"Where's Anthony now?"
"He and Jared's parents are with Jared, or as close as they'll let them get. They won't let anyone else in right now. I've been fucking alone with no one to talk to in that fucking stinking waiting room filled with snot-nosed kids and guys with fucking cuts oozing blood on the fucking floor..."
"Will you watch your fucking mouth!" I told her in a pressing tone. She was about to lose control-I was too-and this wasn't the time. "This isn't about you, Errall! Have you talked to Anthony at all? Do you know how this happened?"
"Barely," she said, surprisingly not striking out with a sharp tongue or fingernail to impale me for telling her off. "All Anthony told me on the phone was that Jared was attacked in their apartment. Someone must have come to the door. Afterwards, Jared was able to get to a phone and dial 9-1-1. Whoever it was who called Anthony from the hospital said someone had thrown a substance in Jared's face and they thought it might be acid. They didn't know if...if his body could survive the trauma...Russell, oh God, Russell, why would this happen to our sweet, sweet Jared?"
I had the sinking feeling I knew the answer to that. Or at least part of the answer. "Do they have a suspect?" I questioned. "Are the police involved? Has someone been caught?"
"Why are you asking me all these questions I don't know the answer to?" she spat at me. "I hate that!" She tossed aside her spent cigarette with great disdain and readied for another.
"Errall, you know this case I'm working on."
"Yeah, yeah, yeah," she said. Her face took on the look of someone desperate for a change of subject.
"I think Jared is involved somehow."
"What are you talking about? How? Weren't you hired to find out why that woman jumped off the Broadway Condos building?"
"Yes, that's how it began, but it's become something much different. One thing led to another and then another..."
"But how is Jared involved?"
"I think the boogeyman is after him."
When Errall could smoke no more, I led her back into the waiting room. I didn't want to be far should Anthony or a doctor come out with news of Jared. Thankfully emergencies in Saskatoon that Thursday evening hit a slow spell and we mostly had the uncomfortable seats and bad coffee to ourselves. We spent some time going over what we didn't know and eventually fell into private silences, contemplating the fate of our friend.
"Russell," came a familiar voice.
I looked up from where I'd slouched down into my seat. It was Constable Darren Kirsch. Both Errall and I jumped up and, forgoing greetings of any sort, barraged him with questions.
"I thought I'd find you here," he said in a calm, professional voice.
Two men in their forties pushing an eighty-year-old woman in a wheelchair entered the waiting room about then and Darren shepherded us into a corner where we sat in a tight group.
"Have you seen him? Have you heard anything?" I asked him.
"Although Jared was lucid enough following his attack to phone 9-1-1, by the time the emergency response team arrived on the scene he was unconscious. They had to break down the door to the apartment. He's been slipping in and out of consciousness ever since. We've been unable to talk to him to find out exactly what happened or if he knew his attacker or attackers."
"But you've been to the apartment, where it happened?" I said. "You have some ideas, right?"
Darren eyed me carefully and then Errall, I guess to assess our mental stability at this highly emotional time. We must have passed muster, because he went on. "There was no forced entry-other than the ERT-so it would appear that Jared let his attacker in."
"It was someone he knew!" Errall exclaimed.
"Not necessarily. It just means Jared didn't suspect a threat from this person." He took a breath before continuing. "It appears that the attack took place right in the doorway. A substance was tossed into Jared's face. We're quite certain now that it was some low-grade form of acid."
Oh God. Oh God. Oh God.
"Is it...is it bad?" Errall croaked out.
The big cop only nodded.
All I could think of was Jared's face, a thing of such great beauty it had graced the cover of almost every major fashion and entertainment magazine in North America and Europe. People were awestruck by the curves and edges of a face put together in such perfect proportion that it defied easy description or conventional definition; the olive skin that gave him the exotic look of an untouchable stranger, the golden green eyes of a gentle lioness, the thick lips that when turned into a smile lit up a room. I did not know if I could live without Jared's face; how could he?
And then, one other thought. Acid was also used to desecrate Duncan Sikorsky's artwork in Vancouver.
"I spoke with Anthony," Darren told us.
"How is he?" Errall and I both asked at once.
"As you might expect. I spoke with him about whether he had any idea who might have done this. He didn't. He said everyone loves Jared." He looked at me then. "But Jared told him about your experience at The Berry Barn-I read the police report-and that you thought Jared might somehow be tied to the case you're working on. I need you to tell me what's going on, Quant." It wasn't a request.
I glanced around the room, and except for the two men and their mother /mother-in-law who were commiserating quietly amongst themselves, the place was empty. "It began with Tanya Culinare," I said in hushed tones, "the woman who jumped off the Broadway Condominiums building. That led to me to discover the death of her ex-girlfriend, Moxie Banyon."
"Another suicide?" Errall asked.
"Accident, or so it seems-to some."
"I asked the Moose Jaw cops some questions, like you asked, Quant," Darren said. "There really wasn't much of an investigation. It seemed like she drowned, no cause for suspicion."
