The Lullaby Girl (Angie Pallorino Book 2)

by Loreth Anne White

  Jacob Anders had told her on the phone that his staff had started documenting everything in her box from the moment she’d brought it in. They’d made good headway by the time she’d called him this afternoon. He’d committed to having his techs work overtime and through the night if necessary in order to meet her request for them to log, copy, digitize, and garner whatever samples they could to be tested later. For an additional price.

  This was priceless to her, she’d told him. She was desperate to have it all saved before she had to hand the evidence to the RCMP.

  It’s not just for me now. I had a sibling. This changes everything.

  And Angie did not doubt for an instant now that Tranquada’s new DNA test would come back positive. Because it fit—all the strange disjointed memories in her mind slotted into this scenario. And it just fed her urgency, the fire in her belly to find answers. Why had she been the one to survive and not her sister? And yes, she doubted her sister was alive somewhere wearing a prosthetic, although anything was possible. But it was more likely the little girl in the lilac high-tops had come to terrible harm at the hands of one of those men with guns outside the hospital. One of those men, Angie believed, had slashed her mouth and taken both the young dark-haired woman and the other child.

  Up on her whiteboard, next to the photograph that Jenny Marsden had given her, Angie stuck a photo of the dismembered foot. She’d clipped and printed it from an online Vancouver Sun news article.

  Stepping back, she studied the growing collage of images. Her nerves popped and sparked at the seismic shift in her paradigm.

  Two little kittens, two little kittens … The woman singing in the dark room—a memory that Alex had coaxed out with hypnosis—the sense of another presence in the room, a little girl calling with her hand reached out to Angie. Comeum playum dum grove …

  Her eyes filled with sharp emotion. She swiped it angrily away.

  Focus.

  She checked her watch. The clock was ticking—she had to scan every single page in Voight’s files before morning. Then she needed to drive out to Anders Forensics and pick up her evidence before Pietrikowski arrived at the station to take possession of her boxes. Before he slapped her with a warrant and started rumbling about obstruction charges, because that was not going to sit with well with Vedder and the rest of the brass, who’d love any opportunity to cast her adrift, especially now. And she wanted back in sex crimes when all was said and done.

  Angie set up her printer-scanner beside her computer and began to work through the files in the box, scanning and digitally filing each page as she went. Her scanner was slow and the process tedious. She told herself she could not afford to waste time in reading any of the details right now. She could go through it all on her computer later.

  Inside Voight’s binders were the reports from the initial responding officers. Results of a neighborhood canvass. Witness statements taken from parishioners exiting the cathedral, other statements taken from people across the street, from the nurses and docs in ER. On the surface everything seemed to tell the same story: A woman screaming. Gunfire. Men yelling. The cathedral bells clanging, followed by the screech of tires on a street somewhere behind the hospital.

  In her quick survey of the statements she was scanning, Angie noted nothing mentioned about anyone else actually seeing a dark-haired woman without a coat being pursued by two big men across Front Street. She hoped that Ken Lau’s grandmother had not just made this up, as she’d later claimed.

  It was almost 1:00 a.m. when two newspaper articles slid out of a plastic sleeve and wafted to the floor.

  Angie bent down to retrieve them. Clippings from the Vancouver Sun. She read the first. It was short—basically a caption under a photo of a charred wreck of a van. It was dated 1998—twenty years ago. The piece reported that an explosion had alerted CP rail workers to a vehicle fire near a train yard in the Burnaby area. Firefighters had extinguished the blaze by morning, and in the glove compartment of the burned-out black Chevrolet cargo van RCMP had found a Colt 1911 semiautomatic pistol, .45 caliber. At the time of going to press, the police had offered no further details, saying only that the vehicle blaze was under investigation.

  Angie frowned. Why was this article in here?

  What had Voight been thinking?

  That this particular van could have been the one heard screeching outside the hospital almost seven years earlier? The one Ken Lau’s mother and the orderly smoking out on the hospital balcony had possibly seen? Did Voight suspect the Colt .45 was the handgun fired outside the cathedral?

