by Joan Boswell
“I am surprised,” Rhona said as they stood and moved to the door. She wasn’t going to find out anything else. Time to move on. “To change the subject, whoever killed Ms. Trepanier must have realized it wasn’t Ms. Wuttenee, but maybe he was too out of control to stop or he was afraid if she woke and saw him he’d be caught. How much information about Ms. Wuttenee’s background did you get from your interview?”
They’d reached the door. Ian held it open for Rhona. “Sorry. I know all about equality, but opening doors for women is a hard habit to break. About Ms. Wuttenee, I agree she may have been the intended victim. It’s not too late to talk to her again. Why don’t we tell her to come down to Ms. Grant’s office and speak to us after we check out Ms. Trepanier’s apartment? If we have time after that, we could go through Ms. Trepanier’s appointment book.”
“Good plan. If the killer got the wrong girl, Ginny Wuttenee may be in danger, and the sooner we pin down her life story, the more likely we are to know whether or not she needs protection.”
“Ginny Wuttenee is staying with Ms. Nesrallah. We’ll stop and tell her to meet us downstairs in the party room in an hour when we’ve finished in Sabrina’s apartment,” Rhona said.
“Not Ms. Grant’s office?”
“No. We’ve interfered enough in their lives. The party room will be fine.”
“We should have it to ourselves. No one will be partying right now,” Ian said.
Before entering Sabrina’s apartment, they pulled on gloves and protective covers for their shoes.
“If we turn up anything significant, we won’t have contaminated the site,” Rhona said.
The apartment reeked of paint.
“I thought the new paints didn’t smell,” Ian said.
“Latex is better. They’ve used oil in here,” Rhona said, flicking on the hall light to reveal deep amber walls, the colour intensified by the amber shade on the overhead light. The effect was strange but attractive. From the hall they moved to the living room.
“Charcoal. Isn’t it smashing,” Ian said. “The white woodwork, the ebony furniture — absolutely smashing.”
Rhona wasn’t quite so taken with it, but it was a stunning room.
“I never considered charcoal. My pine furniture would stand out against it. I see a project coming on.”
Rhona reflected that if Ian had made that statement with any of his male colleagues, he would have been mocked, if not to his face then behind his back. Maybe the fact that he revealed so little about himself was a careful cover-up because he realized how he’d be perceived. Interesting. Maybe he wasn’t the metrosexual she’d pegged him for. Maybe … but what did that have to do with anything.
“Nothing personal here. It could be a hotel,” Rhona said.
They continued to the master bedroom, also painted charcoal with a black iron bedframe and white linens. A well-stocked bar cart and the same mirrored ceiling they’d seen in Ginny’s bedroom as well as a white floktari rug on the black-stained floor made a dramatic but impersonal impression.
Ian slid open the drawer of one bedside table.
“Anything?” Rhona asked.
“A selection of condoms,” he said and bent to open the cupboard underneath. “Sex toys to please almost anyone.”
“See what’s in the one on the other side,” Rhona instructed.
Ian walked around the bed and checked. “Same kind of stuff, but there’s more sadomasochistic things — a whip, handcuffs.” He probed further. “Leather masks and other things,” he said and shut the door.
“Tools of the trade, I suppose. Could be relevant — too soon to tell. We need to know more about her, who she is, and where she came from. Let’s try the other bedroom. She must stash personal belongings somewhere. This room reveals nothing about her personality other than her dramatic taste in furnishings and colour and her willingness to do whatever her clients asked.”
She opened the door of the second bedroom and stopped to absorb the total contrast to the rest of the apartment. Soft rose walls, a white wooden single bed with a beautiful quilt. Four more beautiful antique quilts hung on the walls. On the white desk an open, ready-to-go, state-of-the-art sewing machine and a closed Apple laptop took up the space. Two tall white bookcases filled with rectangular white baskets and a series of black binders, a chest of drawers with a wall-mounted flat-screen TV, and an armchair slip-covered in cream cotton with a footstool upholstered in rose-patterned chintz completed the furnishings. A multi-coloured rag rug on the floor added to the room’s welcoming coziness.
