* * *
Mick and Raven watched on the CCTV system as Constable Darren Tate entered the lockup area less than ten minutes after coming on duty.
“Bingo,” Raven said.
“I can’t believe Tate is involved in all of this,” Mick whispered, as if Tate could hear them. “How deep do you think he’s involved?”
“All the way,” Raven answered. “I’m willing to bet he’s linked to Paigo in some way.”
They could see Adara at the bars of her cell now, talking animatedly with Tate. He nodded several times and then Adara waved her hand out to her side as if dismissing him. He turned and left lock up.
“Pretty obvious who’s giving the orders,” Mick said.
Raven switched monitors, bringing up the camera for the evidence room. “Yeah, it’s like he’s her little bitch.”
They waited a good forty-five minutes before the evidence room’s CCTV camera went black. There was a sudden dimming in the room that drew Raven’s attention to it.
“He cut the camera feed.” She moved to the monitor and brought up one of the cameras she installed earlier. The lights came on in the evidence room and Tate stood in the doorway. He glanced over his shoulder and closed the door behind him. Raven switched to another monitor, bringing up another camera, this one focused on the aisle where evidence boxes with Adara’s name on them had been planted after they shipped the real evidence down to Orillia for safe keeping. It took Tate a few minutes to locate them and then he carried one box at a time, stacking them next to the door. Then he left the room, turning off the lights and leaving the boxes next to the door.
Raven followed him on a monitor displaying multiple cameras inside and outside of the station. He checked the hallways, squad room, and the bullpen before going out to the parking lot. He got in his vehicle and brought it around to the side door, close to where the evidence room was located. Raven waited until he was going back for the last box before she sent a text to LaCroix.
“Let’s go,” she said to Mick.
They walked out the front door and Mick turned to the left, Raven to the right. Raven jogged around the building and waited just around the corner. When she saw the lights from LaCroix’s SUV, she stepped around the corner with her gun raised, facing the front of the car. Tate stood behind it, closing his trunk.
“Step away from the vehicle, Tate, and let me see your hands,” she called out. The look on his face was priceless. His bulging eyes darted around looking for a way out.
“Hands,” Raven yelled.
Tate’s right hand reached for his weapon, but it wasn’t in its holster. Mick was right behind him and had lifted it out. She pushed him onto the trunk, securing his hands behind his back before he realized what was happening. Raven’s heart swelled in pride. “Yeah, she’ll do,” she murmured to herself.
Mick removed Tate’s duty belt and LaCroix patted him down.
“What the hell?” Tate yelled. “I was just going out on patrol. What the hell is this?”
LaCroix pulled him off of the trunk and Mick popped it open. “Want to explain what you’re doing with the evidence from the Adara Kirby case in your trunk, Constable?” LaCroix asked.
“I-I was just … uh, I …”
“Yeah,” Raven said as she approached. “You were just …uh … what?”
Tate jumped back into LaCroix, screaming, “Keep her away from me.”
Raven nearly doubled over laughing. What the heck did he think she as going to do to him?
Mick and LaCroix escorted Tate into an interview room and Raven had two uniforms carry the boxes back inside. They were just filled with photocopy paper to weigh them down, but now they were evidence as well. Evidence with Tate’s fingerprints all over them because he hadn’t bothered to glove up. Idiot.
They left Tate sitting in the interview room while they executed the warrants. They began with his locker at the station and his patrol vehicle before moving on to his personal vehicle and his apartment. The first three gave them nothing except the evidence boxes.
Raven and Mick climbed the three flights of stairs to his apartment about an hour behind the forensics team. They donned paper booties and signed in with the uniformed officer at the door. The first thing Raven noticed when she opened the door was the smell of rot, like food had been left out too long. She scanned the room, taking in the empty beer bottles on nearly every flat surface and food containers scattered about. Clothes were scattered over various pieces of furniture and it looked like the guy didn’t own a vacuum. One of the forensics guys met them just inside the door with a massive grin on his face. He pushed thick black framed glasses up his long nose.
