“Trying to commune with the spirits of the dead again?” Lacey kicked the snow off her boots. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to sound facetious.”
“Well, you’re right. It’s been frustrating.” Zoe led the way to the kitchen and filled the kettle. “Were you hiring Marcia for ski lessons? You don’t need them.”
“No, I was showing her a photo of our missing nurse. Somebody said they’d seen her with a woman who looked like Marcia. She didn’t remember when I phoned, but I hoped the photo might jog her memory.”
“You’ll have to start at the beginning. What missing nurse?” By the time Lacey had filled her in, starting with the Christmas market and ending with Eddie Beal’s dubious identification, the kettle had popped. Zoe started tea. “I’d be surprised if Marcia recognized her own mother today.”
“Yeah, she seemed upset.”
“Yep.” Zoe fiddled with her spoon. “I had to break it to her this morning that her dear friend Phyl, the second Mrs. JP Thompson, has moved to England without a backward glance. Phyl moved Marcia here from Ontario, got her the TFB job, and encouraged her to buy that rundown cabin across the way. Phyl treated her like a best friend right up until she left the country without telling her she wasn’t coming back. Now Marcia will be losing her job as well as her friend. She’ll only be entitled to a tiny severance package because she hasn’t been there that long. Middle-aged women don’t easily relocate unless they have strong connections in other oil companies, which she doesn’t. I don’t know how she’ll keep up the payments on her cabin and her townhouse.”
“She told me she’s selling the cabin.” Lacey accepted a cup. “She’s already started packing up and burning the trash. What a shattering thing to do to someone you called a friend.”
Zoe stirred her tea. “Rich people … they don’t get what it’s like to live paycheque to paycheque. Us ordinary people could lose everything we’ve worked all our lives for while they live on investments and trust funds as if nothing’s changed.” She looked around the kitchen. “This place sure changed. It used to be a homey cabin not much bigger than Marcia’s. The Thompsons spent all their holidays and long weekends out here, skiing and tobogganing and such. Arliss taught them all to ski, cross-country and downhill, and made them help with trail maintenance. She gave those kids a work ethic even though the family was getting richer by the year. Hey, could the person who thought it was Marcia with your nurse be mistaken?”
“How?”
“Arliss is the same general height, and she looks a bit like Marcia. She’s a member of the Backcountry Safety Association, too. She might have worked the booth at that Christmas market.”
Lacey stopped swirling her mug. “Does she have any connection to a nursing home in Ontario?”
“If it’s in Waterloo, she did. JP’s mother was in a dementia ward there for nearly twenty years. What’s that got to do with this?”
“Sandy ran into someone she knew from the Waterloo nursing home where she used to work. Dee’s mom couldn’t remember that person’s name, but thought it might have been Marlice. That’s kinda close to Arliss. Anyway, we’re trying to track that person down in case Sandy went to visit her. Or she might know if there’s anyone else in Alberta who Sandy would visit.”
“It can’t hurt to ask.” Zoe pulled out her phone and flicked it off airplane mode. Her call went to voice mail. “Arliss, I’m with Lacey McCrae — you met her at the funeral reception. She’s the one who went skiing with us. She’s looking for someone who’s gone AWOL, and you or someone who looks like you were seen talking to her in Bragg Creek and in Cochrane before Christmas. If this rings any bells, could you please call Lacey?” She recited the number and clicked off. “I hope that helps. Do you have a replacement nurse for Dee’s mom?”
“We’ve been managing between me and Dee and my friend Marie — she’s a nurse who’s not working right now. After the holidays, we’ll have to figure out how to get Loreena back to Ontario. Sandy travelled with her, and she was supposed to see her safely home again.”
“Sounds complicated.” Zoe squeezed her forehead between thumb and index finger.
“Headache?”
“More like a pounding through my skull. Eric keeps showing me his backpack, and I haven’t the faintest idea where it might be.”
“Nobody does. Do you know why it’s so important?”
“Not a clue.”
“Calvin told me Eric was carrying papers for JP Thompson that day.”
