CULLEN AND COBB MYSTERIES
Serpents Rising
Dead Air
Last Song Sung
None So Deadly
Copyright © David A. Poulsen, 2019
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All characters in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Poulsen, David A., 1946-, author
None so deadly / David A. Poulsen.
(A Cullen and Cobb mystery)
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-4597-4141-6 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-4597-4142-3 (PDF).--ISBN 978-1-4597-4143-0 (EPUB)
I. Title. II. Series: Poulsen, David A., 1946- . Cullen and Cobb mystery.
PS8581.O848N66 2019 C813’.54 C2018-904815-8
C2018-904816-6
1 2 3 4 5 23 22 21 20 19
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
To Glenda and Mary
And to the teachers and librarians — with special mention to Mr. Reddick and Mr. Erickson — who inspired me to believe in the power of creating, whether on a stage, on a page, on canvas, or with music. All of you are the reason I am able to do this. All of you are the reason I love to do this.
PROLOGUE
My name is Adam Cullen. Some of you may have read my chronicles of cases I have worked previously with former Calgary homicide detective, now private investigator, Mike Cobb. You are then aware that I first met Cobb when I hired him to investigate the deliberately set fire that took the life of my wife, Donna, in May of 2005. Though he was unsuccessful in that effort, Cobb, in turn, recruited me almost a decade later to conduct research in connection with another case he was working. During that investigation we began to look again at Donna’s murder, and this time the two of us were able to find and confront the arsonist/murderer. There was, I suppose, justice.
Cobb and I have worked other cases since — again, some of you may have seen my accounts of those investigations and their results. But since early in our work relationship, there has been one case, one terrible unsolved murder from 1991, that has hung over our heads like a guillotine blade and has become, at least for me, something of an obsession. For those of you who have never heard of or been interested in Cullen and Cobb, or for those of you who have forgotten the details of the Faith Unruh murder, the following will, I hope, serve to update you as to where events stood as we began one of the most difficult times, certainly in my life, and, I suspect, in Cobb’s, as well.
ONE
Marlon Kennedy had been dead for almost ten weeks.
Christmas had come and gone; cold, dark January had given way to the longer, more optimistic February days, and evenings that began after six o’clock. There had been more snow than the almanac had forecast, though its prediction of a milder, kinder February appeared, at least so far, to be accurate.
Cobb and I were sitting in the Sunterra Market at 12th Avenue and 1st Street East, just a few blocks from Cobb’s office.
With Theory of a Deadman’s “Santa Monica” rolling through the speakers, Cobb was working the prime rib lunch special while I had settled for soup and a sandwich, my appetite dampened somewhat by the topic of conversation. We were talking about Marlon Kennedy. Except, of course, that wasn’t his real name.
Kendall Mark had been a Calgary Police Service detective at the time eleven-year-old Faith Unruh was murdered while walking home from school in 1991. Cobb had been on the force at that time, as well, but he was only two years into his career and not yet working homicide. It was in that department that he would spend much of his career before leaving the police service to become a private investigator. I had worked with Cobb on a few cases, including the search for the arsonist who set fire to my home and killed my wife, who was in the house at the time. Almost a decade later, we found that person.
Cobb told me the details of the Faith Unruh murder after my girlfriend’s daughter and her best friend had stunned us with their knowledge of the horror that had taken place fifteen years before either of them had been born.
Faith Unruh had celebrated her eleventh birthday the day before she died. She was walking home from school with a friend on a pleasant June day. The two lived just a block from one another and had parted company at the friend’s house, leaving Faith to travel the remaining block of her walk alone.
She never arrived home. Her killer somehow lured her into the backyard of a house two doors down and across the street from where she lived, strangled her in broad daylight and left her next to a garage with a piece of plywood over her. She was found several hours later, naked but not having been sexually assaulted.
Cobb told me that everyone in homicide had thought this would be a quick solve — that they’d have the guy within a day or two. The investigators figured it had to be someone who knew Faith, or at least knew her route home, and was also aware that she’d be alone for that final block. There was, of course, the possibility that it had happened by chance — that a predator had happened upon a near-perfect victim and had acted on impulse. Cobb said most investigators had ruled out that scenario, believing that the perfect storm of luck and opportunity was improbable. And that view was compounded by the belief that Faith would not have gone into the backyard of a neighbouring house with someone she didn’t know.
