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

by Robert P. French

  I tap the mute button on my phone and pick up the other phone on the table in front of me. It is also set to a conference call. “Check in,” I say.

  “Here,” says Stammo.

  “Right,” says Ghost.

  “Yeah,” says Tommy.

  I can see all three of them. Ghost is closest to me, sitting on the steps of the monument. Tommy is on a bench at the south-east corner and Stammo is in his truck just up Hastings, illegally parked opposite the Amsterdam, Vancouver’s original marijuana café.

  Connor checks a couple of the benches then makes his way to the one facing the back of the monument. He sits and clutches his Safeway bag to his chest. He is the epitome of nervousness, which works in our favour, as the blackmailer is not going to expect him to be calm and collected.

  “You’re doing well, Connor,” I say, then realize I have my own phone muted. I tap it and repeat my encouragement.

  “Thanks,” he says.

  I examine the other people in the square. Half of them look like they are as homeless as Ghost and Tommy, or close to it. If the blackmailer is as big an amateur as we think, he is not likely to be using any of them. Of the others, no one seems to be focussed on Connor. There are a couple of lovers on a bench to the left, eating ice cream cones and deep in conversation. There’s an elderly couple, probably tourists, standing, reading the words engraved on the monument. Up on the south side of the square is a well-dressed man sitting alone on a bench. He is looking down at the monument. From his vantage point he may also be observing Connor, but I can’t be sure.

  “It’s ringing!” Connor says.

  “Remember to press the button to conference call,” I say then hit the mute button fast. “We’re on,” I say into the other phone.

  A new voice comes in through my earbuds. “Look hard right,” he says. Connor turns to his right. “Do you see that garbage bin?” Connor nods.

  The well-dressed man stands up. He’s looking down, maybe at Connor or maybe at the monument.

  “Tommy,” I say into the other phone, “do you see the well-dressed guy?”

  “Yeah, Rocky,” he says excitedly.

  “Good. I may need you to follow him.”

  The blackmailer’s voice says, “I said, do you see the garbage bin?”

  Interesting. He hasn’t got eyes on Connor or he would have seen his nod.

  “Yes,” Connor says.

  I look up towards the well-dressed man but he’s walking out of the square. He almost collides with a jogger running into the square.

  “Forget him Tommy,” I say.

  The blackmailer says, “Walk to the bin and place the bag on top of it.”

  Connor stands up. Simultaneously the young lovers also stand and make their way, hand in hand, towards the bin.

  “Ghost,” I say. “Walk towards that garbage bin, straight ahead.”

  “OK, Rocky,” he says and gets to his feet.

  “If that couple grabs the Safeway bag, try and stop them,” I tell him. I stand up and head out of the café. The lights are against me and the traffic on Hastings is heavy. I look back at the scene. Connor is nearly at the garbage bin. The young lovers have stopped and are standing beside the bin, kissing. “Move in, Nick,” I say to Stammo.

  Then I see it.

  The jogger is running down the path, which cuts diagonally through the square. He will arrive at the bin at the same time as Connor and he’s looking directly at him.

  “It’s the jogger!” I shout into the phone.

  My view is cut off by a double-length trolley bus lumbering along Hastings. Damn! It takes forever to pass me. When it finally clears my line of sight, Connor is lying on the ground. Ghost has his hands over his face and there is blood on them. The young couple are moving toward him, and the jogger, clutching the Safeway bag, is running between cars as he crosses Cambie Street.

  Nick turns his truck onto Cambie just as the lights change. I dash across Hastings and see the jogger run into the alley that divides the block. Got him. He may be able to outrun me, he won’t be able to outrun Nick’s truck.

  I sprint as fast as I can to the alley’s entrance. As I arrive, I hear an insistent car horn. A glance to my right and I see that Stammo can’t turn into the alley. There is a Honda with out-of-town plates parked across the entrance. The people inside are studying a map. Nick is hitting the horn and shouting out his window at them, like a New York cab driver.