Zoe dropped her hand. “If it’s company business, it could be confidential. Do you know what it’s related to?” She felt Eric’s excitement soar like sparks up a chimney and held her breath for Lacey’s answer.
“What I understand from Calvin and Aidan is that Eric discovered malware in the cheque-writing printer. It was automatically mailing fraudulent payments out every time the accountants did a payment run. Eric told JP about it, but he had no proof then. This time he was bringing proof.”
Malware-Cylon-that’s-it-that’s-it. Fireworks exploded behind Zoe’s forehead. She gripped the counter for support, barely able to process the implications. When her head stopped ringing, she asked, “How long was it going on for?”
“They only knew about September. They thought when they told JP, he would order an investigation into the rest.”
“There will be one starting now.” The explosions faded. This Zoe could deal with. “I’ll go back to the office tonight and call up the cheque log for September.”
“If we could find the backpack, you wouldn’t have to. It’s probably in his car. Except the RCMP have searched for it, both before and after … well, after you and Lizi found his body. You don’t have any insights about the car, do you?”
“I wish I did.” Zoe sipped her tea and thought about everything she’d experienced since she’d touched Eric’s frozen face. All the times she’d been dizzy with emotion, or had seen things that weren’t there, or … had fallen asleep at the wheel. “Do the police know how Eric got to the chalet yet?”
“No. Why?”
“What if he came over the upper loop instead of straight up from the square, and slid off the road out of fatigue? He’d been driving in the blizzard for a couple of hours by then. I almost drove off up there myself in broad daylight.” She glanced out the window. Blue shadows were climbing over the woodshed. “We could take a quick drive up there now.”
“It’s too close to dusk to see much today. We could search tomorrow afternoon, though, earlier in the day. Since the chinook, the snow level is lower, and some parts of the car might be visible.”
Yes-yes-find-my-car. “You’d do this on a ghostly tip?”
Lacey gave her a stern look. “I’m not doing this because of any psychic shit. I’m doing this because the snow was too deep then to show any traces, and the police may have skipped the uphill stretch.”
“As long as we do it.” Do-it-do-it-find-my-car. Zoe looked at her visitor. Lacey seemed so hard, so pragmatic, and yet inside she was thoughtful, concerned for her friends and … frightened?
All those times Zoe had seen inside people had been accidental so far. She’d never tried on purpose to tap into whatever it was; she’d simply been bowled over in passing by Marcia’s misery and Brian Anders’s detachment. This time, she closed her eyes and envisioned Lacey sitting there, with her expressionless face and blondish curls, her hands cupped around her tea. Behind her, a black cloud thickened into the shape of a man with wide shoulders and small, mean eyes. He loomed over Lacey, his hands reaching for her throat.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Ignoring the dogs’ welcoming yips, Lacey slammed into the house. “What did you tell that woman?”
Loreena dropped a wooden spoon into the sink. Dee, in the midst of raising a stack of plates to the cupboard, set them gently on the granite countertop instead. “What woman?”
“She knew.” Lacey growled the words. “She knew I was afraid of Dan. What did you tell her? How dare you talk about my marriage to a stranger?�
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“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Dee propped herself against the countertop. “I haven’t talked about your marriage to anyone, except, well …”
“Me,” said Loreena. “And I haven’t told anyone, either. I didn’t even tell Dee about the other night. Sit yourself down, maid. Tell us what happened.”
Faced with their confusion, Lacey backed away. She slipped off her snow boots and hung her coat on its hook. Her head was whirling. All the way home she’d been seething with rage and hurt, believing Dee must have spilled her deepest secrets. That was how psychic fraudsters operated: worming out secrets and then pretending to “discover” them by mystical means when it had the greatest impact. But even if Loreena had told Dee about Dan and the strangling, Dee would never gossip about it.
“I’m sorry I blew up,” she said, re-entering the kitchen. “It was Zoe. She asked me today what man I’m so afraid of. What man wants to —” She stopped there, unable to say the words that would expose her most raw underbelly. “I jumped to the conclusion she was talking about Dan, and that you must have told her about him.”
