The Lost Ones

by Sheena Kamal

  He rakes his hand through his thick dark hair and gazes at me from over the top of his glasses. “My work is very important to me,” he says finally. “For a long time, it was the only thing I really had in the world to call my own. Only thing that made me happy.”

  With the advent of the Internet, everybody fancies themselves a journalist. Everybody has access to a camera on their phone. The old news institutions are crumbling because people no longer want to pay the price for information if they can get it for free. But there is an art to dedicated reporting, to the research it takes to give a full picture. Seb is an artist in the way he processes information, in how he relays it to others. Whatever is sensationalistic in his work gets there naturally on its own merit. His work ethic is what has kept him employed and respected. And, apparently, I’m now a liability to that sterling reputation of his.

  “A research associate who’s breaking into places and lying about where she is and what she’s doing . . . I don’t know what to think. If you’d just told me . . .” He trails off and looks at me with a desperate plea in his eyes. With a child he only sees on the weekends, a broken marriage, and a lover he doesn’t quite understand, he’s a man who takes simple pleasure in examining an issue until he lays it bare, exposes its bones, losing himself in the minutiae of research that would drive most academics mad. What he’s dealing with here is out of his comfort zone.

  “I’ll leave,” I say, after a moment of silence. I put the key in my pocket.

  “No, that’s not what I meant. I’m trying to . . . what the hell is going on here, Nora?”

  I shake my head. “I don’t know.” It’s the truth, but not the one he wants to hear.

  “You can trust me.”

  “I know,” I whisper. “But you can’t help me with this.”

  Seb’s voice stops me before I cross the threshold. “I called my old editor. Mike Starling hasn’t been seen or heard from for a week. He was supposed to come in for a meeting today, but he never showed up. Has something happened to him? What do you know about his disappearance?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nora, if the paper doesn’t hear from him by tomorrow, they’re going to file a missing person’s report. And if the police come to me, I will tell them he was looking for you.”

  I turn to go. He says nothing to make me stay, and I walk away slowly on my bad ankle, like a spurned lover waiting to be called back into welcoming arms. For a brief moment it makes me sad, makes me angry, that this has never been my story.

  I’m in the basement, running my hands through Whisper’s fur, when an address is texted to my phone. Though he may not approve of what I’m doing, or the secrecy with which I’m doing it, Seb has decided to give me a chance to make things right. As far as employers go, he is quite possibly the best someone like me could ever hope for.

  “Come on,” I say to Whisper. “We have work to do.”

  The Corolla doesn’t start but the place we’re going isn’t too far away. Only about an hour and a half on foot. We walk in the rain, Whisper happy to stretch her legs, completely at ease in this weather and on these streets.

  23

  I don’t envy investigative journalists. They have to employ their own bullshit detectors, with varying degrees of success. If they’re lucky, they uncover a massive plot of some sort and win prizes and accolades and eventually get to write the definitive book on how this really happened or that came tumbling down. They place themselves in the role of impartial observer with nerves of steel and impressive moral compasses. They are defenders of justice and, come hell or high water, they’re going to give you the truth because, for them, the truth is paramount. For others, not so much. It’s an exciting career because even though they don’t make much money, investigative journalists work hard and get to look busy and important. If they’re unlucky, they’re thrice-divorced alcoholics suffering from PTSD from reporting on the front lines of war, haunted by stories that got away because of singular sources.

  This particular journalist has had it rough. For a hard-nosed, chain-smoking reporter to be relegated to human interest pieces about women is insulting. When I think about him doing extended coverage for my story, I’m embarrassed for him. He must have been devastated when the assignment came down.

  At the apartment address Seb texted me, I try the key from the envelope in the lock. It doesn’t fit but, no matter, because the door is unlocked. Someone has been here before me, tracking dirt over the threshold and into the room. Good. The dirt from Whisper’s paws will fit right in, but we pause just inside the door anyway. There’s something not quite right here. I don’t sense another person, another presence, but there is a feeling of disquiet nonetheless. I listen for any unusual sounds, but there’s nothing out of place. Whisper moves ahead of me, following a scent. She disappears into the bathroom. Naturally.

  I look around Mike Starling’s apartment, with boxes of old files and stories haphazardly stacked in every available corner, and I can see that he hasn’t given up on his ghosts. He’s let them into his home and they haunt his private spaces. There are dishes piled in the sink and the garbage is overflowing with takeout containers. The milk is at least a week past its expiration date. There are reminders stuck to the fridge about appointments and meetings. Two appointments for this week: one with a chiropractor and the other with his divorce lawyer to sign the papers. Over the latter he scrawled: For Amy . . . Where the fuck is the fuchsia duvet?

  I continue on. A cursory look through the files reveals an obsession with corruption in the housing market, corruption in the medical profession, corruption in the political machinations of the extraction industries. His notes are categorized by date and fill dozens of journals and notepads strewn about.

