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

by Ruttan, Sandra

  While he’d been talking to Steve she’d been busy.

  Ashlyn snapped her fingers and set the file on her desk as she spun around to look at Tain. “You’re right. A cousin. If we can find her, she might be able to—”

  “Whoa.” Tain held up his hand. “Are you okay?”

  Ashlyn’s eyes narrowed the tiniest bit. What Tain thought of as her look of mild annoyance. It was always fleeting, an instinctive motion comparable to swatting at a fly, but it hinted at what was going on beneath the surface. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  A defensive response. One that suggested more than slight irritation.

  “Ash.” He reached out and squeezed her arm. “You got pretty worked up in there.”

  “I’m just tired of all the crap. I want to get to work.”

  “But this case? You said yourself—”

  She held up her hand. “We’re on it. And if anything was going to convince me it’s the right thing, it’s the bosses trying to pull us off.” Ashlyn slid out of his hold, sat down at her desk and automatically got busy leafing through the papers in front of her.

  Mechanical actions. Lacking her usual thoughtful scrutiny of the details.

  “That wasn’t what Steve was doing.”

  “Really? You could have fooled me.”

  Tain sat down across from her. “He was pushing your buttons to see how you’d respond.”

  She glanced up at him. “Don’t they ever get tired of playing games?”

  “Look, you—”

  “Do you trust me with this?”

  “I wouldn’t have fought with him if I didn’t.”

  She stared back at him for a moment, appearing to consider his words. “Then why are we even having this conversation?”

  “I just want to make sure you’re okay.”

  “How do I look?”

  “Ash.” The growl in his voice sounded harsh to his own ears, which wasn’t what he’d intended. He tried to soften his tone. “This isn’t going to be easy.”

  “If I was looking for an easy job, I made a big mistake joining the RCMP.”

  Knowing what he meant, choosing to avoid it.

  When he saw the woman who was clearly in charge at the scene, Craig suddenly felt old. She looked as though she’d barely graduated from high school, although that wasn’t to suggest a lack of maturity, just that she looked young. Her olive skin was framed nicely by dark, curly hair that was swept back off her face into a loose bun. As she snapped on gloves, she barely afforded Craig and Mac a quick glance.

  “Are you the ones who found the body?” she asked.

  “Constables Nolan and MacDougall,” Craig said, with a quick gesture to indicate who was who.

  “Not exactly an answer to my question,” the woman said briskly as she bent down beside the remains Craig had found earlier that day.

  Craig knelt on the other side of the body. “There was a team of us out here, searching the area.”

  “Must be your lucky day.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You drew the short straw and got pulled off the manhunt.”

  Craig paused. “I suppose that’s one way of looking at it.”

  “Boys chasing a suspect around in the woods with guns or a partially decayed frozen body that actually smells better than it looks.” She glanced at him. “There’s nothing sexy about this.”

  “I’m here to do my job.” He heard the defensive edge in his words, despite his efforts to extricate it.

  The woman looked up at him silently, then glanced at MacDougall before turning back to Craig. “You got any experience dealing with a partially decomposed body?”

  “She looks good, considering how long she’s been dead.”

  “And how long is that, exactly?”

  The heat rushed straight up into his face. “What I meant was—”

  “I’m Dr. Winters,” the woman said coolly. “And I believe I’ll be the judge of how long she’s been dead, how long she’s been lying here and what kind of shape she’s in. Unless, of course, you’re just being modest. Perhaps you have more experience than I do and don’t want me to be intimidated by the fact that you’re really a forensic anthropologist.”

  She stared at him and after a moment said, “Well?”

  “Well what?”

  “Are you?”

  “No.”

  There was a tiny tinge of color in her cheeks as she glanced back down at the body. “Now that we’ve cleared that up, I must admit from what I’ve seen so far, she does appear to be in good shape.”

  The doctor looked at him for a second. Was the hint of a smile on her lips or was it his imagination?

  “You didn’t answer the other question.”

  Question? Craig scrambled to remember what she’d asked, then nodded. “Sorry. Yes. I’ve dealt with decomps before.” He didn’t add that it was on a case he’d rather forget, a case that could tie directly to the body in front of them.

  Behind him, Mac cleared his throat. Craig didn’t avert his gaze, but the doctor looked up and a shadow flicked across her face before she turned back to Craig.

  “Then you know we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us, and this won’t be pleasant.”

  He looked down at the body again and nodded. There was a lot of work ahead of them, not just in the next few hours but in the coming days, and he suspected the only thing about the case he’d find pleasant would be closing it.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Craig rolled the driver’s side window down as he pulled out onto the road. It was an archaic motion, one most people had forgotten performing, but he’d been unwilling to give up the ’91 Rodeo that he’d had rebuilt when he’d purchased it years before. It wasn’t the most fuel-efficient vehicle—something that he’d been reminded of constantly in recent months of winter and mountain driving—but it was sturdy and reliable.

