The Lullaby Girl (Angie Pallorino Book 2)

by Loreth Anne White

  “Did he work on it?”

  “He opened the files up several times, extracted some notes, poked around a bit. In the end he resealed the boxes. When I sold the house after he died I brought them here and they went into the basement.”

  Angie stared at the boxes. Deep inside her belly, her muscles began to shake.

  Is it possible?

  Could the forensic evidence that Jenny Marsden had told her about be inside those boxes—lab serology results, prints, ballistics info, rape kit—things she could have retested for DNA?

  “I think Arnie would like you to have them,” his widow said softly. “He’d like to know that someone was still looking.”

  Angie’s heart galloped up into her throat and her skin turned hot as she continued to stare down at the two boxes on the floor. A potential portal.

  To her past.

  Her future.

  CHAPTER 6

  Angie circled the city block three times before she found street parking near the Starbucks entrance—she wanted the Nissan close by so she could keep a check on her boxes. Hurriedly she exited her car and stuffed coins into the meter. It was already past two. She jogged toward the coffee shop, her bag slung across her body. Wind blew cold, but at least the rain had stopped. Heart beating fast, she pushed open the door.

  Warmth and the scent of coffee greeted her. The place was bustling, noisy with chatter, different staff working behind the counter. Excitement punched through her as she caught sight of her target—an elderly Asian man bent over a newspaper at a small round table in the back.

  Angie threaded her way through the lineup and approached the table.

  “Morning,” she said, tempering her voice.

  He glanced up. Angie judged him to be in his seventies. He was small, bent like a question mark inside his oversize houndstooth jacket. His ears stuck out like mug handles from beneath a monk’s fringe of white hair that circled a smooth mahogany pate dotted with liver spots. Beneath his pronounced apple-shaped cheekbones, his jaw looked hollow, as if he might be toothless. Eyes, deep and brown, peered at her quizzically from behind small silver-rimmed glasses.

  Angie offered him a smile and said, “My name is Angie Pallorino. The barista working here last night told me I might find you here today. I believe you operated the Pink Pearl Chinese Kitchen?”

  He frowned. “Yes. For many years. My family owned it. I worked in the restaurant, many, many years, since my twenties.”

  “Could I join you for a moment? I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

  He frowned and adjusted his glasses, hands trembling slightly with age or illness. “I was … just about to leave. My show comes on television in fifteen minutes. I always watch it.”

  Angie’s muscles tightened. “I’ll be really quick.”

  He hesitated, then held his hand out to the vacant seat in front of him. “Please.”

  “Could I get you another tea?” Angie said as she pulled out the chair. “Something else perhaps?”

  “No, thank you. Like I said, I’m about to go.”

  She seated herself, spoke quickly. “Was your restaurant here in 1986?”

  “Well before that. My parents opened the Pink Pearl in ’82. My sister and I sold it only five years ago. It was a piece of Vancouver history, if I say so myself. Many eras in this city that we have seen come and go.”

  Angie leaned forward. “Do you perhaps remember when a child was left in the angel’s cradle at Saint Peter’s Hospital on Christmas morning in ’86? There was apparently a gunfight, yelling, screaming. Tires screeching. Maybe you were among the crowd of people who were interviewed by police or journalists?”

  He frowned, his eyes going distant. “Yes. That was a big day, yes. I couldn’t forget that day. Shooting. The child. The papers said it was a gang fight, yes.”

  “You saw?”

  “Not me. I was back in the kitchen. We always closed late, after midnight. Things were busy all hours at the Pink Pearl with the nurses, doctors, paramedics often coming over for something to eat, or for takeout, between shifts. But my grandmother was by the cash register that Christmas Eve—she saw something. She died many years ago.”

  Adrenaline crackled into Angie’s veins. “What did she see?”

  A look of caution entered his eyes. He glanced at the door. Angie placed her hand on his arm. “Please, I need to know. For a friend. I’m looking into the old angel’s cradle case.”

  “Are you a journalist?”

  “No.”

  “Police?”

