She looked up and for a second I thought she was angry but her face softened. “I know that had to be hard for you, and I so wanted you there, but Kyla … didn’t. Being sick like she was, Adam, it was pretty bad. No, really bad. There are things that happen, embarrassing things. For a little girl who wants her mom’s guy to think she’s amazing, when she isn’t feeling very amazing … she just didn’t want you to see her like that.”
I sat for a long minute. “Damn,” I said loudly enough for a few people to turn to look at me. “There I was focused on me, feeling sorry for myself, and the whole time this kid that I’m crazy about is going through hell. God, I’m a jerk.”
“You’re not a jerk, Adam. I know you wanted to be there for her, for both of us, and you had to wonder when I kept shutting you out. You’re here now and that’s what matters.”
“Listen, Jill, I’ve never been a dad and there are going to be times when I’m not very good at this, and …” I ran out of words, but it didn’t matter. I think Jill knew what I was trying to say.
“Listen, why don’t you go and find out why Mike wanted you there,” she said. “If there’s any news here, I’ll call you right away, I promise.”
“But I’d like to be here when she wakes up.”
She nodded gently. “I know, and I also know that Kyla will want to see you when she wakes up, but that might not be for several hours. So I think you should do what you need to do and I’ll call you.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure, but you tell Mike Cobb that if he puts the man I love in danger of anything more than a cat scratch, he’ll answer to me.”
“I think you already told him that.”
“Then remind him.”
I smiled at her. “I’ll remind him.”
“I’m going to go back and sit with her.”
A brief hug later, Jill was on her way back to her daughter’s bedside and I was heading for the hospital’s exit, dialing Cobb’s number as I walked.
He answered after three rings. His first words: “How’s Kyla?”
“She’s sleeping. Jill’s with her. They’re going to do some tests. You still want me to come over there?”
He paused. “Yeah, I don’t think it’s a bad idea, but only if you’re okay with not being at the hospital. There have been some developments that it would be good for you to be on the ground floor for.”
“Kyla’s going to be sleeping for a while and Jill’s with her. I’m on my way.”
“When you get here, ask for Sergeant Kirschoff. You’ll need to show ID and he’ll bring you to where I am.”
Thirty-five minutes later I was approaching the station from the 17th Avenue side. I was two blocks away and could already see the flashing lights of several cop cars, an ambulance, and even a fire engine. Overhead a helicopter hovered in place. I figured at first it was maybe STARS Air Ambulance, but as I got closer I realized it was a news chopper from a rival talk station — only slightly less right wing in its stance than the place it was now covering.
Irony.
I parked a block away and walked the last few hundred yards, reminded of the only other time in my life I’d ever encountered a scene like this one — the day my wife’s life had been taken by a maniacally cruel arsonist.
I shivered on a morning when the temperature had already reached at least 20 degrees Celsius. I asked a uniform and was directed to a guy who was carrying on two simultaneous conversations — one into a cellphone, the other into the sending unit of a two-way radio. I waited for both conversations to end and moved into his sightline.
I held up my media ID. Sergeant Kirschoff didn’t appear to be happy to see me. “You guys are supposed to be behind that ring of patrol cars over there. There’ll be a briefing in an hour or so. So move it.”
“Adam Cullen,” I said. “Mike Cobb said you’d direct me to where he is.”
“Cobb, oh yeah, the private investigator.” He said the last two words with the same inflection that I use when saying “prostate examination,” but he pointed in the opposite direction from where the media were to gather — and closer to the station.
“Thanks,” I said, and started toward the building’s parking lot.
“Hold it,” Kirschoff barked and I turned back to him. “You’ll need this.” He held out an ID card in plastic and attached to the end of a blue-and-white lanyard.
I took it, pulled it over my head, and resumed my search for Cobb. I could see that a small tent-like structure had been erected, I assumed over the body of Jasper Hugg.
I found Cobb a couple of minutes later. Like Kirschoff, he was on his phone, but he spotted me and held up one finger to indicate he was almost done.
I worked my way over to him and leaned on the fender of an ambulance. The rumble of its engine and the flashing lights quickly convinced me that a migraine headache was in my immediate future.
Cobb ended his call and gestured for me to follow him. We walked through the open back door of the station. There were several people whom I took for RIGHT TALK 700 employees milling around, some looking stressed, others looking terrified. Several were hugging, a few were crying.
Cobb ducked around a corner and into a room that housed a photocopier, a fax machine, and several shelves stacked high with stationery supplies and dozens, maybe hundreds of tape cases all labelled with dates and times. I assumed they contained the various programs.
“Thanks for doing this.” He held out his hand and we shook, something we often did, always initiated by Cobb, when we hadn’t seen one another in a while.
“So do you know what happened?”
Cobb nodded. “Some. The police investigators have put together a few things. Hugg came in early — by early, I mean a little after four in the morning. It looks like he was the only one in the building.”
“No security?”
“They don’t have cameras, but the building is locked at all times,” Cobb answered. “Entry is restricted to people who have a photo ID card. It has a bar code on it that unlocks the door.”
