The Girl in the Moss

by Loreth Anne White

  CHAPTER 14

  MONDAY, NOVEMBER 19

  Kjel Holgersen dumped two more file boxes onto a table in the small incident room. Leo entered the room behind Kjel and hefted his own load onto the table. Swearing, Leo slapped dust off his pants. He’d loosened his tie, and his face was red, beads of perspiration glinting along his upper lip. He smelled like old liquor.

  “So you was late at the Pig again yesterday?” Kjel said as he lifted the top off one of the boxes.

  “Drowning my sorrows, yeah. Why in the fuck did Maddocks pull me from homicide into iMIT anyways?” Leo flung his arm at the mounting stack of boxes. “Just to stick me in this shithole? These cases are dead, I tell you. Stone-cold dead. While the rest of the team is out there working the hot major incident stuff, we gotta go through this crap?” He shoved a metal desk into position under the window as he spoke, bagging the best spot in the room. “Maddocks is fucking getting back at me for talking to Grablowski about Pallorino being the cradle baby. He figures I leaked Pallorino’s story and that I am responsible for the book Grablowski’s written.”

  “You did leak it,” Kjel said.

  “Well, I’ll tell ya something—I didn’t write that goddamn book. That forensic head shrink would’ve been all over Pallorino’s true crime story with or without me. I just facilitated it, sped things up a bit.”

  “For a fee.”

  Leo ignored the jab and ambled over to the coffee machine. “Question is, why is Maddocks sidelining you, eh, Holgersen? What have you done to earn this special treatment from the new boss man, eh?”

  Kjel shunted his own metal desk into position against the wall next to the whiteboard. “Because he figures I gots what it takes to boost the entire department’s homicide and missing persons solve rates. But hey, if we do score, if we makes some of these cases hot again, we gets more staff, a higher profile. Not a bad gig.”

  “Dream on, buddy.” Leo poured himself a mug of coffee and set it on his desk. He went back to the boxes, took the lid off one, and began rummaging through old homicide files. “Where in the hell do we even start with this shit?”

  “Right there. Like you’re doing,” Kjel said. “We go through each cold case, document it in our new computer system—”

  “System’s not even up and running yet.”

  “Will be by the end of today. Techs are due in an hour. Once we’ve entered a case, we gives it a rating in terms of solvability, public interest, potential to generate new leads via social media, potential to apply new DNA tech, potential links between other old cases, potential witnesses who might still exist and who have decided to talk, and so forth. Then once we’s ranked the priority—like applying triage—we starts running the top cases past the crime analyst. We starts feeding those to the soc media unit, and we starts getting DNA and fingerprint evidence into the crime lab queue. When and if we get hits, we run with them hits. When and if we need more staff, we ask. Simple.”

  Leo snorted and opened a murder book. He scanned the contents. “Well, for starters, we can ditch some of these.”

  “Some of what?”

  “Dead junkies.” Leo jabbed his hairy finger on a young woman’s mug shot. “Deceased homeless vics like this useless tweaker here. Found overdosed down a bank near the Gorge five years ago.”

  Kjel went over to look. He read the victim’s name. Seema Solomon. Someone’s daughter. Maybe a sister. Maybe even a young mother. A human being who’d deserved respect. A human being who’d ended up in a bad place and was now dead. Under suspicious circumstances.

  Leo shut the file and put it to one side on the table. He returned to ferreting in the box.

  “So what you gonna do with that dead tweaker file, then?” Kjel said.

  “Nada. That’s going on the dismissal pile.”

  “Just ’cause the vic was part of a marginalized population?”

  Leo stilled and shot Kjel a glance. “You kidding me? Ever since pig farmer Robert Pickton started hunting street workers in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, now every missing or murdered street person could be a victim of some serial murderer?”

  “Don’t know until we look.”

  Leo snorted. “On the one hand you got linkage blindness, but on the other there’s overkill, buddy.”

  Kjel opened another box and took out a file. This one contained details of a missing persons investigation from last December. He flicked through the file contents.

