The Drowned Girls (Angie Pallorino Book 1)

by Loreth Anne White

  “What is it?” she said, watching him intently.

  “John Jacks. Except it’s spelled J O N J A C Q U E S.”

  “The same name as Drummond’s boyfriend?”

  “Apparently Dr. Jacques has a son. Jon Jacques Junior. Twenty-two years old. Leo and Holgersen have been digging into Jon Jacques Senior’s background. He’s on the board of the Oak Bay Country Club, and he’s been investigated in the past for organized crime connections. Allegations of laundering, tax evasion, bribery of a judge. Nothing stuck. Crown counsel has dubbed him Teflon Jon.”

  She whistled softly. “So the dentist and his son could be a nexus between our two dead girls—Gracie Drummond and Faith Hocking.”

  “And that Sun reporter, Merry Winston, was also at Faith Hocking’s apartment, same time as Holgersen and Leo arrived there. Somehow she got wind of our floater’s ID and address.” Maddocks cast his partner another glance. “What are your thoughts about this leak being internal?”

  “If it is internal, it’s gotta be someone with a serious axe to grind,” she said. “Winston’s informant either wants to take someone inside the MVPD down, or he’s hitting at the entire organization of the MVPD.”

  “Not necessarily a he. Could be a she.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Exactly what I said.”

  “You think it’s me?”

  “You’re not the only female in the MVPD, Pallorino.”

  She glared at him, waves of hot energy crackling off her. “I’m the only female with this particular case information.”

  “No you’re not. There’s tech support staff. And there’s the family and intimate connections of other officers. Cops talk at home—like it or not, it happens.”

  She fell silent, just the sound of wipers and the soft hum of the heater in the car.

  “You trust me, right?” she said quietly after a while.

  “You’ve got to trust a partner.” He stole another glance at her. “Your partner is the guy who has your back.”

  CHAPTER 30

  The incident room was hot and thick with the scent of bodies, wet coats, stale cigarette smoke that lingered in clothing and damp hair. Combined with the cheesy, yeasty, garlicky, pepperoni smells of the pizza slices softening their cardboard containers, it was making Angie feel sick. She poured herself a glass of cold water and took a seat up front, near the whiteboard, her mother’s strange words churning around and around in her brain. And that hymn—a supposedly beautiful Christmas song of praise to the Virgin Mary. She’d looked up the English translation on her phone before entering the incident room.

  Ave Maria

  Virgin of the sky

  Sovereign of thanksgiving and loving mother

  Accept the fervent prayer of everybody

  Do not refuse

  To this lost person of mine, love …

  Was the discomfit that this song seemed to awaken inside her because of this case—the religious overtones? The Virgin Mary symbolism? Because Gracie Drummond had been laid at the feet of a stone Madonna? Or was everything—her hallucinations, the voices inside her head, her possible PTSD, her sexual conflict over Maddocks, her anxiety over her mother’s mental illness—curdling with the facts of this homicide case and her past rape cases? Was her ever-increasing fatigue further scrambling her mind?

  Her thoughts returned to her mother’s odd mention of Italy. Combined with the discrepancies of the dates on the backs of those photos and the snippets of memory seemingly returning from the car accident when she was a child … it was eating at Angie. And those phrases that she kept hearing in her brain?

  Uciekaj, uciekaj! … Run. Run! … Wskakuj do srodka, szybko … get inside. Siedz cicho! … stay quiet!

  What in the hell language could that be? Why did she seem to understand what the words meant?

  Buziak resumed his place in front of the whiteboard at the head of the room and rapped his knuckles on the table like a gavel. A large monitor had been brought in and mounted beside the board, which was accumulating more graphic photos and information as results came in from various aspects of the investigation. A male who looked to be in his late fifties—dark hair, John Lennon glasses—was fiddling with a laptop at a table near the monitor, gearing up for some kind of presentation as he brought a desktop image up onto the screen. Fitz was there, too. Sitting in his chair against the wall again, observing.

