Woman Chased by Crows

by Marc Strange

  And so, almost without a conscious decision on her part, Anya began twice-a-week sessions with a psychiatrist who, as it turned out, had been searching for answers of her own.

  Breaking into Dr. Ruth’s house wasn’t as easy. There were double locks front and back and the ground floor windows had burglar-proof latches. Adele was getting ready to kick in the back door, but Stacy told her to hold off for a minute.

  “Upstairs. Looks like the bedroom window’s open a crack.”

  “Oh sure. Got your rocket pack handy?”

  “Standard equipment.” In three easy moves Stacy went from the deck to the railing to the roof of the sunroom, and slid open the bedroom window while hanging by one hand.

  “You’re in the wrong business,” Adele called up from the back lawn. “Could have been a cat burglar.”

  “It’s on my resumé,” Stacy said, and disappeared inside. Thirty seconds later she opened the back door. “It’s harder to clean out a three-bedroom house in a hurry,” Stacy said. “Maybe they left stuff behind.”

  “I’ll flip you for who gets the basement.”

  “You want it?”

  “Hell no. That’s where my mother used to stick me when I said ‘fuck.’”

  “No problem. You get the attic.”

  “Oh fuck, it’s got an attic, too?”

  Stacy grinned. “Meet you back here.”

  Adele was happy to find out there was no attic. Attics weren’t quite as creepy as cellars, but they did hold a few shitty memories. The upstairs had three bedrooms, two baths. The master bedroom was at the front of the house, overlooking a tree-lined street. The trees were still bare of leaves and the curtains were pulled on all windows on the opposite side. The broadloom bore the imprints of a queen-size bed, two side tables, a loveseat close to the window. The carpet had been recently vacuumed. The closet was bare except for a tangle of discarded wire hangers. They must have had a truck, or one hell of a garbage pickup. The ensuite bathroom was clean. The wastebasket held an empty plastic package for a disposable razor, the medicine cabinet had one bent Q-Tip and a dusting of powder on the bottom shelf. That was it for the happy couple. Didn’t look like much action had been going on in there for a while.

  The other two bedrooms were small and didn’t contain beds. In one of them was an Ikea computer workstation, partially disassembled. Maybe they lost the Allen wrench, I was always doing that. Damn Ikea, anyway. Never could figure out the stupid instructions. Left one behind at my last residence too. The computer cable was neatly coiled on the bottom shelf of the empty bookcase.

  The small bathroom was almost as clean as the big one except that they’d left behind the terrycloth toilet seat cover and the medicine cabinet held an empty Dristan squeeze bottle. Adele did a final check. On one of the coat hangers she found a torn piece of what looked to be a baggage claim ticket. That was it for the upstairs.

  Stacy called up from the main floor. “Anything?”

  “Nada. You?”

  “Doesn’t look like they were really living here. Not long anyway.”

  “Okay, I get the kitchen, maybe they left some peanut butter or something.”

  Kitchens are harder to strip bare; upper and lower cabinets, cutlery drawers, refrigerator, oven, nooks and crannies everywhere. Even better, things fall behind refrigerators and stoves and are never seen again unless someone feels like pulling them away from the wall.

  “What the hell are you doing?” The man at the back door was loaded down with a lawn sign, a pail filled with cleaning supplies, a broom, a sponge mop and a vacuum cleaner. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to confront Adele or yell for help. “You’re not supposed to be in here.”

  “Are you supposed to be in here?”

  “Yes, of course I am.”

  “And who are you?”

  “What does it matter who I am, who are you?”

  Adele showed him her badge. “Adele Moen, Metro Homicide Unit. Hey Stace,” she called, “you want to come in here? We’ve got a visitor.” She smiled at the man. “Come on in, stranger. State your business.”

  “Homicide? Oh Christ. Is there a dead body in here?”

  “Haven’t found one so far. How about you, Detective Crean?”

  Stacy shook her head. “Care to show us some ID, sir?”

