Reilly often wondered why that was still his problem. He was 55 with 35 years in, well past the time when he could retire, collect his pension and spend his time fishing. He knew that would please the brass, too. There was always a long list of protégés and relatives looking for promotion. Knowing that his very presence pissed off the eager climbers and their mentors was worth something, but it wasn’t always enough.
In a good week, he could still help take some shitbag off the street, maybe even put him behind bars if the system didn’t commit some technical violation of his rights along the way. That used to be satisfying, but after so many years on the job he knew it usually just meant that another guy the same would step up. Rinse and repeat.
It wasn’t the criminals that bothered him the most, though. What could you expect from them? They broke laws for a living. It was Reilly’s own colleagues that he found hardest to take. It was as irritating as jock itch to watch people who were incompetent and full of themselves push their way to the top, taking jobs that he always imagined would be his. That was the curse of being the son and grandson of former chiefs. Early on, he assumed that he would have a similar career path, but so did other people. He had become the guy they had to stop to get to the top. He had to admit that his tendency to tell so-called superiors exactly what he thought probably hadn’t helped.
Still, more than three decades of service and not even an inspector. It was embarrassing, something his father Seamus never failed to mention. Nasty old fart living in a mobile home outside Fort Myers, playing 36 holes of golf most days and still knocking back enough Scotch to pickle a hog. His old man had come up in the days when knowing how to swing your fists and your baton was grounds for promotion. Now, it would get you flayed alive on social media. It seemed like every time someone in uniform got a little too enthusiastic there were 20 people filming it.
Not that Reilly condoned that sort of shit, but it was tough living in a world where people demanded action on crime, and then expected you to treat the criminals like they were visiting royalty.
He pulled on a blue robe that he had owned for decades and walked the few steps into the apartment’s little white kitchen. He started the coffee maker and surveyed his surroundings. The kitchen was IKEA, cheap and glossy like the rest of the apartment. Reilly didn’t care. He was seldom home and the place on Cooper was an easy walk to the central station on Elgin. So what if the building looked like a parking garage. He was renting.
His old house on Grove in Ottawa South had been home, but it seemed pointless to stay there after Jenny had left him. Almost seven years ago now. It was hard to believe. He would have had to buy out her half of the house in the divorce settlement. It just didn’t make sense financially and there were too many memories of his failed marriage.
Now he had done it again. The apartment had been his place with Suzy, and she was gone, too. He opened the cupboard to get his favourite black mug and saw hers still sitting there, white with a bold red S on it. The mug hadn’t been worth hanging on to, just like him.
His relationship with Suzy seemed almost surreal now. Maybe it had been wrong from the start. Suzy had been dating his son, Sean, and she showed up at Reilly’s place one night, pissed at Sean and demanding to know where he was. Feeling that he owed her after shamelessly misleading her to help solve a case, Reilly had invited her in. After a few whiskies, one thing had led to another and she ended up staying for five years. And now she was gone and he didn’t even know why.
The thing with Suzy had cost him his relationship with Sean. He hadn’t thought his son was serious about her, but Suzy knew how to put a hook into a man. Sean was an inspector now, out in East Division. They hadn’t spoken in more than two years, and then only because of a case.
Reilly poured his coffee and tried to push all of that to the back of his mind. There wasn’t a day he didn’t think about Suzy, but that wasn’t going to bring her back. He had work to do and he had to get focused. Maybe the deep thinkers weren’t going to bother themselves about the dead Chinese girl, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t. In the world Reilly lived in, there weren’t special sets of circumstances that meant some homicides weren’t worth exploring. He didn’t care whether the victim was an MP or a street hooker. He went after the perp just as hard.
