Disposable Souls

by Phonse Jessome

  “Did you see Pastor Gardner leave?” I asked Bobby.

  “No. I drove up from the church like I do every morning. He was gone when I got here. Thelma is here. She’ll know where he is. What is this about?”

  Thelma Waters walked through the patio doors before I could answer. She was carrying fresh-cut flowers. The reds, yellows, and oranges of the blossoms gave a warm glow to her pale skin and white hair. The sixty-three-year-old retired teacher spent her days looking after the Gardner family. She was a founding member of their church and perhaps its most devout lay minister.

  “Hi, Thelma, this is Constable Christmas.”

  “Good morning. Good to see you both. We are expecting Father Greg. He didn’t say you were coming, Cam. We can’t wait to hear about his Camino pilgrimage. Have you seen him since he returned?” she asked.

  “Yes, he’s thinner. Is Samuel around?”

  “He’s here somewhere.” She smiled and moved toward the kitchen counter with the flowers. “Coffee is fresh.”

  A door on the left side of the kitchen swung open. Samuel Gardner walked in. Sam was small for a seventeen-year-old, bordering on frail. His eyelids dipped low into brown eyes, giving him a permanent sleepy look. Not that you’d ever get a good look at them. Sam’s gaze was always on the floor. His deep tan and rich black hair hinted at his Honduran roots. Sam was among the first orphans brought to Canada by the Little Maria Foundation and the only one adopted by Pastor Gardner himself. He’d spent two years in a refugee camp after a hurricane-soaked mudslide erased his world. His family, every person he knew, his entire village and world gone in seconds.

  Sam had become a featured attraction on Pastor Gardner’s broadcasts. He’d get so caught up in Gardner’s revival-style evangelical preaching that he’d walk slowly to the podium and begin to speak in tongues, his eyes shut, his hands raised. Others in the congregation would fall to the floor. I had no idea if it was real or staged. I figured he was so damaged by the early childhood trauma that his ranting could have been his way of coping with the pain. I hoped his faith was really that strong; he’d need a higher power to lean on right now.

  Sam stopped as he entered the kitchen and looked quickly toward Thelma and then back to the floor. The kid screamed damaged, even after all these years in a good home. Some hurt can’t be undone by a clean kitchen. I didn’t want to drop more pain on his world.

  “Constable Neville, it’s been more than a year. I was convinced I’d never see you again. The Lord reminds me of the virtue of patience,” Sam said. At least he remembered me.

  “Be still in the presence of the Lord and wait patiently for Him to act, my dear.” Thelma smiled.

  “Those who wait on the Lord shall renew their strength,” Bobby added with a smile of his own.

  I wondered what the Bible verse might be for “Wake up and smell the badges.” So far, no one seemed concerned about two police officers arriving unannounced. That’s not healthy, if you ask me.

  “Thelma, Samuel, can you both sit for a moment? I have some bad news.” Blair did that disappearing thing, fading to a neutral corner to watch. There is no easy way to tell people. Your adrenaline spikes, your stomach falls. You need to be on top of your game, but you can’t be. Not if you have any humanity left.

  “Samuel, I’m sorry.” I reached out and put my hand on the kid’s arm. “Your father was found in the city this morning. I’m afraid he’s been a victim of foul play. I am so sorry, Sam.”

  I watched as this frail boy absorbed the news. His shoulders hunched forward. He seemed to sink inside himself, his eyes looking quickly at me, then to Thelma, and back to the floor. Bobby Simms covered his mouth as a schoolgirl squeal slipped past his lips. Thelma reached for Sam as she took two steps in our direction before she fainted. I scratched her off the suspect list as Blair picked her up.