  “I’m Ben Chiklis. I’m the rental agent. This place was supposed to be vacant.”

  “Oh, it’s vacant all right,” Adele said.

  “This was a rental?” Stacy gave that some thought. “Explains the lack of a personal touch. How long were the tenants here, sir?”

  “They had a year’s lease. It’s up next month but the woman said she’d be leaving early. I’m just here to check it out, make sure it’s in shape to show it. Nothing broken is there?”

  “Wish my place was this clean,” Adele said. “I was just going to check behind the major appliances when you came in, Ben. Why don’t you and Detective Crean have a look around and you can tell her all about the tenants.”

  Stacy led Mr. Chiklis out of the kitchen and Adele went back to muscling the stove away from the wall. Behind it she found a packet of soy sauce, a crushed fortune cookie and paper-wrapped chopsticks from Long Wok. The fortune said, “You will find true happiness.” The refrigerator held one limp leaf of iceberg lettuce draped over the bottom rack. There was no peanut butter. So much for fortune cookies.

  “Let me help you with that stuff,” said Stacy. She relieved him of the vacuum cleaner, the mop and broom and leaned them against the wall. Chiklis laid the sign on the floor. It read, “For Lease Pilon Realty.” Stacy had a look inside the pail. It held Windex, Mr. Clean, Febreeze, a sponge and a wad of cleaning rags. “They made it easy for you Mr. Chiklis. The place is clean.”

  “That’s good,” he said. “You never know what you’re going to find, y’know?”

  “So far we haven’t found much of anything. So. What can you tell me about the people who leased the house?”

  “Not that much,” he said. “She was a medical professional, I believe; the gentleman was in the construction business.”

  “Did he have his own company?”

  “I wasn’t the rental agent when they took the place. But I can get you a copy of the rental agreement if you want it. They must have had references. It’s an executive-level home, all the amenities, fireplace, hardwood floors . . .”

  “Yeah, it’s a nice house. But it doesn’t look like anyone actually lived here.”

  “I understand the husband had some problems with the police, but I thought that had been straightened out.”

  “It was.”

  “According to his wife, he moved out last Monday or Tuesday. That’s when she said she’d be leaving as well.”

  “You’re here pretty quick. She can’t have been gone long, either. Did they leave together?”

  “I don’t know. I got the impression they were separating.”

  “So how do you come to arrive here so fast? I mean, they’ve only just cleared out. Here it is Friday and already you’re putting a sign out, vacuuming the stairs . . .”

  “I came by yesterday morning and saw the moving truck here. It looked like everything was going.”

  “Were either of them still here?”

  “No, just the moving men.”

  “Do you remember which moving company it was?”

  “Oh sure, Dorians. Couple of guys with a big truck. Here in town.”

  “Did you talk to them?”

  “Yeah, for a minute. I talked to John. He’s the older brother. Just to make sure they were both gone. I wasn’t sure of the situation.”

  “Right. Did you ask them where the stuff was going?”

  “Storage. They have their own lockers.”

  “Hey, Stace,” Adele was calling from the kitchen. “A minute?”

  “Right there
.” She turned back to Mr. Chiklis. “You go ahead Ben, you can start upstairs.” She handed him her card. “You find anything at all, you let me know, okay? Crean. Rhymes with brain.”

  Stacy left Mr. Chiklis to struggle up the stairs with his cleaning supplies and headed for the kitchen. Adele was wedged behind the refrigerator. She was holding up something that looked like a boarding pass. “Bingo,” she said.

  “What have you got?”

  “Not a hundred percent sure. Looks like a Via Rail ticket invoice. Montreal–Oshawa.”

  “She’s gone to Montreal?”

  “Looks like . . .” She peered at it closely. “Looks like somebody came from Montreal. Yesterday.”

  Lorna was back.

  “I am losing circulation in my hands. Can you not loosen the ropes just a little?”

  “Maybe, in a while, if you help me.”

  “And pretty soon I will have to pee.”

