Creep

by R. M. Greenaway

  “Is this going to be an incredibly long story with no twist?” JD asked.

  “It’s got a twist,” Leith promised, but he got the message and cut to the chase. “It turns out grandmother and granddaughter are close, and they both love the house. They wanted someone in there who wouldn’t tear it down. At least that’s what Alison got from her conversation. The rest is just guesswork, but we think the granddaughter put the bug in her grandmother’s ear that we should get the place, and since it’s Wilma’s decision, that’s exactly what happened. And here I am, a happy homeowner.”

  “Wow, it’s like a fairy tale,” JD said. “As someone looking forward to a future of studio flats and ever-rising rents, I’m happy for you. I hope you put an inspection clause in the contract?”

  Leith shrugged. “Don’t need to. I was in construction before joining up. I can fix anything. Just need a pile of nails and a jumbo box of Band-Aids. You’re going to help me paint, though, right?”

  JD sniffed, but didn’t say no, and that, Leith thought, was progress.

  Monty was done with his call. “Am I going crazy,” he said, “Or is our main suspect an honest-to-god werewolf?”

  The search was now on for Troy Hamilton’s attacker, starting from the culvert and radiating outward. Police dogs and Ident specialists were fanned through the woods, and members cruised the streets or hiked the trails of Lynn Valley, eyeing everybody and asking questions.

  JD answered Montgomery’s flip question with a sharp reply. “Our main suspect is Stefano Boone, who’s come to believe he’s a wolf, and desperately needs psychiatric attention, is what.”

  “I’m not so sure of that,” Monty said. “If Stefano Boone killed our crawl space victim, he was definitely in wolf form when he did it. Ben Stirling was chewed up by some pretty nasty wolf-sized incisors.”

  “Actually,” Leith said, “Stirling was mauled by a large dog, probably while he was alive. A whole set of experts said so. In which case, his death may well have nothing to do with Stefano Boone. Let’s keep that in mind.”

  A toolmark specialist, a forensic odontologist, a veterinarian, and others had weighed in on the damages to Ben Stirling — the gouges, streaking tears, torn scalp, nicks and grooves — and concluded they were the bite and claw marks of a large dog. A dog had not sawn off the arm, however.

  Monty took the rebuffs with a shoot-me shrug.

  “I think what we’re looking at is a burglary gone wrong. Large dogs are often sentries, and sentries and burglars don’t mix, do they?” JD said.

  Leith nodded. “Right. Say Stirling was breaking into a property on which some sort of illegal activity was underway. There’s a dog on duty, and with or without its owner’s consent, the dog kills Stirling. Now there’s a mess that has to be cleaned up.”

  “And they can’t report it, because they’re meth cooks, or processing hot cars, or whatever,” JD agreed. “Which probably means it happened in the industrial zone. Or elsewhere.”

  Monty suggested Surrey, his old turf. “Wide-open spaces, plenty of hideaways, strained police resources: the land of opportunity.”

  Leith was thinking of Cloverdale, contained within Surrey — a great place for an off-duty cop to hide a body. But that was another case and another worry. He stood by the map on the wall, found Lynn Valley, and placed his thumb on it. “So how does his body end up in the crawl space of the house he’s illegally occupying? Maybe he’s got connections with that lab or chop shop. Works there, knows the owner, got on their bad side, owes them money. Maybe it wasn’t a run-in with a dog. Maybe the dog was told to attack. But one way or another, his killer is intimate enough with him to know where he lives.”

  Had they written off Ben’s friend, roomie, and accomplice, young Joe Battar, too soon? Leith wondered. He told the others of his concern. “If Battar was working with Ben, not just living with him, he might be the link between the house and the murder. Time to dig into his soul a little deeper.”

  “Waste of time,” JD said. “Battar’s soul is an open book. He’s harmless.”

  She was probably right, Leith realized. But right now, the harmless soul was the best lead they had.

