Chapter Thirty-Three
“I searched along the trail first thing this morning,” Lacey finished, “and there was your laptop, wide open in a puddle. Filthy water dribbled out of every crack when I picked it up.”
“So it’s useless?”
“Maybe not. Wayne recommended a data recovery specialist and I dropped it off there once it was fingerprinted. You might get some data back.”
Dee nodded sleepily. “Mostly legal templates. Easy to replicate from the company database.”
“What about the sound file from the bug?”
“What bug?”
“The recording device we found on your office window. Don’t fall asleep now, Dee. Can you tell me what was on it, or give me permission to lift another copy direct from the recorder?”
Dee looked at her blearily. “Oh, I forgot. Not Neil.”
“I know that. His fingerprints didn’t match. But whoever did that to you, don’t you want them to pay for all the stress they caused you?”
No answer. Just like that, Dee had blinked out again. She might wake up in ten minutes or in hours. Lacey was due at the airport to collect and feed the vault guy, then have him on the jobsite by one o’clock. Dee had hidden the thumb drive copy somewhere Lacey couldn’t find, or it, too, had been stolen. Tom could copy the recording today as insurance, in case the laptop file wasn’t recoverable. Making a mental note to ask him about that, she went out to the corridor where an RCMP constable waited to take Dee’s statement. “Sorry, she zonked out again.”
The cop sat down. Lacey nodded to the security guard on her way out. Dee was really well protected now, if Jarrad or Camille showed up. Or Jake. Although she puzzled over things all the way to the airport, she couldn’t make Mick’s warning fit with anything except the recorder being from Jake’s place. Camille had ample opportunity to take it, although her motive was a mystery. Maybe Mick’s warning about Jake was an attempt to deflect suspicion from the wife he seemed to love.
Nobody could love the “master” programmer of the vault software, Lacey soon decided. A paunchy computer geek with an exaggerated sense of his own importance, he kept shoving his hand up to his pasty forehead while shoving his complaints down her throat. First the wait for his luggage, which she didn’t instantly pick out when it appeared on the carousel. Then the absence of a limo — he always got a limo. The restaurant. She had simply turned in at the first chain she saw that separated its tables from its chairs. Yeah, the food was slightly plastic, but not as bad as it would be at the gas station by the junction of Highways 1 and 22. No doubt she could have driven him all the way to Bragg Creek, except that lunch in one of those places would take an hour longer. Wayne would blame her for their lateness. Her, not the vaultmaster. Well, the vaultmaster could eat as upscale as he wanted tonight, after the vault was fixed, and no doubt he would charge the meal to the Bragg Creek facility along with his flight and his deluxe room at the elegant bed-and-breakfast across the river. And his limo to the airport in the morning.
She ushered him and his tiny tool kit — a laptop bag, really — into the museum at two minutes to one. The atrium smelled strongly of fly spray and faintly of decay. A dozen flies crawled along the gap in the elevator doors with their wings waving excitedly. The vaultmaster gazed at them with his fat lower lip sucked disapprovingly inward. Or maybe it was the odour disagreeing with his plastic salad and petrified croutons. The elevator door opened and a swarm of new flies appeared. Rob dashed over with a spray can upraised.
“Not now,” Lacey said. Rob sprayed anyway and reached in to press the door-closing button.
“I’m trying to keep the flies out of the vault. Can’t have them breeding down there and eventually laying eggs on a loaner painting.”
The vaultmaster sniffed. “I should say not. Have you joined the present century in any other ways? Such as permitting me to install a cyber-link so that future problems can be adjusted from my clean, fly-free office in Vancouver instead of repeatedly being dragged to this rustic village?”
“Put in the software. I’ll let you know when I have approval to activate it. Okay?”
“Thank you. Now where is this Wayne person, who couldn’t follow a few simple directions correctly by telephone?”
A faint growl answered him. Wayne stood beside the elevator. “Let’s go.”