“You’re going to want to see the room down the hall. First door on the right.”
“Bingo,” Raven said. This is what she expected. Darren Tate wasn’t a member of the Solstice Coven, but she was damn sure he practiced magick. Black magick. Her long legs carried her quickly down the hall with Mick double stepping behind her. At the doorway, she stopped and looked in, expecting to see a similar room to Adara’s redecorated office and she wasn’t too far off. The floor was painted black with a large inverted pentagram carved into the centre of it. Unlit candles stood like sentinels at the five points. The altar along the far wall contained spell books and the various tools of the trade.
Cheryl Danby, one of the forensics techs, worked in white, hooded coveralls and glanced over her shoulder at them. “Oh,” she said, and turned around to face them. “You’re going to want to step in and take a look at the wall behind you.”
Raven took two long steps forward and turned. Her jaw dropped as her eyes busily scanned the photograph laden wall. It was covered top to bottom and left to right with pictures of herself going back to her early teens. Tate hadn’t lived here that long though. He was sent to Solstice after graduating from the Police College. Before that, she wasn’t sure where he lived, but it wasn’t around Solstice. So, who had taken all of these pictures?
“Paigo,” Mick whispered, either figuring it out on her own or reading Raven’s thoughts.
“Get Simone Wagnar on the phone,” Raven ordered. “See if she knows if Gregor Paigo has a son.”
While Mick was busy with that, Raven called LaCroix. “I need to know who Tate’s father is. Can you look it up for me?”
“I can. Care to fill me in?”
Raven explained the photos and why Tate couldn’t have been responsible for all of them.
“As far as I know, Tate was raised near Ottawa. I’ll check his birth records and see if his father is listed,” LaCroix said.
“Thanks,” Raven hung up and went into the master bedroom. The double bed was unmade, as if Tate had just gotten out of it after a night of tossing and turning. Clothes were scattered around the room and beer bottles littered the night stands. She found spare uniforms in the closet, which confirmed this was Tate’s room. In the second bedroom, she stared at the neatly made up bed, the bare walls, and clean surfaces on the dresser and end tables. At first glance, it appeared this was an unused guest room. Raven checked the closet first and found a row of plaid shirts and jeans hanging in it. The drawers were filled with t-shirts, underwear, and socks – all neatly folded. It appeared that Gregor Paigo wasn’t the filthy pig his property on the lake suggested. In fact, the bastard didn’t live there. It had probably been sitting empty for years. Damn it. She should have picked up on that.
“Dr. Wagnar said that if he has any kids, she doesn’t know about it,” Mick reported as Raven stepped back out into the hallway.
“Oh, he has at least one,” Raven said. She stuck her head back into the room with the black floor and inverted pentagram. “Cheryl? Could you have someone fingerprint the spare bedroom. Light switches, closet doors, door knobs. I want it thoroughly printed.”
“On it,” Cheryl said.
“Let’s go back to the station and interview the weak link in this trio,” Raven said to Mick.
“Which one is the weak link?”
�
�Tate.” He was the one with the most to lose. He was the one they were going to be able to break. He may have even been an unwilling accomplice in all of this. He’d gone up to Judge Cromwell’s hunt camp to get the warrant signed for Adara’s house, yet he hadn’t tipped her off.
As soon as they got back to the station, Raven went into the CCTV room to review the footage of Tate at Adara’s cell in lock up, zooming in on Adara.
“What are you looking for?” Mick asked, hovering over Raven’s shoulder.
“Watch,” Raven answered.
Unless you were zoomed in, you wouldn’t have noticed Adara’s lips moving, but they were and they were moving rapidly.
“She’s saying a spell,” Mick said.
“Yeah, she is.”
“You think Tate took the evidence out of the evidence room without knowing he was doing it?”
“I don’t know if he knew or not, but I don’t think he had a choice.”
They left the CCTV room and headed for LaCroix’s office, but he wasn’t there.
