Hang Down Your Head

by Janice Macdonald

  We’d either have to push the bikes up now or later at Kinsmen Hill, and I figured I might as well expend energy while I still had some. The day I can pedal up a river valley hill is the day hell frosts up. Once we got to Saskatchewan Drive, it would all be level since we’d be up and out of the river valley—and therefore out of the few hills we could boast in this city.

  Steve let me lead, since my bike would have to set the pace. I stayed on the road till we hit 103rd Street, also known as Gateway Boulevard. It was a one-way street that twinned with 104th Street, which, because it went south, was called the Calgary Trail. Past these two main thoroughfares, Saskatchewan Drive became a one-way street pointed easterly. Luckily, a bicyclist can pop up onto the sidewalk along the river valley, which is extra wide along this stretch for just that reason. That’s what I was heading for when I heard Steve shouting my name. At the same moment, I heard a motor racing.

  Out of nowhere, a huge cream-coloured half-ton truck loomed at me. It wasn’t braking, and I was heading right into its path. I wasn’t even sure if the driver had seen me. He or she made a wide turn into the space where I would have been if Steve hadn’t called out and I hadn’t pulled hard right into the gravelly grime on the edge of the road. Braking in that stuff made my rear tire skid out from under me and I pitched sideways onto the grassy verge between the road and the sidewalk. Thank goodness for bicycle helmets. My knee and inner calf weren’t so lucky, scraping across the gears and pedal on the way to meet the rest of my tangled body under the bike. Mostly, though, I was shaking from the shock of seeing that big metal grille coming toward me, so fast and so impersonally. Why did people want to be so cut off from each other in those high, shiny boxes of trucks and SUVs? The height of the hood obviously must have made it impossible for the driver to see me, even perched up on a bike. While my leg was stinging along with the palm of my right hand, it felt better to just lie still than to try to untangle myself. I figured Steve would help me get to my feet soon. That would be soon enough for me.

  He was on his cellphone when he hauled his bike up behind me. It sounded like he was calling in the bits of licence plate he’d managed to read on the receding truck. For such a shiny big vehicle, there was apparently a suspicious amount of grime on the first part of the licence plate. Finally, he snapped his phone closed and leaned over to help extricate me from my bike frame.

  “Can you stand, babe?”

  “What did you mean about a suspicious amount of grime?” I murmured.

  “There was just enough dirt to obscure the letter portion and two numbers of the licence. That’s not enough to haul the truck over for, but it’s suspicious because the rest of the vehicle was so clean. I doubt that it’s ever seen off-road conditions. That tells me that the licence was deliberately obscured, which makes me think that the driver is either a car thief staging a sloppy getaway or someone was aiming that three-thousand-pound weapon at you.”

  “At me? You’ve got to be kidding.”

  By this time, I was standing, picking tiny bits of gravel out of my knee. Steve checked out the skew of my front tire and pulled the handlebars back into alignment.

  “It’s workable, barely,” he announced. “I think you need a new bike, kiddo.”

  “No way. I love my bike. I’ll just take it down to the co-op and see if I can get some advice and help fixing up the front tire. Meanwhile, if you don’t mind, I’m going to push it home instead of riding it.”

  “Good idea.”

  We set off down the five blocks to my apartment. Steve insisted on walking between me and the road. While I didn’t actually believe his theory that I’d been targeted by the truck, it made me feel a bit better to be buffered from the slight amount of traffic we encountered. It also made me feel vindicated in a petty sort of way that Steve had been present to see me as the victim for once, instead of the prime suspect.

  Once we crossed 109th Street and pushed through the alley by the Garneau Cinema, we were home, and I chained my poor little bike to the rack at the back of the building. Steve brought his bike into the building with him, since it was departmental equipment and probably worth more than several of the cars parked in the lot behind us.

  Inside, I went to the bathroom to wash the grime off my leg and see if I could find some Mercurochrome while Steve headed for my telephone. I overheard part of his conversation to Iain.

  “Just in case, run the numbers and description against vehicles owned by anyone connected. We’ll be here at Randy’s. You have the number, right?”

