by Sam Wiebe
“You haven’t seen her in nine months?”
“She hasn’t wanted to see me.”
“Do you think she could be missing? That something happened to her?”
“Tabitha is at a foolish age,” Betsy Sorenson explained. “She’s made choices that don’t include her family. Well, what can I do?”
She pursed her lips and tapped her knees in a gesture of soldiering on.
“She’s always kept me at arm’s length. When we lived in Abbotsford she’d sneak out to meet people, or sneak them in when I was at work. It was one of the reasons we moved here, to get her away from people like that. A fresh start.”
She freshened our drinks, centering the dishes on the tray, pausing a moment to admire the symmetry. People like that. I wondered who that encompassed.
Betsy Sorenson sipped and continued. “Once Tabitha started college, I didn’t see much of her. She never mentioned her friends. She moved out soon after that, closer to the school. Then I saw even less of her.”
“And you don’t have her address.”
Betsy Sorenson bit her lip. “She doesn’t want me to have it.”
“What about her father?” I asked. “Could she be with him?”
“Tabitha’s father isn’t in the picture,” she said. “He has a new family and doesn’t have much time for Tabitha. Once, when we were fighting, she ran away to him. I guess she thought she’d live with him. Mitch wasn’t having any of it. He sent her back.”
“Sounds like a very tough environment, emotionally—for everyone involved.”
“We make our own world,” Betsy Sorenson said.
“I’ll need to talk to him.”
“Of course. Would you like something to go with your chai?”
I followed her into the kitchen, using the excuse to examine the rest of the house. It was clean and bright and the furnishings had been picked out with great deliberation, but it didn’t seem lived in. No one had ever shifted the rattan chairs to clear space for a drunken game of Twister. The fireplace had never been sparked for warmth or ambiance. No one had ever pushed the crockery to the kitchen floor to fuck on the cutting board island. It was a model house, built to scale and furnished for strangers.
Tabitha would have grown up feeling on display. She’d fashion her personality in opposition to her mother’s, scorning and disregarding the stale middle-class lifestyle Betsy Sorenson had perfected. I felt I understood. Wherever she was, she’d be looking for something honest. Something raw.
“Did Tabitha leave anything here?” I asked, after we’d returned to the living room and I’d complimented Betsy on her chocolate zucchini cookies.
She shook her head. “Just old clothes and books. I donated them all to Goodwill when I redecorated the room. The mess I found when I cleaned it—dirty dishes, piles of paper. Cigarette butts, even after I told her not in the house. Even a couple of used you-know-whats.”
“It’s an awkward time of life,” I said.
We chatted about food, about curries and squab and the Michelin system, and I thanked her for the hospitality. She mentioned her website and the recipe books she had for sale. “I just got the second one back from the printer’s,” she said. “Let me show you, you just wait right there.”
“Mind if I make a call?” I asked her. “Brief and local.”
Once she left I picked up the receiver. The phone’s contact list was empty. In the top drawer of the stand was a gold-leafed leather address book. I trained my cell phone’s camera on the book and slowly flipped pages.
Beneath the address book was a photo album in the same ornate style. The photos covered thirty years in about as many pages. A young Betsy Sorenson in wedding dress, next to a bearded, mulleted man with Tabitha’s sharp features. The birth of her daughter, kindergarten, soccer practice, school recital. Photos of Betsy meeting her culinary idols.
A two-page spread near the end of the album stuck out. Every previous page, the photos had been laid out with skill, spaced perfectly, the plastic preservation film smoothed to transparency. On this spread, two photos were missing from the left page. The remaining school photo sloped diagonally, and the plastic was seamed as if hurriedly replaced.
The opposing side featured a group photo, a teenage Tabitha and classmates on a field trip to the planetarium. George Norris’s chrome crab fountainhead loomed behind them. Two South Asian kids stood to Tabitha’s right. All three were smirking. The right quarter of the photo had been cut away with multiple hacks from dull scissors, leaving a ragged edge. A fragment of black T-shirt was the only trace that another person had once shared the frame.
