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

by Ruttan, Sandra

  He tried to push his concerns about Ashlyn from the forefront of his mind and forced himself to think about the case. Although the manner and timing was a shock, if he thought about it, Millie’s death wasn’t much of a surprise. Victims often had a hard time pulling their lives together.

  And he didn’t know many people who’d survived what Millie had and gone on to lead a normal life.

  The truth was that the greater tragedy might lie in the fact that their investigation would prove Millie had made something of herself. Possibly found peace.

  Happiness seemed too much to hope for.

  He was glad they’d surveyed the body and made observations before they knew it was her. They’d both said the body was too clean for a working girl, didn’t feel right for a pro.

  Which meant maybe Millie hadn’t been on the streets. Maybe she hadn’t deserved this.

  No. Nobody deserved to be murdered and discarded in a Dumpster. What he meant was that maybe Millie hadn’t been involved in something that led to her death. An innocent victim who’d simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time, not someone leading a high-risk lifestyle that would increase the chances something bad would happen to her.

  Tain rubbed his forehead. That was what was really hard to take. In the coming days, they’d pull Millie’s life apart again and either face the heartache of knowing the hell of everything she’d suffered since they’d seen her last, or knowing she’d been strong enough to pull herself through it and come out on the other side, only to fall victim to some other lunatic.

  Some other lunatic.

  Campbell was dead, and Hobbs was still in prison. He’d made the call when Ashlyn went to get food, waiting until the second she disappeared down the hall before he picked up the phone.

  Making sure this didn’t connect to the first case he’d worked with Ashlyn.

  Making sure it couldn’t.

  He knew nobody deserved to be murdered and discarded in a Dumpster, but thinking about Hobbs, thinking about the feeling of bone crushing beneath his bare hands…

  It was almost enough to make him smile.

  PART TWO

  THE PAST

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Three years earlier

  Jenny staggered back from the force of the blow, tasted the blood in her mouth, felt the edge of the dresser digging into her lower back as she hit it and reached out with her hands to steady herself. She’d worked her way up to a small room, in the old house across from the Inn. Bobby liked having her accessible but not in the same space, which was why she had the basement suite. Thin slats of light slipped in through the small windows, and her door led out to a basement exit. The only times the door to the stairs that went to the upper levels of the house was open was when Bobby was busy with her downstairs.

  At night, she could hear the scratching sounds of rodents scurrying across the concrete floor on the other side of the wall, which was really just a sheet of paneling. The drafty basement smelled of mold and damp, and in the winter it was never warm, but it was a step up from the place in the woods, the shack where she hid out so that she didn’t have to sell herself on her mother’s terms.

  “B-but I thought—”

  He sat on the edge of the bed and laughed as he stuck one leg into his jeans, followed by the other. Once his feet were through, he stood. “You thought what? This would make me happy?” He pulled the jeans up and yanked on the zipper.

  “It’s…it’s…”

  “Scruffy, ya think it worked for your ma when she got knocked up with you? Who’s your dad, anyway? You even know?”

  Jenny felt the tears pricking at the corners of her eyes, but she fought to hold them back as she sank to her knees, hands clasped in front of her chest. “That’s not…that’s not…I didn’t…It just happened. Honest.”

  Begging him to change his mind. Begging him to believe her.

  “Whatever. I’m done with this. Ain’t no way I want some screamin’ brat around. You’ll love it more than you love me, and I always told ya I don’t want kids, didn’t I?”

  “Don’t go. Please don’t go. Please.” She could hear the whine in her voice and hated herself for it, but just the thought of him leaving made her feel like a trunk had been dropped on her chest. What would she do without Bobby? She wouldn’t even have a job.

  A job. She looked down at her stomach, which in time would swell. She wouldn’t be able to fit into the places she currently could, wouldn’t be able to thieve for Bobby or spy on drops or anything. Shit. If he was cutting her loose she had…nothing. Jenny choked the words out through the sobs that shook her body. “Please, I’ll never love anyone more than you, I swear. I promise you, Bobby, I promise. I’ll prove it to you. I’ll do anything.”

  He stopped with his hand on the door and turned back to look at her.

  “Anything, Scruffy-love?”

  She nodded as the tears streamed down her face, and he took a step back toward her, tilted her chin up so that her neck was bent almost all the way back. He looked down into her eyes.

  “Okay, Scruffy-love. There might just be a way for you to prove it to me.” He smiled down at her, and it was a cold smile. She could see that, and inside she felt her heart sinking as the fear of what he’d demand started to rise within her, but instead of backing away she leaned forward and wrapped her arms around his legs and held him there.

  “I’ll do anything. Anything you want.”

