by Lou Allin
It was now total daylight, and as the sun began its cycle the guardian trees cast long shadows over the area. As she approached, she kept her eyes on the ground, searching for the incongruity of shape or colour like she did when she hunted for mushrooms or plants in her youth. Except for the indeterminate scuffle of shoes in the dirt outside the open door, nothing indicated that anyone had been there at all. She stepped over the doorsill and knelt down, peering under the empty bunk. Along with desultory pine needles and duff was a tiny white fragment in the corner.
She considered its microscopic nonentity. It might have come from anywhere, now or a week ago. The wind was up, and it might have blown in this morning while the door was open. This wasn’t a hotel, and no one vacuumed daily. From her mini-kit she took a pair of tweezers and placed the fragment inside a collection envelope. Whitish paper, very thin with no writing. About a quarter the size of her small fingernail. What in the hell was she going to do with it? The inspector would think she was around the bend. Better to look foolish than to avoid the problem through ignorance.
CHAPTER FIVE
Monday, en route to work, Holly turned at West Coast Road and Otter Point. The sign “No Gas for 130 Kilometres” was still up, a timely warning for tourists about what dragons lay ahead in the Grand Circle route through Port Renfrew and east all the way through Clearcutland back to Cowichan.
Only a few hundred lucky souls lived in quiet Fossil Bay with a convenience store/gas station, a grade school dating from 1930, and Nan’s restaurant. With land too rugged for the large-scale farming that opened up the eastern island, only loggers and fishermen had lived there. Then their cottages began to be purchased as weekend getaways by urban dwellers. Development on a large scale had not yet arrived, leaving the village in a pleasant time warp. For a year or two, they might be safe from “prosperity.”
She pulled up in front of the remodelled white clapboard cottage with a Canadian flag and the RCMP/GRC crest on the door, St. Edward’s crown adopted for Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth. The lone Impala cruiser, a seven-year-old castoff from West Shore, was parked beside Ann’s new Outback. Behind the building was their ancient four-wheel-drive Suburban for off-road or snowy routes high in the hills. Few realized that on the tops of the San Juans along the coast, as many as twenty feet of snow fell and stayed all winter.
Opening the squeaky screen door, she removed her cap and jacket and tucked them into the closet. Following her, Shogun made his way to Ann Troy’s desk in the reception area for a treat. Everyone was used to him coming to work. The kids and volunteers who stopped by loved him. This was as close as possible to the old-time style of policing where Officer Friendly walked the beat. Ann tended the marigolds, tulips, and zinnias that made the cottage look like a home. Chipper, mindful of his lower status as a constable and duties as a modern male, did the cleaning.
Nearby was his corner and desk. The other rooms served as Holly’s office, a lunchroom, and a tiny bathroom. Ann had ten years on Holly, the same one-hundred-thirty-five pounds on a two-inch shorter frame. Her clipped brown hair was curly, and she wore reading glasses, a recent but necessary surrender to early middle age. “Babysitting again, eh?” she asked.
“You know my father,” Holly said, pouring herself coffee from the carafe, the last of the Kona that Ann had ordered from Hawaii. “He wanted a dog, but somehow I get the walking duties. Kind of like a kid in reverse.”
“Another day in paradise, or so the realtors claim,” Ann said. “We don’t have a stoplight, so it can’t have changed.” This was her favourite joke.
Passing Ann the report she had typed up at home Sunday afternoon, Holly told her about the attack at French Beach, earning a raised eyebrow.
“Sounds like she was a lucky girl,” Ann said, blowing out a breath. “This is really very bad publicity. Watch it hit the local paper for sure, maybe even the Times Colonist.”
Holly turned to her with an ironic smile. “Inspector Crew already bit my head off to suggest that. They’ll downplay it for the sake of tourism. Maybe issue a very mild and inconsequential advisory at the most. Call it an isolated incident.” She drew air quotes. “Nothing will be allowed to tarnish our image. But you must admit that this is unusual.”