  We were in tricky territory. The eight ball was rolling around on the table now, ready to drop. Section Eight of the Charter of Rights protects every Canadian’s privacy. It also handcuffs every cop trying to keep them safe. Section Eight says we can’t violate a person’s reasonable expectation of privacy. That’s where the judges went crazy. The courts have stretched the concept so far, we damn near need a warrant to step out of a squad car. The slightest suspicion that there could be evidence of a crime on private property makes it warrant territory. With the notification finished, we couldn’t search the house. Just being inside risked scratching the eight ball. The smart move was to order everyone out, wrap the property in yellow tape, and sit on our hands for five or six hours waiting for a search warrant. I wasn’t feeling smart. I needed to know where Sandy Gardner was killed. I couldn’t burn six hours only to find out this wasn’t our crime scene.

  Besides, technically, we had no reason to suspect anyone, and that was wiggle room. I didn’t think Gardner was killed in the house. Thelma Waters was part church secretary, part housekeeper and would have been through the house already, but Gardner’s office was above the garage and probably not part of her morning routine. A peek there could rule out the need for a warrant and let us move on. I knew there’d be some uncomfortable time in the witness box explaining my decision, but I’d swallow that medicine when the time came.

  Thelma was sipping a glass of water and sitting beside Samuel. He was lost in a staring contest with the gleaming kitchen floor.

  “Thelma, you do the cleaning here, is that right?” I asked.

  “Yes, why?”

  “Just wondering if you’ve been through the house today, if you noticed anything out of place.”

  “You mean like a robbery? You think someone killed Pastor Gardner and robbed him?”

  “It’s too early to tell. We may need to get a team here to search the house, and it will help them a lot if you noticed anything they should check first.”

  “No. Nothing. Do you want to go look now?” she asked.

  “I would, but that’s not how it works. We have experts to do that sort of thing. What I would like, if you don’t mind, is to use the phone up in the office. I have to call and tell Father Greg what’s happened, and I’d like to speak with him in private. I don’t want to make a call like that on a cell.” Blair shot me a look that I ignored.

  “Oh, of course. Yes, Father will need to know. Please tell him we’d still like him to stop by if he could.”

  “I will. Now, I need all three of you to stay right here in the kitchen. Constable Christmas will stay with you.” I looked at Blair. He nodded. The eight ball scratch was mine, not his.

  Thelma gave me a key to the side door of the garage, but I didn’t need it. It wasn’t locked. It was going to be tough to convince a judge why that didn’t make me suspicious enough to wait for a warrant. Oak handrails topped carved balusters on both sides of the stairway; plush red carpeting covered each step. Sunlight streaming in through skylights splashed back from gold-plated doves inlaid on each riser. A lot of money for a stairway. I thought of the coke dealer again. Maybe God was a better seller.

  The door at the top of the staircase opened inward to reveal a long, spacious room running the length of the garage. The centre of the back wall, like the one in the kitchen, was all glass. It rose to meet the roofline at the peak and showed an even more impressive view. You could see the full length of the lake and the green-on-green patchwork of maple, birch, pine, and spruce trees covering the hillside across from the Gardner estate.

  A glass-top desk sat beneath the glass wall, its high-backed leather chair turned away from the windows offering instead a view of a vanity wall. Pictures of Pastor Gardner with prime ministers and princes, presidents and paupers. At least a dozen showing him holding young children in Third World slums. I wondered if any were taken in Pakistan; some of the scenes looked like my village in the hills. At least the chosen ones saved by his adoption agency wouldn’t be swinging knotted ropes at anyone.

  Above the pictures, a she
lf held an assortment of art objects collected from those same countries. Everything seemed to be in order. My concern about Section Eight eased, but the clean room did little to relieve the anxiety over not knowing where the murder happened. I still didn’t think Gardner was killed at the dump.

  There was a telephone on the desk. I walked over to make my call. I paused a moment when I saw a day planner, the old-fashioned paper kind. Old-school preacher, nice. I took a pen from my pocket and flipped it open to yesterday’s date. A few meetings filled his final day along with a note to call Father Neville. A youth group meeting at the church was the last appointment in the book. Everything was in perfect cursive script. More likely it was old-school Thelma at work here. Yep, a note in a different hand ran down the left edge of one page. That would be Sandy Gardner, doodling maybe, while on the phone. My Sweet Lo, it said. Guess he hung up before he finished the lyric. Thinking of him hanging up a call reminded me to make one. I still wanted to give Greg a heads up, but seeing his name in the day planner meant I also needed to know if my brother had heard from Gardner yesterday.

