Undertow

by R. M. Greenaway

  Leith said nothing, but maybe Bosko read the set of his expression and went on to explain, “We’ve talked about this before. I don’t know how he does it, but he gets at the truth like some kind of human homing device. I’ve put him back on the case of Jane Doe, and we’ll call it a test. Leave him alone and see if he comes up with an answer.”

  “Which Jane Doe?”

  Bosko put a memo in front of him with the details — a girl washed up on the rocks, bloated beyond recognition, never named. “Cal tells me he had been looking into something he had heard on the streets last year, but he didn’t get it verified before his accident. The case has since gone nowhere and remains open. Cal’s now seeing how Oscar Roth and Jamie Paquette tie into the story, if at all.”

  Leith hadn’t heard of the drowning. He had been working in Prince Rupert when it happened, and he’d had his own John and Jane Does to deal with. He said, “I’m still not sure how you’re going to avoid this blowing up in your face. It’ll all come out in court, how he was mixing with the witnesses. If that’s not contaminated evidence, sir, I don’t know what is.”

  “If it goes to court. And it will only go to court if Jamie Paquette turns up, and if she pleads not guilty.”

  There came an interruption. With unbelievable timing, Constable Urbanski stuck his head in the door and shouted, “Fuck yeah, they got her. It’s on BCTV, live, car chase along the Yellowhead. C’mon and see!”

  * * *

  The rest of the evening was like movie day in Sex Ed. class — paperwork and phone calls abandoned, everyone glued to the monitor as the chopper followed the insect-like progress of several police cars and one sedan, zooming in, zooming out. And then cheers as the sedan was successfully boxed in and the driver stepped out, her hands in the air. Jamie Paquette’s run was finally over.

  Forty-Two

  The Emerald Waves

  Later, Leith had to wonder how much Dion’s advice had influenced him. If not for his firm but unsubstantiated belief that Jamie had killed Cheryl Liu, would he, Leith, have interrogated her so hard? Long into the night, pushing her for answers, shoving at her denials, tripping her up, and circling back to catch her from behind.

  He grilled her on the bootie she claimed to have picked up. Why had she done so? What had she done with it? Why couldn’t she describe it? And why did she not recall picking up a second object? He didn’t describe the gin bottle, as the holdback could come in handy later on. And then there was Joey, the little boy — had she seen him or not? How could she have seen him, shut the cabinet door, and not remembered any of it? Other details she was clear about, so why not this one? Jamie admitted she had been stoned that night, her and Oz both. She had a bit of weed and coke, as had Oz. Not crazy high, but enough to lose it a bit.

  Leith was up half the night, sweet-talking her, commiserating with her, but in the end what worked was a persistent harangue. It came down to stamina. She was strong, but he was stronger. So he asked, and asked again. How could she have attacked a helpless woman holding a small child? How could she with any stretch of the imagination justify such a horrendous act? Did she really fear that woman? Even high on whatever she was on, couldn’t she see what she was doing was insanely wrong?

  His questions were calculated to knock her off balance, and they worked. She oscillated between ingratiating, frightened, and angry. She lost track of which emotion would serve her best, and foundered. She tried tears. Tried insults. Then crossed her arms and refused to speak.

  He kept talking in the face of her silence. He asked if she was religious, and how would her God want her to deal with this now? Lie, or come clean? He told her she could turn her life around. She could still do well in the world, but only in truth.

  Then he let her eat dinner, which she left barely touched, then let her rest, then went at it again, chipping away at her story and her patience until, in the eighth hour, the dam broke.

  Yes! She screamed it at him. Yes, she had attacked the Asian lady with the kid. Oz hadn’t done it. She had. Why? Because the Asian lady had attacked her, tried to kill her, for something she didn’t do. It was called self-defence. It was an eye for an eye. Last summer that Asian lady had snatched Jamie off the street, took her to a basement suite somewhere. The lady and some Chinese guys had questioned her for hours, just like in this room, but with a gun to her head. The gun was fired, too. It had no bullets, but she had died on the spot. She really did.

  “What did she think you did?” Leith asked.

  “I don’t know. It was some big mistake.”

  Lot of big mistakes happening here, Leith thought.

