Omand's Creek: A gripping crime thriller packed with mystery and suspense

by Don Macdonald

  “Ah, beautiful Transcona,” Traverse said. “They’ve got their own micro-climate out here. Always a bit sunnier, always a bit warmer, a bit happier.”

  Shelter grimaced at the joke as he surveyed the little house. It was a wreck in contrast with the well-kept homes on either side. Cream-coloured paint peeled from the stucco, and a decorative shutter hung by a nail beside a picture window, shrouded by curtains. The front lawn was mostly weeds. Bits of yellowed newspaper and a potato chip bag were caught in the shrubbery beside the crumbling cement steps. Shelter thought he could smell diesel wafting from the railway yards but decided it was his imagination.

  Earlier, Shelter had called Karen Roth at the group home. They’d wanted to get Pam into an interview room downtown to find out what she knew about the murder of her partner in prostitution, Monica Spence. But when Roth insisted she was too scared to leave the house, they were forced to make the long drive out to this neighbourhood.

  Traverse pushed the doorbell and gave two sharp knocks on the aluminum outer door. After a few seconds, he opened it and hammered on the main door. The curtains fluttered. A dead bolt lock was thrown, and the door squeaked open as far as a chain lock would let it.

  One brown eye examined Traverse through the crack. “Pam?” he said, holding up his badge. She released the lock, opened the door, and stood aside. They advanced into a tiny living room. Dusty beams of sun penetrated the room from cracks in the curtains. A sixty-inch flat-screen TV showing a daytime talk show with the sound muted provided the only other illumination.

  “Sorry, I had the headphones on.” Pam nodded down a hallway toward a couple of closed doors. She was a big white girl, not overweight but solidly built. Her shoulder-length hair had been bleached blond and dyed with magenta streaks.

  She picked up the remote control from the coffee table, snapped off the TV, and retreated to a recliner. She was wearing sweats with the word Juicy printed across her butt. Pulling her legs underneath her on the chair, she seemed to be trying to make herself as small as she could, like a cat curling up for a snooze.

  The detectives helped themselves to seats on the couch. Traverse thanked her for seeing them and after a pause said, “Let’s start with your name.”

  “It’s Pam. No last name.”

  “No, uh-uh,” Traverse interjected, patient but firm. “If we’re getting off on the right foot here, we’ve got to know who we’re dealing with.”

  She thought about it before sighing. “It’s Pam. Pamela. Pamela Daniel. Okay? Happy?”

  Her face was puffy, eyes bleary. Shelter guessed she wasn’t used to being out of bed before noon and wondered if she was in withdrawal. Her eyes bounced from one detective to the other. She reached for a throw cushion and held it to her chest like a shield.

  “We need to talk to you about Monica Spence,” Traverse said. “We understand you were working with her, like her partner in the business.”

  “I’m not telling you guys one fucking thing about Monica until you promise me a safe place to stay.”

  “Let’s just talk, and we’ll see what we can do, eh? We can’t help you unless you’re willing to help us.”

  “Don’t give me that shit. Not one word.”

  Shelter changed tacks. “Whose place is this anyway?”

  “My uncle, my mom’s brother. I swore I’d never come back to this neighbourhood, and here I am. I’m broke, and I gotta get out of here.” She tossed the pillow aside and grabbed a pack of du Maurier cigarettes off the table. She lit one with a trembling hand.

  Shelter was torn, and he knew Traverse would be feeling it too. He didn’t want to make a promise to this woman he couldn’t keep, especially before he knew if she had anything valuable to give them. But they had to get her talking. He decided to take a chance and sort it out with MacIsaac later.

  “We can’t make any promises, but we’ll do our best to get you into a hotel with some police protection until this thing is resolved,” he said. “That’s the best we can do. We’ve got bosses, and they’ve got budgets. If you help us, we can probably move you this afternoon.”

  She took a deep drag from her cigarette and examined the blood-red nails on her right hand. Shelter knew she was bluffing, like a poker player taking her sweet time to save face before folding a losing hand.