I strongly disagreed with that assessment. "What about now?"
"We'll be looking into things a little deeper."
"I don't know how, but I think Moxie Banyon was murdered, maybe unpremeditated, but murdered nonetheless."
"Quant, what the hell...?"
"Just listen to me. As I dug into the recent past of Tanya and Moxie, I found a disturbing similarity, a pattern of extreme, unrelenting harassment, as if someone wanted to scare them to death."
"You think Tanya Culinare and Moxie Banyon were scared to death?" He sounded incredulous and, really, I didn't blame him.
I nodded. "First off, Tanya Culinare was not the most stable person to begin with. Then all this shit begins to happen, first to Moxie, then to her. They end up breaking up, or maybe they decide to part ways for a while until things return to normal-I'm not sure which. Moxie moves to Moose Jaw, then she-not a swimmer-ends up in a pool, fully dressed and drowns. The barrage of harassment against Tanya escalates. I'm not a therapist, and I don't know if Tanya was unstable enough to be the type of person already at risk to kill herself, but given this constant environment of fear and mental torture, I think that's exactly what happened.
"I think the night she died, she'd been driven to the limit and finally cracked. For months she'd suffered almost daily doses of harassment: threatening phone calls, things that go bump in the night, mysterious packages showing up on her doorstep, constantly being watched or followed, all petty irritations that when added together were driving her around the bend. She had no family here, no friends to speak of, her lover had left town...and then died...she'd been to see a therapist but it wasn't helping; he may not have even believed that what she said she was experiencing was real. Her only real friend, her boss Victoria Madison, didn't believe her.
"Then that last night, she was hiding out in her apartment as she often did, alone, scared, as she often was, and then once more she heard noises, as if someone was trying to get into her apartment. Maybe the phone was ringing too. Desperate and frightened, she tried to reach out for help. She knew that if she couldn't put an end to this, she'd go insane. She'd already tried the police. Her boss had given her the number of a private detective: me.
"So, she calls me. It's two-thirty in the morning. She tells me that someone is coming to get her, that he wants to hurt her. She sounds like someone who is frightened to death. It's too much for her. She hangs up. She's all alone, no one to turn to. Someone is there, wanting to hurt her, perhaps kill her like they killed her girlfriend. She can't leave the apartment because she believes this boogeyman is behind the door, so she escapes to the balcony. Someone is still trying to get in, scratching at the door, phone still ringing, she feels all alone, helpless, terrified, desperate. She jumps."
For a moment the three of us sat there in silence, somehow sensing that my scenario was not far off from what really happened to Tanya Culinare that sad night.
I added an extraneous thought, "It could be that whoever was carrying out this systematic harassment didn't necessarily expect Tanya to kill herself."
Errall completed my gruesome hypothesis. "But it was a welcome result?"
I nodded and continued to unfold the steps of my case. "Then I met Moxie's best friend, Duncan-a man terrified of his own shadow. I found out he's been suffering the same kind of harassment from the elusive boogeyman character."
"Boogeyman," Kirsch stated flatly. "How can you be certain it's the same guy doing all of this? And why 'boogeyman'?"
Good questions. "I guess I can't be one-hundred per cent sure, but whoever this person is, he or she loves nothing better than to send the victims little love letters. And they all say the same thing: Boo."
"God, Russell, this is giving me the creeps." Errall admitted.
"So then Duncan disappears, but before he does he leaves me a photograph of a group of people and one of those people is Jared." I gave Kirsch a pointed look. "The list of names I asked you to check out was a list of people in that photograph."
He nodded. "Most of which had made complaints about being harassed." He was beginning to take me a little more seriously now. "So you think this boogeyman character is after everyone in the photograph?"
"Why else would Duncan give it to me?"
"Could he be wrong? Or could he be the boogeyman, trying to mislead you?"
Sheesh. I didn't want to consider that. But it didn't feel right. Duncan's fear was so palpable I doubted he could have faked it. "Maybe, but I don't think so."
"Quant, I think you're jumping to some mighty big conclusions here." A typical cop response. They want to be the only ones who jump to the big conclusions. "There's a whole hell of a lot of difference between harassment and scaring someone to death, or worse. What you're talking about is murder."
"I know, I know. What I don't understand is that for some reason the boogeyman is treating some of the people in the photo differently than others. Some are only getting threatening notes and irritating calls, while others are ending up dead. It's like he hates them all, but some more than others."
"Or..."
I stared at Kirsch and waited for it. Despite his usual inclination to disparage most of what I say, Kirsch is-I hate to admit it- a smart cop, and he knows when something fishy is more than just an unpleasant smell.