  I head into the alley. My quarry is a good hundred meters ahead of me and he is getting into a nondescript grey car. I redouble my pace but before I have halved the distance, the car accelerates away and within seconds is exiting the far end of the alley.

  I stand panting and turn around. The Honda is moving away, no doubt unimpressed with Vancouver driving manners, and within seconds Stammo roars towards me. I pull open the passenger door and hop in. It slams behind me as he accelerates.

  He takes the tracker off his lap and hands it to me.

  It’s a high-end model and for a second I wonder how much it cost us. It shows a map on which we are a blue dot and the tracking device is flashing red and is moving east on Hastings. Stammo hangs a left on Abbott, to the screeching of brakes, followed by horns. He accelerates down the block but the lights are red and he is blocked from turning right by a car straddling the lanes. He swears in technicolour and hits the horn futilely.

  The flashing red dot crosses Carrall and by the time the lights change and we turn onto Hastings, the dot has turned left off Hastings and onto Columbia. Stammo accelerates down Hastings and just makes the lights across Carrall.

  I look down at the tracker. The red dot is stationary. “He’s stopped by the lights on Cordova,” I yell.

  “Got him,” Stammo says and his truck roars as he pushes the accelerator lever. I have to admit, he really has learned how to use his specially-equipped truck.

  As we pull onto Columbia, the street is empty. “Where is he now?” Nick barks.

  The red dot is steady. The grey car should be right in front of us.

  He slows and our blue dot passes the tracker’s red dot.

  “Stop the truck,” I shout. It jolts to a halt.

  I jump out and scan the pavement behind us.

  And I see it.

  A white device, like a credit card with a red wire sticking out of it.

  We were outsmarted.

  We have just cost our client twenty-five thousand dollars.

  Maybe this blackmailer is not such an amateur after all.

  “Was your client OK?” Tina asks, concern written on her face. It’s a face I’ve loved since I first saw her at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting six months ago.

  “He had a couple of bruises but he was OK. The jogger knocked him off his feet and snatched the bag of money but Connor fell on grass. Poor old Ghost got a bloodied nose but if anything, he was proud of it. It gave him a story to tell over a beer or ten. What was amazing was that Connor was OK about the money.” I take a bite of the pakora. It’s delicious. I love it when it’s Tina’s week to cook.

  “So what’s next?” she asks.

  “Connor was more optimistic than he has the right to be. He thinks maybe the blackmailer will be satisfied with twenty-five grand and that it’s all over. I doubt it. He said his software company has eighty-five employees so I’m guessing he’s probably a millionaire. The blackmailer has to know what he’s worth and it seems unlikely he’ll stop now.”

  “What’s the name of his company?” she asks.

  “Why?” I ask. Tina is a reporter and I really don’t want any of my clients to appear in the Daily News Hound dot com.

  “You are sooooo suspicious,” she grins. “I won’t write a story about any of your clients, I promise. I was asking so that I could find out how rich he is. Just because he has eighty-five people working for him, doesn’t mean it’s a successful company.”

  “I’m not sure I remember. It was on his business card.” I try to conjure up an image of it. “It was dark blue with white
letters… 'Energy’ something, I think.”

  “Oh, yes of course, 'Energy something’, I know it well.” She grins even more widely and I am torn between eating more of the wonderful meal and reaching across the table to kiss her. But then again, I can do both. So I do.

  As we eat contentedly, I remember something else. “I got an email today,” I say.

  “Only one?” she laughs.

  “It was from a friend of mine who I was at UBC with. We did our Masters together. He decided to stay in academe and he’s now a professor at SFU in charge of the English Lit. department.”

  “Does he want you to spy on his unfaithful wife?” she says biting into a poppadom.

  “No, he wants me to go and work with him and teach Shakespeare to undergrads, maybe do a Ph.D. at the same time.”

  “Would you want to do that?”