  I move away from the files, stand with my back to the door, and look at the room. There is no art on the walls, no furniture save for a mounted television, a desk where there should be a kitchen table, and an ancient leather couch that presumably serves as a bed. There is a lived-in feel here, and the smells that go along with it, but it’s nothing that anyone would call a home. Bare walls, stacked boxes. A threadbare blanket on the couch. Not very much in the way of furniture. A fuchsia duvet would be an affront to the minimalist decor.

  Whisper appears at my side. She rubs her nose against my hip and leaves a wet smear from her snout. It is only then that I notice that the smell in the apartment isn’t only of must, garbage, and dying dreams. Opening the bathroom door has released a scent into the room that I’ve been too preoccupied to notice. A smell of decay.

  In the bathroom I find Mike Starling naked in a bathtub full of bloody water.

  When I used to live in shelters and needed a night of not sleeping with one eye open, when it wasn’t raining too hard, I’d head over to Stanley Park and spend the night huddled in the underbrush or at the foot of a tree. I had a few places that were so deep inside the park that I felt relatively safe. Safer than a shelter, anyway. Once, I found a man dressed in rags nestled between a shrub and a tree root. He had such a peaceful expression on his face that I knew immediately he was dead, because you don’t sleep in the park if you’re the sort who has nice, happy dreams. His eyes were closed and his facial muscles relaxed in repose. There was a half-empty bottle of Johnnie Walker next to him, so I know he went the way he wanted to. I snatched the JW before I left him there—I’m no angel—but stumbling on a dead body like that in the woods wasn’t as horrible as you might think. Plus, I had a good half a bottle left to help me get through the trauma. Whoever that man was, he died warmed from the inside out in the company of his beloved.

  Mike Starling is a different story. He did not go well. As easy as it seems to slash your wrists and bleed out in a tub of water, the breaking of skin, severing the ulnar artery, is a big step that, no matter how much I turn it around in my mind, doesn’t seem like one he would take. If he was going to commit suicide, it would be pills at his desk or a pistol in his mouth.

  His eyes are wide open and staring at m
e as I stand just inside the bathroom. I’m not a forensic expert and I haven’t watched enough television crime procedurals to guess with any precision as to how long he has been there, but if I had to take a stab at it, I’d say it was somewhere between our text message exchange to arrange our library meeting and when those not-cops showed up in his place.

  Whisper and I retreat from the room, from the apartment. Once we’re far enough away from the stench of death, I find a bench to sit on while I collect my wits. My sprained ankle thanks me for the rest, but it’s not going to last for very long. On my phone, I pull up a search of storage lockers in the area. The closest one is four blocks away from this apartment complex and it happens to be a twenty-four-hour access facility.

  On the way there, Whisper sees a stray mutt across the street in an empty parking lot. She pulls the leash out of my hand with a swift jerk and rushes to meet the mutt. They circle each other warily. I don’t call to her, because she damn well knows that what she’s doing is wrong and I don’t want to draw any attention. It doesn’t take long for the other dog to pick up on her energy and before I reach them, he mounts her and humps away for several exuberant moments. It is over just as soon as it starts and she returns to me with her tail between her legs and her head hanging low. I don’t punish her for it, though, because we all cope however we can. I just dust off the other end of the leash and hold it tighter in my grip to prevent another episode. We still have a lot left to do tonight.

  24

  “Excuse me, ma’am,” says the young security guard. We’re standing outside of a storage facility and he’s several feet away, shining a flashlight into my eyes. “You’re not, um, supposed to be doing that.”

  Whisper moves out of the shadows and growls as the guard approaches. She’s feeling guilty about what she has done earlier with the stray mutt in the parking lot and is trying to make up for it by being especially protective. When the guard catches sight of her, he slows and comes to a stop just outside of lunging distance. I quit trying to shove the key from the envelope into the lock of the exterior storage unit on the first floor of the building and put a steadying hand on Whisper’s back. This is the fourth unit that I’ve tried, in hopes that the security guard in the front office was taking a nap. Apparently not.

  I decide to come clean. “I’m looking for a unit registered under the name Starling. Mike Starling.”

  The guard eyes Whisper. The hand that’s not holding the flashlight moves unconsciously to cover his groin. “We’re not supposed to give out that kind of information. Are you his, um, emergency contact?”

  Maybe this is his first week on the job or maybe Whisper has rattled him, but the adorable young guard only wants to help. It is refreshing, but silly. He has just inadvertently given me what I need.

  “Amy Starling?” I say, hoping he won’t notice that I haven’t said that I’m Amy Starling. There is only so much outright lying I can stomach. But if I’m to access this storage unit, sacrifices have to be made. A girl is missing and a journalist is dead. Both are connected to me. These two things can’t be coincidences.

  The guard pulls a slim portable tablet from his pocket and scrolls through it. “Oh, yeah. Here you are, Ms. Starling. We’re really supposed to take ID, but . . .” He glances down at Whisper. “Maybe you can stop by the office on your way out and leave your dog by the gate. I’ll take a copy of your ID then.”

  “That sounds like a plan.” My voice is so falsely cheerful that I’m sure he can tell something is wrong . . . But he doesn’t seem to. He’s too busy keeping an eye on Whisper, who is, in turn, busy keeping an eye on him.