  There was something warm and cozy about knowing your boyfriend gave your number to his workmates. Unless, of course, you were uneasy when your phone number was known by members of the police force as a useful contact spot during dangerous cases. I tried to remove that connotation from my head by concentrating on pouring stinging chemicals onto my knee.

  I came out of the bathroom with gauze taped to my knee and shin, my hair pulled back and my face and hands washed clean of dirt and tear tracks. All in all, I figured I looked pretty darn good. Steve seemed to agree, although he was suitably ginger in his bearhug, not sure where I might be bruised from the fall. I leaned into the embrace, thinking I could do with a whole lot more of this and a whole lot less of murder, mayhem and bicycle spills.

  “How are you feeling?” Steve murmured into my hair.

  “Pretty good. Actually, I feel like making a couple of lists.”

  He laughed. “You must be feeling good. Okay, lists it is. You get the paper and pens and I’ll make the tea.”

  “Oh God, marry me.”

  Steve laughed.

  “Be careful, or I’ll hold you to that. Lucky for you I don’t hold anyone accountable for anything they say within twenty-four hours of a near catastrophe.”

  “What happened to ‘anything you say may be used against you in a court of law’?”

  “You’ve been watching too many American cop shows, oh aptly-named Miranda.”

  I rummaged in my desk drawer for a couple of pads of foolscap and grabbed some pens from the can next to the computer. There was no way I was going to let Steve know I’d started a murder file on my laptop weeks ago, nor that I’d shared a list-making interlude with Woody. I had a feeling Steve would see that as an intimacy that went too far. He came back into the living room with two cups of steaming tea, which may have seemed inappropriate to anyone checking the thermometer but was exactly what I needed after a long day on the hill capped off by nearly becoming a traffic statistic. Bless Steve and his St. John’s Ambulance training. I sat on the sofa, stretched out my grazed leg, and leaned into the corner. Steve sat on the floor, reclining against my end of the couch.

  “All right. What are we going to start with?” he began.

  “All the victims would be a good start, and then maybe we can make some connections.”

  “I’ll do that in chronological order, then.” He wrote in neat block capitals, in a column: David Finster (dead), Paul Calihoo (wounded), Barbara Finster (dead), Pia Renshaw (dead), Randy Craig (wounded).

  “Hang on! Why are you putting my name there?”

  “What if that wasn’t some random bike-hating driver? We have to consider the possibility that your accident just now was an attack, too.”

  “You really know how to calm a girl down. You didn’t mention that theory to Keller, did you?”

  “Why?”

  “I just think that man is going to kill me himself if he thinks I’m involved in this investigation. Your boss doesn’t like me, you know.”

  “It’s not that he doesn’t like you, I don’t think. I think it has more to do with worrying about civilian involvement. Any time there’s an extension into the community from the force proper, there is the greater possibility of vulnerability for all, especially the civilians. That’s when it becomes Keller’s problem.”

  “Well, I would rather he not think of me as being in his way and ‘his problem.’ I would also rather not be thinking of myself as a target for bad guys, so why don
’t we take me off that list for now.”

  Steve shrugged and added a question mark by my name, which I figured was as close a compromise as I was going to get.

  “Is there anything to link the victims in terms of how they were attacked?” I continued.

  Steve shook his head. “Nope, not unless we stretch things to your idea of song possibilities, and I think Murray McLauchlan is more country than folk, anyhow. We have someone knifed and garrotted and hung up on display. We have someone knocked on the head from behind. We have a business torched and a body burned to a crisp, and someone drugged and smothered on the hillside surrounded by thousands of possible witnesses. Then, we possibly have a hit-and-run scenario. All totally different MOs. Either these are completely separate crimes, which I just don’t buy, or they are crimes of opportunity in which the murderer is pushed to improvise with materials and situations at hand.”