“Not exactly Fort Knox.”
“No,” Cobb agreed, “but they don’t keep gold here.”
“I just thought after Hamilton …”
“Good point.” Cobb pulled out the notebook he carried with him all the time, flipped some pages, and made a notation. “Think I’ll ask about that.”
“Anyway,” I said, “Sorry to interrupt.”
Cobb waved it off and continued telling me the story of what happened to Jasper Hugg.
“Sometime between six and six-thirty, three people arrived together — the host of the show that starts at 7 a.m., the producer of that show, and a news guy. They pulled into the parking lot and parked next to Hugg’s car, a Lexus. They commented about his being here that early, but no one seemed to think it was any big deal. Except that when they got out of the car, one of them — the news guy, his name is Todd Hippel — saw what looked like someone lying on the ground at the far corner of the building. There’s some grass there and a park bench, and they initially figured it was a drunk or druggie sleeping it off. The guy was half on the grass and half on the pavement of the parking area. They were about to ignore whoever it was and head into the building when Hippel noticed that the person on the ground was big, as in real big.
“That got Hippel thinking — Hugg’s car and a big guy on the ground. So he decided to head over there to make sure it wasn’t Hugg and that he hadn’t had a heart attack or something.”
Cobb must have thought of something else because he suddenly stopped talking, pulled out the notebook, and made another notation before slipping it back into his blazer pocket.
“Another question I need to ask,” he explained. “Anyway, the person on the ground turned out to be the very dead Jasper Hugg, and it was obvious that he hadn’t died of natural causes. Hippel called it in and a patrol
car was here in minutes, confirmed that it was clearly a homicide. That’s when detectives and a woman from the ME’s office were called to the scene. That’s where we’re at now.”
“What did he die of?”
“Stab wounds. Several of them. At least one to the heart, five or six to the upper torso, and a couple to the neck and head area. According to the nurse, from the Medical Examiner’s office, at least three or four of the wounds would have been fatal by themselves.”
I glanced at my watch. It was 9:39 a.m. Hugg had been dead for at least three hours, maybe longer. I looked back at Cobb.
“I’m not sure why I’m here.”
“There are a couple of things I want you to see.” Cobb began moving out of the building and back toward the parking lot.
Once outside he walked quickly toward the area that seemed the most frenzied. We reached the yellow crime-scene tape and out of habit I stopped. This was where my fairly extensive experience as a crime writer had taught me I belonged. On the outside of the tape, and later, coffee in hand, at the scene of the media briefing where we would be told what the police wanted us to know and nothing more.
Cobb lifted the tape. “You’re okay to follow me. We just can’t get too close.”
I stepped under the upraised yellow plastic and moved up alongside Cobb. “At some point,” I told him, “you’re going to have to tell —”
I stopped in mid-sentence as just a few metres directly in front of me, one side of the tent structure was open. And there was the body of the man I had talked with in his office just a couple of days before. He was lying next to the park bench I had sat on after my interview with Larmer.
Jasper Hugg lay face up, his right arm directly out to the side, the other, awkwardly beneath him, or at least it appeared so from where I stood. He was wearing a black-and-yellow track suit, and I wondered if, after putting in a few early hours at the office, he had been on his way for a morning workout or a jog when his assailant attacked him. Much of his head and face were covered in blood, and I wasn’t sure I’d have recognized him if I didn’t already know who it was. The top half of the track suit was stained bright red from the neck down, almost to where the sweatshirt stopped and the sweatpants began.
I turned to Cobb, partly to address him and partly because I was finding looking at Hugg very difficult. “Do the police have any idea who killed him?”
Cobb didn’t look at me, focusing instead on the body I would have preferred not to see. “More on that later. Look over there.”
I looked in the direction Cobb had indicated and two people, a man and a woman, stood close to the body, the man making notes or drawing something in a notebook, the woman speaking intently to someone in what looked like hospital garb. From time to time one or the other of them would point at Hugg. I couldn’t tell if they were arguing or merely animated in their discussion.
A photographer was snapping pictures, a second was videotaping the scene, and three or four other people, as near as I could tell, were gathering bits of what I guessed was possible evidence from the ground around Hugg’s body. I couldn’t tell what they were finding, but whatever it was was placed in plastic bags and carefully labelled. I spotted Lynn Cannizaro, a registered nurse from the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner whom I’d met previously while covering violent crimes in my freelance work. She was closest to the body and occasionally speaking into some kind of recording device.
“The good news,” Cobb relayed in a voice barely above a whisper, “is that the lead detectives are good, very good.” He nodded at the woman, who was just wrapping up the conversation she had been engaged in.
“Yvette Landry. Been on the force twelve years. Was RCMP before that. Damn good cop, but I recommend you don’t piss her off. She’s tougher than truck-stop meat loaf and doesn’t give a damn about whose feelings get hurt during an investigation.”
Cobb pronounced her name “Laundry,” with a slightly French intonation, and I was reminded once again that he was fluently bilingual, an ability that surprised me every time I thought of it.