Footsteps. I snapped a photo of the torn photograph, then closed the album. Betsy Sorenson approached carrying two spiral-bound books, each cover white with a rudimentary stencil design in Easter pastels. Classy Cooking, volumes one and two. I perused them politely.
“Usually I wouldn’t do this,” she said, “but you seem like such a nice person. These are seventeen ninety-five each. Yours, two for twenty.”
I passed her the money and she asked if I wanted them signed.
“Make it out to Kay,” I said. “My sister will absolutely love these.”
Six
Once upon a time, the Sorensons had lived in Abbotsford, a border town in the heart of the Fraser Valley. In a sense they still did. After the divorce, Tabitha’s father had bought a three-story house in a gated neighborhood, far upscale from the home he’d shared with Betsy and Tabitha. He lived there now with his second wife and their two children.
An economist by trade, Mitchell Sorenson worked in the city as a senior analyst for a property development firm. I calculated his daily commute at just under three hours. Given Vancouver housing prices, that almost made sense.
The foyer of Dose Development’s office suite featured a glass-enclosed model of the firm’s latest project. A grove of white plastic apartment towers was arrayed along a relief map of the False Creek waterfront. A stack of flyers next to the model explained when each phase of the Villas Con Alma would be complete.
The receptionist told me Mitch was at lunch but I was welcome to wait. It was two-thirty. I ignored the sofas and magazines and stared out the window at the panorama of skyscrapers and cranes and scaffolding, a city launching itself higher and brighter and casting ever-longer shadows.
Eventually a quartet of middle-aged corporate types entered from the elevators. The lone woman in the group headed past the reception desk, while the others finished discussing the Lions’ chances this Friday.
“Hundred says they pull it off,” said a silver-haired man in a blue blazer.
“I know better than to bet against Big Mitch,” another man said. “What are you, zero and fifty lifetime in the office pool?”
The three of them chuckled. The receptionist pointed me out to the man in the blazer, who turned and crossed toward me. The same face from Betsy Sorenson’s wedding photo, now clean-shaven and middle-aged, solicitous yet guarded as one gets after a three-martini lunch.
His handshake was damp but firm. “Let’s talk in my office,” he said, leading me through the cubicle maze to a glass-walled corner suite.
Once he’d settled behind his desk, I told him I was here about his daughter. He squared his shoulders, his hand beginning a slow crawl toward the intercom. I mentioned I’d just come from his ex-wife’s house.
“Ah, this is about Tabitha.” His tone suggested relief and vexation—unlike his current family, trouble with Tabitha wasn’t unheard of.
“No one has seen her since the end of the spring semester,” I said.
“All right.” He blinked, waited for me to continue.
“When did you last talk to her?”
“It’s been a while—a long while.”
He managed to lean back and look at the ceiling without moving his hand from the intercom.
“We talked New Years, I think. Yeah. That was when she told me she no longer wanted to be an economist. Was studying poli-sci instead. She also told m
e I should go fuck myself, quote-unquote, and fuck my fucking family.”
It was my turn to stare and wait for him to elaborate.
“I’m guessing you’re from that college,” he said. “All I can tell you is, I don’t have a large presence in Tabitha’s life. Betsy has seen to that. And Rita, my wife, finds dealing with them anxiety-inducing. So you see.” He spread the hand closest to me atop the desk.
“Any idea where Tabitha would go? Friends of hers?”
“Sorry, no, I don’t have the faintest. Now I really do have work, and it’s not going to do itself.”
I stood, nodding, doing my best Columbo. “Last thing, sir, if you don’t mind.” I held my cell screen so he could view the photo fragment of Tabitha and the other two teens. “Any idea who those are?”
“I assume her friends.”
“And this T-shirt in the corner here—could you tell me who that belongs to?”
Mitch Sorenson tapped the intercom. He extricated himself from his desk and approached the door. He seemed to be working himself up to anger.
