Cal Rogan Mysteries, Books 4, 5 & 6 (Box Set)

by Robert P. French

  “Oh yes,” she says. “It’s that pretty yellow boat we saw in the marina. I wish grandpa’s boat was like that.”

  “It’s probably a bit out of grandpa’s budget,” I grin.

  We watch as the boat comes round the headland and turns toward us.

  “Is it coming here?” she asks.

  “I doubt it.” But before the words are out of my mouth, it turns some more and is heading directly in our direction. “Oh, it is. Looks like we’re going to have a visitor.” It’s not unusual for passing boaters to put into our little cove to ask a favour or even to ask if the house might be for sale. It will be nice to have adult company for a while. “Let’s go and see what they want.”

  She drops her last oyster, together with the gloves and the screwdriver, into the bucket and we head across the beach toward the dock. Then I remember I’m in my skimpiest of bikinis. I look toward the house. There’s a beach towel draped over the patio balcony. Do I have time to get it? I look back to sea. Maybe.

  “El, take the bucket of oysters back to the house and bring Mommy that beach towel on the patio. Quick like a bunny.” She runs back, grabs the bucket and dashes toward the house.

  Oh dear, the boat’s faster than I thought, already it’s entered the cove. Its prow is dropping as the driver throttles back. El won’t be back in time with the towel, I’ll just have to brazen it out.

  I reach the dock just as the boat arrives. There are two men on board. The one at the helm maneuvers it expertly up to the dock as his companion gets up from his seat, steps up onto the sliver of decking beside him and jumps lithely onto the dock. He’s wearing fashionable and expensive clothes which are a uniform for the richer members of the boating set but somehow they don’t look right on him. And he’s wearing leather gloves which is decidedly odd.

  He smiles, looks me up and down and makes me wish Ellie would get here with that towel. His smile broadens but it makes me even more uncomfortable. It’s not a nice smile, it doesn’t reach his eyes which, incidentally, are now focused on my breasts.

  “You must be Samantha,” he says. The shock that he knows my name is increased exponentially by the hispanic accent with which he says it.

  “My name is Javier,” he says. “Mr. Santiago sent me.”

  I stifle a scream as Ellie runs up with the beach towel and, ominously, the driver reverses the boat away from the dock and heads back out toward the open water, leaving us alone with God knows who.

  41

  Cal

  The office is very plush. It’s behind the stage and was probably a dressing room when the building was a theatre. Pastor Kilman is sitting behind his desk dressed in slacks and a jacket. It’s the same way I was dressed when I was here yesterday; he’s even wearing a Rotary lapel-pin. The man has attention to detail, I have to admit; he knows how to imbue confidence.

  He has used his cold reading techniques to impress me that he knows a lot about my supposed wife Elizabeth. He’s good at it too. Despite myself, I can feel the rapport he has built. If we were talking about Sam, I’m not sure I wouldn’t believe him. “Where was Elizabeth born?” He asks.

  “Galway, in Ireland,” I say without thinking. It’s the first place that came into my mind.

  “I thought so,” he nods wisely. “There’s something in her voice that reminds me of the emerald isle.”

  He’s good. He doesn’t say ‘she has an Irish accent’ in case she had moved here as a child. But if the mark’s wife did have an Irish accent, or maybe just a hint of one, he has established he knows that.

  “But that’s the problem you see.” His voice has taken on a grave tone. “Most people don’t know this but when the soul leaves the body, it almost always heads to it’s place of birth. It’s part of the process of completing the circle of life. That is what Elizabeth has done.”

  “Why is that a problem,” I ask, my voice laced with concern.

  “Well on occasions, a soul can get stuck at their place of birth. They don’t want to leave. They have too strong an attachment to the place. What’s happening with Elizabeth is that she’s staying in Galway because it’s her place of birth, and there’s something that’s holding her there, but deep inside she longs to pass over to the other side. It’s a rare condition and it’s causing her great conflict and distress. The longer she stays there, the worse it gets until she comes to a point where she can no longer pass over to the bliss of the spirit world which awaits her. She would spend eternity as a lost soul. I sense she’s very near to that point.”

