“As soon as I reported up the line that we’ve got a homicide, the RCMP showed up and started talking joint investigation. They sent a superintendent, not the usual corporal, so I knew it was something big, but those boys don’t like to share information.
“Somehow they know who she is. Mae Wang. A student at Carleton, they say. I asked why the Mounties were so interested in a Carleton student and all I got was a shrug. This prick superintendent actually said, ‘It’s above your pay grade.’ Can you believe it?
“They’ve got a story about how the girl’s roommate knows some guy at the RCMP, so when she doesn’t come home night before last, the roommate phones this unnamed Mountie and reports her missing. For this reason, she’s on their radar. And she’s a foreign national, so they’re saying they ought to be involved.”
“Sounds like they’re stretching a point. What do you think the real interest is?”
“Don’t know, but it gets worse. About nine o’clock, a posse from the Chinese Embassy shows up at the morgue demanding they release the body. They’ve got a limo, a hearse and two big SUVs. Some bullshit about Chinese burial customs and the need to ship the body home to China quickly. They’re waving all kinds of official-looking paperwork. There’s one guy still on duty and a bunch of Chinese in suits yelling and shouting. He caves in and releases the body, coroner’s investigation not even complete.
“My new Mountie friend says it’s ‘regrettable’ and someone from Global Affairs will write a stern note of protest. Do you believe these bastards?”
“I can see why you’d be pissed off. What’s this mean to your case?’
“There is no case. I’m off it, ordered to focus on existing caseload. Not a damned thing I can do. With this joint investigation, they’ve moved it up to inspector level. Couple of brass hats from our place and the Mounties are going to sit around and play with their joints. That’s how these things work. But I’ll tell you, no one’s going to chase or throw some kid off the top of a building two blocks from the police station and walk away. Not in my town.”
I nodded. “So what do you think is behind it?”
“Could be just the usual diplomatic ass kissing. Same stuff we see when a drunken Russian runs someone over. The government makes some noise about it, but most of the time they let it blow over. Looking for the same consideration if there is a drunken Canadian in Moscow, I guess.”
“That doesn’t make it right.”
“It sure as hell doesn’t. I took this straight to the chief who gave me a line about the situation being complicated, all part of life in a national capital, that kind of thing. Meanwhile, whoever killed this girl is still walking around out there.”
“Or on his way back to China.”
“That’s possible, too. Lover’s quarrel, maybe. Could be a guy from their embassy.”
“So what do you think the chances are of anyone talking about any of this on the record?”
“Slim. Our guys will refer everything to the Mounties. You’ll probably get a generic statement from A Division, but that’s all. You might get a canned quote from Global Affairs as well. I’m thinking that, as a columnist, you’ve got a little more freedom to say how outrageous this is, even if all the facts aren’t available.”
I was certainly interested. This was a big story if I could nail it.
Reilly reached into his suit-coat pocket and pulled out a photo of the woman I had last seen on the fence.
“Morgue shot,” he said. “It’s not bad, though. There was no damage to the face. Maybe you can ask a few questions, see what you can find out about this girl. She’s more than just some Carleton student, that’s for sure.”
I took the photo, looked at it for a moment, then put it in my purse. Even in death, the young woman was beautiful in that soft way that Oriental women had. How had she ended up on the roof? And why that building, of all buildings?
No need to tell Reilly that I had already planned to spend the day finding out more about the woman. Now it seemed a lot more worthwhile.
“My day is pretty clear,” I said. “And you’ve got me off to an early start.”
“Good, good,” Reilly said, nodding. Then he turned to me, his dark eyes locking on mine. “Anything I can do to help, let me know. I just can’t make an official move. Don’t call me before noon, though. Right now, I’m going home to crash.”
“You look like you could use it. Thanks for the tip.”
I looked again at the photo of Mae Wang. Who are you, I thought? And who killed you?
EIGHT
Mae Wang was a ghost, in every sense of the word. I had spent the morning in the apartment searching for her trail online, but the bread crumbs were few and far between.
When I started in journalism, putting together a person’s life story consisted mostly of initial guess work, leads and interviews. It was a slow process, unless you got lucky or the person was prominent. Now, you could usually learn quite a lot about someone in a single day, and the place to start was Facebook, where they would tell you all about themselves, with pictures.
Mae Wang wasn’t so forthcoming. I did learn that she was a graduate student at Carleton’s School of Linguistics and Language Studies. She was also a teaching assistant and freelance interpreter. She listed her interests as reading, piano and ping pong. What was it with Asians and ping pong?
If Mae was in a relationship, she wasn’t saying. She had only three Facebook friends, and two of those were in Vancouver, which Mae identified as her home town. There was a lie. If she was from Vancouver, the Chinese Embassy wouldn’t be shipping her body back to China. It was a good back story if Mae Wang was really someone else, though. Vancouver had to be wall to wall with Wongs and Wangs. Who would question the authenticity of Mae’s story?
Mae’s Facebook page seemed to be mostly a way of advertising her availability as an interpreter. There were few postings and those were mostly cryptic. “Attended Canada-China Friendship Society event,” things like that. It was enough to show that she was out there, but Mae Wang didn’t feel the usual compulsion to tell the whole world about everything she did. Either her life was dull or she wanted to keep it private.