“I didn’t,” Dee assured her. “I’ve hardly seen her without you around, and even if I had, your private life isn’t something I’d spill. I’d never do that to you.”
“Get that tea down you,” said Loreena.
Lacey took a mouthful of tea so loaded with condensed milk that it slid over her tongue without burning. She dropped onto a stool. “Now I have an inkling of how Marcia felt when she learned Phyl Thompson isn’t coming back from England.”
“Marcia didn’t know? How could she have missed the signs?”
“She seems to have no friends except for Phyl, who didn’t tell her. Zoe told me she’d let it slip this morning and Marcia was still in denial.” Lacey explained about running into Zoe at the chalet, and the possibility that Arliss Thompson was the woman Eddie had seen talking to Sandy. “Zoe left her a message, but she hasn’t called me yet.”
“Arliss,” Loreena mused. “That could be the name. You don’t have a picture of her, do you?”
Lacey shook her head. “But JP’s mother was in a dementia ward in Waterloo for decades. Enough time that they’d recognize the sight of each other even if they weren’t well acquainted.”
“Arliss’s family went there for two weeks every summer,” said Dee. “Her son mentioned it at the funeral. When she calls back, we can finally find out what she and Sandy talked about.”
“If she calls back.” Lacey swallowed more tea. “I didn’t say anything before, but Sandy left that nursing home under a cloud, accused of planting a malware script in their accounting system that stole money. Her friend Pat swears she wasn’t capable of that level of computer manipulation, but it’s possible she did do the stealing and just made up a story for Pat when she got caught.”
“We saved you some supper.” Dee put a plate of tortellini in cream sauce into the microwave to reheat and pushed a dish of freshly grated parmesan over to Lacey. “Rob made the sauce. He said to wish you Happy New Year.”
Lacey nodded absently, still thinking through the implications she’d been too angry to focus on earlier. “What if Arliss planted the nursing home malware? Later, when her marriage was on the rocks and she needed money for a lawyer, she could have loaded the same script at TFB Energy, topping up her post-divorce income without JP’s knowledge. Sandy would be able to add two and two. She’s almost the only person who could.”
“That’s a huge leap.” Dee passed Lacey the plate. “You don’t know yet if Sandy and Arliss did meet out here.”
“Eat before it gets cold,” Loreena instructed. “We’ll know more when we know more.”
Lacey ate, grateful for the warm food and the comfort of knowing Dee had not betrayed her trust. Zoe must have taken a shot in the dark. What had she hoped to gain? Bull had speculated early on that she was unwilling to openly point a finger at someone. She might have regretted mentioning Arliss and hoped the change of track would throw Lacey off. Did Arliss have an alibi for the weekend Eric died?
Lacey hadn’t yet worked out how she could find out when her phone rang. “Hey, Bull, what’s up?”
“We found your car.”
Relief spread through her, warmer than the pasta. “Sandy, too?”
“No. We had to pop the trunk to be sure. Found her suitcase. No purse, no keys.”
“Shit. Insurance won’t cover that trunk.” The words had barely left her mouth when the implications of Sandy’s abandoned suitcase hit her: a woman running off to start a new life doesn’t leave behind her suitcase unless she has no choice.
“It’s totalled, anyway. Back half in a snowbank, front end torched. A Stoney band councillor found it and called in the VIN.”
The cream sauce turned to vinegar in Lacey’s stomach. Car torched and driver missing, suitcase still there. There was no way to pretty up that picture. She forced herself to focus. “Stoney Nakoda First Nation is a long way west of Cochrane. How could she have ended up there?”
“If she turned west on 1A instead of going on across the river, one more turn would have brought her up into the hills. In the whiteout, she wouldn’t necessarily have seen any of the nearby houses.”
“Where is that exactly? I’m coming over.”
