The Lullaby Girl (Angie Pallorino Book 2)

by Loreth Anne White

  Slowly, she lowered her drink to the counter.

  I saw that today. I saw them filming while I was in the ferry lineup speaking to Vedder.

  Two middle-aged men climbed onto the vacant stools beside Angie. She barely registered them.

  “Man, check that out,” said one male to the other. “Weird shit, those floating feet. What’s that now, seventeen in the last ten years?”

  “But that’s just a kid’s sneaker,” said the other man. “A little girl’s shoe. Those other floating feet were all adult size.” The male leaned across the bar and called to Antonio. “Yo, could you turn that TV news up a sec?”

  Antonio bumped up the sound. Angie stared, transfixed by the little high-top runner that once again filled the screen. A yellow-white mass nestled inside the shoe. Something dark and unarticulated began to unfurl at the core of her body. Anxiety rose inside her.

  The camera cut back to the beach, this time to a reporter. Dark tendrils of hair blew across the woman’s face as she spoke into her mike. “A decade-old mystery was reignited on Monday when the remains of another detached human foot, still in a shoe, washed up on the causeway beach at the Tsawwassen Ferry Terminal, making it the eighteenth dismembered foot to be found along beaches in British Columbia and Washington State since 2007. The shoes containing the macabre contents have been washing up like pieces of ocean detritus, and they’ve been found among bits of foam, candy wrappers, shells, rocks, or clumps of seaweed. Betsy Champlain was on the beach with her children New Year’s Day when she made the grisly discovery.”

  The reporter turned to the pregnant blonde woman. “Ms. Champlain, can you tell us how you found the dismembered foot?”

  “My two children and I were in the ferry lineup, heading back home to the island. It was really busy, several sailing waits. Our dog, Chloe, needed a bathroom break, so we brought her down to the beach, where she broke away from my son. We found Chloe over there by those rocks with something in her mouth.”

  “The shoe?”

  Emotion twisted the blonde woman’s face. She shied away from the scrutiny of the camera by looking down at the sand. “It seemed so small,” she said softly. “So alone, just lying there on the beach. Just a child’s shoe—the same size as my daughter’s. That little girl is—was—probably the same age as my child.”

  “How old is your daughter, Ms. Champlain?”

  “She’s three.”

  Angie swallowed. The man seated closest to her cursed softly. “Just a kid,” he said again. “How does a kid lose a foot? What in the hell happened to the rest of her?”

  The camera cut back to a close-up of the reporter. “RCMP spokesperson Constable Annie Lamarre has confirmed that the brand of shoe is a ROOAirPocket, girls’ size nine, left foot, and yes, it does contain what appears to be the remains of a child’s foot. Lamarre said the discovery was sent to the BC Coroner’s Service for further examination. The Coroner’s Service has declined comment, saying only that the case is under investigation. CBC has learned, however, that this particular ROOAirPocket high-top model was manufactured only between the years 1984 and 1986, after which it was discontinued and replaced with the ROOAir-Lift.”

  The image of the shoe once more filled the screen. An inexplicable nausea rose in Angie’s belly. The reporter’s voice spoke over the image. “In BC several of the dismembered feet found to date have been identified as having belonged to people with mental illness who likely jumped off one of the many bridges in the area. Three of the feet were linked to individuals who probably died of natural causes. Other theories have also been suggested—some think the shoes floated across the Pacific from the Asian tsunami or that they drifted from one of several small plane crashes up the Inside Passage. Others have suggested something more nefarious—a serial killer. What is unusual, whatever the theories, is that no other body parts have ever surfaced to match the feet.” She paused. The camera zoomed suddenly back to her face. “And this recent ghoulish gift from the sea—the discovery of this little girl’s shoe manufactured more than thirty years ago—is not quite like the others.”

  Angie glanced around the pub. The interior seemed to have grown darker. Colder. She felt as though she was being watched, but no one was looking at her. Yet the sense of things closing in that had besieged her in the ferry lineup was tightening its grip. Outside, the wind gusted, lashing rain against the mullioned windows.

