Serious Crimes (A Willows and Parker Mystery)

by Laurence Gough

  “When?” said Willows.

  “Soon as I hung up.”

  CPIC was the Canadian Police Information Centre, a computerized database shared by police forces across the country. Wilcox hadn’t wasted any time.

  “While she was on the phone,” Wilcox continued, “I asked her would she mind coming down to the station. She showed up a little before five, right at the end of my shift.”

  Willows glanced out the window. It looked cold out there. Low, heavy dark clouds. He wondered if it was going to snow again, if the winter would ever end.

  Wilcox took a disposable lighter out of his pocket, turned it over and over in his hands. He hadn’t had a cigarette in almost three full days, and he was just about ready to explode. “Mrs Lee had everything I asked for,” he said. “The usual background info, a pretty good head and shoulders shot — recent and decent. I checked the sudden death reports with the coroner’s liaison. Phoned the hospitals, looking for John Does that fitted his description. No joy. Next couple of days, I got on the phone and talked to the people who’d seen him last. People who worked for him, his friends, the neighbours. Nobody had any ideas. I got some copies of the picture out to the media, and went to work on my backlog.”

  Wilcox put the lighter back in his pocket. There was a pack of nicotine-substitute gum on his desk. He helped himself to a stick. Yeah, better. He pulled out the lighter again, stroked it fondly.

  “Three days later, he’s still missing. But the guy pulled a disappearing act a few years ago. Turned out it was a trip to Vegas. His wife says it doesn’t happen anymore. Okay, fine. The guy doesn’t drink. There’s no problems with other women. His business was doing good. I phone the Vegas cops. They don’t know what I’m talking about. Okay, I ask Mrs Lee for permission to talk to his doctor. Doc tells me Lee was healthy as a horse. No sign of depression. I get his blood type, checked the availability of X-rays. What else… Phoned his dentist and asked for a copy of his dental chart.”

  Wilcox flicked his lighter, sparking long tongues of flame. “By now, a week’s gone by and I got the guy figured for a homicide. Maybe somebody’ll stumble across the body, and maybe he’s buried so deep we’ll never find him in a million years.” Wilcox glanced out the window. It was still January. He sighed. “A couple days later, I think it was the tenth, it’s in the file, I get a call from the grieving widow. She says her husband’s safe at home, we can call off the dogs.”

  “Any explanation?”

  “Nope.”

  “You confirmed it was really Mrs Lee that called?”

  Wilcox chewed furiously on his nicotine substitute, which was suddenly doing him no good at all. “It was her voice, Jack. No doubt about it. Also, she knew the case number.”

  “Just asking, Tommy. Do the Lees have any kids?”

  “A son and a daughter. The girl’s thirteen, attends a local high school. The son’s twenty-two years old, for the past three years he’s been living in Boston.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Business admin at Harvard.”

  “And that’s it, you never heard from Mrs Lee again?”

  “Nothing, not a word. I figured the guy had taken another trip to Vegas, got cleaned out. Was wandering around in the desert in a barrel. Or maybe got himself mixed up with a showgirl, something along those lines.”

  “I want the names of the people you talked to, his friends and neighbours, everybody.”

  “You got it,” said Wilcox.

  “I mean now, Tommy.”

  “Right after lunch.”

  “You’ll work faster on an empty stomach.”

  Wilcox sighed. He unwrapped another stick of gum and stuck it between his jaws, clamped down hard. Homicide dicks were always in such a goddamn hurry. The people they worked for were dead, for God’s sake, and they were gonna stay that way forever. So why the big rush?

  Willows stood up. He started to walk away and then stopped and turned and looked Wilcox straight in the eye. “Half an hour, Tommy?”

  “Yeah, sure. Think we should synchronize our watches?”

  “What time you got?”

  Wilcox glanced down at his wrist. It was twelve, no, thirteen minutes past ten. He looked up, ready to share this information.

  But Willows was gone.

  Chapter 5

  Christy Kirkpatrick had enjoyed a long and varied professional life, and believed that during his career as a forensic pathologist he had been privileged to see and do things that other men rarely even dreamed of.

  But this was weird. This was, in fact, weirdness beyond weird.

