Lullaby for the Nameless (Nolan, Hart & Tain Thrillers)

by Ruttan, Sandra

  “We know someone’s been feeding information to the Native leaders, Tain.”

  “You better have some evidence to back that up before you make that kind of an accusation, Nolan.”

  “Nobody can cover their tracks forever.”

  “You sonofa—”

  “Enough.” Sullivan’s voice carried the weight of authority, and both men fell silent.

  The copied documents, the way Tain had reacted that morning…

  Ashlyn hadn’t known someone was leaking information.

  She glanced at Nolan, who was turning away, but as he did he saw her looking at him and stopped. For a few seconds they stared at each other until a shadow flickered across his face. His eyes hardened as he turned to look at Tain, but he said nothing.

  If Nolan was thinking about the papers and her silence, it looked like he was going to keep it to himself.

  “We have enough problems to deal with. What we don’t need is reckless accusations.” Sullivan glanced at Nolan. “Or renegade cops.” He glanced at Tain. “Put your personal differences aside, stop the bickering and bullshit, and get to work. Both of you. Understood?”

  There was silence, neither man wanting to be the first to speak. Ashlyn hated pissing contests.

  She stepped forward. “Yes, sir.”

  Sullivan’s head snapped as he turned to look at her. His expression changed subtly, just for a second, but she was certain she’d seen a softening around the eyes.

  He nodded at her. “Good. We’re going to have to do a search of the woods—”

  “I’ll organize that,” she said, aware Tain and Nolan were still staring at her.

  Sullivan shook his head. “No. Tain will. I want you and Nolan to start working on identifying the girl.”

  “We may have to wait for more information from the coroner,” Nolan said.

  Ashlyn walked right up to the grave and crouched down. She took a deep breath as she thought back to the photographs she’d seen in the files, and she studied the girl in front of her.

  She was wearing an old-fashioned white nightgown that appeared to go down to her ankles. Her legs had been wrapped in plastic, but her arms were lying out from her sides so that her body formed the shape of a cross.

  Why wrap the lower part of the body and then stop? Inside the wrappings, Ashlyn could see a dark stain. Had her killer or killers put plastic underneath her to help dispose of the evidence? Ashlyn looked at the girl’s chest. The wound that had apparently caused her death was partially concealed, but that part of the body hadn’t been wrapped, and as far as Ashlyn could tell, there wasn’t plastic underneath the rest of the body either.

  Just under the legs.

  There was a gap between the nightgown and the plastic where the body of the baby lay across the girl. Ashlyn tilted her head and leaned down.

  Blood was running along the side of the plastic.

  “Is it possible she was kept frozen and dumped here recently?”

  Tain said nothing as he walked over to her.

  Ashlyn moved out of his way so he could get a better look.

  When Tain stood and turned around all he said was, “You may not be completely useless.”

  Ashlyn thought she saw Nolan smirk before he lowered his gaze and stepped around Tain so that he could get a closer look at the body as well.

  She wasn’t sure if it was her discomfort or the comment that had amused him.

  Sullivan frowned as he looked from the victim to Tain, who offered one curt nod, and then Ashlyn. “We’ll have to wait for the coroner to be sure about that. You think of anything else that might be useful?”

  “It’s Mary Donard.”

  “You’re sure?” Sullivan asked as Tain turned around again and looked at the girl.

  Ashlyn nodded. “Pretty sure. I was looking at file photos just before we came out here. She’s got a small scar on her chin and a tattoo on the right side of her neck, and looks to be the right height.”

  “Okay. Then we get the evidence we need to confirm her identity, and we say nothing about the second victim.”

  “Will you brief the other team, or should I?” Nolan asked the sergeant.

  Sullivan paused. “I haven’t decided yet.”

  “Aiken opened the file on Donard,” Ashlyn said.

  Sullivan turned to her partner. “Nolan, you’ve done an excellent job bringing Hart up to speed.”

  Tain’s turn to smirk, but he was standing behind the sergeant, so only Ashlyn saw him.

  “I’ll go speak to Aiken myself, just in case.” Sullivan glanced at Nolan. “Any questions?”

  “Why would you keep them frozen only to dump them in the woods later?” Ashlyn asked, almost without thinking. It was what had been going through her mind since she’d stepped away from the body.

  “That’s easy,” Nolan said. “You’ve run out of room and have more victims to store.”

  An awkward silence followed. Ashlyn could only guess that each one of them, like she, was thinking about the very real possibility that all their missing girls might be dead.

  Only a matter of hours ago they’d just been missing.

  What Nolan’s response didn’t explain was the one thing none of them seemed ready to talk about yet.

  The second body.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Eighteen months ago

  Nolan drove with a void face and appeared solely focused on the road. The night was as black as molasses with a heaviness in the air that made it feel almost as thick. There was tension in the atmosphere, as though a storm was coming, but other than the blanket of nightfall, the sky didn’t look threatening. There wasn’t even a breeze.