  “I’m doing this in a personal capacity,” she said. “Just conducting some research into the child’s story. For my friend.”

  He held her eyes, weighing her, and Angie forced herself to temper the edge she could hear entering her own voice. “Did your grandmother give a statement to the police at the time?”

  He shook his head slowly, as if still figuring out whether to trust her. “She didn’t speak English. She didn’t like police. She stayed away from them. Was afraid of police because of her history in China. But she told us what she saw that night.”

  “Us?” Angie urged gently.

  “Me. My sister. My mother and father and my brother. She was standing over there—facing the windows. That’s where the cash register used to be.” He pointed to a place across from the door. “Red curtains used to run along the bottom half of the windows so that people walking past in the street couldn’t easily look in at the patrons dining at the tables. It was almost midnight—the church bells had not yet started ringing. And that’s when she saw the woman.”

  Angie’s pulse spiked. “Woman?”

  “In a dress. Running across the road toward the alley between the hospital and the church. She carried a child on her hip.”

  “The cradle child?”

  “I think so. My mother said she took notice because this woman wore no coat, and it was cold. It had started to snow. Because of the curtain, my grandmother could only see the top half of the woman and the child on her hip. My grandmother hurried up to the window to see more, but already the woman was gone, down that brick alley. Then, just as my grandmother came up to the window, she heard yelling. She said two men then came down the street, from over there.” He pointed to his left. “She said they were chasing the woman and the child. They carried handguns. Also no coats.”

  Angie’s mouth went bone-dry. “What … what did she look like, this woman?” Her voice came out hoarse.

  “All my grandmother could see was very long dark hair. The woman seemed young, she said.”

  “And the men?”

  “Big. Muscled. They went into the alley after the woman, and then my grandmother heard gunshots, but right as the shooting started, the church bells started clanging. She heard tires screech farther away. Then a black van came past, very fast, although the van might have been unrelated, she said. It was only later—after the newspeople and the police arrived and the crowd started gathering outside the restaurant—that we learned a child had been put in the cradle.”

  “And you didn’t mention this to the police—what your grandmother saw?”

  “I did,” he said. “The investigators asked to speak to my grandmother directly, with me as interpreter, but she changed her mind—she told me in Chinese that she hadn’t seen anything at all and that she’d imagined it. I relayed her words to the police. She was eighty-two at the time, and her eyesight was not good. Cataracts. She was also prone to imagining things, and no one else had seen these men and that woman, so …” He shrugged. Outside the coffee shop, a bus drew up and stopped. Hydraulics hissed noisily as the bus lowered and the doors opened to let passengers out. The man’s gaze shot to the bus through the window, and he checked his watch. “I must go.” He folded his newspaper and pushed himself up onto his feet. “Good luck with your research.” He gave a slight bow.

  “Wait, wait.” Angie came quickly to her feet and dug into her pocket for a business card. “I didn’t get your name, and I might want to speak to you
again later or call you.” She handed the man her card. He studied it, then glanced up sharply.

  “You are police.”

  “I work as a detective on Vancouver Island, yes, but this has nothing to do with my job. I promise. Like I said, it’s a personal favor for a friend.”

  Mistrust entered his small brown eyes.

  “My friend was the child left in the cradle,” Angie said quietly, desperate to build trust before he departed. “She wants to know why she was left there and where she came from. I’m trying to help her. Is there somewhere I can contact you later if I need to?”

  “I’m Ken Lau,” he said finally as he pocketed her card. “I live in one of the apartments upstairs. We have always lived above the Pink Pearl. Now I live above the Starbucks.”

  “And your phone number?”

  “I’m in the phone book. Lau on Front Street.”

  And with that he shuffled toward the door and pushed out into the winter afternoon. The door swung slowly shut behind him.

  CHAPTER 7

  Angie inched down the mile-long causeway toward the Tsawwassen Ferry Terminal. Her goal was to be home in good time for her birthday dinner date with Maddocks—she burned to tell him her news now—but blustery weather and high winds had delayed ferry sailings and backed up traffic. She’d also cut timing fine by having returned to the Starbucks to find Ken Lau.