  Angie read the second newspaper clipping—a short article about a drug bust in Vancouver’s east side that occurred November 20, 1993, twenty-five years ago. A VPD officer had been shot in the head, and an innocent bystander had taken a bullet in the lower back during the bust. Both had been transported to hospital. Two men had been arrested on scene. Another two had fled in a van. The report stated that more details would follow as they emerged.

  But there was nothing else in the plastic sleeve. Angie chewed the inside of her cheek. Perhaps Voight had been working on some theory that had not panned out, and he’d dropped it. Hence no follow-up articles. Possible these clippings were totally unrelated to the cradle case and had been inadvertently included in the binder—these things happened. She’d drill deeper into this angle later, but right now she needed to keep scanning.

  It was past 3:00 a.m. by the time she’d copied and digitized everything.

  Her vision blurry with exhaustion, Angie clicked off the lights in her apartment and crawled into bed with her track pants and sweatshirt still on. As fatigued as she was, she could not fall asleep. Outside wind gusted. Rain hammered in waves against her windows. Her brain circled around and around everything she knew about her case to date, and she tried her damnedest to remember something from her past. Anything. She even tried to conjure up the ghost of the little girl in pink again. But nothing came to her. She punched her pillow into shape, determination steeling her. Whatever it took, she was going to get answers. Not for herself, but for that little girl who could be her sister.

  As she dozed she thought she heard the little girl’s words finally whispering through her mind again …

  Come. Come playum dum grove … come …

  Or was it the wind?

  CHAPTER 26

  FRIDAY, JANUARY 5

  “Doctor,” the nurse says with a nod as the man strides past the reception area. He wears a medical coat, a name badge clipped to his pocket, a stethoscope around his neck.

  He knows from the Russian interpreter where the girls are being held in the institution, what ward, what room. He knows protocol of entry. He reaches the room and tilts his head politely toward the uniformed officer sitting outside, guarding the occupants. A momentary look of question enters the officer’s face. It’s placated by his quick smile and his assured reach for the door handle. Confidence. It’s the art of the trickster. It’s 12:49 a.m. as he enters the room. The officer is perhaps tired and sluggish because of the hour.

  A small night-light casts a faint glow near the back of the ward. The girls are afraid of the dark, it seems. But the glow is not bright enough for him to see what he needs, so he takes a small Maglite from his pocket. He goes bed to bed. One by one he checks the charts hanging at the ends of the beds. One girl stirs as he moves past. He casts her an avuncular smile, waits. She turns over and goes back to sleep. He suspects they’ve had medication to aid slumber.

  He finds the chart he’s looking for. His target is asleep on her back, features slack and calm under a blanket of oblivion. Pretty thing. She must have brought in top dollar. He knows from the interpreter that she’s the one who spoke to the lead detective named James Maddocks. It’s via her that the man will now send a message from his boss. He removes his lab coat, lays it neatly on a chair near the bed. He snaps on latex gloves. Going up to the side of her bed, near her pillow, he bends down and places a gloved hand upon her shoulder. Gently, he tries to r
ouse her. “Sophia,” he whispers in her ear.

  She moans slightly, stirs. He tries again. “Sophia.”

  Her eyes snap open wide. She sees him. Terror twists into her face. He slaps his gloved hand hard over her mouth. “Shh,” he whispers, holding his Maglite to his lips like an index finger. Then in Russian he says, “Be very quiet. Do not move, or I will kill all the other girls as they sleep. Do you understand?”

  Her eyes flare sharply toward the younger ones, whites showing huge around her irises. She’s protective over them, he realizes. This is helpful. “Do you understand me, Sophia?” he says again in Russian, close to her ear.