“Not the beginning of a trend, I hope. We’ve been blessed with our boring jobs for so long,” Ann said. If the alternative was gang wars, they’d settle for traffic duty. “When a strangler enters the picture, you aren’t in Kansas anymore.”
Island homicide statistics were well under the national average of about 3.2 per hundred thousand. A spousal murder, an errant drug deal, those were expected. A predator on the loose was another matter. Mainland police were still smarting from the national shame of a pig farmer with a subnormal IQ, who had murdered over sixty women. Because most were prostitutes or transients and the mainland jurisdictions overlapped, he had gone unarrested for over a decade. If the police had listened to some of the early warnings, dozens of lives could have been saved.
Holly remembered her mother fuming whenever another First Nations woman disappeared. “When a blonde, middle-class girl is killed, it’s on television 24-7,” she had complained, punishing the table with her small first for emphasis. “It’s a damn shame. Everyone has the same value.” Holly had little idea that her mother would become a statistic. She often wondered whether her mother’s dangerous job had something to do with it. Without a doubt, she had enemies.
“Let’s pray it’s a blip on the radar,” Holly said. “At least it didn’t escalate into a rape. And Maddie seems to be holding up, or as well as anyone could be.” She described how the girl’s fitness helped her put up a fight and bought extra seconds. “She was shy but tough underneath. We could use someone like her in the force. She’s wasting her time as an English major.”
Ann sat back in her lumbar-support chair, a sceptical look on her round face, much more of a pessimist than Holly, due either to age or experience. “Too bad she didn’t clock him with a Maglite like yours. We don’t stand a chance of finding this lurker. We are assuming that he acted alone, right?” Stats supported that idea.
“This doesn’t sound like a tag-team crime, but a question of opportunity. Anyway, I have the plate someone saw. I’m running it on CPIC in a minute. I stopped in yesterday afternoon, but the system was down.” Holly said. The Canadian Police Information Centre also scanned for pending cases and checked “wants.”
“Working on Sunday. This is a change. And you made the rounds of the park. So nice of Crew to allow you to assist his royal highness.” Ann popped a jot of sarcasm into her observation. Inspectors were not her favourite people, especially the men. “They don’t call it the Peter Principle for nothing,” she’d say, referencing a bestseller that claimed that people rose to their own levels of incompetence.
Ann finished speed-reading the report while Holly talked. “And this little kid said … oh never mind. You know kids. Imagination and embellishments.” Eye-witnesses were known for unreliability. Four people often had five different descriptions, according to their discrepancies in vision or hearing or even their preconceptions. Kids could dream up details from a fantasy world or even have it implanted by an unethical interviewer.
Ann indicated her approval with an arched eyebrow. “You scored there. A licence plate is gold.” She pointed out an “affect-effect” error in the report. Then she put down the papers and levelled her hazel eyes at her corporal, adding a long, suspicious hmmm.
“This guy who scared off the assailant? Sounds pretty coincidental that he was strolling in the park that late. Creepy. There’s a thin line between maintaining a community watch and being a peeper,” Ann suggested.
“Paul the Peeper? That’s good. Paul Reid lives on Seaside Drive. It’s a close-knit little community. The residents consider French Beach access part of their manor privileges. Something else was odd, too.” She told Ann about the Bible verse.
“Too bad you didn’t get a look at the rest of the book. It’s not in our purview
to do that, but you’d be surprised at what can turn up. Some teens stole videotapes from a house once in Wawa, and it had kiddie porn on it. They turned it in and we put their principal away.”
Pouring herself another cup of coffee, Holly took the report and went into her office to make the corrections, calling over her shoulder, “He seemed like a decent guy to me. A little rough around the edges. Not my kind of date besides the fact that he’s several decades older.”
Ann’s sharp pencil tattooed the desk. “My brain cells are running slow this morning. Still, that name….”
