I looked left past Cobb and my stomach lurched as I saw the headlights of the pickup coming at us, blinding in their intensity.
Like a mirror image the truck and its deadly driver were careening toward us on the boulevard at the perfect angle, in fact, aimed at a spot just a little ahead of us. And somewhere inside me there was a tiny appreciation for this woman who even now had been able to realize that she’d have to lead us by just a bit to guarantee the impact that was now inevitable.
That impact came.
The massive pickup hit the light pole with a force that I thought would snap it off like a dead tree branch and allow the truck to continue its missile-like mission into the driver’s side of the Jeep.
The light pole buckled and its light exploded like the detonation of an aerial firework. The noise of the crash was a sound I’ll never forget — the scream of metal on metal with a jarring of the senses and obliteration of the night in a way that could surely only be duplicated by the weapons of war. If there was another scream — the human kind — it was lost in the noise that for those few seconds was everywhere.
Cobb was able to finally get the Jeep stopped. He wheeled it around, without speaking, and took us back to the scene at the light pole. Our lights illuminated the horror that was the end of the chase. The front of the truck was unrecognizable, the rest of it a twisted, terrible distortion of what it had been.
It was over.
The silence was as intense and eerie, and somehow as frightening as the noise that had preceded it.
And eeriest of all, one shard of metal, I couldn’t tell if it was from the truck or the light standard, pointed in the air, a single arm extended skyward like a cobra stretching ever higher to the sound of the charmer’s notes.
Delores Bain was pronounced dead at 11:57 p.m., three minutes before December 14.
Twenty-Six
“Why didn’t she just shoot us? When she came up alongside us, it would have been easy.” I ran my finger around the lip of a faded blue porcelain coffee mug.
Cobb and I were sitting in an all-night pizza place in Forest Lawn.
We’d ordered a pizza, but between the two of us we’d eaten half a slice. Appetites dulled from being frontline players in a bizarre special effects clip.
A twenty-something waitress with big, dark eyes and what sounded like a level four cold came by every few minutes to fill our coffee cups and eye the pizza as if to determine what was wrong with it.
“It’s not the pizza,” I finally told her. “It’s been a tough night and we don’t have much of an appetite.”
The waitress smiled, apparently reassured that neither she nor the cook had screwed up, and filled our cups one more time.
When she’d gone Cobb nodded. “I thought about that too. A few reasons, I think. First of all, it isn’t as easy to shoot a moving target, in this case two moving targets, as they make it look in the movies. Especially when the shooter is trying to drive and shoot at the same time. Second, until that moment she still had a chance of getting away with it. Two guys get bumped into a fatal head-on with a sanding truck, the driver of the bumping vehicle is distraught, blames road conditions, and even though there are some connections to other questionable events, there isn’t much for evidence. Had she been successful with getting us out of the way, she stood a good chance of getting away with all of it.”
“Yeah, I guess so,” I said.
“And third, not everybody’s a shooter. She’d succeeded once before with the sideswipe thing — why abandon a winning strategy? She’d been waiting for the right moment and the gravel truck was the right moment.”
I told him about the picture on the wall of her office at the school. “Maybe she drove race cars or demolition derby cars back in her youth.”
“That would explain some things. Using vehicles as weapons. The killing of Elaine Yu. How well she handled that truck on a slick road. Guess it doesn’t much matter now.”
I wondered if I looked as tired as he did. Guessed that I did. I drank some of the coffee, trying to make sense of all that had happened.
After the wreck on Memorial Drive Cobb and I had been grilled yet again by the cops — first from the traffic side, then by two homicide detectives named Weller and Twistleman. The nature of the crash that killed Delores Bain had taken it out of the realm of a traffic investigation.
I’d got the impression Weller didn’t like Cobb or me very much. Or maybe it was the good cop–bad cop routine and Weller was the bad cop. If that’s what it was, he was good at it.
He was pencil-thin with dark, dull hair that lay against his skull like a bandana. Weller had eyes the same colour as his hair. And about as friendly.
I wouldn’t have called Twistleman good so much as just less bad. He was the size and approximate shape of a cube van and red-faced in a brown wrinkled suit and shoes that hadn’t seen polish in a long time. If I’d been the casting director I’d have put him in the role of bad cop.
Cobb and I had talked about it while we’d waited for the ambulance and cops to arrive at Memorial Drive. We agreed we’d be as truthful and forthcoming as possible but that the word “follow” might be preferable to “chase” or “pursue” when we described our efforts to stay close to Delores Bain.
Weller was a little smaller than me, and though his tan dress pants and corduroy jacket probably looked fine on Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate, the ensemble didn’t say retro so much as out of style. Weller was also a hardass, like the cops in the old movies who hated all private detectives and lived to make gumshoes’ lives miserable.
But maybe I’m not being fair to Detective Weller. I have to admit that from the moment I first heard his name, I had a visual of Pickwick’s man, Samuel Weller, firmly Photoshopped into my mind. Probably didn’t help foster a relationship based on respect.
