Extensions

by Myrna Dey

  “How’s the baby?” Dex asked.

  “Critical. We’ll go back in a while.”

  The yard was enclosed on three sides by a five-foot cedar fence with a gate on the north side and a solid short stretch on the south. To reach the back, he would have had to open the gate with the baby in his arms. But if the latch were not secure at the time, it would have offered no more resistance than a swinging door. From the back, four escape routes were possible: over the fence into a neighbour’s yard on the left or the right, into Charles Rummel Park bordering the back, or around the south side of the house and over that short joint of fence and onto Colleen Street.

  The yard displayed the same understated good taste as the house. A sprawling oak tree to the left had a circular bench built around its trunk over a bed of fine white pebbles. Hydrangea bushes, not yet in bloom, hugged the back of the house, and a neat border of foliage I didn’t recognize framed the large patio. A trellis thick with vines provided a half-roof and sides to the concrete area. A path of irregular stepping stones led from the patio to the pond. Two bent willow chairs stood facing the water on either side of the short walk.

  Deep and craggy, the pond resembled a grotto inverted in the earth. A wave of ragged rock protruded on one side and more shrubbery circled the rest of it unevenly, a deliberate effect. Custom landscaping like this could cost as much as a house in Mission. The pond had likely not been cleaned since last fall; the stale water inside must have been rainfall. Lilies or colourful fish might have brightened it in summer, but at the moment it held only a few leaves and twigs, and maybe a trace of Anton Kubik’s blood. Ident had already taken a sample.

  Dex was carefully examining the fence where a footprint or a scrap of mud or fibre might have been left behind, but complained that all he could find was raccoon shit. The abductor must have been agile enough to leap up to the fence rail and spring over the foot or so of slats at the top.

  Hands on hips, Tessa stared at the adjoining yards and Wayne anticipated her question. “Yeah, we’ve spoken to the neighbours on both sides. No one saw him in one house and no one’s home in the other. The park seems the obvious route to flee and will be harder to prove.” Wayne stopped and looked down. Near the pond his foot had stepped on something: a clear plastic baby soother, easy for the eye to miss on first inspection. “Could be helpful,” he said. “Makes you want to cry, doesn’t it?”

  Wayne called an ident member over and she photographed the soother before he picked it up carefully and slipped it into a plastic bag for the exhibit locker. One of our Serious Crimes members — today it was Wayne — collects and itemizes all exhibits to be examined later for fingerprints. The ident woman moved on to the stepping stones with her camera, shaking her head. “Not much to go on when the mother and emergency team have trampled over them.”

  I decided to take the inside route to check the front entrance. The kitchen was unnaturally clean and tidy for a house with a baby in it. Given that most of the houses I attended lay at the other end of the cleanliness range, I had still never seen one this immaculate. The only evidence of little Anton was a wooden box with toys and cloth books in one corner and an almost empty baby bottle on the cupboard; it was no doubt the one Selena Kubik was using to feed him when she heard the abductor at the front door.

  An open bookcase made of pewter divided the living and dining areas. Books shared the shelves with a raku pot, three photos, and a cast iron candle holder containing a spray of narrow ivory tapers. The photos were all black and white. Baby Anton with a wide, toothless smile in a corduroy beret gave me another heart cramp. The good-looking man with Selena Kubik had to be her husband: older than I would have guessed, grey-haired, tall, a cosmopolitan face and stance in an open-necked white shirt and sports jacket. He might have been the poster boy for Hugo Boss Seniors. He was standing with his arms around Selena’s waist and she had stepped forward, almost as if she were trying to get away. The third photo was of the husband holding the baby, both heads thrown back in pure joy and laughter. The close-up weathered skin suggested he was in his mid- to late fifties. Around the pictures stood a few art books, a couple of atlases, some history, and half a shelf of Czech titles nudging against — surprisingly — two Harry Potter books. Other than those two volumes, the bookcase had been arranged carefully, as if too many books would be regarded as clutter.

