“There we got a big goose egg. The city is pretty quiet this time of year. Everywhere we’ve checked had no guests matching the description of a man and a woman of the age I’ve given them.”
“They must be holed up somewhere. There’s no way she got past our roadblocks after her attack yesterday,” Bernadette said.
“Like I said, this place is like a ghost town for guests right now, so if they were here, we’d find them. We even did some out of out of town searches and got nothing.”
“Out of town…” Bernadette said.
She walked back to Evanston. “I think we need to take a ride.”
“Where to? Can we pick up lunch on the way back? I missed it yesterday, with the situation and all…” Evanston’s words trailed off as she realized what she was saying.
“Sure, we’re heading for the seminary,” Bernadette said.
“Why? We interviewed everyone there. You got someone you want another shot at?”
“No, I want to go through the rooms out there.”
“What for? Are looking for the ghosts of old priests?”
“Our suspects haven’t shown up anywhere in town and there was no sight of them when Frederick was murdered. What if they’re staying at the seminary?”
“But how could that be? The place is mostly vacant—whoa, hell yeah, the perfect place to hide out. Come out of your room, attempt a murder, come out of your room, and hang a priest. If this is for real. We need some backup.”
“We’ll get two units to back us up,” Bernadette said. “I’ll let the chief know.”
17
Evanston and Bernadette drove in silence to the seminary with two police cruisers behind them.
“Just how crazy does the chief think you are for thinking the suspects are in the seminary?” Evanston asked.
Bernadette pulled down her sunglasses and looked at Evanston. “No more than usual, but he figured we’d be out of his hair, what he has left of it, for a few hours.”
“I hope you’re right, I’d like to see the look on the detachment’s face when we make a collar on one of your crazy ideas,” Evanston said.
Bernadette shook her head. “I guess that’s a compliment?”
They drove up to the seminary with no lights or sirens, thinking it best not to alert the suspects in case they were there. Father Francis met them as they made their way into the entrance.
“I received your message,” Father Francis said. “I doubt if our seminary would be harboring the fugitives. I’m sure someone would have seen them if they were roaming our halls.” He stood there in his cassock, with his arms crossed. He looked and sounded indignant that the police would have suggested such a thing.
“We like to eliminate all possibilities,” Bernadette replied with a smile. She thought it better to humor him than to explain her reasoning. “Would you please show us to the rooms that are unoccupied.”
Father Francis pointed behind him. “It’s the entire west wing. We closed it off years ago. We keep it heated with the water running so as not to damage the infrastructure, but no one goes in there.”
“Does your maintenance man ever go in?”
“He goes in every three days, makes a complete check of the area, and signs off on a sheet near the front of the wing. We need the documentation to keep our insurance up to date,” Father Francis said.
“I see. Thanks, Father, we’ll do our checks and then see ourselves out,” Bernadette said.
They walked down the great hall and into the West Wing. A clipboard was on a side table with a scrawl of dates and times.
Bernadette picked up the clipboard. “Hmm, looks like the maintenance guy has been pretty regular. But this is interesting. It’s all the same pen.”
“What’s strange about that?” Evanston said.
“How often do you have the exact same pen with you day in day out for several weeks? And it’s written in almost the same style,” Bernadette answered.
“So, that means we’re still going in then?”
“Yeah,” Bernadette said. She turned to the officers. “We go in as teams, and no one separates. Cover each other, weapons drawn. If these two are here, they’re armed. Copy that?”
They had Constable Stewart and Simmons with them. Simmons was a mid-thirties single mom with dark hair and brown eyes and devotion to the force and her ten-year-old daughter. Somehow, she managed her job and her growing daughter in a way that made most in the force envious.
“We copy,” Stewart replied. “I’m not about to get stuck by that bitch.”
Simmons looked at Stewart. “Be nice now, you don’t even know the lady.”
They entered the wing slowly. Enough light came from the outside to see well at first, but then it got dim as they progressed down the hall. The old wooden floors creaked under their feet.
Pictures of past priests looked down on them from the walls. The place smelled of old carpet and wallpaper.
“Did you see something crawl across the floor?” Evanston asked.
“Probably a mouse,” Bernadette answered.
“I hate mice,” Evanston said.
“Try not to get too excited. There might be a lot of them around.”
“You know if the maintenance guy actually came in here, you’d think you’d see some traps set,” Evanston said.
“There you go, never believe what you read—did you hear that?”
“What?” Evanston asked.
“I think I heard a door slam up ahead.”
Bernadette turned to Stewart and Simmons. “I heard something up ahead. We each take one side of the hall and clear each room. Copy that?”
Stewart waved he’d heard and went with Simmons to check each room. The rooms were small, holding two single beds with a four-drawer dresser in between and an armoire.
To ensure the room was clear, they opened each armoire to ensure no one was hiding inside. After swinging numerous ones open, Stewart turned to Simmons. “This feels kind of silly.”
“If the suspect jumps out of one of those with a scalpel, it won’t be.”
“You’re right,” Stewart said as he pulled the next one open as Simmons stood behind him with her weapon drawn.