  On the walk back through the woods, Ashlyn had felt so tired she could barely hold her head up, but once she’d shut the car door and they’d begun the drive back to town, a nervous energy had prickled at her, some inexplicable sixth sense kicking in, insisting something wasn’t right. She scanned the road ahead of them and the ditches. The movement of a rabbit doing a one-eighty made her heart leap into her throat, and no sooner had she caught her breath than she’d been forced to brace herself against the door as Nolan slammed the brakes and swerved to avoid a deer darting across the road.

  Behind them she could see the headlights from Tain’s truck.

  The tension in her body began to ebb as more of the trip passed uneventfully, and once the mountainside and forest gave way to sporadic buildings and paved streets with dim lights pushing back the darkness, she breathed deeper.

  She straightened up a bit. The streetlights were dim, but the town had a bright glow to it, the shimmering haze of light over buildings that you expected when house after house was adorned with Christmas lights.

  “What the—”

  Nolan had turned a corner and slowed the vehicle. Ahead of them, a bonfire had been set in a vacant lot, right across from the RCMP station, and the crowd of people that had gathered spilled out onto the road.

  The air was blanketed by stillness, and not even the crackle of the fire completely disrupted the uneasy quiet. Ashlyn scanned the crowd as she tried to guess how many people were gathered around the fire.

  Nolan turned the vehicle toward the station.

  She looked at him. “Aren’t we going to respond?”

  “Take a look, Constable. What do you see?”

  Ashlyn indulged him with a quick glance out the window. “A group of people gathered around a bonfire.”

  “Look again.”

  She did, this time not skimming the crowd to gauge its size but looking at the individuals, the solemn faces that had turned to watch their vehicles as they approached.

  “I thought things had calmed down with the creation of the task force.”

  Nolan glanced at her. “They only heated up. Our bosses have done the bare minimum to win the public-relations war elsewhere in the province, where people don’t have to walk the streets in fear or worry about their daughters disappearing. The tribes, they never really have figured out how t
o win the PR game.”

  “So that makes it okay?” she asked as he parked the Rodeo in front of the station. Uniformed officers were making their way across the street now, addressing the crowd with a bullhorn.

  Ordering them to leave the area immediately.

  They got out of the vehicle, and for a moment she wasn’t sure what Nolan intended to do, but he walked around the Rodeo toward the group on the street. Ashlyn glanced to her right, confirming that Tain had already parked his truck and was walking out toward the officers as well. Nolan was on an intercept course.

  She followed.

  From the bullhorn: “You are trespassing on private property. You must leave the premises immediately, in an orderly fashion, or face prosecution.”

  “Yeah, because a trespassing charge is a real threat to these people.” Nolan muttered the words under his breath, but she still heard them.

  The man standing at the front of the group facing the officers was almost a stereotype. Long hair, a weathered face with deep lines, dark eyes that carried the pain of sins borne by generation after generation of his people. He crossed his arms and turned around.

  So much for meaningful negotiations.

  The crowd followed his cue and one by one they all turned, arms folded, standing still as stone, staring at the fire.

  “What do they want?” she asked Nolan.

  Before he could answer, Tain interjected. “Answers.”

  The officers conferred with Sullivan, but she couldn’t hear what they were saying. As she surveyed the group, she noticed a woman to her right. The woman pulled her coat tight around her body and wrapped her arms around herself as she looked down at the ground, her long, dark hair falling down to cover the side of her face. When she raised her head, it wasn’t to look at the fire. She turned toward the officers, watching Nolan, then Tain.

  Their gaze met, and the woman’s look had the force of a blow, as if she’d just crossed the distance between them and physically pushed him. There was something about the face that seemed familiar, but Ashlyn couldn’t place it.

  Sullivan walked over to them. “You could try talking to them,” he said to Tain.

  “You think we Injuns all speak the same language, that because of the color of my skin they’ll listen to me?” Tain replied.

  The woman who’d been watching started walking toward them as other vehicles approached. Ashlyn glanced at the vans, then at Nolan, whose eyes widened. More trouble they didn’t need.

  “We won’t leave until we get answers,” she said. Her comment was directed at Tain, not Sullivan.

  “Then you’ll be here for a long time, because we don’t have anything to tell you,” Tain said.

  “Fine. We’ll stay.”

  “Look.” Sullivan glared at Tain as he reached for the woman’s arm. “Can’t we go somewhere more comfortable and talk? I’m sure that we can come to a reasonable—”

  “Talk?” The woman practically spat the word into Sullivan’s face. “For years, we’ve talked. Whole generations of our people have lived in poverty, driven from their lands, their children taken from them so that they could be raised by your people, and always your answer is the same. Talk. This isn’t about land, and it isn’t about what your ancestors stole from mine. This is about finding these missing girls. It’s about finding my sister. I don’t want talk. I want action.”

  It clicked into place, and Ashlyn realized why the woman looked familiar. Summer Young. Her sister had been the first to disappear.

  “I assure you, we’ve brought in more manpower, and we’re working around the clock,” Sullivan said. He kept looking to Summer’s right, where the reporters were taking positions, cameras already rolling. Sullivan had a wild look in his eye, that of a desperate man who might do anything to stop the situation from spiraling any further out of control. Through the cameras, the eyes of the world could now focus on Nighthawk Crossing, a small community close to several reserves where First Nations peoples resided and a stone’s throw from the US border. The Native communities felt more kinship with the tribes in Washington State than they did with Canadians, and the difficulty of monitoring a border that stretched thousands of miles was a tangible reality the police grappled with on a daily basis. Drug trafficking, human smuggling…no one wanted to know what was being smuggled across the border on any given day.

