The K Handshape

by Maureen Jennings

  “That’s lovely, dear,” said Loretta. Joy didn’t respond and Loretta turned her head so she was facing her. “Lovely,” she said slowly, making the word distinct. Nora snorted, went behind her, and made a sign to Joy, who smiled and responded. She made some signs and pointed in my direction.

  “She wants you to sit beside her,” said Nora.

  I did as commanded, aware that both Leo and Loretta weren’t happy about me being the chosen one.

  “Nora, why don’t you make us all some coffee?” said Loretta.

  If I could have drawn a balloon coming from Nora’s mouth, it would have said, “Eff off and make your own coffee,” but she clenched her teeth and stomped over to the sink, where she started to rinse out the coffee pot with much clink and clatter.

  “How is she?” Leo asked, indicating his granddaughter.

  “She is asking for her mother every five minutes. We have to tell her what’s happened. She won’t settle down until something definite is said.”

  Oh God. Selfishly I didn’t want to be there when that happened. I couldn’t imagine how you can get across that kind of news to a child.

  “I want to ask her some questions first,” said Leo.

  Loretta folded her arms across her full, unfettered breasts. “What sort of questions?”

  “We think that Dee had a male visitor sometime in the past two months who may or may not be implicated in her killing. I’d like to ask Joy if she met anybody and what he looked like.”

  “I suppose Nora will have to be the one to do that.”

  “I suppose I will have to, seeing both of you can communicate dick all in sign language,” said Nora.

  I felt a light tap on my forearm. Joy was trying to get my attention. She made a sign at me, her fingers outstretched, her eyebrows raised.

  “She wants to know where her mommy is,” said Nora.

  “How do I say ‘I don’t know’?”

  “The way you’d say it to a hearing person.”

  I grimaced at the child and shook my head, making my expression as friendly as possible. She turned to Nora and made the same sign, “Where’s my mommy?” Nora signed back at her, saying at the same time, “Your mommy’s late. She’ll be here soon.”

  “Don’t tell her that,” Loretta burst out. “She’ll be waiting for her. She has to be told the truth.”

  Nora’s face turned red with anger. “The truth? You want her to know the truth? That her mother was found in the lake with her scarf wrapped around her neck. The truth that she was murdered in cold blood. Is that what you want me to communicate to her?”

  Loretta was prevented from answering by a wail from Joy, who was waving her hands frantically at us. Nora went over to her and scooped her up in her arms. She could protest all she wanted that she wasn’t the maternal type but nothing could disguise the love she felt for the little girl.

  She rocked her back and forth while Joy continued to wail. Leo got out of his chair and went over to them. He began to stroke the child’s hair. “Hush, dear, hush.” Loretta remained at the table, her hands clenched in front of her. She looked so unhappy, I wanted to comfort her as well. Finally, Joy stopped crying, lifted her head, and shoved Leo’s hand away angrily. She stuck her thumb in her mouth. Her eyelids drooped as if she was on the verge of sleep.

  Nora glared at us. “She might not be able to hear but she’s sensitive to atmosphere. It scares her when people are angry.”

  “I might point out, it was not I who was shouting,” said Loretta quietly.

  I decided to divert any further arguments and went over to the coffee machine. “Nora, why don’t you and Joy sit down and I’ll finish making the coffee? Shall I get her anything? Milk? Juice?”

  “She’d probably like some apple juice. There’s some in the fridge.”

  “I’ll get it,” said Leo.

  He took out a Barney mug and brought it over to Joy. She took it sulkily. She wasn’t ready to accept him yet. I put mugs on the table and returned to the counter to watch the coffee drip into the carafe.

  “Have you made any progress with the case?” Loretta asked. Her voice was neutral, emotions under control, but she hit some tripwire invisible to me and Leo snapped back at her.

  “No! We’re just at the beginning.”

