Lacey flopped microwaved scrambled eggs and cheese onto a bagel and ate it in the living room, staring downhill at the horrible river. If a person was body-checked down that crumbling bank, nothing would save her. How long before the torrent covered the bridge and cut off her access to Dee? She should head back to the hospital immediately, but Tom’s message had her on edge. Wayne might be letting her go entirely. She would be hard-pressed to put a deposit on a cheap apartment at this rate, much less convince any bank to give her a mortgage. Maybe she should go down a bit early, sound out Wayne before Tom arrived. So it didn’t look like she needed the backup. The last bite of bagel landed in her mouth as an RCMP patrol car sped across the bridge far below. Was Tom driving a marked car today? She hurried out, brushing crumbs from her hands.
When she arrived, the museum’s atrium was empty except for a handful of people staring out the riverside windows. A blue band flickered across their faces at intervals. The police action was outside. Probably nothing to do with Tom, then, or Wayne, or her job. She tracked Wayne down in the kitchen, glowering at his sandwich and batting at a half-dozen flies that threatened to land on it whenever it wasn’t moving. He nodded at her.
“What’s up, McCrae?”
“Not much. I came to see if you had an ETA on the vault guy and how soon you will absolutely need me to return to work.” She mentally crossed her fingers against him running her off on the spot.
Wayne waved his sandwich again. “Friday morning. Can you collect him at the airport at eleven thirty? I’ll text you the flight info. We’ll finish the vault right after lunch if you can stay that long, and leave the rest until next week. Bring bug repellent.”
Okay, she still had a job. That was good news. Now to hang around until Tom showed. “What’s with the patrol car out back?”
“Huh?” Wayne looked through the kitchen hatch toward the office windows, where the backhoe’s long arm was intermittently lit by the cruiser’s light bar. “Can’t be much. I didn’t hear a siren.”
“I’ll go see what’s up,” she said, leaving Wayne to his sandwich. The elevator door opened as she reached for the button. “Whoa, Rob! Where’s the fire?”
Rob barely slowed. “Hi, Lacey. Excuse me.”
She followed him back to the kitchen. “What’s with the police?”
“We found, well, they found — the backhoe guy, I mean — he found the hit-and-run car in the river. The red Corvette. I just came in to get Jan a cup of tea.”
“Are they sure it’s the right car? Never mind. I’ll ask the constable.” She ran up the nearest stairs, past the knot of gazing ghouls and out the terrace door. The tail end of the red Corvette lay on the bank, the backhoe’s metal mouth resting on the rags of its white roof. The patrolman stood by his car, talking on a cellphone. Slime coated his boots, and his pant legs clung wetly. Had he found a body in that Corvette? Lacey made a mental bet on no. With the leather roof floating, even a seat-belted driver could have been tugged free by the evil, brown water — a nice mess for a crime scene team. She turned away from the memories of other bodies, of her terrifying struggle to free her tank strap in that sunken boat on the dive-training exercise. Underwater bodies were not her business, not anymore. She was just a civilian with a question.
“Hi,” she said when the officer closed his phone. “I’m the housemate of the hit-and-run victim. Is that the vehicle of interest down there?”
The constable sized her up. “Crime scene unit has yet to verify.”
“No driver inside?”
“Not now.” He said it with resigned gloom. The RCMP would bring in a crane and a flatbed to haul away the saturated vehicle. The first cop on scene would have to stay until he could follow it to an evidence-processing facility. She had all afternoon to find out what he knew about Dee’s investigation.
“Looks like you’ll be stuck here awhile. Want a coffee or something?”
“That’d be great. Cream, two sugars.”
As Lacey reached the kitchen, Tom arrived, his face ten degrees grimmer than usual. She sent the constable’s coffee out with Rob.
Tom refused coffee. “Someplace private. Both of you.”
Lacey led Tom and Wayne to the art library beyond the classrooms. It was fly free, but maybe not for long, the way the miasma of decay and diesel from the backhoe’s work was seeping through the windows. Wayne shut the door and stood by it.
“This an official visit, Tom?”
