And killed her instead.
She reached the fork at the end of the trail. Both paths were grueling uphill runs. She chose the one on the left. Serpentine Hill stretched out in front of her. It was steep. It was punishing. It was just what she needed. Alaska slowed down, angling into the woods to check out the squirrels. She pounded up the winding hill mercilessly. Just when she thought she could breathe no longer, the path leveled off, letting her heart catch up to the relentless pace her legs had set.
That was how she lived her life. Fast paced. Striving for success.
Because if you were successful, you’d be respected. No one could hurt you. No one could take that success away from you.
That had been her mantra for the past fifteen years. If she didn’t have that, she didn’t have anything.
LMB was her ticket to the kind of career she wanted. Thanks to the TransTissue case, she could sense success just around the corner. The easiest—and most prudent—thing would be to concentrate on that case. She’d done the groundwork over the weekend. She had a strong analysis to present to John Lyons this morning. She should forget about Marian MacAdam. After all, her client’s last words to Kate were that she would find proof of Lisa’s drug use herself.
But how could a seventy-year-old grandmother who lived a life of privilege know how to find proof of a teenager’s illicit drug use?
She still didn’t have the answer to that question when she ran through the park gates, Alaska trotting by her side. Sweat left a damp patch on her back. To hell with it. As soon as she got to the office, she’d hand in her memo on the TransTissue defense to John Lyons. Then she’d call Marian MacAdam. She’d tell her that if she was really concerned about Lisa’s well-being, they needed to contact the authorities right away.
To hell with Randall Barrett. He was the one who’d sent her the client. He’d have to live with it, too.
Her office phone rang. It was 8:55 a.m. Kate snatched up the receiver. She’d just called Marian MacAdam, but there’d been no answer. Maybe her client had been in the bathroom.
“Hello?”
“Kate, it’s Mark.” Mark Boynton. From the labor law practice. She straightened.
He cleared his throat. “I realize it’s short notice, but I need someone to assist on a hearing today. Are you free?”
Her heart leaped. “Yes, of course.”
“Great. Meet me in my office ASAP. I want to go over a couple of things before the hearing starts.”
She put the receiver down, grabbed her briefcase and trench coat and hurried from her office.
As she walked down the hallway, doing her best to not swing her briefcase in excitement, she suddenly remembered her call to Marian MacAdam.
The hearing had gone well. Really well. Mark, a year away from partnership, had been pleased.
“You think fast on your feet,” he’d said over a sub during the lunch break.
“These feet will run with anything you give me,” she’d said, hoping he’d be impressed enough to throw her a lifeline out of the ghetto.
When she returned to her office just before 6:00 p.m., she checked her voice mail, then scanned the e-mails from her assistant. No message from Marian MacAdam.
In a way, she was relieved. She was tired; she wanted to get home at a decent hour for once—before Alaska peed on the floor.
And besides, what difference would a day make? The wheels of justice ground slowly.
It could wait until tomorrow.
7
Tuesday, May 1, 2:00 a.m.
He circled the silver sedan around the long building before rolling to a gentle stop beside the rear entrance.
No one was about. Nor should they be; it was the middle of the night. But you never knew.
He glanced upward through the windshield again. Yes. The grain elevators were a vacant shell. Cranes stood in the distance, frozen under the floodlights like Jurassic dinosaurs. A white fuzziness softened the hard metal edges. He frowned. The light was very bright. Too bright. It made things blurry in contrast.
He slid out of the car, easing the door shut, and padded around to the trunk. His pulse quickened.
Then froze. He heard a scuffling noise. His eyes scanned the long dingy building above. There was no light in the windows. Was someone up there? Watching him in the dark? He stared into the black recesses where the floodlights didn’t reach. White fringed his vision. He squinted. There it was again. A movement. A scurrying.
His shoulders relaxed. A smile twisted his lips. He should have recognized that sound. After all, hadn’t he waited many nights for his prey in this very spot?