  The putty-coloured walls were sparsely hung with original art. Again I thanked Retha for my recognition of quality. One was an enchanting restaurant scene by Keith Holmes, a Galiano artist Mom and I had met at an exhibition on Granville Street. In fact, Dad had wanted to surprise her with one of his paintings for Valentine’s Day, had she stuck around.

  But that was one of the few signs of colour. The poinsettia on the coffee table was creamy; the small artificial tree on the dining table was made of white feathers and decorated with silver baubles. I kept thinking of Gail and the other young mothers I knew; most would have been bouncing their babies to Christmas carols and bombarding them with the colours of the season. Maybe Selena Kubik did — the bouncing, that is.

  Outside the front door, the sisal mat on the landing was caked with mud. While I was waiting for ident and Wayne to come from the back to photograph and seize it, the mailman walked up with letters in his hand. “What’s going on?”

  “You’ll see it on the news.” I pointed to two media vans discharging crews and equipment onto the property. “Do you want me to put that mail inside?”

  He handed me two letters and some flyers and I looked around for a surface in the foyer or living room to set them. None seemed appropriate. No magazines or papers lay among the pottery and vases. I decided to leave the mail on a small built-in table under the phone in the kitchen, though even that held no pads and pens for jotting messages. To make sure this house wasn’t just a movie set, I pulled open a little drawer underneath and found a notepad and a pen lined up inside. I set the mail neatly on top but not before looking at it. Both letters were for Jan Kubik — one from a solicitor Tomas Svoboda on Richards Street — and the other, the larger square shape of a greeting card from the Czech Republic.

  In the backyard, Tony was taking notes from Wayne as the cameramen and reporters from various networks set up for his interview. They had already done a pan of the front of the house to give an idea of the neighbourhood. Tony would be an asset to any organization — good-looking, well-spoken, co-operative. Unfortunately, he didn’t have much to share with the public today, other than a hazy description of a man with an accent and a baby near death in a hospital. We would eventually bring in a forensic artist once Selena was composed enough to give details.

  Tessa appeared from the side of the house. She motioned Dex and me into the kitchen, out of camera range. “A young guy in the basement next door just woke up. His parents are away and he didn’t hear us ring the first time. He was drinking all night and just after he fell asleep, he heard loud talking at the front, looked out to see a white Porsche speeding away in the hazy dawn, then heard screaming from the back. Or did he hear the screaming and then see the Porsche? He wasn’t sure of the sequence of events because his hangover sucked him back into bed somewhere in the middle of it all.

  Wayne escaped from the cameras to the kitchen just then and Tessa told him what she had learned. “Let’s go back,” he said to her. To me he said: “Could you go to the hospital to check on the baby and Mrs. Kubik again?”

  I nodded.

  On the way over in the car, I couldn’t stop thinking about Jan Kubik and the shock awaiting him. The picture of him with the baby haunted me.

  Cory was pacing back and forth in front of the hospital room when I went in. During the time I was away, Selena and the baby hadn’t moved. A respirator was breathing for him and she didn’t look up when I tiptoed in and stood next to her. Little Anton’s skin was grey and translucent — almost pearlized — and I watched for a flicker of anything from him. Nothing.

  “He is going to die,” Selena whispered.

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nbsp; I put my hand on her shoulder. “Can I do anything? Has your husband been contacted?”

  “No,” she said flatly.

  “Would you like me to help you get through to him?”

  “No.”

  Her reluctance was clear. Why was I so eager to start the man’s grieving process anyway? Contacting him through the airlines would simply ruin the rest of his flight, if in fact he was on his way. But if he were stranded in an airport, I believed he should be given the news to hasten his return. I’d learned about feng shui from Sara, who had even convinced Mom to set up her new furniture in tune with its principles of balancing energies. But having just come from Colleen Street, I sensed more of a chill in the house than blocked energy. According to home style magazines, its decor might win awards, yet I could not get past an emptiness that went beyond this tragedy. Why would she not want to share these life-threatening moments with her husband? Or was she clinging so close to the edge herself that an extra breath of response would send her over?

