by Dale Mayer
Kate nodded at that. “You know what? This one, Candy, she was supposed to attack a blind woman,” she said, with a frown. “This group of upstanding college students picked out that victim for her.”
At that, Lilliana stepped forward and stared at Kate, incredulous.
“Maybe that unintended victim was protecting herself from them. You know? Like fighting back. Candy attacked somebody healthy instead of that blind woman, made it look like an accident. Candy was bawling her head off over the whole thing. Did she knock somebody over? Yes, I think so. Did she help them up and apologize afterward? Maybe. Was all of this because this group was pressuring Candy to be as bad as them? Possibly. I have no idea. They’re all entitled rich kids, all a brick short of a load.”
“They’re creepy for sure. It comes with that upper-class-privilege personality,” Owen said quietly from the side.
She looked over at him and smiled. “And you’re right there—the privilege, the lifestyle, the wealth. They just ooze arrogance.”
“We’ve all met that kind,” Owen agreed. “But we can’t afford to piss them off and their rich parents with fancy attorneys, until we get some corroborating information. Plus, we don’t want to tip off this group of bullies, or they’ll be lawyered up so damn fast that you’ll have a hard time getting anything out of them.”
Kate nodded. “Absolutely, he’s already threatened that over routine witness questions.”
Just then, Colby returned to the bullpen, a frown on his face. “I spoke to Paul. They have had a couple complaints about a gang of kids from his Faculty of Arts, running around and knocking people over, but, when nobody would come forward to make any definitive statements about it, it was pushed to the side. Nobody seemed to get seriously hurt, and no one wanted to talk to the UBC Legal Department or to the RCMP, so it was never reported beyond Paul.” They all just silently looked at him. Colby shrugged. “It’s a university campus, full of kids, plenty of them drunk or loaded half the time. A lot of them make poor decisions. We’ll need a whole lot more to go on, if we’re to get very far before they’re tipped off.”
Lilliana said quietly from behind them, “So, we all agree that we need to stop this.”
“But we also can’t forget about everything else on our docket,” Colby said. “These guys are shitty. I agree. But we also have a killer out there.”
“We have more than one this team is working on,” Owen said. “We need to keep focused on what’s hot and move when we can. This is a great sideline and something that we all really want to work on, but just because these guys are shits doesn’t mean they get to take our priority and divert our attention.”
Colby shook his head. “Don’t forget that we have Reese and two assistants.” He raised a hand before he heard the usual comments. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. We’re shorthanded. We all need more help. Keep your priorities, people.”
It was a hard truth, but one that Kate had to listen to nonetheless, because they were right. Only so much anybody could do at any one time, and, although she had intimated that these guys may have killed someone with their bullying, she didn’t have any proof. And that was bothersome in itself. She didn’t want these guys to get away with anything—rich daddies and rich attorneys notwithstanding—but she didn’t have anything on them at this point that would do anything but get their knuckles rapped.
Kate looked over at the others and nodded. “What I don’t want is to see Brandon’s group just get a suspension for a few days. It should be much more serious than that, or it’s not worth doing.”
“She’s right,” Rodney said. “A slap on the wrist will just empower entitled assholes like this. We’ll have to work that angle as we can.”
Kate agreed. “Let me get back to the accident on the corner.”
“Accident?” Rodney asked, with a wry smile.
She frowned. “I don’t know why I keep thinking of it that way.”
“Maybe it is an accident, as far as the auto collision is concerned. But did somebody accidentally shoot her in the head?” he asked. “Unless somebody was out shooting for fun, not intending to hit anyone, in that case, it’s possible that it could have been an accident.”
She frowned. “Let’s wait until we get the forensics for that.”
He said, “It doesn’t feel like an accident to me.”
“No, but it doesn’t really feel like a regular murder either.” She frowned, thought more about that, then shook her head. “I don’t even know what I’m saying at this point. Right now there’s too much going on in my head.”
“Focus.” Rodney dropped off the report that he had printed for her. “This has the police histories on all the people on the scene. Take a look, and see if anything pops for you.”
She sat here with her coffee and perused the reports. Like Rodney had said, a few small hits but nothing major, nothing that even showed any older trauma that could account for this. That didn’t mean that one of these bullies didn’t have something else going on in their world or that they hadn’t waited all this time to get back at somebody, but nothing really got her attention. She kept reading and noted there wasn’t a report on the victim herself. With that, she turned on her computer and brought it up.
Sally Hardgens had lived in Vancouver for over twenty-one years. Wow, Kate thought. Either college kids look five years younger than their age or maybe this was a sign that Kate was growing ever older. She shook her head at that. Sally was in the first year of her master’s program in chemistry, and she apparently wanted to be a biochemist. At that, Kate gave a silent whistle, thinking, what a shame she was killed because anybody with the brains to pursue that field could really do some good in the world. And this woman was in the prime of her life.
Checking further, Kate couldn’t find any campus records to indicate any black marks against Sally. Everything indicated she was a model student. Of course being a model student came with its own perils too because not everybody was a fan.
