Dark Water Under the Bridge

by P. D. Workman

  “Mr. Warner, you are under arrest for assaulting an officer of the law,” she told him in a calm, clear voice, grasping his arm.

  But somehow, he slipped out of her grasp. Having failed in pushing her farther away from his family, he tried the reverse. Before Margie could take one step forward to stop him, he had rushed at the girls, sweeping them out into the water. There were a couple of strangled screams of surprise and fear before they went under the surface of the dark water. Margie ran toward them, her mind a horrified blank, unable to process what had happened or what she should do about it. Warner charged her, bowling her over. The collision knocked the wind out of her, and she was left on the ground, her head spinning. She stared up at one of the towering monoliths, then forced herself to move. Roll over. Regain her feet and her balance, look around for Warner. But the babies were behind her, and what was she going to do about them?

  “Go!” Jones shouted at her. “I’ve got the kids. Go after him!”

  Margie’s movements were slow, like swimming through concrete. She saw Jones pick up the lifesaver and toss it into the water. As she turned away to look for Warner, she heard a splash and knew that Jones had jumped in.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Warner was on the run. Margie shut everything else out and focused on gaining on him. He couldn’t be allowed to get back to his car and make an escape. He had killed his wife, had intended to kill his children, and she was not going to let him get away. She didn’t know if he had planned to kill himself too, but running suggested to her that his instinct to preserve his own life and liberty was still strong.

  Her feet crunched through the gravel of the pathway. Warner was headed for the education center, toward the big pool and the walkways elevated over the water. Margie’s mind rebelled against the idea of running toward them. The last thing she wanted was to end up plummeting into the water. But she had a job to do. She was a cop and she couldn’t let her phobia control her decisions. She had been told more than once that the only way to overcome her fear was by exposing herself to it. So in reality, running toward the water at a breakneck pace was good for her.

  She had a stitch in her side. She had let her running habit fall by the wayside when she had moved to Calgary. If she wanted to stay in shape, she would have to get up earlier in the morning to run, and morning was not her best time. But she was getting out of shape, and should at least consider it.

  Warner entered the walkways. He slowed down, but was still moving at a pretty quick clip. Margie put on a burst of speed to catch up with him and stepped onto the walkway herself. Her heart was in her throat. She could barely breathe. Her vision was narrow so that she could only see what was in front of her. She knew the way out. She needed to keep pushing forward, and then she would, in a couple of minutes, be on solid ground again. She could tackle Warner in the parking lot. Cuff him and take him into custody. It would all work out just fine.

  She was no longer running, but was pushing herself to move as quickly as she could. The walkway felt narrow and unsteady. She knew she was suspended above the water, and her brain was telling her that at any minute, she could die. She went up the stairs to the second. She listened, but could no longer hear Warner’s footsteps clanging ahead of her. He must already be off of the walkways and into the parking lot. That meant that she didn’t have much farther to go.

  A blow hit her from the side as she turned a corner. She was stunned and thrown off balance. Where had it come from? She grabbed onto the rail to steady herself and to try to reorient herself. She could see the water below her. Just her and a thin grille topped with a railing to keep her separated from it. Whose idea had it been to put young children and the frail and infirm so close to danger? Why had they thought it such a good idea to build out on the water instead of on solid, safe land?

  She caught a flash of his face in front of her—an angry, maniacal grimace. “Leave me alone! You think a woman is going to get the better of me? Never!”

  Before she had a chance to anticipate what he was going to do, he slammed into her again, the weight of his body throwing her against the low barrier. His hands grasped her elbow and knee, and he lifted her off of the ground. Using their momentum, he had her up and over the railing before she could catch hold of anything.

  She was airborne, arms and legs flailing frantically for something to stop her fall. Then she was in the water. It drove all of the air out of her lungs when she hit the surface and then sank beneath it. Shockingly cold. The water enveloped her. She couldn’t see. She held her breath and flailed and hit bottom. She was disoriented, feeling the mucky, slimy floor of the pond bottom beneath her. Had her brain blocked out the sensation of falling through the water? It seemed as if the journey to the bottom of the pond had taken only an instant.

  She tried to push herself up, her hands sinking into the mud and not propelling her toward the surface. She tried to swim up toward the surface, and her hands broke out of the water.

  Margie repositioned herself feet downward, and tried to stand. The muck prevented her from doing it very gracefully, sucking her feet and ankles down, but the water was not even to her waist. Margie took in gasps of air and tried to settle her panicked body and brain. She could breathe. She wasn’t drowning. But she was in the middle of the pond, sinking almost to her knees in muck.

  She looked around, trying to figure out the best way to get out. The education center towered above her, and the walls were sheer rock, too steep to climb.

  Someone was yelling at her. Margie blinked foul water from her eyes and tried to focus on the voice.

  “…okay?” she heard from somewhere up above her. Margie tipped back her head to look at the figure standing on the edge. Finkle, his hands making anxious movements.

  “I’m okay,” she confirmed, still gasping.

  “Can you turn around? Or are you stuck?”