  CHAPTER 11

  He sits at his metal desk writing a letter. On a shelf to his left is a small television set. It’s tuned to the local CBC channel, which is airing a Canucks–Oilers hockey game. He’s waiting for the news. Earlier he ate a decent-enough dinner in the cafeteria. Now is the customary hour during which he likes to conduct his correspondence, old style, with pen and paper while listening to—and occasionally glancing up at—the day’s news on television. Routine. He’s come to like it. Routine is life. Habits are what make a man. If he masters his habits, he masters control. It gives him power. People misunderstand power. Real power is being at peace with oneself and living in the moment—not being affected by the currents and actions of others. Once his correspondence is complete, he will do his pull-ups.

  My dearest Mila,

  he writes.

  Did my gift arrive in time for Olivia’s birthday? I asked your mother to ensure that she ordered it with plenty of time to spare and to surprise you both on the day. Let me know as soon as you can whether Olivia likes it. Perhaps you could send me a photo of Livvy with her gift?

  He pauses, looks up at his small window. It’s dark outside. Raining. He wonders if the air is cold.

  I hope to make it in person to Livvy’s birthday party next year. It might be possible. I want to believe it shall be possible. My next hearing is in five days. Tuesday. It’s scheduled before lunch, which means statistically I might stand a better chance this time. Think of me then, please. Wish me luck. I am a changed man, Mila, and I will show them that. And when—

  “Another dismembered foot has washed up in Salish Sea …”

  His gaze shoots to the TV at the sound of the news anchor’s voice. He stares as an image of a dirty high-top sneaker fills the screen. Pale lilac. Small. Something waxy and gray-yellow inside the running shoe. Ice filters into his chest. He drops his pen, snatches up the remote, increases the volume. He listens to the reporter on the beach recount how the girls’ size-nine shoe came to be found on the causeway beach at the Tsawwassen Ferry Terminal. His mouth turns sawdust dry.

  “CBC has learned, however, that this particular ROOAirPocket high-top model was manufactured only between the years 1984 and 1986 …” The images, the sounds, begin to blur. He blinks hard as the camera cuts back to the reporter, and he struggles to swallow as a memory torques through him.

  Little feet running. Flashes of pink, purple … on deep-green grass. Puddles of light, rare ripples of laughter … a singsong nursery rhyme.

  Screams. Blood everywhere. The crab pots.

  The fish eating flesh …

  Time stretches like elastic. He can no longer hear the sound of the television. All he can see in his mind—as if burned in negative upon his retinas—are the child’s eyes, clear and gray, round and bright with utter delight as she opens the box and discovers the shoes—a new pair of pale-purple ROOAirPockets, nestled in the box with soft tissue paper.

  No, this cannot be. Not possible. Not after all those years. Not right before my parole hearing. It’s a coincidence. Has to be …

  The newscast segues to a piece on a tent city protest in downtown Vancouver. He gets up, goes to the basin, turns on the tap. He runs the hot water until it is scalding. He washes his face, scrubbing his hands brutally over his skin, the harsh prison soap burning his eyes. He turns off the water and braces his hands on either side of the sink. Slowly he looks up into the shatterproof mirror bolted to the wall. A face looks back at him. It’s not his. Not the face he knows when he thinks of himself. This man in the mirror has a complexion that is sallow and sick against his pri
son shirt. The eyes are lined, and the lids droop at the edges with flaccid skin. But those eyes still see things from a time long ago. And right now they see the dark shadow lurking behind the man who stands in front of the mirror. A shadow, it appears, that he cannot outrun or outlast. No matter how hard he tries.

  It’s nothing. Calm down. It means nothing to me. It’s just a coincidence.

  CHAPTER 12

  Angie made several trips up from her car in the underground parkade, carrying her file boxes and the supplies she’d bought on her way home to her apartment on the top floor. Once inside with her last load, she kicked her door closed behind her and set the second case file box on the floor beside the first, wincing as the muscles in her injured arm protested. She rubbed her arm as she stared down at the boxes.