  I slipped out of the room to find Cory talking to a cute nurse, so I sat down in his chair. I’d been in Cory’s spot on several occasions, often spending my whole shift as a guard outside a hospital room. I’d seen murder victims die, accident victims both die and recover, suicide failures and successes. Most of the injuries and deaths we attended could have been prevented, unlike the rest of the patients in the hospital. That’s why disgust and sadness choked my throat equally at the moment.

  When I first joined the force, I believed the criminal mind might follow a pattern. That we could learn to recognize a certain type who committed brutal crimes. But I’d since discovered that cruel impulses can occur in both sexes, all ages, races, religions, and classes. Men definitely had the monopoly on instigating violence, and after a run of armed robberies you might generalize that poverty, lack of positive home influence, and drugs are also key factors in crime. But then we’d be called in to an Asian or East Indian revenge killing where the body is found in a Jaguar or Mercedes, or a man is stabbed on the doorstep of his million-dollar mansion. And when you started to presume certain visible minorities were more likely to commit the serious crimes, you would find someone the Hell’s Angels had worked over — those tortures were unmatched. How many Caucasians associated themselves with Hell’s Angels or the Mafia when they were so quick to suggest all Sikhs should be sent back to India, Asians to Hong Kong, and West Indians to Jamaica whenever they heard of a killing by one of them? I looked over at young blonde Cory openly flirting with the nurse and wondered if he felt any guilt by association when a white man murdered someone. Probably not. Yet I knew Sukhi did whenever we picked up a Sikh.

  At the moment, I was down on the whole human race. Witnessing savagery was cumulative: it became worse, not easier, with every case. And the present one was about to prove the point, judging from the speed with which the two physicians now hurried past me and into the room. At first I resisted the impulse to see for myself through the window, but finally I stood up. I saw what I feared: the doctors each had an arm around Selena Kubik and were helping her out of her chair. They ushered her to the door, her face still frozen in a blank expression. Our abduction case had become a homicide.

  “Any family we can contact for you?” the female physician asked as they brought her into the corridor.

  She barely shook her head, looking at me as if I were the most familiar person in her world. “Please take me home.”

  I put my arms around her. “I can take you home to get some things, but we have to keep the house clean as a crime site.” Remembering her house, I corrected “clean” to “untouched.” “We can take you to a friend until your husband gets home.”

  When she didn’t react, the doctor took me aside and said: “You’ll get her help for the funeral with Victim Services? She seems impervious right now.”

  I assured her I knew the channels and walked Selena Kubik slowly to the elevator. Inside, I looked down on her, still in her trancelike state. Her dusky complexion had paled and appeared parched. No puffy eyes, red nose, or smeared mascara; no sign of moisture anywhere on her face. A media van parked at the entrance made me thankful to be in plainclothes and in an unmarked car, because they didn’t notice us pulling away. Selena’s silence unnerved me; all I could think to say was “I’m sorry” over and over. She nodded once.

  Cory had called the team on Colleen Street, and Wayne, Dex, and Tessa were waiting with condolences when we entered the house. Mrs. Kubik said she would get her things and Tessa accompanied her upstairs again. While they were gone, Wayne filled me in on the visit to the boy next door. He was twenty-one, had the run of his parents’ home while they were on a cruise, and was still celebrating New Year’s Eve two days later. No more clues besides the talking and screaming and white Porsche, in no particular order and in reduced light. He said the Kubiks were courteous neighbours, but his parents didn’t know them well. One of the neighbours across the street had also seen a white sports car drive away, but that was all.

  “So there never was anything for Dex to find on that fence.”

  “Guess not.”

  “Strange she wouldn’t have seen him take off in a car.”

  “It was parked down the street, according to the other neighbour. The perp could have run around the other side of the house after throwing the baby. Or even the same side he used to get there — she was inside, after all.”