"Maybe he's new at this," he began somewhat slowly. "Maybe the boogeyman is only just now beginning to acquire a taste for murder," he said, eyes narrowed in thought. "Something you said earlier-about how maybe he didn't intend for Tanya to kill herself. What if he just meant to harass these people for some reason and then, whoops, one of them-Moxie was the first-dies. Suddenly he's a murderer rather than a simple troublemaker getting petty revenge for something.. .and he finds that he likes it. So he steps up his efforts and, with Tanya this time, it happens again. Russell, this guy could be developing into a real maniac, ignited by his own actions, becoming...a serial killer."
All three of us shared a collective gulp. Could it be true? Had we stumbled into something this huge, this dangerous, this potentially fatal for everyone in that photograph?
"And now Jared," Errall said, looking at me with moist eyes, her mouth a grim line across a blanched face.
Darren stood up. "I'm going back to the station, dig deeper into those names on that list from the photo. Maybe something else has turned up." He stared at me, his face a piece of granite. "What about you? Is there anything else you should tell me?"
There've been times when I've held out on Darren, not told him all I knew, but not this time, not with Jared's life hanging in the balance. I gave him the names of the choir director and bus driver and a description of my brief meetings with both men and then he was off.
My phone rang. Oh crap, no cellphones in a hospital. But the way things were going today, I had to answer it.
"Mr. Quant?" a quaking voice came across the line. "It's Kim Pelluchi. You gave me your card with your number? You have to help me. Richie is gone!"
Despite her desire for more smokes, Errall agreed to stay behind in case word came of Jared's condition while I took Kim's call outdoors.
"Tell me what happened," I said to the woman in as calm a voice as I could manage. God, I wanted one of Errall's cigarettes.
"Richie and I had this big argument after you left last night," she said. "He told me that something did happen the night we were stranded in Davidson. He said he couldn't tell me about it but that he was going to put an end to all our hassles once and for all. Then he just took off on his bike." Oh shit. "And I haven't heard from him since. I tried reaching him all day today, but nothing, and none of his friends have heard from him either." The bike. Oh shit. "Mr. Quant, I'm scared something bad has happened to him, and you told me to call if..."
"Oh shit." I said it out loud this time.
"What was that?"
"Nothing, nothing. Kim, I think I may know where Richie is. I'll call you." And I hung up. No time to explain.
I ran back into the hospital where Errall sat waiting and looking wholly miserable.
"Anything?" I asked her.
She shook her head. I'm guessing that by the look on my face, she knew something was up.
"I have to go."
She glared at me as if I'd lost my mind. "What the hell is the matter with you?"
"I may know who's behind all of this, and if it's the same bastard who did this to Jared -"
'Go.'
Chapter 19
I had recently seen a bike, a ten-speed, with flaking chips of red paint clinging to its battered frame. At the time I didn't know who it belonged to, but it all came together with the call from Kim Pelluchi. The bike, just like the one Richie described to me as his own the night before, was leaning against Guy Marcotte's trailer. Could it be a coincidence? Absolutely. But I didn't think so.
By the time I made a left off Central Avenue into the bowels of Hagar's Heath, the sun had set on this dreadful day and darkness covered the Mazda like a heavy cloak. Without signs to follow, I slowed my pace as I searched for the street I'd visited earlier that afternoon. My eyes were drawn to an unearthly glow and even though the top was up and the windows were closed, I could smell smoke. What the hell is going on, I wondered to myself, my suspicions running amok. An alien craft landing? Someone being burned at the stake? What were these people up to?
My car trembled over the rough road surface and eventually I came to an empty lot...well, empty except for the bonfire. In the middle of the lot-I'm sure contrary to numerous city ordinances-was a large group of people forming a circle around a blazing fire pit. Were they swaying? Chanting? Wearing hoods?
My stomach tightened and prickles of fear dotted my neck. Was this some kind of cult? Was something being sacrificed here? There was a smell, something familiar. But this was a matter for another time-in daylight, with a police escort. Maybe. I just wanted to get away unnoticed with my head and hide still attached to my body. I released the clutch and kept moving.
As it turned out, Guy Marcotte's trailer was at the beginning of the next street over, less than half a block away from where the fire-gazers were doing their spooky bit. I pulled up behind his empty faux driveway, thought better of it, and moved the car further down the stree
t. My gun was still safely stored in a box in my garage. Crap. Why did I even bother? No matter, if this guy was responsible for Jared's attack, I'd take him down with bare hands if I had to. I swung open the door of the car and slipped out with as little noise as I could. That's when I heard the growling.
I froze.
Dog!
Big dog? Little dog? Hungry dog? Stray dog? Tied-up dog? Pit bull? Chihuahua?
The growl continued, lasting an impressive fifteen seconds until the darn thing had to take a breath, and then another fifteen seconds, another breath, another fifteen seconds, and so on and so on. This was one inhospitable place and I promised myself that after tonight I'd never return to Hagar's Heath. My current options, however, were few: get back in the car, or track down someone who might be responsible for Jared's critical condition. Only one option counted. I began to walk. The growling continued but grew fainter the further away I got from the car. Tied-up dog. Phew.
Anthony Bidulka Page 27