by H. P. Bayne
Sully found himself ruminating on Marc’s gloomy thought as he waited on the edge of campus for Dez to pick him up. Once the SUV pulled up, Sully dropped into his usual spot in the passenger seat and passed along details of his visit to the library and those with Emily and Marc.
By the time he’d finished, Dez had parked in front of a diner they’d visited before, a place that did burgers and fries like no place else Sully had ever eaten.
Dez guided them to a high-backed booth near the rear, far enough from other diners to allow them to talk privately.
“So Marc thinks this reaper’s not a threat?” Dez asked.
“He admitted he’s never encountered one personally, so he can’t say anything for sure. But he said lore suggests reapers aren’t good or bad, just ….”
Sully trailed off as a waitress approached, menus in hand.
Dez waved the menus off. “I think we’re both getting burgers with fries. Double cheeseburger for me.”
“Swiss mushroom,” Sully said. “And could I get a water too?”
Dez rolled his eyes. “Cola for me. I’m going full sugar. I need it.”
The waitress smiled and returned to the back with the orders.
Sully smirked at Dez. “Why do you need sugar?”
“Comfort food,” Dez said. “If we’re about to go toe to toe with the Grim Reaper, I need all the comfort I can get. So not good or bad, huh?”
“Nope. Just gatherers of souls.”
“Kind of like you. Huh. Maybe you’re a reaper. Like a living one.”
“Let’s not go there. What did you find out?”
“Had a long chat with the lady heading up Missing Persons. Sergeant Lilian Danvers. Thought she was going to give me the boot, but then Lachlan’s name came up. Turns out she trained under him and actually likes the guy. Anyway, she handled one of the complaints relating to Gabe’s running, once when he was gone for two weeks. But as part of her investigation, she pulled all the material on previous similar calls for service about him. She grabbed the files for me and took me through what she could, on the QT.
“She told me he always came back well-rested, well-fed, no evidence of any trauma. Problem was—just like with every other police officer who’d dealt with Gabe over the years—she wasn’t able to get him to tell her where he’d been or who he’d been with. She said she checked in with everyone he knew, too, and nothing.”
“Weird.”
“Yeah. Here’s something else: Will Pembroke isn’t his birth father. Turns out his birth dad is a guy named Tim Whitebear. And I’ll bet you can’t guess what happened to Tim.”
Sully raised his eyebrows and leaned forward, enabling him to answer quietly. “He was killed near Edge Creek?”
Dez nodded. “Pretty much right where we were standing, actually. Suicide by train. Unfortunately, Danvers didn’t have the file on the suicide, but I’m willing to bet Lachlan knows where to go to get it.”
“Hey, Dez, you didn’t happen to see a photo of this Tim guy, did you?”
Dez tilted his head as he regarded Sully. “You’re thinking about that other ghost you saw near the tracks right before we left, aren’t you?”
“Just a thought,” Sully said. “Realistically, this Tim guy could be one of the invisible spirits I sensed on the train, or maybe he crossed over a long time ago. I’d just like to be sure.”
“I hear ya,” Dez said. “Let’s eat and talk about something less creepy first, though, huh? After that, we’ll go have a chat with Lachlan.”
Dez put Lachlan on speakerphone once back inside the SUV, allowing Sully to hear the conversation.
Lachlan, it seemed, wasn’t thrilled to hear from them.
“What?” he snapped by way of greeting. “I was in the middle of something.”
“What are you doing?” Dez asked.
“None of your business.”
“You’re watching something on your tablet, aren’t you?” Dez asked. “I can hear it in the background.” He shared a smirk with Sully as the background noise suddenly disappeared.
“Shut up, Braddock,” Lachlan said. “What are you calling about?”
“We’ve been running down a couple of leads about the missing kid,” Dez said. “First off, his parents have proven unhelpful. Second, this Edge Creek Light angle might actually have some teeth. Turns out Gabe’s birth father died by suicide right after his son was born. Apparently he died pretty much right near the spot where people go to see the light. We’re wondering if—”
“Hold on,” Lachlan cut in. “Did you get a name?”