The rat strolled unhurriedly across the doorway and out of sight. Rats had brought him so much joy. How well he knew this species. Inside and out.
A rattle startled him. He glanced around quickly. Just the rat running into the garbage bin next to the building. He let his breathing slow.
Time to focus. He opened the car trunk. A faint light showed his prize.
He was good. Much better than he got credit for.
He reached into the trunk. His gloved hands glowed fuzzily against the darkness of his cuffs. He blinked. The blurriness remained. He ignored it. This was the moment. The culmination of his painstaking efforts. Nothing would ruin it.
He unzipped the plastic bag, so silently he felt—rather than heard—the vibration of the teeth yawning open. His hands slid under her. One hand behind the neck. The other at her groin.
She was easy to lift out of the bag, her body fitting compactly in his arms. He glanced around once more. There were houses and apartment buildings surrounding the granary. Ironic that such a noisy, rat-infested spot should be in such an expensive neighborhood, but that was geography. The granary was by the water. So were the houses.
The buildings were silent. It was if they knew he was coming and made sure their occupants were not straying. He hunched over his prize and walked quickly to the rear door of the granary. Blood spattered behind his shoes, gleaming in four little trails behind him.
Perfect. No one could miss her.
He laid her carefully on the ground and studied her one last time.
Her eyes stared at the black sky. They were empty. The drugs had taken care of the fear; his hands had done the rest.
Those hands had once been impotent. Futile. Unable to defend himself.
No. Don’t think of it now. Don’t ruin it. He clenched his fingers to stop the memory from taunting him.
Not now! His fingers dug into his palms. The effort, he knew, was in vain. His brain always overruled his body.
He was wrestling. Furiously. His eight-year-old self shrank under the blows of the fifteen-year-old.
“You are such a wimp,” his brother panted, shoving him.
He fell at his brother’s feet.
“Don’t you ever take my stuff again,” Tim snarled, dangling the prize in front of his eyes. He closed them. It was too much. It wasn’t fair. He always gave Tim his space. Never entered his lair. But when his brother had shown him the pocket knife he’d won at a school science fair, he couldn’t help himself. It was everything he’d ever wanted. And would never be given. Pain warred with envy. He wanted it badly. So badly. The neat, tiny instruments that folded with utter certainty into impossibly narrow slots. He wanted that knife. He wanted to be the knife. To be able to fold into himself. And then pop out to dazzle everyone with his daring and precision.
He rolled away from his brother’s legs and curled into a ball. He would prove himself one day. He would.
And he had. He had proven his mother wrong. And had shown it was not just his older brother who had talent.
A deep rumbling filled the air. A train sped by on the overpass. He ignored it and smoothed the skunk stripe in her dyed black hair. Then he stood and admired his handiwork.
It was flawless. How easily her limbs had separated from her body. There were no jagged edges. No hanging threads of muscle, no torn tendons. They had all been precisely detached. All that was left
was smooth bone under even edges of flesh.
He nodded, pleased. She was perfectly straight. The nipples on her small breasts made a symmetrical triangle with the dark V of her groin. That was why he enjoyed the younger ones so much more. Their bodies were not misshapen from aging. Fewer surprises under the skin, too. The muscles were firm, the bones strong.
Her shoulder and hip sockets gleamed wetly in the dark. Pools of coagulating blood beneath the sockets made dark memories of her limbs.
He pushed his excitement down. How long would it take for the medical examiner to notice the little message he’d inscribed in her glenoid cavity?
8
Tuesday, May 1, 6:25 a.m.
Ethan wove his Jeep around the line of cars inching away from the granary. This must be the early-morning shift of granary workers. A patrol officer urged them past, but they crawled along, craning their necks to peer beyond the bright yellow crime scene tape surrounding the site. Some sipped Tim Hortons coffee, others had a nervous puff. A few talked excitedly on their cell phones.