  Jamie went on. The lady let her go, but her guys followed her everywhere, until she was afraid to set foot outside. She knew the Asian lady’s name, because she’d seen it in the paper, because the lady was arrested for running a dial-a-dope operation. Jamie saw her name was Nuyn, or Noon, something like that. Later she saw that the Noon lady had been found not guilty, and released, and so much for her peace of mind. And no, she didn’t go to the police, because she didn’t trust them. But she wasn’t going to live in fear anymore. So when that Chinese guy started following her and Oz, she told Oz to stop running away like a fucking dick and confront him.

  Oz did. He beat the shit out of the guy. Yes, she saw him do it, and yes, she saw it later, on the news, that he was dead. Oz got the guy’s phone, as Jamie told him to do, and Jamie checked out the photos on it. Sure enough, there was a picture of Lady Noon, and as far as Oz was concerned, Noon was doomed, too.

  The phone led Oz to the house, crazy little GPS voice calmly telling him to turn here, turn there. At the house they found their way up the back stairs, and Oz confronted the lady. But he wasn’t sure of himself. He wasn’t sure Jamie got it right, because of the kid, all the toys around. This didn’t look like a drug-selling type to him, and he asked the lady if her name was Noon. He was getting frantic about it, too, coming apart at the seams.

  “So I took over. Her baby was screaming so loud I couldn’t think. I took it from her, and it fell. I didn’t mean for that to happen. I really, really didn’t mean it.”

  Jamie was crying, and they were real tears. Whether her tears were for what she was remembering or what she was predicting, Leith couldn’t say. But the camera picked it all up, every sob and sniffle. Which would work well for her when it came to trial. Especially if her lawyer recommended trial by jury. Which he would.

  Leith said he understood, and he knew Jamie hadn’t meant for any of this to happen. He asked if she was ready to continue.

  She nodded. “Then the lady started screaming even louder than the baby, and I tried to tell her to stop, to be quiet. I just wanted to let her know I wasn’t going to put up with her people following me around anymore, to lay off, leave me alone. She grabbed a bottle and tried to hit me with it, but I took it from her, and I was going to smash her with it. But I didn’t. I thought I was in control. Except she kept screaming, and I was so mad at her, for what she’d done to me, and to Oz, and to her little baby. I grabbed a towel thing there, wrapped it around her neck. I just wanted her to shut up and listen. But I killed her.”

  After another fit of sobbing and ripping tissues from the box, she calmed down. She said, “Oz tried to stop me, eh, but I’d just totally fuckin’ lost it. He went stomping around, going, What have you done, what have you done, oh my God, what have you done?”

  She closed her eyes.

  “So how did this all start?” Leith said. “Why was this Lady Noon after you?”

  “Like I said, I don’t know.”

  “Oh, I think you know very well. I think you might as well tell me.”

  She shook her head. “No idea.”

  “Then I guess we’ll have to find out, won’t we, Jamie?”

  She said nothing to that, but he thought she looked just a tad worried.

  * * *

  Dion was on the Jane Doe cold case. He
now had plenty to work with, following Jamie’s interview. It was easy. There weren’t too many dial-a-dopers arrested and released in North Vancouver last year, and only two named Nguyen, and only one Nguyen who was a female. Her westernized name was Lisa, and she was thirty-five years old, and if he squinted, she looked a bit like Cheryl Liu. He pulled her up on PRIME. She was arrested, brought in, and he questioned her. He showed her the police artist’s rendering of Jane Doe, and he showed her Jane Doe’s distinctive earring, little round pendant, red background, and two arms of a yellow star, which he now realized was an artistic interpretation of the Vietnamese flag.

  Lisa Nguyen studied the evidence and said, “Sunny. My sister. She’s dead.”

  Later, Dion would work what she told him into what he managed to dig up himself: Sunny’s name was Vu Thi, with the given name Bian. She was not Lisa’s blood sister, but was informally adopted, and she had been in Canada on a work visa. The visa would have expired next month, except she had expired first. The question was how.

  He presented photos of Jamie Paquette to Lisa, before and after her transformation.

  Lisa nodded, pointing at the picture of the thinner Jamie with long brown hair. “She did it.”

  “Did what?”