“Yeah, from your friend Lilian. Tim Whitebear.”
Lachlan was silent for so long, Sully started to wonder whether he’d accidentally disconnected.
“Lachlan?” Dez said.
“I want both of you over here now. Now, you hear me?”
Lachlan hung up, leaving Sully and Dez to exchange the same puzzled look.
“The hell?” Dez asked. “What’s got his panties in a twist?”
“I don’t know,” Sully said. “But I think this job is about to get even more interesting.”
8
When Dez pulled up in front of the North Bank office building, Lachlan was waiting.
He jogged out to the SUV and slammed the door behind himself as he climbed into the back seat. “Compound. Drive.”
Dez risked taking heat by waiting until Lachlan had seat-belted himself in. “What’s got you so wound up?”
The sound of a click told Dez his boss had finished the task. “Just drive, damn it. I’ll fill you in on the way.”
Dez pulled back onto the street and set a course for the eastern outskirts of the city. Lachlan rented a steel storage container in a well-secured compound. There, he kept a wide range of files, many of them copies he’d illicitly made of police files before retiring from the department; others he’d created and compiled himself. Lachlan’s brain was a fount of knowledge on people and places in the criminal world, but he was also a good enough investigator to know the devil was frequently in the details. Sometimes a case turned not on the obvious, but on a clue buried deep inside an interview or a list of items seized from a crime scene.
Dez didn’t press Lachlan further, knowing he didn’t appreciate being nudged into sharing. Sure enough, Lachlan waited only as long as it took Dez to get onto the main road before launching into it.
“Do you remember when you and I first met, Sullivan? You were trying to convince me you could see the dead, so you described spirits seemingly attached to me?”
Next to Dez, Sully jolted upright in his seat. “That’s it! That’s where I saw him.”
“Saw who?” Dez asked.
“The ghost next to the tracks last night. He was one of the ones I saw near Lachlan. I didn’t see him again after that, and given how he took off on me last night, I guess I know why. He’s been trying to avoid me.”
“Why?” Lachlan asked.
“No idea. I won’t know until I can get him to communicate.”
“Maybe we won’t need to, if we can figure out what happened to him,” Lachlan said.
“What did happen?” Dez asked.
“Just get me to the compound,” Lachlan said. “I want to have a look at the file again before I say anything more. It’s been a lot of years, and I’ve been recovering from a concussion. I don’t want to risk mis-remembering things.”
Dez huffed out a quiet breath but held onto his protest. Arguing with Lachlan was almost always a bad idea.
A keypad stood at the entrance to the compound, and Dez keyed in the combination Lachlan had provided him last year. Nothing happened so he tried again.
Dez muttered a curse.
“What number are you using?” Lachlan asked.
“The one you gave me.”
“Oh yeah. They changed the code. Do it at least twice a year—one of the reasons I use this place. New number’s four-one-seven-nine-five.”
Dez punched it in before he forgot the numbers, then rolled
his eyes as the gate opened. “You didn’t think to tell me sooner? What if Sully or I needed something in here and we couldn’t get ahold of you?”
“Don’t get in a grump, Braddock. I hired you for your sunny ways.”
Dez turned into the lane on which Lachlan’s container sat. “My what?”
Lachlan chuckled in response, then pointed ahead, arm extending between the front bucket seats. “It’s that one, on the right.”
“I know which one it is,” Dez snapped.
Lachlan chortled, then climbed out as Dez pulled to a stop.
“I swear, I’m going to give the guy another concussion,” Dez muttered as he shut off the vehicle.
Sully patted him on the shoulder. “Secretly, he loves you like a son.”
“Secret buried so deep, he doesn’t even know it’s there, right?”
