Under the Bridge

by Rebecca Godfrey

  Major Crimes

  WHEN HE RECEIVED the call, Stan Lowe was sleeping, and so as not to disturb his wife, he rose from his bed, wrapping himself in a plaid bathrobe, and headed out to his garage. Christine, his wife, was also a prosecutor, and she would not have been surprised by an 11:30 phone call or by his thoughtful desire to shield her from the intrusion of criminality. Her husband was thoughtful. She had always known this, perhaps from the first moment she saw him in a Vancouver classroom where they were studying civil litigation. Their first date lasted four days, and three weeks later, they had moved in together. He was always thoughtful, still now, twenty years later, when they both had risen to the top tier of the profession: the MCPU—Major Crimes Prosecution Unit. On that night when Stan Lowe rose from his bed, there was a paperback copy of Seven Steps to Spiritual Success beside his bed, next to a black and white photo of his mother, Lee Shoon-Hwa, a woman whom he affectionally referred to as “the matriarch.”

  He couldn’t see anything outside, and he walked blindly over the lawn. We’re Sleepy Hollow, he often said of the suburb where he lived, far away, a refuge from the worlds of his work: crack houses, biker bars, bordellos, morgues. Sleepy Hollow, with the only sound that evening the slow whirl of a sprinkler, the rise and fall of soft water. Victoria averaged three murders a year, his sleep was most often undisturbed, but “when someone dies, they call me.”

  Light flooded the garage suddenly. He sat in a slightly rusted lawn chair. Around him, there were golf clubs, training wheels, surfboards, a well-used set of skis. The bathrobe did not suit him, for he was a tall, elegant man, with a bearing and intellect well-suited to the formal black gown Canadian prosecutors wear.

  Now he was in his garage, in a bathrobe, shivering. This was Stan Lowe’s inauspicious introduction to a case that would soon linger in his own life in ways he could not have foreseen.

  “It’s not confirmed, but I think we have a murder. We’ve arrested a number of teens,” Sergeant Bob Downie, the File Manager, told him. “All the stories, they’re starting to show a consistency.” He briefly summarized for Stan the story of the assault under the bridge and the subsequent murder. “We’re running out of cells,” he said, “and we’ve got Bond, Brown, and Poulton with the main suspects, but we haven’t got a confession of murder.”

  Stan recalls, “I knew they were convinced they had the right people. I knew by the caliber of police officers involved they had reason to be convinced. But it was pretty early on; there wasn’t a body.”

  “I looked for alternatives,” he recalls. “I said, ‘Is there a boyfriend in the picture?’ ‘Could she have gone to a friend’s?’”

  “We’ve looked into that,” Downie said. “We’re pretty sure she’s in the Gorge. Bond’s arranged for a Coast Guard helicopter to go up in the morning, and the Dive Unit’s going in to search as soon as there’s sunlight.”

  “I’ve got a real hesitancy laying charges at this point,” Stan Lowe said. He hung up after giving a simple order: “Find me the body.”

  Part Three

  An Unusual Investigation

  “It’s an unusual investigation. We have rumors but no evidence that a crime has been committed. We’re having to work backwards here.”

  —Police spokesperson Sergeant Chris Horsley

  Saturday Morning

  PRESIDENT CLINTON smiled in the scarlet room of the Pan Pacific Hotel; he smiled before a room of reporters and told them how glad he was to be in Vancouver. “My family and I had a wonderful vacation here back in 1990, before I was president—back when I had a family life that was normal.” He paused and the crowded room of reporters laughed at his suave self-deprecation. “We loved Vancouver,” he said, smiling even more. “This is a great place for the APEC summit.”

  President Clinton, along with eighteen other world leaders, was in Vancouver for the annual Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation Summit, a high-profile gathering to discuss trade and economics.

  There was much to be discussed. As Clinton announced on this morning in the hotel conference room, Canada’s Prime Minister, Jean Chrétien, and himself were committed to “find a meaningful solution to the problem of climate change, democracy in Haiti, and criminals who are using cross-border telemarketing schemes to prey upon both Canadians and Americans.” There was also the issue of Pacific salmon. “This issue has gone on too long,” Clinton said passionately. “It’s caused too much friction between our people.”