There was a fair amount of blood near the body that wasn’t Faith’s, so the police figured they’d have physical evidence, as well. There were also indications that the girl had fought for her life, which meant she had likely screamed. But as
the investigation continued, it became clear that if Faith had screamed, no one heard her. As unlikely as it seemed, apparently no one had seen or heard anything out of the ordinary. The investigating team talked to everyone in the neighbourhood, even appealed on radio and TV for anyone who might have been driving by to come forward — several people had responded, most of whom must have been very near when the murder took place. But there were simply no concrete leads — no actual witnesses, no fingerprints or DNA match, and no apparent motive for the killing — unless it had been a sex crime, and the killer got spooked and fled before completing what he had started.
The original investigating team was two veteran guys who Cobb said had worked their tails off. One was named Lennie Hansel. He was only three years from retirement at the time. The Faith Unruh case apparently haunted the man to the point that he was dead less than a year after receiving his gold watch.
His partner at the time was Tony Gaspari, although cop logic or humour dictated that all of Hansel’s partners over the years were given the nickname Gretel.
Like his partner, this Gretel had become obsessed with the case, and the obsession eventually cost him his family and finally his mental health. Tony Gaspari ended up in a home, unable to look after himself or communicate beyond guttural sounds.
And there was a third cop. It wasn’t his case but he had got caught up in it. Spent all of his non-work hours on it … for years. He became more and more immersed in the case and finally just disappeared.
That man was Kendall Mark. He resurfaced years later and it turned out he had changed both his name — to Marlon Kennedy — and his appearance — from Caucasian to black. He had spent the last several years living on the Unruhs’ street, operating a sophisticated surveillance system that watched both the former Unruh family home and the one across the road, where Faith’s body had been found. He was convinced that one day the killer would show up again at one of the locations associated with the murder, and when that happened, Mark, a.k.a. Kennedy, would spring his trap.
I’d met him under circumstances I hoped never to face again. Because I had become fascinated by the case myself, I had driven and walked the area around both houses, unaware that I was being watched … unaware, that is, until the night Kennedy jumped me in the alley behind my own apartment and came very close to administering his own justice on me before I was able, barely, to persuade him that I wasn’t Faith Unruh’s killer.
And now Kennedy was dead.
Theory of a Deadman had given way, first to Sinatra, then to Corb Lund — apparently whoever was in charge of music selection at Sunterra was nothing if not eclectic. Cobb pushed away the last of his prime rib at about the same time I finished half my sandwich and wrapped up the other half. We topped up our coffee and looked at each other across the table, neither of us eager to pick up the conversation thread that had brought us there.
Cobb started it. “Cops still haven’t got much — it’s another one of those nobody saw anything, nobody heard anything deals that drive cops crazy,” Cobb said as he stirred Equal into his coffee.
“That shit’ll kill you.” I pointed.
“But not as fast as real sugar.”
“Ever hear of no sweetener at all?”
“Boring.” He grinned. “And boredom will kill you quickest of all.”
There’s no answer to that, so I decided to get back on task. “Hard to believe that a guy gets run over in a back alley of a populated neighbourhood in the early evening, and there isn’t someone who knows something.”
“Hard to believe, but it happens. Look at the Faith Unruh murder.”
“So, what do we know?”
He pulled out his notebook, flipped it open.
“Not a lot more — he was run down in the alley behind the garage where Faith Unruh’s body had been found. The vehicle went back and forth over him at least a couple of times.”
“Making sure?”
Cobb shrugged. “Maybe. Although it could have been rage — like the killer who stabs his victim forty or fifty times, knowing that death has already occurred. The police determined it was a car, probably an SUV, not a pickup, and they know the make of the tires.”
“Jesus,” I said. “Tire-tread impressions on the body?”
Cobb nodded. “That, and I’m guessing in Kennedy’s blood and the area right around the body.”
I thought about what he’d said, shook my head. “Something’s bothering me,” I said. “Kennedy was a fit guy and pretty athletic. I know that from first-hand experience. I’m having trouble figuring how somebody managed to drive down that alley and nail him without his being able to jump out of the way.”
“Probably didn’t happen that way,” Cobb answered. “More likely the killer drove in there, Kennedy came along and they talked at the driver’s side window. Casual stuff — how ya doin’, sure is cold. Kennedy let down his guard. Then as he stepped away, he made the mistake of moving either in front of or behind the car. The driver punched the accelerator and knocked him down. Even if Kennedy was still alive at that point, he was likely too injured to escape or even roll out of the way, at least not easily or quickly. The killer drove back and forth a few times and the job was done.”