Sully grinned and joined Lachlan, leaving Dez to catch up.
Lachlan had already opened the man door and now led the way inside. He paused long enough to flick on a light switch, illuminating the inside of the container. In true Lachlan style, he hadn’t been content with the bleak colouring of the place, so had kitted it out with a large area rug and a cushioned chair in which he could sit comfortably while reviewing files.
Lachlan approached the row of filing cabinets lined up against the back wall, talking as he searched for the right file.
“One evening, seventeen years ago, Tim Whitebear didn’t come home after work. Later that night, police got a call to go to a section of rail line east of town, near the defunct crossing where the town of Edge Creek used to be located. Conductor had been drinking, and he didn’t see the guy on the line until too late. Doubtful he could have stopped the train in time even if he had. Body was identified as Whitebear.
“The coroner came in, and because it was believed to be either a suicide or death by misadventure, the case never went far. Major Crimes sent someone out as per usual, but they only had to fill out the requisite paperwork and charge the conductor with impaired driving. He wasn’t charged in the death though.The guy was clearly on the line when the train hit, and even a sober conductor would have been helpless to avoid him.”
“The lights on those locomotives are pretty bright,” Dez said. “They’re sure he wouldn’t have seen him in time if he wasn’t drunk?”
Lachlan shook his head. “Bend in the line. Train approached from the west. Just before you hit the Edge Creek crossing from that direction, there’s a curve with thick woods immediately north of the track. No way for anyone operating a train from that direction to see what’s ahead. Not in time to stop anyway.”
“Did you have anything to do with the case?” Sully asked.
Lachlan slammed shut the drawer he’d just finished riffling before moving to another. “Only peripherally. I was Major Crimes but my colleague Kip Dowley handled things—if ‘handled’ is the right word. He was an arrogant bastard who figured he knew everything when, in fact, he actually knew precious little. He ignored one detail I found interesting: The toxicology results showed Whitebear had a very high blood-alcohol content, somewhere up in the point-twos. But his widow swore up and down he never drank. Not ever. Now, even if Whitebear went out on some random bender behind his family’s back, it’s highly unlikely he ever would have been able to get himself to a point-two-anything and still be able to make his way to the rail line. A teetotaler wouldn’t get past the low-teens in BAC before falling face-first into a puddle of his own puke.”
Dez made a face. “So you’re saying you had questions about the case. Why didn’t you ask them then?”
“You were a cop. You know damn well it’s not done, questioning another cop’s work on a file. You kept your eyes on your own page. Problem is, I’ve never been good at that. It irked me, this one. I had a feeling there was something dark to it.”
“As in?”
“As in, someone plied him with enough liquor to damn near kill him, then put him on that line,” Lachlan said. “He wouldn’t have known what hit him, let alone be able to pull himself off the rail line. He wouldn’t have even been conscious at those levels.”
“Okay, but why?”
“That, my young friend, is what we’re going to try to find out. Aha!” Lachlan had located the file, and withdrew it with a flourish before heading for his chair.
“I thought you knew how you had the files in here organized,” Dez said.
Lachlan plopped down into the seat and settled in. “I reorganized them recently. I like to shuffle things around in case someone’s been able to clue into my organization technique.”
Lachlan didn’t believe in arranging his material alphabetically. If someone ever broke in to find something in particular, they’d have a hell of a time. Months had passed since Dez had come into Lachlan’s employ, and he still didn’t know how the system worked. He doubted he ever would.
“I’m still curious about something,” Dez said. “It’s been seventeen years. If this case rankled you, why didn’t you try to solve it sooner?”
Lachlan’s eyes snapped from the file to Dez’s face. “Hey, I did, junior. The widow hates me.”
“Ah.”
Lachlan’s lips parted in a wide grin. “I’ve got some aces in the hole now. You’re young, you’re good-looking guys, you’ve got those affable manners down. Sullivan here has that special third-eye touch we’ll be needing. And, most crucially, neither of you is me.”