  “Alright, but I’m going to hold you to that. I’ll go to the media. I fucking swear I will.”

  “Let’s start with how you knew Monica,” Shelter said.

  “We met at the group home,” she said in distracted, almost casual way.

  “When did you go into care?”

  “I don’t know. I’m eighteen now, so five years ago, something like that. My dad’s a drinker, and he beat us up — my mom, my brother and me. So, when Mom took off, my brother and I ended up in care.”

  “You became friends with Monica at the group home?”

  She nodded. “We stayed friends when I got kicked out at eighteen. She’d had it really hard too. Lots of abuse and foster homes. But she was sweet. We got along good.”

  “How did you get into the business?” Traverse asked.

  Pam climbed out of the recliner. Sunshine flooded into the room when she pulled back the curtain to peek out the window. She let the curtain go, turned and fixed her eyes on Traverse. Shelter sensed she trusted his partner more, for whatever reason, and he was content to let Traverse take the lead.

  “It wasn’t anything you haven’t heard a hundred times before. He was sweet at the beginning, taking me out to the mall and buying me clothes and jewellery and shit. And the booze, of course, and blow. Before long, he’s telling you he loves you and you love him, eh?”

  “How old were you?” Traverse asked.

  “Sixteen.”

  She turned so she was in profile to them. “And then it starts with a guy in a room, and, you know, ‘If you love me, you’ll do it.’” She examined her nails and gave a resigned shake of her head. “The hardest thing? It was me who brought Monica to him.”

  “Brought her to who?”

  She ground out the cigarette hard into an ashtray. “Fucking Rory. Who else?”

  Traverse let it sit there. “Rory Sinclair was pimping both you and Monica. That’s what you’re telling us?”

  “That’s what I’m telling you. When Monica ran away from the group home and I let her stay at my place. That’s where Rory met her. We were partying, eh? She didn’t want to go back to the house, and she needed the money.”

  She let out a heavy sigh and examined a bangle on her wrist before looking up at Traverse.

  “After a while it was through that bitch girlfriend of his, the Vietnamese chick. She would set up our dates and take Rory’s cut, but at the beginning he plays the boyfriend until you’re so deep into the life, you can’t get out. He’s good at it.”

  Shelter remembered the Asian woman with Sinclair at the pool hall. “What’s the girlfriend’s name?”

  “Jasmine. That’s all I know.”

  “Okay, let’s talk about the protection system you had with Monica,” Traverse said.

  Pam crossed the room and flopped into the recliner again. “We only did it when we were out on the street. When dates were arranged, like online, we felt safer. There were still sick fucks, but at least they know you’ve got their phone number if anything nasty happens.”

  She was starting to talk faster. “But if we were hard-up for cash, we’d work the street once in a while, you know?” She lit another cigarette. “Dumb, right? But that’s what we did. I would take down the licence plates of the cars she got into, and she did the same for me.”

  “Looking out for each other,” Traverse said.

  “Yeah. If the john started doing sick shit or pulled a knife, we could tell him our friend had his licence plate, and he’d back off. That’s the way it was supposed to work.”

  “Was Monica working the night she got killed?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What happened?”

  It took a long time bef
ore Pam answered. She had her eyes on the coffee table and brought a fist to her mouth to contain a sob. When she did speak, her throat was constricted. “She had a bad cold, and she wasn’t going to go out on dates.” She had to pause again to calm herself. “I was downtown at a bar, and she called me. Rory was pissed off because she didn’t want to work. She owed him for some coke.”

  Shelter interjected. “How did she sound? Do you remember?”

  “Scared shitless. You have no idea what it’s like to have an asshole like that in your life, man. She was afraid he was going to beat her up again. She couldn’t take that.”

  “So she went out on a call?”

  “No, she went out on the street, the same place we always worked — on Ellice.”

  “If you were downtown, how do you know what she did?” Traverse asked.

  “That’s what Rory said. When I woke up the next morning, I saw she hadn’t come home. That wasn’t weird. She’d disappear for days on end, partying here and there. But I couldn’t get her on the phone, and she always answered her texts. I started freaking out, but I couldn’t get hold of Rory all day either. And then it was on the news that you guys found a girl’s body outside the city.”