“The part I don’t get is that Kennedy was the most suspicious guy I’ve ever known. Hard to believe he’d put himself in a position to be harmed. Especially like that.”
“He made a mistake,” Cobb said, no trace of doubt in his voice. “We don’t know exactly what the killer did to lure him in there and let him feel secure right up until the moment when Kennedy realized — too late — what was happening.”
I thought about that. “Lure him in there,” I repeated. “To almost the same place Faith Unruh was lured the day she lost her life.”
“Yeah,” Cobb said. “I’ve thought about that. He died maybe twenty or twenty-five feet from where Faith’s body was found.”
“Damn.” In the three years I’d been working with Cobb — my background as a former crime writer with the Calgary Herald had proved useful in researching various aspects of the cases he’d involved me in — I had come face to face with the depravity of the criminal mind and the violence that is often a trademark of that depravity. Here was further evidence.
“And we know that the tape that would have shown what happened in that alley was taken,” I said.
“Meaning the driver of the car killed Kennedy, took his keys, then drove out of the alley, parked somewhere nearby and got into Kennedy’s house, took the incriminating tape and left.”
“Cool customer,” I said.
“Very.”
“And had to know about the surveillance set-up in Kennedy’s house.”
“Yeah.”
I was also familiar with Kennedy’s surveillance system, as he’d recruited me a few weeks before his death to babysit the operation while he was in Vancouver with his ex-wife, who was terminally ill. I was stationed in Kennedy’s house for ten days, until she died and the funeral had taken place. There were two surveillance locations in the house; one was upstairs, and it was focused on the backyard and alley behind the house across the street, the one where Faith’s body had been found. The second was on the main floor and was directed at the former Unruh house — Faith’s home for eleven years and one day.
“The killer had to know about the cameras and the tapes.” I knew I was stating the obvious but I needed to say it: not for Cobb, for me. “He had to know. You don’t kill someone, then search their home for a camera just in case.”
“No, but it’s possible the killer was searching the house for something else altogether or maybe planning a robbery. He stumbled across the surveillance set-up, figured out what it was all about, and the tape that mattered disappeared.”
“You think that’s likely?”
“No.” Cobb shook his head. “I think he was after the tapes. There were no signs of searching or the kind of disturbance associated with robbery in any other parts of the house. And that means Kennedy had to ha
ve told someone about what he had been doing all those years in that house.”
I nodded. It was the only answer — however improbable.
Cobb sipped his coffee, set the cup down, and looked at me. “Did he ever indicate to you that he’d let anyone else besides you and me know about the surveillance?”
I thought back to that time and the conversations I’d had with Kennedy. They were seldom long conversations — never expansive.
“I can’t remember if he said one way or the other. But my gut was that he was extremely secretive about what he was doing, that I was the only one who knew — well, me and you — who’d ever seen the set-up,” I said. “I mean, this was a guy who changed his appearance, his name — Christ, his life — in his obsession with finding Faith’s killer. It doesn’t make sense that he told a bunch of people.”
“Not a bunch of people. But he had to have told one.”
“I guess you’re right.”
“Because if he didn’t, that leaves only one other alternative,” Cobb said. “And that is that either you or I killed him.”
I looked at Cobb. He wasn’t laughing or even smiling.
“I hope you’re not serious.”
He leaned forward. “I know you didn’t kill Kennedy. But the police don’t know that. And they are going to find out that you have a working knowledge of Kennedy’s surveillance equipment and that you’ve been in that alley. I’m warning you that you are likely to be, if not a suspect, at least a person of interest.”
“Which is a phrase used to point to someone they don’t have enough evidence to call a suspect, but who is, in fact, a suspect.”
“Something like that.” Cobb’s face formed a smile best described as sardonic. “By the way, I’m likely to be on their radar, too.” He paused, straightened up. “And for the record, there is another possibility.”
“I’m glad you feel that way.” I was feeling a little taken aback by the direction of the conversation so far and it probably showed on my face. “And that possibility is?”
“That Faith’s killer somehow learned, maybe even accidentally, of the surveillance and was playing Kennedy. Biding his time, waiting for the right moment.”
None So Deadly Page 1