  She nods. Terror has muted her flight-or-fight response. It’s numbed her. She fears for her life and is compliant because of it. She’s been well conditioned. He places his thin Maglite between his teeth and holds it there so he can see what he is doing while using both hands. He takes from his breast pocket a prefilled syringe. He uncaps the needle, taps it. With a swift move he smothers her face with his hand, twisting her head brutally sideways. She writhes and squirms and struggles to breathe under his palm, and it makes the vein down the side of her neck bulge. Deftly he sticks the needle into the vein and pushes the plunger on the syringe. He waits a few seconds, and she starts to relax and go limp. He releases his hand. A soft sigh escapes her.

  “Feels good, no?” he says softly in Russian, stroking her cheek. Her eyelids droop. He returns the syringe to his pocket and then unsheathes the hunting knife that hangs on his belt. He sharpened it well before coming. She’s fading, starting to pass out. It won’t be long now.

  Clamping his palm down over her brow to hold her steady, he forces the back of her head firmly into the pillow. Maglite still in his mouth, he shines light upon her lips. He sticks his gloved fingers between her lips and pries her jaw open wide. He holds it open as she begins to gag. Her eyes flare to life again, just for a moment, and fear flickers in them, but she’s no longer able to resist.

  “You know what happens to girls who talk,” he whispers.

  He brings the hunting blade up to her mouth.

  CHAPTER 27

  Angie remained standing in front of Jacob Anders’s desk. She didn’t have time to sit. It was 8:11 a.m. She was in a rush—going to be late for work.

  “It’s all back in here,” Anders said, patting the side of the box on his desk. “We’ve taken all the blood and hair samples we could, and it’s possible that we’ll have some DNA results for you in a few days. The semen stains might not prove viable, though. We’ll try, but it will take longer. There appear to have been two different sources.”

  “Of semen?”

  “Yes.”

  “On the sweater? Two contributors?”

  “Correct.”

  A sick, bitter taste rose up the back of her throat. It steeled her determination. Whatever had happened that Christmas Eve over thirty years ago, she was going to find out. She was going to get those two men.

  Dead or alive.

  Anders watched her face intently as he said, “There was also a lab report on evidence from a rape kit conducted on Jane Doe.”

  She inhaled deeply. “What did it say?”

  “No evidence of sexual activity, although there was evidence of earlier vaginal tearing.”

  Angie’s gaze shot to the window. Her heart raced, and she clenched her fists at her sides. She glared at the stormy ocean. It didn’t prove anything. She could have been injured some other way. Didn’t mean it hadn’t happened, either. But clearly, whatever had occurred in her early childhood had been bad enough to wipe her memory clean in a merciful act of self-preservation, creating a blank slate upon which her adoptive parents had written a totally new life and identity.

  “Thanks,” she said softly.

  “All the paperwork from the box has been logged, copied, and digitized. The evidence has also been logged and photographically documented. What samples remain have been returned to the packaging.”

  “And the prints?” Angie asked, referring to the images of the bloody finger and hand patents that had been captured on the outside of the cradle door.

  “Also digitized.”

  A spark of adrenaline knotted into her anxiety—those digitized prints could now be run through automatic identification databases.

  “This is your copy of everything we have on file now.” Anders slid a memory stick across his desk toward Angie.

  “I can’t thank you enough, Jacob,” she said as she snagged the storage device off his desk and slipped it into her breast pocket. She reached with both hands to grasp her box.

  “Why is the RCMP reopening this?”

  She stilled, met his wolfish eyes. She’d told him about being the cradle child, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to tell anyone about the floating foot match yet. It might still prove to be an error. She broke his gaze and glanced at the underwater feed of the pig carcass covered in a cloud of sea lice. The carcass seemed bigger, rounder today. More bloated. A Dungeness crab shuffled spiderlike on long skinny legs across the seabed toward the pig. As she watched, the octopus returned, swooping into view from the top-right corner of the screen. It swamped its body over the crab. Silt exploded in a cloud as they struggled and lice scattered. She stood momentarily numb as she watched the octopus smother the crustacean to death and begin to consume it. Angie swallowed as she recalled Jacob Anders’s words.

  Confidentiality, discretion—it’s a necessary and absolute cornerstone of our business.