“Kid,” he said to me, “I get that you have a job to do. The school probably thinks, hell, he’s her father, he’s worth a few dollars, so whatever she took, maybe we can get it out of him. Right?”
“I don’t know she took anything,” I said.
“Sure, sure. Which is why you’ve got that picture, trying to hold over me the people she associated with. Far as I know, she hasn’t seen him since high school.”
“Seen who?”
Mitch Sorenson stepped closer till his feet touched mine. I didn’t back up. He was expecting me to. After a moment he withdrew and his eyes flicked down.
“I’m looking for your daughter,” I said. “That person you made. She’s missing, maybe in trouble. If you tell me who got cut out of that picture, it could help.”
His face traveled from bluster to doubt, and was working toward credulousness when the door opened. A pair of security guards, both shorter and squatter than me, pawed my shoulders and directed me out of the office. The bluster returned to Big Mitch’s face.
“See him out,” he instructed.
They did.
All right, let’s go, easy does it, no worries, nobody needs to get hurt. Into the elevator, please. And don’t come back, next time we will have to call the cops. Have a better day, sir.
As the guards left I noticed the insignia on the back of their uniforms. Wakeland & Chen Security. I’d just been thrown out by my own employees.
Seven
“Do you know how long it takes to get out to Surrey from Vancouver without a car?” Kay said. “All the buses are dirty and they run whenever they freaking feel like it. And the passengers are sketchy as hell.”
“It’s Surrey,” I said. “It’s not called the New Jersey of the North for nothing.”
Kay glanced at our surroundings, her look telling me we were in no position to judge.
We’d tried working in the boardroom of the head office, but Jeff and Marie had ousted us so they could confer with their wedding planner. We’d ended up back on Pender. A Styrofoam clamshell of leftover sushi was open between us on the office table. I could hear rush hour traffic outside, the dirge of a subwoofer from a car idling at the intersection.
“At least the campus was nice,” Kay said. “Way bigger than I thought. Late registration is still going on. The students are mostly locals—a lot of South Asian kids, and a whole lot of white single moms.”
“What’d you find out about the student government?”
Kay consulted her laptop. “There’s an annual election, half a dozen positions. The campaigns get ugly. Most candidates run on a slate—four or five friends, or whatever politicians have instead of friends. The Bottom Line Party won big last year. They’re the cause of the scandal.”
“But Tabitha wasn’t a part of their slate.”
“No,” Kay said. “The girl she replaced, Harpreet Kaur, was Bottom Line’s events coordinator. When she got accepted to a bigger uni, the bylaw says whoever gets the second-most votes gets in. But—it gets messy here. Sure you want me to continue?”
I cleared the food to the table’s edge, opened a bottle of water to fill the kettle. “Go on.”
“The Bottom Liners convened an emergency session and changed the bylaws. Then the administration said you can’t do that, so the party went public to say admin was interfering in student elections.”
“So how did Tabitha end up in there?”
“A compromise,” Kay said. “Atwal and the others met with admin. They agreed that in this case, they could appoint someone. Tabitha was that someone.”
“Why her?” I asked. “Did she apply for the job? Someone suggest her?”
“Couldn’t find out,” Kay said. “No one will talk since the scandal. You think the election was confusing—there’s no records, nobody’s stories match up with anybody else’s. Lies on top of lies.”
I showed Kay the picture from Betsy Sorenson’s house, Tabitha with friends, the severed T-shirt sleeve of the unknown fourth person.
Who gets cut out of photographs? Ex-lovers, usually. If the offender in question had harmed Tabitha in some way, abused her trust, if the sight of them would be painful—
Mitch Sorenson’s response had seemed different. As if Tabitha’s association with the unknown person would harm her reputation, and his own. That didn’t rule out the boyfriend option, but it complicated it.
“See if you can learn who this arm belongs to,” I told Kay. “Also find addresses for Inderveer Singh Atwal and the others. We’ll talk with them tomorrow.”
“Are you sure you don’t want company tonight?” Kay asked.