  I didn’t blame him for not telling her about Sigmund. What was he going to say? Well, Loretta, my son has suddenly become a prime suspect. He and his ex had long ago stopped expecting sympathy from each other. I was torn between pity at their state and a desire to bang their heads together.

  I brought over the coffee pot and filled their mugs. Joy seemed to be actually nodding off in Nora’s arms.

  “I’d rather not upset her with any questions,” she said to Leo. Her voice was softer. “And as for telling her about Deedee, I’d like to bide my time. Find the right moment and all that. If I’m going to be the one to do it, you’ve got to trust me to do it properly.”

  She didn’t say that with any belligerence, just sadness, and I’m glad to say both Leo and Loretta responded in kind.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “Her gerbil died a few months ago,” continued Nora. “Old age probably but she’d liked to play with it. The three of us had a special ceremony and we buried it in the backyard. Dee was so good. She explained that there was a place called heaven where Digger had gone to where he could run all day long in the sunshine and where he was very happy. She said, all creatures great and small eventually go to heaven and we on earth are very sad for a while because we miss them but they still watch over us and we can send drawings as long as we like and they will know what is going on even if we don’t see them.” She had to stop. Loretta took out a handkerchief and handed it to her. Nora sniffed hard. “I thought I’d say something like that. You know, Mommy has gone to heaven like Digger did. We can’t see her but she is with us in her spirit and we can still send her drawings and tell her what is happening. Do you think that would be all right?”

  Leo nodded. “I believe that would be just fine.”

  Joy snuffled and her hand reached up and touched Nora’s chin. She pressed her fingers against it, making a sign.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  The whole profiling team was around the table, including Leo. Katherine was taking it day by day in terms of allowing him to be present at the meetings or not. So far he hadn’t been a hindrance; the opposite, in fact. He was quieter than he usually was, and I could see that after the initial wariness, everybody was relaxing around him.

  Ray Motomochi, perhaps out of respect, had toned down the sartorial excesses and was sombre in a blue shirt and navy suit. He had the floor and he’d spread the anonymous letters across the table so we could see them.

  “All these and the note to Christine were written by the same person. Let’s call him Moses. So far we have not been able to lift any distinguishable print. Not even on Christine’s billet-doux where there is less contamination from other sources. I have hopes I’ll be able to lift a partial or even, God give us luck, a full print. I haven’t had the chance to try everything yet so it does seem as if Moses was being careful.”

  “He must have written the letters with latex gloves on,” said Katherine. “You have to leave some trace otherwise.”

  “I agree. Moses knows what he’s doing. The note found in Deidre’s car was definitely written by somebody else. Let’s for purposes of clarity call that person Roadrunner, as he’s in a hurry.” Ray was trying to be respectful of Leo but he couldn’t totally suppress the habit we all had to introduce as much humour as possible, no matter what.

  “The paper of the Moses letters is slightly unusual in that it’s yellow lined writer’s paper. Easy to get and undistinguished but not everybody’s choice. All the letters were written with an ordinary ballpoint pen, black ink. The envelopes are standard; all were clearly franked, except for the recent one, so we have dates; the stamps are the sticker kind.” He gave us a little grin. “As we know a good source of DNA material can be a
licked envelope but all of these ones have been glued, white school glue you can buy anywhere. Another example that our chappie or chapette is in the know. I’ve got lots of partials but it was handled by many different people and I doubt if that will help us much. Fingerprints is willing to do the donkey work for us, bless them. They may come up with a match from the files but I rather doubt it.”

  A brief word here. Computers don’t make fingerprint matches. It is a boring, labour-intensive job done by four people who sit around their computers all day long looking at countless variations on swirls and loops. It requires skill and experience and always has to be verified by at least one other member of the team. It’s not a job I’d like but it is an essential one. I’ve heard the Fingerprint Department is legendary for cutting loose after hours and I don’t blame them.

  Back to the meeting.

  “Anything you can tell us about the note we found in Deedee’s car?” Leo asked.