In her small office, cozy or cramped depending on state of mind, Holly looked at her reminder ticker for the week. End of the month reports were due. She couldn’t help but think of Maddie. Did the girl make it to her exam? Maddie had her card. Maybe back in a safe and familiar place, some other memory had occurred to the girl. On her desk sat the envelope with the miniscule fragment of thin white paper that she had found in the yurt. Was she being ridiculous or merely cautious? She set it aside in a “wait and see” plan. Even mentioning it to Ann seemed premature.
On the file cabinet was a selection of pamphlets. Sexual Assault Awareness caught her attention. Things had changed since 1983, when the Criminal Code replaced rape, attempted rape, and indecent assault with three levels of sexual assault. Use of force without someone’s consent, followed by kissing, fondling, or sexual intercourse. The Midnight Choker, or so she thought of him, hadn’t gotten that far, thank God. The determining factor became the use of force itself. Contrary to what some thought, sexual assault was not a crime of passion against young, attractive women in dark, isolated places who asked for it by their suggestive dress or lifestyle. It was aggression and power, plain and simple.
Her mother had stressed that fact when Holly was nine and a pregnant woman in far-off Bamfield had been killed by her husband, despite a restraining order. “Murder is the leading cause of death for pregnant women and for babies, too. I don’t want you to be scared, but that’s a statistic that explains why I do what I do. These women are victimized by their bad choice in men.” She had made Holly a special eggnog with a half-teaspoon of rum, and they sat at the kitchen table in the old house in East Sooke. The towering firs meant that the lights were on all day.
“Mom, are you a fem … feminist?” The term tripped off her inexperienced tongue.
“Where did you learn that word?” Her mother’s light brown face wore a look of wonderment as she shifted her thick ebony braid over her shoulder. The first streaks of grey in her hair highlighting the cheekbones were making her more beautiful every year. “Are they teaching you about feminism in grade four? Maybe the system’s better than I thought.”
Holly tried to remember. “I think I heard it in a movie on TV. It sounded kind of bad.”
Her mother gave her a hurt and surprised look. “There is nothing wrong with that word. I don’t know how it got distorted in the last twenty years. It merely means equality and liberation for all, men as well.”
“But Mom,” Holly had said, wondering how her father could be liberated from what seemed like a life of total freedom. “Why did that woman have to die? Can’t the police stop this from happening? You said they were our friends.”
“Honey, there aren’t enough to go around. Many units up-island have one officer for every four hundred square miles. How can they be everywhere? It takes a community and a strong protective wall of women. Men have their good points, I won’t deny it. Your father is a gentle soul, his silly profession aside. But women have different priorities. Wars and power trips are not important to them. Housing, food, warm clothing, love, and safety. Those are their motivations. We’re hard-wired that way.”
“Hard-wired?” Holly gave her temple a rap, which made Bonnie reach over for a hug.
Now these one-man detachments were being phased out, meaning fewer officers for even more square miles. Shaking herself back to the present, Holly tapped into the database and got a name and a description which matched what the young men said. A dark blue 2005 Jetta. “Yesssss,” she said, with an air punch. The car was licensed to a Victor Grobbo on Coppermine Road in East Sooke. She made a quick call. Nobody home. No answering machine. That in itself was strange. How many times in science was the key phrase not “eureka” but “that’s funny”? But she needed backup.
CHAPTER SIX
Chipper arrived at ten, music from his car echoing long before he came through the door. The young Sikh corporal was due to stay until seven on their overlapping schedules until November brought an end to the major tourist wave. Everyone at the detachment preferred the busier months, although the winter meant time for extra training and updating of their skills.
