Invisible Dead

by Sam Wiebe

  PUBLISHED BY RANDOM HOUSE CANADA

  Copyright © 2016 Sam Wiebe

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2016 by Random House Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.​penguinrandomhouse.​ca

  Random House Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Wiebe, Sam, author

  Invisible dead / Sam Wiebe.

  ISBN 978-0-345-81627-6

  eBook ISBN 978-0-345-81628-3

  I. Title.

  PS8645.I3236I58 2016 C813′.6 C2015-908560-8

  eBook ISBN 9780345816283

  Cover image: © Nagib El Desouky / Arcangel Images

  v4.1

  a

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Part One: Omegas

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Part Two: Dans un Café

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Interlude: Fucking Winnipeg

  Chapter 24

  Part Three: Farewell Music

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Epilogue: Crab Park

  Afterword and Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  悄悄是別離的笙簫

  Silence is my farewell music

  XU ZHIMO, “Saying Goodbye to Cambridge Again”

  VANCOUVER

  I don’t know why this city sees fit to kill its women.

  Answers won’t be forthcoming.

  1

  ED LEARY NICHULLS was serving eight counts of second-degree murder up in Kent. “Scrapyard Ed” lured runaways and prostitutes out to his family salvage lot, killed them, eventually, and eventually disposed of the bodies. He didn’t avoid the authorities for long, once they’d started looking. But that had taken years.

  I generally don’t like serial killers, don’t find them interesting, though I could name a couple exceptions. Nichulls wouldn’t be one. But a client had received a tip-off that Nichulls knew something about her daughter’s disappearance, so I made the drive to Agassiz to see if it was true.

  The Kent Institution is two hours east of Vancouver, past sprawling townships that seem intent on chewing through their farmland, regurgitating strip malls and noose-shaped cul-de-sacs of tract housing. Kent is federal and maximum-security, a large brown bunker flanked by caged-in exercise yards. Next door is the medium-security Mountain lockup. Corrections is the town’s chief industry.

  A tall guard with a scar on her cheek walked me through the checkpoints, down the long hallway, concrete walls painted white and green. A conference room had been arranged. Inside was another guard, stone-faced, and a thin man in an expensive pinstripe that hadn’t been taken in. His two-button vest flopped about his midsection. He rose to shake my hand.

  “Tim Kwan. Nice to meet you, Mr. Wakeland. I’m his counsel. For today, anyway.” We shook and Kwan sat back down, smoothing out trousers that hadn’t been pressed. “He gets a lot of requests for his time.”

  “I won’t take up much of it,” I said.

  We waited while the guards fetched Nichulls. Kwan sketched runic-looking figures in the margins of his Day-Timer. I studied the two photos that I’d brought with me. The first was of a young blonde seated in front of an antique bookcase, her posture square and erect, one elbow propped on a desk next to a globe. It was a yearbook photo—I could see ripples in the backdrop on which the bookcase was printed, the shadow of the next kid in line falling across the globe.

  The other photo showed a much older woman, leaning into a graffitied brick wall. Not older—aged. Rough, defiant, sexual. Eyes heavy-lidded and suspicious. Black hair, black eyeliner, overdrawn crimson mouth. A sneer levied at the camera lens.

  That these were the same woman was just one of the contradictions of Chelsea Loam. Her adopted mother had provided ample details about the adolescent who’d been brought into the Kirby family. None of it explained why she’d left home. Or who she’d been before she arrived.

  The door opened and Kwan tensed, snapped shut his notebook. Nichulls appeared between two guards. They sat him down and uncuffed him. Then they hovered behind his chair, each taking a shoulder, an angel and devil in matching uniforms, attending on some poor sinner.

  “Howdy,” Nichulls said to me.

  I wanted to find something in Nichulls’s appearance that would justify revulsion. True, if he’d set his heart on a modelling career, he’d never suffer scheduling conflicts. But homely as he was, whatever sickness resided in him didn’t reside in his face. His thinning white-blond hair and orange beard, colourless eyes and overbite, made him look at worst like a disreputable uncle. Like someone at home at flea markets or the track. Jail hadn’t faded his deeply tanned forearms, which suggested a liver or endocrine problem. Tattooed on his right arm was a blue crucifix.

  Kwan leaned forward and introduced himself, informing Nichulls that Kwan worked for his usual lawyers. Nichulls smiled and watched amused as Kwan studied his hands, the floor, the textured cover of his notebook. Nichulls briefly looked over at me to see how funny I found the lawyer’s agitation. I stared back at him, waiting.

  They conferred for a moment, discussing minor points of treatment and privilege. Minor for those on the outside, at least. Nichulls’s grievances had chiefly to do with meal selection.

  “Three hots and a cot,” Nichulls said. “What I’m owed. Least get me some choice, y’know?”

  “I’ll petition the warden,” Kwan said.