Ethan sighed. It wouldn’t take long for the news to spread.
The good news was that they couldn’t see anything. For that, Ethan was grateful. For the rest, he was not. He’d gotten the call from Detective Sergeant Deb Ferguson twenty-eight minutes ago. “Suspected homicide, the granary,” she had told him. “The night watchman just called it in.”
Ethan had thrown his legs over the side of his bed and forced his eyes to focus on the clock. It was 5:55 a.m. It felt like 3:00 a.m. He needed to get to bed earlier. Staying up flipping through his two hundred satellite channels was killing him. And he didn’t even like TV.
“Here’s the triangle,” Deb continued. She was referring to the Investigative Triangle, the command model they used for investigating cases. He straightened. “You’re up for primary investigator.” There was a pause. Was she hoping he’d thank her? He’d been waiting for months to be assigned primary investigator again. Ever since the Clarkson file. Ever since Randall Barrett had triggered an internal investigation into his handling of the witness. “Right.” He made his voice noncommittal. But he couldn’t hold down the satisfaction that washed through him. He was back in the fold. No, better than that, he was back on top again.
He stood. “Is the scene secured?”
“They’re working on it. The patrol sergeant is taping off the area. I told him to secure everything inside the fence. We don’t want another Surette case on our hands.”
Ethan grimaced. They’d had a hard time living that one down. An inexperienced patrol officer had taped off a three-foot area around the body of gang victim David Surette. The bullet casings were found by a kid fifty feet outside the tape and taken to school for show-and-tell before the teacher called the police.
“I’ll be there in half an hour,” he said, heading to the bathroom.
There was a pause. “It’s a nasty one, Ethan.”
“Yeah?” The tone of the detective sergeant’s voice snapped Ethan out of his precoffee fog.
“Young girl, mutilated.”
“Shit.” That’d be a magnet for the media. He wondered how many minutes it’d take for them to get wind of it. “The patrol sergeant better make sure the scene is nailed tight.”
When he got to the chain-link fence surrounding the granary, Ethan spotted the white bunny suits of two Forensic Identification Services investigators—known as the “Ident guys”—just inside the yellow taped area. They were combing the outer perimeter of the granary lot, cameras and markers in hand. He pulled his Jeep in beside a van emblazoned with Forensic Identification Unit and hopped out. The command bus was sitting next to the gate, silent on the outside, but a hive of activity on the inside. Walker’d be setting up the computers right now.
Daylight burned through the fiery sunrise. How fitting to have a bloody horizon mark this young girl’s death. Red sky in the morning, sailor’s warning. At first, the childhood rhyme didn’t register.
Then it did. More rain was coming. He rubbed his jaw, sloshing coffee over his knuckles. Shit. The Ident guys better work quickly before any trace evidence was washed away.
The patrol officer manning the gate was young. And from the looks of it, fresh out of the academy. The constable’s eyes were stoic, but his face was pale. He would have been the first responder to the call. Ethan wondered if he’d seen a homicide victim before. He doubted it. All the more reason to assign him to guard the body when it was locked in the morgue. “Detective Drake, MCU,” Ethan said, flashing his ID.
The constable glanced at it and opened the gate. “Detective Riley asked me to radio her when you arrived.”
He nodded. Riley was the lead Ident detective. She ran a tight ship, and he respected her for that. No compromising of evidence on her watch. No one was allowed to enter a crime scene without her permission, except for the M.E. There’d been too many crime scenes that were compromised by police officers accidentally stepping on prints that were invisible to the naked eye or by leaving their own trace evidence. But with Riley, things changed. It made his job—and the prosecutors’—so much easier.
Riley saw him and waved. Ethan knew not to be fooled by her small stature. She was tough, a triathlete in her spare time. She had more stamina—mental and physical—than the entire graduating class of the academy. She headed toward him, carefully following a path that he knew would be the same every time. Same way in, same way out. It kept contamination of evidence to a minimum.