  Margie lifted her feet one at a time, pulling them out of the sucking mud and looking for somewhere more solid to put them down. The water was frigid. She was already shivering.

  “Over to your left, you see the rock steps going down into the water?”

  Margie saw a stonework of long, shallow steps. A couple of other workers stood there gaping at her.

  “Just make your way over there,” Finkle told her in a calm, even voice.

  Margie waded through the mud, one painstaking step at a time. It would undoubtedly be faster to lie down on the surface of the water and swim across, unimpeded by the mud, except that she had never learned to swim. Even floating was an issue for Margie, especially with her face in or close to the surface of the water. When she finally got close enough to the steps, Finkle was waiting there, still encouraging her in a measured, reassuring voice. Finkle reached out a hand for her. His grip was strong. With his help, she was able to drag her feet one last time out of the mud and crawl back onto solid ground. It was an effort to break the surface tension. And then she was above the water.

  Finkle patted her on the shoulder. “You’re good. Keep going.”

  At the top, back on firm ground, someone wrapped a blanket around her.

  “Ambulance is on the way. Just sit down here and stay warm.”

  Margie shook her head. She felt better standing. Like she was a grown-up, not a little kid. She wiped foul pond water from her face, looking around. Jones was a short distance away, mothering the two children, all three of them soaked. But they seemed to be in better shape than Margie, who was shaking like a leaf and having problems catching her breath.

  “Are you okay?” Jones asked, looking over at her.

  Margie cleared her throat. “I wasn’t planning on going into the water.”

  “No,” Jones gave a little laugh. “None of that was planned.”

  “Where did he go?” Margie looked at Finkle. “Did you see where Warner went? What direction…?”

  “Back into the city. Headed north. Couldn’t tell you more than that.”

  “They’ve got hawks out,” Jones said.

&n
bsp; Margie didn’t understand at first. Jones pointed to a black helicopter in the sky some distance away. Helicopter Air Watch for Community Safety—HAWCS. The police services helicopter.

  “Does that mean they know where he is?”

  “I don’t know. Need to get back to the radio in my car to touch base. I don’t think either of our phones are going to work. They called 9-1-1,” Jones motioned to the various education center workers who were standing around, some helping and some just watching. “And the chopper was scrambled pretty quickly. I called in the APB on Warner’s vehicles as we were driving over, so they knew what he was driving. But they’ll be waiting for an update from us.”

  “We’d better do that, then.” Margie attempted to squeeze some of the water out of her clothes and headed to the cars. At least they weren’t very far away. Jones left the children under the supervision of one of the teachers and followed.

  They stood outside of the vehicles, dripping everywhere, while Jones called on her radio, asking to be put in contact with the homicide department and with the HAWCS and other police on the ground. In a few minutes, they were all on the same channel, exchanging what information they could.

  Margie bent her head close to listen. “He’s in Erin Woods? I know where that is. That’s not far from my place.”

  “You want to go over?” Jones asked. “I’m not sure how close we’ll be able to get to the action, but you’re going to have to go home to get changed anyway.”

  Margie nodded. “Yeah. Let’s do it.”

  “More than likely, they’ll just tell us to stay out of the way. But you can at least see HAWCS up close.”

  “Yes.”

  “You know your way around there? How to get there? Do you want to meet up in a particular place if we get separated?”

  “I don’t know my way at all.” Margie reached into her car to grab her GPS. She tapped in Erin Woods and waited for something to come up on the screen. “Uh… the Community Center. How about that? We’ll meet there, or get as close to it as we can.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  There were squad cars everywhere. The big armored rescue vehicle used by the CPS Tactical Unit was stopped in the middle of the Community Center parking lot. Both still dripping, Jones and Margie were directed to the tactical unit leader who got what details he could from them as to what had happened at Ralph Klein Park.

  “So, what is your evaluation of his state of mind?” Sergeant Burns queried. “He’s on the run, so you would think he was concerned with self-preservation, but if we’ve got a man who might be armed and who really doesn’t have any reason to live, we need to know that before going in.”

  “Do you know where he is?” Margie asked, trying to discern from the activity around her just what the status of the pursuit was.

  “He ditched his vehicle and took off on foot, so he can’t have gotten far.” HAWCS continued to buzz around overhead, looking for him. “We’ll have scent dogs in a few minutes and they’ll find him. But how he’s going to behave once he’s cornered, that’s always a concern.”

  “He killed his wife. We have the proof and he knows it. He knows he’s going down for it. He’s looking at years of incarceration. He went to the park to drown his children. What I don’t know is whether he planned to kill himself, or to disappear and start a new life somewhere else.”

  “So he doesn’t have anything to lose when we catch up to him. Death or prison. Those are his only options.”

  Margie nodded. She looked at the armored Tactical Unit members. “Be careful. I don’t think he’s armed, but there’s no way to know for sure. I don’t think he’s going to come easy.”

  Sergeant Burns nodded briefly. He’d probably already guessed that, but it was vital for him to have as much information as he could get.

  “Is there any way we can help?” Margie asked.

  “You don’t have a relationship with this guy?”