  Much of it coming through Native lands.

  Summer looked at Tain. “You’ve found a body.”

  It wasn’t a question. Nolan had been right—it hadn’t taken the public long to find out.

  Tain’s face betrayed nothing. “This isn’t the way, Summer. You have to leave.”

  “Or what? You’ll arrest me?” She stepped toward him, her head held high, barely an inch between them.

  “If that’s what it takes,” Tain said.

  Nolan used the gap that had opened when Tain reached back for his cuffs to worm his way between him. “You’re right. We found a body.”

  For a moment there was an uneasy silence as Summer looked from Tain to Nolan. “You’ll give me answers?”

  “What I can,” he said.

  “I’ve heard that before.” Summer glanced at Tain. Ashlyn noticed his fist was clenched at his side, the other hand still on his cuffs.

  “You’ve got no reason to trust me,” Nolan said. “The only thing you can be sure of is that I haven’t lied to you before.”

  She paused. “Not exactly reassuring.”

  “Would you be more likely to believe me if I fed you a line? Made you some promise that things would get better, that your people will be afforded the same justice every citizen of this country deserves? Maybe I should tell you they brought the best and brightest to work the cases, instead of covering every politically correct base they could think of—bringing in community cops who’d want to keep the local people happy, a woman, and someone who has the same skin color as you.”

  “You aren’t much of a diplomat, are you?” Said without the sarcasm one might have expected. Summer relaxed, shrinking down a few noticeable millimeters.

  Nolan smiled, stepped back and extended an arm toward the RCMP station. “Let’s find you some answers.”

  Summer glanced at the reporters, then nodded and allowed Nolan to lead her across the street.

  Ashlyn walked to her desk and plopped down in the chair. It felt good to sit after all the hours on her feet. She reached up and rubbed her temples and started to laugh.

  “What’s so funny?” Tain barked. She stifled a groan. When she’d returned to the office, she hadn’t realized he’d walked in behind her.

  “I smell about as good as you did this morning,” she said.

  It had taken the better part of an hour to get the crowd to leave. Sullivan had calmed down after Nolan left with Summer. She was the first domino. After that, the sergeant was able to persuade the leaders that they were doing everything in their power, and wouldn’t their time be better spent investigating the murder of the girl they believed was Mary Donard instead of handling crowd control outside the RCMP station?

  The fire department had paced anxiously throughout the negotiations, eager to put out the fire, not willing to take any chances of it spreading to nearby buildings after the blaze they’d had to contend with the night before.

  Reasonable men had eventually conceded, although they’d also promised they would not remain reasonable for long. They wanted answers, and they weren’t prepared to wait another year to get them.

  “You should go home and get some sleep, Hart, while you still can.”

  He had his back to her and was standing still. It looked like he was staring at the blank wall in front of him.

  She wondered if he realized how creepy it was that he’d just stop and stare off at nothing for minutes at a time.

  “I don’t even know where home is.”

  Tain remained in his fixed position. Whatever was on his mind, it seemed to have prevented him from processing her words. Part of her wanted to remain in her chair,
which seemed much more comfortable than it had that morning, but if she did, she’d lack the willpower to track Sullivan down and find out where she was supposed to be staying.

  As she forced herself out of her chair, Tain turned and held up a hand.

  “Wait.”

  It was all he said before disappearing out the door and down the hallway.

  Ashlyn started to sink back down, then stopped herself. It would be even harder to get up the second time. Instead, she interlocked her fingers and reached up to the ceiling, then to her left and finally to her right.

  Too many days like this and she might be tempted to start drinking coffee.

  She glanced at her watch. He’d been gone several minutes, and it was getting late. The other shift had arrived, but they weren’t in the office. Ashlyn started walking back and forth, swinging her arms in an effort to keep the circulation flowing. She glanced at her watch again.

  Ten minutes.

  When Tain returned a few moments later, he stopped beside his desk and stared straight at her. “In a day or two there’s a cabin available at Similkameen Valley. That’s where they’ve got Nolan staying. I’m in one of the rental houses on the same property. Until then, Sullivan had a room for you at the Blind Creek Inn.”

  She groaned. Obviously she wouldn’t be staying there. “I can try the motel I—”

  Tain shook his head. “It’s full. Every motel in town or on the outskirts has been filled with people who were staying at the inn.” He grabbed something off his desk and was halfway out the door before he turned back toward her. “Well?”

  “Well what?”

  “I have a spare room.”

  She gaped at him for a moment. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Look, suit yourself. I’m not begging. If you want to curl up with a bit of floor in the storage room and a blanket or sleep in a holding cell, that’s up to you.”

  “Well, since you put it that way,” she muttered. “You aren’t at the same cabins?”

  Tain shook his head. “One lane over. I had to get something with a fenced yard. I have a dog.”