  “Just give it back and it will all be over.”

  “Really? Over for me, surely. If I help you, you will kill me.”

  “No one wants to kill you, Anya.”

  “Well, you may not want to, but it seems to me you will have no choice.”

  “Here is how it could work. You tell me where it is, and then when I have it, and I’m safely on my way, I will phone someone to release you.”

  “My my, that sounds most unappetizing. You phone someone, whom I have not yet seen, and they will free me? Why would they not just shoot me and be done with it?”

  “We are not killers.”

  “Really. And yet so many have died for that silly thing.”

  “It’s nothing but a burden.”

  “At this moment it is the only thing keeping me alive.”

  “I’m trying to keep you from being hurt. I am not the only one in this. There are others who want to use harsher methods.”

  “Who can blame them? Six months of prying into my brains and you got nowhere. They must be most frustrated.”

  “You won’t like it if they take over.”

  “Are you not breaking some important doctor’s oath? Threatening torture?”

  “I don’t have any more time for this.”

  At some point, someone, maybe the doctor herself, gave her a shot of something, presumably something that would make her talk. Truth serum? Is there such a thing? Whatever it was, it filled her head with clouds and hazy images of people long dead or missing. She saw Yuri in her dream. For one brief, perfect moment she saw him, as he was so many years ago, saw him in flight, hanging in the air like a great bird of prey, his head flung back, his long arms spread like wings, immortal. Is that all immortality is?, she wondered. Someone’s fleeting memory of you, there for just a heartbeat, and then gone forever. And what if any memory would serve as her legacy? Who alive could even recall how she was, what she once was capable of?

  And the rest? An image of Ludi in a dressing room, bouncing on her long bare toes. How we laughed about her feet sometimes, just the two of us. Mine, so hard and cramped and sore. And hers, so white, so unblemished, so plain and normal. How odd, that in this drugged state the clearest image is of someone’s bare feet bouncing on a cheap blue rug somewhere. Where? A dressing room. Some small theatre. What does it matter? There’s your immortality, Ludi dear, I remember your toes.

  Eventually they got tired of her meandering babble and they left her alone for a very long while, left her alone to pee where she sat, they didn’t care, left her to grind her wrists raw against the ropes and to rock the wooden chair back and forth. It was evening by now, the shafts of light through the barn wall had slipped lower and lower and then died, leaving her to sit in the gloom.

  “You got any frickin’ idea what’s going on here, partner? I mean, any idea at all?”

  “It’s complicated, isn’t it?”

  “Complicated? It’s a ball of snakes. And just when you think you’ve got one by the tail the whole thing twists around on you.” She was rummaging in Stacy’s glove compartment. “Should’ve taken my car.”

  “We can stop somewhere.”

  “No, I don’t want to stop somewhere. I want to grab some people by the neck and shake some straight stories out of them. I mean, come on! Dilly’s the bad guy. His fingerprints are all over this thing. Maybe not his actual fingerprints, but you get my drift. So we’ve got him just about backed into a corner and pow! Some new asshole we aren’t even looking at blows him away. Now where’s that at?”

  Stacy concentrated on her driving for a while. “You sure you don’t want to stop for a burger or something?”

  “You hungry?”

  “I’m confused is what I am. Same as you. I wouldn’t mind a minute to talk about things.”

  “Good. Fine. Anything coming up?” Stacy made a quick right turn into the West Mall shopping centre. They had a choice of an A&W, a Taco Bell, a Pizza Pizza and a Subway. Adele clapped her hands. “Fuck. It’s the motherlode.”

  “Knock yourself out. I’m going into Foodland to get something my body can actually use.”

  “Whatever.”

  Adele decided on a Mama Burger, onion rings and a root beer. Stacy came back to the car with two bananas, a bag of almonds and a small carton of orange juice with pulp. They sat in the parking lot with the doors ajar and concentrated on chewing and slurping for a while. After polishing off the first banana and a few almonds, Stacy spoke. “What don’t we know?”