  As the other detectives began to seat themselves around the room, the seat beside her remained vacant, as if she was some kind of pariah. It was Maddocks who eventually took it. As he sat, his arm bumped up against hers. Angie involuntarily tensed. She could feel his heat, his solidity beside her. And again a memory of him naked in the red room pulsed into her darker, twisting thoughts. She inhaled deeply.

  Desire was a tricky beast.

  Lust was her addiction. Anonymous sex was easy. But this … this other thing she was beginning to feel—this vulnerability, this need for his approval, this budding sense of … affection—she needed to get out of his proximity. She needed a new partner. She couldn’t handle losing another friend. And she could certainly not find herself slipping into another intimate relationship with a colleague. Instinctively she knew she was not in a good headspace to deal with any of this right now.

  “Okay,” Buziak said. “What do we know so far? Let’s start with the postmortem lab results …”

  The heat and stifling atmosphere in the room thickened further as he spoke. Angie’s brain began to buzz and her vision started to narrow. Buziak’s words drowned into an unintelligible monotone. She tugged at the collar of her sweater, trying to pull his words back into focus.

  “… undigested gastrointestinal tract contents indicate that Hocking had eaten two to three hours before death,” Buziak was saying. With shock, Angie realized she’d completely tuned out, and she had no idea how long she’d been absent. Panic kicked through her. Focus, dammit.

  “… DNA analysis on the contents of Hocking’s GI tract indicate she consumed a meal that included Tuber melanosporum, black truffles—which are native to parts of southern Europe—and Kobe beef, specifically from the Tajima-gyu breed of cattle found in Japan’s Hyōgo Prefecture.” He glanced up from his notes. “Our floater ingested a very pricey meal two to three hours before she was killed.” He scanned further down the pages of the report. “We’re still waiting on further expert analysis, but the animal hair found inside the tarp is goat. Domestic. Both the outer winter guard hairs and softer underfur. There was also human hair trace found in Hocking’s pubic combings. Nuclear DNA and mitochondrial DNA tests, plus light microscopy, show the hair to be Caucasoid, black, and originating from the pubic, lower abdomen, and thigh areas of two specific male donors. Neither of those two DNA profiles match anything in the system.

  “Additional body hair from one of those profiles was also found on the decedent’s body. So, two unidentified male subjects …” He pursed his lips as he skimmed more of the report and turned a page. He found what he appeared to have been searching for.

  “The pieces of leaves—Quercus garryana—commonly known as Garry oak. And the seed found in the tarp is from an agronomic grass species. Combined with the Garry oak, it likely represents one of the rare scrub oak ecosystems found on shallow soils of the southern island and Gulf islands—we have a botanist attempting to narrow down an area for us.”

  He took a sip from a glass of water. “We got nothing more from a canvass of the area around the Blue Badger Bakery. The regular commuter who gets off at Drummond’s stop checks out, has alibis. No one could identify the second passenger who also got off at that stop the previous Saturday evening. The forensic ident guys, however, did find hair and blood evidence in the gasworks alley that is a DNA match to Drummond, as well as a button from her coat. The trace from Drummond’s clothing, including what appears to be some blonde head hair, is still being processed.” He looked up.

  “Various tire imprints were located in the adjacent lot, both sedan and SUV
, recently made. This is all consistent with the theory that Drummond was surprised and attacked in the gasworks alley, subdued, and then transported by vehicle to the site where she was sexually assaulted and mutilated, before being transported once again and placed on the Ross Bay grave site. Video surveillance footage obtained from the 7-Eleven opposite the cemetery shows a dark SUV driving slowly past the top entrance shortly before midnight Sunday. Our experts have identified the model as a Lexus LX 570. Recent. High-end. Footage enhancement shows a partial plate—registration looks like it could start with BX.”

  A murmur rippled through the detectives. This could prove to be a breakthrough. Buziak stuck a grainy black-and-white of the Lexus up on the board. He followed this with a second even grainier image of the plate partial.

