“I know,” Angie said. She waited until Lorna Drummond was able to look up again. “So Gracie works every Saturday night at the Blue Badger?”
“In the bakery, yes. Night shift.”
“Do you know of anyone who regularly catches the same bus as Gracie, perhaps, someone who might have seen that Gracie got both on and off the bus at the bakery stop yesterday, Mrs. Drummond?”
“No. I … I don’t know. I think it’s usually the same bus driver, though. She’s mentioned him before. Gary, I think his name is.”
“Why did she mention Gary specifically?”
“Because he’s friendly. He always greets her by name.”
“Which school does she attend?”
“Duneagle Secondary.”
“Did she mention any concerns, whether anyone has been following her in the last while, bothering her?”
“No, I … don’t think so. I shouldn’t have let her work nights. I shouldn’t have. She was working because I’m a single mom, right.”
“And her father—where is he?”
“We’re divorced. He remarried. Moved up island, but where exactly I couldn’t tell you. Can’t remember when I last saw a maintenance check from him.”
“You’ve been separated long?”
“Since Gracie was nine.”
“Does she work anywhere else?”
“Just that one day a week at the Badger.”
“Did her father perhaps send her money directly?”
She glanced up, eyes widening for a brief instant. “No, why?”
Angie held her gaze. “Your daughter was wearing some very high-end designer boots last night.”
“She … must be paying those off herself. Through her work—that’s why she’s working. Like I said. To buy nice things.”
“Do you know how much a pair of Francesco Milano boots costs?”
“No—what is this about, exactly?”
“They cost upward of a grand, I believe.”
Lorna Drummond paled. Her eyes flickered. “Maybe she got them on consignment. She buys a lot of things secondhand. Maybe she was borrowing them. Oh God, I haven’t been paying attention.”
“Who is your new partner—your date?”
“You don’t think—”
“Just for the record.”
“Kurt Shepherd. I met him four months ago, when he lost his mother at the nursing home where I work. He lives in Esquimalt. He’s a mechanic at Barney’s, a really good guy. He’s been so nice to me.”
“We’ll need to come to your house, take a look at Gracie’s room. Is that okay?”
“Yes, yes of course.”
“Does Gracie have a cell phone?”
“An iPhone. I’ve been calling it ever since I saw that terrible stuff on the news. It just kept flipping to voicemail.”
“We’ll need her number and the name of her service provider.”
“I … uh … her plan is with ClearWave, I think.” She gave Angie her daughter’s number. As Angie jotted it down, she caught a flash of movement in her peripheral vision. She glanced up to see a flurry of activity outside Gracie Drummond’s room.
A voice, calm, came over the ward paging system. “Code blue, room twelve. Code blue, room twelve.”
Angie’s heart kicked. Lorna Drummond whirled around in her chair. “What is that? What does that mean?”
The double doors at the end of the corridor blew open. Nurses and a cardiac team in green scrubs came rushing through the doors and down the corridor. Dr. Finlayson ran behind them.
Lorna Drummond lurched to her feet. “Oh my God—that’s Gracie’s room! They’re going into her room—” She lurched in a wild stumble toward them.
“Mrs. Drummond!” Angie surged up and went after her. “Lorna! Wait, please!” Angie caught hold of the woman’s arm outside the room windows, halting her from entering. Through the glass they could see a nurse pumping Gracie’s chest while the defibrillation paddles were being readied.
“Stand back,” another nurse ordered. The paddles were applied to her body. Gracie’s frame juddered as they fought to shock her back to life. But nothing happened. The line on the machine ran flat, not even a blip. They tried again. Again. Still nothing.
Lorna wrenched free of Angie’s grasp and burst into the room. “Oh my God, Gracie—” A nurse stopped her.
“Please,” Lorna Drummond sobbed. “Please tell me what’s happening!”
The nurse placed her arm around Lorna Drummond’s shoulders and led her back out into the corridor. “You need to wait here, Mrs. Drummond. Let us do our job. You’ll just be in the way. Okay?”