  As well, the world leaders would spend the weekend discussing the economic crisis in Asia: the exodus of dollars that began last summer in Thailand, Indonesia, and Malaysia, spread to Korea, and was now threatening Japan. South Korea had asked the International Monetary Fund for a bailout package totaling $20 billion. Japan’s fourth largest brokerage firm, Yamiachi Securities, was near collapse.

  While world leaders discussed the economic fate of Malaysia in scarlet boardrooms, the sky in View Royal was thick and gray on Saturday. The story was still unproved, yet spoken of now in the interview rooms in the strange slang and rhythms of young girls in flared pants and ponytails. By morning, with the order of “Find me a body” echoing in their ears, the men boarded a helicopter and set over the captive waterway. The men pulled on their black suits and went underwater, attached to a rope, into the darkest underground.

  The girls remained in the cells, stifling and airless. They called out each other’s names. “Dusty,” someone yelled. “Maya!” another screamed.

  At Diana’s, Syreeta was too distraught to sleep. At 6:30, she had called her mother and asked her to come pick her up from the home where she had first kissed Warren, on the porch, after telling him that she was getting braces.

  Diana had tried to comfort her. “It’s just a disgusting story,” she said. “I’m sure Warren didn’t do anything. Maybe the girl who’s missing, maybe she decided that she had nothing to live for and she drowned herself. And maybe the police heard Kelly’s disgusting story, and they decided to arrest a bunch of people but they’ll find out Kelly was just lying and they’ll find out what maybe happened to that girl, and Warren’s not going to be in any trouble.”

  Syreeta did not speak to Diana of the things she had heard, the things she had not believed when Warren was on his knees, holding her hands in the bedroom. She did not tell her mother either when her mother arrived to pick her up and take her back to her own bedroom.

  It was not yet afternoon when two police officers knocked on the door of the Hartley home. When the police arrived, Syreeta could see them through the stairwell and on seeing the two men, she began to cry and ran into her bedroom.

  And she was crying still when she sat in the interview room. She wore a blue shirt with a camouflage pattern and denim overalls. The cops asked her if she could give a statement and she cried some more.

  “Okay,” Constable Cameron said gently. He was a large man with an innocuous and classic babyface—full cheeks and pink skin. “If you want, we’ll try and get a statement, and if your emotions make that impossible, we’ll stop. I think you’ll probably get through this, and I think it’s probably going to help you in the end. Syreeta, what I want you to do is start with Friday. Can you tell me what happened from dinnertime to the time you went to bed? Can you do that for me?”

  The young girl spoke through her tears. She said: “I went to Shoreline and everyone was there. That was the night that the Russian thing was going through the sky. We were all watching that. And then I started feeling sick. I started feeling really sick, so I was going to find Warren and see if I could get into the school. I was going to ask my mom to pick me up. But the doors were locked, so I couldn’t get in. Someone yelled out, ‘Bitch fight,’ and everyone started running up to the bus stop except me and Marissa. We stayed behind. We just slowly walked up there, and when we got there, there was Laila and everyone was talking and they’re like, I don’t know, laughing or something. And then Warren asked me what was wrong, and I told him. I said, ‘I don’t feel good.’ He asked if I wanted
him to walk me home. I just said no. He said, ‘Why don’t you catch the bus? I’ll give you a dollar. I don’t want you walking home.’ So I got on the bus and I left, and I got home at about nine o’clock. He called me at about quarter after eleven. I answered the phone; I told him I was sleeping, so that’s all that happened to me on Friday night.”

  “And did you see him Saturday morning?”

  “Saturday afternoon he came over.”

  “Could you describe what happened when he came over?”

  “Well, I was talking to my friend Tara earlier in the morning on the phone, and she told me that the fight had happened. She told me that Warren kicked a girl in the head. And I asked him. I said, ‘How come you didn’t tell me you kicked a girl in the head?’