  I was dialling Greg’s number when I noticed a flickering light at the far end of the room. I put the handset back in the cradle. I figured the office was at least fifteen, maybe twenty metres long. A cluster of chairs surrounded a coffee table in the space furthest from the door. An open laptop sat on the table. A leather wingback chair was overturned in front of it.

  As I got closer, I could see handcuffs hanging from its curved front legs. A dark nylon cord hung from an open rafter on the ceiling. It stopped just short of the overturned chair. A looped slide show was causing the flicker on the laptop screen. I watched as one picture melted into another. The blue light just below the screen told me it was coming from a disc inserted into the computer.

  Was I standing in the crime scene? If I was, the suspect pool was going to be a deep one. Gardner’s office was the hub of his Church of Salvation and The Little Maria adoption agency. Hundreds of people came through this place in the run of a year. When I did the security audit, I found out Gardner had given keys to at least a dozen members of his congregation. I’d advised him to change the lock and that policy. I hoped he’d followed that advice.

  The images on the computer screen punched a hole in my chest. Children, twisted and contorted into someone’s idea of sex toys. Posed for a camera in graphic sexual positions. Some with adults whose faces were digitally blurred, most with other children whose faces were left clear. The screen filled with a young girl, six maybe seven, her blonde curls spread across a satin pillow. The hairy gut of an overweight man hung over her. The picture didn’t show the man’s head. I looked for tattoos or scars on his body, anything that would help the ICE team identify the bastard. The Internet Child Exploitation squad would have to scour every image on the disc. They could have that gig. I looked into the little girl’s eyes as she faded from the screen, replaced by another child. I’d seen the look in bombed-out villages in Afghanistan. The kids there had lost limbs. The little girl on the computer had lost everything.

  Two glasses of amber liquid, a candy dish, and a pill bottle sat beside the laptop. I made the liquid for Scotch; the multicoloured tablets in the dish had to be ecstasy. I didn’t need a closer look to know there’d be a Satan’s head stamped on every pill. Stallion approved. Blue football-shaped pills filled the bottle. I saw a small blood stain on the overturned back of the chair. A set of men’s clothing sat on a chair behind the laptop. The way they were neatly folded told me Gardner had taken his clothes off voluntarily.

  I stood there for five minutes. It felt like five hours. I needed every detail while it was fresh. I didn’t want to look at the computer, but I knew those kids would be the fuel that would drive me now. Pastor Gardner didn’t feel worth avenging anymore.

  The scene didn’t add up. If Gardner was killed here—and the cuffs, the clothes, and blood stain sure made it look that way—why move him? Moving a body is about hiding it. Usually, the body drop is off the side of a boat or in deep woods, not an open area beside a busy terminal. If it was just to lead us away from here, then why leave this scene intact? The obvious answer was post-kill panic. Even people who carefully plan a murder will often panic and make stupid decisions after the body falls. I’d seen people go to great lengths to cover up a crime and forget to get rid of a gun. Every cop loves post-kill panic. It solves a lot of cases. This scene looked like it could have been abandoned when the killer freaked. But, why drive past countless small docks beside a nice deep lake and take a body to the old dump? There was another possibility I didn’t like. The scene I was looking at was a fake.

  It didn’t look staged, but that was something I had to consider. The kiddy-porn crowd tends to dig up its garbage online. The ICE team finds it hidden in hard drives behind firewalls and false files. The computer disc was portable; anyone could have inserted it into the pastor’s laptop and hit play. My instincts told me this was real, and the pastor had a serious problem. But was I being played?

  Being a murder cop is a complicated gig. I made a few notes about my initial thoughts, and the doubts. Even if it was the real scene, finding it was adding to the mystery, not helping to solve it. It would be up to Carla Cage and the forensic team to tell me whether it was real and what it said.