  He’d had her body, and ever since she’d started working for him on his side businesses, he’d owned her soul. What more could he possibly ask of her? Whatever he wanted, it couldn’t be that bad, she told herself over and over again, until she almost believed it.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Eighteen months ago

  When Constable Ashlyn Hart had thought about introducing herself to her new colleagues, she’d tried to work out a number of possible scenarios in her mind. Every attempt to anticipate all possible responses had been made, down to quizzing friends and talking to her mentor from The Depot, the training academy for Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers. She couldn’t gain much personal information from anyone who’d worked in the area or might know her new colleagues because she’d been ordered not to disclose the details of her transfer until after she’d joined the team, a fact that piqued her curiosity even more, but she knew she needed to hit the ground running and integrating into the team successfully would be crucial. She’d done what she could to prepare by trying to plan for the various responses she might face when she arrived for her new assignment.

  Sidestepping any issues quickly would be critical, so sleep had been exchanged for considering what it would be like working with a new partner, speculating what the Interior of British Columbia was like in the fall, whether her partner would have a family.

  The other thing she’d found herself worrying about was how well they’d get along. She’d done one short stint in plainclothes, more by default than anything, because the local people had an issue with strict regulations and the uniform served as an obstacle when it came to building trust. The assignment was at a detachment so far in the sticks that she’d found herself handling nuisance complaints about property lines and curbside parking on the small stretch of dirt road that they called a main street. The weeks she’d spent there in the spring had basically amounted to clerical duty and refereeing. In truth, she was a rookie, and as a rookie plainclothes officer, the only thing she expected was to be paired up with someone older, with a lot more experience. Playing the statistics, it was likely she’d be working with a male partner, and if she had a male partner who was married, it could cause some tension for them in their personal life. It was even possible she’d find herself working with someone who had a problem with women on the force.

  It was also possible that she’d be working with someone who would assume she was just a young kid, pushed up the ladder because of her gender, that she wasn’t up to the job.

  She’d devoured all the newspaper articles about the tea
m that she could find, but there wasn’t much information, and she was working off the assumption that she wasn’t the only new person being transferred in.

  A lot of possibilities had gone through Ashlyn’s mind as she’d made the trip to BC’s Interior. The one thing that hadn’t occurred to her was that she might find the station locked with no sign of anyone around.

  Ashlyn turned. The crisp morning air had a surprisingly strong smell of smoke. She wondered if wood-burning fireplaces were that common in the area. Would she have a wood stove in her temporary accommodations? She didn’t even know where she’d be living.

  The transfer had been that abrupt. Nighthawk Crossing didn’t have a large RCMP detachment, but a few bad headlines had put the small town on the provincial map for all the wrong reasons, and it had become a focal point for politicians who wanted to give people the idea they were actually serious about doing something about crime.

  Accused serial killer Robert Pickton had been on trial since January, and the press hadn’t been content to cover the courtroom drama. They’d been eager to remind residents that the police had failed the women Pickton was accused of murdering, that prejudice against sex-trade workers and the homeless was rampant in society. The number of missing women bore witness to a pervasive indifference, but while most citizens were comfortable living with their prejudices they were also willing to assert that the people paid to serve and protect should not allow their own biases to cloud their judgment or dictate how they handled their jobs.

  In other words, the police should care, even if the rest of society didn’t. That was the convenient thing to say when the eyes of the world were looking down their noses at a police force that had allowed a pig farmer to murder forty-nine women before being caught.

  Pointing out he’d only allegedly murdered forty-nine women didn’t help much.

  With the police, it was possible to understand. Call after call, arrest after arrest—they did what they could to get women off the streets. And court date after court date, they watched the women walk back out onto the street after serving a minimal time behind bars or having their bail paid by their pimp.

  The truth was, if one of those windblown citizens had been mugged for so much as twenty bucks or harassed by a squeegee guy on East Hastings they would have begrudged the lack of police response because of reassigned manpower dealing with the serial-killer case. As long as the police were still there to take the call when an upstanding taxpaying citizen had his mailbox covered with graffiti, they shouldn’t embarrass the nation with their prejudices, although that was the condition inferred silently. Nobody wanted to be the one to actually say it. It would confirm the bias—the belief that some victims were more important than others—wasn’t a police prejudice. The police worked on the scale of priorities within the limits of the manpower and resources they had available and the political pressure they were under. It was people who decided some victims were more important than others.

  Reporters had been quick to capitalize on the story, and when interest in Pickton’s victims began to fade, they pointed to the stalled investigations of unsolved missingpersons cases and the disappearances of several teenagers in the Interior, in the Similkameen Valley. More accusations of police negligence followed. The first girl had disappeared more than eighteen months earlier, while the most recent girl to disappear had already been missing for a few weeks before her mother had reported her disappearance. During the months between, nine other girls had vanished. The fallout from the finger-pointing had prompted officials to form a task force, and under normal circumstances that would have taken some wind out of the critics’ sails.

  Not this time. Instead, the mudslinging had intensified. Native girls had been disappearing in the area for over a year and a half and nothing had been done. It had taken missing white girls from decent middle-class families to get the attention of politicians. Until then, the various officers investigating individual cases hadn’t even been considering a connection between the missing Native girls and missing white girls.