I’d told her I was doing a favor tonight for a friend, leaving out that the friend was Sonia and the favor involved prying into the private life of a cop. My half sister didn’t need to be involved in that. I wasn’t totally convinced that I did, either.
“You’ll be busy enough with the Sorenson case,” I said, shuffling my notes to uncover my car keys. I had a thought. “Check out who the Sorensons knew in Abbotsford, before her mother moved to Surrey.”
Abbotsford was close to the American border. Motorcycle gangs like the Exiles took advantage of that, using locals as glorified henchmen. The gangs of Surrey and Abbotsford drew their members from middle-class families no different from the Sorensons. High school kids who hung out together in the smoke pit at recess, who carpooled to karate class, who burned each other CDs and shared a resentment of their place in their parents’ suburban world.
If Tabitha wasn’t one of them, she’d grown up among them.
At eight o’clock when the shift change occurred, I was parked under the south side of the Cambie Street bridge, near the unpaved lot that the VPD uses for their parking overflow.
I watched Sonia leave the precinct, walk across McSpadden Avenue, and enter the lot. The strap of her gear bag was slung across her chest. Her shoulders slumped as if that wasn’t all that weighted her down. She looked frail, exhausted.
A moment later her gray Mazda hybrid rolled silently out of the lot, turning down a side street that would feed her onto the bridge. She lived just on the other side, near Coopers’ Park, surrendering two-thirds of her paycheck for an eleventh-floor apartment with a view of False Creek.
She’d tried once to tell me what the view meant to her.
“That this is all mine,” she’d said. “That I belong here as much as any of this.”
I’d looked down from her window at the condos and casino and the Science World dome, and told her she was welcome to it.
Chris Chambers came out of the precinct eighteen minutes later, in conversation with a pair of cops still on duty. The three paused just inside the gate. Chambers finished his anecdote and the uniforms headed to an Interceptor. He lingered, tapping his thumb on his cell phone, looking up to wave at the pair heading out on patrol.
Chambers wasn’t the same man I’d seen at the retirement party a decade ago. He’d packed
on weight, and his thinning blond hair and dark moustache made him resemble a medieval blacksmith, or someone playing one at a renaissance fair.
Still, there was an impressive confidence to his interactions. He projected solidness. Completeness. Though the other uniforms were the same rank, they deferred to him. They seemed to feel what I’d felt, what Sonia must still feel—that to disappoint Chris Chambers would be a terrible thing.
Coming off his shift he was wearing a navy blue polo shirt and tan slacks. He spoke into the phone as he climbed behind the wheel of a white Lexus coupe. He let the engine growl, then tore out of the parking lot in an exhibition of dust.
If I’d been driving the van I never would have caught him. Chambers didn’t abide red lights. The Lexus slashed across town, heading roughly toward Boundary. I weaved my decade-old Cadillac sedan down parallel streets, willing to risk losing him to keep from being made.
Chambers owned a semidetached on Adanac, a faux-brick-sided building with crisp white trim. A crushed stone walkway led up from the curb through a chest-high black steel gate. No garage, the Lexus parked out on the street in view from the expansive bay window.
I drove past and parked at the end of the block. In the rearview I watched Chambers go inside.
Lights were on in the living room. At five to eleven they were switched off. A bulb in the second-story window went on, briefly, then the house was dark.
An hour passed. I waited, wondering what exactly I was waiting for.
Sonia Drego and Dana Essex were essentially different—one willful and sensual, thoughtful and at the same time heedless, while the other was a construction of tiny, overthought movements, a person trapped inside an ice floe. Yet both had sent me on tasks I didn’t fully understand. Maybe they didn’t either.
In any case, I wasn’t getting answers tonight.
Eight
Inderveer Singh Atwal stood at the end of his parents’ driveway, inhaling orange-scented smoke from a vaporizer pen. The former student president of Surrey Polytech lived in a cul-de-sac near the college. His family’s house was three stories of gold aggregate and whitewashed wood, set behind a brick fence topped with concrete pineapples. He swung the gate closed behind us.