  The city morgue is situated in an old orange brick and mullioned-window building located on Cordova Street, just around the corner from 312 Main. The operating theatre is located on the top floor of the building, in a large, square, brightly-lit room. The floor and two of the four walls are covered with small, glossy blue tiles. The remaining walls are lined with lockable refrigerated stainless-steel drawers that are just the right size for storing a body. There is a massive cast-iron and frosted glass skylight in the ceiling. If you look closely, you can see where repairs were made to the skylight in the spring of 1947, when a cop named Wilbur Cartwright fell through the glass while moonlighting for a sleazy tabloid that wanted candid shots of the autopsy of a notoriously fickle B-movie star who’d asphyxiated in the arms of her blind lover.

  Directly beneath the skylight stood two zinc tables. Each table is seven feet long and three feet wide, and stands exactly forty-two inches above the tile floor. A constant stream of cold water flows along a shallow groove that runs down the middle of each table, from the slightly elevated top end all the way down to the bottom, where a chrome drainage pipe vanishes into a hole in the tiles.

  Kenny Lee’s corpse, still in a classic full-lotus position, sat proudly erect in the middle of the table closest to the door.

  Kirkpatrick was trying to melt him down with a 1000-watt Philips Vanite blow dryer. He’d been wielding the blow dryer for the better part of two hours. His wrist ached, and the whine of the machine’s tiny electric motor was driving him crazy.

  As he’d plugged the Philips into the extension cord, he’d worked out a simple strategy. He’d start at Lee’s head and work his way to his feet. His theory was that the warm, melted water that dripped down the body would help speed the thawing process.

  It had started well enough. The ice that covered Lee’s face was less than an inch thick. Kirkpatrick found that he could hold the nozzle of the hair dryer as close as two inches away from the surface of the ice, but no closer, because the melt had a tendency to spray back at him, and he didn’t care to risk electrocution.

  After almost two hours, he was just clearing the last traces of ice from Lee’s face, directing the flow of hot air upwards at Lee’s snub nose to loosen the two plugs of ice that filled his nostrils.

  He switched the hair dryer to his left hand, flexed his aching wrist and aimed the dryer so the blast of hot air was directed at the bridge of Lee’s nose. He had a small bet going with himself — which nostril the ice plug would fall out of first.

  He’d also given some thought to working out how long it was going to take to thaw out the whole body, from head to foot. What he had failed to consider when he’d started was the fact that Lee wasn’t simply sheathed in ice, his entire body — even the marrow in his bones — was frozen through and through.

  Kirkpatrick wondered if there was a mathematical formula for calculating the time required to thaw a given number of cubic feet of frozen human flesh. He couldn’t recall studying such a formula at med school, but then, there was an awful lot about med school that he couldn’t remember.

  Thank God.

  The telephone rang. Kirkpatrick switched off the dryer. He could hear fat drops of melted water hitting the puddle that had collected on the tile floor. It was slippery down there. He’d have to watch his step. He went over to the telephone and picked up.

  Willows said, “What’ve you got, Christy?”

&nb
sp; “Nothing much, Jack. I’m still trying to melt the ice off him.”

  “I thought you’d be finished by now.” There was an edge to Willows’ voice. “How long is it going to take?”

  “In some places, Jack, Lee’s covered in a layer of ice that’s as much as six inches thick. But the main problem is that his body’s frozen solid, too. If you think about it, the water falling on him couldn’t have frozen unless the entire corpse was thirty-two degrees or less.” Kirkpatrick paused, and then said, “You see what I’m getting at?”

  “Over the weekend,” Willows said, “the temperature in the city dropped to a maximum low of twenty-one degrees. The Sun Yat-Sen Gardens were closed to the public from six o’clock Friday evening until Monday morning. Was there enough time, during that period, for the body temperature to drop from ninety-eight point six to the freezing point?”

  “I don’t know,” said Kirkpatrick. “It depends how much the guy weighed, and I can’t find that out because he’s still covered in ice.”

  “Parker and I worked out roughly how long the hose had been running by the volume of the flow and the amount of water sprayed on the corpse and surrounding ice,” said Willows. “Our guess is between six and eight hours.”

