The Early Investigations of Joanne Kilbourn

by Gail Bowen

  Mieka seemed wholly absorbed in her fingers, but her voice was strong. “I called a little before six and asked Bernice if she’d mind locking up when she left.”

  “And your premises were locked when you arrived this morning at …?”

  “At around seven-thirty. I’m an early riser. And, no, the shop wasn’t locked. The front door was closed, but the dead-bolt wasn’t on, and the back door, the one that opens onto the alley, was open. There was a pigeon flying around in the store. And there were bird droppings on the counter.”

  Inspector Zaba looked at Mieka expectantly.

  Mieka shrugged. “I chased the pigeon around for a while until it finally flew out, then I cleaned up and I brought the dirty rags out here to the garbage. That’s when I found Bernice. I went inside and phoned you and then I called my mother.”

  A female constable came outside and told Inspector Zaba that there was a phone call for Mieka. He nodded and told Mieka she could take it, but when she went into the building, he followed her.

  I stayed behind, and that’s when I heard two of the younger cops talking. One of them apparently knew Bernice pretty well.

  “She was a veteran,” he said. “On the streets for as long as I was in vice, and that was three years. She was from up north; she used to be one of that punk Darren Wolfe’s girls.”

  The other man looked at him. “Another Little Flower homicide?”

  “Looks like,” said the first cop. “The bare bum’s right. The face didn’t seem mutilated, but maybe they’ll pick up something downtown.”

  The young cops moved over to the garbage can and started bagging hunks of bloody plaster. They didn’t seem to feel like talking any more. I didn’t blame them.

  When Mieka came out, it was apparent that the brutal reality of the murder had hit her. Her skin was waxy, covered with a light sheen of sweat. I didn’t like the way she looked, and apparently Inspector Zaba didn’t, either.

  He came over to me and lowered his voice to a rasp. “I think we know what we’ve got here, Mrs. Kilbourn, and your daughter looks like she’s had enough. Get her out of here. We’ve got all we need from her for the moment.”

  Grateful, I started to walk away, but I couldn’t leave without asking. “What do you think you’ve got?” I said.

  Inspector Tom Zaba had a face that would have been transformed by a smile, but I had the sense he didn’t smile often.

  “An object lesson,” he said. “In the past year, we’ve had four of these murders.” He looked thoughtfully at Bernice Morin’s body and then at me. When he spoke, his voice was patient, the voice of a teacher explaining a situation to an unpromising student. “We’ve got some common denominators in these cases, Mrs. Kilbourn. One, all the victims were hustlers who’d gone independent. Two, all the girls walked out on pimps who don’t believe in free enterprise. Three, the faces of all the victims were mutilated. Four, all the dead girls were found with the lower halves of their bodies exposed.” He raised his eyebrows. “You don’t have to be a shrink or a cop to get the message, do you?”

  I looked at Bernice Morin’s body. Her legs were strong and slender. She must have been a woman who moved with grace. I felt a coldness in the pit of my stomach.

  “No,” I said, “you don’t have to be a shrink or a cop to get the message.”

  Victoria Park looks like every other inner-city park in every other small city in Canada: a large and handsome memorial to the war dead surrounded by a square block of hard-tracked grass with benches where people can sit and look at statues of politicians or at flower beds planted with petunias and marigolds, the cheap and the hardy, downtown survivors.

  Mieka and I sat on a bench in front of Sir John A. Macdonald. It was a little after nine, and we had the park pretty much to ourselves. In three hours, the Mr. Tube Steak vendors would be filling the air with the smell of steaming wieners and sauerkraut, and the workers would spill out of the offices around Victoria Park and sit on the grass in their short-sleeved shirts and pastel spring dresses and turn their pale spring faces to the sun. But that was in the future. The only people in the park now were the sad ones with trembling hands and desperate eyes who had nowhere else to go.

