“Interested in them or interested in her?”
“How come you’re all dressed up?” I asked, instead of answering Bernie’s question. “Going somewhere special?” With his tan pants he was wearing a tan corduroy jacket, a cream shirt with a brown stripe in it and nicely polished brown brogue-cut shoes.
“I just left city hall. Superintendent Mallory and I had another meeting with the mayor. She’s worried about those two little boys that have gone missing.”
“Pederast panic?”
“Among other things. Now I’m heading out to Goldstream Park to meet a friend of yours.”
“Who’s that?”
“Somebody nice.”
“Speaking of Nice, did he find anything interesting when he turned Titus Silverman’s house over?”
“Nothing that added to or contradicted the information we already had.”
“He didn’t find any dead bodies, bloodstains, bags of coke?”
“Not even a smutty postcard.”
“It would be really great to nail Titus for trafficking.”
Bernie’s face muscles tightened. “That won’t happen. Due to an unanticipated turn of events, Titus Silverman now has immunity from prosecution.”
“Don’t tell me,” I said, appalled, “that he’s made a deal with the Crown already?”
“No, Titus hasn’t copped a plea. Put your coat on. There’s something in Goldstream Park you ought to look at before it starts to smell.”
“Sorry, I can’t.”
“Baloney. A hike in the fresh air will do you good.”
I looked at Bernie’s freshly polished shoes and said, “We won’t be roughing it, obviously.”
“That’s what you think,” Bernie said.
“Just a minute,” I said. “I need to check something first.”
Bernie twiddled his thumbs while I phoned the Good Samaritan. Marnie Paul’s condition was unchanged. Visitors were still being discouraged.
“You can drive,” said Bernie, throwing his keys across the desk for me to catch.
His Interceptor has an automatic transmission and power steering so, unlike my MG, it’s no fun to drive. But I slid behind the wheel and we headed north out of town. As Douglas Street turned into Highway 17, we were listening to the police channel and heard that a fifteen-year-old girl in a stolen minivan had just run a red light at Blanshard and Hillside and driven into the side of a fuel truck. The resulting conflagration was creating traffic gridlock. I switched the radio off when the dispatcher launched into a description of the incinerated girl’s horrific injuries.
The ribbon developments flanking Victoria’s highway north gradually give way to open countryside, and over to our left we could see Portage Lagoon, where someone was paddling a white kayak and a couple of fishermen were dangling lines from a rowboat. A guy in a red wetsuit was being dragged behind a ski boat in flagrant disregard of municipal bylaws.
Traffic speeded up after we passed the Helmcken Road hospital. Beyond Millstream Road the highway gradually narrows from six lanes to three, and we began the long, slow ascent into the rocky, forested mountains that run the entire length of Vancouver Island, forming its spine. Huge evergreens spread their branches to meet each other high above—they say that squirrels can travel the length and breadth of Vancouver Island without ever touching the ground.
As we approached Goldstream Park, we drove alongside the wide, shallow creek that was the site of a flash-in-the-pan gold play a hundred and fifty years ago. When the lode petered out, the region reverted to what it had been before—a wilderness refuge for bald eagles, cougars, black bears and nature lovers—instead of the usual tacky ghost town crammed with souvenir shops and cigar-store Indians. We pulled into the unpaved parking area now filled to overflowing with cars, buses, blue-and-whites, ambulances and fire trucks. I squeezed the Interceptor into the empty space beside a pumper truck.
A park ranger, standing on a wooden bridge that spanned the creek, was pointing out Mother Nature’s unspoiled wonders to a group of schoolchildren and telling them that in a few months this creek would be thick with spawning salmon, along with the animals that flock there annually to feed on their decaying carcasses. But the kids seemed more interested in the uniformed emergency personnel coming and going along the Mount Finlayson trail than in what the ranger was saying to them.
Lightning Bradley, a middle-aged constable with a bulging gut, was leaning against a tree drinking coffee from a Styrofoam cup. When Bernie and I got out of the Interceptor, Bradley heaved his empty cup into the bushes and wandered over. “Hi, guys,” he said. “Manners is up there, waiting for you.” Pointing across the creek, he added, “What you do is, you follow that path till you get near the top. Then you kind of follow a little path that juts off to the side . . . ”
“Up your fat ass!” Bernie snarled in disbelief. “First thing you’re gonna do is, you’re gonna pick up that Styrofoam fucking cup and drop it in a garbage gobbler. Then you’re gonna waddle your sorry ass back here and show us the way.”