  Oddly enough, as many people seemed to be upset by the use of the term Native as by the lack of action from the police. The problem with changing the language to be politically correct was that you couldn’t change what had been ingrained in the minds of people for decades, said with no offense intended but now taken as an insult. Ashlyn had never wrapped her head around the term Aboriginal, and First Nations sounded so general, so vague.

  So…sanitized. “Black” was offensive, and now “Native” wasn’t the preferred label. She wondered when someone would decide “White” should be banned. Perhaps she’d have to start calling herself a European-Canadian.

  Bickering over semantics aside, the RCMP was being forced to look over every unsolved missingpersons case in the area over the last five years that could be connected to the missing girls.

  Ashlyn paced back and forth on the sidewalk by the entrance. Some members of the team were at least a few weeks ahead of her. The task force had been created in August, and she knew some of the men had worked in Nighthawk Crossing and the surrounding area prior to being reassigned, but for some reason she was being transferred in now, and with only thirty-six hours’ advance notice, there hadn’t been much time to get a handle on what was going on.

  A glance at her watch told her she was ten minutes late. Shit…Had she set her clock back when she’d crossed the border from Alberta? Maybe she was actually early. She’d been a bit behind schedule. The Trans-Canada Highway cut through the center of Calgary, and an accident at the intersection with Center Street had forced drivers to weave through residential areas, trying to make their way around the mess. Canada’s fourth-largest city desperately needed a ring road, but politics had stalled the process. Billions in oil revenue pumped into the local economy annually, but there wasn’t enough money to build the highway. Wasn’t that always the way?

  She’d still found time to stop at the candy store in Banff and stock up on treats for her nieces and nephews and her cousin’s daughter.

  Those things were clear in her mind, but what had happened when she’d continued west and crossed the border wasn’t.

  She drew in a breath and let it out slowly. The way it pricked her throat was a reminder that summer was in its twilight. When she’d gotten out of her car, she would have described it as a crisp morning, but as she stood on the sidewalk, wondering if she hadn’t set her watch back, she changed her mind. It was chilly.

  She pulled out her cell phone to solve the mystery, then adjusted the time on her watch. Early.

  Instead of returning to her car to warm up, Ashlyn started to walk around the building. The station was small, not designed for task forces and long-term investigations that required plainclothes officers. It didn’t take long to make her way around to the back.

  When she reached the back of the building, a quick scan of the area took in the back door of the station and a handful of vehicles filling up most of the staff parking.

  Ashlyn frowned and turned to look at the back door again. It wasn’t flush against the frame, and as she stepped closer, she could see what appeared to be a dark plastic bag that had been caught in the bottom. She crouched down and looked at the bag, which she guessed must contain a ream’s worth of paper, if not more. Ashlyn ran her hand along the edge of the door and looked in.

  It wasn’t closed.

  Someone had dropped the bag, probably without realizing it, and failed to secure the back door.

  They must have left in a hurry. A bundle of five hundred sheets of paper had some weight to it. How could anyone not notice?

  Ashlyn grabbed the bag and tugged on it, but failed to dislodge it from the door. She paused.

  Her top priority should be closing the door to secure the station, but she had an opportunity to get inside. Part of her disliked the idea of literally sneaking in the back door.

  She thought about the locked front door and glanced around the parking lot again. There were too many vehicles on site for
the station to be empty, so she pressed her head up against the side of the door.

  No voices, no cough, no hum of a photocopier at work or footsteps down the hall. She jumped when she heard a phone ring in the distance. It rang half a dozen times before it stopped. No one had answered it.

  After one final glance around, Ashlyn pulled the door open, wedged herself in the opening and picked up the bag. As she looked up into the station, she listened to the silence.

  Close the door, go back to her car and wait? Although she was early, she had no idea how long she might sit there, and without access to the station, she also didn’t have access to the temporary accommodations she was being provided with, so she had nowhere else to go.

  The door was open. She could go inside. Ashlyn glanced at the bundle in her hand. How could a trained officer drop a bag filled with papers and not notice it?

  She’d assumed they were dropped when someone was leaving. What if someone had dropped them on their way in? She thought about the unanswered phone.

  They could be in the bathroom or, worse, in need of medical assistance. Only one thing was certain. Something wasn’t right.

  Ashlyn stepped inside. The back door opened to what amounted to a large closet that the hall went through, before turning. It was still possible someone was there who hadn’t heard her at the front door.

  After a deep breath and quick glance at the fully shut door behind her, Ashlyn walked through the entry area and turned to go down the hall.

  “Who the hell are you, and just what the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  Said as the file she was reading was snatched out of her hands with so much force the chair she was sitting in wobbled. She’d been leaning back, the front legs off the ground, her feet propped up by the bottom desk drawer, which had already been pulled out. Had it not been for her presence of mind and ability to grab the corner of the desk beside her, Ashlyn doubted she would have stayed upright.