  And us. We sat side by side, not saying anything for a few minutes, then Mieka started to talk. Her voice was high and strained. “I only ever really talked to her once, Mummy, and it was here. One morning we came over here so Bernice could have a smoke. We talked about her tattoos. She was so proud of them. She had a snake that curled around here.” Mieka traced a circle around the firm flesh of her upper arm. “Bernice was wearing a tank top that day, and she caught me staring at the snake. I was embarrassed, so I mumbled something complimentary. Then she just opened up. Told me she’d gotten the snake done down in Montana, and she thought it was so hot, she’d had a rose done on the other arm. She said all the people she hung with thought the snake and the rose were the best, but that was because they hadn’t seen her private tattoo.

  “Then she did something strange. We were sitting over there by the swings. Bernice looked around to make sure we were alone, then she turned away from me and hiked up her tank top. On her back was a picture of unicorns dancing.

  “I knew it was an honour that she was showing me the tattoo, and I knew I should say something, but I just choked. Finally, Bernice pulled her shirt back down and laughed. ‘Knocked you out, eh?’ she said. Then she said she wanted me to see her back so I’d know she wasn’t just somebody who did cleaning.

  “I didn’t mean to ignore her, Mum. You know I’d never be mean deliberately, but I guess I was just so busy I didn’t pay much attention to her …”

  I put my arm around my daughter’s shoulder and pulled her toward me. “It’s okay, Miek,” I said. “It’s okay.” But I knew it wasn’t, and so did Mieka.

  Her eyes were filled with sadness. “I haven’t told you about the unicorns. Bernice dreamed about them one night after her boyfriend beat her up. The next morning she made the drawing, then she took the bus up north to a tattoo artist she knew who could do the design right. She said it took three hours and it just about killed her, especially the parts on her shoulder blades, but she said the unicorns were so beautiful they were worth it.”

  “Let’s go home, baby,” I said.

  She shook me off. “Do you know what she told me, Mummy? She said she liked unicorns because they were the only animal that refused to go on the ark with Noah, and that’s why they’re extinct. She said her boyfriend told her it was because they were so dumb, but Bernice said she thought it was because they were too proud to get intimidated.” Mieka’s face was crumpling in pain. “That’s what she said, Mummy. Unicorns died out because they were too proud to get intimidated.”

  Finally the tears came, and I took my daughter home. She slept most of the morning, but when I came back after picking up my youngest child, Taylor, from nursery school, Mieka was sitting at the kitchen table and there was a plate of sandwiches in front of her.

  “Peanut butter and jelly for Taylor and salmon for us,” Mieka said. She bent down and gave Taylor a quick hug. “Sound good to you, kiddo?”

  Taylor beamed. “Look,” she said, “I made you something, too. I did it at school.” It was a painting. In the centre of the page, a baby lamb nuzzled its mother and a chick cracked the top of an egg. The rest of the page was alive with red tulips. They were everywhere: bursting through the grass on the ground and the clouds in the sky. A corona of them shot out in a halo of red around the yellow sun. On the top, in the careful printing of the nursery school teacher, were the words “NEW LIFE.”

  I tapped the words with my fingertip. “Life will go on, you know,” I said, looking at Mieka.

  She smiled and said quietly, “I know. It’s just hard to think that it won’t go on for Bernice. Seventeen is too young.”

  “Too young for what?” asked Taylor.

  “Too young to miss the spring,” Mieka said, turning away. “Now, come on, T., what’s the drink of choice with peanu
t butter and jelly?”

  After lunch, Mieka said she had some errands she should do, and she’d feel better if she was busy. Taylor and I drove to the nursery to buy bedding plants. It felt good to stand in the sunshine, picking up boxes of new plants, smelling damp earth and looking at fresh green shoots. As we drove home, Taylor was still curling her tongue around the names: sugar daddies, double mixed pinks, sweet rocket, bachelor’s-button, black-eyed Susans. By the time we pulled into the driveway her lids were heavy and she came in, curled up on the couch and fell asleep. I covered her with a blanket, poured a cup of coffee and dialled the number of a friend of mine from the old days before my husband died.

  Jill Osiowy was director of news at nationTV now, but when I met her, in 1971, she’d just been hired as a press officer by our provincial government. It was her first job, and she was very young. We were all young. My husband was twenty-eight when he was elected to the House that year, and when we formed the government, he became the youngest attorney general in the country.