“I hope it doesn’t have to be.” Tom pulled out a Ziploc bag. “Recognize this?” Whether Wayne did or not, Lacey did. She started to speak but, seeing a minimal headshake from Tom, stopped.
“Digital recorder. I use one for on-site notes,” said Wayne. “This the one McCrae asked about on the weekend?”
“Looks the same,” said Lacey. “But is it?”
Tom dumped the little device out of the bag. A faint shimmer of dust puffed around it as it landed. Fingerprint powder.
“We should have the latest comparison soon,” he said, “but it might not be necessary. Wayne’s going to explain this to us.” He flipped open the battery compartment. Under the lid was a narrow printed label bearing a serial number and a familiar name: AWL Security Services Ltd. Wayne’s company.
Wayne looked at the gadget like it was an interesting species of insect. Then he said, quite mildly, “I hope you didn’t drive out here expecting me to confess to illegal intercepts, Tom. I need to check that serial number, but I believe it went with an installation I did a few months back.”
“Near here?” Lacey asked.
Wayne scratched one ear. “Get my laptop from the van, McCrae. The serial number will be matched with the jobsite.”
She ran, her brain buzzing. If the device came from Mick Hardy’s house, that clearly pointed to Jarrad. If not him, then who? Did Neil’s rich girlfriend use Wayne, too? Neil’s fingerprints weren’t on the recorder. Could he have paid a local to plant and monitor the bug, to spare him valuable deal-making hours in Calgary? She came back with the laptop bag and watched impatiently while Wayne logged in. He typed the serial number into the search function.
“Jake Wyman.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
“But Jake doesn’t like Neil,” Lacey told Dee’s sleeping face a couple of hours later. “He said so, you said so, and even Neil said so. Why would he have lent Neil a recorder? Or Jarrad? Although Jarrad could have lifted it during some hockey thing up there. But he’d still need someone to go check on it, download the recordings, while he was away with his team.”
Dee, naturally, did not hazard a guess. Lacey studied the half-healed scratches and scrapes. The bruised bits were slowly easing from vivid reddish purple to yellowish grey. The duty nurse said they had decreased her level of sedation, but the improvement, if that’s what it was, wasn’t obvious to the naked eye. Marie’s word was the one Lacey trusted. Marie had read the charts with her old Emergency nurse’s eye and sworn to the reliability of Glasgow Coma Scale scores. The important thing was to keep the brain slightly stimulated, despite the drugs. That’s why you talked to people in comas. Their brains could register voices, and their vital signs often responded to the calming presence of a loved one. It was all reassuring nurse-speak, a side of Marie that Lacey had almost lost sight of. So Lacey held Dee’s hand and talked, although Marie would probably not have approved of the topic. Reminding a comatose woman about the car that ran her down would be bad form, but talking about the recorder seemed safe enough.
“Wayne said Jake saw him using one last winter and asked how it worked. He mastered the buttons and liked it, so Wayne gave him a spare out of the van. Good customer relations on a job that size. Anyway, would Jake have given Neil the recorder, or a chance to steal it? You’ll suggest I ask Jake himself. But you’re not thinking this through, Dee. He’s now as much of a bugging suspect as Neil.” Or Jarrad, she thought. “Except I have no idea why Jake would do that
to you, and I can’t exactly go ask him that. Even Tom and Wayne aren’t ready to do that, not until they get the fingerprint results from the recorder. It’s sheer luck that the plaque you presented him on Friday night had been so well polished beforehand. Jake’s prints are almost the only ones on there. I’m still betting on Neil, though. I wish the cops had given the nurses that rat’s photo. I’m glad you gave him the boot, even though it cost you. I’m pretty sure Jake sees right through his smarm.”
