“Yes. They had been in Deep Cove, at Ms. York’s place. Ms. Paquette was visiting last night and ended up staying over. Ms. Paquette, she doesn’t drive.”
“Ah,” Leith said.
“So this morning she was trying to call Mr. Roth to get a lift home. He wouldn’t answer, so the two of them drove out here together. In the Nissan.”
Leith had a look at both women in the two cruisers, and couldn’t gather much from what he could see behind the sheen of glass. He saw pale, attractive faces staring ahead. The auburn-haired woman in one car — the victim’s sister, identified as Melanie York — he gauged as about forty. The blonde in the other, the maybe girlfriend, was possibly in her mid-twenties.
He told Johansson to get both women to the detachment for a nonintrusive processing, with emphasis on their hands, and he’d be there in an hour and a bit to talk to them.
He and JD pulled on crime-scene suits from the kit in the trunk and walked over to the open garage door, which of the three sat adjacent to the house, the one with interior access. Paley had designated Leith team leader on this. His first time running the show on the North Shore, and it happened to be the death of a billionaire, just his luck.
This garage was walled off from the other two. Inside stood a constable, keeping watch, but doing little else. She made note of their entry and told them nothing had been touched since police arrival except the light switch.
Centred lovingly in the garage sat a muscle car, jet black, as Johansson promised, and mint, nosed toward the rear wall. Unlike Johansson, Leith was more interested in the body that lay face down on the cement. He looked as if he had tripped on his way down a couple risers from the interior entryway and crashed into the car’s passenger-side door. Considering the head was hooded in some kind of sack, a trip or a push was quite possible.
The body was that of a chunky male dressed in designer jeans, lots of embroidery on the rear pockets. And a T-shirt, distressed black and factory frayed. He was barefoot. The sack on his head appeared to be a pillowcase, dark green, soiled, tightly bound around the throat with what looked like a man’s necktie. JD said, “Don’t know, sir, but if it was me finding him here like this, I’d have got that pillowcase off first thing. Then called 911.”
The top of the head lay about eighteen inches from the side of the black car. The heavy arms lay spread out, and the knuckles were bloody. What looked like blood was smudged on the floor under his hands and seeped through the pillowcase fabric around the region of the lower face. Leith wondered what kind of horror they would find when they unwrapped the head.
“Check out the dent,” JD said.
Leith followed her eyes up the side of the car, but saw nothing.
“It’s shallow,” she said. “You have to catch it in the light.”
He moved around until he saw it, too, the slight cave on the passenger door. The damage matched quite nicely with how the body had fallen. “Quite a hit,” he said. “He was shoved. Maybe got knocked out.”
JD nodded. “Then they turned the car on to idle and left him to die. Vicious.”
The coroner, Jack Dadd, arrived, along with the first of the Ident members, and got to work. Leith walked carefully around the vehicle, taking in what details he could. The Mustang was obviously beloved, a showpiece. Classic plush dice hung from the rear-view mirror. No debris on the seats within. He wondered if the owner ever drove it out and about, subjecting its finish to the elements. Probably not. On the right front-corner panel, just back of the wheel well, placed with all the thoughtfulness of a beauty mark on a woman’s face, was the chrome word BOSS, with 429 underneath. And against all this loving care were crude letters scratched across the driver’s door: Die Ashole.
Leith straightened from inspecting the vandalism and said to the Ident member closest to him, “Don’t let Johansson see that. He might not get over it.”
* * *
On the main floor of the big house, JD snugged her hood and joined Leith as he walked from lofty room to lofty room. The Ident photographer was having a field day, for it seemed a hurricane had been through here, household items flung, toppled, shattered. In the kitchen a knife rack had been upset, leaving pricey-looking cutlery scattered across the floor. This struck Leith as the eye of the storm. This was where the man had been taken down and hooded before being pushed into the garage. A bloody hand mark on the wall, smeared in that direction, told the grim tale of struggle and defeat.
