiner was crouched next to the body, conducting his scene examination. The assistant ME, Eric Lefevre, stood beside him, taking photos. Jim and Harvey were busy searching the outlying area of the scene in a methodical and systematic fashion.

  Allan moved closer. “What’d he do?”

  “He severed the distal phalanges from the right hand,” Coulter said. “All of them. Even the thumbs. Precisely at the joints.”

  Allan exchanged a small glance with Audra. Coulter came up off his haunches, carefully gauging his own steps as he moved around to the other side of the body. He collected a few bloodstained leaves covering Kate Saint-Pierre’s left hand and called Harvey over to process them.

  “Same injuries here too,” Coulter said.

  “He left the wedding ring,” Audra noted.

  Eric added, “And a nice Garmin watch.”

  Allan craned his head, peering over Coulter’s shoulder. The hand, like the right one, was missing the bones at the ends of the fingers. Jaw tight, Allan wondered if Kate Saint-Pierre had fought back; people being strangled usually did. Then biological evidence seemed the likely reason for cutting off the fingertips.

  But the suspect hadn’t been overly concerned about leaving evidence behind when he murdered Mary Driscow. He’d been sloppy, amateurish. Was this a sign the man was evolving, getting more careful? Or was he just toying with them?

  From those first moments at the scene, Allan told himself things would be different this time. He didn’t want to spend another year wallowing in shame and self-doubt, as he had with the Driscow case. A year wondering just whom or what he had overlooked.

  The same man had murdered both women. Allan was 99 percent sure of that. The similarities were just too striking to deny. Location. Victim selection. Use of similar weapons. Same body-disposal scenario. Same signature aspect—Mary Driscow had been displayed with her top pushed up and her pants pulled down. Identical to Kate Saint-Pierre. Then came the date. Mary had been murdered on October 17 of last year, her body found later the same day.

  “Looks like they were severed here,” Coulter said. “But I don’t see them.”

  Allan figured the suspect had carried the fingertips off. Maybe even ditched them in a garbage barrel or recycling bin somewhere in the park. Those needed to be searched, their contents sifted through.

  He looked around, feeling the sheer size of the park, every tree, every bush, the carpet of leaves. A lot of real estate surrounded them, the task of covering it all, enormous.

  Additional officers needed to be called in to help with a grid search. Any homeless people squatting in the park needed to be located and questioned. One of them might’ve had a chance meeting with the suspect. Bring in the dogs too. They could detect overlooked items that still retained human scent.

  “Did the suspect mutilate Mary Driscow like that?” Audra asked him.

  Allan turned to her. “Huh?”

  “Mary Driscow. Did he mutilate her like that?”

  “No. That’s one difference.”

  “Only one?”

  “As far as I can see.”

  Audra frowned, quiet for a moment. Her eyes went small and distant with memory. She tapped the tape measure against her thigh, the sound like the clop of a horse’s hoof.

  “Bits and pieces of that case are coming back to me,” she said. “We have a DNA profile from that one, right?”

  “Yeah, from a suction lesion on Mary’s breast.”

  “No semen found?”

  Allan shook his head. “No.”

  “Condom, maybe. We’re seeing that more and more these days.”

  “Yeah. But we never found a discarded condom wrapper at the scene or a used condom. Unless he took them with him. Maybe he couldn’t get off. Some men can’t during the act of rape.”

  Audra chewed on her lower lip, nodding several times. “Fingernail scrapings didn’t turn up anything?”

  “They turned up Mary’s own blood and skin. She left claw marks on her neck as she tried to pull the ligature free.”

  Coulter interjected, “This victim has similar injuries, Detective. She was conscious and fighting for her life.”

  Allan leaned in for a closer look, the harbor breeze cool on his face as it drifted through the trees with a soft whisper. He could see three scratches curving under the left side of Kate Saint-Pierre’s jaw. Several flashes went off as Eric took photos from different angles.

  “The ligature left a parchmented weave pattern in the skin,” Coulter went on. “There’s extensive congestion and petechia above the ligature mark. Two—no, three more curvilinear abrasions on the right side of the neck.”

  “What’s the ligature pattern tell you?” Allan asked.

  “It’s a spiral weave pattern. Like a rope. The furrow is approximately half an inch wide.”

  Allan nodded. Similar, he knew. Maybe even the same one used to strangle Mary Driscow.

  “The body is cold and clammy,” Coulter said. “Hypostasis is fixed. Rigor is fully established.”

  Audra asked, “What’s your guesstimate?”

  “So many variables involved. At this point, I’ll place time of death at eighteen to thirty-six hours. I’ll see if I can narrow it down once I do the post.”


  Allan said, “We’ll compare notes later. See what info we can dig up.”

  For a moment, he and Audra watched Coulter securing paper bags over each hand of Kate Saint-Pierre. Then Audra held up the tape measure for Allan to see, flicking the steel blade out a few inches and letting it snap back inside.

  “Wanna get back to work?” she asked.

  “Of course.”

  “Where were we?”

  Allan checked his sketch. With his pencil, he pointed off to a tree at the southwest edge of the crime scene.

  “That’s the last one,” he said.

  As Audra walked off to get the measurement, there came the sounds of a commotion out by the jogging trail, several voices yelling at once. Everyone froze, all heads turning toward the noise.

  Someone’s voice suddenly shot above the cacophony. “Hey! Stop! You’re not allowed to be here. Stop now.”

  Just visible through the gnarled branches, Allan saw a man running down the trail, heading straight for their location. A uniformed officer chased him. In lengthening strides, he was closing the distance.

  Allan and Audra hurried from the grove to head the man off. As they left the trees, the officer sprang forward, catching the man high in the back and riding him to the ground. With a grunt, the two of them went sliding through the gravel, the officer on top. They stopped a few feet from the barrier tape.

  Chugging air in and out of his mouth, the officer wrenched the man’s arm behind his back and reached for his cuffs.

  The man arched up under the officer’s weight, dark hair falling in tangles over his forehead. Allan could see the adrenaline fuming in his eyes.

  “Is it Kate?” he cried. “Is that my wife in there?”

  Allan swallowed. Beside him, he heard Audra mutter, “Jesus.”

  The man’s gaze washed over their faces and settled on Allan.

  “Did you find her? Kate Saint-Pierre. Please, is it her? Is it?”

  Heart heavy, Allan stared down at him, holding the man’s eyes with his own until he saw what Allan had seen, that it was over, that the worst fear had been confirmed.