“Come, Mrs. Drummond,” Angie said gently, trying to steer the woman away from the glass.
But Gracie’s mother broke free again and pressed both her palms flat against the window. “Gracie! Oh my God, Gracie … Please, please, don’t die. Not now.”
Inside the room, Dr. Finlayson met the eyes of the nurse with the defibrillation paddles. The nurse shook her head. Dr. Finlayson checked her patient, then glanced at her watch and said something. Angie’s heart sank. The doc was pronouncing time of death.
A strange, thin, inhuman wail issued from the throat of Lorna Drummond. She whirled around and attacked Angie, slapping at her chest and arms and face. “You—you did this! You took me away from my baby’s bedside. You let her die without her mother there!”
Angie braced against the feeble assault, emotion hot in her eyes. For a moment she was unable to move, unable to bring herself to grab hold of Lorna Drummond’s wrists and halt the distraught woman’s blows. It was as though Angie needed to be hit, to be punished by this mother. For her neglect of her own mother. For whatever wrongs she’d done in her life.
Finally, a spent Lorna Drummond slid down the length of Angie’s body and crumpled onto the floor at Angie’s biker boots, her body racked with sobs. Two nurses came running to their aid.
Angie swallowed and stepped away, thankful that hospital staff was taking over. Shaken, she made her way down the corridor and stepped outside the ward. She stopped and caught her breath. Then, mouth dry, she called Vedder.
“She passed—she’s dead,” Angie told him when he answered. “Her name was Gracie Marie Drummond. Sixteen years old. In her final year at Duneagle Secondary. Would have been seventeen in a few days.” As she spoke, she caught sight of Holgersen loping angrily down the corridor toward her.
“What the fuck, Pallorino?” Holgersen demanded as he reached her. He pointed his finger at her face. “You do that to me one more time and—”
“She died.”
He stilled. His hand lowered slowly to his side.
“She drowned. Right there in her hospital bed.” Angie’s gaze remained locked with his. “Some things don’t wait for you to take a piss or a smoke.”
CHAPTER 11
It was 11:15 a.m. in the newsroom when Merry Winston’s cell phone rang. She checked the caller ID. Unknown. She answered.
“Merry here.”
“She’s been identified, and she just died.” The voice was distorted, sort of electronic-sounding. Neither male nor female.
Her heart kicked. She glanced around the newsroom. Quiet. Sunday morning—the majority of the staff was off for the weekend, out on a break, or chasing down a story. Merry didn’t take weekends off. She had something to prove and no life outside of her work. Her wet rain gear hung drying over a chair at the empty desk next to hers. She’d gotten soaked trying to get information down at the wharf this morning, but she couldn’t get past the police barricades this time. Cops weren’t saying anything. But some gawker in the crowd said he’d heard that a body had been found floating in the Gorge, under the Johnson Street Bridge. She’d come in to make some calls in an effort to get information.
“You mean the Jane Doe at Saint Jude’s?” She clicked the record button on her phone as she spoke.
Silence.
Tension, adrenaline crackled through her. This was not the first time her mysterious informa
nt had called with proprietary information. He—she did believe the distorted voice belonged to a male, although she couldn’t say why, because it was just very well disguised—had previously offered her tips that could only have come from inside the Metro PD.
“Who was she?”
“Gracie Marie Drummond. Sixteen. Student of Duneagle Secondary.”
Merry’s pulse raced as she jotted the information down. “What else can you tell me? Cause of death?”
“Drowning.”
“What? In the hospital?”
“She’d also been mutilated. Genitals. And a crucifix carved into her face.”
Something inside Merry stilled like stone. For a moment she couldn’t find her voice. She cleared her throat. “Can you repeat that?” she said quietly.
“She had a crucifix carved into her forehead. She’d been circumcised with a sharp blade. Her assailant took a lock of her hair.”
“Where … where did you get this?”
The call went dead.