  “Is there anything we can do?” I ask, leaning forward and injecting a note of desperation into my voice.

  He reaches across the desk and pats my arm. “Don’t worry, there is. If I can talk to her, I can lead her out of the conflict and over to the other side.”

  “Can you do it now? Please.” I beg him.

  “Unfortunately, no—”

  “Why not?” I interrupt, adding a soupçon of anger to the mix.

  “I can certainly help her but I would need to go to Galway to be able to communicate with her.”

  “Please Pastor, I’m begging you to do that,” I say.

  An undecided look moves on to his face. Man, he’s good at this.

  “I want to, but my flock here needs me—”

  I interrupt with the magic words, “Please Pastor, I can make a significant donation to help the Church while you’re away. Would twenty thousand dollars cover the costs?”

  He looks like he’s weighing the pros and cons. “It would help and I do want to help Elizabeth. If you can make that donation to cover the cost of keeping the Church running while I’m away in Ireland and add five thousand to cover travel expenses, I could leave tomorrow.”

  “I can do that,” I say. I take out my cheque book. “Is a cheque OK?”

  “Certainly,” he says.

  I write the cheque and hand it over to him. “Here it is.”

  He takes it and puts it in his inside pocket. “Thank you, my son,” he says. “This money will ensure Elizabeth’s safe transition to the spirit realm where she will wait until you are ready to join her there.”

  Gotcha!

  “There’s one other thing I want you to do Pastor,” I say.

  “Anything,” he says magnanimously.

  “I want you to listen to something.” I take the digital recorder from my pocket. “Do you know what a police scanner is?”

  His smiling mask is replaced by puzzlement. The first genuine emotion I have seen on his face. “It listens to police transmissions?”

  “Not exactly. What it does is it scans the radio frequency spectrum and records any transmissions which are in progress at the time. When I was here yesterday, I brought a computerized scanner with me.” It starts to dawn on his face. “Would you like to hear what I recorded?”

  He stares at me in silence, not trusting himself to speak, I suspect.

  I flip the playback switch and a woman’s voice starts talking. The voice is rich, vibrant and playful. “Hello Petey. I hope you can hear me. If you can’t, you’re in big trouble. I have a couple of hot ones for you. The first one’s named Cal. I got everything. He was standing right under one of the microphones. He’s sitting in the fifth row between Silly Millie and Edna. He’s loaded. He even put a hundred bucks in the plate.” There’s a pause but I skip past it. “His wife was Elizabeth. He doesn’t know where to bury her ashes. Poor baby, like it matters. Ha ha. Tell him Salt Spring.” I skip by the second, longer pause. “OK baby, the next one’s a sap named Donald, his daughter’s name was Bethany, she died of heart failure.”

  I switch off the player.

  His face is white. “What do you want?” he asks.

  “I want the ten thousand dollars you scammed from Phil and Florrie Franks with an additional ten thousand dollars fee for me. I want it in cash and I want it now.”

  “Twenty thousand dollars? Are you serious?”

  I chuckle at the hypocrisy. “I’m as serious as a heart attack. If I don’
t walk out of here with the cash in hand, this recording of your wife,” I stand up and wave the digital recorder at him, “and the recording of the so-called service you conducted yesterday will go to the CBC, CTV and CityTV just in time for tomorrow’s news cycle. Then tomorrow morning I will visit a friend in the RCMP fraud squad with copies and with the recording I just made of you accepting my cheque for twenty-five grand.”

  He stands up and madly tries to find a way out of the hole I’ve dug for him… but to no avail. He deflates. “How do I know these are the only recordings?” he asks.

  “You don’t.” I put the recorder back in my pocket.

  “So how do I know you won’t—”

  “Because I want to keep you in business Pastor. You didn’t think twenty grand would buy me off did you? It’s just a down payment.”

  He slumps back down into his chair and puts his head in his hands.