  Part of him felt that the problem with new vehicles was that there was so much more wiring, it only increased the probability that something would go wrong. Maybe that was the problem with people. So many options, so many choices, opening doors to darkness they might not otherwise have conceived without the twenty-four-hour news cycle and easy access to accounts of barbarity both old and new, foreign and domestic.

  His eyes burned in protest of every set of headlights in the oncoming traffic while his body shivered from the cold air. He guessed it was near freezing, if not below, but he needed the cold to help him keep his eyes open. It was almost 11:30 p.m., and his stomach had long since given up complaining about the lack of food and abundance of coffee, a substance he wasn’t terribly fond of but occasionally drank when necessary to stay awake and alert.

  He’d started drinking it a few months earlier, when he’d left the Lower Mainland on temporary reassignment.

  One temporary reassignment after another.

  The good thing about constantly being shuffled from one team to another, usually because of an emergency, was that he was continually forced to adapt to a new environment, deal with new people. He was living life on the high end of the learning curve, which required him to devote his energy and attention to the here and now.

  No time or energy to think about yesterday and tomorrow, or so he told himself.

  If things ever leveled out, he might be forced to remember what had happened, to process it and come to terms with it and consider what he was going to do when the dust settled.

  Deal with his guilt.

  He had to double-check the number on the motel room before he put the key in the lock, and when he opened the door, there was no feeling of familiarity that greeted him or sense of being home. Just the vague awareness that this room was like so many others he’d slept in over the past few months. Swap out the generic painting on the wall, the color of the bedspread, give or take an extra blanket on the shelf above the open closet and all the temporary accommodations blended together in his mind.

  It stood out in stark contrast to the memory of his own living room in Port Moody, swathed
in the glow of firelight and the glimmer of the fiber-optic Christmas tree in the corner. Close his eyes and he could almost feel the warmth of Ashlyn’s presence, the touch of her skin on his arm, the way his chest tightened when he saw her walk into a room, so aware of how much she meant to him, so afraid it was nothing more than a house of cards that would be blown apart by a sudden breeze.

  It’s no wonder your daddy didn’t stick around. How could anyone love a loser like you?

  He pushed the memories from his mind, pulled off his boots and tossed them on the lino near the entrance. The muscles in his back protested as he straightened up. Hot shower or bed?

  He tossed his jacket over a chair, crossed the room, turned on the small bedside lamp and put his gun and cell phone on the nightstand next to the book he’d been trying to read. From there it was a short walk around the bed to the bathroom, where he avoided his reflection in the mirror as he brushed his teeth.

  It was a safe guess that he looked as rough as he felt.

  The act of pulling off his shirt as he walked back to the bed was instinctive, and he followed it by tossing his pants over the chair nearby, the one with last night’s clothes still hanging over it.

  Back to the bathroom to shower. The cold would wake him up, and he didn’t want to spend another night looking at the ceiling, counting sheep. Or, if he was being honest with himself, counting bottles. Followed by counting mistakes. His attempts to try to forget coming full circle with the laundry list of sins he carried with him, the things he couldn’t let go.

  His weapons of choice for beating himself up over and over again.

  He turned the tap to hot and watched the steam cloud his image from the mirror. If only it could cloud his memories as easily.

  When he returned to the main room, he paused beside the bed. He pulled back the comforter and sat on the clean sheets as he stared at the nightstand.

  The drawer slid open silently, and he reached inside and lifted the bottle. There was still about a third of the whiskey left, and he held the neck for a moment, watching the light shimmer on the liquid as it sloshed inside.

  He set the bottle on the nightstand, turned off the light and lay down. The cushion of the mattress should have signaled the opportunity for desired rest, but although he closed his eyes and tried to clear his mind of the memories bubbling just beneath the surface, sleep denied him. He lingered in the semiconscious state, with a heightened awareness of the room around him, despite the dark. One thing about this motel he hated; it was in a wind tunnel, and when the gusts gained strength it sounded the way he imagined a thousand screaming banshees would, and yet it wasn’t enough to drown out the other noises.

  Every creak as someone shifted in the bed in the room above him, every time someone in the room beside him flicked channels during the commercial breaks, every beat of his heart…It all echoed in his ears, despite the way the wind wailed.

  Until replaced by a deafening quiet.

  The stillness was unnatural and unsettling. Craig’s consciousness began to pull itself through the fog as his muscles tensed.

  Sweat trickled down his back as he sat up and threw the covers off, fighting the cloud that still hovered over his brain. Where was he? What was he doing here?

  As he connected with the answers, his breathing slowed and the muscles in his shoulders relaxed, but he still felt the twisting in his gut, the way the hair on the back of his neck stood on end.

  Even through the thick motel curtains he could tell it was unusually dark outside his room. At some point over the past few months he’d grown accustomed to the dim glow of motel lights slipping under the door or sometimes through the far side of the window if the drape wasn’t pulled over all the way. This night, there was nothing but blackness, and he blinked a few times to reassure himself that he really did have his eyes open, despite feeling the familiar burning from fatigue.

  He reached for his gun, fingers finding the recognizable metal in the darkness as he swung his legs out of the bed.

  That was when his brain figured out what was wrong with this picture, and he glanced back toward the television.