“Wait! You bastard.” She glanced toward the editor’s desk. The weekend editor was not there, either. Shit. She got up, paced, sat back down, got up again. She was shaking. Shitshitshit. She needed to verify this.
What did he mean, drowned?
Circumcised?
The hair.
And the crucifix …
Is he trying to mess with me? How could he know? A voice from the past serpentined up into her memory, escaping from a locked door in the basement of her soul …
Do you reject Satan, father of sin and prince of darkness?
And all his works?
Do you reject the glamour of evil and refuse to be mastered by sin?
Sweating, she quickly dialed the Metro PD press liaison. Her call kicked to voicemail. She left a message, then phoned the hospital. As expected, they wouldn’t give out information. She searched online for the name “Gracie Marie Drummond,” found a Facebook page, but privacy protection had been engaged—she couldn’t see who Gracie’s friends were. Or any of the posts. There were a few online mentions of a Gracie Marie Drummond in connection with Duneagle Secondary school choir performances, but that was about it.
She tried the Metro PD press person again. Once more her call went to voicemail. She left another message.
Merry paced, waited.
No one returned her calls. The clock ticked.
Was he back? Was it possible? She needed to file this story. She wanted to get it out there bad. Technically, she couldn’t until she verified the information from her anonymous source. But this deep throat hadn’t let her down yet. What his agenda was she did not know, but his information had been 100 percent solid to date.
A kind of desperation rose inside her. The kind that had always preceded her need for a fix. She hadn’t felt this kind of twitchy desperation in years, and it only fueled the maelstrom that had exploded inside her body and her brain with the mention of the crucifix. The hair. She seated herself at her desk, bit her lip.
Foot jiggling, she opened her Twitter account. Twitter was where she routinely plugged her personal crime blog—the Winston Files. Her private blog was where she piqued and provoked and raised questions that she couldn’t under the auspices of the City Sun. One day she hoped to put podcasts up. She was planning to do a true crime series, like that famous podcast Serial. It was a very, very fine line she treaded on her blog, by newspapers’ standards, but so far the Sun brass had let her have at it, because it was sensational. Because it had brought readers directly to the Sun. And part of the ailing City Sun’s mandate was to salvage itself and grow readership by going more trashy, sensationalist. Other journalists now followed Merry’s Twitter and blog accounts—reporters from respected radio and television news shows. She was getting to be a fucking independent social media crime star in her own right. A long way from her life in foster care and on the streets. This was what she had to prove to the world. This was her agenda. She’d once had to sell herself, her body. For the crystal meth.
Do you reject Satan, father of sin and prince of darkness?
It was after the rape that she’d started to come right. It was like a final wake-up call. Pastor Markus at Harbor House had helped steer her onto course and had picked her up when she’d fallen off the wagon. Missing kids, abused females, addicts, sex workers—yeah, she had stories and things to prove. Now she sold other people’s misfortune instead of her own. She rubbed it all into mainstream society’s face. It was her fuck-you back at the world, and the fresher and more salacious the stories she could find, the better, and it was paying her bills.
But still, she hesitated …
Do you reject Satan, father of sin and prince of darkness? Say it! Say, I do!
She swallowed, steeled her jaw, and started typing out her tweet:
#CEMETERYGIRL Duneagle student Gracie Marie Drummond, 16, raped @Cemetery has died.
Merry paused. Sweat prickled above her lip. She added:
Circumcised. Crucifix cut into face. Lock of hair taken.
She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to block out the disjointed snippets of memory this information was flaring through her brain. She remembered his eyes—had seen them through the slit of a ski mask. And those words. He’d said those words, a blade pressed to her throat as he’d kneed her into the ground. And she’d woken up in weeds and garbage at the bottom of a ravine with a red crucifix on her forehead, bleeding. In terrible pain. No pants. A missing lock of hair from the center of her hairline.
Rage, fear whammed through her. She opened her eyes, sucked her breath in deep, and stabbed ENTER.