  “Sunny had very pretty necklace, made in Vietnam. This woman, her name is Paquette, she wants to buy. Sunny is in Vancouver, at a dance club, and my brothers are there, too. My brother, he hear this woman talk to Sunny, want to buy her necklace from her. Sunny say no, her boyfriend give it to her. She will not sell. Later Sunny and this woman walk out together. We never see Sunny again. This woman kill Sunny.”

  Dion asked Lisa what she had done about it.

  “Nothing,” Lisa said.

  Soon Lisa Nguyen would become an open file in her own right, along with her brother, T.T. Nguyen, and others, to be investigated for kidnap, assault, uttering threats, and obstruction. But that would come later. Now Dion paused to catch up on his notes.

  In a separate but related investigation, he had established the date of a certain boat crash. Inquiries at the marine scrapyard had led him nowhere, so he had gone at it the long way, picked up the phone, and made some calls, until he found a gardener who had worked for Oscar Roth last summer. The gardener recalled Mr. Roth hauling the damaged boat home one day. He had seen a great crack along the bow, and he had asked Mr. Roth about it. He clearly recalled Mr. Roth laughing as he answered, “My dumb bitch sweetie-pie dead-headed my favourite boat, man.”

  Soon after that the boat had disappeared off the estate, and Mr. Roth didn’t seem to think it was funny anymore. He also told the gardener he was no longer needed. Coincidence? Maybe.

  Fortunately, the gardener could pin down the crash date quite accurately, thanks to being fired exactly four days later.

  Dion asked Lisa Nguyen for the date that Sunny had disappeared. She knew that quite accurately, too. Later that day, he applied the date she gave him to the date of the Stingray crash, typed it up into a report, and handed it in to Constable David Leith.

  * * *

  “It was an accident,” Jamie told Leith in light of the new information. “We hit something, and Sunny fell overboard. I couldn’t save her. Are you going to arrest that lady for what she did to me?”

  She meant Lisa Nguyen.

  Leith said, “Let’s just stick with Sunny. Tell me about Sunny’s necklace.”

  Jamie stared at him. “Who told you?”

  “Just tell me the story.”

  “Oz was away. I was out partying. I met her on Richards. She was with a bunch of Asian guys, and she said they were supposed to keep an eye on her, and she wanted to ditch them and go have fun. Fine with me. She was a fun girl, super pretty. She’d never been on a motorboat before, so I took her out on the Stingray.”

  She reflected a moment. “She didn’t drown like you see in the movies, lots of shouting and splashing. She went under, then came up, and she just lay there. I was so scared. I was going to try to pull her on board, see if I could save her, but water was coming in fast. I knew if I didn’t get back to shore real quick, I’d be in there, too. So I left. Those Asian guys she was with, they must have tracked me down. That’s when everything started going wrong for me. I told Oz I wrecked his boat. I told him I was sorry. I thought the cops would come and throw me in jail for what happened, but they didn’t. I told him not to tell anyone. He took the blame for me. He didn’t know about the girl, though. But even if he knew about her, he would have taken the blame. He was like that.”

  She looked sadly at her own hands. “I didn’t treat him good. I took him for granted. I hurt him, a lot. I wish I could just back step, back step, back step to the day we met. I’d have done it differently. I’d be a smarter girl, and all those people …”

  Leith nodded. He and Jamie had spent so much time together over the last two days that an odd rapport had developed. She tilted her head to one side, her eyes softly reflective, and gazed at him across the table. “You ever see something, and you think to yourself, if I only had that thing, I’d be okay? I’d never be sad again?”

  Leith had never seen such a magical object, but he understood the power of longing. He murmured that he knew what she meant.

  “It was like that,” she said. “Emeralds on silver, like a million little sparkling leaves. I offered her a thousand dollars, but I guess it was worth a whole lot more, because she wouldn’t sell it to me. But that’s nothing to do with anything. If you’re thinking I wanted to steal it from her, I didn’t. I’ve had enough shit stolen from me, and I hate thieves. I don’t steal. But I thought she’d change her mind, if I showed her some fun. But she didn’t. Maybe I was a bit mad. Maybe I tried to scare her a little, going so fast. But that’s all. Just a little tiny payback.”