  “Hey, this is the Annelise Janssen case,” he said. “Remember that student who went missing from the UVic campus last winter?” He peered up from the file. “She’s still missing. Her father is that big-shot industrialist. Pots of money.” Kjel tapped the file. “This one’s high profile and high on the public-interest scale. A pretty young blonde from a good family just vanishes off campus, poof, gone? No one has a clue where she went? If we can solve one or two like this, we gots it made.” Kjel ambled over to his new workstation and sat at his desk as he continued to peruse the file.

  “Yeah, I remember this one,” he said. “I was partnered with Pallorino in sex crimes when a woman’s body floated up in the Gorge last winter. Everyone’s first thoughts was that the floater was Annelise Janssen. It was the first question reporters asked me and Pallorino.” He glanced up. “I reckon this one goes to the top of our pile. I reckon for starters we get this onto the social media desk and put word out again that we’s still looking for tips on Janssen.”

  “It was all over social media last December.”

  “Yeah, but you knows how it goes. Sometimes peeps is scared to come forward at the time. Then circumstances change in their lives, and they’re ready to talk. Or maybe someone never saw those posts last winter.” As Kjel returned his attention to the file, out of the corner of his eye he saw Leo snag the tweaker murder book off the table and take it back to his desk.

  An odd feeling quirked through Kjel as he thought of Maddocks’s words.

  Just watch him for me. Watch how he handles and prioritizes cases.

  CHAPTER 15

  It was almost noon on Monday when Angie knocked on the door of the Hart residence, a rambling estate on the ocean near Metchosin, a semirural area about a half-hour drive from the city. Finding Rachel Hart’s address had been easy. The documentary filmmaker, now seventy-two, had a website with contact details. Angie had called ahead to explain her investigation and to ask for an appointment.

  A man in his early seventies opened the door. He was tall, rangy limbs, a long face with playful light-blue eyes. “Angie Pallorino?”

  “Yes, I—”

  “Rachel is expecting you. Come on in. I’m Doug, her husband.”

  Angie shook his hand. He had a solid grip, and the smile in his eyes remained warm. She liked him on the spot. She’d done a bit of digging before coming out and learned that Rachel was married to Dr. Douglas J. Hart, a recently retired dean of humanities at the University of Victoria. It was the same university that Maddocks’s daughter, Ginny, now attended, and where Angie’s father had been a professor of anthropology. Before turning to law enforcement, Angie had once thought she might pursue an academic career of her own.

  “Come through this way. Don’t worry about your shoes—Rachel is out back, down by the water, fly casting.” He led Angie through an open-plan living room to sliding glass doors that looked over a lawn that rolled down to a bay. The Hart home was all clean architectural lines and plenty of natural light. A series of black-and-white photographic portraits filled one wall. Angie slowed to examine them. Some studies were of Doug and Rachel, others of a small boy with a young girl. Then the girl alone at various ages as the years progressed.

  “Is that Eden, your daughter?” she asked Doug. “I think I recognize her from some of the river trip photos.”

  “Yes. And that’s our boy, Jimmy. We lost him when he was four.”

  “I’m so sorry.” She glanced at Doug.

  “Jimmy was riding his tricycle and went off the edge of the dock at a lake house we were renting ov
er the summer. By the time we realized he was gone, it was too late. It was a rough time.” He opened the door, letting in the fresh autumn air. “I’ll take you down to the beach. Rachel likes to practice casting down there when she needs to think or relax.” He shot another easy smile over his shoulder. “Rachel hasn’t thought about the river trip in a long while. She was rather deeply shocked when you told her about Jasmine’s remains being identified.”

  They walked over the lawn. The ocean danced and sparkled in the sunlight. Along the boundary of the property, deciduous trees were still aflame in fall color, leaves ruffling in the breeze. It was a glorious day.

  Doug stopped on a grassy knoll, his hands going into his pockets. “There she is.” He titled his chin toward the water.

  Down at the bottom of the incline, at the water’s edge, a lithe woman with long silvery hair in a ponytail cast her line in balletic arcs, water droplets glinting in the sun. Her physique and movements belied her age.

  Angie and Doug watched in silence. It was a sort of poetry in motion, thought Angie, an esoteric ribbon dance with a fine filament of line. She knew firsthand from her recent trip with Maddocks just how goddamn difficult it was to pull off that kind of grace with a fly line.