  * * *

  Having changed into joggers and kangaroo jacket, a baseball cap shading his eyes, Dion sat at his desk in the detachment, twisting a paperclip into a spiral. He wondered if Farah Jordan had ever owned a dog, or had access to one. She wouldn’t have the strength to haul a man’s body to the Greer house, up over the fence, and then drag it under, in his estimation. But she could have had help. A boyfriend, maybe. Seemed she wasn’t too particular about the kind of men she picked up.

  He had been given the rest of the day off, having strained his shoulder in carrying the boy from the culvert. A minor physical strain that was nothing, really, except a good excuse to sit and twist paperclips. He thought of his jolly little meeting with Montgomery and Leith, them both laying it on thick, telling him what a great job he’d done, how he’d go places — Leith putting on an act for Montgomery, and Montgomery — maybe — putting on an act for Dion, and Dion just doing his best not to be a defeatist.

  He pulled on his jacket and left the detachment. There was something he had been meaning to take care of for the longest time, an exorcism of sorts, and since he had the day off, he might as well do it now. The trick was to just get in the car and barrel out there. Don’t overthink it, don’t fret, just go.

  Once he was on the scene, far out there in Cloverdale, where his life had swerved so badly off course, he would finally know what to do with what was left of himself.

  Twenty-Nine

  SHUDDER

  November was a great month for rain on the Lower Mainland. It came down hard now, and already it was diluting Dion’s plan. What kind of a plan was it, anyway? Go to the scene of the crash that had taken so much from him, stand there and, what? Talk to Looch? In this kind of downpour, even communications with the dead would be washed away in streams of mud.

  Don’t think. Just go.

  The Ironworkers Memorial Bridge crossed the Burrard Inlet, then the thoroughfare dipped into a tunnel and became Highway 1, broadening into an eight-lane river of traffic as the city fell away behind him. He drove the limit in the gloom until conditions forced him to slow. It was the rain, buckets of it coming down, competing with the windshield wipers, messing with visibility. He was driving slower than the traffic around him, he realized. Dangerously slow. Finally he rolled to a stop on the shoulder with the hazards flashing.

  It was a typhoon. He folded his arms over the steering wheel to wait it out. The other drivers caromed past on their daily commute, home to Surrey, Abbotsford, Chilliwack. The engine idled and the wipers whined and slapped, fighting off the flood. Blurry, clear, blurry, clear.

  He had come out this way in the summer and found the intersection where Looch had died. But finding the crash site hadn’t been his objective. He was trying to work backwards and find the gravel pit, where he would try to figure out if the body was still there or not. However unwise it may have been, it was something he had to do. He had found the accident scene and the pit itself. He had stood and looked around, but couldn’t recall where the body lay. The place looked undisturbed, though, and he felt assured that the dead man, Stouffer, still rotted underfoot. Strange, because it was a shallow grave, temporary. He and Looch would have put Stouffer elsewhere, and a whole lot deeper, if they hadn’t been seen by the girl with pink hair. Like an evil sprite, she had led them on a chase, straight into the path of a speeding Camaro.

  The story would have turned out so differently, if not for the girl. Looch would still be alive. He would be here to share the burden, help figure it out, make it go away.

  It wasn’t going away. Sitting in his car in the rain, Dion wondered if the body had been found. But if it had, it would have been identified. The name Stouffer would have hit the news, and Dion would have known. On the other hand, may
be even if the body was found, even if the name was mentioned, the story could have faded so fast that he hadn’t caught wind of it. A low-life was dead, a murder unsolved. Happened a lot in the Lower Mainland.

  But then IHIT would have looked at the timeline, the proximity, considered all the unanswered questions surrounding Dion’s crash, linked him with the body in the gravel pit, and come knocking on his door. Or maybe it was a work in progress.

  It didn’t matter. He was out here not to worry about his past crimes, but to visit the place where Looch had died. It seemed the best place to say goodbye, and ask for some advice while he was at it.

  Except the rain wasn’t going to let him get there. He was pulled over, miles from his destination, too cowed by the thundering of water on metal to carry on. He watched the river of headlights and taillights. He saw lights in the sky, a chopper passing overhead, and it struck him then that he was being watched, no longer in the abstract sense, but literally. Drones, agents, tracking devices. They had their methods.