  Leith thought she was probably telling the truth. He also thought there was a darker side to her truth. Her anger was probably not tiny at all, but huge and impotent, and if she didn’t intend on killing anybody that night, she did intend on terrifying the girl for what she had done to her, making her want something she couldn’t have.

  Leith had one more item to put to her. The alcoholic wanderer Alex Caine had gotten back to JD. As requested, Caine had searched his apartment for the piece of paper he had discovered tucked in the box and left on the steps of the North Shore News, along with the blue bottle. He had found it. The note pointed the finger directly at Jamie.

  Leith wasn’t sure how useful the note would prove to be. Even if it wasn’t excluded in court, which he suspected it would be, it did nothing to help solve the crime of Oscar’s own death. Except to say, in a PS, that Oscar felt his life was in imminent danger, which in retrospect went without saying.

  He placed it before Jamie, and she read it to herself, slowly, carefully, and sadly.

  To the North Shore News/Police. Enclosed please find proof that Jamie Paquette killed the lady and her baby on Mahon Street, the note said. Also please find enclosed the bottle she grabbed to threaten the lady. It’s got her fingerprints all over it. She’s pure evil and you should arrest her. That was the main part of the note, with some elaborations. It went on: She also made me beat up Mr. Liu, but I didn’t kill him. I solemnly declare I just hit him a couple times and he was okay when I left. I told him I was sorry, and I don’t understand what happened, but I take full responsibility for his death. PS. Some guys are after Jamie for something she did last summer, and they’re after me, too, and I fear for my life. That’s why I want to come clean. I plan to leave town and never come back. I want her put away for good.

  Jamie subsided in her chair and looked at Leith. “Okay, so I’m pure evil. What about it?”

  “Nothing, really. Just hoping it might refresh your memory, and give you some idea about who killed Oscar.”

  “Well, after reading this, yeah,” she said. “It’s kind of obvious. He did.”

  Leith sat forward. “He who?”


  “Oz. Oz killed Oz.”

  He charged Jamie formally with the first-degree murder of Cheryl Liu and Rosalie Liu. Maybe she eventually would also be charged with complicity in the murder of Lance Liu. That one would take a lot more work, but it was a job Leith was determined to undertake to the best of his skill and ability, so help him God.

  He called the guards to remove Jamie to the cells.

  “Oh, and tell Cal I’ll get him for this,” she said, and gave him a final smoky-eyed smile.

  * * *

  The beach in front of Jon York’s Sea Lane home was a narrow, rocky strip that disappeared at high tide. This evening the tide was low, and Dion stood, dressed against the chill, boots in the grit, facing the water. The water looked rough, but not wild. To get wild water, he would have to travel by ferry and car as far west as one could get from this corner of the world, to Tofino, where the breakers rolled in high and strong.

  Still, the sea before him was far from flat. He stepped onto a barnacled rock and watched the waves swell and subside. Water slapped the shoreline and spat at him where he stood. He turned to look up the slope behind him. From here he could see only the eaves of Jon York’s dream house. The place would go on sale now. Unfinished, priced accordingly, it would sell fast.

  Still on the boulder, being knocked almost off balance by the wind, he bit the bullet and phoned Kate. When she answered, he said, “I’m thinking we should go to Tofino and learn how to surf, what d’you think? I don’t mean now. I mean when you’re through with the guy you’re seeing.”

  Kate was good enough to say yes, learning to surf at Tofino sounded like a great idea. The phone call finished, Dion stared down the water, his reason for being here. He cupped his hands to his mouth to hoot out contempt at the waves that had tried to kill him.

  Another reason for his visit to the beach was to get closer to Jane Doe, Sunny. He had a name for her now, and stats. An orphan, Vietnamese father and French mother, both killed in a plane crash. He had a photograph of her for the file, but he still pictured her as an artist’s initial rendering, pre-3D model, soft pencil lines and a playful gleam in those dark eyes. Not that it added much to the file, but Sunny’s boyfriend was also a known entity now. Tran, a young police officer in Vietnam, with whom Dion had spoken on the phone. Struggling with his English, Tran had described a necklace he had bought for Sunny, which she cherished. Green emeralds? No. He didn’t know the English word, so he had consulted a colleague. Glass, he told Dion. Bought in Biện Hòa for a hundred and thirty-five dollars.