Bradley’s averted eyes and tight mouth showed that he’d got the message.
Grinning broadly, Bernie popped the Interceptor’s trunk, reached inside for his waterproof pants and hiking boots and proceeded to put them on.
The Mount Finlayson trail starts with an easy uphill hike over a wooden bridge and along a well-trodden path, but after a few hundred yards the ascent becomes steeper. My Chinese shoes were useless for climbing, and I was soon sliding on the damp leaves and slippery pine needles. Conditions worsened after Bradley, panting and purple-faced, led us off the main trail and along a pathless slope. Here canopies of dark, dank leaves created a perpetual twilight world, and we had to climb over barriers of rotted, fallen trees and blackberry tangles and grab at slippery, moss-covered branches for support. It took us 40 minutes to pull ourselves along the slope and up a cliff to reach a goat plateau. Nice Manners and Victoria’s chief medical examiner Cliff Tarleton, along with a couple of bunny-suiters, were there already, gazing impassively at a lumpy blue tarpaulin the size of a bed sheet that was concealing a recently exhumed human corpse.
“Looks like somebody scraped a shallow hole with his boot, rolled the body into the hole and then covered things up with loose dirt,” Manners told us. “By the time I got here, the scene-of-crime had been seriously compromised—first by scavenging animals, second by a hiker’s dog and third by the hiker who found the body. Then the two park rangers who were alerted by the hiker trampled the entire scene before they called us.”
Breathless from the climb, Bernie bent, hands on knees, and moved an edge of the tarpaulin aside to reveal the upper part of a mottled male corpse wearing a loose white shirt and grey jockey shorts. “Somebody’s done quite a number on him,” he remarked superfluously, gazing intently at the horrible thing lying at our feet. “Say, Doc, one eyeball has popped out . . . ”
Dr. Tarleton, a scruffy-looking man of fifty, ambled over. “Decomposition gases can build up pressure inside the skull,” he said. “They build up enough, it forces the eyes out like that.”
“Yeah, I know. But this guy’s head was bashed in, so how’s the pressure gonna build up? Besides, why just the one eye? Generally they both pop out.”
Tarleton shrugged. Bernie kept looking at him. Shaking his head, Tarleton said, “I don’t know everything, Bernie. Sometimes there is no simple explanation.”
Bradley, who had been leaning over the corpse for a good look, straightened up and said, “What I can’t never get over is how big eyeballs is. Bigger’n a fucking golf ball.”
A tiny white object protruded from the earth between the corpse’s legs. I took a pencil from my pocket, poked for a few moments and uncovered a scrap of paper covered with illegible handwriting.
Bernie beckoned one of the bunny-suiters and said, “Put this in an evidence bag.” Then he turned back to Tarleton. “So what do you think, Doc?”
“His face was beaten in,” said Dr. Tarleton, stating the obvious, then h
e added, “ . . . after death. It was flogged with a blunt object until it is, as you can see, unrecognizable. All of his fingers have been cut off, and I’d almost go so far as to say that they were cut off by a trained dissectionist.”
Bernie shook his head. “They look to me like they were snipped off with sharp pincers. If the guy’d had an axe, he’d have cut the hands off instead of just the fingers. And I’d guess he’d smash the face in with the blunt side, wouldn’t you?” Bernie suggested calmly.
“That’s right,” Nice Manners interjected. “But our killer was either in a hurry or he panicked, because he overlooked something. Have a look at this.”
Bernie bent over again to look more closely at the grisly remains.
Using his fingertips, Manners rolled up the corpse’s sleeve to reveal a hearts-and-flowers tattoo encircling the word “Edie.”
As calm as a gallery goer admiring a painting, Bernie examined the dead man’s partially exposed right arm. After several moments, he straightened up to ask, “Any idea how long he’s been here, Doc?”