“The real Sabrina Trepanier lived here,” Ian said.
“No photos, which may or may not mean she’s totally alienated from her family. Some people don’t like having photos around.”
“Because they think a photographer steals their soul? I remember learning in introductory anthropology that some tribes in the South Pacific believe that and won’t have their pictures taken,” Ian said.
“Maybe that’s their reason, but I think I’ve read that for some people photos remind them constantly of happier times, of the speed with which life is passing, of people they’ve loved who’ve died, and of their own mortality,” Rhona said.
“Interesting explanation. I’ll think about that, because I don’t display photos in my apartment. I have some stashed away but not on display.”
Rhona, who’d been about to open the top bureau drawer, smiled at Ian. “At last we have something in common. I feel the same way. Photos make me sad, and you won’t find any in my apartment either. I do have photo albums. It’s funny, people who visit always comment and their remarks always sound critical.”
Ian grinned back. “What do you know, something in common.” He turned to the desk, where he pushed the sewing machine to one side, opened the computer, and booted it up.
Rhona found a tidy selection of underwear in the top drawer of the bureau. On the left it was black, filmy, and sexy, and on the right utilitarian and unexciting. This woman certainly had compartmentalized her life.
“The computer doesn’t require a password, which is not usually a good thing for us,” Ian said over his shoulder. “The user either has nothing to hide or doesn’t think anyone else will ever look at it.” He folded himself onto the white wooden desk chair, which had a grey Obus cushion attached to its back, and began clicking away. “Speaking of family, I’ll check the address book.”
A minute later he said, “No Trepaniers here. Now I’ll pull up her emails.”
Rhona continued with the drawers. She felt underneath each pile of T shirts, sweaters, workout clothes, but found nothing. She then removed the drawers to check their undersides and the back interior of the bureau. Again she found nothing.
“We need to know if her real name is Sabrina Trepanier and if she has any family contacts. You may have to scan subject headings to figure that out,” Rhona said.
“I’m ahead of you. I’ve done a brief run-through. Most correspondence is with quilters, suppliers of fabric, and other people connected to sewing. Now I’m looking in her folders. None labelled family. One for friends in Toronto, one for passwords, one for Aeroplan.”
“Aeroplan. Check that one. If she ever travelled she had to have a passport, and it will have her birth certificate name.”
“Got it. Claire Sabrina Trepanier.”
“Mystery solved.”
“Now to find her family. I’ll check filed information and the sent emails. Usually that list is shorter than received.”
“Is there a heading for clients? I thought that was how escort services operated,” Rhona said.
“Nothing.”
Rhona, finished with the bureau and moved to the bookcase. Sabrina had not been a reader. A pile of People, US, In Style, and quilting magazines did not count as literature. The baskets held fabric and sewing equipment. Rhona glanced at the bed. She thought the carefully pieced pattern was called double wedding ring. She didn’t know where the information had come from — crafts and sewing had never inter
ested her. In one basket, completed blocks in pinks, creams, and mauves almost filled the space. They were beautiful and she felt a momentary sadness that Sabrina’s quilt would never be finished. She opened another covered basket and found neatly organized files. Thumbing through, she discovered that Sabrina had taken a small business course at George Brown College. She had documented her progress towards the establishment of a quilt- and latch-hooking business. A file on possible properties, another on sourcing, on quilt shows and competitions. On a piece of paper she’d written possible names for the store.
“She was a quilter, not a reader, and she was in the final stage of preparing to open a business,” Rhona said, reaching for the first of the black binders.
In a minute or two Ian looked up. “What’s in the books?” he asked.
“The first one contains dozens of erotic photos, very explicit pictures that Sabrina probably used for escort publicity. The second one has the traditional shots photographers take for models preparing portfolios. The second album may have been made before she got into the escort business. The photos are the kind a model presents to an agency,” Rhona said. She carefully extracted one that showed smiling Sabrina modelling a plaid shirt and jeans that might have come from an L.L. Bean catalogue. She recorded the removal in her notebook. “We’ll make copies of this for the white board and to show to any family we find.”