“Save it until morning. Search and Rescue will stage at daybreak. That storm might have buried her, but the chinook will have uncovered her remains.” He paused. “I don’t need to tell you to keep that under your hat, right?”
“I have to tell Dee and her mom. They’re right here.” After swearing she wouldn’t let them inform Dennis before the RCMP did, she set the phone down and looked across the island at two anxious faces. “They haven’t found Sandy, but they found my car way out in the boonies. The way it was buried, they think she wandered away from it sometime during the blizzard.”
Loreena closed her crepe-thin eyelids. “Four days ago. That means …”
Lacey laid her hand on the older woman’s wrist. “I’m afraid it probably does.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Lacey woke at dawn from a dream in which she was begging Dan for money to replace her car. His mocking laugh followed her into consciousness. Shaking it off with difficulty, she came up against an unrelated but intense belief that Eric’s death and Sandy’s disappearance were connected. Overnight, her subconscious had neatly listed the parallels in her mental notebook:
Both victims knew about the computer malware.
Both inexplicably abandoned their vehicles in snowstorms.
Both were connected by the Thompson family — more specifically, by Arliss Thompson.
Lacey checked her phone. No messages, no texts, not from Arliss or anyone else. She threw on her clothes and headed downstairs, mentally listing questions whose answers would either strengthen or weaken her developing theory of the converging cases:
Where was Arliss on the November long weekend? Check with Zoe. If she’ll even speak to you after the abrupt exit yesterday.
How would Arliss have known exactly when Eric was going to show JP evidence of the fraudulent cheques? Eric’s mother. Ask Aidan if his mother knew where Eric was going and why.
Arliss designed the accounting system at TFB and could surely circumvent it. Did she ever have access to the accounting office at the nursing home? Ask Pat if she remembers Arliss or can find out about her office privileges there.
If Arliss had been in contact with Sandy, her number might appear on both Dee’s landline and Sandy’s cellphone. How to find Arliss’s home and cell numbers? Reverse search didn’t turn up anything last night. Ask Zoe, if etc. …
Where was Arliss on Boxing Day while Sandy was heading for Bragg Creek? Try TJ, or get Aidan to question Arliss? Caveat: TJ might lie for his mother, or he might have stayed behind at the chalet in November to dispose of Eric for his mother. Would a devoted son kill his childhood friend at his mother’s command?
Had Arliss and Sandy planned to meet along the route home to e
xchange a blackmail payment? Ask Pat, and hope the answer is in those unread emails.
Lacey reflexively logged in to her email. Nothing from Pat, but there was one from an address she didn’t recognize, with the header Your Malware List. Calvin had come through.
The email contained a table organized by the date the malware was found, the company or organization it had infected, how long it had run undetected, and a Notes column with additional information about the computer system and the action taken after discovery. Most instances were employees or teenage sons of employees who had found the script online and deployed it either directly into the machine or over an unsecured network connection. If not caught by a virus scan, the malware was usually uncovered within a couple of months by accountants flagging the suspicious payments. In one instance, a youthful hacker had set the mailing address to the home he shared with his mother, who worked at the targeted company. Starting ten years ago, the dates of the malware attacks got markedly further apart. Calvin had told her before Christmas that the script was now routinely blocked by automated virus scans.
Lacey ran her finger down the column and found the Waterloo nursing home. Bingo! A three-month active period four years ago in which the money stolen amounted to Theft Under $5000, and an unnamed minor was identified as the perpetrator by security tracking sites after he bragged in an internet chat room. No record of legal proceedings. That part of Pat’s story checked out. Sandy hadn’t planted the malware, and the management had hushed up the theft.
But … if Arliss hadn’t planted the malware at the nursing home, she had no motive to silence Sandy. Unless one of her sons had done it … Pat hadn’t remembered the details clearly. Could the culprit be the grandson of a resident rather than the nephew of an owner?
When she heard Dee shuffling to the kitchen, Lacey went to get fresh coffee. “Any chance that JP gave you his first wife’s phone number?” she asked.
“None. Why?”
“It would save me some hunting, that’s all.”
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