Aside from the mayhem, it was a gorgeous place. Blocky but inviting leather furniture filled the living room, along with melodramatic flower arrangements. The floor was polished wood, scattered with ornate Indian carpets of rich gold and blue. From the stone-floored foyer two gently curved staircases led to the chambers above.
Did I just call them chambers? Leith thought. After doing the circuit of the main floor, he and JD went upstairs. Not much was disturbed up here, except for a linen closet in the hallway that had been pillaged, sheets and bedding flung to the floor.
“Matching set,” JD said, looking at the dark-green bedding strewn about — it had been cleaned, pressed, and folded, but was now willy-nilly.
Four bedrooms were upstairs, and another room that might have been considered a lounge. Or reading room, except there were no books. And finally an office with a big desk, big leather chair, tacky posters, and dartboard.
One bedroom apparently belonged to a child, judging by the size of the bed, the colour scheme, and the toys. Where was the kid, then? Nobody had mentioned anything about an abduction. JD got on her phone to see if she could find a fast answer.
The last two rooms Leith saw were neatly made, as if reserved for guests.
The master bedroom — pretty near the size of his own apartment — was messy. The king-sized bed was unmade. Clothes lay discarded wherever: socks and underwear, men’s jeans, ladies’ slips. Newspapers and magazines were scattered on the floor by the bed and apparently stepped on. At first sight the room looked like another battleground, but it wasn’t. It was simple laziness.
JD told him she had spoken to the dead man’s sister, and the kid, Oscar Roth’s daughter, was at her house with her housekeeper, and was safe. “Thank God,” Leith said, thinking of little Rosalie Liu, who hadn’t been so fortunate.
Downstairs, between kitchen and dining room, he and JD stood in a darkened nook where the homeowner had recreated a miniature English pub, complete with brass counter and three bar stools, beer taps, and all the fixings. Here French doors leading outside let in streams of pleasant morning light. The glass was modern, tough, double-pane, but had been smashed inward. The smashing tool lay outside on the patio, a five-foot-long iron pry bar.
Looking up, Leith saw a little white surveillance camera pointed at the smashed doorway. “Hallelujah!”
“Save your happy dance,” JD said. “There’s no feed. I checked.”
He stared at her. “Why? Why is there no feed?”
But of course JD couldn’t know any better than he did.
Eleven
A Blinding Flash
A new flush of investigators entered the area. Among them were Dion and Torr in their white suits. They stood in the garage, having a look at the body. Leith observed that while Torr squatted and peered, doing a good show of soaking up all visual indicia, Dion seemed less than interested.
Ident got to work. Leith and his investigators left the house and stood outside to hammer out a plan of action. Leith assigned out the tasks, exhibits, continuity of evidence, continuity of body. Someone to source the pry bar and someone else to speak to whoever dealt with the security system in this place. He also needed a couple of members to track down and interview the army of help he imagined must be running this show, the groundskeepers and cooks and scullery maids. And the butler, somebody suggested.
“Yes, the butler,” he said. He told JD to stay and monitor the scene. To Dion he said, “Come and sit in on t
he witness interviews, would you?”
JD looked surprised, then disenchanted, then resentful, and Leith knew why. She was his right-hand man, not Dion. He would have to tell her, later. The new arrangement was by Bosko’s decree.
* * *
This was Bosko’s idea, Dion thought. Bosko was pulling strings to make him feel integral. Or else to ensnare him. He and Leith had taken chairs, and Leith was making the introductions to Melanie York. He asked her first about the child.
“My niece, Dallas,” she told him. “I was babysitting her last night. She’s with my housekeeper now. Don’t worry, she’s being well looked after.”
Dion thought that on a better day, Melanie York was probably more aware of how attractive she was. She would know how to hold her head to best advantage, fold her legs, keep her shoulders back. But this wasn’t a better day. Her brother had been murdered, and she had found him. Her facial muscles sagged, and her body was arranged on her chair in a rigid and graceless way. She wore jeans and a fine-weave cardigan over a plain white T-shirt, not much in the way of jewellery. She told Leith she was thirty-nine years old, childless, an ex-teacher of middle-school children, married for the last ten years to Jonathan York. She said the name with emphasis. “You must know him, right?”