The tweet went live.
She started typing up a blog post.
CHAPTER 12
The new thin-screen television mounted on the wall in Zach Raddison’s office was tuned to the local twenty-four-hour news channel. Zach’s office adjoined the mayor’s, and he kept an eye on the news as he directed the guys with the special Sunday delivery of the mayor’s new desk.
The City Sun had this morning run a shocking front-page article about a violent attack on a Jane Doe in the Ross Bay Cemetery, and the reporter—that pugnacious little Merry Winston—had dragged the mayor’s office into it already by mentioning Killion and crime stats, and by mentioning missing UVic student Annelise Janssen. It was tabloid trash, sensationalist scare-mongering at best, but Zach knew firsthand what a powerful tool that kind of fear-mongering garbage could be. He’d used Merry Winston himself during the campaign—quietly feeding her information that would hurt their opposition.
But now this was happening on Killion’s watch. That was a problem.
Plus there’d been a police incident at the Johnson Street Wharf this morning, slowing city traffic to a snarl—a woman’s body had been found in the Gorge. This news in particular worried Zach. He told himself it couldn’t be her. It wasn’t possible. Still, he was on edge as he followed the breaking story.
“Over there, near the window,” he instructed the men hefting the desk.
Mayor-elect Jack Killion would be sworn in as the lead lawmaker of the city in just two days, and as Killion’s successful election campaign manager, Zach had now been hired on as Killion’s “special advisor,” a right-hand man whose key objective was to keep the Killion brand going and growing. It was a cut-to-order position for him and would evolve over time.
They called his father—Jim Raddison of Raddison Industries—the King Maker, and Zach was the King Maker’s son. He’d tasted his first big win with Killion now. He’d gotten his hands dirty in the campaign trenches, and he’d loved every minute of it. He was twenty-eight years old, and he’d helped put a man in office.
He would be a king maker himself.
“No, no, angle it more to the left, for the light,” Zach instructed. The delivery guys inched the desk a little more to the left.
The ousted incumbent was a woman—Patty Markham—and it had showed in her office decor. Zach was remedying this. He wanted to depict Killion as a man’s kind of man. A powerh
ouse. A business leader and innovator who did not mince his words.
The paint job had been completed and the new images hung—sleek black-and-white photographs of Victoria’s architecture dating from the eighteen hundreds to images of buildings currently under construction, including Ray Norton-Wells’s big waterfront development. The works had been shot by a top photographer, and they depicted power. The past and the future. Control. Growth. Jobs. That, and Killion’s tough-on-crime approach, had been what eked them into this office door. They now had four years to prove themselves and to better the results next time around, because Killion had set his sights way higher than the mayor’s office. He had his eye on provincial, then federal political balls, and Zach planned on going with him all the way.
A BREAKING NEWS banner flashed suddenly across the bottom of the television screen. The show cut to the anchor in the studio. Zach stilled, pulse quickening.
“A warning: the following information is graphic, and it might be upsetting to our sensitive viewers,” she said. “The young victim of last night’s brutal sexual assault in Ross Bay Cemetery has died from her injuries. She’s been identified as sixteen-year-old Gracie Marie Drummond, a Fairfield resident and student of Duneagle Secondary.”
What the fuck … ?
Zach grabbed the remote, jacked up the sound, heart hammering. This was not good, not at all. He barely noticed the delivery guys taking leave as he glued his attention to the breaking news.
“Drummond’s cause of death is, mysteriously, drowning, according to her mother, Lorna Drummond, who was contacted by VNN reporters this morning following a disturbing leak by a crime reporter on Twitter. Metro police are not commenting other than to say their investigation is ongoing. However, Lorna Drummond has confirmed to VNN that her daughter had been immersed in water, sexually mutilated—circumcised—and that the shape of a crucifix had been carved with a blade into her forehead. A lock of hair had also been cut near her hairline.” A school photo of Gracie Drummond appeared at the top right of the screen.
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