  “Well, you know what…”

  But my phone cuts me off by ringing insistently.

  The caller ID starts 604-263. Although phone numbers are portable now, 263 used to be a Kerrisdale exchange and lots of the older residences still have that number. I give Tina a lopsided look. “I’m sorry, I have to take this.”

  She smiles and nods. We both have professions where it is important to take some calls any time of the night or day.

  I accept the call. “Cal Rogan.”

  “Hello Mr. Rogan, it’s Steph White, Zelena’s friend.”

  I was right. “Hi Steph.”

  She is silent for a moment. Then, “I really need to talk to you about what happened in Hong Kong. I couldn’t say anything in front of my mother. She just went out to play bridge with her friends. Could you meet up with me?”

  “I would really like that Steph. If I’m going to find Zelena, I need to know the truth.”

  “Could you meet me this evening? I’m going downtown to meet some friends. We could meet before.”

  “Sure. When and where?”

  She thinks for a moment. “The Starbucks on Robson and Thurlow? 8:30?”

  “I’ll see you there.”

  “Thank you so much,” she says and hangs up.

  I look across the table. “I’m sorry,” I say.

  “Some people will do anything to get out of doing the dishes.” She laughs, gets up, comes around the table and gives me a wonderful kiss. “I’ll be here when you get back,” she promises.

  I can’t help but wonder if she will always be this forgiving of the pressures of my job.

  “I’m soooo sorry I couldn’t tell you the truth before. My mom is like so strict about stuff, she’d have killed me.” Steph White leans towards me over the table, her hands clasped around her skinny latte. Although it’s a Monday, she’s dressed like she’s ready for a party. She’s not as stunning as Zelena looks in her picture, but Steph is very pretty. If her mother is as strict as she says, I’m betting she put on that short, glittery dress after her mother left for her bridge club and will not go back home until her mother is home and fast asleep in bed. Yet she’s nineteen, old enough to vote and drink. Odd.

  I smile encouragingly. “So what really happened in Hong Kong?” I ask, taking out my note pad.

  She pauses. It’s a typical reaction as a witness approaches the moment of truth. She smiles at me and runs the tip of her tongue over her top lip, removing a smudge of latte foam. She looks down at my notepad. “You have to promise me you won’t tell my mother or Zel’s parents. They would freak. Especially her dad, he’s like a hundred times more strict than my mom.”

  I struggle not to show my irritation at these protestations of parental strictness. “Listen Steph,” I say. “Your best friend and her brother are both missing. I don’t see any reason I have to tell your mother but I can’t keep anything from Zelena’s parents if it will help me find her and Aleksander.”

  She looks me in the eye for a long moment but I can’t read her expression. “OK,” she says.

  I try and ease her into talking. “When your mom was out of the room, you told me the story about winning the trip on YouTube wasn’t exactly true.”

  “No, it wasn’t,” she says.

  “When you mentioned it, I thought it was a bit far-fetched for someone on YouTube to give away a prize like that.”

  “Oh, no,” she says. “There was a competition—there are lots of them on YouTube—and we both entered but we didn’t win. We just told our parents that Zel had won.” She bites her lower lip.

  “Go on,” I say.

  She takes a deep breath and it all spills out in a rush. “Zel and I both had boyfriends but we never told our parents. They so wouldn’t approve of them. Anyway, after we’d entered the competition, we were all at a party together and we were talking about where we would go if we won. Harvey, that’s Zel’s boyfriend, is from Hong Kong and he said it would be a great place to go. He said if we didn’t win he’d pay for the trip anyway. Harvey is like super-rich. He said he would come with us for part of the trip and he even offered to pay for my boyfriend to go too. He said it would be his gift to us to celebrate the end of our first year at UBC. We thought he was joking but when we didn’t win, he just gave us our tickets. He told us he also had tickets for him and Chad and that they would come over and stay with us for a few days.”

  “Chad’s your boyfriend, I assume.”

  She gives a little pout. “Was,” she says.