  As she crawled forward, the two case file boxes hunkered on the seat behind her like a heavy presence, alive and full with simmering, cobwebby secrets yearning to be addressed. But she had to wait. She wanted to open the seals in a sterile environment wearing gloves in case there was uncontaminated evidence in there that could be retested. Angie’s plan was to call Dr. Sunni Padachaya, head of the MVPD crime lab, and ask her to recommend a cutting-edge private firm with forensics expertise to run any tests she might require. Money was not an issue. This evidence was priceless—and Angie had investments. She’d been shrewd with her income over the years. The discovery of these boxes was a game changer—it fueled her with renewed hope.

  Angie cursed as she was forced to tap the brakes again. The lineup of cars ahead slowed to a dead halt. Impatient, she drummed her nails on the dash. Wind gusted, rocking her vehicle, driving billowing curtains of rain and mist over the road. She reached for the phone icon on her dash and pressed Maddocks’s number. His phone rang several times before cutting to voicemail.

  “Hey, me again. I’m in the ferry lineup heading home. Just letting you know.” She’d save her news for dinner. “See you at the King’s Head.” She terminated the call, but that strange hollowness at not being able to connect with him stole into her excitement at having found the boxes and Ken Lau.

  Angie waited for the line of cars to start moving again along the spit that jutted out into the wind-whipped ocean. The bruised sky was growing darker as clouds lowered—another front coming in. A bright light down on the misty beach caught her attention. She peered at it through the worms of rain squiggling down the driver’s side window. A small group of people clustered around the light. It was unnaturally bright. That’s when she noticed the CBC news van parked just off the road above the beach. Curious, she reached into her glove compartment and extracted her binoculars—cop habits die hard. She wound down her window. Rain wet her face as she trained her scopes on the group. Someone was holding a huge umbrella over a plump blonde woman who appeared to be under the interrogation of a reporter with a long black coat holding a mike. The plump woman’s short hair ruffled in the wind. She had a small white dog on a leash. She wasn’t just plump, Angie realized as the woman turned sideways—she was very pregnant under her blue jacket. The pregnant woman pointed to a rocky outcrop on the beach. The cameraman swung his camera in that direction. As Angie watched, a strange chill filled her, an odd sense of things closing in.

  Her phone rang and she jumped. Quickly she hit the control panel on her dash, connecting the call, expecting Maddocks.

  “Pallorino,” she said, almost adding, MVPD sex crimes.

  “It’s Vedder,” came the voice. Angie went stone still. Anxiety twisted into her stomach at the sound of her immediate superior’s voice—Vedder was boss of the sex crimes unit where she’d spent the past six years. Vedder had also been appointed as the MVPD liaison between her and the Independent Investigations Office.

  “Sir?” She wound up her window.

  “Can you come in later this afternoon? We have a ruling from the IIO. We’d like to meet in person to discuss that as well the results of the MVPD internal review.”

  For a nanosecond Angie was unable to speak. She cleared her throat. “What did the IIO say?”

  “We need to do this in person. You might want to bring your union rep.”

  Fuck. Her eyes burned. She rubbed her brow. “I … I’m in the ferry lineup at Tsawwassen,” she said slowly. “If I make this next sailing, I could be in your office just after five. I’ll call Marge Buchanan and see if that works for her.”

  “Confirm with me once you’ve contacted Buchanan.”

  “Vedder, who is ‘we’?”

  “Me and Flint.”

  Angie cursed inwardly. Inspector Martin Flint was head of special investigations under which the sex crimes unit fell, along with the counterexploitation unit, the high-risk offender unit, and the domestic violence criminal harassment unit. She was toast.

  “You’ve got to give me something—let me at least prepare myself.”

  “I’m sorry, Angie.” His use of her first name did not help. The tone in his voice told her that this was not easy on him, either. Vedder had been good to her. He’d gone to bat for her on the many occasions that Angie had butted heads with the misogynist dead wood on the force. Detective Harvey Leo for instance. She and Vedder had become close—he was one of the few guys on the force she had bonded with, someone she trusted. So, this was it. She’d suspected it might happen—that they’d fire her ass. She just hadn’t anticipated it happening so soon. Her biggest worry now was the IIO handing her case over to Crown prosecutors. She could be charged for use of excessive and lethal force. “I’m also really sorry about the timing,” he added. “I know it’s your birthday.”