Bernadette and Evanston made it down the hall going room by room, clearing each armoire and looking under beds to see if there’d been any sign of activity.
“It sure feels colder in here,” Evanston said.
“They must have closed a bunch of heating vents. They only need to keep the pipes from freezing.” Bernadette said as she swung an armoire open.
“They didn’t have much did they,” Evanston said.
“No, they were giving themselves to God. That was the whole point, abandoning worldly possessions to attain the kingdom of heaven,” Bernadette said.
“You believe in all that stuff?”
“Doesn’t matter what I believe, it’s what they believed. Thousands of men and women have become priests and nuns over the years trying to pursue heaven.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“You’re right, I didn’t. Now, let’s get these rooms cleared,” Bernadette said.
They came out of their room at the same time as Stewart and Simmons who gave them the all clear sign.
“This is the last one,” Evanston said. She opened the door to the room and jumped back. “We got company.”
Bernadette motioned for Stewart and Simmons to cover them. She opened the door slowly and swept the room with her gun. The room had been lived in. There were two sleeping bags and food containers on the floor. A mouse was busy with one.
Bernadette entered the room and checked the armoire. A shirt and pair of pants hung there. She went to the top drawer and opened it to find a gray hooded sweatshirt. Taking a pen out of her pocket, she moved the sweatshirt to find a blonde wig.
“I guess we know how our blonde disappeared,” Bernadette said, holding the wig up with her pen.
“I’ll be damned, they were here all along,” Stewart said fr
om the door.
A door slammed down the hall. They all jumped and turned in unison.
“Do we call for backup?” Evanston asked.
“By the time they got here our suspects could be gone. Let’s move forward,” Bernadette said. She took the lead with Evanston and the officers behind her.
Pushing open a large door that separated the dormitory from the bathrooms, Bernadette swept the room with her weapon and the others followed inside.
The only light came in from frosted windows. A row of toilets lined the room and beyond them were sinks and shower stalls. They moved in opening toilet stalls as they went.
At the end of the room a toilet flushed.
They surrounded the stall, crouching low with guns pointed. No one breathed.
The door opened. “Police—freeze—down on the ground now. Get down now.”
A frightened man in coveralls hit the ground so fast it looked like his legs had failed him.
“Don’t shoot, don’t shoot,” the man whimpered from the ground.
“Hold up, everyone. It’s the maintenance man,” Bernadette said. She bent down and helped him off the floor.
“Yes, yes it’s me, Dmitri Vlasik, the maintenance man.” He got up from the floor and brushed the dirt off his coveralls.
“You didn’t sign into the book that you were doing a check,” Bernadette said.
“I came in the back way, from the parking lot.”
“Did you know, Mr. Vlasik, that there’s been someone living in the rooms on this floor?” Bernadette asked.
Vlasik’s eyes went wide. “That’s not possible. I was here last week, I saw no one.”
“So, you don’t come in every three days like the sheet claims in the front hall.”
Vlasik shifted from side to side, his eyes dropped to the floor “How can I? I do everything here, the boiler is one hundred years old, the electrical system hardly functions, and half the time the toilets back up. I do what I can.” He raised his head and looked at Bernadette. “Are you going to tell Father Francis? I need this job, I’m a pensioner and my pension pays me shit.”
Bernadette shrugged her shoulders. “Sure, you can tell the Father you couldn’t possibly check every room and maybe he’ll cut you some slack. I’ll put in a good word for you. Now, show us how someone could have got in here without being seen.”
“Okay, no problem, follow me. The priests lock up nothing here. I’ve told them they should lock the doors at night, but they won’t hear of it,” Vlasik said as he led them out of the washrooms to a set of stairs
They followed him down two flights of stairs to a doorway that led to a small parking lot in the back. Five cars occupied spots outside the doorway. Four cars were covered in snow; one larger vehicle had a tarp thrown over it with no snow on it.
“Who owns these cars?” Evanston asked.
“Some of the priests who have lived here and left, leaving their cars behind. Some of them are junk, but the seminary hasn’t had time to dispose of them,” Vlasik said.
“What about the one under the tarp? It looks like it was recently moved,” Bernadette said.
“That’s strange, it was covered in snow last week. It’s a Toyota van that we used to take some priests into town. The priest who drove it became ill, so they parked it back here.”
Bernadette walked into the parking lot and lifted the tarp on the back of the vehicle. She looked at Evanston. “Looks like the Toyota van has miraculously become a GMC SUV.”
The other officers came over to the vehicle. Stewart pulled out his cellphone and pulled up the license number. “We got a match. This is the suspects’ vehicle they rented from Hertz back in Calgary.”
Bernadette got on the phone and called the detachment, ordering a complete team to come out and sweep the vehicle and the room in the seminary for prints.
“We now know why we haven’t seen them in a hotel in town. They’ve been living here most of the time,” Bernadette said. She turned to Vlasik. “Can you get us the vehicle license number of the van?”
“Yes, of course. I’ll do that right now,” Vlasik said. Walking away with a slight limp, he hurried as fast as he could in the direction of the office.