Weller made it clear that he’d like to nail Cobb’s “vigilante ass” for reckless driving and leaving the scene of an accident. He’d flipped open his notebook to inform us that “Doris Pahk had called in a complaint to the effect that a Jeep Cherokee had, while driving erratically, struck her vehicle, a 2005 Dodge Caravan, and fled the scene at about 9:50 p.m. the previous evening.”
Cobb stayed silent and so did I.
“Is that about what happened?” Weller flipped the notebook shut. He seemed to enjoy the act of flipping — maybe for dramatic effect.
“A vehicle like the one you described pulled out in front of me as I was trying to recover from being struck from the side by the pickup driven by the deceased woman as I’ve already described,” Cobb said. “But, to be honest, things were happening rather quickly and I may have missed the secondary contact after the violence of the first one and my desire to follow the person who had struck us.”
It was quite the oration from a man who wasn’t known for long speeches. Weller turned to me. “What about you? You being a newspaper man and all and trained to observe what’s going on around you — were you aware of contact between Mr. (he emphasized the mister) Cobb’s vehicle and the Dodge Caravan?”
“No, sir.”
“But you saw the van.”
“Yes I did.”
“But you don’t know if your vehicle hit Ms. Pahk’s.”
“As Mr. Cobb mentioned, things were a little chaotic just as that moment.”
“So you don’t know if your vehicle hit Ms. Pahk’s,” he said again.
“No, sir.”
Another cop had come into the room. I didn’t pay much attention to him at first. After a few minutes he spoke to Weller.
“Is the central issue here a traffic violation, Detective?” We learned later the newcomer’s name was Hannigan. He was senior to Twistleman and Weller and a harder ass than either of them.
“Sir?” Weller said.
“We have what appears to be a deliberate attempt to cause bodily harm with a vehicle, arguably attempted homicide; we have the person who is alleged to be the perpetrator of the attempted homicide now deceased as the result of a vi
olent collision, perhaps of her own doing, and you appear to be focusing on a possible traffic infraction.”
I’m betting cops hate to be humiliated in front of guys they are trying to impress with their toughness, and since they can’t really take out their frustrations on the superior doing the humiliating, I’m pretty sure Weller filed away Cobb’s name and mine on his I’ll-get-these-bastards-one-day list.
There was more, but after Hannigan’s comments it was pretty smooth sailing. We were finally cleared to leave with the warning that follow-up questioning might take place.
“There’s a lot about this I don’t understand,” I said.
“Me too.” Cobb poured milk into his coffee.
“She had to have been following us.”
Cobb nodded slowly. “Maybe I’m getting too old for this. That’s two tails I haven’t made in the last few days.”
“There was a blizzard out there. How could you have seen her?”
“She saw us.” He drank some coffee. “Thing is, I did see the truck and I ruled out a one-ton dually. Shouldn’t have.”
“That last part — trying to ram us head-on — that was pretty much suicide.”
“The only person who could tell us what was going on inside her head at that moment is dead, but maybe she thought her luck had run out and she had nothing to lose. Or maybe her hate was so great that she was willing to do whatever it took to kill you.”
“Suicide,” I said again.
Cobb nodded. “Whatever it took.”
“It doesn’t make sense. How could the reputation of her school be enough to make her want to kill people?”
“People kill for a lot of reasons that don’t make sense. Nutso sports fans have tried to kill players on opposing teams. Mothers have tried to murder girls that were going to beat out their daughters for spots on the cheerleading team. There are a whole lot of crazy people out there who’ve never seen the inside of a psychologist’s or psychiatrist’s office.”
“Yeah,” I said, but it still wasn’t clear to me, none of it.
Cobb looked at me. “If she was obsessed with her school and it was all she had in her life and she saw first Donna, then you, as a threat, then clearly this was a woman sick enough go to any extreme to punish — or eliminate — that threat.”
“And for that … obsession, Donna died.”
“Yes.”
I stared at my coffee cup for a long time. Finally I looked up at Cobb.
“You were pretty damn good out there yourself, you know.”
Cobb sipped his coffee, looked at me, and smiled.
“Maybe. But we were lucky too. If that light pole wasn’t there …”
“Yeah.”
“What was your plan when she turned and came at us? You couldn’t have calculated that she’d hit the light pole.”
“You’re right, but I knew we had no chance at all as long as we stayed on the road. I figured if I got off Memorial and onto that boulevard at the last possible second maybe she’d miss us.”
“And if she’d missed us and the lamppost? What then?”
Cobb shrugged. “Maybe the river. I can’t say I’d thought that far ahead.”
“I need sleep,” I said. “What do you say we get out of here?”
“Why don’t you take the pizza home,” Cobb said. “Shame to waste it.”
I shook my head. “You’ve got kids. You take it.”
Cobb nodded. I waved at our waitress and gestured that we needed a box for the pizza. While we waited, Cobb chuckled.
I looked at him. “Are you overtired or delirious?”
“I was just thinking,” he said. “We’re like those duos in the detective novels. Maybe we’ll have to team up again in the future. I can sometimes use a good researcher.”
“Hey,” I said. “I’ve read some of those books. I know what happened to Sam Spade’s partner. He was dead by chapter two.”