  “So you told your parents you had won the contest and you went on the trip.”

  “Yes,” she brightens up. “We flew first class on Cathay Pacific and Harvey had even arranged for a limo to take us from the airport to our hotel. The limo driver was in the arrivals hall holding up a sign with our names on it. It was like being a celebrity. He took us to the Kerry hotel and we had two rooms overlooking the harbour; it was amazing.”

  “What did you do there?” I ask.

  “Oh, it was great. We went to visit all the street markets and shopped our faces off during the day and in the evenings, we went to nightclubs.”

  “Did you always go to the same club?”

  “Not at first, but when Harvey and Chad arrived, he took us to a place called the Golden Dragon. It was amazing. We just kind of made it our place.”

  “How long did your boyfriends stay?”

  “Just for a week. Zel was so happy. Before Hong Kong she and Harvey hadn’t, you know, really hooked up before.” She lowers her voice and leans closer. “She told me he was fantastic in bed and was more kind and gentle than anyone she’d ever been with. She just glowed all the time. She was lucky.”

  I remember what Zelena’s father said about her not having a boyfriend. “Was Harvey her first?”

  “OMG no! Zel’s so beautiful that she had a constant string of boyfriends. Don’t get me wrong, she didn’t sleep with all of them, she wasn’t a slut. But she definitely wasn’t a virgin either.”

  “Did Chad enjoy it too?”

  “Yes, but it didn’t really work out with us.” I look into her face and the sadness I see is muted by an expression I can’t quite read.

  “So what happened after the boys left?”

  “Zel was so over-the-moon in love that she wanted to fly back with them. But Harvey said he had to go to L.A. on business first, so she stayed.”

  “So Harvey’s older than her?”

  “Totally. He’s thirty-one.”

  “Tell me about Zel going missing.”

  “Sure. It was the day after Harvey left. The weather was really nice so we spent the day just hanging out beside the hotel pool. That evening we had dinner at an open-air restaurant just by the Temple Street night market and walked to the Golden Dragon. We had a couple of drinks but it just wasn’t the same without Harvey there, so we went back to the hotel. The next morning, we were planning to take the cable car and see the giant statue of Buddha, but when I went to her room, she wasn’t there and her bed hadn’t been slept in. When she wasn’t back by the evening, I called the police. They were useless by the way.”

  “Did you talk to anyone who stands
out in your mind?” I ask.

  “Not really. There were a couple of guys at the pool who tried to pick us up but Zel shooed them away. Apart from that I can’t think of anyone.”

  “No one at the restaurant or the nightclub.”

  “No. No one. Well, apart from Leo.” She sees the question on my face. “Leo’s the manager, or one of the owners, of the Golden Dragon, I’m not sure which. He was there every night and Zel was always flirting with him. But she flirted with everyone.”

  “Zel’s brother Aleksander, does he know the truth?” I ask

  “Zander? No way. I can’t imagine that Zel would tell him. He’s as bad as her dad. If he’d known, he’d probably have told his parents.”

  “What about Harvey? He must be really upset.”

  “Oh, poor Harvey, he’s devastated.”

  “You’ve seen him since you got back?”

  “No but I’ve texted him a lot. He never liked it that Zel flirted so much and he thinks she’s met someone else and gone off with them.”

  “Does he suspect anyone? Maybe the manager of that club, the Golden Dragon,” I check my notes, “Leo.”

  For a second she looks a bit flustered but covers it with, “No, not Leo. He and Harvey have been friends since they were little kids. Leo would never do that to Harvey.”

  I get the impression that maybe she had a bit of a crush on Leo. “How did you feel about Zel flirting with Leo?” I ask.

  “Zel flirted with everyone,” she says.

  “So you said, but I asked how you felt about it.”

  “I didn’t really care except that I felt sorry for Harvey.” She says it a bit too casually. I wonder if she’s covering up something. I just look at her but she doesn’t add anything.