His gambit this morning with Kris Redner might pay dividends, but he needed a few other lines working, too. There wasn’t much doubt that someone at the RCMP knew what was going on. Probably CSIS, too. Something like this had to be on the spy agency’s radar because of the Chinese Embassy’s involvement. Whisking bodies away in the middle of the night smelled a lot like Ministry of State Security work. Reilly had done a few joint ops with RCMP and CSIS guys. They figured at least half the embassy personnel in Ottawa were MSS agents.
There was one guy he had hit it off with, one who didn’t take well to the internal bullshit. Farrell, that was his name. Had started out as a Mountie, then switched over to CSIS. Reilly had heard that Farrell was some kind of a private contractor now. That could mean anything in his line of work. Maybe he was still plugged in. If so, he seemed like the type who would give it to Reilly straight. He decided to make a few calls, see if he could track Farrell down.
Reilly wondered if Kris Redner would make any progress, and if she did, whether she would share it with him. Right now, he didn’t have a lot to trade in exchange for information. He liked Redner. She called it the way she saw it. The Citizen writer was smart and seemed tough, but he knew she was just showing him her outer shell. You had to have a thick one to spend your life dealing with crime and criminals, whether you were a cop or a reporter.
Reilly hoped that he hadn’t made a mistake in enlisting her help. If the Mae Wang case played out the way he thought it would, they were going to be up against some pretty serious people, ones who didn’t really care about the rules.
He had always thought Kris Redner would be up for that, but she’d changed somehow in the last few months. She’d been away for a while, then when she came back, she was off for months on medical leave. His instinct was that she’d gotten her nose into something serious, maybe illegal. Now he was pointing her at more trouble.
Reilly vowed to keep close tabs on Kris. He’d made the mistake of drawing Suzy into a dangerous story once, back before they were together, and it had put her life in danger. He couldn’t do that to another woman. He had already made more mistakes in life than his conscience could bear.
TEN
I powered down the windows of my old Honda Accord to let in some air. The temperature had shot up to 25 degrees Celsius, typical of May’s unpredictability in Ottawa. The sun was beating down in a cloudless sky, but I had found a maple to park under across the street from Lily and Mae’s building. The parking spot wasn’t legal, but it wouldn’t matter as long as I was in the car. If I did get a ticket, I’d just throw it in the glove compartment with all the rest.
The car was a 15-year-old beater, but it was good enough for my rare trips out to the Citizen offices on Baxter Road, and the occasional stake out. The thing would probably collapse into a heap of rust before I put enough miles on it to change the oil.
I was going to have to get lucky to connect with Lily Liu. I didn’t have a cell number for her and no one under the age of 30 was in the telephone book. Most people came home around dinner time, though, and I was prepared to be patient.
Metcalfe must have been a grand street once, way before my time. Most of the homes were red brick Victorians, the showy ones built by people who had money and wanted everyone to know it. Lily’s apartment building was the exception, a six-storey brown brick rectangle, circa 1960. It was a rundown joint much like those that ruined just about every major downtown street in Ottawa. The late afternoon sun at least gave some kind of life to the drab apartment block.
I could see why Mae Wang would have chosen it, besides relatively cheap rent. It wasn’t terribly close to the university, but it was more or less equidistant between there and the Chinese Embassy
on St. Patrick in the ByWard Market. The two poles of my life were the cop shop and the courthouse. For Mae, it was the university and the embassy.
It was 5:30. I wished I had thought to take a pee break, but if I left now, it would be the moment Lily Liu showed up.
I wondered if I would be able to discover what was really behind Mae Wang’s death. There was obviously a story there, but perhaps no one had the whole picture. It would be up to me to try to piece it together, but so far, the shape of the pieces wasn’t very clear.
I did have the horrible and graphic image of Mae being spiked on a fence right in front of me. It was an unbeatable way to start a column, but then things got fuzzy. It was a homicide, Reilly said, but the police weren’t confirming anything. I had already checked that. The RCMP was even less co-operative. Wait for a press release, their useless flack said. Not likely. Then there was the angle about the Chinese spiriting the body away in the dead of the night. I didn’t expect either the Chinese or the RCMP to confirm that. Too embarrassing all around. My portrait of Mae herself was still sketchy. What Horsley had told me was only a percentage of the truth, and a small one at that.