  In those days, Jill’s hair was an explosion of shoulder-length red curls, and she wore Earth shoes and hand-embroidered denim work shirts. She was smart and earnest, and her face shone with the faith that she could change the future. By the time we lost in 1982, Jill’s hair was sleek as the silk shirts and meticulously tailored suits she bought in Toronto twice a year; she was still smart and she was still earnest, but she’d had some bruising encounters with political realities, and the glow had dimmed a little.

  She had used the first years after the government changed to go back to school. She got two graduate degrees in journalism, taught for a while at Ryerson in Toronto, then came back to Regina and her first love, TV news.

  That afternoon, when she heard my voice, Jill gave a throaty whoop. “Well, la-di-da, you’re back in town. I’d heard rumours but since you never actually phoned me, I didn’t want to believe them.”

  “Believe them,” I said. “And as susceptible to guilt as I am, you can’t guilt me on this because we’ve only been back in Regina two weeks. We’re not even unpacked yet.”

  “Okay,” she said, “I’ll come over and help you unpack. That’ll guilt you.”

  “Right now?” I asked.

  “Sure. I’m just poring over our anemic budget trying to find some money that didn’t get spent. Depressing work for the first five-star day we’ve had this month.”

  “Come over then. It’d be great to see you. But listen, I was calling for another reason, too. Have you heard anything about a case called the Little Flower murders?”

  Jill whistled, “I’ve heard a lot. One of our investigative units is putting together a feature on it. I can bring over some of their tapes if you like.” She was quiet for a beat. “What’s your interest in this, Jo?”

  “I’ll tell you when you get here. Listen, I bought a new house. Same neighbourhood as I lived in before I moved to Saskatoon, but over on Regina Avenue.” I gave her the address. “Twenty minutes?”

  “Fifteen,” she said. “I’ve been cooped up here long enough. I’m starting to wilt.”

  When I saw her coming up the front walk, she didn’t look like a woman who was wilting. She looked sensational, and I was conscious of the fact that I hadn’t changed since I’d grabbed my blue jeans and an old Mets T-shirt out of the clean laundry when Mieka had called that morning. Jill’s red hair was cut in a short bob, and she was wearing an orangey-gold T-shirt, an oversize unbleached cotton jacket, short in the front and long in the back, and matching pants. On the lapel of her jacket she had pinned a brilliant silk sunflower.

  “You look like a van Gogh picnic,” I said, hugging her. “Where did you get that outfit?”

  “Value Village,” she said. “It’s all second-hand.”

  “How come when I wear Value Village it looks like Value Village?”

  “Because you’re too conservative, Jo. You’ve got to force yourself to walk by the polyester pantsuits.” She stepped past me into the front hall and looked around. “My God, this isn’t a polyester pantsuit kind of house. You must be doing all right.”

  “Well, I am doing all right,” I said, “but not this all right. Come on, let me give you the grand tour, and I’ll tell you about it.”

  Even after two weeks, I felt a thrill when I walked around our new home. It was a beautiful house, thirty years old, solid, with big sunny rooms and lots of Laura Ashley wallpaper and oak floors and gleaming woodwork. I loved being a tour guide and Jill was a wonderful companion: enthusiastic, flattering and funny. When we walked out in the backyard and she saw the pool glittering in the sun, she said, “This really is sublime.” Then our dogs came out of the house and ran down the hill. Sadie, the collie, stopped dead at the edge of the pool, but Rose, the golden retriever, jumped in and began doing laps.

  “Not so sublime,” I said.

  Jill grimaced. “Does that happen often?”

  “She’s getting used to it,” I said. “We’re down to about fourteen times a day.”

  “This is why I have cats,” Jill said.

  “Lou and Murray are still alive?” I said, surprised.

  “They’re planning their joint birthday celebration even as we speak,” Jill said. “They’ll be thirteen July 29.”

  “Come on,” I said, “let’s go in and get a beer and you can tell me all about it. Are cat years the same as dog years? Are Lou and Murray really going to be ninety, or just thirteen?”

  “You’re mocking us,” Jill said, “so I’m not going to tell you. Let’s hear your family’s news.”