“Can’t say offhand. Probably been dead for a week or ten days. There’s no telling, of course, how long ago he was brought to this location.” Then the medical examiner cleared his throat and added, “He was shot with a single bullet. It went through his left temple and came out the back of his head.”
“Hm-m,” Bernie said. “A week or ten days . . . ”
“And Titus Silverman has been missing for a week or ten days,” Manners commented.
“Yes, very good, Nice,” Bernie replied genially. “Titus Silverman has been missing for a week or ten days. This could be him.”
“Oh, it’s him all right,” Manners returned smugly. “I had a hunch about this and called Vital Statistics. Titus Silverman married Edith Dundern in 1984. The marriage ended in divorce eight years ago.”
“Good work, Nice. What do you plan to do next?”
“Well, if you’re done, we’ll bring the rest of the squad up. Lay the whole area out in a one-metre grid and search every millimetre.”
“In the old days we used to lay things out in three-foot grids and search every inch,” Bernie mused.
“Things change,” Nice Manners observed.
“They certainly do,” Bernie said. “Old-fashioned villains took pride in their work. They dug graves at least six feet deep. They made life more difficult for coppers and for our hungry four-legged friends.”
Dr. Tarleton decided to add his two bits. “Quite right,” he said. “This park is probably full of old buried corpses.”
“And I certainly hope they stay buried,” Bernie chuckled. “Otherwise we’ll be tripping all over the fuckers.”
A helicopter hovered unseen above the trees. Bernie put a hand in his pocket and brought out his smelly corncob. In the silence after the chopper’s pock-pock-pocking had faded away, we could hear the far-off roar of diesel trucks downshifting as they ascended the Malahat and jake-braking on their descent. Speaking to nobody in particular, Bernie said, “What’s the easiest way in and out of this spot?”
Nice Manners shrugged.
Bradley said, “There’s no easy way. If you head uphill, there’s an old logging road that leads over to the Bear Mountain subdivisions and a golf course, but it’s real rugged country. We better go down the way we came up.”
“That’s not what I’m getting at, Bradley. I’d like to know how this corpse got here.”
“He didn’t walk,” Manners declared. “Somebody probably drove the dead body in along that logging road and slid it down here instead of carrying it up.”
“That helps narrow things a bit,” Doc Tarleton said. “The person or persons that you’re looking for are rugged and sure-footed and clever enough to plan ahead and take advantage of inclined planes.”
“How about a sidehill gouger?” Bernie said.
“How about sasquatches?” Doc Tarleton countered. “Apart from the mechanical advantage thing, a sasquatch would fit the bill in every respect.”
After examining the evidence, I had to agree with Nice Manners’ theory. Titus Silverman had been murdered and mutilated—or mutilated then murdered—after which his body had been dragged downhill from the logging road.
As Bernie, Constable Bradley and I began slipping and sliding our way back to the parking area, Bradley said, “Say, Bernie, what’s a sidehill gouger?”
“A species of mountain goat,” Bernie replied gravely, “that’s seldom seen except in the Cariboo. The right legs of sidehill gougers are a bit longer than their left legs, so they can only go uphill counter clockwise. Most people only see their trails, which wind up and down the hillsides like corkscrews.”
Bradley rose to the bait. “So how do they get downhill?”
“Young sidehill gougers roll down. They lose their balance when they get to the flat land at the top and just tumble downhill like drunken sailors. Old sidehill gougers go downhill backwards.”
≈ ≈ ≈
We were almost back to Victoria when Bernie mused, “About Lawrence Trew and his alleged bad temper . . . From the available evidence it would seem that he might have been involved in a punch-up in the kitchen of his house. The other guy might have been one of his acquaintances—a friend even. That assumption is feasible because, before you entered Trew’s house and saw those bloodstains in his kitchen, his back door was unlocked and the security alarm had been deactivated, and that suggests Trew invited his assailant in.”
“Well yes, his security alarm had been switched off but not necessarily by Trew,” I objected. “It’s activated by an ordinary four-digit keypad device. Some of his regular guests would probably know that keypad number—in fact, lots of people might know it. It’s likely to be the last four numbers on his social insurance card or the year of his birth—something easy for him to remember. Then what happens is one of his former girlfriends or house guests is at the hairdresser’s and the hairdresser mentions birthdays. They start talking about security and later it turns out that the hairdresser’s son is a housebreaker . . . ”
Bernie smiled charitably. “A likely scenario, except we’re not talking about an ordinary housebreaking. That was Trew’s blood on the floor. We’re probably talking about a killer.”