At six-foot-three, with his café-au-lait skin, short goatee, and light-blue turban, Chipper was probably in more holiday shots than any other Mountie barring those protecting the Houses of Parliament. Even though he didn’t wear the dress-uniform red serge, visitors, Americans especially, loved to take pictures of Canada’s multiculturalism at work. The uniform privilege had been a hard-fought case all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled over twenty years ago that Sikh RCMP officers were entitled to wear the five K symbols of their religion, including the kirpan and the signature turban. The Sikhs had a proud history of fighting for the British Empire in the First and Second World Wars. To the shame of Canadians, Holly felt, nearly two hundred thousand people had signed a petition against the idea.
“Hey, Guv. Yo, Ann,” he said, tossing a gleaming white grin as he saluted. On the table he deposited a dozen assorted muffins from the Tim Hortons in Langford. “Low-fat carrot and pineapple for you two.”
“Chief, boss, or your highness will be fine,” she said, though secretly she enjoyed his little joke. People gave you nicknames if they liked you. Nice nicknames, that is. “And you might avoid the chocolate one yourself. Don’t they have 550 calories? I thought I saw some love handles. The Big 3-0 is looking over your shoulder.” To his amusement, she gave his tall figure a challenging onceover, even poking his slim waist. How much easier it was to interact with a modern man instead of the mastodons from her training years. Most were at the “she’s gotta be able to take it, so let’s lay it on” stage. Change came slowly in the established military machine. It would take another generation to catch up, but progress was being made.
“No way. You are looking at the king of crunches. I picked up a Bowflex on Used Victoria. Mr. Universe, here I come. Maybe I’ll even get in one of those calendars like the firefighters. Can you imagine what a date magnet that would be?” He pounded his flat stomach with a modified gorilla growl, then went to his desk and picked up a bulletin, which he brought to Holly. “This came last week. Roadway deaths have gone up by nearly 8 percent this year. Fifty-one on the island. The Integrated Road Safety Unit is coming to Victoria for a seminar next month. I’d like to go.”
She gave him a folded-arm response. “Sure you just don’t want to get out of traffic duty?”
His expressive mouth tossed back the challenge, then he dropped to one knee as if proposing. “Losing me, even for a day, will be tough. Be generous. Think of the lives you might save.”
Ann was clearing her throat, her hand levitating over the muffin box. They both knew that she was watching her calories. Then with a small groan, she opened a paper lunch bag and took out a celery stick, popping it into her mouth and chewing with little satisfaction.
Holly gave the bulletin a once-over. Recently B.C. had enacted the toughest drinking and driving law in the country. Blowing even .05 instead of the standard .08 could mean a three-day suspension and a fine of $450 plus towing and impound costs. “Speed and alcohol lead the lists, followed by driver inattention. Someday every car will have a breathalyser.” The worst living nightmare was being on-call in a traffic fatality, especially when children were involved. Or animals. Nobody ever spoke about poor little Schatze heading like a furry missile through the windshield. Her father was right to be cautious about Shogun.
“Islanders don’t know how to drive in winter, that’s for sure,” Holly said.
“Spare me, you two.” Ann had entered the force in her mid-thirties, having raised her son on her own into his teens before pursuing a law enforcement career. She never spoke about those early struggles, nor the father. For all Holly knew, the contribution came from a sperm bank, except that young single girls didn’t usually have that option. “I spent two years in the Wawa area, remember? The Edmund Fitzgerald didn’t go down for nothing in Lake Superior. Every weekend brought another lake-effect blizzard. One snowflake falls here, and it’s a three-ring circus. You’ll be sorry you bought that Mustang with no weight in the back, Chipper.”
“Come on, Ann. No comparison,” Holly said. “There are what, twelve people living in Northern Ontario? Once a winter there’s a bloodbath here on the Malahat. That bus driver who avoided a beer truck saved the lives of everyone on board last week.”
The Island Highway traversed tortuous territory on its way through Goldstream Park up to Nanaimo. Rockcuts on one side and forested cliffs with jumbo Douglas firs on the other. Year-round tourists gawked at the postcard views across to Vancouver and the white-capped mountains beyond. Few invested in snow tires despite the warning signs.