Rob looked at his watch. “Another couple of minutes to let that blast settle and a jiffy to sweep out the remains. Anyone like a cup of tea?”
Wayne curled his lip. The vaultmaster sniffed. Lacey rolled her eyes. It was going to be quite the afternoon.
When the elevator doors opened on the vault level, the stench hit Lacey’s nose a nanosecond before the humming hit her ears. The metal door to the vault was home to hundreds of flies, all buzzing madly. Rob gave them a hefty blast from his spray can. While Lacey held her breath, waiting for the spray to settle, her eyes met Wayne’s. She had seen enough locked doors crawling with flies to know something substantially bigger than a rodent was rotting in that climate-controlled vault.
Wayne glared at the door. “Got gloves, McCrae?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then get on it.” He waved his key card over the master lock and entered the code with the tip of a tiny screwdriver instead of his fingers. When the door whooshed softly open, leaving a one-inch crack, he put the handle of his hammer in at the top corner and eased the door open wider, scraping aside a swath of fallen flies. The smell seeped out, stronger and more intensely familiar. Lacey snapped on her latex gloves, stamped her feet to shake off any loose dirt or fibers, and stepped forward.
Rob, one hand over his mouth and nose, muttered, “Please tell me some workman forgot his liverwurst sandwiches in there.”
The vaultmaster, finally cluing in, paled. “Is there a … something in there?”
Wayne nodded. “What’s left of something, it seems. Thank god for air conditioning, eh, McCrae?”
The vaultmaster backed away as the foul odour flooded the small lobby. He turned his face to the corner and puked up his lunch. Lacey shrugged. He wouldn’t have to digest any more of the plastic salad now. She took a couple of deep sniffs to desensitize her nose and walked through the door.
In the sterile wash of overhead lighting, it took her only a moment to spot the misalignment of a rack at the end of the row. It was the same one she’d been trapped behind. She shivered, then refocused on the job at hand. “Flashlight?”
Wayne handed one in and she edged along the wall, watching the floor for any trace evidence before she could step on it. By rights she should be wearing a Tyvek bunny suit and slippers, as well as the gloves, but that wasn’t her job any longer. Before calling in the pros, she only needed to know what — or whom — she was calling them for. She made her way to the last rack and ran the light along its edges, looking for obvious stains or fingerprints. Then she gingerly turned the light and her eye to the narrow gap.
At first she saw only steel mesh and the limited flashlight ray. She bounced the light off the white-painted ceiling for better diffusion. The first half-length of the mesh floated in the dark, bare except for the posters she’d seen before. The light spread farther back and then she knew, if she had doubted before, what had stopped the drawer from closing flush with its neighbours. In the same spot where she had narrowly escaped being crushed ten days ago, someone else had not been so lucky.
Jarrad Fiske’s bloated face hung in the shadowy space between two end plates.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Half an hour later, Lacey sat in the museum’s administration offices while RCMP officers took over the vault. Once again, she was on the civilian side of a police incident, banished to a distance while real cops handled a situation. Cops who hadn’t quit the Force.
Those six months of training at Depot were all about weeding out the quitters. You weren’t supposed to quit after that. You were supposed to serve f
aithfully until your honourable retirement. Her leaving the Force reinforced the stereotype of women not being tough enough to stick with the job. The duty cops would take their tone from Wayne, who had retired honourably and could be trusted. Lacey was an outsider. Here was a straight-up investigation for which she had possibly crucial background on the deceased, and she had forfeited the privilege of saying, “Sergeant, I’ve discovered …”
The glass wall facing the lobby muted the police voices out there. It also reflected her face and the room behind her, where Rob and the vaultmaster waited. Wayne had impressed on them both that discussing the scene or transmitting news of it before giving their statements to the police was practically a hanging offence. The vaultmaster sucked in his pouty lip and commandeered the secretary’s desk, where he sat tapping away on his laptop as though uploading his remote-control software was the only task of import in the place. Or he was tweeting what he’d been asked to keep quiet. Rob was in his office, phoning the art storage place to put an indefinite hold on shipments that were supposed to arrive Monday. The delay in using the vault seemed to bother him more than the reason for it. He had only said, “Will the smell go away when the body does?” and then asked Wayne about crime scene cleanup companies.