  BOX 01 JANE DOE SAINT PETERS #930155697–2

  BOX 02 JANE DOE SAINT PETERS #930155697–2

  She allowed herself to feel excited as she locked her door and shucked off her rain jacket. She’d rather focus on her cold case than on making decisions about whether or not she was going to dig out her uniform and report to the MVPD’s social media desk tomorrow. It also kept her thoughts from straying to Antonio behind the bar or from hitting the club. Or dwelling morosely over her failed birthday date with Maddocks and what that meant to her, and whether she wanted to fight to make a relationship work with him.

  Once her coat and boots were off, she flicked on all the lights in her small apartment and got the gas fire cranked. She changed into warm leggings and pulled on a fleece sweater, thick socks, and her Ugg boots. Even so, cold seemed to linger inside her bones, as though a dank chill had crawled out of the shadows of her past at the hospital yesterday and burrowed into her very core, and it was not going to go away until she found answers.

  After wiping down her dining room table with a bleach cleaner, Angie covered the surface with a shroud of heavy-duty plastic sheeting—she’d picked up the roll at the hardware store along with four-by-four-foot melamine sheets, a glue gun, and a pack of colored markers. Ideally, the case file boxes should be opened in a lab or in a similarly sterile environment in case they contained biological evidence that was still viable. Proper evidence-handling procedures should be followed. But chain of custody had long been broken. Arnold Voight, according to his widow, had opened the boxes on more than one occasion in his home. He or his surviving family members could have introduced any number of contaminants. The boxes had also been stored in a basement, which could have been damp. So whatever evidence these boxes might contain, it was unlikely to be admissible in court.

  However, if she did discover evidence that could be retested, it might steer her toward new clues, something that could be used in court. And yeah, she was thinking like a cop here—not only did she want answers, but she also wanted legal retribution. A wrong had been done to that little Jane Doe—to herself. Men with guns had chased a young woman with long dark hair across the street in the snow—a woman who might be her mother. Jane Doe’s face had been sliced, blood all over the place, semen stains on a sweater left with the kid. Shots had been fired. Witnesses had heard tires screeching, possibly from a van that had fled the scene with the woman being held captive. Or dead.

  If Angie could draw any consolation from what she’d learned so far, it appeared that the dark-haired young woman had been desperately trying to save the child. The woman had cared.

  Angie had not been abandoned—she’d been protected from the bad men.

  Once the plastic sheeting had been secured around the table legs, she stepped back and examined her work. Her incident room was taking shape. She hefted the boxes from their place at door and set them upon the prepped table surface. Boxes in place, she proceeded to denude one wall in her living room of framed photographs and a painting. Working carefully yet swiftly, Angie used the heated glue gun to affix the white melamine sheets to the bare wall, creating a giant dry-erase crime scene board. It might be a bugger to remove these sheets later, but she wasn’t thinking about later.

  While the glue was drying, she shunted her desk and computer up against the adjoining wall. Firing up her desktop, she opened the file in which she’d saved the few online articles that she’d managed to locate on the angel’s cradle child from 1986. Her goal was to make more trips to the mainland, where she would start by visiting the Vancouver library archives in search of possible microfilm copies of all the newspapers from that period.

  Those articles could yield potential leads, give her the names of photographers and journalists who’d covered the story, names of the publishers and editors of the time, possible witnesses. Also an option was approaching the television stations and newspapers directly in search of archived material, but she wanted to tread very carefully before approaching any journalist types. They’d smell a story on her. She was not ready to become the news. Again.

  Especially not now that she was walking on thin career ice after the Spencer Addams shooting.

  Angie connected her digital camera to her desktop and downloaded the photographs she’d shot outside the hospital and cathedral. She selected a couple and hit PRINT. She then clicked open an image that she’d saved from one of the online articles—the sketch artist’s rendering of Janie Doe. The caption beneath the image read, DO YOU KNOW THIS CHILD?

  She hit PRINT.