  Nichulls’s eyes focused on me and he nodded and smiled. “Might as well get down to it,” he said. “Down to the nitty gritty titty. What’d you want to ask me?”

  I held up the photos. He reached for them, pulled them toward him. I let go.

  “First,” Kwan said, “let me reiterate that nothing you say to my client or he to you can in any way be interpreted as an admission of wrongdoing. If, however, said information proves valuable in locating someone, whether living or deceased, we would expect that information to be made available to various parole boards, committees and appellate courts, preferably in the form of written affidavits or spoken testimonials from yourself or your office, to be used on my client’s behalf at his discretion. We’re clear?”

  “Clear,” I said.

  “Clear,” Nichulls echoed, grinning. “Clear as mud. Who’s this cutie?”

  I told him her name. Nichulls examined the second pho
to. He had no problem marking the blonde student and the grey-complexioned runaway as one and the same. I didn’t read recognition in his face. Only a casual lust.

  “Looks young,” he said, tapping the corner of the yearbook photo.

  “She was twenty-four when she disappeared. That was eleven years ago.”

  “This girl a whore,” he said, a funny inflection on the last syllable.

  “Are you asking or telling me?”

  “Asking. If I ask you, I’m asking. She a whore?”

  “She trafficked,” I said. “You’re familiar with the strolls. Have you ever seen her before?”

  “Don’t think so,” Nichulls said. “No.”

  “Then we’re done here.”

  I rose and put out my hand for the photos. He kept them at arm’s reach from me, the way a bully might. The guards inched closer. Tim Kwan pushed his chair back slightly.

  “Now hold on a minute, hold on here.” Nichulls gestured for me to sit. “I said I didn’t think so. Think’s not the same as certain. Gimme a minute. Eyes aren’t so good anymore.”

  He squinted and stared at the photo of the young girl in her chiffon dress, posed in front of the cheap backdrop, arm near the prop globe. Him holding the picture felt obscene. I sat and waited. I don’t wait well.

  “And?” I asked.

  “Hold your horses.” He tapped his temple. “Gears don’t turn as fast as some people’s. ’Specially not after what I been through.”

  “Either you know her or you don’t.”

  “And I said I’m thinking. Takes as long as it takes. Where is it I know you from?”

  “I’m a private investigator,” I said. “One or two cases have made the papers.”

  “Don’t read ’em.”

  “I was a cop before. Briefly. That must be where.”

  “Nah.” He squinted at me, then nodded to himself. “The Astoria. You and that old man.”

  I nodded, no use hiding it. Kwan looked at me, curious.

  “I used to box in the basement of the Astoria hotel,” I told the lawyer. “Sometimes after training my father would take me upstairs for a drink.” I pointed to Nichulls. “We’d see him in the bar, time to time.”

  A grin of absent-minded nostalgia played out on Nichulls’s face. He was a celebrity and loved being one. Back then, though, he’d been one more drunk, twisting quarters into the guts of a candy dispenser, grinning at my father the cop and my sweaty sixteen-year-old self. The grin took in the square-shouldered man sitting with the exhausted boy in the hotel bar and assumed the worst. The grin said: you are my tormentors and you are no better than me. The grin aimed beyond us, at the world, and still gracing the contours of his face now.

  “Those were the times,” Nichulls said. “Not like now. You still fight?”

  “No.”

  “Why’s that? Not good enough?”

  “Partly,” I said. “Once my father died I had no use for it.”

  “Sorry to hear that, him dying.”

  “I appreciate your sympathy. Could we get back to Chelsea Loam?”

  “Never left her,” Nichulls said. “Kind of body’d she have? Tall, thin, fat, what?”

  “Slight.”

  “She dress like a whore? Real obvious-like, bright red lips?”

  “I didn’t drive out here to give you beat-off details.”

  His brow crinkled. “No call for salty language. Remember it’s you asking me for help.”

  “You’re right.”

  “Catch more flies with honey—your dad never tell you that?”

  “If you ever saw her, or did something with her, tell me. Please. If not, tell me that.” The please was hard to get out.

  Nichulls held up a pair of stubby fingers. “Hold on two secs. You’re working for who, ’zactly?”

  “Her mother,” I said. “Foster mother. She’d like to see her daughter buried, if there’s anything to bury. And if not, then at least know what happened to her.”

  Nichulls nodded. He’d put the photos down on the cheap wood coffee table. Tim Kwan spun them toward himself and stared, as if he hadn’t looked at them before. I wondered what kind of lawyer he was.

  “The mother put up any kind of reward?” Nichulls asked.

  “No.”

  “But she’s paying you something, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “What?”

  “Something.”

  “Was just curious,” he said, hands flying up to underscore the harmlessness of his query. “Your girl takes a nice photo. Can I keep these?”

  “No.”

  “Guess I’ll have to get Timmy Boy to bring me some.” He wet his bottom lip. “Dangerous world out there. You hoping your girl turns up, nice and safe and sound?”