Of course killing them wasn’t exactly the most common way of snubbing them.
Kate kept going through everything she had on the victim, then tossed the report on her desk in disgust. “Nothing on our victim to speak of either. At least nothing that’s showing up.”
“Good,” Rodney acknowledged. “I mean, it’s not good in the sense that random killings are much harder to solve. But what if somebody was just going after anybody who happened to be at that corner?”
“So, wrong time, wrong place. Not about the victim but about the location. If so, then we go back to the history of that particular spot.” With that, she brought up all the reports on the other accidents in the area. “Here are those other four cases you mentioned.”
“But they weren’t all in the same block,” Rodney said. “So does our killer think it would be okay to move it to a new location?”
“I don’t know. Somebody is doing something here, and we just haven’t figured out how or why … just yet.”
“No.”
“But we have to consider these other cases”—Kate tapped her monitor—“because at least this one was very similar.”
“Which one? In what way?” Owen asked.
“Listen to this, from an earlier death in that area. According to observers, this woman just collapsed in front of the car. The driver wasn’t charged because there was absolutely no evidence that his vehicle caused mortal injuries, and it was an undetermined cause of death. She died at the scene—no signs of obvious trauma. It was initially thought the car itself had been the weapon, but no forensic evidence was found there. No hair. No blood. No skin cells. No nothing. The coroner also said that, due to the circumstances, he couldn’t confirm natural causes either. In the end, he had no way to say how she died. He did run a tox screen, and it came back negative. No drugs. No alcohol.”
The others looked at Kate, and she shrugged.
Andy returned to the bullpen, with a hot cup of coffee, catching the last part. “That makes no sense. If they’re connected, how did she die
?”
“That’s the thing.” Lilliana frowned, looking over Kate’s shoulder at this earlier report. “Her heart just stopped, or it was stopped for her, and we don’t know how. They examined her on scene and ran a tox screen, but no autopsy was done.”
At that, Kate whistled. “So if no autopsy was done, and she died at the scene, it should have been just put down to natural causes.” She shook her head. “But they didn’t do that either.” Noting Smidge had signed the report, she picked up the phone and called his office. When he answered, as cranky and as testy as always, she smiled because that was a man after her own heart. Being bitchy just made her happy. “It’s Kate Morgan,” she said in a snappy voice.
“I’ve got nothing for you. If you’d stop sending bodies down here, I could actually get to them.”
“I hear you. Five years ago was another vehicular accident with a bike rider. Not the same block, just down a little bit farther.”
“Yeah, what about it?”
“No cause of death,” she said.
“What the hell has that got to do with me?”
“At the time, the investigators initially thought it was impact with the vehicle, but you found no obvious trauma to the body, right?”
“Right. I remember that case. That one puzzled me too.”
“So you could pull up nothing for it?”
“Well, if I said that, I said that,” he said in a cranky tone.
“Right, I get it. So, how is it that somebody dies from absolutely no sign of death?”
“The heart stops,” he snapped. “It happens.”
“But it wasn’t a heart attack?”
“No, and sometimes it happens like that. For one reason or another, we just don’t really know.”
“She had no underlying condition, but her heart stopped, and she just keeled over for no reason. That’s the best we could come up with?” Kate asked.
“It’s an open case, I believe.”
“It’s not closed in the sense that no cause of death was identified, so it hasn’t been closed because you didn’t decide if it was from unnatural causes.”
“I couldn’t say either way. When I was pressured to put something down, that’s what I chose to put down.”
“Interesting,” she murmured.
“Don’t go calling me on that one,” he snapped. “On this one, however, I found a cause of death.”
“So, do we know that the hole in the back of her head caused her death?”
“Yes. It goes right into her brain.”
“So, theoretically, could she have ridden a little bit forward, even with that in her head?”
“Yes,” he said.
“How far?”
“I don’t know. Probably up to fifty, sixty, even seventy meters. I mean, we’ve had people walk into the hospital with knives sticking out of their skulls. So the self-preservation ability of the human body is amazing. Our cyclist could easily have been shot way down the road, and, not knowing what the hell happened to her, she faded more and more as she got to that intersection.”
“Do you know for sure that the vehicle did not cause her death?”
“Yes,” he said, without hesitation. “It did not cause her death.”
“Fine, because we have the driver. He came in and confessed.”
“Confessed to what? Hitting her?”
“Well, no, not quite hitting her. He said he was at the intersection, stopped, and she was there in front of him and just kind of collapsed.”
“And of course, the fine upstanding citizen that he was, he hopped out and immediately administered aid and called 9-1-1.”
“No, of course not. He took off, citing the line of traffic behind him.”
“Sometimes I hate people,” Smidge said.
“I think our job gives us a little more license to hate people,” she said quietly.
“Nah, I’d probably still hate people anyway.” Then he hung up.
She chuckled. “He’s in fine form today.”