She stopped in front of him. Alarm bells rang in Ethan’s head. In the five years he’d known her, he’d never seen Audrey Riley show any emotional reaction to a case until it was over. But today he saw distress blurring her usual focused gaze.
“Here’s the rundown, and it isn’t good,” Riley said, her hazel eyes locking his. “The victim looks to be approximately fifteen to eighteen years of age, been dead for several hours. She was discovered by a security guard.” She crossed her arms. “Doubt he’ll have a job after today. He admitted to falling asleep. Seems like he took a catnap every night.”
“How long did he sleep for?”
“He claims he was asleep for twenty minutes around 0200, but he’s an old guy. I bet it was longer.”
“And what time was the victim discovered?”
“0540. The security guard called the police right away. He was scared shitless.” A muscle flexed in her jaw. “He has shit for brains, too. He ran through the tire track the killer left. We can’t get an imprint.”
“That the only one?” From the flash of frustration in Riley’s eyes, Ethan knew what her answer would be.
“Yeah. So far, it’s the only trace evidence we’ve uncovered.”
He stared at her. “That’s it?”
“Yeah. The victim was naked, Ethan. No clothes, no ID, no fibers that we can find.”
That meant the autopsy would be more crucial than ever. “Which M.E. is coming?”
“Guthro.”
He relaxed. “Good. He’ll find something. There’ll probably be some trace under the nails—”
“Didn’t anyone tell you?” Riley asked brusquely. “She was dismembered.”
His heart dropped. “Deb was told she was mutilated.”
“No. All her limbs were cut off.”
“Shit,” he said softly. “Have you recovered them yet?”
“Not yet.” The way she said it, Ethan had no doubt the Ident guys would be digging holes in every inch of dirt until they did.
“So this wasn’t the kill site?”
Riley shook her head. “Uh-uh. This site is pristine. You could have the Queen for fucking tea here. He killed the victim somewhere else and dumped her here.”
“Damn.” He stared past her shoulder at the crime scene tape. An anonymous dismembered girl, a clean dump site and rain about to fall on whatever trace evidence there was.
Halifax had never seen anything like it.
9
Tuesday, May 1, 9:00 a.m.
Marian MacAdam unlocked the
door to her condo and rolled her overnight bag inside. Despite her attempts to make it feel like home, the condo had a still quality that she hated. No matter that she’d lived in it for almost three years, she couldn’t get used to the confines of a high-rise. A house—or at least her house—had always seemed to breathe when she was gone.
Marian hurried through the living room and threw open the patio doors. The air was so damp it left a layer of moisture on her skin.
Part of her wished she hadn’t come back just yet. Her plan had been to spend the week in St. Margaret’s Bay, getting her cottage opened for the summer. Before her disastrous meeting with Kate Lange, she’d had visions of organizing the spare bedroom so Lisa could invite some friends to “hang out” there for the school holidays. She’d even looked into sailing lessons at the local yacht club.
But her meeting with Kate Lange had punctured those hopes. She’d spent the past three days halfheartedly making lists of jobs for the cleaning service, restocking the pantry and washing all the sheets.
Yesterday, she sat on the deck, the wind cool despite the sudden hit of spring heat. The fog had retreated to the outer islands. It would stay there for a few hours. She gazed at the water. Thinking about happier times. Thinking about her life with Roy. Missing him more than ever. Wishing she could talk to him about her meeting with Kate Lange. She’d wanted the lawyer to deal with her troubles, not heap more on her plate. She couldn’t make her understand that calling Child Protection Services was the worst thing Marian could do to Lisa.
Wasn’t it?
She had been so sure of that on Friday. Then over the weekend the doubts crept in. Just like the fog.
When her friend Margaret called last night to invite her for lunch at the art gallery today, she accepted with alacrity. Her doubts would not let her rest. Better to have some company. She wasn’t sure if she would confide her troubles to Margaret; she’d see how lunch went.
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