“Maybe she intended to take the first route and either didn’t get the bookings or learned that the escort business was more lucrative,” Ian said.
“That would be my guess,” Rhona agreed. “She seems to have been an organized woman who had a goal and was prepared to do whatever it took to get there.”
“I agree. I just checked her trash. She used the computer to make dates and dragged the info into the trash so there wouldn’t be a record. Presumably she did that in case her apartment was raided and her computer was seized. Fortunately for us, she hasn’t emptied the trash in quite a while, so we’ll retrieve the information.”
Rhona moved to the cupboard. “Still no family.”
“No, only friends and not many of those. We could contact them and ask about her background,” Ian said and he leaned over. “Wait a minute. I’ve moved to the desk drawers. In the bottom one she has files, and one contains personal documents.”
Rhona left the cupboard and moved to stand beside him.
He flipped open a purple folder with inside pockets and extricated a birth certificate, a will, and other legal documents.
“This copy of her will is two weeks old. Why so recent?” Ian said.
“Because she was afraid and wanted to tidy up her life in case anything happened to her,” Rhona said as she bent to read over Ian’s shoulder. “Aside from two special bequests, she leaves everything to the Toronto Children’s Aid Society. Her collection of antique quilts is to go to her mother, Marie France Trepanier, of Oakville, with a thank-you to her and to her grandmother, Marie Claire Arsenault, if she’s alive, for teaching her to sew. All other clothes and personal possessions go to Virginia Wuttenee, currently living at 68 Delisle Street. Now all we have to do is locate her mother. Trepanier can’t be that common a name in the Oakville area.”
Ian picked up a file of monthly bank statements. “She has money, most of it in GICs. She must have been cautious, ’cause they don’t pay much.” He looked over at Rhona, who had opened the cupboard. “Seems she thought of being an escort as a business and a way to accumulate as much capital as she could.”
“I wonder why we didn’t find her purse in Ms. Wuttenee’s place. Perhaps the killer took it to cover his tracks or make it look as if the crime was a robbery gone bad,” Rhona said before they moved downstairs. She phoned the investigating team and emphasized how important it was to intensity the search for the missing purse.
When Rhona and Ian entered the party room, Ginny, long hair shining, face scrubbed clean, wearing blue jeans and a cavernous maroon sweatshirt with “Toronto” emblazoned on the front, stood staring into the large fish tank, one of the room’s distinguishing features.
“Ms. Wuttenee, we’re here,” Rhona announced and waved the young woman to a soft, upholstered chair while she chose a firmer one for herself. “Have you remembered anything more that could help us?”
“No. I can’t imagine why anyone in the whole world would kill Sabrina. She was nice, really, really nice. You asked about clients. If she didn’t make a client happy he wouldn’t come back, but why would he kill her? Maybe somebody from her past. She never talked about the past.” She rubbed her eyes. “I’ve tried and tried and tried but I can’t think of a single thing to tell you that might help. I wish I could.”
“Thanks. If anything does come to you, phone us immediately. Now tell us about yourself, about your background. Give us a picture of yourself,” Rhona said.
Ginny glanced quickly at the door as if weighing her options for escape. “You mean a photo?” She looked puzzled.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean an actual picture. I meant that we want to learn about you, where you come from, who you know in the city, if you and Ms. Trepanier had any friends in common. That sort of thing.” Rhona smiled as encouragingly as she could. She sensed that any previous encounters Ginny had had with the police had been unpleasant, so she did her best to put the young woman at ease. “Take your time and don’t worry about deciding what might or might not be important. We’ll do that.”
Ginny looked from one to the other. Clearly she felt uncomfortable. She shrugged. “Nothing much to tell. As you can see I’m an Indian. I’m a status Indian and grew up on the Red Pheasant reserve. When I was,” she paused, “eighteen I came to Toronto.”