  I retraced my steps and headed for the stairway. I looked at the telephone on the desk and regretted touching it. As I walked down the stairs I realized that little mistake might just keep the eight ball in play. No judge would think I went up there believing it was a crime scene, and then touched the phone. Instead, I’d look like an idiot who stumbled into the crime scene blind. I could live with that.

  I called dispatch and ordered up a crime-scene team. I didn’t know if Sandy Gardner was killed in the garage, but I was damn sure what happened there was criminal. I decided our best bet was to accept that Gardner was a pedophile unless the crime-scene techs found something suggesting a staged scene. If he was a sick bastard, that offered motive, something we were lacking so far. An angry kill, and then a panicked killer, made sense. I’d share my initial doubts with Blair so we didn’t get tunnel vision, but working the kiddy-porn angle felt right to me. Sometimes that matters more than anything.

  The kitchen looked shabbier. Same place, sunshine still sparkling from gleaming surfaces. It just didn’t feel any cleaner than my old man’s dump now that I believed a pedophile liked to chow down at the table. Kiddy porn leaves a big stain.

  Blair was outside waiting for the cruisers to bring enough yellow tape and uniforms to lock the property down. By declaring this our primary crime scene I pulled most of the resources from the dump. I told Blair what I’d found in the office. It put him in a dark place, and he wanted to stay out of the house.

  The images from the laptop played non-stop in my mind. I craved action, but I was stuck. I looked at the old-fashioned clock on the wall. I could feel the second hand pounding like a sledgehammer. We were racing toward that moment when red tape replaced yellow tape. Cops work murder for victims. Unfortunately, we do it in a system built for defence lawyers and their clients. Crown attorneys in Nova Scotia have been wimps since a judge bitch-slapped them for playing cute one of Canada’s biggest ever wrongful death cases. A couple of cigar-chewing mine managers walked away from twenty-six bodies in an underground sweatshop called the Westray Mine, because the prosecutors didn’t play fair.

  Now, they build a disclosure file that would fill a coal mine. They demand a log of every step taken by every cop. That means a file manager, usually a sergeant, must approve and record every move we make in the field. Before we make it. Tends to slow things down for the cops. Works for the prosecutors, though. They overwhelm defence lawyers with a kind of over disclosure that can hide evidence in plain sight.

  Thelma was comforting Samuel at the table. Bobby Simms leaned against the kitchen counter, the smile gone. There was anger in his posture, defiance in his folded arms. Bobby use
d to be a dangerous guy until he ran into Jesus in the prison yard. Looked to me like there was still some hard guy in there. He’d have to come to the office for the long chat later, but I figured I’d keep it civil for now, just take him outside to ask a few questions. My phone beeped before I could ask him to follow me out. A text from Blair. I wasn’t happy with what it said.

  “Thelma, Father Greg is out front. Do you still want him to come in?” I asked.

  “Please, yes, we do.” She put a hand on Sam’s arm.

  “Okay, I’ll send him in. Hey, Bobby, come on along. I want to chat with you outside for a minute.”

  A priest was a good idea for Sam and Thelma. I just wished it was a different priest; one brother a day is my limit. My relationship with my little brother is complicated. Greg pulled me out of that alcohol-fuelled tailspin when I left the club, and I am grateful. Unfortunately, he still thinks he’s saving me and offers priestly advice when I don’t want or need it. He forgets he’s my brother, not my father. He didn’t grow up with Gunner and me. We share parents and not much else. The old man was a full-on junkie by the time Greg came along. He didn’t put up a fight when our mother’s parents took him in. Living with the old man was a bitch, and we resented Greg for getting a free ride. He probably didn’t have it much better, but we just couldn’t see it that way. Our crazy grandparents believed he was born to atone for the sins of our meth-head mother. A gift from God they called him, and they promised to give him back. They pushed him from the cradle to the collar.