  “What’s she trying to catch?” Angie said.

  “Nothing. She has a fly without a hook. It’s just practice. Her Xanax.” He fell quiet, seemingly lost in his own mind as he watched his wife at the water’s edge.

  “Is it okay to talk to her about Jasmine and what happened on the trip?” Angie asked quietly.

  Doug seemed to snap back from wherever he’d journeyed in his brain and said, “No. Well, yes, of course she’s fine to talk. It’s just that it was a long time ago, losing Jasmine. Your phone call—the sudden revelation that those human remains belong to Jaz—it brought it all back. Rachel took it very hard at the time. It was her trip. She organized it. She invited Jasmine, and she felt responsible for everyone’s safety.”

  “Did Rachel know Jasmine well?”

  His gaze ticked to hers. “Well enough. Maybe it’ll help seal the wounds now that Jasmine’s remains have been found. Why don’t you go down and introduce yourself while I put some coffee on? I’ll bring it out to the table on the patio—it’d be a shame to waste a day like today.”

  Angie and Rachel sat nursing coffees at a small round table in the balmy, low-angled sunshine. The golden light was flattering on the older woman’s features. Angie liked her face. It was angled with interesting lines, a firm set to her jaw, sharp gray eyes. Her wrinkles seemed to map a history of intense thought, laughter. Sadness, too. Strands of silver hair escaped a thick ponytail that brought Jane Goodall to Angie’s mind.

  “Do you mind if I record this?” Angie set her digital recording device on the table between them.

  Rachel eyed the device. “Why record?”

  “Just for my reference. I can be more present, listen more completely if I’m not taking notes.” She smiled.

  Rachel nodded, lifted her coffee mug, then stilled. “Run by me again why Justice Monaghan hired you? Does the postmortem on Jasmine show something suspicious?”

  “No. Jasmine’s death is being ruled accidental. I suspect engaging my services is Jilly Monaghan’s way of dealing with the news. She feels a need to do something, anything.”

  “She’s losing her memory, you know? Word is that she has some kind of dementia.”

  “I heard. I suspect for a woman of her considerable intellect, a woman who once wielded the power to lock people away, to take away their freedom—this makes her feel in control again. Possibly it’s just her way of finding closure.”

  Rachel held Angie’s gaze, her mug midair as she considered this. Something softened in the older woman’s countenance, and Angie felt as though she’d passed some arcane test.

  Rachel took a sip. “I was going on forty-eight when I got the idea for the documentary,” she said. “At the time, perimenopause was a slap in my face. I wasn’t dealing well with the changes to my body or mind—the irritability, shortness of temper, thinning skin, the sudden aches in my joints, sleepless nights, bad dreams, hot flushes, exhaustion. The list is endless. It felt cruel and sudden.” She paused. “The worst, I think, was the mood swings. I felt almost homicidal at times.” She met Angie’s eyes.

  “My fly rod and the river became my only salvation. Fishing in the wilderness brought peace. It drove home to me how angling had brought me happiness during the many stages of my life, starting from when I was a little girl on my granddad’s knee, watching his big hands tie impossibly delicate little flies that would lure esoteric creatures up from their watery depths. He showed me how to study nature, mimic it, quietly. To be strong yet work with a gentle touch that registered every nuance of movement in the line. To not be afraid of the wilderness but to embrace its vagaries, to find solace and meaning in Mother Nature’s arms.” She sipped her coffee, her eyes going distant as they caught autumn sunlight.

  “Fishing and camping trips got me through puberty, through being bullied at school. Through my first real relationship and subsequent heartaches. It helped me through my son’s death, brought me close to my own daughter. It gave me my profession—a desire to document outdoor life and sport on film from a female perspective. So, facing menopause, I once again turned to the river, to angling, to my passion for film, and I decided to document a story of women at various stages of their lives using the river as a metaphor for life. I wanted to show how they all came to angling and how they individually used fishing and nature to define their roles and understanding of being female in a man’s world.”

  Angie liked this woman even more. “Hence the Women in the Stream title?”