  While her printer hummed, Angie checked her whiteboard sheets. They felt secure—the glue was dry enough. At the top of her board, in bold black letters, she scrawled, ANGEL’S CRADLE CASE ’86. Under the header she copied the case ID that the VPD had used on Voight’s boxes: JANE DOE SAINT PETERS #930155697–2.

  Beneath the case number she stuck the sketch artist’s image of Janie Doe. Beside the sketch, Angie pasted the fading Kodak print that Jenny Marsden had given her. Next she added the images she’d shot outside the hospital.

  She took a step back and absorbed the visual effect, the case now feeling tangible. Real. It channeled her focus.

  Her own bruised face from thirty-two years ago looked back at her. Angie touched the scar across her lip.

  Who are you, Janie Doe? What did those eyes of yours see that was so bad that you can no longer remember?

  Angie shook herself, snapped on a pair of crime scene gloves, and picked up her camera. She returned to the table and shot several angles of the sealed boxes, ensuring that she captured the file numbers. She was going to document every step of this very personal investigation.

  The term cold case was controversial, Angie knew. It gave the impression that unsolved cases were unworkable. But a cold case was just a concept—there was no one standard definition. It was simply a case that had been reported to law enforcement and investigated, but either due to insufficient evidence or a lack of strong suspects, no one had been arrested and charged. And because of the passage of time, a lack of fresh leads, pressures on municipalities and police departments for higher solve rates, those cases were no longer being actively pursued by investigators.

  But where time was your enemy … She set down her camera and reached for a box cutter. Time is now your friend.

  Conventional wisdom held that if a homicide was not solved within the first twenty-four to seventy-two hours, then the chances of solving that case begin to diminish rapidly. The reasons for this were obvious: The opportunity to retrieve uncontaminated evidence was strongest at the outset. Witnesses were still centrally located, their recollection of events fresh. They were also less likely to have had opportunity to get stories and alibis straight among themselves.

  However, over the years, as Jenny Marsden had noted, relationships between people involved in a crime could change considerably. Witnesses once afraid to come forward might no longer be reluctant to talk. And with the leaps that had been made in forensic science since the late eighties, minute amounts of trace that once might have yielded nothing could now be tested for DNA. The old hard-copy tenprint fingerprint card system had also been revolutionized with the advent of digitalized friction-ridge imaging s
ystems—digital scans of prints were now stored in automated print identification databases to which new files were constantly being added.

  This could be solved, Angie thought as she found her box cutter and began to slice carefully through the yellow tape on the first box. Her pulse raced in anticipation. It was possible.

  She opened the lid, and disappointment stabbed—just one binder inside with some loose files, two rather skinny notebooks, and newspaper cuttings in a plastic sleeve. She told herself this did not necessarily mean the investigative files were incomplete.

  It is not the size but the quality that counts.

  She was lucky to have these at all.

  Moving to the second, bigger box, Angie sliced the tape and opened the top. Her pulse kicked. Inside were several brown paper bags marked boldly as EVIDENCE. Almost shaking with adrenaline, Angie reached for her camera and took more photos. She set her camera down, then lifted out the bag on top. On the side the contents were marked as STUFFED BEAR, SAINT PETER’S HOSPITAL ANGEL’S CRADLE.

  She hesitated, then, with gloved hands, she carefully opened the top of the bag. A teddy bear’s head peeked out, fur stiff with a dried brown residue. Blood—her blood. Time slowed. Her mouth turned dry. Carefully she slid the teddy out of the evidence bag and studied it—not dissimilar to the one she’d witnessed inside the new angel’s cradle bassinet that Jenny Marsden had shown her. This bear also sported a T-shirt imprinted with the words SAINT PETER’S HOSPITAL. But the letters on this little T-shirt were barely legible under the stiff brown residue. Her heart began to pound.

  This is my blood I’m holding in my hands. From when I was four. This teddy was with me inside the cradle. A bolt of bright white light struck into her temple, sending mirrorlike shards of memory slicing through her brain. Pain seared across her mouth. Angie gasped. A woman screamed.