I could always go with the old intriguing mystery, series of question marks approach, but I knew I would never be satisfied with that. Even though I had never met Mae Wang, the outline of her story pushed a button with me. It felt like a case where a woman had been used by a powerful man or men, then eliminated when she became a complication. The same thing had nearly happened to me. My own situation had been different than Mae Wang’s, and I had been luckier in the end, but the apparent injustice of Mae’s death had reminded me why I did this job in the first place. I had to admit it felt good after months of hanging around the apartment brooding, burning up my sick time.
In the passenger side mirror, I saw a young Asian woman walking down Metcalfe, coming from downtown. She wore a bright yellow sleeveless dress and cork wedge sandals. What looked like the strap of a backpack was slung over her shoulder. Even in the mirror, I could see that this woman was beautiful, with delicate features and long, glossy black hair. There was no saying it was Lily Liu, but she looked a lot like the girl in the picture that Mae had posted on Facebook.
Once the woman was about 15 feet behind my car, she looked both ways, then darted across Metcalfe toward the apartment building. It was time to move. If this woman wasn’t Lily, it would just be a mildly awkward mistake.
I got out of the car and hurried across the road, just in time to evade a speeding Blue Line cab. As the woman I hoped was Lily reached the door of the building, she put down her black backpack and pulled out a door security card.
“Excuse me,” I said. “Are you Lily Liu?”
It was apparent from the look of surprise on her face that she was, but Lily hesitated a moment before answering. Then she said, “Are you some kind of bill collector?”
“No, not at all.” I had my media credentials on a lanyard around my neck and quickly showed Lily my identification card. It was meaningless in a situation like this, but I had found that if I brandished it confidently, some people were more likely to co-operate.
“A journalist?” Lily said. It was clear from the look on her face that she’d have preferred the bill collector.
“Yes. I’m with the Ottawa Citizen. I’m working on an obituary on Mae Wang. Mind if I ask you a few questions?”
Lily looked left, then right, as if she was concerned that someone might be watching her. Then she quickly swiped her card through the security device on the building’s main door. “Hurry up,” she said.
I stepped quickly behind her into the building’s small main lobby. It was landlord green and smelled like someone was cooking onions. There was an outdated bank of brass mailboxes on the right side, most of them with no name in the little slot that was supposed to identify the tenant. There was a single elevator to the left and a flight of stairs straight ahead.
“Follow me,” Lily said. “I’m on the second floor.”
I trailed behind in a cloud of Lily’s perfume. It was some kind of jasmine scent, much like Mae’s. The image of a dying Mae flashed in my mind, but I pushed it aside.
Lily’s apartment was the first on the right. When she got to the door, she set down her backpack and reached into her purse for her keys. Then she turned and said, “You’d better tell me a bit more about this. I don’t want my name in the newspaper.”
“No need for that. I’m just trying to get a fuller picture of who Mae was. When a person dies so publicly, we normally do an obituary. It’s a way of honouring her life.”
I couldn’t count how many times I had given some version of that pitch to relatives and friends of people who had died violently. It was always true, as long as you defined obituary broadly.
Lily tilted her head to one side, as if weighing whether this was something she wanted to be involved with. She had very large dark eyes set in a girlish face. Her skin looked like it belonged to a child, it was so smooth. What would it be like to be so effortlessly beautiful?
Finally, Lily nodded twice, then opened the door. The kitchen and living area was really all one room, but Lily and Mae had divided it with a folding screen depicting cherry blossom trees on a red background. There was a bamboo mat in the middle of the room and the furniture was black and low to the ground. Down a hallway, I could see two bedroom doors and a bathroom at the end of the hall. Even with the afternoon sun, the room was gloomy, the sunlight filtered by a big maple in front of the building.
