“For me there have only ever been two things … baseball and writing. When my baseball career ended, it seemed like the right time to pursue the journalism option.”
“Ever regret it?”
“Until I hooked up with you, never.”
He laughed at that, then turned serious. “I guess I have put you in what looked like harm’s way a time or two. I apologize for that.”
I shrugged. “I brought this on myself. And you saved my ass. I won’t ever forget that. Besides, I’m a big boy. If I felt I couldn’t do this, I could always walk away.”
“I hope you don’t. We’re not a bad team.”
“Just remember — you get me killed and you’ll have to deal with a pissed-off Jill.”
“I’ve thought about that. Scary.”
We both laughed. Relieved laughter.
“So, what’s next?”
“Well, we’ve got a couple of items on our plate. I’d like to get back on the Faith Unruh–Marlon Kennedy thing.”
“I’ll start looking at tapes tomorrow. That should get my mind off Scubberd and company.”
Cobb started to respond but didn’t get the chance as his phone rang. He looked at the number and answered. “Yeah?”
That was the last word he said. He listened for a while, then ended the call and put his phone away.
He took a drink of wine, more than a sip this time. “Grover’s disappeared,” he said.
That jolted me back to the reality of what had gone on earlier that night. “Disappeared as in dead?”
Cobb shook his head. “That was Rock Scubberd. He told me Grover had screwed him around. He didn’t elaborate, just said nobody does that and when he finds Grover he’s dead. Told me he wanted me to be the first to know.”
“Meaning what?”
Cobb pursed his lips and thought for a minute before he answered. “Knowing Grover, it’s entirely possible that he did try to pull something on those guys. That’s how he rolls, on everything. I imagine he’s now concentrating on keeping his ass on the top side of the grass. So maybe the call was a warning to us, a message — if I know where Grover is, Scubberd will expect me to give him up.”
“And?”
“And happily for all of us, I don’t know where Grover is.”
“Think he’ll try to get out of Calgary?”
“Hard to say. This city is what he knows. He might stay and see if he can come up with a way of getting back in Scubberd’s good graces.” A pause. “Or, hell, he might be on his way to Vancouver.”
“So, if you did happen to come across Grover, would you make the call?”
“I’m kind of hoping I never have to answer that question.”
Cobb finished his wine. “I don’t know about you but I’m ready to call it a day. It’s been a long one.”
I no longer wanted the rest of my drink. Like Cobb, I needed this day to be over. And I hoped the next one and the ones after that might be a little quieter, a little easier. I paid for the drinks and we walked out into the night.
A north wind had come up, and the temperature was falling fast. A fitting end to Monday, Monday.
FOURTEEN
The weather had definitely turned. We were in the throes of a protracted pre-spring cold snap — the forecast being several days of temperatures in the minus teens, with windchills considerably lower.
The Accord and I felt pretty much the same way about prairie winter. Neither of us was keen to get started, especially in the frigid early morning hours. It was the fourth day of well below normal temperatures with lots more to come. I was already gritting my teeth.
I had finally finished the third book in my kids’ Spoofaloof series, gone through dozens of surveillance tapes, cursed Kennedy for not moving to newer technology that would have been easier to work with, and drunk several gallons of coffee.
Ninety-six hours of self-imposed solitary confinement: me, the computer, the tapes, the coffee, and, later in the day, quite a number of cans of Rolling Rock. And now even the beer was gone. The only thing the tapes had given me was a persistent headache, which I admit may have been, at least in part, facilitated by the beer.
I’d found all of the points when there seemed to be some unexplained movement on the tapes going back a little over a year. And though I was certain there was human activity in that alley — the marks on the wood were proof of that — the tapes revealed nothing I didn’t already know. I remained convinced, however, that there was a connection between the marks on the garbage bin stand and Kennedy’s murder. I was a great deal less certain about the puzzle that troubled me every day and about which I changed my mind every other day — the connection between Kennedy’s death and the horror that ended Faith Unruh’s life so many years before.
The tape-fest concluded, I was sitting on the sofa at Jill’s place, both of us enjoying a near-ritual post-dinner glass of wine. I decided the time had come to do something that was long overdue. I was scared to death that what I was about to do would jeopardize what we had together, but I couldn’t continue to deceive someone I wanted never to deceive.
I set my glass down and looked at her.
“Serious time,” she said.
“Yes,” I said. “Very. There’s something you need to know about the twenty-five thousand dollars the Inn received from that anonymous donor.”
“You know who the donor was?”
“I do, yeah.”
And I told her. I told her all of it, left out nothing right up to and including the confrontation with the MFs at the Hose and Hound Pub a few days before.
When I finished I picked up my wine glass as she set hers down.
“There’s one more thing I want to say,” I told her. “I am so sorry that I kept this from you. I thought I had good reasons, but there aren’t any reasons good enough for me to lie to the person I care about most in this world. I … I’m sorry.”
She didn’t say anything for a long time. The longer she stayed silent, the more worried I became.
Finally, she spoke. “I’m not sure if I should yell at you or hug you.”