  “Everyone is connected somehow. David and Barbara Finster are brother and sister. The Finsters are linked to the money bequeathed to the Centre where Paul works. Barbara Finster was Pia’s boss at the Barbara Shoppes, although that isn’t linked to David or to Paul. And I am linked to the Centre and, through proximity of the hillside, to Pia. I still don’t see any sort of clear picture.”

  “Me either,” Steve admitted. “Let’s try a different list.”

  “Money?”

  “That’s a good one, but we’re still not sure who benefits from Barbara Finster’s death. We know there was a hassle between the Finsters and the university over the money to the Folkways Collection, and that it’s possible whoever killed Pia Renshaw did so because she knew something about the arson or Barbara Finster’s murder. Possibly Paul was attacked just because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He might have walked in while someone was robbing the Centre. Maybe Pia saw something she shouldn’t have seen. Or maybe whoever set the fire that killed Barbara Finster was misinformed about which store Pia managed and was after her all along.”

  Steve let his head drop back toward me on the couch. Even from upside down, I could see the exhaustion around his eyes and the tension in his jaw.

  “What time were you up this morning?” I asked softly.

  “Same time as you, give or take an hour. It’s been a long, strange trip today for sure.”

  “I promised you supper, didn’t I? Maybe some food would help.” I pushed myself up off the couch, cringing just a bit as I bent my sore knee. Steve pulled himself up onto the couch, asking if there was anything he could do to help. He looked relieved that my answer was negative.

  I kept mulling over motives and connections as I chopped up some green onions, mushrooms and cheese to toss into a quick frittata. There was one very sad-looking tomato that I quickly chopped up into a bowl of bagged spring greens. I sliced up the last of a loaf of French bread and pulled a tub of margarine out of the fridge. Supper was ready in all of fifteen minutes. I set the table and went around the corner to call Steve. He had nodded off. I debated whether or not to just let him rest, finally deciding that food was just as important to a tired body as sleep. With the levels of tiredness coursing through my own body as a gauge, I didn’t think he’d have any trouble falling back asleep once he was between cool sheets.

  We ate quietly, both of us having endured enough soundscapes for one day. Steve gathered up enough energy to help me wash the dishes, and then we moved back into the living room, having decided to go to bed as soon as he’d checked in with his partner, Iain.

  I picked up Steve’s notepad from the floor, looking at the lists of names and various arrows he’d doodled between them. There was a big question mark to the right of his list, with five arrows emanating from it toward the names of the victims, which included Paul and me.

  That was the trouble in a nutshell: there was no one I could think of who could stand in the place of that question mark and have a need to hurt or destroy all the people on the list. Someone might hate the Finsters. Someone might hate the Centre or the Folkways collection. Someone might hate the Barbara Shoppes. But who would hate all three? Something just didn’t add up. I stared at the names, not paying much attention to Steve’s conversation, but hearing something in Steve’s tone of voice get sharper. I idly rolled my pencil down the paper from the top, noting that it obscured an entire line of foolscap, wondering if that was an official measurement of line depth on paper—HB pencil diameter? I watched David Finster’s name disappear, then Paul’s and then Barbara Finster’s. No long letters, so the names were completely obscured. Pia’s name was, too. In fact, mine was the only name with a tailed letter in it.

  Something gnawed at me. I rolled the pen halfway back up the list. That was it. I stared at the list now. I still didn’t know all the whys and wherefores, but I suddenly had an idea about connections where before there had been none. I looked up at Steve just as he put down the phone and turned to me with an animated look.

  “They finally found a dentist listed in Barbara Finster’s home phone book, which they needed to check her dental records, and guess what?”

  “Barbara Finster isn’t dead,” we said in unison.

  41

  ~

  Steve jumped into the shower as soon as he was off the phone. Iain was whipping by to pick him up on the way to the airport, after organizing the roadblocks on the Yellowhead both ways and the Queen Elizabeth II south. It was assumed she wouldn’t be heading north. After all, fugitives didn’t run from the police by heading north unless they had some sort of Albert Johnson fixation.

  While he sluiced himself off and tried to find his second wind, I gently pulled some jeans on over my scraped knees and got ready to go along. Steve wasn’t going to like it, but I had my reasons.