  “As you can see, lined paper, torn at the side. It comes from a small-sized notebook. The writer used pencil. The problem of course is that it got wet…” He paused awkwardly. Nobody wanted to draw attention to this and leave Leo open to his own recriminations. “The pencil didn’t wash out, fortunately, but I couldn’t pull any print.”

  “Thank you, Ray,” said Katherine. “Jamie, what’s your take on the geographic profile? Let’s put Chris in the equation and Grace Cameron as well as Deidre. See what we’ve got.”

  Ray quickly collected up his plastics where he’d put all the letters. Jamie had cut himself shaving and there was a bit of toilet paper sticking to his chin that was slightly distracting.

  He put down the city map which he’d enlarged and marked.

  “Deidre was found here in Memorial Park. Her residence was here on Mary Street. The casino is, of course, way over here. You can enter the park from two sides, north and south, if you are driving, but it is accessible from any point if you are walking. Houses are well set back from the park and the pier would not have been visible to anybody who was not in the area itself.” He wasn’t telling us anything new and I shifted restlessly. Lack of sleep was making me cranky.

  “Given the apparent connection provided by the letter writer, I have marked Christine’s apartment. G here stands for Grace Cameron, who is the current resident of an apartment once occupied both by Nora Cochrane and briefly by Hannah Silverstein, who was a close friend of Deidre’s. As you can see, except for the casino, all of these locations fall within a very small area. Walking distance of each other. We accept the fact that Miss Larsen knew her attacker well enough to accept a ride from him or her. According to Inspector Chaffey, all of the bus drivers and taxi drivers who were working during our window of time have not made an identification.”

  “A bus driver wouldn’t necessarily notice if he was busy, would he?” said Leo abruptly.

  “No, and the process of trying to find witnesses is going on.” Jamie sighed. “That’s what we desperately need, of course. But let’s assume for now she got a ride into town and that her intention was to go to Memorial Park as the note suggests. What we don’t know of course is where she was actually, er, killed. There are two possible scenarios. A person as yet unknown but who was not her attacker gave her a ride and let her off at the park. From there she may have met with the writer of the note. This person may be her killer but it is very unlikely that she was killed in the park itself. That means this person must have had access to a vehicle which she got into. She was, er, killed somewhere else and her body taken a few hours later to the pier where she was found in the water.” There was a tense silence, nobody wanting to imagine Leo’s daughter the victim of a torturer, and we all knew only too well that these things happened.

  “There was no sign of trauma to the body other than the strangulation,” said Katherine with a quick involuntary glance at Leo. “Jamie, you said two scenarios. Spell out the other one for us.”

  “I think if we take the note found in the car as significant, Deidre would have been in a hurry to get to the Memorial, so let’s say, for the purpose of argument, she got a lift with somebody who subsequently attacked her. She might not have arrived at the park at all. Perhaps she was driven somewhere else, subdued, and killed in his car. Then, later on when there is the greatest likelihood of the park being deserted, he drives onto the pier, buys himself some time by filling her pockets with stones, and drops her into the water. This is a relatively short window of opportunity and we can focus our enquiries on a pretty precise time period. She finished playing at 10:40, and we have her exiting the casino at 10:43.”

  I interjected my information at this point. “The casino has got the exit and entrance CCTV tapes. We can follow up on cars leaving the premises.”

  “That might help us a lot,” said Katherine. “Let’s get that information as soon as possible.”

  David hadn’t said anything to this point. He was drinking a glass of some poisonous-looking thick purple fluid. He hadn’t offered to share it with anybody, thank goodness. He raised his forefinger to get Katherine’s attention. She frowned at him.

  “Yes, go ahead.”

  “With respect, Jamie, you said two scenarios but there is really a third, isn’t there? What if she got a ride to the park with an uninvolved person who left her there and went on their own way. She did not meet with Zachary Taylor because she was late. She isn’t that far from her house so she sets off to walk home. Along the way, she meets her assailant, who offers her a ride. From what we know of her, she would have to have accepted willingly because she was a strong and fit young woman. She gets into the car; this person somehow and somewhere subdues her… strangles her, keeps the body as we have said, etc., etc.”