  “And that was Monica,” Shelter said.

  Pam nodded and began to sob. Shelter became aware of the sound of a clock ticking somewhere behind him in the gloomy house. He gave a slight shake of his head to Traverse. All this information she was giving them was what they’d spent weeks looking for. Pam grabbed a couple of tissues from a box on the coffee table and dried her eyes.

  “What did Rory say when it came out it was Monica?” Traverse asked.

  “He came over to my place, and he’s playing it cool. You know — there’s nothing we could do for her now. Shit like that.”

  “He didn’t seem upset or worried?”

  “He was pretending to be broken up, but he’s a heartless prick,” she said. “He told me to be cool, and everything would be okay. But I just couldn’t calm down. Monica was on the TV every fucking night.” She paused to wipe her eyes. “What if it was Rory who did it?” Her voice went up, a hint of panic. “What if he finds out I’m talking to you guys?”

  Traverse waited for her to calm down. “How was he acting in the days after Monica was found?”

  “Business as usual until that lawyer lady started coming down on him. Then he started to freak.”

  “By lawyer lady, you mean Crystal Rempel.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Pam said. “She found out Rory got Monica into the business, and she would not let it go. She was calling him and coming up to him in bars. Asking him what happened to Monica and threatening to go to the police.”

  “How did Crystal find out about Rory and Monica?” Shelter asked.

  Pam lowered her eyes and went quiet.

  “You told her,” Traverse said.

  Pam nodded. “He’ll fucking kill me if he finds out.”

  “You called her?”

  “Monica told me she was cool, and I remembered where she worked.” Pam took a deep drag from her cigarette. “I was so scared. I needed to talk to somebody. We met at a coffee shop in St. Vital, a place Rory would never go. She was super smart and beautiful. I told her about Monica and him. And she starts asking me about dates we’d been on, eh? And I couldn’t help myself.” She paused, her eyes fixed on Traverse. “I told her about the picture.”

  “What picture?” Shelter said, suddenly alert.

  Pam stood up and went to the back of the house. She returned and handed Traverse a photocopy of a photo. Shelter leaned over to study it at the same time.

  It had been taken in a dimly lit room but was in focus. It showed four people partying in a hotel room. Rory Sinclair was seated on the king-size bed closest to the camera. He was looking over his shoulder at a man whose head was tilted back, laughing at a joke. The laughing man was Indigenous and obese, with a heavy gold chain around his neck. His name was Charlie, just Charlie — that’s all Pam knew. He was holding a rolled-up bill, ready to snort a line of cocaine off the top of a chest of drawers strewn with beer cans and miniature liquor bottles.

  In the background on the other side of the bed was another man, standing with his profile to the camera. His face was indistinct, but he was white, in his fifties, bald with a fringe of grey hair, glasses and a pot belly. Pam remembered his name was Bill. He had an arm wrapped tight around the shoulder of a smiling girl with shimmering black hair facing the camera. She was dressed in a clingy charcoal mini-dress and was petite beside his bulky frame. The girl was Monica Spence.

  “You gave this photo to Monica?” Shelter asked.

  Pam nodded.

  “And Crystal?”

  She nodded again before burying her face in her hands.

  FOURTEEN

  Shelter leaned back in his chair and looked up at Traverse standing in the entrance to his cubicle. Shelter was listening to him talk about Rory Sinclair, but part of his mind was measuring the change in his partner. The meeting with Pam Daniel seemed to have thrown a switch in Traverse. He was back to his old self: excited, engaged, on the hunt. Shelter hoped it was the start of a new chapter, and he would decide to stay with the department.

  “I don’t know what Nicki is talking about. There’s no way Rory is calling you,” Traverse said. “We’re going to have to bring him in.”

  “If he doesn’t want to be found, he won’t be,” Shelter said. “He’ll just jump up to the rez.”

  “What possible reason could he have to want to talk to you?” Traverse asked. “Don’t get me wrong. You’re a great conversationalist and all, but Monica, Crystal, it’s pointing to him.”