“You want some green tea?” Lily asked.
“Love some,” I said, although I really would have preferred a coffee or a shot of Glenfiddich. “Do you mind if I use your washroom?”
“No, go ahead. It’s at the end of the hall.”
I quickly headed down the short hall and closed the washroom door. I really did have to pee, but a person’s washroom could tell you something about them. I saw the chaos one would expect from two young women living together. The ledge around the bathtub was cluttered with shampoos and body washes in brightly-coloured bottles. There was still a faint tinge of body wash in the air. The beige formica countertop around the single sink was overloaded with cosmetics and a hair dryer rested precariously on one corner. Two pairs of actual stockings hung drying on the shower rack. Interesting. Most women in the modern world only wore stockings during sex. No doubt Mae and Lily were getting plenty of that. I needed to find out who Mae was having it with. Judging by the mess, they weren’t having it here. I knew from personal experience that men were turned off by a mess of girly stuff in a washroom, even if most of them were slobs in their own way.
I carefully opened the door of the medicine cabinet. There was the usual acetaminophen and ibuprofen, more lipsticks, tweezers, various perfumes and a box of ribbed condoms. No prescription medications of any sort. That certainly supported Reilly’s information that this was a homicide. Most people would resort to moodimproving medications before jumping off a building.
Other than that, my quick survey of the washroom had told me only that Lily and Mae were young, sexually active and not very tidy.
I relieved myself, hovering over the toilet seat, and then went back into the main room. I heard the sound of a teapot clanking, then the whoosh of a kettle coming to the boil.
“Have a seat,” Lily said. “It will just be a minute.”
I lowered myself into one of the black chairs. It was like a regular chair, but without legs. I hoped my back didn’t seize up completely.
Lily handed me a mug of tea, then descended gracefully into a chair just like the one I was struggling to adjust to. I didn’t think I had ever been that flexible.
On the street, Lily had seemed nervous, almost jumpy. In her own apartment, she was starting to relax. I pulled a reporter’s thin notebook from my purse, to remind Lily that this was business.
“So, Mae Wang, what can I tell you?” she said. “I think I’m still in shock about her death. It’s just hard to believe that she’s gone. And th
e way she died? It was horrible. I just can’t believe that Mae would kill herself. I didn’t see it coming at all.”
“You can’t blame yourself for that.” Remembering what Reilly had said about Lily knowing some guy in the RCMP, I said, “So you reported her missing, I heard?”
“Me? No. The first I heard about Mae was when the police came here.”
“OK, I must have gotten that wrong,” I said, knowing I hadn’t. “What kind of police were they?”
“RCMP. They said something about it being because Mae worked at the embassy.”
“Right, right,” I said, nodding as if that made some kind of sense. Maybe it did, but it wasn’t what the RCMP superintendent had told Reilly. I’d have to raise it with him.
“Now I have to do something with her stuff. I don’t even know where to send it. Mae was from Vancouver, but she never really said anything about her family. I don’t even know who they are.”
Probably because they don’t exist, at least not in Vancouver. Did Lily really know so little of Mae’s life? I had told her I was writing an obituary. The smart move would have been to tell me a few harmless things and send me on my way.
At least the cup of tea created a politeness window that would give me time for a few questions. I decided to take it slow. “How did you and Mae meet?” I asked.
“I’m a interpreter. I do work for business and government. There are a lot of Chinese business people coming here to discuss commercial interests. I actually met Mae at a gig at the Chinese Embassy, though. She did quite a bit of work for them, especially at social events.”
A person working at those kinds of events would hear a lot of things. I wondered if Mae had heard something she shouldn’t have.
“I see. I take it the two of you must have hit if off, since you became roommates.”
Lily shrugged. “We had a lot in common. Mae was new in town, looking for a place to live. I needed a roommate. As crappy as this little apartment is, the rent is expensive for one person.”
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