  Finally he looks up. There’s a slyness on his face. “OK,” he says. He opens a drawer, pulls out two bundles of bank notes and pushes them across the desk to me. I can’t help but wonder how much cash is in that desk.

  “Thank you.” I reach back into my pocket, take out the digital recorder and drop it on his desk. I turn and walk to the door, then do a ‘Columbo’. “Oh, by the way, don’t try and deposit that cheque I gave you, I already put a stop payment on it.”

  The sly look vanishes from his face.

  “Get out!” he says as he picks up the digital recorder, the second one I had in my pocket, the one with no recordings on it.

  “See you soon,” I say as I leave.

  The big grin on my face tells me this has been a great day; to add the icing on the cake, I just need to make some calls on the way to meet Sean O’Day.

  “I shouldn’t have chosen this place,” he says, sitting down opposite me. I thought he chose Bean Brothers in Kerrisdale because it was far enough away from downtown that it would ensure some privacy.

  “Why,” I ask.

  O’Day looks around the place. “Dale and I would often come here on Sunday morning for breakfast.” His face shows no sadness to match the words and again I wonder at how well he masks his emotions. “So what was so important that you couldn’t talk about it over the phone.”

  I tell him about the twenty-thirteen-dot-com website and the bible quotation. “As it says ‘they are to be put to death,’ I was worried for you.”

  O’Days inscrutability fields are still in place. I can’t tell how he feels about this news. He looks at me for two or three seconds. “OK,” he says. “Thanks for letting me know. I’ll be careful.”

  He starts to get up from the table and a lightning bolt of intuition tells me I need to keep him here. “There’s more,” I ad-lib. “Please, sit down.”

  Not taking his eyes off me, he complies.

  “You don’t look like someone whose life might be in danger,” I say, to give myself some thinking time. However, he says nothing; just gives a small shrug.

  My gut tells me there’s something about him I need to find out. I just can’t work out what. Maybe if I ask about Dale. “Dale was from a religious family, was he religious himself?” It’s the first thing I can think to ask.

  “Not as such. I’m sure he believed… but he couldn’t stomach the religious views on his orientation. He blamed his family’s church for causing the split with his father and brother.”

  “And you?”

  “Me? I’m afraid the Catholic Church beat any belief I might have had out of me. I’m a fully paid-up atheist.” His Irish accent is more in evidence.

  “Did Dale go to a church?”

  He gives a small laugh, more of a grunt really. “Only church basements,” he says. “Why?”

  I ignore his question. “His brother said he was a regular at church.”

  “Then he’s a liar.”

  Why would Luke Summers lie about something so easy to verify? I’ll tuck that question away for later.

  “What did you mean, church basements?” I ask.

  He thinks for a while, weighing some decision probably, not that it shows on his face. “Have you ever heard of gamma?” he asks.

  “Sure, it’s the third letter of the greek alphabet.”

  “Yes, it’s also an acronym for Gay And Married Men’s Association. It’s a self-help group for married men who are gay. Dale had been a member for years. To him it was the closest thing to a religious group. He went at least once a week. They held their meetings in a church basement downtown.”

  A self-help group to help married gays is hardly going to be involved in Dale’s death. So I guess I’ve drawn a blank in my meeting with Sean O’Day.

  Then it hits me.

  Maybe I haven’t drawn a blank.

  “Have you ever heard of GAMMA?”

  “Sure,” Adry says with a giggle. “It’s what I called my grandma when I was a kid. Why?”

  “Nothing, where’s Nick?”

  “Don’t know. A couple of hours ago, he got a phone call from his landlady and she seemed worried about something. Next thing I know, he’s flying out the office saying he won’t be back for the rest of the day. I asked him what the problem was but he just wheeled off into the elevator.”

  I head to my desk and take out my phone. Siri calls Nick for me but there’s no reply. Oh well, I guess I won’t get to run my theory past him after all.