  “What time was it Yang discovered the body?”

  “Approximately six thirty.”

  “So the hose was turned on, say, between ten and midnight?”

  “Somewhere in there.”

  “Then my guess is Lee was killed at least twenty-four hours before he was dumped in the pond. And that the body was frozen solid at the time he was dumped.”

  “So it’s fair to say the body was stored outside, or in an unheated building for twenty-four hours or more before somebody turned him into an ice sculpture?”

  “Right.”

  “How long before he thaws, doc?”

  “I’d say at least two days.”

  Willows sighed, and hung up.

  Kirkpatrick cradled the receiver and went back to the zinc table. He studied Lee’s face. The skin had a faint greenish tinge. Lee had combed his hair straight back, and that’s the way it was now, except for a bit sticking out over his left ear. Kirkpatrick resisted the urge to use his comb. Lee’s eyes were wide open. He was staring straight ahead, into distances so vast they were immeasurable. But then, that’s what you were supposed to do when you meditated, wasn’t it? Lose focus. Slip outside yourself. Kirkpatrick reached out and gently pinched Lee’s nose. The plugs of ice shot out of Lee’s nostrils and into the palm of his hand.

  Lee sat perfectly still — about what you’d expect from a man who was colder than a freshly-mixed margarita.

  Kirkpatrick took a quick pass with the dryer. A single tiny crystalline bead of water hung trembling from Lee’s eyelash. He remembered a late-night movie he’d seen on TV a few weeks ago, about a group of explorers who’d stumbled across a frozen stiff locked into an iceberg somewhere in the arctic. A Neanderthal type, who’d been in a state of suspended animation for several thousand years. The explorers had made the mistake of thawing him out, and he’d turned on them and… eaten them.

  Well, after a fast that lasted two or three thousand years, they should have expected the poor guy to have an appetite.

  Tentatively, Kirkpatrick reached out and touched the droplet of crystal-clear water that hung trembling from Lee’s eyelash. There was, of course, an explanation for the movement. Passing traffic would cause the building to vibrate. Although the vibrations were usually too minute to notice, they were always there. The whole city was constantly shaking, if you thought about it.

  One thing for sure, Lee sure as hell wasn’t alive.

  But just to make sure, Kirkpatrick reached out and pressed the tip of his index finger gently against the dead man’s eyeball. The orb was cold and unyielding. Lee’s eye, like his brain and all his thought processes, was frozen solid, hard as a bowling ball.

  The telephone rang again, startling him badly enough to make him scream and drop the hair dryer, which fell into the puddle of melted ice water. A bright orange bolt of electricity arced from the dryer to the zinc table. The air filled with the stench of melting plastic, and then a circuit-breaker somewhere deep inside the bowels of the old building automatically turned over and all the lights went out.

  There was a moment’s silence, and then a chunk of ice shattered on the tile floor.

  Christy Kirkpatrick’s overworked heart did a backflip, raced out of control. He screamed again, but much louder this time, as if his life depended on it.

  Then the battery-powered emergency backup lighting system clicked in, and he managed to get himself under control. My God, what a terrifying experience! He went over to the sink, splashed cold water on his face. His chest ached where his heart had thumped against the bones and flesh. He silently vowed that no one would ever learn about the day all the horror movies he’d ever seen sprang to life and nearly did him in.

  Chapter 6

  It was cold. Garret could feel the chill in his bones. His knee joints, as he scuttled down the alley, were stiff and tight.

  “C’mon,” whispered Billy. “Move it! Haul ass!”

  Garret turned to look back down the alley. Billy’s rusted-out Pinto was parked under a mountain ash. The cold snap had pinched the last dead leaves from the tree; the branches were bare except for clusters of shrivelled red berries. What was left of the Pinto’s chrome trim gleamed beneath a streetlight. Piece of shit. Garret drove a ’65 Mustang powered by a 289-cubic-inch V-8. Black on black. He spent every spare dime he made on the car, and he loved it the way he’d never loved his mother. They were using the Pinto because the Mustang was in the garage, waiting for a new fuel pump Garret couldn’t quite afford.