  “He said, ‘ I didn’t want you to know because I shouldn’t have done it.’

  “And I was like, ‘Yeah, well you still did, so why did you?’

  “He said, ‘I don’t know.’

  “And that’s all he told me about that. It’s hard to remember what happened then….”

  “Did you do some laundry for him?” the cop asked, and Syreeta wondered to herself how they knew this. Maybe Warren confessed everything.

  “I washed his gym clothes, and I washed a pair of white jeans because he told me he got in a fight with some Native guy because him and Kelly were walking down the road, and the guy said, ‘Hey you and your hoochie,’ and then he went and got in a fight with a guy. That’s what he told me happened.”

  Syreeta paused.

  “Okay. Could you describe those jeans to me?”

  “They’re just white baggy jeans. There was lots of mud all down here, and he folds them up so there’s mud in the creases, and there was maybe two splatters of mud on the leg, but that’s all there was.”

  “What about the blood?”

  Syreeta hesitated. “I saw some blood, but the blood was two splatters. There wasn’t much.”

  “Two splatters—”

  “Not much at all.”

  “Did you wash a sweater for him?”

  “I bleached his sweater for him. His sweater didn’t have any blood on it.”

  “Okay. Now as the week’s gone on, there’s lots of conversation about what happened on Friday evening. Lots of speculation. Lots of rumors at school. Did Warren talk to you again about this?”

  “Yeah,” Syreeta said, with the slow air of someone slowly understanding a mystery. (“I was just putting it all together as I talked to the cops,” she would later recall. “I was trying to make sense of everything that hadn’t been making sense to me.”)

  “One day after school, he was going to come over to my house. He was talking to Josephine and Kelly, and I went over to him and he was telling everybody, ‘Shhhh….’ And I got mad at him. I was like, ‘Are you trying to hide stuff from me?’ And he said, ‘No.’ I’m like, ‘Whatever. You can keep on talking. I’m going.’

  “He said, ‘No. We’re finished talking.’

  “We had to go back to his house first. I was lying on his bed while he got changed and ready to go out. He asked me, he said, ‘Do you really want to know what happened?’

  “I said, ‘If it’s a big deal, and you don’t want to tell me what happened, you don’t have to.’

  “He said, ‘I’m asking you. Do you want to know?’

  “I said, ‘It doesn’t really matter to me.’

  “And he just, there was a song on the CD that he was listening to and it said 187. 187 in gang talk is murder, or whatever, I’m not sure. And then he said exactly that.

  “I said, ‘What are you talking about?’

  “He said, ‘That girl named Reena.’ He said, ‘Well, there you go.’ And that was the end of the conversation. I didn’t ask him anymore. I didn’t want to know anymore, and that’s all he told me.”

  “Did you have any conversation after that about it?”

  “No”

  “Could you try and be as specific as you can about when he was talking about 187? Did he say anything about how it happened or where it happened?”

  “That’s all he told me. I didn’t—I didn’t—I didn’t believe him. I didn’t believe him. I was like, ‘Oh yeah.’ I didn’t think he had done it at that point. I thought he was just saying that it happened.”

  “And now, what do you think?”

  “I don’t know what to think,” she said, and she began to sob.

  “Have you spoken to Kelly at all about this?”

  “No”

  “Are you and Kelly friends?”

  “Acquaintances.”

  “Are Kelly and Warren good friends?”

  “They talk in school, and we all hang out with the same people, but I wouldn’t say they’re good friends.”

  “Okay. Let’s go back to when he was at your house and you confronted him about kicking a girl in the face. What exactly did he say? Just take a moment and think about it. If you have to, close your eyes to concentrate and clear your head and think about it. We’re not in any hurry.”

  “At first he asked me who told me, and I told him Tara. He said Tara needs to keep her mouth shut. I said, ‘Too bad. Just tell me why you did it.’ He said, I don’t know why I did it. Everyone was doing it. I was just there. It just happened.’

  “I said, ‘Oh, that’s really cool. You kicked a girl in the face.’