  He was interrupted by Ian Sim’s nasal voice. “He’s ready for you now,” Sim said, looking over the chest-high cubicle wall. Shelter led the way to Inspector Neil MacIsaac’s office. On the way, Shelter realized he hadn’t had a chance to grab lunch, and he felt a headache starting behind his eyes. This visit to the boss’s office wasn’t going to help.

  “Okay, give it to me,” MacIsaac said.

  Shelter had his notebook out and was flipping pages. “Pamela Mary Daniel. She’ll be nineteen on August 12. Arrested twice for solicitation. She says Rory Sinclair groomed her for prostitution when she was sixteen.”

  Shelter ran down how Pam knew Monica Spence and had introduced her to Sinclair, and how they’d worked the street together.

  “And the night Monica was killed?” MacIsaac asked.

  “Pam got a call from Monica. Rory was pissed off over a drug debt, and she was hitting the street alone. When she turned up dead, Rory told Pam to sit tight and ride it out.”

  Traverse interjected. “But she panics and decides to take it to Crystal Rempel.”

  Shelter glanced at Traverse. “Show him the picture.”

  Traverse opened a file folder and laid the image on MacIsaac’s desk. “Pam took this at the Bond Hotel less than a week before Monica was killed,” he said. “She comes out of the bathroom and pretends to be sending a text. Instead she takes the picture, a little habit of hers.”

  “Dangerous habit,” MacIsaac said, shaking his head as he scanned the photo. “What am I looking at?”

  “Rory brought the girls and an eight-ball of coke,” Shelter said. “He stayed to party for a while.” Shelter scooted forward on his seat and leaned over the desk, pointing to the large Indigenous man. “Besides Rory here, you’ve got Charlie Osborne.” He moved his finger left to the white man in the background, his face in profile, indistinct. “She only knows this guy as Bill.” He straightened and pushed himself back in his chair. “And she says there was one other man in the room.”

  “What do we know about him?”

  “An older white guy in a suit. He didn’t stay long. That’s it.”

  “Who set up the party?”

  “Pam doesn’t know. Just that they were celebrating something. A business deal.”

  MacIsaac nodded. “Who else has the picture?”

  “After Crystal was
killed, Pam was so freaked out, she erased it from her phone and destroyed the SIM card.”

  “Why so scared?”

  “Because of the way Crystal reacted to it,” Shelter said. “When they met, they talked about Monica’s dates — who she’d been with. Pam showed Crystal the picture, and she was very hot to get a copy.”

  MacIsaac took that in, lowering his eyes to the jumble of paperwork on his desk. It took a couple of seconds for him to come up with the question Shelter and Traverse were waiting for. “Did she give a copy to anyone else?”

  It was Shelter who answered. “Monica Spence.”

  MacIsaac raised an eyebrow.

  “If she was hard-up for cash, maybe she decided blackmailing someone in that room was the solution,” Shelter said.

  “Okay, what’s our play?”

  “We’re looking for Rory. We’ve got him on pimping,” Shelter said. “We’re also trying to track down Charlie Osborne and find out who the other two guys in the hotel room were. Sharma and Sim are working on the hotel — who booked it, video from the parking lot and front desk.”

  On the way back to their desks, Shelter said to Traverse, “I want you on Charlie Osborne. We need more on him — his work, who he hangs out with.” Shelter sat down at his desk and said over his shoulder, “All these guys are probably talking to each other. When we find out who everybody is, it’s going to unravel...hopefully.”

  Shelter leaned against the car hood a couple of hundred metres from the Indigenous Friendship and Assistance Centre on the northern edge of downtown. Mourners had begun to file into the two-storey cinder-block building for Crystal Rempel’s memorial.

  Shelter was there on the off-chance Rory Sinclair might show up. It had been a long, frustrating two days. A search of his haunts around town had come up empty, and the RCMP on his home reserve couldn’t find him either. They hadn’t had any more luck bringing Charlie Osborne in for questioning about the hotel room party and the identity of Bill and the other man.