Fisher used a total of fourteen of the five by seven inch cards. He searched for prints on the dead girl’s neck, the area directly behind her ears and ear lobes, and her wrists. Because there was a possibility the body might have been dragged or carried from a different location, he also applied cards to her heels and the skin around her ankles. He lifted her skirt. No panties. He pressed cards against the flesh of both thighs. As he finished with each card, he dusted it down and then put it into a pre-marked evidence envelope. As he dusted the last of the cards, he glanced up at Willows, shrugged.
“Check the bedframe and windowsill,” Willows said. “We’ll let the ME go over her and then I want to take off her blouse, try the area around her upper arms and breasts.”
“If you say so,” said Fisher without enthusiasm.
Latent prints on living flesh maintain their integrity for a maximum of approximately ninety minutes. On a corpse, survival time depends on a number of complex factors, primarily atmospheric conditions and the state of the skin. The Kromekote lift technique was new to Fisher, and it was obvious he didn’t have much faith in it. But he’d do his job, and that was all Willows cared about.
Willows told the cop at the door to hustle over to the Red Hawk Cafe and retrieve the medical examiner.
There were no plastic or visible or latent prints on the bed or windowsill or bureau, none on the lightswitch or wall in the area of the lightswitch.
The doorknob yielded a partial palm, three fingers and a thumb. Willows was fairly certain the prints were useless; that the occupant of room three-fifteen would provide a perfect match.
Fisher went down the hall to the bathroom. He dusted the bathroom door and the doorknob and found that both were covered in fingerprints, dozens of them, layer upon layer. The bathroom was small, with a sink and toilet, no tub. Fisher dusted down the inside of the door, and then the lightswitch and wall around the switch. He went to work on the sink and taps, the surrounding wall area, then slipped on a pair of disposable rubber gloves and dusted the cracked plastic toilet seat, the water tank, flush handle. When he was finished he had hundreds of overlaps and dozens of partials, maybe a total of twenty useful prints. Because there was always a possibility that a print could be damaged during the attempt to lift it, he shot the worthwhile prints with the lab’s Polaroid CU-5 fixed-focus camera.
He was taking the last of the Polaroids when Willows showed up.
“Let’s do the rest of the Kromekotes, Tim.”
“The ME finished already?”
Willows didn’t see much point in telling Fisher that the uniform he’d sent down to the Red Hawk Cafe had found Popeye curled up in a fetal position on the floor by his table, drenched in tears and vomit, suffering from a severe case of food-poisoning. By now he’d be in St Paul’s, getting his stomach pumped. A replacement ME was on the way but wasn’t expected for at least another hour. By the time he reached the crime scene it was probable that any latents in the area of the victim’s shoulders and breasts would have melted into her skin.
It had been a long day. Before it was over, it was going to get a whole lot longer.
16
Frank was halfway into his chair when the waiter arrived at the table. Frank grabbed him by the elbow, said, “Whatcha got on tap?”
“Miller Lite ... Labatts ...” The waiter frowned, trying to remember. “We got another one, what is it ...”
“Gimme a Labatts,” said Frank. “A pint. What’s your bar rye?”
“Double Crown.”
“Make it a Seagrams.”
“Seagrams, you got it.”
Frank smiled, gave the arm a squeeze, let go. The waiter was all dolled up in the house uniform of a big white cowboy hat, shiny black fringed pants and a crisp white shirt. The shirtsleeve was rumpled and creased where Frank had held him, and there were dark sweat rings under his armpits. His shift had started ten minutes ago, but as he retreated towards the bar he looked as if he’d just finished a long, hard ride.
“Jesus,” said Pat Nash, grinning. “You scared the hell out of him.”
“Did I?”
“See the look on his face? Like he just sat on one of Gary’s cactuses.”
Frank rolled his shoulders, a careless shrug. In his life, he’d found that frightening people wasn’t usually a bad thing to do. He glanced across the table at Nash, who was drinking Granville Island Lager out of a longneck bottle. Frank wondered about that. He’d have thought the beer was a little upscale for Nash, and it was in the back of his mind that a bottle, because it was heavier and easier to handle, made a better weapon than a glass. Did Nash have something in mind, or was he just being careful? Frank had killed Oscar Peel, and Oscar and Nash were distantly related. Most families weren’t all that close, but some were. He leaned across the table, looked Nash straight in the eye, and said, “How you feel about Oscar?”