  “He told me not to worry about it. That’s what he always does when I try to get something out of him. He told me not to worry about it. That’s all he told me.”

  “Okay. Let’s start at the beginning of the conversation about 187. We’ll get you to relax again, and just try and think about the conversation you had with him at his house. Was anything extra said other than what you’ve already told us? Try and add more detail. Give us as much detail about that conversation as you can. Can you do that for me?”

  “We got to his house and I was lying on his bed, and he was getting changed out of his gym clothes. I went and called my mom to see if he could come over, and when I came back to the bedroom, he said, ‘Do you really want to know what me and Kelly were talking about?’

  “I said, ‘No. If you don’t want to tell me, I don’t want to know.’ And then he said, ‘Exactly that. 187.’ And we sat there. He said that he didn’t want me to know because he didn’t know what I’d think of it. He didn’t want me to worry about it. I don’t know exactly what he said.”

  “Did he say that he had done this 187?”

  “No. He told me that him and Kelly or something happens. Something happened and Kelly was standing there and Kelly was … Kelly was doing something to her, and then, he told me that she got … I can’t remember what he told me.”

  “We’re going to get you to relax because again, you’ve come up with more stuff. It sounds like it’s all right there. You start at the beginning of what he told you, and you grab a bit in the middle and then you skip to the end. I think if you really concentrate you’ll be able to fill the whole thing in. And another thing, I notice you keep using the word something.

  “I think if you really think about it, you’ll remember exactly what that something is. I think that something is something very terrible, and so you don’t want to say it out loud. We all know what happened is terrible. Your mom knows what happened. My partner knows what happened. I know what happened. It was a terrible thing that happened, but we’re going to have to talk about it. If you could just get it all out, as opposed to just leaving it as ‘something.’ I think that you’re just trying to—it’s not real until you say it, but it is real. Okay? And it did happen. And nothing is going to change that it happened. If we could just get you to talk about that conversation again, and when you start to feel yourself say something, maybe just stop yourself and think about what that something is. Can you do that for us?”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Can you start with the conversation at his house?”

  “I’ve got to think about it for a minute.”

  “Take as much ti
me as you need.”

  “He didn’t really explain much to me. I didn’t want to know. He just kind of said that they’d gone down after and I don’t know what happened, but then they dragged her into the Gorge. He said that Kelly held her head under for five minutes first, and then they threw her in.”

  Syreeta began to cry now, although she had been crying quietly throughout the interview. She put her hands to her eyes.

  “Does that help, telling us about it? I can see that you’ve really got quite a burden here. You’ve been keeping this all inside for a week. I know there’s still more inside of you, and if we could get you to try again. I know it’s hard. He’s your boyfriend, and it’s hard to talk about what happened, but could you try for us?”

  “I’m trying to think. He kept asking me if I wanted to know. I just said no, and then eventually the song said 187, and he said exactly that. I don’t remember how he told me. He said that it wasn’t true that he’d beat up a Native guy. They went down after, and something happened. I can’t be exact. I don’t want to pin it on anybody.”

  “We just want you to tell us what he told you.”

  “I think he told me that him and Kelly killed the girl. I really didn’t want to know, but then he told me Kelly had, I don’t know, kicked her, stepped on her head a couple of times, and then she stuck her head under water for five minutes, and they dragged her into the Gorge.”

  “Okay. That’s more detail again. I know this is really hard, Syreeta. I do. I know you’re not having any fun. This is the worst day you’ve had in a long time. This is the worst week of your life, I’m sure. And I’m not here to torture you or anything. I just want to get as much detail as I can get. You did really good that time. It flowed, it made sense, and it was in a logical order. Do you think if you just relax for a minute here, you could do it again and fill in all the gaps for us? Is that okay? Is that something you can do if we give you a minute here?”

  Still crying, Syreeta said, “I can try.”

  “You’re doing really well. You’re great. We really appreciate what you’re doing for us here. The truth is important. It has to come out. So just take a minute and relax, and when you’re ready to start again, you can.”