  His dashboard looked untampered with, but so what? Easy enough to plant something, have him monitored. If that’s what they were doing, then they knew where he was right now, and they were wondering what he was up to. Or maybe they were well aware of what he had done, and were just waiting for him to prove it.

  The eye in the sky belonged to Mike Bosko, he was sure of it. Experimentally, he drew a sharp, loud breath. He laid a hand on his chest. His heart was pounding hard. Were they graphing that out, too, tracking his emotions? He squeezed his eyes shut.

  On the seat beside him his cellphone tweedled, making him jump. He watched it tweedle into silence. The second time it rang he lifted it to his ear. “Dion.”

  “Cal, it’s Jackie,” said the voice. “I’m glad I caught you. I just wanted to know if you’re okay.”

  “I’m okay,” he said, and presto, his anxieties sprouted another tentacle. Was Randall after him, too? The whole hit-and-run scenario could have been concocted. A trust builder, a scam. A Mr. Big scenario in reverse. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “Well, lookit. It seems to me I’ve put you in an awkward spot, and you’re obviously conflicted. So I want you to know, you’ve done nothing wrong. It wasn’t your theory, it was mine. All you did was answer my questions, right? I’m going to leave you out of it, from now on. Consider yourself untangled.”

  He gaped at the highway. There was a question he had been saving up for their next meeting. Linnae Avenue. But if she was shutting him out, it no longer mattered.

  She went on in her usual snappy way. “And you’re right. I’m putting it to bed on my end, too. If anything, I’ll hand my notes over to Internal. I just wanted to give you the heads up, my friend, in case I do that, and in case they want to get in touch with you about it. Otherwise, there’s just no proof, and I’m not going to waste any more time on it. Sorry I dragged you into it. I owe you a drink, okay?”

  Her rapid-fire voice was annoying, but good, too, pulling him out of what felt like a bad dream and back into a less silly reality. The enemy fire strafing his car was just another full-blown west coast downpour, and Mike Bosko had better things to do than monitor anybody’s heartbeat. The hit and run was real, Breanna Ferris was dead, and if Randall wanted to drop the conspiracy theory, he was more than happy to give it his stamp of approval.

  “Good,” he said. “But since you did confront Tori, we should meet and talk over how to deal with any possible flak. Don’t hand it to Internal until we talk it over. We could do that now, except I’m in the middle of something here.”

  Technically, it wasn’t a lie. With no breaks in the traffic, trucks and cars were thrumming by with a wet hiss, rocking his car on its shocks. Definitely in the middle of something. He said, “Denny’s, in a couple hours?”

  She surprised him then with, “Probably not necessary at this point. I’ve got it well in hand.”

  “I think it is necessary,” he said. “We can’t leave it hanging. I’m part of this whole thing. You saw to that, right? We need to debrief.”

  A slight hesitation on her end, and he had the sudden, sinking feeling that between this morning and now, something had gone off the rails.

  “Yes, all right,” she said. Not with her usual zeal.

  “What’s happening, Jackie?”

  “What’s happening is what I said is happening. But you’re right, we should meet. Denny’s, in two hours, say six thirty. That works for me. Bye.”

  There it was again, a different ring to her voice. She was lying to him.

  “Wait,” he said. “Linnae.” It was something he wanted to nail down, before it got lost again in his own mind. “You said it’s interesting, so what about it?”

  “It’s not interesting at all. It was me, a camper, making up campfire stories, like you said. Just another false lead. Anyway, see you soon.”

  He ended the call, signalled, waited for a gap in traffic, and pulled into the frantic rush of the slow lane, worrying. He would have to drive several kilometres south before an off-ramp would get him turned back homeward. Visiting Looch would just have to wait for another day.

  * * *

  From his apartment, Dion phoned the detachment to check on the progress of the Stefano Boone manhunt. Doug Paley told him that the wolf was still at large, but evidence — blood spatter left like bread crumbs — had guided them up a barely traversable trail that linked the Mesachee with the residential plateau above. A quick connection for Boone between home and forest. Not an easy trail, unless you’re a wolf.