“Yeah, that was unfortunate.” Cobb chuckled again. “But maybe I’m a better detective than Sam Spade.”
“Yeah, but maybe I’m not as good a partner as Sam’s was.”
“I’d say you were pretty damn good.”
“Thanks.”
The waitress came with a box and we packaged up the pizza. Cobb threw twenty dollars on the table and we headed out into the starless night to where Cobb’s Jeep sat beneath a street light, a wounded warrior, both sides showing the evidence of what had happened earlier that night.
To be honest, whether Cobb was serious or not about our ever working together again, I was thinking I’d be perfectly happy if my detective days were over.
Twenty-Seven
The dinner preparations were proceeding well.
I’d altered the menu a little. I decided that carbonara must be an Italian word that meant some-really-bad-shit-is-going-to-happen-to-you so I switched up the pasta course to a pesto primavera over spaghetti. I stayed with the mussel appetizer and a similar green salad to the first time around.
I’d cleaned the apartment to within an inch of its life, bought flowers for the table, and set them between two bottles of Amarone. I wore a light orange sweater I had bought in Vancouver a year before, over designer jeans and new sneakers and wondered, like Tom Hanks’s character in Sleepless in Seattle, if I was trying too hard.
This time there were no visitors during my preparations and I was relaxed when Jill arrived — promptly at six, apparently not worried this time about the whipped cream going scoodgy.
We sat on the couch with glasses of wine. Shania Twain was soft in the background. It felt comfortable. Jill was wearing a brown, bulky knit sweater and Cruel Girl jeans. She tucked her legs up under her and with her bare feet and ponytail she looked casual and in a word, good.
“How are things at the inn? Is it okay if I call it the inn? The actual name’s a little long.”
“Only those who have actually sorted food bank items and stocked shelves get to call it the inn, so you’re … uh … in.” She smiled the smile that I was getting to like more all the time. “And things are good,” she said. “I saw Jay and Zoe yesterday.”
“How’re they doing?”
Small shrug. “Both clean as far as I could tell. Jay’s hanging in there with the program for the moment, saying all the right things but … it’s hard to know for sure.”
“What do you think are their chances?”
“Reality? Maybe seventy-thirty against, at least for Jay. I’d say Zoe’s going to make it okay unless he goes back to the stuff and takes her with him.”
“Seventy-thirty,” I said. “Not great odds.”
She shook her head. “What happens with a lot of these kids, adult users too, is they start out trying real hard and maybe even do okay for a while until there’s a bump in the road. Something happens; they lose a job or they get dumped by the boyfriend or girlfriend or somebody they’re close to dies, and they’re so fragile that they just fall back to the old ways. So we’ll see what happens with Jay when some of the garbage life throws at us comes his way. With Zoe there, he’ll have a better chance than if she wasn’t. But the whole thing’s a crap shoot; unfortunately when someone does break the cycle and actually takes their life back, it comes as a pretty big surprise. Sad that it has to be that way.”
We sipped wine and sat for a couple of minutes without talking.
“How are you doing?” Jill asked me.
I set my wine glass down and looked at her.
“It’s getting better, I think. Having the answers is helping even if some of the answers are painful.”
“Like what?”
“Are you sure you want to talk about this stuff?”
She nodded.
“Okay,” I said. “I went to talk to Donna’s mother. I guess I was upset … not angry really, but upset that she had known about the abuse but hadn’t told me. She said Donna had made her promise that she would never tell anyone — anyone — what had happened.”
“And you think she should have broken that promis
e with you?”
“I guess after Donna was killed I thought … I don’t know what I thought.”
“Tough position for a mom to be in.”
“Yeah.”
Jill reached over and put her hand on mine.
“Adam,” she said softly. “If it had been me, I would have honoured my daughter’s wishes.”
I nodded. “Yeah.”
We sipped our wine then, each of us lost in thoughts of our own.
“Okay, enough melancholy talk,” I said and stood up and headed for the stereo. “Time for some mussels and dinner music.” As Shania was wrapping up “Rock This Country” I hit the eject button and said over my shoulder, “k.d. lang, okay?”
“k.d. lang is wonderful.”
As the music began, I took Jill’s hand, and led her to the table. I topped up our wine glasses and set the mussels on before I sat down.
“A toast,” she said.
I raised my glass. “What should we toast?”
“Well, ‘to us’ is such a cliché,” she said.
“Absolutely.” I nodded.
“To us.” She smiled.
“To us.”
During dinner we talked about Kyla (she loved The Spoofaloof Rally), what the Flames should do in the off-season, horses (Jill knows a lot — I know only how to bet on thoroughbreds), and we talked again about Delores Bain.
“There’s still so much I don’t understand,” she said.
“Me too.”
“The part that’s hardest to figure is that she hated the victims. If you want to kill someone, why not kill the guy who brought all the pain to the school?”
“Maybe she thought he paid his debt to society for the shame he’d brought on the place. And the girls hadn’t.”
“That’s crazy.”
I nodded and took a sip of wine. “It is crazy. I don’t know what defines insanity, but I think to be so obsessed with your school’s reputation that you’d kill … that has to be getting awfully close.”
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