  “He must have been awfully fast, and she slower than she thinks. She could have frozen for a few seconds. She’s been that way all day.”

  Tessa brought Selena back down with a Louis Vuitton overnight bag. Wayne gestured her to a chair. “Mrs. Kubik, we’re going to need your help in providing more details. Did you see a car?”

  “No, I did not. It was misty and I only saw him at the front door before he snatched my baby. He was gone by the time I got to the back. I thought it was over the fence.”

  “Neighbours saw a white Porsche with a dark-haired man driving away at about that time.”

  “I never saw a car,” she repeated.

  “Do you feel up to talking to a forensic artist about a description?”

  “No.”

  “In that case, we will take you to a friend or relative or hotel until tomorrow while we complete our investigation. Do you have one you can call?”

  “I will take the hotel,” said Selena Kubik, without answering. “And I want her to stay with me.”

  She pointed at me.

  IT IS NOT UNCOMMON to guard a witness in a hotel room, but being a companion for Selena Kubik was definitely out of the ordinary. She was more a candidate for Victim Services than for us. Given her mental state, which seemed catatonic at the moment, Wayne decided she should have the attendant of her choice, namely me. He said an IHIT guy had just shown up, but there had been a run of homicides in the lower mainland recently, and they had no problem letting Burnaby Serious Crimes continue what we had started as an abduction.

  Wind and rain had stepped up the January gloom a notch, and I put on the heater along with the wipers and lights on the way back to Dad’s to get an overnight bag. He was working on his book at the dining table, when I dashed in from the downpour. After I’d thrown some underwear, pyjamas, and a toothbrush into my little carrying case, I began to outline the situation as quickly and simply as I could for him. Halfway through, I heard myself saying, “You shouldn’t have to put up with these disruptions — the next one might be the middle of the night. It’s probably time I moved back to my apartment to give you some peace and quiet.” Dad hid his flinch well. I could tell he had been thinking about it himself, and true to form, he would want to make everything as easy as possible for me. “I suppose,” he started, “in other words…”

  “In other words, Dad, I would be perfectly comfortable living here with you forever. No daughter has ever had better care in the history of daughterhood. But my place is sitting there empty and it doesn’t seem right for me to be this dependent on my father.”

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p; “Maybe it doesn’t appear normal, but you’re always welcome here.”

  “You’ve proven that beyond a doubt — and who knows when I’ll end up here again. But right now I have to get back to work.” I reached over to give Dad a hug. “I can’t say when I’ll be back.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I’ll watch the news. Oh, by the way, Warren Wright phoned and said to call him.” Was there a twinkle in Dad’s eye at the foregoing conversation about having my own place?

  “Thanks.”

  I ran quickly to the car to avoid getting wet. Before backing out, I took a couple of deep breaths to direct Dad, Selena Kubik, and Warren Wright to their respective corners in my head instead of jamming together behind my eyes in a growing ache. I was relieved to have spoken the difficult words to Dad. His accommodating nature made it easy, causing more guilt. Mom at least would question me on my decisions, making me earn them in a way. As for Warren Wright, the abduction had kept him at bay for a few hours, but now my eager/ cautious thermostat started flipping again. I would return his call later.

  The rain and late hour had removed all curious onlookers from the cordoned-off house on Colleen Street. I parked behind Wayne at the curb and leapt across the grass, using one hop to knock on the window of the cruiser in the driveway where Matt and Daya were eating sushi on guard duty. Selena sat primly in the foyer on a wrought iron chair, as if she were waiting in a bus depot and not her own house. She wore a gunmetal rubberized raincoat with a black umbrella across her knees. Her eyes noted my return, but nothing else moved.

  Wayne walked with me to the kitchen. “Welcome to Serious Crimes. I learn something new in every case. We’ve booked a suite at the Holiday Inn Express at Metrotown for you. It’s an odd request, but you might be able to get some forgotten details from her. They come out when people are relaxed or vulnerable.”