  Yeah, happy fucking birthday to me. “I’ll be there.” She stabbed the kill button. And sat numb. Through the squiggles of rain on the window, the film crew was moving closer to the rocky outcrop. A truck behind her vehicle honked. Angie jumped. The line of cars in front of her had started to move. She flipped a bird over her shoulder and reached forward to engage her gears. It wasn’t anticipation that crackled through her now as she crawled farther forward with the traffic. It was anxiety, a sense that life as she’d known it really was over.

  Finally drawing up to the ticket booth, she rolled down her window. A blast of sea wind slapped her in the face, tangy with salt and restless with change.

  Hers was one of the last vehicles to make it onto the Queen of the North. The ferry ramp made a heavy ka-clunk sound as she drove onto the vehicle deck. A sound of finality. As the bridge drew up behind her, a man in a bright-orange visi-vest waved his flashlight, sending her deeper down into the dark bowels of the vessel. Engines and metal rumbled. Angie parked, got out of her rental, locked it, and zipped up her down jacket. She went up to the passenger level, pushed through the heavy door to the outside deck, and braced into the gusts as she walked to the front of the boat. She stood there, hands on the railing, her face turned to the raw wind, and she didn’t care about the ice-cold rain that lashed her face. Across that metal-gray water was the island. Her home. Behind her lay the mainland, her unknown past. The ferry horn blasted, and the tone of the grumbling engines shifted as the props churned white foam into the sea. The ship pulled out of the dock. Angie felt as though she was about to cross a threshold.

  CHAPTER 8

  Maddocks refrained from loosening his tie, although the interview room inside the Vancouver Island Regional Correctional Centre was airless. Hot. Cinder block construction. Pale institutional walls. Two-way mirro
r. Locked door. A male guard in a black uniform stood in front of the door, feet planted apart, shoulders square, his right hand clasped over his left wrist in a posture that indicated he was ready for anything. The name tag on his breast pocket read MORDEN. A ring of keys and a truncheon dangled from his belt. Across the table from Maddocks sat the inmate he’d come to interview—Zina, the transgender bodyguard-assistant arrested in the Amanda Rose takedown two weeks ago.

  Seated beside Zina was defense lawyer Israel Lippmann. Observing through the two-way glass were Holgersen, a Crown counsel prosecutor, and a correctional officer.

  Maddocks, Holgersen, and the Crown lawyer had driven up the Saanich Peninsula to the old Wilkinson Road jail—a max-security facility that housed both offenders who had been sentenced and those on remand. Lippmann had proposed a deal in exchange for his client being transferred to another facility and for ameliorated charges. The carrot being dangled in front of the MVPD and Crown counsel was information on the identity of the barcode girls.

  It could be the breakthrough they needed to help track the suspects who’d trafficked the girls. This kind of sex trafficking usually involved some level of organized crime and international criminal cooperation. The barcode tattoos themselves indicated a level of coordinated criminal structure and ownership branding.

  Maddocks regarded the aquiline features of the seven-foot-tall transgender prisoner across from him. The inmate’s hair was cropped military-short and dyed silver. Maddocks had recently learned via Lippmann that the prisoner self-identified as female. It wasn’t easy for Maddocks to suddenly think of this abuser, captor, and trafficker of young women as a “she.” But he was working on it. Her skin was a strange ashen tone, her eyes almost colorless. She wore prison garb—bright-red pants, red sweatshirt with VIRECC, BC CORRECTIONS emblazoned across the back. She sat eerily still, no emotion evident in her features. Fresh purple contusions and swelling marred her left cheek. Stitches tracked across her left temple. Ligature marks ringed her neck. Ironic, Maddocks thought, given how one of her sex workers had died during a breath-play act gone wrong.