  “For starters, we don’t know who shot Dilly O’Grady in the fucking head.”

  “Has to be someone he knew. Sitting beside him in the car. Somebody he trusted.”

  “Got a list? Wife? His assistant, Chris, Cam, whatshisname?”

  “Cam.”

  “Him? Why? Fucked his career? What does he care?”

  “This was his shot at the big time.” Stacy finished the second banana and left the car to find a garbage can.

  “Yeah. Drastic though,” Adele said. “I’m leaning more to somebody close to the jewel business.” She followed Stacy across the lot and tossed her garbage as well. They both stood beside the trash bin. “Yeah, gotta be somebody involved in the Nimchuk thing, or those other Russkies, can’t keep them straight. The guy in the park, the beaky one in Montreal, and let’s not forget Louie.”

  “And Louie’s kid, Darryl.”

  “I don’t see him getting his act together enough to pull it off.”

  “Me neither,” said Stacy, “but if we’re making a list we should put everybody on it we can think of.”

  “Who else is there?”

  “We’re back to the doctor.”

  “But no connection.”

  “Well, no connection to O’Grady that we know of, but we’ve got a big connection to the jewels. According to Mr. Tomashevsky . . .”

  “Wow. Are we dealing with some odd ducks on this or what?”

  “He says the doctor was sent to Canada to find that big rock. She drops off their radar, winds up in my town where she’s been hiding out for at least six months.”

  “Hiding out and working on our dancer.”

  “And getting married, too?” Stacy asked.

  “Hunh?”

  “She shows up in Dockerty, a small town in the middle of nowhere, ostensibly to get close to Anya and, what, she meets this guy, falls in love, gets married? Does that sound plausible?”

  “Right, who is this guy?”

  Stacy had three almonds in the palm of her hand. She held them out to her friend. “Have one. Good for you.” Adele took one, Stacy ate the second one, and then without hesitation whipped the last one across the parking lot to bounce with a distinct ping against the side of a dumpster. “That’s what I’d like to know. Who’s this Harold Ruth? The poor guy in the wrong place with the wrong gun in his hand who was treated like crap by the cops and set free because he didn’t do anything.”r />
  “So after that nobody looks at him again because he’s just a poor shmuck who got some crappy treatment.” She burped and tossed her root beer cup into the trash can. “Let’s get back to the station. I want to talk to Hong and Siffert.”

  When Constable Maitland inquired of Mr. and Mrs. Wallace if he might look at the pictures they’d taken with their new Sony Cyber-shot that morning, they asked him, more or less politely, to get off their porch. When he explained that it was possible that they had captured an image that could help the police locate a missing woman, they relented, but not until Mr. Wallace had secured Maitland’s promise to tear up the parking ticket. There was of course no guarantee that they had anything useful in their little camera, and Maitland knew that he might be stuck paying the ticket out of his own pocket, but he agreed to the bargain provided he could borrow the camera for a few minutes.

  Mr. Wallace followed Maitland to his cruiser and watched him transfer the images to his cellphone, and when he gave back the camera, Mr. Wallace (rather smugly Maitland thought) tore the ticket in half and handed it back with a facetious “Have a nice day.”

  Adele pulled her chair over to Stacy’s desk. “Wayne Hong’s unavailable. Don’t know if he’s unavailable to me or to the world, but I caught up to Dick Siffert at his mother-in-law’s place. I think they were just sitting down to dinner. He was happy to have an excuse. Says she makes the worst pot roast in the universe.”

  “Was he okay to talk about Harold?”

  “Yeah, says he doesn’t give a shit. Nothing’s going to happen. Be back on the job Monday. They didn’t do anything to the guy. I don’t buy it a hundred percent, probably tuned him up a bit, but nobody’s heard any talk about a civil suit. In fact nobody’s heard anything from the guy since his case got tossed. Says the only reason they held on to him was because he dummied up, said he wanted a lawyer and they could go fuck themselves. That’s why they were sure he was good for it.”