  For the second time I stood up. “I didn’t think you knew anything. Or would say if you did.”

  Nichulls didn’t rise to the bait. “You afraid?” His tone was scornful, mock curious. “Think I’m bad, there’s people out there put me to shame. Believe you me.”

  “What people?” I said.

  “Real bad people.”

  “Do you know what happened to her?”

  Nichulls leaned forward and cleared his sinuses. One of the guards touched his shoulders and Nichulls slouched back.

  “Leaving now,” I said to the guards.

  Kwan passed me the photos. From the look on his face, he seemed genuinely saddened that nothing had come from the meeting. That raised him in my estimation, though I didn’t share the feeling. It had gone the way I knew it would.

  The killer had the last word.

  “I’ll be here if you need me,” Nichulls said.

  2

  IT WAS MUGGY and overcast as I drove back to the city. Even with the windows down and the odd spatter of rain dancing on my forearm, I was sweating. July in the Lower Mainland: the sun transient, the rain lukewarm and viscous.

  I drove straight downtown, touched my pass to the sensor on the parkade gate, slid the Cadillac into its spot. Then I rode the elevator up to the office.

  It had been a strange transition from self-employment to being one half of a partnership. Wakeland & Chen Private Investigations had a plush office suite in the Royal Bank building, on the stretch of Hastings where addicts and panhandlers are politely discouraged. We had several corporate clients and a full-time office staff, even if that staff was Jeff Chen’s second cousin Shuzhen. Gone was my cubbyhole of an office, with its cobbled-together furnishings, and the staircase that smelled perpetually of piss, no matter how often I bleached it. Partnering with Jeff Chen had turned my career around.

  At the same time, I didn’t like dealing with white-collar types, other than to hand in my work and cash their cheques. I don’t golf, I don’t schmooze, and when I drink it’s usually alone with my stereo. A smarter person would keep quiet and start saving for a Porsche. I was beginning to feel unsuited for about eighty percent of my profession.

  Jeff was tolerant. He’d spent a decade navigating the corporate security world. He’d worked for Aries, a company so shady they could only call staff meetings during an eclipse, run by a crook who thought scruples were for the weak. Jeff knew I was eccentric, but also that I would deliver. A successful missing persons case netted the kind of publicity you couldn’t purchase.

  So we struck a compromise: I was free to work the cases I wanted, provided I donned a suit and glad-handed every once in a while.

  I dropped the mileage log on Shuzhen’s desk, then headed to my office to scoop the mail off my table. The only thing that had accompanied me on the trip to the profitable end of Hastings was that oak dining table, chipped and scarred and pocked with cigarette burns. Someone had once broken into my old office and set it on fire. That tank of a table had withstood the blaze, and I’d had it refinished. It still served as my desk, incongruent as it was with the tasteful, flimsy office decor around it now. Furniture that can survive arson has untapped potential.

  My office door was unlocked. Standing inside
with her back to the door was Marie, Jeff’s fiancée. She was a good person. I reminded myself of that as she turned and shot me a look that seemed to ask what business I had being here.

  “When will you let me pick out a real desk for you?”

  A witty rejoinder would only lead to squabbling. I shrugged. “I’m comfortable with it. What are you up to?”

  “Seeing if you billed Gail Kirby.”

  “Heading over there now.”

  “Because it’s been a month already, and when I phoned she said she’d just received the invoice.”

  “Heading over there now.”

  “And I didn’t know if you’d been late handing it in, or if it was disorganization on her part.”

  “I’ll give her the invoice today,” I said. “And I’ll tell her, cancer or no, she doesn’t pay within forty days I break her knees.”

  “You do that,” Marie said. “Try to remember this is a business, not a charity. People who won’t do business aren’t worth doing business with.”

  “You learn that at the School for Culinary Arts?”

  My stupid mouth. Marie frosted over instantly.

  “I’m twelve credits from my MBA,” she said. “And yes, before that I explored other career options. How well did you do in college, Dave, you want to talk academic achievement? What did you accomplish?”

  “I drank a lot in libraries.”

  I put the file on the desk. Marie looked at the photo of teenaged Chelsea Loam. Her face softened. “I thought this girl was a prostitute,” she said.

  “That’s an old photo. Other than the street shot, the only others are from arrest reports. I don’t like using mugshots—gives the impression she’s a criminal, sends the wrong message.” I tapped the yearbook photo. “So does this one, but having people think she’s a doe-eyed innocent is better than seeing her as a harlot who got what was coming to her.”

  “People think that?”

  “People think a lot of shit,” I said.

  Jeff came down the hall, spied us and turned in. He kissed his fiancée and took his sweet time coming back down to earth.

  “You went and saw that asshole today,” Jeff said. “Anything useful?”

  “It was a long shot. She worked in the same area where Nichulls took his victims, but so did a lot of people.”