For Lacey, Jarrad’s corpse was a giant question mark. How long had he been in there? How had he gotten in there? Had he set the touchy rack in motion himself, or had someone else done it? Accident or murder? He might have been alive for hours or days, trapped in agony where nobody could hear his cries for help. What a thought!
Wayne walked in. “This has fucked my schedule backward over a barrel. You good, McCrae?”
“No worries.” Well, except for whether I’ll have any job hours coming after this disaster or if I’ll be scavenging out of Dee’s freezer for the next month while looking for other work.
“Good. I’ve gotta start the next job on Monday. If I leave you a detailed diagram, can you run camera cable through the ceiling tiles below the theatre? You’ll have to work around whoever is using the classrooms down there.”
Paid hours. Whew. “Sure. Just leave me whatever tools I’ll need. Do you care if I don’t wait until Monday to start? I’ve got a few days to make up.”
“Long as you don’t charge me double for Sunday.”
Lacey leaned closer. “Did they get you to check the elevator log? Can you say how long he’s been down there?”
“Need-to-know only, McCrae, and you don’t need to. Get used to it.” He pulled up a wiring diagram on his laptop. They spent the next half hour going over it, then bringing in cable spools and tools from the van. A pair of reporters followed them across the parking lot.
“Is it true there’s a body in there? Is it connected to the car from the river? Is it the missing hockey player?”
Lacey kept on walking. She had never made enough seniority to talk to the media while she was on the Force, and she wasn’t going to start now. Let Wayne handle it. Which he did by shrugging and walking past the outstretched microphones. No more than the vultures deserved. And just how had they got onto this so quickly?
Constables were waiting for them at the office, annoyed that Lacey had not sat meekly in a chair until wanted. She shrugged off their frowns. Until a month ago, she had outranked both of them. She followed one constable into the little meeting room and sat across the table from him without being told. Nor did she wait for him to ask a question.
“You do know Jarrad Fiske was wanted for questioning in a vehicular assault last Sunday?”
“We know all about that, ma’am. Please confine your statement to the discovery of the body.”
So much for giving them useful background on the deceased. But then, she had never made the special investigations team out in Surrey because, as her sergeant repeatedly told her, she had too much imagination and was prone to going off on tangents. Most of the men she tested with went on hunches, too, only their tangents led to a by-the-book solution, whereas Lacey’s equally correct solutions leaned toward interpersonal elements. Despite her recent lapse into linear thinking about the dangers of ex-husbands, she was not about to ignore the interpersonal elements of Jarrad’s very odd death.
Whatever had taken him into that vault, into that space behind the massive steel rack, it was not an accident. It was the result of who he was, who he was involved with, and whatever was going on in his life. Not potentially criminal activities, but emotional ones. No stranger could have forced a robust young hockey player into that unlikely death trap. It was someone he knew. Someone with a key card had either given him their card or gone down there with him. Therefore it was someone connected to the museum. Every board member had a key card, and so did the staff, but only a few had vault access. That was the suspect pool in a nutshell.
The constable didn’t ask for her inside knowledge, not of the relationships or of the vault access. He only wanted to know whether she had touched anything and how she had recognized the deceased. She gave him a step-by-step account of finding the body. She also gave him her fingerprints, hair, and a sample fibre from each item of her clothing, to eliminate any traces she might have left in the vault today.
Dismissed, she picked up the tools Wayne had left for her, climbed upstairs to the theatre level, plugged in the little gizmo that read elevator logs, and downloaded everything from Friday afternoon forward. She might not be able to link card numbers and card holders at a glance the way Wayne did, but Rob had a complete list in his office that she could check. Whether Jarrad had run over Dee himself or merely let his car be used, whoever had gotten him into the vault had some explaining to do.