There were only two photos. In one, a smiling Mae sat on a stone wall in a knee-length white dress with a thin pink sweater over top. It was taken in some kind of garden, with cherry blossoms in the background. It would have been a shot from Vancouver, or China. The look on Mae’s face was gentle, and yet somehow knowing. I printed the picture out. No need to use a morgue shot if I didn’t have to.
The other showed Mae with her arm around a similar-looking young woman, standing in front of some tulips on Parliament Hill. The other Facebook friend, possibly. It was a typical tourist shot, but it had been taken from too far back to be a selfie. I wondered who the photographer was.
I extended my electronic search farther. Mae had no presence on Instagram or Snapchat. Infomart, the data base that logged every mention of a person in a newspaper, TV or radio newscast and even in a blog, produced an elderly woman in Bismarck, North Dakota, and an American in technology. No surprise. Most ordinary people didn’t appear in the news and Mae Wang didn’t seem like an attention seeker. All Google offered was a lot of information about a Mae Wang park in Thailand.
For someone with more attachment to society, I could have looked at mortgage records, court records that would show lawsuits or divorces, disciplinary records of professional societies and political donation records. As it was, at the end of my electronic search, I knew what Mae Wang wanted people to know, and it wasn’t much. There was no saying any of it was even true.
There were two useful leads. The only Facebook friend Mae had in Ottawa was Lily Liu. Odds were that was her roommate. A quick call to the media relations person at Carleton had revealed that Mae’s graduate supervisor was a Professor Ronald Horsley. I decided to start with him.
An hour later, I was in Horsley’s crammed little office in Paterson Hall, one of a jumble of Carleton University building
s that would have seemed modern 30 or 40 years ago. They hadn’t aged well and now they were punctuated by towers that had all the grace of aging condo buildings.
Horsley’s office was a narrow white rectangle with books on battered wooden shelves down one of the long walls and photographs of Horsley all over the other. I glanced at them while Horsley finished a phone call. There was the professor as a young, bearded backpacker with the Great Wall in the background. The picture had to be 40 years old. In another, he was part of what looked like a group of students greeting Mao. There were pictures of him as an older man, too, at various functions with Chinese people that I didn’t recognize. In all, there were probably more than 50 photos on his trophy wall.
Horsley himself was no prize. His backpack had become a frontpack, a round potbelly that could have qualified him to play Santa. His beard was as unkempt as it had been 40 years ago, but now grey. Horsley hadn’t visited a barber lately either, his wispy hair long and shooting in all directions. I knew the type, students who just kept going back for more degrees and ultimately never did leave the security of the campus and the life they had enjoyed in their 20s.
“Yes, yes, I’ll pick it up,” Horsley said, sounding somewhat annoyed. Then he put the phone down and rose to greet me. He was close to six feet tall and didn’t look quite as rotund standing up. “Ron Horsley,” he said, extending a hand. “Tragic story about Mae Wang. How can I help?”
I had had the task of giving Horsley the bad news over the phone when I called to make an appointment. There was a considerable pause when I explained what happened, but he had pulled himself together and agreed to co-operate on what I had told him would be an obituary. It was a truish statement.
I sat on the single hard wooden chair, opened my notebook and said, “I’m really trying to find out everything I can about Mae. Did you know her well?”
Horsley paused slightly before answering, then said, “I knew her in a collegial way. It’s a smallish department. One gets to know everyone.”
Right. He had wanted to get into Mae’s pants and felt guilty about it now, or perhaps regretful about his failure. “When did you first meet Mae?” I asked.
“When she was assigned as my graduate student. Very bright girl. Excellent Mandarin skills, but she was looking for the academic qualification to go with it. She had hoped to teach, ultimately.”
“A fine ambition,” I said, hoping I had managed to keep the sarcasm out of my voice. “I can see that you’ve certainly had a fascinating career,” I said, gesturing toward the wall of photographs. I didn’t really want to hear a lot about Ron Horsley’s life, but I was certain it would be his favourite topic and buttering up a source a little bit never hurt.
“Well, I have seen some remarkable things. I’ve been a sinophile since a rather young age. Fascinating people and culture. Canadians know so little about the Chinese, beyond the stereotypes.”
“I’m sure you could write a book about it.”
“Actually, I have. Three in fact.”
I needed to change the topic before Horsley started to tell me all about them. I wondered if anyone had ever read his books, other than students assigned them as course work.
“I’ll have to check that out,” I lied. “But back to Mae Wang. Can you tell me what kind of person Mae was? Her interests, what mattered to her, that sort of thing?”
Horsley tugged on his beard, considering his answer. “She was rather quiet, in that way that Asian women often are. Somewhat introverted, I would say. Highly intelligent. Well read. I can’t say I recall her mentioning any hobbies or activities. Our focus was strictly on her academic work.”
“Of course. Did she have many friends here at the school?”