Leith said he didn’t, actually.
“Diamonds,” she said, shortly. “He owns it. Or he’s one principal. Oz — I mean Oscar — is the other.”
Dion knew what Diamonds was. A new harbour-side nightclub that had been under construction and controversy last fall, when he had left the North Shore. A lot of people didn’t want it built, but a lot of other people did, and those who did must have won, for the place was now up and running. He had seen a review in the paper written by a young person who thought it was kind of retro nineties, lame decor, music not great, cute bartenders, and she would give it three and a half stars for trying.
The other night he had pulled over as he was driving by to look it over. The building sprawled across the ex-shipyards at the foot of the Second Narrows bridge, far enough from downtown to lie cloaked in darkness. Blue-silver lights washed over the black exterior wall like stars, from eaves to entrance. The building was not as big as he’d expected, but stylish, the way its decks starfished out over the water. On hot summer nights, he imagined, clubbers would spill out with the music, visible to the world and advertising Diamonds as the place to be. On the night he had stopped to view the club from the street, there had been lineups at the entrance, with classic body-builder types allowing people through as space became available within.
He hadn’t heard of any police callouts to Diamonds yet, but they would come. Fun like that always brought trouble, in one way or another.
Melanie told Leith that Diamonds had been running since New Year’s, so not quite half a year. “Oz and Jon met at UBC. They were both Type T personalities and economics wizards, and best buddies, so that’s how Diamonds was born.”
“What’s Type T?” Leith asked.
“Risk-takers. Entrepreneurs. Not happy unless they’re walking the edge.”
She described the paths Oz and Jon had taken after UBC — Jon at a trading company, Oz managing a nightclub in Whistler. But they were always tossing bigger ideas around. And seven years ago, while they had all been out clubbing in downtown Vancouver — it had been Melanie’s thirty-second birthday party — the two men knew their destiny. With Jon’s talent for numbers and Oscar’s hands-on experience, they would open a ground-breaking, twenty-four-seven dance-club and strip-bar combo on the North Shore.
“Type T,” Leith said.
“Exactly,” Melanie said.
“How’s the business going?”
“They’re kind of almost not really breaking even, I think. But it’s only been, like I say, half a year. There’s nothing like it on the North Shore, so they should find a niche, eventually. The twenty-four-seven idea didn’t last long, but they are managing to attract businessmen for the strip shows, and youngish people for the club. But now with Oz gone …”
She talked at length about her brother’s death, but gave little away about how she felt about it. Then she went on about Oscar’s failed marriage.
In the second hour, Dion’s stamina began to slide. Lack of stamina was another secret he kept from the force. He hadn’t expected Leith to bring him along, was the problem. He didn’t like tasks unfinished, and a part of him was still processing what he had seen at the mansion — heavy dead man face down on the garage floor, dark-green pillowcase over his head tied with a necktie that was shiny grey on black. Evidence of a break-in, a main floor that looked like it had been turned inside out.
Melanie didn’t take many breaks, which deprived him of catch-up time. Now she and Leith were talking about a car key for the Mustang, and now they were talking about Dallas, and Dion wondered how the discussion had gone stateside so suddenly.
“Brain damage,” Melanie said.
But she wasn’t talking about him, he realized as she returned his stare with an abstracted smile. Leith’s questions plodded on. Dion gave up on notes, crossed his arms on the table and leaned forward to watch Melanie and do his best to listen.
“Cleo took a tumble when she was eight months pregnant,” she was telling Leith. “They figure that’s what did it, injury to the baby’s cerebellum in the womb. Last I heard, they’re calling it Autism Spectrum Disorder. ASD.”
Cleo, Dion thought. Who the hell was Cleo?
“Born without much to say,” Melanie said. “As I think I already told you, she’s six, but she’ll probably be three for the rest of her life.”