  We went into the kitchen. Jill found a couple of beer glasses while I opened the beer.

  “You did hear, didn’t you,” I said, “that I’ve adopted a little girl? Her name is Taylor, and she’s five. She was my friend Sally Love’s daughter.”

  Jill’s eyes looked sad. “I heard about Sally, of course. That was such a tragedy.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I don’t think any of us are over it yet. Anyway, there was no one to take Taylor, so I did. It seems to be working out. The kids are really good with her, and I think Taylor’s beginning to feel that we’re her family.”

  “She’s lucky to have you,” Jill said. “Not every kid gets Gaia, the Earth Mother.”

  “Well, thanks,” I said, “I think.”

  We brought out two bottles of Great West and sat at the picnic table and watched Rose do her patient laps. It was a perfect day, still and sunny and warm. Jill turned to me. “This is what my mother and her friends used to do when I was growing up,” she said. “Twenty-fourth of May weekend they’d hit the backyards and start working on their tans. My mother used to call it her summer project.”

  “Do you want to go back to that?” I asked.

  “Lord, no,” she said. “Now tell me about the house.”

  “Actually it was Sally’s lawyer’s idea. When I was making the arrangements to adopt Taylor, he asked me if I was going to have to renovate my old house for an extra child. In fact, I’d planned to. Nothing very elaborate, but Taylor’s inherited her mother’s talent for making art.”

  “Not a bad inheritance,” Jill said.

  “Not bad at all. It’s amazing to see. You read about gifted children, but to actually live with a little kid who has this incredible talent is something else again. Anyway, I told Sally’s lawyer I wanted to add on a room where Taylor could paint. He just about patted me on the head. ‘Good, good,’ he said, ‘we mustn’t ignore the fact that in cases like these the concept of life expectations comes into play.’ ”

  Jill shook her head. “Ugh, lawyer talk. What are life expectations?”

  “According to this guy it’s a term the law uses to describe what Taylor could have expected her life to be like given her parents’ earning power and position in the community. Sally and Stuart Lachlan were both wealthy people – so the lawyer said Taylor could have reasonably expected to grow up with pretty much everything she wanted.”

  “I don’t like the sound of that,” Jill said t
houghtfully.

  “Neither did I,” I said, “but in this particular case it simply meant investing a little money from Taylor’s trust fund in the place she was going to live. At first I was going to put it toward the new addition, but then this house came on the market. I’d gotten a pretty good advance for that biography I wrote about Andy Boychuk, and you know what a slump real estate’s in here. With what I got for our old house and the advance, this place really didn’t cost much more than the renovations would have.”

  “And this is so spiffy,” Jill said.

  “Right,” I said, “and this is so spiffy. Can I get you another beer?”

  “No, I’ve got a meeting at four o’clock with the vice-president of finance. He’s coming out from head office, and I need to smell hard-working and underfunded.” She looked at her watch. “If we’re going to look at the Little Flower tape, we’d better do it now. You never did tell me why you’re interested.”

  I tried to keep the emotion out of my voice. “This morning Mieka found a body in the garbage can outside the place she’s going to have her catering business. It was a woman who had done some cleaning for her – actually it was a girl, seventeen. I overheard one of the cops say it looked like another Little Flower murder.”

  Jill’s body was tense with interest. “Was the face mutilated?”

  “I couldn’t see her face,” I said. “But whoever killed her had pulled her slacks and panties down around her ankles.”

  “Bastard.” Jill spit the word into the fine May afternoon.

  Her face was ashen as we walked into the house. Neither of us said a word as Jill put the tape in the VCR and the first pictures filled the screen. They were sickening. Reflexively, I closed my eyes. When I opened them, the images on the screen were even worse. The camera had pulled in for a tight shot of the inside of a commercial garbage bin. There were two girls lying on some garbage in the bin. They looked as if they had been folded in two and dropped in. Both girls were naked from the waist down, and each of them had long hair that fell in a dark pillow behind her head. They would have looked like children hiding if it weren’t for their unnatural stillness and for the hideous distortion violence had made of their faces. The features were unrecognizable; eyes, nose and lips had run together into a charred, melted mass.