When she got back to the office, Wayne was heading out. He handed her a sheaf of diagrams, warm from the printer. “Any questions, call my cell.”
“Yes, sir. Have a good weekend.” The other constable left Rob’s office. Lacey looked at the meeting room, where the vaultmaster was giving his statement — and doubtless a litany of complaint — to another constable. He could talk as long as he wanted, so long as his voice covered her chat with Rob. She folded Wayne’s diagrams and leaned into Rob’s office. “I have to check the elevator logs against the key cards. Can you give me a copy of the cardholders list?”
“Sure.” In a moment the office printer whirred beside the secretary’s desk. Rob came out as she was scanning the list of names and stood fidgeting beside her until she lifted her head.
“What’s on your mind, guy?”
The curator rubbed his neck with one hand. The gesture was old and tired, but the worried face looked younger than his estimated thirty years. “Uh, are you about done for the day? Now that Wayne’s gone and all.”
“I could be.”
“Because, well, I’m supposed to be meeting a friend of Jarrad’s for a drink after work, and I don’t want to be the one to …”
“To tell him his friend is dead. But you don’t want him to see it on television, either.”
Rob nodded. “I realize it’s an imposition, but you’ve got experience giving people bad news. If you’d come with me, at least long enough to explain the situation …”
Lacey looked down at her plain, dark cargo pants and tan T-shirt. Not grubby — she hadn’t worked enough to get dirty — but not fresh, either, and faintly tainted by the pong in the vault. She wanted a shower and a drink and some thinking time. Yet a chance to meet a friend of Jarrad’s, to question him while he was in shock and off guard, was not to be ignored.
“Where are you going?”
“He’s meeting me outside the wine bar.”
Lacey made up her mind. “It’s not the kind of news that should be broken in a public place. Why don’t you hop over to that liquor store beside the wine bar and pick up whatever you think he’ll drink? When he shows up, say you have to bring the stuff up to Dee’s. We can tell him there.”
“That’d be great.” Rob’s worry lines eased. “I’ll go right away
.”
“I’ll go home and get out some glasses.”
A couple of minutes past five, one of Jake’s BMW convertibles whizzed up Dee’s drive, carrying Rob and another man. Lacey went out to meet them and stopped in surprise. The hockey player behind the wheel was the same man who had told her about Dee and the windshield.
He got out of the car. “Ma’am. How’s your friend?”
“Recovering, thank heavens. Call me Lacey.”
Rob came to stand beside her. “Meet Chris.” His eyes appealed to her to take it from there.
“I see you brought my supplies, Rob,” she said. “You know the way to the kitchen, right?” Rob took the hint and carried the bags around to the mudroom door. Lacey leaned on her Civic and looked at Chris. “I got the impression the other day that you knew Jarrad pretty well.”
“As well as anyone, I guess. I still don’t think he would run over your friend. Not sober, anyway.”
Sympathy softened Lacey’s voice. “We might never know now.”
Chris frowned. “Why not?”
“I’m sorry to tell you this, but it’s bound to be on the news soon. Jarrad has been found. He’s dead.”
The hockey player recoiled. “That’s not true.”
“I’m afraid it is. I found him.”
Chris slumped against the Bimmer. “Was he … in the river?”
“No. He didn’t drown. Why don’t you come inside and I’ll tell you what I know.” A small voice belatedly niggled about contaminating an interested person before the police got to him, but the constable hadn’t cautioned her not to talk about her find. He had probably figured it was too late, that those reporters in the parking lot had winkled out all she knew before he’d gotten his hands on her. As if. She steered Chris to the living room, where Rob handed him a drink. Chris accepted it and drank half, apparently without noticing. Then he looked at his glass and sat down heavily on the couch.
When the Flood Falls Page 23