“That’s too bad,” Leith said. “So Oscar and Cleo got divorced soon after Dallas was born, and you say the lawsuit’s still ongoing? Big custody battle, was it?”
“Not custody. They both agreed Oz should keep Dallas. It’s gone to appeal over the money. She secured a settlement, but Oz is fighting back. He thinks he should get child support. Cleo thinks otherwise.” Melanie grimaced. “But don’t get me started on those two. Anyway, it’s moot now. She’s won. She’ll get the house, Oz’s interest in Diamonds, and the kid to boot.”
“And his interest is what, do you know?”
“I don’t know the latest shareholder stats. Fifty percent of eighty, whatever that is, times wherever it’s at right now.”
“That’s not too helpful,” Leith said.
“I know. Sorry.”
“And what about Jamie?” Leith asked.
Dion wrote it down and flipped back through his notes. Jamie was the dead man’s girlfriend.
“She won’t score anything from his death,” Melanie said. “She’s known him barely a year. Maybe another few months and they’d have gotten married, but as it is, she’ll walk away with some nice clothes and jewellery, maybe a few bucks he put in her bank account, but that’s about it. However, she’s only twenty-six, and she’s pretty. She’ll find herself another rich guy to tow her along.”
“Sounds like you’re not too crazy about her?” Leith said.
“No, I like Jamie. I’m no better. I’m on a free ride myself.”
Melanie’s face twisted, then cleared. Her makeup was messy around the eyes. Like Kate’s the other night, Dion thought. Also like Kate, there was a faint line of dirt under her nails, as though she had been lightly gardening and had forgotten to scrub out the soil.
Leith asked her to go over the events of the night and day once more for him. Her response was sharp. “Oh my God, do I have to? I’ve already given it to the other fellow. In detail.”
“Once more for the record, please.”
She blew out a slow breath through pursed lips. “I was babysitting Dallas while Oz attended a house party somewhere out there in whatchamacallit. Lion’s Bay. Jamie was elsewhere. She’s a bit clingy, doesn’t go anywhere without Oz, but she doesn’t like house parties, and I guess she probably needed a shopping
fix, so she cabbed over to Metrotown for the day. It was getting late. I expected Oz to call or come get Dally, but he didn’t. Having too much fun, I guessed. Didn’t matter to me. Dallas often stays over. Easiest kid in the world to care for. One toy, one stream of thought, no complaints. Food-wise, whatever you put in front of her, she’ll eat.” Melanie paused. “Where was I?”
“Oz and Jamie have left you babysitting Dallas. Was anyone with you?”
“No. Jon’s on the Island. Business. About nine at night Jamie called. She said she couldn’t reach Oz, had he come by to pick up Dallas, or what? I said no, he must be partying hard. She said she’d come wait with me, then. So she grabbed a cab and came over. We hung around, listened to music, drank cocktails.”
“What time did she arrive?”
“Half hour or so after her call. There’s a guest room downstairs she uses a lot, it’s practically hers. She went to bed about twelve thirty, and I crashed about one, with Dally. In the morning, still no Oz. Tried his number, kept going to voice mail. So we left Dallas with my housekeeper, and I drove Jamie back to their place in Jon’s car. He’s got my truck on the Island.”
The morning bits had already been confirmed by the housekeeper.
“It’s not far to Oscar’s,” Melanie went on. “Fifteen to twenty minutes, depends on traffic. Traffic was light then, so probably took us fifteen at most. We walked inside, saw the mess. And the back door had been smashed. Heard the car running and ran into the garage. Found Oz. I tried to take that thing off his head, but couldn’t untie the knot. He was dead. I knew it. And the fumes in there were awful. I went straight back outside and phoned 911. I called Jonathan too, in Victoria. He’s grabbing the first flight back. He’ll be here soon, I’m sure. He’s devastated. Poor Jon.” She stared into space, as if realizing for the first time that the death of her brother was just the first ripple of an expanding circle. “That’s about it,” she said. “If you want the unabridged version, it’ll have to be another time. Sorry, but I need a break. Seriously.”
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