Cobb moved his gaze in the direction of the male cop. “Andrew Chisholm. He’s not quite as good as Landry, but he’s good. Easy to underestimate because he’s soft-spoken and smiles a lot. Drinks a bit, too, but as far as I know it doesn’t get in the way of his doing his job.”
I looked over the blood-soaked body again. “Weird,” I said.
“What is?” Cobb looked at me.
“Hugg was a big man. Presumably strong. You don’t just walk up to a guy like him and stick a knife in him without a fight or resistance or … any way of knowing if …”
Cobb shook his head. “I didn’t get much from the detectives, but they did say it didn’t look like Hugg struggled much until at least the first knife thrust, and maybe not much then depending on how badly he was injured. So either he knew his killer and was lured over here, or someone snuck up on him.”
“In either case he didn’t realize he was in any danger.”
Cobb shrugged. Noncommittal. “It seems a plausible scenario. The other thing that seems likely is that the killer was big, or at least tall. Hugg has several wounds on the upper parts of his body. A small guy, a) would have had trouble overpowering a guy like Hugg who wasn’t just big but also tough, and b), would have had difficulty inflicting wounds to Hugg’s face and head in particular, unless he was as tall as or almost as tall as his victim.”
“Maybe some of the damage was done after Hugg was on the ground.”
Cobb nodded. “A possibility for sure. But at least some of the nastier cuts, the ones that would have brought Hugg down, had to happen when he was still on his feet.”
I turned away from the body. I wasn’t good at the kind of gruesome clinical discussion we were having about someone who, a few hours earlier, had been a living, breathing human being. I wanted to get away from there. I needed to get away from there.
“All of this is bloody fascinating,” I said, immediately regretting my choice of words, “but I‘m not sure why you’re telling me any of it. I don’t expect to write a novel based on your working for Buckley-Rand Larmer, and while the murder of his associate is unfortunate, certainly, it has no particular bearing on me and —”
“That’s just it,” Cobb interrupted.
“What?” I turned to look at him. “What’s just it?”
“I know you’re not comfortable with this, and I won’t keep you here any longer than necessary, but the truth is, Hugg’s death will very likely have a direct bearing on both of us, at least for the foreseeable future.”
I raised an eyebrow at him but didn’t interrupt.
“The police have taken Larmer into custody for questioning and it’s very likely they’ll be formally charging him with the murder of Jasper Hugg.”
Several seconds passed before I was able to manage a response.
“Goddamn.”
“Yeah.”
“I didn’t think those things happened this fast. Hugg hasn’t been dead that long and already they’ve detained a suspect.”
Cobb nodded. “It doesn’t often happen this fast, but it can in the right set of circumstances.
“Was there a witness?”
“I’m not sure. They’ve got something they think is solid, but I don’t know what that is. The cops don’t see me as a need-to-know person.”
“But why? What the hell motive would Larmer have for killing someone he relies on so heavily?”
“They did tell me that. They’re convinced that Hugg was planning some kind of palace coup either to take over the show himself or to bring in someone he could control a little more. According to the cops, Hugg and Larmer hadn’t been seeing eye to eye on things for quite a while.”
“Is this a theory or do they have some evidence of this?”
Cobb shrugged. “Don’t know that, but I doubt they’d take him in for
questioning without something concrete as to motive.”
“And even if Larmer and Hugg were adversaries in the workplace, why not just fire the guy? You don’t usually kill somebody over philosophical differences.”
Cobb remained silent, looked deep in thought.
I thought back to my meetings with both men, scanned my memory for any hint of a rift. If there was one, I hadn’t seen it.
“So I guess that would address a couple of points — the one about Hugg knowing his attacker and the fact that the attacker was a big man. Larmer works on both counts.”
Cobb nodded. “It appears that Hugg had gone out to the parking lot, either to get something or to go for a run. He heads over this way, maybe to start his run, or maybe in response to someone.”
“The killer.”
“That seems likely.”
“Larmer.”
“Not Larmer.”
“But I thought you said —”
Cobb held up his hands, palms facing away.
“The cops are wrong. Larmer didn’t kill Hugg.”
“And you know this because?”
“Because he told me.”
“Larmer told you he didn’t kill Jasper Hugg?”
“Yes.”
“When? It seems like this is all moving very fast.”
“He called me, told me to get here fast. I was here when the police read him his rights, slapped on the cuffs, and led him away. I had a chance to exchange a few words with him before they hauled him off. He told me he didn’t do it. I believe him.”
“End of story?” I said.
“End of story.”
“Oh, well, that settles it then. A guy who makes a living by playing games with the truth and is a candidate for the Jerk Hall of Fame tells you he didn’t kill a guy who the police, who are actually investigating the crime, say he did. And, as you just noted, they presumably have gathered evidence in support of the charge they are getting ready to lay but you’ve decided on the basis of him saying, “Well gee, Mike, I really didn’t kill the guy, you know what I mean?’ to which you say, ‘Yeah, Buck, I absolutely know what you mean’ — based on that conversation you’ve decided that Larmer is innocent.”
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