  She moistened her lips and said, “Did you hear the news about the dismembered child’s foot found five days ago?”

  “I did.”

  “The DNA of that foot is apparently a dead match to mine. The VPD detective on my cradle case submitted my DNA profile to the identification and disaster response unit at the coroner’s office before he retired. They got a cold hit between the two.”

  A beat of silence. When Anders spoke again, she heard the subtle shift in his tone. “That is interesting. I presume they’re doing another DNA test to confirm the hit?”

  “Correct.”

  “Is this going to cause problems?” He nodded to the box. “With the RCMP.”

  “Not for you. The evidence was mine. I provided it to a private lab for testing. Now that I’ve been asked, I’m handing over what has not been used.” She gathered the box into her arms, wincing slightly. “Thank you again—I need to get to work.”

  “I’ll be in touch,” he said.

  But as Angie reached his door, she turned and said, “Monozygotic twin DNA—it’s not absolutely identical, is it?”

  “Identical twins come from the same fertilized egg, so they do share the same DNA. Which makes monozygotic twins indistinguishable using the standard panel of thirteen STR loci. However, as each twin embryo grows and develops in utero, and the cells continue to multiply, the replication of each twin’s DNA isn’t perfect. Minor errors or variations begin to occur so that by birth each twin’s DNA is subtly different from its sibling’s. And as life goes on, each twin is subjected to different environmental stresses, which in turn alter each one’s DNA replication. These variations can now be picked up by a newer DNA technique known as single nucleotide polymorphism, which gives the examiner a complete DNA sequence of the strand being analyzed.”

  “So given changes due to environmental stresses, even my own adult DNA could potentially have minute differences from my childhood DNA?”

  “Technically—” The phone on his desk started to ring. “I need to take this,” he said, reaching for the receiver. “I’ll call as soon as we start getting results.”

  “Thanks again.”

  Angie left his office and hurried for the building exit. She pushed through the door holding her box. Wind and rain slammed into her as she stepped into the cold air. Sheltering her box with her body, she made for her Nissan rental. Once inside the car, she started the engine and put her foot on the gas without giving it a chance to warm up. Her pulse was galloping. Even without traffic she w
as going to be late for work now.

  Vedder and company were not going to approve of her actions on the job so far. And now she really needed to keep her job in order to run the pending test results. The first thing she was going to do the instant she found a break today was get those digitized patent finger and palm prints taken from the cradle crime scene into the automated fingerprint identification system.

  CHAPTER 28

  “What?” Maddocks blinked in disbelief as the person on the other end of his phone repeated the news. Maddocks killed the call and fired a hard look at Holgersen. “She’s dead,” he said, feeling numb. “Sophia Tarasov is dead. Hospital staff found her unresponsive in a pool of blood in her bed at 7:30 a.m. Coroner and pathologist are en route to the hospital now.”

  Holgersen shot erect in his chair, eyes wide. “What?”

  Maddocks surged to his feet, raw shock pounding through him. He grabbed his coat, shrugged into it. “Get an ident team out to the hospital. Stat. Then meet me out in the lot.”

  “What … what about the others?” Holgersen said, coming to his feet.

  “Terrified. Not saying a thing, but they’re alive.” Maddocks fished his old dog out from under the desk. “Get hold of the interpreter, too. Get her to meet us there. We know at least one of the other girls speaks Russian.” He barked the order as he made for the incident room exit. Jack-O under his arm, Maddocks strode fast toward the elevator, his mind reeling, sweat breaking out over his skin. He jabbed the elevator button. While he waited for the elevator, he placed a call to one of the first responding officers still on scene at the hospital.

  “Constable Dutton,” came a male voice.

  “Sergeant Maddocks here,” he said as he entered the opening elevator doors. He pressed the button for the ground floor. “I’m the lead on this. That uniform guarding the girls’ room last night—I want that officer’s name, the hours of his shift. If he’s still there, keep him there. If not, bring him in. If another uniform replaced him—or her—on a shift last night, I want that officer in, too.”