  Something began to niggle at Angie’s memory as she stared at the images.

  “The 7-Eleven surveillance footage,” Buziak said, “is consistent with witness evidence obtained during a canvass of the surrounding Ross Bay Cemetery residences. A female senior with insomnia was looking out of her window shortly before midnight and saw a dark SUV parked down near the side entrance of the cemetery, closer to where Drummond was discovered.”

  He placed his knuckles on the table and leaned into them, his dark eyes intent on his detectives. “Forensic techs are presently combing through footage secured from a new highways department camera mounted on the Johnson Street Bridge to see if they can pick up this Lexus and plate traveling west or east around the time Drummond was abducted in Victoria West.”

  Angie cleared her throat. “There was a black Lexus SUV with tinted windows parked across the street from Lara Pennington’s residence when we interviewed her,” she said. “It pulled off as I caught sight of it. I didn’t see the plate, but Pennington had been watching the street from her window and seemed afraid.”

  Buziak stared at her a moment. “You didn’t get a plate?”

  “No, I didn’t get the plate,” Angie repeated coolly.

  Maddocks turned to overtly stare at her, as if asking why she had not informed him of the Lexus.

  She added, for his benefit, and to get in her own dig, “I only noticed the vehicle because I was waiting for Detective Maddocks to finish walking his dog.”

  His eyes narrowed sharply at her. Someone behind her whispered something.

  “All right,” Buziak said. “Also of significance, our so-called pastor, Markus Gilani, has a record and has served time. He was charged for driving while impaired eleven years ago. He had a minor with him in his vehicle. She was giving him oral sex when he struck and killed a female cyclist. Leo and Holgersen will be paying our pastor another visit. Now, I’m going to hand over to forensic psychologist Dr. Reinhold Grablowski, who I’ve brought in as a consultant on this case.”

  Again, murmurs rippled through the audience, and behind Angie, someone groaned.

  The dark-haired man with the Lennon glasses came to his feet. He pressed a key on his laptop. The screen came to life with a Geographic Information System map of greater Victoria.

  CHAPTER 31

  Merry banged on the door to Harbor House, shivering and hugging herself against the cold. Pastor Markus opened the door, and his eyes went wide.

  “Merry? What … on earth are you doing here? We’ve already allocated beds for the night, if—”

  “I don’t need a place to stay. I just need to see you. Can I come in?”

  He glanced furtively down the street, then, voice lowering, he said, “You shouldn’t have returned here. I told you, it’s natural that you might feel … things, because of what I helped you go through, but I’m a married man. A man of God. Verity, my wife, is pregnant at last,” he said. “I’m going to be a dad now.”

  “Fuck, it’s not that! It’s about those girls! It’s about what happened before. To me. There’s a fucking monster predator out there. He’s back, and he got that Cemetery Girl, and might have gotten Faith, and he’s been out there for a fucking long, long time.”

  “Come inside,” he said quickly, probably more to quiet her down than anything else, because she was starting to get hysterical and she knew it, and she couldn’t control herself.

  He led her through the kitchen and into his small back office. He told her to sit near the heater, and he brought her a mug of hot tea. She cradled her hands around the ceramic mug that had been printed with the words Repent thy sins, and thou shalt be forgiven. She sipped, still shaking, from something far deeper than cold. He fetched her a sweater from the thrift store box.

  “Give me your coat,” he said, holding the sweater out to her.

  She shrugged out of her wet coat and into the sweater. He hung the coat by the gas heater. He looked agitated.

  “I heard the cops came to see you about Faith,” she said. “What did you tell them?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You didn’t tell them about me? About the red crucifix on my face five years ago?”

  “No. I respect my kids, the residents—”

  “What happened to me, and to the girl in the cemetery, it’s connected. It’s him. He’s back.”