Bernadette watched him leave. “I feel sorry for that guy with all the work he has to do, but he’s lucky he didn’t give the rooms a thorough check.”
“Why is that?” Evanston asked.
“Because they would have killed him if he had.”
18
By late afternoon, the crime scene techs swept the room in the seminary and the vehicle for prints and any DNA. They’d found the shower the couple had used and the garbage bin. A news team had gotten wind of the tech’s activities, parking themselves outside the front door and raising their antennae on their truck as if somehow, they could pick up something from the police.
Bernadette walked outside and was approached by a young woman in a parka holding a microphone.
“Detective, have there been any new developments in the recent murders?” she asked, thrusting the microphone under Bernadette’s chin.
Bernadette stood there, careful not to look frustrated or annoyed. A cameraman was rolling footage in back of the reporter.
“This is all part of our ongoing investigation. If you go to our detachment, our spokesman will fill you in with latest events.”
“But they’ve given us nothing. They only say everything is part of an ongoing investigation,” the young woman complained.
“Well, there you go, we’re consistent now, aren’t we?” Bernadette said with a smile and started walked away.
Jacob Burkov blocked her way. He had his cell phone in one hand, using it to record. “Well, Detective Callahan, I hear you’ve sprung your uncle and he’s now residing with you. Do you have anything to say to these new developments in your life?”
Bernadette looked at the smiling well-dressed man and saw red. She put up her hand and knocked his cell phone to the ground. “Listen to me you little shit, you almost ran me over the other morning. I could have you charged for that.”
Burkov put up his hands. “Your headlamp was in my eyes. I couldn’t see. It wasn’t my fault.”
“Following me is obstruction of a police officer. I can have you hauled into jail for that.”
“You’d never make that charge stick, and you know it,” Burkov said. “I’d be out in no time.”
Bernadette smiled. “You haven’t seen the backlog in our jails. Maybe you can write a story about that—oh, but you won’t have your cellphone. We confiscate those.”
“I’ll gain more followers and more sponsors,” Burkov said. “Go ahead take me in, I dare you.”
Bernadette bent down and picked up his cell phone and handed it to him. “Here, you dropped this.”
She walked away knowing she’d screwed up. Her grandmother always said to never fight with a pig, you get dirty and the pig enjoys it. She walked back into the seminary where Evanston was waiting.
Evanston took her aside. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? You fed right into his hands. That’s what he was hoping you’d do. That whole thing of him trying to run you off the road—that was him getting under your skin, so he’ll have something to write about.”
Bernadette shook her head. “Yeah, damn it, you’re right. I really screwed up. But on the bright side you’ll probably get a bargain on catnip on his blog next week.”
Evanston put her hand to her forehead. “Oh, girl. You’re something, you know that?”
Bernadette shrugged and went back into the seminary to work with the crime scene investigators.
As the morning turned to late afternoon, CSI left the scene and so did Bernadette and Evanston. They grabbed a sandwich on the way back, wolfing it down with a Diet Coke at the Subway Stop so they wouldn’t be getting mustard and relish on their desks back at the office.
They had a meeting with Durham and the other detectives, with Durham taking the lead.
“What have we got?” Durham as
ked.
Bernadette looked at her notes. “The murder and incident took place at the hospital at eleven hundred hours yesterday. If the suspects went back to the seminary and changed vehicles then, that gives them almost twenty-four hours driving either east or west.”
“That gives them Vancouver, Calgary or Winnipeg. They could be anywhere by now,” Evanston said.
“We’ll put out a BOLO to all units both east and west and have them check all gas station CCTV’s. I’ll get some units to set up roadblocks at some of the mountain passes in British Columbia,” Dawson said.
“That’s all good, Chief,” Bernadette said. “But I got a feeling they’re still in the area.”
“Why is that?” Durham asked.
“Because they’re not done. Father Dominic is still alive. That’s who they came for. I think these two will go back into another hole and wait. If they hid from us in the seminary, they’ll do something off the grid. I suspect an abandoned house, or they’ll do a push in of some single person and take over their house,” Bernadette said.
“You seem overly certain of that,” Durham said.
“I just got a of sense of the dedication of the mission of these two. We’re not dealing with average criminals. These two are serious about getting their job done.”
“Okay,” Durham said. “We’ll send out a notice.”
“We also need to get onto every senior citizen’s Facebook site and tell them to look out for these two, then let everyone know they need to check on their single relatives to make sure they’re okay,” Bernadette said.
“Your pretty certain of this?” Evanston asked.
“I’m deadly certain.”
Anna Lindkvist lay on the sofa with her hands and feet tied with duct tape. A dishtowel had been stuffed in her mouth. This had happened so fast. The two young people had seemed so nice.
They’d knocked on her door just after she got in from her taxi ride back from the store. They said they had a grandmother in the neighborhood, but they’d gotten lost, and their cell phone had no battery power left. Could they just step in and use her phone?
Deadly Ancestors: A Bernadette Callahan Mystery (Bernadette Callahan Detective Series Book 5) Page 9