  “You’re looking for unit 108, Ms. Starling. It’s right this way.” He points to a unit on the far side of the lot, farthest away from the security office, then looks down at Whisper. “You’re fine to get there on your own?”

  “Yup,” I say. My face contorts into a bright smile. Damn that cheerfulness. Damn it to hell. Sneaking around a storage locker in the middle of the night is nothing to be cheerful about. Raising suspicion by trying to get access to a murdered man’s storage unit before his body is found is no smiling matter. If I’m caught, how will I explain this?

  “Great,” the young guard replies, clearly relieved to put some distance between us. “Make sure to stop by the office afterward.”

  Whisper relaxes and trots along behind me as I head for unit 108. The key fits perfectly into the lock. I open the door and switch on the light.

  Like his apartment, Starling’s unit contains boxes and boxes of files, but instead of haphazard piles strewn about, these files are stacked neatly and appear to be organized by date and story research topic. There’s a desk with a work lamp plugged into the unit’s single electrical outlet, along with a space heater. On the desk is a laptop and a portable modem. So this is where he’d actually been working on his private projects.

  Before we start, Whisper and I share a bottle of water, me first on account of her drool. I sit at Starling’s desk and, careful to keep my gloves on, go through his laptop. His most recent searches were not about corruption. He was looking at bone marrow transplants. Some private research into embryonic stem cells. The curative powers of stem cell treatments. I wonder if Starling was sick and needed a transplant; if so, a divorce might have pushed him over the edge. But illness isn’t what killed him. I’m almost certain of this. Though putting him in a tub and slitting his wrists was a deft touch, it will not hide the fact that he’d been murdered. In my mind I play his message on my voice mail and I know that I’m not mistaken. It was real fear coming through.

  I continue searching. After an hour or so, I hit the jackpot.

  It takes me a while, but now I have a rough idea of what he was looking into, just not why. Starling’s interest in corruption and industry bribes to political bodies seems to zero in on Syntamar Industries, a Canadian mining outfit. For the most part it has been operating quietly in the province, hardly making the splashes that the pipeline companies have. There were a few joint ventures overseas, but these too seemed to be under the radar.

  British Columbia is one of the most beautiful places in the world. Mountains and oceans and lakes and nonrenewable resources. The draw of the west coast is bigger than the hype of Vancouver, the main economic center of the province. Most of the indigenous territory here is on unceded land, and most of this land supports entire ecosystems that shelter and protect, by a truly perverse twist of fate, these valuable resources. Lorelei has been encouraging me to go to her anti-mining protests for years, but she’s never able to find me when the date approaches. Not that she’s ever tried very hard. Starling had probably rubbed shoulders with her a time or two and I wonder if he had any idea that one of the leaders of the province’s environmental movement is none other than my sister. If he were alive, he would have salivated at the idea of that story.

  A photograph of the board of directors for Syntamar Industries from twenty years ago is circled in a newspaper clipping that I find on the desk. Seated around a conference table, the board is composed of Caucasian males of varying shapes and sizes, but all over the age of fifty and sporting the requisite dark suit and subdued tie. They are grinning, presumably happy to be wealthy and important. At the far end, either at the head of the table or at the foot of it, is a slim Asian man, also in his fifties. His expression is polite but inscrutable. Whether or not he is pleased to be wealthy and important is not immediately obvious. I do a web image search on the photograph, but nothing comes up that identifies the Asian man.

  There’s a name written in the margin of the old paper. I fold the clipping and slide it into my back pocket.

  Along with the Syntamar research, Starling has also pulled details on Canadian immigration from Hong Kong during the nineties. Something about it rings a bell, but there isn’t much there.

  Just after 3 a.m. I wake Whisper up and we leave the unit. I lock the door behind us and slip past the security office. I don’t tie Whisper outside and I don’t go into the office to spe
ak to the nice young guard. Someone has to teach him to be more thorough in his enforcement of the access policy and it looks like that someone is me.

  It’s not raining as we walk home but the streets are still slick from an earlier shower. They glisten in the places where the streetlights hit them and then fade away into the darkness. For a while I hum some Howlin’ Wolf because I’m in that mood, but don’t get much further than a few bars of “Back Door Man.” No matter how much I try to push the other voice out of my head, it persists. It has been in there since I saw the journalist in the bathtub with his wrists slit—no, who am I kidding? It has been there for years, hiding away in some dark corner of my mind, but replayed incessantly since I heard it while cowering on the landing of the office. Was it just yesterday? I don’t know. My memories are being particularly intrusive tonight.

  “Get rid of her,” the voice said, some fifteen years ago. Or was it sixteen? I lost so many months in the aftermath, I can’t quite remember.

  Someone on the other side of the room said something in return but I couldn’t hear it clearly, not with my head covered.

  “I don’t give a fuck. Wrap her up in that sheet, no need to spread her blood around any more than you already have, you imbecile, and throw her in a ditch somewhere. I don’t care where, just as long as it’s past the city. And stop giving them that shit. Someone’s gonna catch on sooner or later. What will your father say if he finds out?”