  “I’ve interviewed him before. He wasn’t antagonistic then. But today…” She looked down at her dripping uniform. “I don’t know whether he intended for me to drown, but he did throw me over a railing into the water.”

  “So, no,” Burns said dryly. He looked at Detective Jones. “And you?” He observed her soaked uniform as well.

  “No. Although I can tell him that his kids are okay. If he thinks he succeeded in drowning them, he might be more desperate. If he knows they’re okay…”

  Burns scribbled notes into a notepad. “Whoever tracks him down can pass that along. You’re right; it might be just enough to make the difference between him being taken into custody quietly and suicide by cop.”

  He didn’t tell them anything else they could do, so Jones and Margie stood around awkwardly, watching the rest of the officers who were involved moving from one position to another and reporting to Burns. The dog handler arrived with a German shepherd at his side and, after a few minutes, the dog was put onto the scent he was to track. Margie watched him put nose to ground and cast around. She imagined Stella trying to do the same thing. Stella sometimes thought she was a hunting dog, but she wasn’t very good at it. She could track a quarry a few feet, but then she lost the scent. The shepherd with the dog handler seemed to be up to the job. In a couple of minutes, he was pulling hard on the harness, following Warner’s trail from the car he had ditched. He led his handler to the far corner of the school field, which then joined with a pathway, out of their sight. Margie looked at Jones, then around at the houses close to the Community Center. There were a lot of residents looking out their windows or doors or hanging around the sidewalk. They looked up at HAWCS and took pictures of the tactical vehicle with their phones.

  “The Twitterverse is buzzing,” Jones observed. “Let’s just hope that Warner isn’t following it.”

  Wherever Warner was, crouched between houses or hiding under someone’s car, Margie didn’t imagine he was tapping on his phone, checking out all of the social media.

  Would he hide? Would he try to walk out of the area? Get on a bus and escape the police net? She really wanted this guy. She wanted to make sure he was put behind bars for as long as possible.

  She tried to squeeze more water out of her chilly, chafing clothes.

  “You should go home and change,” Jones suggested.

  “I know. But I want to see how this all ends up. It won’t take long, right? Just a few minutes?”

  “You never know. Sometimes a standoff can go on for hours before the person finally gives up to the police.”

  “I’m going to stay for a while, at least. I really want to see them catch this guy.”

  Chapter Twenty

  They heard the dog barking in the distance. They all stood as still as statues, waiting for gunshots and explosions. Margie could hear Sergeant Burns‘s radio crackling, the reports coming in one on top of the other. He had been spotted entering the back yard of a house across from Erin Woods Park. The Tactical Unit worked to surround and contain him. Still no shots fired. Margie breathed shallowly, not wanting to miss anything. Over the radio, she heard the shouted command for him to come out with his hands up. Warner yelled back, wanting to know the status of his children and of the police women at the park.

  Margie and Jones listened to the information being relayed back to him. Would their reassurances be enough to deescalate him? Was he past that, too desperate to be calmed down?

  No shots.

  He exchanged words with them another time. And another. Margie started to breathe normally again. He was having a conversation. He had not attacked or made threats. He hadn’t said he had a weapon and charged one of the team.

  It was working. They could all breathe again. Margie would be filling in paperwork for days, but they would have him. The children were safe. The other people in Warner’s life that might have crossed him one too many times were safe.

  Eventually, a voice came over Burns’s radio.

  “We’re clear. Suspect in custody.”

  Margie found she didn’t care about
the paperwork. She was happy to go home to change and then drive back downtown with towels on her car seat and report back to the office to be debriefed and get started on the pile of reports that would need to be filed.

  “The Roscoes have the children,” Cruz told Margie. “They were taken straight there. Children’s Services will follow up to evaluate the home and finalize the placement, but they will be safe with family tonight, not in foster care.”

  “But they don’t know the Roscoes. So it’s still going to feel strange and foreign to them.”

  “Better to be with family, though. They can start settling in and getting healed, instead of being disrupted with a series of placements and maybe getting separated. And I suspect they know Grandma and Grandpa better than we think.”

  Margie raised her brows. “Oh? I didn’t think Mrs. Roscoe was lying when she said she hadn’t had any contact with them.”

  Cruz pointed to Margie’s computer screen, where the video Mrs. Roscoe had received from her daughter’s email account was still frozen in a small square in the corner of the desktop. Margie pressed the ‘play’ triangle, and it started from the beginning, Arabella talking herself through the instructions that her mother had given her. Tapping on the picture of Grandma.

  Cruz nodded. “She knows who Grandma is. Her mother showed her pictures and talked to her at least enough to recognize the picture and know who it was. Maybe they didn’t have any direct contact, but the little girl had been told who she was, and that was who she was supposed to send the recording too. She knew that Grandma would do something to help them when she received the video.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  In a few days, Margie was with her own grandparent, secure in the knowledge that Warner was behind bars awaiting trial and Patty’s daughters were safe. Moushoom had been quick to agree to go with them to Glenbow Ranch Provincial Park for a golf cart tour, and after that, to MacKay’s for ice cream.