“Yeah.” I thought it would be funny to say I know which one I’d choose but I didn’t. This wasn’t the time for funny.
“I love you for caring enough about the Inn and what it means to me that you’d do anything to help save it. But Mike was right. It was incredibly dumb to think you could deal with people like that. You could have been arrested or killed. Do you know what that would have done to Kyla and me?”
She stopped and I saw a solitary tear on her cheek. I didn’t move to brush it away. I didn’t speak.
She took a couple of breaths. “As for lying to me, well, I guess you didn’t really. You just didn’t tell me the truth. Splitting hairs, maybe, but I’m trying to give you the benefit of the doubt here.”
“Yeah,” I said again.
She picked up her glass, took a drink. A long moment passed before she spoke again.
“This is over now. I don’t want to talk about it now or ever again.”
“So you’re not going to throw my ass out in the street?”
“You big dumb twit. There are men who abuse their wives or girlfriends; some are addicts, some gamble, and some fool around. And I’m going to throw you out for trying to do the right thing and being willing to risk your life for something I care about? That would make me as dumb as you.”
It had taken no more than ten minutes. Ten minutes for me to confess and apologize and to be forgiven. Turned out to be some of the best minutes of my life. Then Jill leaned in to me and gave me a long, slow kiss that reminded me again that an amazing woman loved me and that I was one lucky big dumb twit.
Cobb and I sat across from Detective Yvette Landry in her cubicle. She’d asked us to come in for a chat. There were a couple of cops at other cubicles in the room, but her partner Chisholm wasn’t one of them. I thought that was interesting; maybe Landry was trying for a slightly more cordial ambience this time.
“How’s it going wit
h Unruh-Kennedy?”
I looked at Cobb. We’d already agreed on the way into the building that he would do the talking. “I’m not sure we’ve made much progress,” he told her. “Still chasing down a few things.”
“Like?”
“Oh, you know … this and that … here and there.”
“That’s it?”
“Guess so.”
It looked to me like Landry saw Cobb’s answer for what it was: evasion.
She sat back. “Have you thought any more about Kennedy’s contention that there might have been irregularities with the investigation?”
I thought that was an interesting question and wondered about her motivation in asking it. Had she or the department uncovered something?
Cobb seemed to be on the same page. “That’s something I was planning to ask you.”
Landry smiled. “I asked you first.”
Cobb shrugged. “The irregularities, the mistakes, whether they were deliberate or not, are undeniable. But did they impede the investigation? Hard to imagine how they couldn’t.”
“As I told you earlier, we looked at it and there was an internal inquiry a long time ago. Neither came up with anything substantive.”
Cobb waved that off. “Lots of internal inquiries tend to find nothing substantive. Did this one look at Maughan?”
“As a saboteur or as a suspect in the murder?”
“How about both?”
“I can’t answer that off the top of my head. I can tell you that I read the report and checked his alibi and it holds up as well now as it did then.”
“And what was his alibi?”
“He was working that day. The case was the unexplained death of an elderly widower in northwest Calgary, circumstances suspicious. It was determined fairly quickly that he had been murdered. Maughan and his partner caught the case and were interviewing potential witnesses that afternoon.”
“Together?”
“I read the homicide file. The notes said they spoke to three people that afternoon.”
“Anybody follow up with those three people?”
A pause. “I don’t know.”
“They clear the case?”
She shook her head. “An arrest, but no conviction.”
“Any chance we can get a look at the file?”
“To what end?”
Cobb shrugged. “Because we just like chasing our tails. Or maybe we think Maughan deserves a closer look. Either way, I’d like to have a peek at the file.”
“You know that’s not allowed.”
“Yeah.”
“And I know you’ve seen homicide files before.”
A pause. “Yeah.”
A half-smile played at Landry’s attractive mouth. “A little quid pro quo?” she said.
“What can we do for you, Detective?”
“Word is that you’ve used the services of an informant named Ike Groves before.”
“The Grover? I may have chatted with him from time to time, back in the day.”
“How far back?”
Another shrug. “It might help if you were to tell us what you’re looking for.”
“One of Groves’s girls is dead. It was a nasty one. Your name came up as someone who knows the guy.”
“I know the guy. Pretty street-savvy player. Knows where the bodies are buried, so to speak.”
“Yeah, well, now he’ll have one of his own to bury.”
“I heard something about it.”
Landry leaned forward, tapped a pencil against a cheekbone. “Where’d you hear it?”
“Out there,” Cobb waved an arm. “The mean streets of our city, Detective. Word gets around.”
“You remember who passed it along to you?”
“Anonymous. Someone called me, didn’t identify himself, said he’d heard I knew The Grover and wanted me to know.”
“You hear anything else? Like maybe who took her out?”
Cobb shook his head. “A guy like The Grover had enemies. Probably lots of them. In fact, someone like him, even his friends might deserve your attention.”
“So, why wouldn’t those enemies take out Groves himself?”
“Like I said, he’s a slimy operator. Might be hard to find. I don’t know. Guess if they couldn’t find him, they went after her.”
“This girl have a name, Detective?” I asked, thinking and hoping that The Grover had lots of girls and that I didn’t know this one.