Mick followed Raven to the observation room. Tate paced back and forth along the back wall, stopping every now and then to scrub his hands over his face. He still wore his navy blue uniform pants and shirt, but his belts and Kevlar vest had been removed. He’d undone the top few buttons on the shirt and a white t-shirt was visible beneath it.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” his voice grumbled through the intercom, but he didn’t sound angry. He sounded scared shitless.
“Coffee?” LaCroix asked, entering observation with a tray holding three coffees. Raven stared at them longingly. He didn’t know she was pregnant.
“I’m sure one won’t hurt,” Mick whispered. “It’s after two in the morning and you’ve been up since about six yesterday morning.”
So had Mick, but she didn’t mention that. Maybe she thought it was harder on Raven because she was pregnant and she was probably right. Raven felt exhausted and every inch of her body ached. God, she wanted that coffee. LaCroix slipped one out of the tray and handed it to her. She couldn’t not take it. He’d know something was up because Raven always drank coffee.
“Thanks, Sarge.”
Raven filled him in on what they’d seen on the CCTV as they watched Tate pace nervously.
“You think Adara put some kind of spell on him?”
“Yeah.” Raven took her first sip of coffee and closed her eyes to savour it. She couldn’t say it tasted any different than the decaf, but for some reason it was a whole lot better.
“You okay,” LaCroix asked.
“Oh, yeah. I just really needed this caffeine kick.”
“So, how do you want to go at this?”
Raven watched Tate for a moment, mumbling to himself as he paced back and forth.
“Let’s bring in the video from the evidence room. See what he has to say about that.” She went back to her desk and grabbed her laptop then entered the interview room with Mick while LaCroix watched from the box. They took their seats while Tate continued to wear the thin carpet bare across from them. Raven set up her laptop and brought up the surveillance footage. She cued up the clip in lock up first. “Take a look at this,” she said, swivelling the laptop around to face him. Tate placed his hands on the table and leaned over. While he watched the video play through, Raven watched his expressions.
“So what? I checked on a prisoner. There’s nothing wrong with that.”
“Okay,” Raven said, spinning the laptop around to face her. She cued up the segment from the evidence room and spun it around again. “Tell me about this.”
While he’d been attentive and curious watching the first video, he was anything but watching this one. His face turned red, his exhalations heavy. He clenched his hands into tight fists on the table. Raven pushed her chair back a few inches to be ready in case he turned violent.
“You already know I took the boxes out of the evidence room. I was transporting them down to Orillia.”
“Really? There was no order for them to be transferred.”
Tate swiped at the laptop, sending it sailing towards the end of the table and Mick caught it before it flew over the edge.
“This is bullshit. There was an order on the sergeants desk when I came in. You must have done something with it.” He pointed his finger at Raven. “You’re setting me up. You’ve always had it out for me.”
Raven smiled up at him. “We’ve been to your apartment, Tate.”
That shut him up pretty darn quick. He spun around as if he’d been punched. “Fuck.”
Raven rose out of her chair. “You can either sit down and have a calm conversation with us or I’ll walk you down to lock up and place the multitude of charges against you including accessory to murder and accessory to attempted murder.”
He was definitely in panic mode, breathing like a bull facing a matador, his face resembling a red traffic light. He dropped his face into his hands and swore again. “It’s not going to make any damn difference. You’re not going to believe a word I say. You may as well just lock me the fuck up.”
Raven pulled the laptop towards her and brought up the video from lock up again. She zoomed in on Adara’s face and turned the laptop towards Tate again.
“She’s chanting a spell, isn’t she? She’s compelling you to remove the evidence.”
Tate turned, dropping his hands from his face and studied the laptop screen. “That’s how she’s doing it? She’s using a spell on me?”
“Sit down, Tate. Tell me what you know,” Raven said. “And how Gregor Paigo is involved in all of this.”
He looked at her with an expression of utter shock. “How do you know about Gregor?”
His birth records listed his father as unknown, but Raven was sure Gregor Paigo was Darren Tate’s father. “You share an apartment and some of the photos of me in your black magick room date back to when you would have been ten years old, long before you came to Solstice.”