  The car they were going to break into was a green Volkswagen Golf. It was three years old and worth maybe eight thousand dollars. Whoever owned the car had spent another three grand on the stereo system. The dashboard was crammed with a Blaupunkt tape deck, state-of-the-art Alpine CD shuttle, Alpine speakers and a sub-woofer, the whole system powered by a 200-watt Sony amplifier. The Golf was parked in a paved lot behind a bakery. The owner started work at two in the morning and didn’t finish his shift until noon. By then, Billy and Garret would be long gone and so would the stereo.

  Garret stood in the distorted diamond-pattern shadow cast by a chain-link fence, keeping watch, as Billy approached the car from the driver’s side. There was a thin burst of white light from his flash. He barked like a dog, a whispered howl of triumph.

  Garret rubbed his hands together, breathed little puffs of smoke.

  “Clear?” whispered Billy from the darkness.

  “Yeah, yeah. Hurry up!”

  Billy raised the ball-peen hammer and hit the side window just above the door lock. The window exploded. Billy reached inside, unlocked the door and swung it open.

  The Golf’s interior light came on.

  Billy stuck the flashlight in the back pocket of his jeans and attacked the dashboard with the hammer. He had the Blaupunkt out in fifteen seconds flat. The CD shuttle was a little trickier. Delicate electronics, he couldn’t nuke it with the hammer, had to go easy. Cut some wires. Thirty seconds. He could hear Garret pacing back and forth in the lane, heels clicking on the asphalt. Billy had to watch himself — there were loose wires and chunks of shattered plastic and glass all over the front seat. He went to work on the amplifier. He needed a medium-size Philips screwdriver and he didn’t have one. Fuck. He yanked on the Sony’s support bracket, pressing his shoulder up against the steering wheel for leverage, using brute strength to do the job. The bracket tore free without warning and he hit his head against the rear-view mirror.

  The Golf shifted on its springs. Hail on the roof. No, Garret’s knuckles.

  “What the fuck’s taking so long, man?”

  “Fuck off!” hissed Billy.

  He popped open the glove compartment. A road map of the city, registration papers. Kleenex. He passed the radio and CD player and Sony amp to Gar
ret, climbed out of the car and eased shut the door. The Golf’s interior light went out. They hurried down the alley.

  Billy slipped behind the Pinto’s wheel. He paused to light a cigarette, knowing the delay would drive Garret crazy, and then turned the key in the ignition. The Pinto’s dinky four-cylinder engine coughed twice and then caught, spewing a cloud of burnt oil at the mountain ash. Billy put the car in gear and drove to the end of the block and hung a right, turned on the headlights.

  Garret, starting to relax, leaned back in his seat and rested his boots on the Pinto’s scaly dashboard.

  Billy ran a stop sign, not even bothering to check for oncoming traffic. He felt flat, depressed. Let-down. He could remember when busting into a car gave him a nice little buzz, really got him pumped up. But he’d done it too many times. It was like playing the same record over and over and over again. Or spending too much time with the same girl. Didn’t matter how crazy about her you were when you got started, after a while nothing much was happening. You were bored. He blew a lungful of smoke at Garret’s surly profile.

  “Fuck off,” said Garret.

  Billy laughed.

  It was Tuesday, three o’clock in the morning. The graveyard shift. They’d been doing business since a little past midnight, scoring Porsches and Golfs and the odd Mercedes. The way they worked, their modus operandi, Billy would pick a neighbourhood and then cruise around in the Pinto, looking for cars parked in unlit driveways or unlocked garages. He had a little penlight he used to make sure the car had a decent radio. He was quiet, but not too quiet. If the car owner was an insomniac or it turned out there was a couple of pit bulls tucked away on the back porch, forget it. Billy kept a baseball bat in the car, but it was only for self-defence, in case some asshole pushed him too hard.

  If there was no problem, everything looked good, Billy wrote down the address on a piece of paper. When he had maybe a dozen cars lined up, he arranged the addresses in order so they could go from one place to another as efficiently as possible. The radios, as they bagged them, went into a cardboard box in the trunk of the car. Usually, they’d hit seven or eight cars out of twelve. The other cars wouldn’t be there or something about the situation wouldn’t be quite right.