Nash didn’t hesitate. “He was a jerk. Tell you the truth, Tracy’s better off without him.”
The waiter came back with a shot glass full of rye and a dimpled pint mug, his ten-gallon hat casting the table in shadow. Frank drank an inch of beer and then dropped the rye, shot glass and all, into the pint and drained the whole thing down. He licked his lips and waved his hand at the table. “Bring us another round, pard. And half a dozen pickled eggs and a couple packs of pretzels.”
The waiter jerked his thumb over his shoulder, down towards the dimly lit rear of the bar. “Pretzels in the machine down there by the pool tables. Need some change?”
“No,” said Frank. “You do.”
Frank waited until the guy had turned his back and then let Nash have a look at his new gun, a Magnum Research Desert Eagle .44 calibre semi-auto gas operated blaster with a fourteen-inch barrel. The weapon was almost two feet long, including the home-made noise suppressor that Frank had let Gary take down to the basement and paint matt-black with a spray can from the local Home Hardware store. Put wheels on it, the damn thing was almost as big as a tank. Frank figured the silencer was good for maybe five or ten shots before the baffles gave out. He lowered the gun under the table and held it between his wide-spread legs with the hard length of the barrel pressed up against the inside of Nash’s thigh. When Nash’s eyes were as big as they were going to get, Frank said, “Gary’s kind of disappointed in you, Pat. Way he sees it, he gave you some time and you been pissing it away.”
Pat Nash wanted to look around, see if anybody was watching. But he was afraid that if he lost eye contact with Frank, that Frank might squeeze the trigger. Dump like this he could empty the clip, knock back a couple more beers and then make his getaway. No hurry at all.
“Want to know what Gary said, exactly? ‘Splash the bastard.’ ” Frank grinned. “Sure can turn a phrase, can’t he?”
Nash drank some Granville Island Lager. The bottle thumped down on the table. Nash didn’t let go of it, held on tight.
“Rub me out, huh.”
“Kill you dead.”
“You sure, Frank? I mean, maybe you didn’t hear him right. It was nap time or something. Little dink had his mouth full of animal crackers and warm milk.”
Frank threw back his head and cackled at the ceiling. His teeth looked like sugar cubes, unnaturally white and square.
“So what’re you gonna do?” Nash said. He lifted the beer bottle to his lips and Frank tensed, but all he did was drink some beer.
Frank dug the blunt nose of the noise suppressor into the soft meat of Nash’s thigh. “I do exactly what I’m told. Unless I feel like doing something entirely different. In which case I do that.”
Pat Nash leaned back in his chair and waited. He wasn’t sure, but he thought Frank was probably having a little fun with him. The waiter ambled over with another Granville Island Lager, Frank’s beer and shot, a plastic bowl full of foul-smelling eggs, the pretzels. Coming towards them, he sounded like a reindeer. Nash looked down and saw the poor sap was wearing spurs as big around as the hubcaps on the old Pontiac that Oscar had died in. Jesus, wha
t happened to the good old days, when a bar was a place you went to get drunk? The waiter put Frank’s drinks and the eggs and pretzels down first, then Nash’s beer. Frank gave him a twenty, waved away the change. Wasted money. Guy was so spooked he probably would’ve paid for the round, if Frank had asked him.
“Thing is,” Frank said, “I liked the way you handled yourself the night we had to shoot Oscar. And I figure, why waste talent? Gary, on the other hand, his favorite thing is getting even with people. I saw a woman beat him to a parking space once, over at Oakridge, that big shopping mall? Gary waited three hours in the rain and then followed her home. She was driving a BMW 325CSi. Brand new. Fucking expensive car. Gary poured five gallons of diesel all over it, lit up with my Zippo, which I never got back.”
Frank ate an egg, popped it into his mouth whole, chewed twice and swallowed.
“I had that Zippo eight years. Got it down in New Orleans. It was so old the chrome was all worn off. You know how hard it is not to lose a Zippo? Something about those lighters, I don’t know what it is. Impossible to hold on to, they just disappear.”