  The lights that stayed on twenty-four seven were off, on all the electronic appliances.

  Craig set the gun back down, picked up his cell phone and flipped it open.

  4:49 a.m.

  He groaned as he shut the phone and tossed it back down beside his gun. How was it possible to feel as though his head had barely hit the pillow when it was almost time to get up?

  The wind had knocked out the power, to the motel at least. If the outage was more widespread, it could make for a busy day, with the possibility of getting pulled off the investigation to direct traffic if the lights were out.

  Not something Craig usually had to do, but like Sergeant Yeager had said only hours before, they were stretched pretty thin.

  He thought about the bone-chilling cold of the night before and wondered if the sound he’d attributed to heartbeats had really been the distant drumming of rain against the roof two floors above him.

  Rain that could have turned to ice, taking down power lines, causing days of disruption as crews tried to clear roads, make repairs and the police were needed to follow up on stranded motorists or recluses without power or supplies who might need to be dug out. Chaos disrupting the order of their investigations.

  Craig scratched his head as he swung his legs back up on top of the bed, lay down and forced his eyes shut.

  It was wishful thinking, and he knew it.

  The low moan of the wind returned, and with it he felt himself drifting into a restless sleep.

  Part of his brain still wondered how he was going to handle the problem with Mac and part tried not to think about Ashlyn’s silhouette in the moonlight or the feeling of her breath on his skin.

  Tain sat on the edge of the bed, head in his hands. It was almost five a.m., and the team could only afford a few hours of sleep before they met at the station.

  He lay down against the comforter, knowing he should take the time to get undressed, but not daring to let his body fully relax into a sound sleep. This was another part of working a case that nobody could train you for, how to sleep when your mind was still processing the details, turning over all the information, trying to home in on the things that didn’t sit right and figure out why they were bothering you.

  Usually for the first day or two, the adrenaline compensated for the exhaustion, but this day had taken an emotional toll.

  He felt the burst of anger when he thought about what had happened in Steve’s office. There weren’t many people Tain claimed to trust, but Steve had earned his respect over time. Tain could speak freely without fear of unreasonable rebuke, and he’d been able to tell himself that as an RCMP officer, he might still be able to do some good.

  Lately he’d found himself thinking he couldn’t, that he’d be better off walking away. The politics, the bureaucracy that contaminated the process…

  What he couldn’t walk away from was Ashlyn. In the past few months, she’d had to deal with the reality of being a victim herself. First she’d had a physical confrontation with Byron Smythe, a shady lawyer who put profits ahead of people and threatened to jeopardize a murder investigation. It wasn’t a stretch to hold him responsible for the deaths of three more people; Smythe may not have pulled the trigger, but his interference kept critical information from them. Tain knew Ashlyn blamed Smythe, at least in part.

  The other person she blamed was Officer Parker, a cop from the Port Moody Police Department who’d seemed to feel the job was about power instead of about serving the public, the kind of guy who liked to throw his weight around when it suited him and fell down on the job when it really mattered. When Ashlyn had been assaulted in the home she’d shared with Craig and Officer Parker had been charged it hadn’t come as a surprise to Tain, but the evidence was thin. Ashlyn had never gotten a good look at the person who put her in the hospital.

  Who caused her miscarriage.

  Pa
rker had been suspended, and there were rumors that even if he was cleared he wouldn’t get his job back. Port Moody had brought in the RCMP because they needed their resources on a high-profile murder of a four-year-old boy just days before Christmas, and they’d ended up on the wrong end of a scandal when it was revealed that one victim was murdered while police officers who were supposed to be watching him slept in their car outside. Ashlyn had filed complaints about Parker during the investigation, and when the ax fell Parker had blamed her.

  They’d had to go to court to testify, and they were still waiting for a verdict. Ashlyn didn’t need to say anything. Every time her phone rang he could see it in her eyes. She needed closure, but he feared she might not get it, and in recent weeks both Smythe and Parker had tried to smear Ashlyn in the press.

  Smythe being so generous he’d offered to defend Parker pro bono.

  So generous, or just hell-bent on getting even with Ashlyn after the confrontation they’d had at the mall, a confrontation that had gotten physical.

  He wondered how Ashlyn would cope if Parker got off, about the timing of facing the forthcoming verdict while working the murder of a girl they knew. A girl they knew from the first case they’d worked together, a case they’d both rather forget. Had it been harder to see Millie’s body in the Dumpster, or to see Ashlyn trying to pretend everything was okay?

  It wasn’t a hard question to answer.

  In the months since her attack, Ashlyn had closed herself off, had buried her pain and her grief and tried to shield it from everyone, including him, and as much as he wanted to offer her the dignity of respect, of confidence that she’d pull through, the more time passed, the more he worried.

  Perhaps the end of the trial would allow her to begin the healing process, even if Parker got off.

  Not if. When. He’d seen the evidence himself, and it was purely circumstantial. Smythe had even thrown himself in as another potential suspect with as much motive as Parker for hurting Ashlyn, casting more doubt on a case that was dubious at best.