She checked her notes. “Leah. Leah McDaniel. Dancer and prossie. Her stage name was Pink.”
I forced my face to remain still. I met Landry’s stare, but didn’t blink. She turned her gaze on Cobb. “You mentioned Groves’s friends. Any in particular I should be paying attention to?”
“Can’t help you there,” Cobb said. “I didn’t hang with the guy. Either he or I would arrange a meeting; he would pass along some information if he had what I needed. He’d get paid and we’d part company. I can’t say I know much about him beyond his criminal activity, which I’m sure you are as aware of as I am.”
Landry looked unhappy. “Care to hazard at least a guess as to where I might start my investigation?”
“Grover was a street guy. I’d probably start by talking to some of the people who knew him, people who lived their lives the same way he did.”
“Street people. Crack addicts, dealers, pimps. That’s who you’d recommend?”
“Be a place to start. When can I come by and pick up the homicide file for the old guy?”
“You don’t. Come by tomorrow. I’ll photocopy the relevant pages and leave them at the desk. Sealed envelope, your name on it. Nobody sees those pages but you two.”
Relevant pages meant we weren’t getting everything in the file. Cobb didn’t argue. He knew, as I did, that Landry could get in trouble for giving us anything. “Thanks, I appreciate it. Anything else you’d like to chat about?”
“The higher-ups don’t believe there’s a connection between Faith Unruh’s murder and Kennedy’s. There was a meeting and that was the only item on the agenda.”
“You at the meeting?”
“I was, yes.”
“And is that your thinking, as well?”
She shook her head slowly. “I don’t know. How do you explain it? Twenty-five years after a little girl is murdered, a guy who spent all that time trying to find the killer gets himself killed just a few feet from where she died. On the one hand it’s hard to believe they’re not connected. But it’s twenty-five years, for God’s sake.”
“We’ve had that same conversation ourselves,” Cobb said. “More than once.”
“Do you really like Maughan for Faith Unruh?”
Cobb shrugged. “Did you know he gave The Policeman Is Your Friend presentations at the school Faith attended?”
Landry sat up. “You sure about that?”
“One hundred percent. And there’s a chance he gave at least one of those presentations to Faith’s class.”
“Where’d you …? Doesn’t matter.” She shook her head. “That’s not much.”
Cobb nodded. “By itself, no it’s not. But if he was part of the group that was first at a crime scene that had some evidence go missing and if there’s a chance that he knew or at least had met the victim … well, it makes you think, doesn’t it? Then you factor in his being given the lead in the investigation for a time, then having it taken away. There’s starting to be some building blocks there.”
She shook her head. “Cards maybe, not blocks. It’s still pretty flimsy. And if it was Maughan, does that mean you agree with the brass that the Kennedy killing is unrelated?”
“They’re either unrelated or there were two people in on the Unruh killing.”
“So you think that somehow Maughan ditches Kinley, hooks up with his accomplice — they murder an eleven-year-old girl — and Maughan is back on the job an hour or so later?”
“Whoa!” Cobb held up his hands. “So far, all we have to say that Maughan and Kinley were working that day
is the report in a homicide file, a report that one of them would have written. And if there was an accomplice, who’s to say it wasn’t Kinley?”
“Kinley’s dead, too. So that blows any theory that the Kennedy and Unruh murders are related pretty much to hell.”
Cobb shrugged. “Whoa again. That’s never been my theory. It’s been a question I’ve asked, just as you have.”
She nodded. “But damn near impossible to prove there’s a connection.”
“And damn near impossible to prove there isn’t.”
“I don’t know if you know this, but the way the law works, you have to prove guilt, not innocence.”
“I’ve heard that.”
“I know it’s a pain in the ass sometimes, but that’s the way the system operates. So you’re going to need a whole lot more than a cop giving presentations at a victim’s school and a weird chain of events in the investigation to even get out of the batter’s box with this.”
“I know we haven’t got much. And believe me, that frustrates me as much as it frustrates you.”
“Good luck finding more.”
“Thanks,” Cobb said. “That starts tomorrow with the homicide file on the old man’s death. What time do you get in?”
“Nine o’clock.”
“I’ll be there just after nine. I’ll bring coffee.”
It looked like we were wrapping up. Turns out we weren’t.
Landry turned back to me. “Why don’t you tell me about the time you spent in Kennedy’s home?”
I’d been waiting for this moment, but when it happened I was taken by surprise, which was likely how Landry wanted it to happen. I thought about trying to buy time by asking how they’d found out, decided that would be a bad idea.
I wanted to glance at Cobb to see if he was in favour of my answering her or if he wanted me to keep my mouth shut. But I knew Landry would see my look at Cobb and probably regard it as suspicious.
I opted instead for the truth, knowing that talking to the cops without a lawyer present was seldom a good idea. I decided I’d start and if things looked like they were getting greasy, I’d clam up and wait for counsel.
“He asked me to man the surveillance system for him while he was away with his wife, who was in the last stages of her life. I did that. He came home after his wife’s funeral and I left. End of story.”
None So Deadly Page 24