  Also, there had been a sighting of a wild-eyed young man dressed in black fur, crouched at the curb near Dempsey. So the search was off the park for now and focusing on the area of Boone’s home. There was no answer at his parents’ house, where he lived in the basement. No answer from his cellphone, or from his parents’ landline either. No vehicle sat in the driveway. Failing that, Paley told him, a search of the Headwaters park would get underway.

  Dion had doubts. “All nine thousand acres?”

  “If that’s what it takes. I’ll tell you what Ident found at the scene of the crime, though. Kind of fun. Tiny tufts of black fur snagged in the brambles. A whole series of them. Not biological fur — synthetic. We’ve got the bastard’s polymeric DNA.”

  “Montgomery said there was blood at the scene, as well. It probably wasn’t Troy’s, as he didn’t seem badly cut, so the attacker was wounded?”

  “If so, not badly. It was a spattering, a drop pattern,” Paley said. “A cut or a nosebleed — who knows. Nice that he left a calling card, anyhow. By the way, I see you wormed your way back into GIS. Congratulations.”

  “I’m a marvel. Just ask Corporal Montgomery.”

  Paley laughed and hung up.

  At 6:00 p.m., Dion was at Denny’s, half an hour early. He tried Jackie Randall’s cellphone to let her know he was here, to see if she could move the meeting up, but her phone went to voice mail.

  He sighed and settled in to kill time, lulled by the drifty music, MacArthur Park melting in the dark. Halfway through his decaf and still ahead of schedule, he called her again. This time she answered on the fourth ring, saying, “Hello,” breathlessly. “Hoo,” she said. “Steep.” She didn’t sound like she was sitting in her car, on her way to meet him, but like she was engaged in blood-pumping exercise.

  “Jackie?” he said. “I know it’s only six fifteen, but I’m sitting here —”

  She cut him off, saying, “Sorry, Cal. Miscalculated. I’ll be a little late. Make it seven?”

  “Frankly, no.” He looked down the length of the restaurant to its exit. “I’ll tell you what. You call me when you’re free, and we’ll meet wherever is handy. Jackie? Hello?”

  Silence. She had hung up, without apology or explanation. That wasn’t like her. And where the hell was she? Steep. He frowned out the window. The tone of voice she used with him was always slightly jokey
, whatever they were talking about. The few words she had huffed at him just now were far from amused. She sounded … irked?

  He tried her number again. Got her answering service.

  She was climbing a steep trail. Where else but at the Headwaters? She was a good climber, and it would take quite an incline to make her puff like that. That could explain the call cutting out. She hadn’t hung up, but stepped out of range. That could be the Mesachee, where the signal was iffy.

  She must have been dispatched to the scene. Maybe the werewolf had been found, and he, Dion, was being left out of the loop. Irritated, he paid for his coffee, got into his car, and drove.

  But a dispatch wasn’t the answer either, he saw as he approached the park gates. There was no evidence of a police presence in the park, now that the crime scene had been processed and Stefano had been tracked back to civilization. No cops, no hikers, nobody.

  Just one car. At the end of the parking lot, nearest the footbridge, Dion found a single vehicle, the familiar black Volkswagen Golf, gleaming in the last throes of the late afternoon’s rainstorm. He pulled in close behind the car and stared through the windshield at its backside, its witty bumper stickers, its Bart Simpson doll suckered to its rear window.

  He walked over to peer into the interior of the Golf. It was locked up, cold and empty. Had she crossed the footbridge to the main park, or struck up the outlaw bike trails of the Mesachee? Her aborted message didn’t give enough clues.

  He again tried her cell number, with no luck. He crossed the footbridge, stood where the trail forked, and shouted her name into the darkness. Then he backtracked and got his flashlight from his car, as darkness was filtering in. The culvert area made more sense. He walked along the road to the unofficial, unendorsed path that would lead up to the Mesachee. Not along the creek, but up.