  He was quite right and he gained respect points from me for sure. I knew there was a reason he was on the team other than as a covert apostle for alternative living.

  “Good, well put, David,” said Katherine.

  “If this scenario is the correct one,” said Ray, “we are looking for a disorganized killer who happened upon her by chance. Her death may not be in any way connected to the notoriety surrounding her baby. And the letter writer is a completely different person from her killer.”

  Profilers are not immune in the least from wishful thinking. A case that is neat and tidy is much easier to deal with than one where the possibilities are virtually unlimited. Or so it often seems in the early stages.

  Leo spoke. “Whichever way we turn it, I’d say we are dealing with somebody local. Somebody she knew or at least recognized by sight. It was a miserable night. She would have wanted to get home as soon as she could. But come on folks, we’re nattering on about scenario this and scenario that. Let’s not overcomplicate the story. She got a ride into town, was dropped off, met Zachary Taylor as planned, and he was the one who killed her, as I may remind you, he threatened to do.” His tone was truculent. We all understood what he was feeling. He wanted an answer, a face, and I knew he was in a rush to judgement.

  “We’ve got a red alert to find Zachary Taylor.” Katherine flicked her thumbnail on her pen, not looking at Leo. “The difficulty here is to keep an open mind.”

  She said it gently but Leo flushed. He knew it was him she was addressing. Like an invisible wraith, the presence of his son, Sigmund, hovered in the room. Where did he fit into all of this?

  Leo’s eyes met mine and I grimaced, a “we’ve all done it” sort of expression. I don’t know if that would have calmed him down or not because Janice came into the room.

  “Sorry to interrupt but Ed Chaffey just called. He said they’ve picked up Zachary Taylor’s trail.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Her entrance couldn’t have been better timed if we’d all been in some Agatha Christie play. Leo looked as if he was going to jump out of his seat and run right there and then.

  “Tell us more, Janice,” said Katherine.

  “A farmer near Beaverton heard the appeal and phoned in. He said he’d let a man park his camper van in hi
s field. It fits the description we have… unfortunately Taylor isn’t there. He has a scooter which he uses to get around on and the farmer says he went out early this morning. Ed’s men are going to stake out the place to wait for him to return. If he does.”

  “Did the farmer give any indication as to whether Taylor knew we were after him or not?” Leo asked.

  Janice had brought in a sheet of paper. “The farmer’s statement was as follows: ‘He seems like a nice enough fellow. He said he was travelling in the area, had some friends to visit, and gave me some money for a few days for use of the field. That was fine with me, nothing in there anyway at this time of year.’” Janice glanced up. “Farmer then says, ‘He did seem a bit het up but it was hard to tell as he was deaf as a post so we had to write everything down.’ Ed said to tell you that he’s on to the ‘write everything down’ remark and will collect a sample from the farmer as soon as he can, assuming he kept the notes.”

  “A scooter will give him some mobility,” said David, “but he can’t move that quickly. If he wants to do a real run for it, I’d guess he’d go to the railway station or the buses.”

  “Or for that matter, he could rent a car,” said Leo impatiently. “They should get somebody down to the depot immediately with his description.”

  “I’ll speak with Ed but I’ll bet he’s already checking out those options,” said Katherine.

  Leo went to stand up but Katherine waved him back into the chair. “Hold on. Let’s finish the meeting properly. I think Ray had something on the parking ticket.”

  Ray picked up his notebook. “I haven’t got something, so much as I’ve got nothing. There is no record of a parking ticket being handed to a camper van on Mary Street on the morning our witness mentioned. We’ve gone four or five days each side of that date but nothing has shown up. No tickets at all were handed out on that street. The department was short-handed apparently so didn’t go near some residential streets. Mr. Torres was dreaming.”