  “You should go to the police, Merry—”

  “And tell them what? That I was a runaway foster reject, a meth-head junkie? That I was so high I can’t even remember exactly what happened that night? I recall his eyes, and those words, and waking up in the ravine. And then seeing the red crucifix on my forehead when I looked in the mirror. And I knew I was sore and bleeding, but I wasn’t one hundred percent sure of anything that had happened apart from that. I thought I could have been tripping out.”

  “Merry,” he said gently. “Have you been using again?”

  “Not yet.”

  He shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “Why did you really come to me, Merry?”

  “I shouldn’t have,” she spat out bitterly. “I thought you could help. Now I know for sure you won’t tell me, but I need to ask—have there been any others like me that you know of? Do you know of any street kids over the past years who spoke of a bad john, or a possible sexual assault associated with a crucifix? I want to know exactly how long he’s been around, been doing this.” She set the mug down and dragged her hands over her wet hair. “Fuck, I’m scared. I didn’t know who else to talk to. He could be reading my stories in the paper and know that I was one of his victims. He could have been watching me all this time.”

  He returned her gaze steadily but remained silent, and her stomach kind of bottomed out.

  “So there have been others.”

  Silence.

  “Shit. Tell me.”

  Silence.

  “If you won’t talk to me, I’m going to your wife, and I will tell her what happened between you and me all those years ago. I’ll tell the congregation. It’ll be the end of you and your silence, Pastor.”

  He heaved out a sigh, looked away, got up, paced. Then he reseated himself and drew his hand down hard over his mouth. “Okay,” he said softly. “There was a kid once, named Allison Fernyhough, who was assaulted in the same manner as you were. She was pretty messed up by it and ended up doing drugs on the street for a while, and she bunked here some nights, which is how I came into contact with her. She told me, and I suggested she tell the police, given your earlier experience. She did, but it was too long after the fact. There was no evidence they could use, and they weren’t able to help. Allison said there were rumors on the streets about other victims, too, but I never heard more than that.”

  “And you never mentioned this to me?”

  “Like I said, I met Allison well after your attack, Merry. And then no more. It all stopped. Like he disappeared.”

  “When, exactly, did this happen?”

  “Two years after you.”

  She surged to her feet, grabbed her wet coat.

  “Where are you going?” he said, getting up. “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to get him. I’m going to find this sick fucking bastard and nail his dick to the wall, and I
’m going to use my crime blog to do it. For Faith, and for those other girls, and for myself. I’ve got a freaking huge following now. Even if the paper does fire me, I won’t need them in order to finish this. I don’t need the City Sun’s bureaucracy and editorial board shit. I’ll do this on my own.”

  I’m not going to let him drive me back into using, not going to let all my hard work go to waste. He will not put me back in the gutter …

  “Merry, you cannot do this on your own.”

  “You know what? I can. No one has ever been there for me. Apart from you, that is. You picked me out of the gutter and wrung me out. Save the good girls, you said. You helped me after I was assaulted—you sold me your sorry story of a light at the end of the tunnel, and of God and heaven and all that, and for a while I actually believed you because it was all I had. But it was my own smarts that got me out of that hole I was in and cleaned me up. My own determination that stuck me through the night classes, and kept me holding down those fast-food jobs, and kept me studying for my journalism diploma at the same time. My own ability that swung me a nighttime gig on the Sun crime desk, because I knew the streets and where to find a goddamn good story, and I clawed up one rung at a time. And you know what else? Now I know you for what you are.” She glowered at him, breathing hard, anger and hate and bitterness twisting through her body.

  “There’s always another path, Merry. A high road instead of the low road.”

  She snorted. “I was born to the low road, Pastor. Just like you. And I don’t trust those cops. Clearly they couldn’t help this Allison Fernyhough, and I know things about some of them. One of them is using me and my position at the paper, and I’m gonna use him straight back.”

  She dumped his sorry-ass thrift store sweater onto the floor, punched her arms into the wet sleeves of her own coat, and made for the door.

  CHAPTER 32