  42

  Stammo

  The pain pushes through into my mind. Where the fuck am I? I hear a groan. It’s me… I think. My head feels like it’s going to explode. Through the throbbing, I can feel the hardness. I’m lying on something hard. Like a floor, except that it’s bouncing. Why’s it bouncing? Floors don’t bounce. I try and get up but I can’t. My legs won’t… Of course they won’t. I’d forgotten. Where’s my wheelchair? I try and open my eyes. They won’t open.

  It’s loud. The noise is familiar. I’ve heard it before. It’s an engine. The floor gives a big bounce and throws me up. For a second I’m weightless until it slams me down again. I yell out in pain. But now I know where I am. I’m on a boat going fast through the water, bouncing on the wave crests.

  But I still can’t see.

  What the fuck happened to me? I was at the office. What happened then? Oh yes, I got a call from Mrs. V saying I had to come home, there’d been a terrible accident. She was hysterical. I seem to remember going through the front door of the house. Then nothing until here.

  Why can’t I see? I try and reach up but my hands are tied. I can’t move them.

  Why am I on a boat? I haven’t been on a boat since…

  Oh no.

  Oh no way.

  43

  Cal

  Tuesday

  I feel like an outsider, twice over. I’m an outsider to this church; it didn’t matter during the service when I sat at the back and stood when everyone else stood and kneeled when they kneeled and sat when they sat. But here at the cemetery I’m the person nobody knows. I’m an outsider as far as Luke Summers is concerned; his look made it quite clear I am not welcome. But that verse from Leviticus fits so well with the ethos of this church.

  The minister officiating at the grave is a tall florid man with a huge head and small hands; he’s definitely the fire and brimstone character Stammo described. I’m sure Dale Summers would have shuddered to think he was being buried at the church which would have condemned him. However, funerals are for the living not for the dead.

  Two of the living are noticeable by their absence: Marly Summers and Sean O’Day.

  My phone vibrates, thank heavens I remembered to turn the ringer off. I ignore it; pulling it out of my pocket and answering it would be the quintessence of gauche.

  As the Minister drones on, I look around at the assembled congregation. They all look like upstanding citizens. But my experience tells me even the most solid citizens can commit the most heinous crimes. My gaze wanders and I do a half turn toward the limousines. Six black, stretched vehicles polished to a tee. Then out of the
corner of my eye, I see something that doesn’t fit. In fact two things: an RCMP cruiser and a black Chrysler without hubcaps which is almost certainly an unmarked police vehicle.

  They drive slowly and quietly up behind the last limo in the line.

  I look toward the grave. The congregation are facing away from the cemetery’s roadway, so they are unaware of the new arrivals, but the minister’s eye has caught them. He stumbles over a word and then regains his stride and continues.

  I look back. Standing beside the unmarked car are two faces I recognize: Steve Waters, my former partner at VPD, and the odious young detective named Eric Street who should have been fired two years ago. The sight sends a frisson of fear dancing up my spine. The last time I saw Steve at a funeral he was arresting me. Have they found new evidence on Samuel Island? I can feel my heart beat in my chest. How did they know I’d be here. Maybe they called the office and Adry told them. They don’t seem to have seen me yet and I wonder if I can sidle away and back to the main road where my car’s parked. I look in that direction… not a chance. I am royally screwed.

  At the grave the minister has finished and a line of relatives, led by Luke Summers and a woman who’s probably his mother, walk to the grave side and, one by one, each casts a lone red rose into the grave.

  As I try to guess what new evidence they may have found—which I have tried to do a thousand times before—the minister has a few words with Luke and his mother and turns to go but then stops. I follow his gaze and see that Steve and his sidekick are heading toward him followed by a uniformed RCMP member with Staff Sergeant chevrons.

  I let out my breath. Maybe, just maybe, they’re not here for me.

  They have a brief conversation with the minister and then are joined by Luke Summers. It’s clear no one’s happy with what the police are talking about, especially Summers. He’s running one hand through his blond crewcut and his voice is raised but I can’t catch what he’s saying. Then the RCMP officer says something and everyone seems to calm down.