Jake Wyman, the nice old ranch-hand type who had dropped two million dollars into the museum to please a wife with one leg already in someone else’s bed. Women were obviously his Achilles heel, but otherwise, he hadn’t gotten that rich by doing dumb things. And yet, he would fit the “arrogant” part of Dee’s last note. He had walked into the house uninvited while Lacey was upstairs. He’d been at the house on Sunday afternoon while Lacey was napping out back. That was the same day the drawers and Dee’s purse were moved, the day Dee was hit by Jarrad’s car. He could have tried to recover the bug. He wouldn’t have known Lacey had taken it to the RCMP. If Dee had shot that fact at him on Saturday night, he would have had no reason to search the house, and no reason to … well, that was the next logical assumption. No reason to hurt Dee.
If Jake was the prowler and the attacker both, silence was his best policy as long as Dee wasn’t awake to tell anybody. The nub of the matter, though, was why. Why would someone that rich and powerful bother with a simple bug on a neighbour’s window? It made no sense.
Back to Jarrad. He might have done the hit and run, but he was away playing hockey when the bugging seemed to have begun. Could Camille have taken the recorder from Jake’s and planted it herself, maybe hoping to further diminish Dee as a witness against Jarrad? Mick might have noticed the recorder in his wife’s possession. Lacey could hardly ask him if his wife had helped her lover terrorize and then try to murder the neighbour. His pacemaker would blow a fuse.
It was all a blurry mess of people she hardly knew and had no official right to question. Unofficially, she could ask Terry Brenner. He’d known these people for years. There was no suspicion attached to him in anyone’s mind. Which, in the world of detective fiction, probably made him the villain.
Oops! She wasn’t talking to Dee. Those last few years with Dan, who’d only ever answered her in order to twist her words, had left her unused to talking beyond the necessary exchange of information. Okay, talking out loud some more.
“I think I have a plan. I’ll slip out after supper and phone Terry Brenner. He’ll know if Neil was at any Wyman parties this spring. Meanwhile, I was thinking about our trek through the Algonquin Trail. Do you remember those two German guys and the bobcat …?”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
“Searching those unstable riverbanks is really not your business.” Jan glared at Terry as he bolted down his supper while standing at the kitchen island.
“I have to help out,” he said between mouthfuls of pasta. “This is what we train for.”
“You train to rescue living people. If Jarrad went into the river Sunday night, he’s not alive now.”
“If his battered corpse is washed up on the bank downstream, would you rather I find him tonight or leave him for some young family to find next weekend, after he’s been partially dismembered by wildlife?”
“Besides,” said Jan, ignoring his speech, “I’ll bet he never was in that car. He probably pushed it over the bank to confuse the trail and then Mick or Camille drove him to the airport.”
“You might be right. But the Mounties asked us to check along the banks, so that’s what we’ll do. Quit fussing. You know I’ll be roped to two other guys near the water.”
“Some of those SAR volunteers are rank idiots who only show up for the beer. If they fall in, you’ll go with them. And it’ll be dark soon.”
“It’s nearly the summer equinox. It won’t be dark for hours. Just chill, honey.”
“Yeah, chill,” said Rob. “Think of it as just another training night, only if he finds what they’re looking for, he gets bragging rights for a decade. Think of the money he’ll save on other people buying his post-meeting drinks.”
“You saying I’m a boozer, guy?”
“Nah. Mickey Mouse could put you under the table. Ready to go?” Rob helped Terry load his gear and then drove him down the hill. Shaking her head, Jan rinsed her teacup. Guys. The phone rang as she was moving to the sunroom to watch the searchers gathering in the museum parking lot. She scooped up the handset and kept walking.
“Hi, can I speak to Terry Brenner, please? This is Lacey McCrae.”
The woman who had called her a drug addict, the one who hadn’t bothered to say hello this afternoon on the museum terrace. The cow. She’s had a stressful week, too, Jan reminded herself firmly. And you want to know how Dee’s doing, so be polite.
“Hello, Lacey. Terry’s out. How’s Dee? Is she awake yet?”
“Uh, hi.” In the pause that followed, Jan had a moment to start panicking over Dee before Lacey went on, “Dee is doing as well as can be expected. That’s the official line they always give out, but a nurse friend of mine confirmed it this afternoon. They’ll ease her off of the medication overnight and start checking her speech and stuff in the morning. Only …”
“Only what? If there’s bad news, I’d like to know about it. Dee’s my friend, too.”