“It’s his room, not mine. I don’t have anything to do with that stuff.”
“Yet you were at the gathering of the coven tonight.”
“She asks me to do stuff for her and I can’t say no. It’s like I have to do it. I have no choice.”
“What else has she asked of you?”
“Nothing. This only started after you arrested Gregor. I swear to God I had nothing to do with what Gregor was doing or what Adara has been up to. The two of them have been working together, either in Gregor’s creepy room or in hers. After he was locked up, she started calling me, telling me she needed help. All I did was carry a thermos for her to the gathering. She gave me some weird verse that I was supposed to chant thirteen times along with her. That was it.”
“Did you know what you were doing when you removed the boxes from evidence?”
Tate dropped his head into his hands, elbows on the table. “Yeah, but I couldn’t stop myself. I had to do it. Just take me down to lock up. You’re not going to believe anything I say.”
“I believe you,” Raven said.
Tate’s head popped up and he stared into Raven’s ice blue eyes. “You do?”
“You went out to Judge Cromwell’s hunt camp to get him to sign the warrant for the search on Adara’s house, but you didn’t tip her off. That tells me you’re on the up and up.”
Tate sagged, as if all of the tension in his body suddenly released.
“Tell me what you know about the four women Paigo abducted.”
“I don’t know anything about that. Honestly, I don’t.”
“You must have seen my pictures on the wall of his … whatever that room is.”
“Yeah, but I thought he was just obsessed with you, you know? You’re hot, Raven. I thought he just had a thing for you.”
She didn’t know whether to be flattered or repulsed. She needed to interview Paigo and find out why her pictures were plastered on that wall. Had he put some sort of dark magick spell on her?
“What about Adara? What do you know about what she was up to?”
“Nothing. You have to believe me. I don’t know what she did to Ena Bowen. I know you charged her with Ena’s murder, but I don’t know anything about it.”
Raven let out a frustrated sigh and signalled to LaCroix through the two way mirror. He entered the room and told Tate he was on suspension, but he was free to go. Raven, Mick, and LaCroix went back to his office where LaCroix made a call to let the officers assigned to tail Tate know he was leaving the building. Raven sank down into one of the chairs facing LaCroix’s desk.
“I need to interview Paigo again.”
“Let’s call it a night,” LaCroix said. “I’ll make arrangements for you to see Paigo in Penatanguishene tomorrow morning.”
“And I want to interview Adara.”
LaCroix cocked his head and raised an eyebrow at Raven.
“Give me a chance, Sarge. I can probably get more out of her than anyone else.”
“We’ve got a mountain of evidence against her, Rave. Most of it in her own handwriting.”
“I know.” Raven leaned forward, locking her eyes on his. “But, we don’t know the ties between Paigo and Adara. Did she have any involvement in the abductions and murders of those girls? Did he have a hand in Ena’s death? And I’m really freaked out about all of those pictures of me on that wall. Is something going to happen to me because he’s cast some sort of spell. Or worse, is something going to happen to my –” She cut herself off there. She’d almost let it slip that was going to have a baby. “Is something going to happen to Riley? There’s a reason he targeted women who looked just like her. He’d even been trolling her profile on the Dating Pool.”
LaCroix sighed. “Fine. But, do it in the morning. Let’s get the hell out of here for the night.”
“Amen to that,” Mick said.
Despite the fact that both Paigo and Adara were locked up, Mick insisted on staying the night at Raven’s again. On the drive home, Raven said, “I’m starting to think you’ve got the hots for me, Warren.”
“Well, you are hot,” Mick laughed.
“Yeah, yeah.” Repulsed, she thought. She was definitely repulsed Tate thought she was hot. And that wound her back to thinking about the one person she wanted to think she was hot. Was she working tonight or home sleeping? Was she thinking about her or had she moved on weeks ago? Considering Riley’s profile was on a dating website, she had to assume she already moved on. She had to stop thinking about Riley.
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