  As he walked out to see me in jeans, T-shirt and a zippered hoodie, he started to protest, but I held up my hand. “I’m the only one of you who has seen Barbara lately, and she’s in disguise. I am sure that’s who I saw on the hillside.”

  “And you’re saying Barbara Finster murdered Pia Renshaw?”

  “Well, why not?”

  “Let’s start at the other end of the question: why? And if you’re going to insist on coming along, let’s head out to the front to watch for Iain. We’ve got to get to the airport to see if we can stop her. They’re blocking the QEII just past the airport exit, this side of Leduc, but we need as many legmen as possible at the airport.”

  “What makes us so sure she’s heading for the airport?”

  “The direction her truck took after trying to run you down. I think that was just opportunity for her, not something she planned out. After all, we could just as easily have gone home through Skunk Hollow. She, on the other hand, had to come out of her condo parking garage and turn right on Saskatchewan Drive if she was going to connect with the Calgary Trail to the airport. She’s on the move and I don’t think driving to Kananaskis is on the agenda.”

  “So that was her truck?” I shivered, recalling the gold grillework bearing down on me. “Did Iain match the licence plate?”

  “Make, model and last number of the plate match. That’s enough for me. When a dead woman’s truck starts aiming at my girlfriend mere hours after a third person connected to her dies, I make some room for circumstantial evidence. There he is,” he said, waving at Iain, who was rounding the corner in an unmarked Crown Victoria.

  Iain McCorquodale didn’t look too pleased to see me clambering into the back seat, but he didn’t say anything. He just checked quickly in all directions before pulling a U-turn in front of the Garneau School and heading back towards 109th Street. He had the dashboard light pulsing, which made the inside of the car resemble a patriotic discotheque. There wasn’t all that much need for the siren, though, since traffic was low for a Saturday evening. With the Folk Fest on the hill and the Cariwest Festival downtown, and the weather being so nice, not too many people were getting into their cars just to cruise Whyte Avenue. Yet.

  Iain drove capably while filling Steve and me in on the reports of X-rays
proving that it hadn’t been Barbara Finster in the Barbara Shoppe blaze. Apparently, Holly Menzies had been X-rayed for a heel spur a couple of weeks before the fire. I guess that’s what comes from wearing those ballet flats day in, day out. Forensic X-rays showed the same spur on the deceased. So, two of the managers of her stores were dead, her inventory at one store torched, her brother murdered, and the second-in-command at the Centre for Ethnomusicology beaned, just so she could run away incognito? Something wasn’t adding up.

  “Another interesting thing about the fire was the lack of powdery ash at the scene. Seems there’s no way a shop full of silk and wool and other expensive fabrics could burn without there being a higher percentage of residue left behind. Plus, the whole place should have been reeking of the smell of singed hair and feathers, which it wasn’t. So, either the Barbara Shoppes were selling polyester masquerading as silk, or Finster moved a heck of a lot of inventory before she tossed the match.”

  I thought about my middy blouse, and the glorious feel of the linen trousers I’d tried on. There was nothing cut-rate about Barbara Shoppe clothes.

  “Maybe they should check the other stores. I remember there was only one of anything in any size at any Shoppe. If there were doubles of any sizes, wouldn’t that indicate that she’d transferred clothes to the other stores before burning it down for the insurance?”

  “Maybe,” Steve said. “Of course, we have to determine whether Barbara was burning it down for insurance money and Holly Menzies just got in the way, meaning she died by accident, or whether Menzies was the intended victim and the fire a cover-up for the murder. Or maybe Menzies was just a convenient stand-in to make us all stop looking for Barbara Finster. But if Finster was going along with being thought dead, then how could she collect on the insurance?” Steve’s mind was a thing of beauty. It would have taken me two lists and a spreadsheet to work all that out.

  Maybe Iain was also taking stock of my limitations, because he clicked off his flashing light. As we turned onto the road to the Edmonton International Airport, he bluntly said to Steve, “What is she doing here, by the way?”