Horsley frowned, making a bit of a show of concentrating. Then he said, “I don’t think so. The only one I really saw Mae with was one of our former students, Lily Liu. In fact, I believe they are roommates.”
“That’s useful,” I said, although all it did was confirm something I had already assumed. “How about politics? Was she for or against the regime in the old country?”
“I have no idea,” Horsley said quickly. “She certainly wasn’t Falun Gong or anything like that. They’re a cult, you know.”
“Really?” I didn’t know much about Falun Gong, but I did know that the Chinese government hated them and seemed determined to stamp them out, anywhere in the world. I wondered if there was some kind of political reason why the embassy had been so quick to seize Mae Wang’s body. She had to be more than just a quiet student at Carleton.
“Oh yes,” Horsley replied. “A quasi-religion with an agenda to destabilize the Chinese state. I’ve researched it thoroughly. Not that the leadership in China is without its faults.”
I was no expert on world politics, but I knew that the government in China was one of the most repressive in the world. Not without its faults didn’t quite capture it. There was no point getting into a political debate with Horsley, but I could see that he was one of those Canadians who loved everything about China and were willing to overlook little things like torturing dissidents and locking people up for saying what they thought. Apparently meeting Mao made up for a lot.
“Mae was from Vancouver, was she?” I asked.
“I believe so. Rather an Asian city, Vancouver.”
“How about her family? I’ll need to contact them.”
“I don’t believe she ever talked about them, now that you mention it. Nothing that sticks in my mind, in any case.”
Horsley gave an incongruous grin. I suspected he was enjoying being no help at all. The question was why.
“I see that Mae did freelance translation. Any idea who she might have worked for?”
“That wouldn’t have been directly relevant to her work here, but I do believe that she mentioned working for the Chinese Embassy from time to time.” Horsley nodded his head, as if confirming his recollection. “Yes, I definitely remember that. The embassy has a rather large contingent here in Ottawa. Regrettably, relatively few of them speak English well. There are a lot of social events on the diplomatic circuit. I believe Mae would sometimes accompany their diplomats to act as an interpreter.”
Now we were getting somewhere. Mae Wang was young and attractive. Maybe one of the diplomats wanted something more than interpretation. Or perhaps she had fallen in love with one of them. I had covered a lot of murders where women were the victims, and most of them had to do with sex or love, or some confusion over the two.
“I don’t suppose you would know who she was interpreting for?”
“I do move in those circles myself,” Horsley said, just so I would be clear on his status. “Unfortunately, I can’t recollect being at any diplomatic event where Mae was working.”
Interesting choice of words. Horsley wasn’t saying that he didn’t attend any events where Mae was present, just that he didn’t recollect. It was a phrase recommended by lawyers when they suspected their client was lying and there was a chance the other side could prove it. It left the door open for improving one’s recollection later on.
“And if Mae had been present, surely you would have remembered, her being a student of yours and all.”
Horsley reddened a bit. He clearly knew what I was implying by the words “and all.” I still didn’t think he’d gotten anywhere with Mae Wang. Young women weren’t attracted to men of Horsley’s age and looks unless they had a lot of money, fame or power. Horsley couldn’t possibly have enough of any of those to overcome his other deficiencies.
“Yes, I suppose I would have remembered. Mae was a memorable woman.”
I made a point of writing that in my notebook.
“I’d rather you didn’t quote me on that.”
So he was married. That made his crush just a little bit more pathetic.
“One last thing. Do you happen to have an address for Mae Wang? I should talk to the roommate.”
“I think I just might,” Horsley said, making a show of riffling through a Rolodex on
his desk. Like he hadn’t memorized it and maybe even spent afternoons lurking around outside Mae’s place like a lovelorn teenager.
‘Yes, here it is,” Horsley said, plucking a card from the file and passing it over. I noted the address, an apartment on Metcalfe in the 300 block, pretty much downtown. Mae’s cell phone number was there, too. I scribbled that down as well, but didn’t say anything about it.
“You’ve been a real help professor,” I said.
Horsley smiled, seemingly confused by my generous assessment of the interview.
“When will your article run?” he asked.
“Soon. It looks as if there really isn’t much of a story to tell.”
Horsley nodded vigorously, finding that a little more reassuring than the idea that he had been a big help. I wasn’t sure what Horsley’s angle was yet, but I was pretty certain he had one. The thing I didn’t know was whether this dumpy, China-loving Carleton University professor was connected to Mae Wang’s death. I decided to try my luck with Lily Liu. Maybe she could connect the dots and explain what was happening between Horsley and Mae Wang.
NINE
Reilly rolled out of bed and looked at his watch. Two o’clock. Shit. He’d slept through half of the day. The sun was forcing its way through the thin curtains. How had he slept so late? And not so much as a drink the night before. He couldn’t pull all-nighters like he used to.
He turned on his phone and listened to the assortment of dings and dongs it made as it downloaded texts, e-mails and voice messages. When you were the staff sergeant in Major Crimes, the world never slowed down and let you take a day off. The stabbings, shootings and homicides in the city were up, but the chief and the mayor kept on telling people how safe it was while squeezing the police budget so that they were short staffed everywhere.
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