“How about this,” I suggested. “Trew’s at home when somebody rings his doorbell. He looks outside, sees Titus Silverman. Opens the door and lets him in. Trew loses his temper, blows are exchanged, and Titus Silverman ends up with his face beaten to a pulp and no fingers. According to Doc Tarleton, somebody who knew what he was doing removed those fingers, and Trew, as we know, was a doctor.” I parked Bernie’s Interceptor beside a fire hydrant across the street from my office and switched off the engine.
Bernie yawned, flexed his shoulders and stretched in his seat. “Deer hunters also know how to dismember animals, as do butchers. Cutting off a guy’s fingers can’t be too tricky—in spite of what Doc Tarleton says.” He paused before adding, “There’s been a suggestion that because Trew had an affluent lifestyle, he must have had a big income, possibly from drugs, but there’s no evidence to support that, and I’m beginning to doubt it. He has a record, but he’s not an ordinary criminal—he doesn’t even park next to fire hydrants.”
“Al Capone didn’t have a criminal record either, till the FBI busted him for income-tax evasion.” As I was getting out of the car, I said, “Trew might have gambling debts.” And this reminded me of something else. “By the way, Bernie, what did you do with Titus Silverman’s address book?”
He took it out of the glove compartment, climbed out of the passenger seat and gave it to me.
“I’ll call you,” I said.
“What Lightning Bradley told us earlier about there being no easy way to the top of that hill?” Bernie said as he walked around to the driver’s side. “He’s probably right, but how would he know? He sure as hell hasn’t hiked up there.”
“He wasn’t always fat.”
Sighing, Bernie drove off.
CHAPTE
R FOURTEEN
A few days later I was sitting in a booth in Mom’s Cafe at the Fisherman’s Marina, drinking coffee and having a side of New York fries. The jukebox was out of order, and an old-fashioned radio on a shelf behind the counter was tuned to KPLU. Somebody who sounded like B.B. King but wasn’t was singing Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit.” I looked out the window. Because of the Japanese current, fog had formed along the outer coast and was now drifting inland and blanketing the Inner Harbour. Tonight, perhaps, the fog would rise above the mountains and give us more rain.
In another booth a couple of telephone repairmen and a man dressed like a stonemason were eating lunch. The only other customer was a guy wearing half-moon glasses and dressed in a Nike tracksuit with the jacket unzipped to his navel. He was sitting alone in a corner tapping a laptop’s keys. Perspiration beaded his brow and ran down his cheeks.
Somebody slapped me on the shoulder and then sat on the red vinyl and silver duct-tape-upholstered seat across from me. It was that ink-stained wretch Fred Halloran, and he seemed happy to see me. Baring his gleaming white dentures and carefully enunciating every consonant, he said, “I was driving past and noticed your little coupe. Somebody has let all the air out of your tires, old chap, so I thought I’d buy your lunch and cheer you up.”
“Buy your own lunch. I’m eating this one.”
“No, seriously, I’ve been thinking of giving you a call.”
“You need a favour?”
“What’s the latest on those missing kids?”
I gave him a blank look.
“The ones from Harris Green,” Fred persisted. “The pair of ’em vanished at the same time. A bit unusual, don’t you think?”
“Not at all. Two boys or two girls will often run off together on a lark. In a way it’s a good sign because it probably means that, wherever they are, they probably weren’t kidnapped. Diddlers usually grab one kid at a time.”
Fred leaned across the table and seemed about to unveil the secrets of the Sphinx when a waitress came out of the kitchen carrying a jug of coffee. When she saw Fred, she gave an agitated double take. She was about Fred’s age—thin, grey–haired and wearing glasses with bottle lenses that magnified her dark eyes. The drab green dress she wore hung loosely from her narrow shoulders, and she looked careworn and exhausted. After a short pause, she straightened with a visible effort and came over to us, carrying a menu and a coffee pot.
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