Lacey’s reluctance — or uncertainty? — came through clearly in her voice. “Only … well, I don’t know if you’re friends with Dee’s ex, Neil?”
“Not hardly. I’m sorry if you like him, but I don’t think he was ever good enough for her.”
“Something we agree on,” said Lacey, suddenly sounding more cheerful. “Then you won’t mind not telling Neil she’s about to wake up.’”
“I’d be surprised if he knew she was hurt.”
“He knows. He came to her hospital room last night. And —” Again the hesitation. “Look, Dee didn’t want anyone to know this, but someone was stalking her. It might have been the hockey player they’re looking for, but it might equally have been Neil. I’m not accusing him of anything at this point, but a whole lot of women get stalked, and sometimes hurt or killed, by their ex-husbands.”
“Jesus.” Jan sat down on her lounger. It was a wonder the phone didn’t slide from her hand. She clutched it tighter and automatically pulled an afghan over her lap. “Are you sure?”
“We couldn’t quite pin it on Neil. But I don’t want Neil, if it was him, to have another shot at her before she can tell the police what happened.”
“God, I had no idea.” Everybody protected poor, feeble Jan from stress or worry. It wasn’t as if she could be any practical use in a crisis, anyway. She realized she was clenching her jaw so tightly it ached. She breathed deep before saying, “I’ll make sure he doesn’t hear it from any of us. What else can I do to help?”
“Would you be willing to answer some questions about the past few months? I’m trying to get a feel for whether Neil could have pulled some specific stunts, and I don’t know anyone else well enough to ask.”
“Is that what you were going to ask Terry about?”
“Yes. I understand you don’t socialize as much as he does because of your … health issues.”
It was obvious Lacey was really, really trying to be courteous. If Jan hadn’t heard her say it, she might not realize what Lacey really meant by “health issues.” If this woman had been even the tiniest bit nicer that first day, Jan could have explained. But not in the face of that snap dismissal, those few words that reduced her life-crushing issues to a self-inflicted mess that inconvenienced everyone around her. Rob would advise her to pretend she didn’t know, to keep the focus on what was best for Dee. In other words, keep her thoughts to herself and co-operate. Much as it galled her to admit it, Lacey was in a better position to protect Dee from a stalker. Anger at her own helplessness m
ade Jan’s chest hurt. She took another deep breath.
“Ask me anything you want.”
When Rob returned home, Jan was curled up on the lounger under her afghan, absentmindedly holding the phone, staring out the window with her head in a whirl.
“What’s up, doc?” he asked.
“I think my brain cracked under interrogation. You wouldn’t believe what that Lacey woman was asking me.”
“Ooh. Do tell.”
“Only if you get me some tea first. It might be June but it feels like October inside me.”
Rob returned with two mugs and settled on the carpet. “Give.”
“Would you believe Dee’s ex was stalking her?”
“No!”
“That’s what Lacey told me. She wanted to know about every time Neil has been in this area since Christmas. Any parties? Not even one of Jake’s extravaganzas? She must have meant the All-Star week, but he wasn’t there. Dee left with that defenceman from the Hurricanes, and she would have been more discreet, not to mention more irritated, if Neil had been there.” She paused for a sip of tea. “Then lesser events. House sales? Social calls? Is Neil on good terms with any neighbours? Does he have any other business that might take him up to Jake’s place?”
“And?”
“Across the board, no, I told her. He’s not on visiting terms with us, Jake, the Hardy household, or anyone else I could think of. He was a glad-hander and elbow-bender with the rest when he lived here, but once he moved out, nobody noticed his absence. Or if they did, they were glad. He had a habit of saying quite snarky things to Dee. It made people uncomfortable.” Jan shifted to look down at the log house below, basking peaceably in the sunset’s glow. If Neil had been that unpleasant in public, how nasty had he been at home? “Jarrad, on the other hand, has been everywhere. I didn’t think of it during Lacey’s interrogation, but maybe he was stalking Dee to get revenge for his windshield.”
When the Flood Falls Page 19