  Rachel nodded. “I invited an angler in her seventies, one in her sixties, one divorcée who was also a single mum, another angler married yet childless by choice, two lesbians seeking to adopt a child of their own, all the way down to my own daughter, Eden, entering the difficult teen period.” She looked away, as if remembering.

  “All of us were dealing with our sexuality and femininity in our own ways. Jaz, for example, was the flighty temptress with the world still lying fresh at her feet. Her life had not yet been molded by partnership commitments or motherhood. Choices still dangled tantalizingly in front of her.” She cleared her throat. “I pitched the idea, got sponsors, and started planning. We set off in September of ’94.”

  Angie eyed her recorder, checking that the red light was still on.

  “It must have hit hard to have Jasmine die on that trip.”

  Emotion filled Rachel’s gray eyes. She nodded and once more looked away at the ocean. “It crushed me,” she said. “I saw in Jasmine the epitome of femaleness in full, lush, glorious bloom. Could have any man she wanted. Wasn’t choosing to settle yet. She represented what we’d all been once and what we’d lost: choices.” Rachel met Angie’s gaze. “Jasmine would have been going on fifty now, had she lived.”

  Angie felt a sudden paradigm shift. Realizing that Jasmine would now be older than she was herself hit home. It made Angie realize she’d have been Eden Hart’s age at the time of the fateful trip. Just fourteen. At that time Angie had been blissfully unaware of her own tragic and brutal childhood or true identity.

  She reached down into her sling bag hanging over her chair and took out a file. From the file she extracted the photos Justice Monaghan had given her. Angie placed on the table the picture of the group of women laughing under the Hook and Gaffe sign.

  “Can you point out who’s who in this photo and tell me a little bit about each?”

  Rachel nodded. “That was shot outside the motel and pub in Port Ferris where we all met the first night. Our guides met us there, too. We left our cars at the motel, and the guides drove us up to Predator Lodge in their big four-wheel-drive vehicles the following morning. That there is me, obviously.” She pointed. “And that’s my daughter, Eden. This is Willow McDonnell. She was thirty-nine at the time, gay, a criminal defense lawyer. This is he
r partner, Trish Shattuck, forty-two, a landscape architect. They were trying to adopt a child from Korea at the time of the trip, but the process was dragging and they’d faced several disappointments. Both were—still are—keen fly-fishers. Both had come off rough relationships, one with a man, the other with a woman. They were each other’s second chances and working hard not to blow what they had left of life.”

  She pointed to the blonde in the photo. “Kathi Daly, thirty-nine at the time. My good mate.” Rachel smiled a little wistfully. “Foul mouth and a sharp wit. She was recently divorced, a single mother of four who felt that she was never enough. Her ex was going through a midlife crisis in hackneyed fashion—new sports car and a string of nubile young pussies, many of whom he paid for in one way or another, which left him nothing for child support. This redhead here is Irene Mallard, forty-two. Married. No kids. Believed her husband was having an affair because her ‘vagina was no longer tight.’” Rachel snorted. “Like she was a disposable cock sheath past her sell-by date. Irene constantly fretted over whether she should’ve had kids, whether that might have kept her philandering husband close. But the reason she’d opted not to have children in the first place was because she figured they aged a woman.” Rachel glanced up. “Yeah, yeah, don’t tell me, I know. I didn’t get Irene at all. But she gave a different perspective on the female journey. Plus, she was a brilliant angler. Fishing was the one thing that took her out of herself and away from self-recrimination.”

  Angie’s thoughts turned to Maddocks’s question in the car, about whether she wanted kids, and her chest felt tight. “What about the other two?”

  “Donna Gill. Sixty-one. A triathlete. Single by choice. She claimed she was too self-centered for a committed relationship—didn’t want to be a slave to a guy, she said. Donna was a wellness coach, taught gym classes for seniors, led a hiking group in the summer, and did snowshoe and cross-country ski tours in the winter. Über health conscious. Ironically she died five years after the trip—cardiac arrest. Cholesterol apparently off the charts. And this is Hannah Vogel. She’s passed, too. Septuagenarian. German background. Fished the European rivers as a child and forged new frontiers in female fly-casting competition in North America. Widowed at the time of the trip and her children grown. She was a writer—narrative nonfiction. Part of me wanted to be like Hannah.”