Frank ate another egg. Nash studied the bubbles rising in his beer.
“Gary burned that goddamn BMW to the ground. Came home and watched TV until three o’clock in the morning and then gave her a call. Told her if she ever tried anything like that again he’d sneak into her house a year or so down the road, inject strychnine into every piece of meat in the fridge, slaughter her whole goddamn family. Wipe ’em all out. The dog too, if she had one. And you know something? He meant every word of it, the dummy.”
Nash reached across the table and picked up a bag of pretzels, squeezed until the air inside made the bag pop open. “Why are you telling me all this shit?” he said.
“Guy got shot up pretty good at the Vance. Randy Des-Moines, you know him?”
“Don’t think so,” said Nash.
“Fella who splashed him said he found twenty keys of smack, needs some cash. Randy made a grab for the ring and got it stuffed up his ass. Shooter’s gone for now but he’ll be back. And the word is out, Gary’s the man to see. What comes around, goes around, right? Gary’s real eager to set up a meet. Get his drugs back and blow the fucker’s head off.”
“You want me to do the shooting,” said Nash, and bit into his pretzel to hide his relief.
“That’s right, only while you’re at it, I want you to waste Gary, too.” Frank paused, letting it sink in. “Then you and me can do a split. Percentages, I figure eighty my end and twenty for you. Sound good?”
Nash nodded, liking the idea a whole lot. The trick would be to do Gary and at the same time keep an eye on Frank, because although Frank seemed straight enough, he had an idea Frank wasn’t the sharing kind.
Still, his style had always been to take things one step at a time, slow and easy.
He helped himself to another pretzel. Frank smiled at him. He chewed, swallowed, smiled back. Frank reached out and grabbed his third pickled egg, popped it whole into his mouth. His cheeks bulged. He drank some beer, swallowed. Burped. Scooped up another egg. Waved his hand at the bowl.
“Dig in, don’t be shy.”
“Thanks anyway, Frank.” Nash watched Frank’s jaws rise and fall. Gulp. Another mouthful of beer, a fifth egg. Nash sipped at his lager and kept his face blank. It was a weird situation, sitting there watching Frank stuff his face. Like he was watching a condemned man eat his last meal.
Because what was on his mind was Frank’s store-bought teeth, how they’d crumble and splinter when he took his cannon away from him and used it to pistol-whip the shit out of him, just before he shot him dead.
17
The tide was on the ebb, and the swiftly-moving water, pushed by a fitful offshore breeze, was pale green and choppy, flecked with white.
Willows stood on the dock with his hands in his pockets and his back to the weather. Parker and a Marine Squad sergeant named Curtis were standing about twenty feet away. Despite the distance and the fact that they were downwind, Willows heard every word of the sergeant’s argument as he tried to convince Parker the smart thing to do was not to come along for the ride.
“Never seen a floater, have you?”
“Not yet,” said Parker.
Curtis had thick black hair combed straight back, a neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper moustache. His dark gray eyes were very calm. “It’s not a pretty sight, young lady.”
A detective is equal in rank to a corporal. Parker was outranked. She chose her words carefully. “It’s my case and I’m going to stick with it. That’s what I’ve been trained to do, sergeant. So why don’t we just leave it at that.”
Curtis glanced at Willows, who studiously ignored him. He turned back to Parker and said, “The head’s belowdecks on your right. We just scrubbed the deck.”
The body had been found in False Creek, fouled in the web of pilings of the huge wharf that supported the Granville Island Farmer’s Market. Granville Island is not really an island at all, but simply a fat isthmus of land that had once been an industrial site but was now primarily a mix of parkland, speciality shops, restaurants and theatres. The man who’d found the corpse had been fishing for crab. He’d had the presence of mind to note the slashed throat. The indication of foul play had resulted in a call to Major Crimes. Willows and Parker and Curtis were waiting at the Marine Squad’s Coal Harbor base for VPD 98, the squad’s thirty-one foot Uniflite, to pick them up.
Parker moved down the wharf towards Willows. The wind tore at her hair.