“He doesn’t like being called out on an old case, never has,” Rodney said. “He gets quite snarky about it, but you seem to get along with him just fine. Why is that?”
She turned to him. “Why not?”
He shrugged. “Can’t say that he and I ever hit it off that well.”
“Nothing to hit off. He’s the guy you got to hit against.”
He looked at her, his gaze narrowing, as he studied her. “Seriously? You go in there aggressive?”
She shrugged. “He’ll be that way regardless. If you can’t give as good as you get, he’ll walk all over you.”
“Great. Here I’ve been trying to be a nice guy and tiptoe around him, while you go in there, like a bowling ball.”
“Yep,” she said cheerfully, “knock him right over. He talks to me. We talk to each other. We don’t have any bullshit back and forth, and he appreciates it.”
“Well, I’ll be damned. I’ve been handling all those grouchy assholes over there wrong this whole time. Who knew?” He shook his head and returned to his computer screen, while she sat here, chuckling beside him.
“Doesn’t help much though on that one earlier case.” Kate got up and started two separate whiteboards, one with the bullies and one with this accident and, at the bottom of that one, she added the other accidents annually for the past five years. She put up pictures and reports and a summary of all the dates. Then she looked at it, shrugged. “Not a whole lot here.”
“You’ve got multiple cases there and nothing to even begin to fill the board,” Lilliana said. “That’s how these cases end up cold in the first place.”
“Yeah, I hear you. I’m doing my best to make sure it doesn’t happen to this one.”
Colby walked in again, took one look at the empty second board and frowned.
She raised one hand. “Don’t say it. I know nothing’s up there.”
“A few things are. I remember a couple of those accidents,” he muttered. “There was some consternation among us because we didn’t end up with a definitive cause of death. Families really struggle with that. They need to know what happened, so they can work through it and move on. When you can’t do that, it’s really hard on them.”
“So what do you do?” Kate asked.
Colby shrugged. “You make it a little more general, a little less easy to deal with, but you give them closure.”
She frowned. “In this current case, the young woman has a hole from some projectile. Smidge didn’t say bullet, and he didn’t find it in her head. As a matter of fact, it’s not there at all.”
“What? It went in and didn’t come back out?”
She shook her head. “No, it didn’t.”
“Ice,” Owen said immediately.
She turned, looked at him, and frowned.
He continued. “We had a case like that not too long ago. This guy was making ice bullets, and they can kill people. By the time we got to the autopsy, the ice bullets had, of course, dissolved, and nobody could find anything. Maybe run it and see if there’s a history somewhere with it.”
Inspired by even the thought of having something to check out, Kate sat back down again at her desk and immediately searched for murder cases involving ice bullets.
Meanwhile Colby walked over and studied the boards. “I see you got the bullying kids up here.”
“Yep.” She spoke to him, not even turning to face him. “As long as I’ve got the kids up there, I won’t forget about them.”
“You’ve got a long-ass memory. I can’t imagine you forgetting about anything.”
“You’d be surprised. I try not to, but, once in a while, I mess up.”
With that, he turned and walked out.
When she came up with two cases, one was caused by dry ice, she turned to the other one. She whistled. “Look at that. Owen, you’re right on target.”
“What did you find?” he asked.
“About ten years ago, a kid on campus was killed. They were all making ice pellets and
using BB guns. This one ended up shooting himself in the head and dying.”
“He shot himself? That’s in the report?” Rodney asked Kate.
“According to the eyewitnesses, yes.”
“I wonder if those eyewitnesses would change their story now.” Rodney looked over at her.
Her eyebrows shot up. “It is at the university again.”
“Which brings it back to a connection that we can’t ignore. And that’s not our jurisdiction.”
She tapped her fingers on the keyboard aimlessly, as she thought about it. “It was a long time ago though, ten years. So, why now?” She turned to face her team. “If we’re working on a revenge theory, why so long afterward?”
“Maybe our fictional killer was a younger brother, or maybe it was a family member who didn’t live here, or maybe it has absolutely no connection,” Lilliana said, trying to bring their musings back to ground zero.
Kate looked over at her. “A serial killer is motivated by something known though—at least to him. And we need to find that motivation. And we have five annual deaths, which is suspicious, and, if murders, done by the same person, is the definition of a serial killer.”
“Maybe,” Lilliana said, “and we’ll follow the leads, but let’s make sure we stick to the line of truth and not fiction.”
“But fiction is so much more normal,” Kate said. “All this reality, it’s way worse than fiction. Nobody can make this shit up.”
And, with that, she turned around and did some more research.
*
If Simon thought the damn enhanced sense of smell was bad, the noise in the back of his ears was driving him nuts. He had cut his usual day short and, once home, started right away on a heavy weights workout in his spare bedroom, burning his muscles, until he was in a hard-core sweat in an effort to ignore the white noise in his ears. But it seemed like the more he tried to ignore the background noise, the more he focused on it. And the more he focused on it, the louder it got.
Finally he cried out, “Stop! For crying out loud, stop. Stop.”