“How old are you now and where is Red Pheasant?” Ian asked.
“I’m still eighteen. It’s in Saskatchewan.”
“Then you haven’t been here long.”
“No. Four months.”
“Is Red Pheasant where you went to school?”
“Clifford Wuttenee to grade nine.”
“A relative?” Rhona asked.
“Lots of Wuttenees.” She shrugged. “I think he was the guy who signed Treaty 6. No relation.”
“After grade nine?” Rhona said.
Ginny shifted as if sharp nails covered her chair. “Battleford. North Battleford Comprehensive. My grandmother didn’t want me to go to Sakawen. She thought you could fight whites better if you went to their schools.”
“What’s Sakawen?” Ian asked.
“An Aboriginal high school. They’ve got two of them now. I had to go to the white school. Believe it or not I stuck it out to graduate because my grandmother really cared. She wanted me to be proud to be Cree, to be strong. She didn’t want me to end up like my mother.” Unexpectedly, her eyes brimmed and she wiped them with the back of her hand, drawing attention to her bitten nails and cuticles.
“My grandmother insisted that I be proud of who I was and where I came from too,” Rhona said. “It makes a difference in your life if someone who loves you believes in you, doesn’t it?”
Ginny didn’t say anything but she considered Rhona’s remarks. “I don’t think it’s the same when you’re an Indian,” she said.
“I am and it did,” Rhona said.
This time Ginny stared at Rhona as if she could check out her DNA. “You’re an Indian?”
“My grandmother was born on Poundmaker’s reserve. She took me back there in the summers when I was a little girl.”
“But she didn’t live there?”
“No. After she left residential school she worked as a maid in Battleford and married a young Methodist minister. You won’t remember, but until they changed the Indian Act, an Indian woman who married a white man lost her status and couldn’t live on the reserve. We visited family but we couldn’t stay. “
Ginny smiled. “Wow. And now you’re a cop. Pretty good for an Indian kid.”
“Thanks, but we need to get back to you.” Rhona glanced at Ian and knew by his raised eyebrow and quizzical smile th
at he thought she’d been out of line. He probably considered it a tactic to persuade Ginny to reveal whatever she was hiding. It wasn’t true. Rhona hadn’t intended to reveal as much. She was still reacting to the Spirit Report and her own acknowledgment of the shame about her past that she sometimes felt.
“What happened to your mother?” Ian probed.
“She died,” Ginny snapped without looking at him.
“People do. What did she die from?” Ian said.
“This has fuck-all to do with anything, but for your satisfaction, my father killed her and he’s in the Prince Albert pen.”
“I’m sorry.” Ian did look as if he wished he hadn’t been quite so abrupt. “How old were you?”
“Four.”
Rhona closed her eyes. How horrible and traumatic. Probably another example of a man who felt undervalued and inferior using alcohol to deaden the pain, and when that didn’t work, turning his self-hatred and rage against those closest to him. She opened her eyes and met Ginny’s steady gaze.
“There’s nothing I can say except I’m sorry.”
“Thanks,” Ginny said.
“What happened after you graduated?” Ian asked.
Pause. Rhona felt Ginny was considering whether to tell them something else. From experience she knew they should sit back and wait. But there was no way to communicate her belief to Ian, who plowed on.
“Well, what did you do?”
“Came to Toronto. Got picked up at the bus station. Worked the street until Fatima found me and here I am.”
“Your pimp must have been angry. Did he come after you?”
“Probably, but he didn’t find me, and now I’m always careful where I go.”
Time for Rhona to issue a warning. “I’m glad to hear that, because we believe you, not Ms. Trepanier, may have been the target. Sabrina was in your bed and the killer may have been after you. That’s why we wanted to know your background, to see if you could think of anyone who might have reason to kill you. Tell us about your pimp.”
A clearly shocked Ginny pulled back as if Rhona had menaced her with a hot poker. “My god,” she said, looking from one detective to the other. “Do you really think so?”