“Bit of a chauvinist, the sergeant.”
Willows smiled. “He gave me the same speech, my first time out. Word for word, as a matter of fact.”
“He called you a young lady?”
“No, he called me a young man. And I was, believe it or not.” Willows turned up the collar of his black leather jacket. “Curtis has been around a long time, Claire. Remembering my first time out on the boat, I’d give you the same advice.” Willows grinned. “That is, if I thought for a minute you might take it.”
They heard the deep throb of the engines first, and then the boat came into view, crawling along at five knots to minimize its wake. Parker moved away from the edge of the wharf as the constable behind the wheel swung the boat around, inched closer to the dock.
“Lovely vessel, isn’t she?” Curtis said to Parker. “Thirty-one feet in length, a ten-foot, six-inch beam. Walk-through transom, swim grid. She’s powered by a pair of four hundred and forty horsepower Chrysler V-8 marine engines. Top speed of about thirty-five knots. But we won’t be pushing it, not today.”
Curtis stepped aboard and offered Parker his hand. She ignored him. He winked at Willows. VPD 98 had a crew of two constables. Both men were dressed in dark blue nylon floater jackets, regulation pants and baseball caps. The seahorse logo on the jackets was incongruous with the police crests high up on the jacket sleeves. The constable behind the wheel, Hollis, had regulation shoes but the second man was wearing black Reeboks, white sports socks. Willows had seen him around. He tried to remember his name. Leyton.
“Cast off,” said Curtis. He glanced at his watch. Twenty past ten. Coal Harbor was a cul-de-sac. They’d have to cruise all the way around Stanley Park and up English Bay, beneath theBurrard and Granville Street bridges. The trip would take at least twenty minutes.
“More comfortable inside,” Leyton said to Willows.
It was crowded down below. Curtis sat in a padded blue bucket seat that looked as if it had been stripped from a sports car. Hollis sat in an identical chair. He wrote a few lines in the ship’s log, a small, dark green, hardbound book, then put the log to one side and slowly eased the throttles forward. A bell rang shrilly.
“Oil pressure,” said Curtis. The clanging of the bell stopped abruptly. The noise of the engines deepened and the bow rose slightly. Behind the control console there was a small Formica table and a narrow bench seat. Leyton asked Parker if she’d like to sit down. She said she preferred to stand. Leyton glanced at
Willows, and then made himself comfortable.
They cruised past the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club and Deadman’s Island, an Indian burial ground now used as a naval facility. Curtis passed out small white envelopes. To Parker he said, “Earplugs. We use them whenever engine revs exceed twenty-two hundred r.p.m. Union regulations.”
The throttles were pushed all the way forward. The boat crashed into the sea. The earplugs were made of little tubes of white foam. Parker watched Curtis roll the foam between his finger and thumb, compressing it, then insert the plug into his ear and hold it in place while the foam expanded. She followed his lead.
Willows saw a freighter from Vladivostock. Sleek, shiny black cormorants preening themselves on a buoy. A raft of buffleheads, small black and white ducks locally called ‘killer whale’ ducks. Off to starboard, a twin-engine floatplane thundered past at an altitude of no more than a hundred feet, wings flashing bright yellow as it sideslipped towards the air terminal on the south shore of the harbor.
They rounded Hallelujah Point, the bronze statue of Harry Jerome, the Nine O’Clock Gun. The cannon had once signalled the end of the day to fishermen in English Bay. On one occasion a prankster had loaded it with a rock the size of a bowling ball, and blown a hole in the floating Shell gasoline station.
“How fast are we going?” Willows said to Leyton. He had to yell, because of the earplugs.
“About twenty-five knots. We can go faster, but only for short bursts. Too hard on the engines.”
Off to Willows’ left was Brockton Point, a favorite parking spot for night-time lovers. The path along the seawall was busy with cyclists and joggers, even the odd pedestrian who was content merely to walk. All around them the water sparkled in the sunlight. The wind was in their face now, but the tide was speeding them along and they were doing almost twenty knots. They passed beneath Lion’s Gate Bridge, the cars and trucks and buses high above them seeming no larger than a child’s toys.
Hot Shots (A Willows and Parker Mystery) Page 13