Life in the small town of Landsend, a couple hours south and west of Victoria, BC, Canada, was just too idyllic.
I was screwed. Something horrible was going to happen any second now, I just knew it. Maybe it was my thirty years in the Toronto homicide department that made me suspicious of every little thing. If something wonderful was happening, I figured it couldn’t last long. Perhaps I was just being paranoid.
I mean lots of nice things happen to lots of nice people, all the time. And I’m a nice person. I deserve nice things to happen to me.
Perhaps the string of dead bodies I’d been finding ever since I retired was just a run of bad luck. I mean, finding a corpse in the airplane bathroom on my flight out to Victoria was just a fluke. And then stumbling across another dead guy in the hotel on my first day in Victoria was just dumb luck. So really, statistically speaking, what were the chances of finding another cadaver? Probably zero. At the very least, vanishingly small.
I inhaled deeply and took a bite of my ice cream. Everything was going to be all right. Just relax, Meg, your new care-free existence starts right now, I thought. Learn to enjoy your life, completely devoid of crime and homicides. Billions of people do it every day, and you can too.
After my pep talk, I felt much calmer so decided to continue walking along the beach, feeling the warm sun on my skin, dreaming of all the fun things I could do. Which is when I saw them. A crowd of people gathered near a cloth-covered gurney off in the distance, along the water’s edge.
With a completely involuntary action, my trigger finger squeezed the ice cream cone I was holding with tremendous force, crushing it to tiny bits, then the two ice cream scoops landed on my hand with a slimy thump.
“Goddamit,” I said, chucking the mess toward the nearby seagulls.
What the hell was going on? I was assured by Grant Peterson, the one and only cop in Landsend, that there was absolutely zero crime in this small town on the coast of Vancouver Island. He promised me up and down that if I visited Landsend, I would not see a single criminal the entire time I was there.
And he’d been right. For the first 24 hours. Then Grant had managed to slip and fall, breaking his leg in three places.
“So who should I call to fill in for you while you’re laid up?” I’d asked Grant not half an hour ago at his bedside in the hospital, staring at his full leg cast.
“Don’t worry,” he’d said. “Everything’s going to be all right. There’s never any crime in Landsend. Just relax and get yourself settled in. Believe me you’ll be bored senseless before you know it.”
Staring dead eyed at the ever growing mob, off in the distance, I wondered how difficult it would be to break Grant’s other leg.
Sighing, I set off down the beach. As the only healthy cop in town, I guess it was on me to figure out what the hell was going on.
What happens next?
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Books by Pamela Kenney
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Victim in Victoria Page 7