“She didn’t want to talk to us either,” Sully reminded Lachlan.
“You’ll grow on her.” Lachlan’s tone held far more certainty than Dez felt about the statement.
“What did you do to get under her skin?” he asked.
“Some people want nothing more than to get to the bottom of what happened to their loved ones. Others want to forget about it and move on.”
“And she’s the latter?”
“So she says. But I think it could be something more. I think it’s possible someone threatened her or even paid her off to keep her from talking about it.”
“Who?” Dez asked.
“If I knew that, I wouldn’t need you, would I?”
Sully folded his arms as he regarded Lachlan. “There’s another possibility as to why a spouse wouldn’t want to dig further into it.”
“Yeah,” Lachlan said. “And believe me, I thought about the possibility she was involved in his death. Never could figure out a motive, though. Far as I could see, there were no issues of domestic abuse, Whitebear was a good provider and a decent guy, no skeletons in the closet. He actually worked for the railway, some sort of office job. Given his death was made to look like a suicide, it screwed up the payout on his life insurance plan. I couldn’t figure out any way Shelby stood to benefit.”
“When did Will come into the picture?” Sully asked.
“No idea. I gave up on the case when Shelby made it clear she wanted it left alone. With no cooperation from her, and no way to interview anyone else without it getting back to the department, I couldn’t continue. Never far from my mind, though. I ran into her once a few years back in a grocery store parking lot, but she beetled the other way as soon as she recognized me. Whatever we manage to pull off now will have to come from someone other than her.” He met Sully’s eye. “Whitebear himself would be a good place to start, if you can convince him to chat with you.”
Dez moved to Lachlan’s right shoulder as he continued flipping through the file. It wasn’t huge, which made sense given the circumstances. Considered non-suspicious, the matter had little need for a pile of paperwork. Reports from police who attended the call and dealt with the small train crew, witness statements, a few interviews with railway officials and the people who knew the deceased, autopsy and toxicology results. Lachlan took the initial reports for himself before handing the rest of the file to Dez and Sully. Dez skipped the autopsy photos, but checked out the attached report and scanned for the blood-alcohol content.
“BAC was .26,” he said.
“I’ve got the
transcript of Shelby’s police interview here,” Sully said. “It’s short, but she clearly says Tim didn’t drink.”
“Like I told you,” Lachlan said. “Find the info on the conductor and the engineer police talked to, will you? That’s what I came here for. I need to find some addresses for them. With a whole lot of luck, they’ll still be at the same residences.”
Dez gave Sully the file to hold onto while he jotted down the necessary info from the statements.
As Dez scribbled, Sully bent his head over one of the reports. “Tim’s boss at the time said Tim had been the victim of some racist vandalism shortly before his supposed suicide,” Sully said. “Do you recall that?”
“I do,” Lachlan said. “In fact, I remember thinking that avenue wasn’t looked into deeply enough. Whitebear was Indigenous, and someone spray-painted his car with a slur a couple of weeks before he died. I checked into it myself when no one else did, but I couldn’t tie the vandalism to anyone. At the time, a well-known white supremacist was making the rounds across the country, drumming up support from budding neo-Nazis everywhere. He stirred up all sorts of crap, made a few people who’d been closet racists feel like they could come out of hiding. You boys are probably too young to remember, but a number of protests and counter-protests occurred at the time. Things were pretty volatile for a year or two after the asshole came and went.”
“And Tim was killed in the middle of that,” Dez summed up.
Lachlan nodded. “Which is partly why I wasn’t prepared to rule out foul play. But I never really knew for sure.”
“Is it possible Shelby wasn’t paid off at all?” Sully asked. “Maybe she’s just scared.”
“I thought about that, but I never got the fear vibe from her,” Lachlan said. “Stubbornness, yes. But it might be nothing more than our personalities clashing. Perhaps you can get more out of her than I could at the time.”