by Linda Moore
The glass in the front door gave way and I called out again. “I’m here, help me.”
From the kitchen I heard the bolt slide and the back door open as two police officers entered the front vestibule.
“Back door!” I said, gesturing with my head “He’s escaping!”
One of them sprinted after him while the other worked at untying my hands.
“Why are you here?” I asked breathlessly, “How did you know to come here?”
“Two calls came in: one from a Blue Bell taxi driver to say something didn’t look right and one from your neighbours next door who called about that barking dog.”
“I think this guy is the one who hurt that young man the police found tonight,” I blurted out as my hands were freed.
Wasting no more time, he turned and followed his partner out through the back.
Molly was scratching at the front door and whining. I pulled it open and stepped onto the porch.
“It’s okay, Molly. It’s okay,” I said, trying to get my breath, and bending to give her a hug. I could feel myself trembling. She licked my face, which normally I would abhor, but it felt great. “Stay here now. Wait until I clean up all this broken glass.”
Chapter Fourteen
It was three o’clock in the morning and I was at loose ends. The police hadn’t returned though I expected them to come back or send someone else to question me. I could only think that they were so caught up in the chase they’d forgotten all about me. Their cruiser was still parked in front of my house. I had swept up the glass as best I could and had brought Molly into the kitchen and given her a bowl of cat crunchies and some water. Now I had the kettle on and was hoping to calm myself with a cup of tea. I picked up the cat and tried to settle her on my lap, but she was even more electrified by the night’s events than I was. She scrambled down. I looked at the phone.
Though Harvie claimed he never slept, he was sound asleep when I called.
“I’m so sorry, Harvie,” I apologized. “I know we had a wild and crazy day but tonight’s been even crazier.”
“What’s up, Roz,” he said. “What’s happening?”
“You’re going to think I’m nothing but trouble,” I replied. “Can you possibly come over?”
“Five minutes,” he replied, and hung up.
I felt so grateful I wanted to weep. The sudden shriek of the kettle’s whistle had me almost jumping out of my skin. I took a deep breath, made the tea and left it to steep.
I didn’t want Harvie or anyone to cut themselves on the jagged edges of the door’s remaining frosted glass, so I dragged a piece of fibreboard up from the laundry room and was standing on the front steps attempting to tack it up over the upper half of the door.
“This is easier with two people, Roz.” Harvie was suddenly behind me.
“Oh, god!” I exclaimed. “Sorry. I’m a little jumpy.”
“It’s okay, Roz, take it easy. Let’s get this done and then you can tell me what happened.” He reached out for the hammer and I handed it to him. “God, look at your wrist,” he said, seeing the red marks that had been left by the cord.
“Wrists.” I showed him both. I held the board in place while he tacked in several nails. Then we went into the kitchen for tea while I filled him in on the night’s events.
“Oh boy,” he said. “Oh boy, Roz. This is a very bad scene.”
“I know, Harvie. I don’t think there’s any doubt that Peter King was killed. I mean these guys are brutal.”
“Look, there are too many people getting hurt, including yourself. It’s time to fill in the police and let the chips fall.”
I knew he was right. Molly let out a low sharp woof as the doorbell rang. This time we both jumped.
“That must be the cops coming back, ” I said.
“Let’s hope so,” he said.
Though it hardly seemed likely my attacker would ring the front doorbell, Harvie and I went down the hall like two frightened kids. With the broken glass covered over, I now had no way of seeing though my front door, so I cautiously opened it to find none other than Arbuckle standing there.
“Haven’t we met somewhere before?” he asked dryly.
“It’s a relief to see you, Donald,” said Harvie.
“Please come in.” I pulled Molly back so he could enter. Then I realized this visit might not be about me. “Oh my heavens—have you found Sophie?”
“No luck there,” he said. “Tonight I’m investigating a serious assault on a young man, and one of the officers who was here earlier contacted me to say you had indicated there might be a connection between your assailant and that case.”
“That’s right. He told me I would end up like ‘my little Arab friend.’ And I had just heard the report on the 2:00 a.m. news. How is he doing, do you know?”
“According to the most recent report from the hospital, he’s still unconscious, possibly in a coma.”
“Oh no, what a disaster,” I said, my heart sinking.
We were standing in the hall. Harvie said pointedly, “I think we should all sit down so you can fill Donald in on the details, Roz.”
“What’s happening out there—have they caught the creep?” I asked as we walked into the kitchen.
“Not so far, but he lost a glove going over your fence. We’re bringing in the dogs.”
I poured him a cup of tea. “Milk?”
“Clear’s fine,” he replied. “Okay, I’m all ears. Fill me in.”
“Right,” I said, seating myself across from him. “There’s a connection between Sophie and the young man who was beaten—‘Aziz’ I think is his name.”
“It is,” Arbuckle replied. “Aziz Mouwad.”
“He was the one having his tarot cards read this morning. This all relates to a case that McBride and I are working on. Aziz carried some information to Sophie’s that could help to bring a murder charge in the death of Peter King.”
“The lawyer who died recently?”
“That’s right,” Harvie chimed in. “Environmental and Trade Law specialist. He was a long-time colleague of mine and also a good friend.”
“And you’re saying King was murdered?” Arbuckle looked at Harvie.
“I’m just learning about all this myself, Donald,” Harvie said.
“We don’t have conclusive evidence yet,” I said, “but Peter King’s son Daniel suspects that he was, and has hired McBride to investigate.”
All at once, my eye was drawn past Arbuckle to flashing lights outside the kitchen window. I stood and walked over to look out. Figures with flashlights and a number of dogs were out in the dark treed area beyond my back fence. A kind of no man’s land, once proverbially known as “The Jungle,” it now surrounded a recently built men’s shelter. Just below that and across the street was the huge dig for the new sewage treatment plant. Maybe that’s where my attacker has escaped to, I thought. Maybe he’s hiding down in the muddy depths of the enormous excavation.
“When is McBride due back?” Arbuckle demanded.
“Soon I hope,” I answered, still looking out into the darkness.
“Had you told me all of this earlier today—and about your personal involvement—I would have been able to offer you some protection. You’re a target, and you’re playing a very dangerous game here.”
“I know. It was stupid. I think I was in shock this afternoon.” I turned abruptly and stared at them. “Oh my god!”
“What’s happening, Roz?” Harvie stood up.
“I’ve just put two and two together. I….Yes, it makes sense. We have to go now—no time to lose!”
“Go where?” Harvie asked.
I turned to Arbuckle. “Can you find somebody who can get us into the treatment plant excavation? That’s what my attacker meant when he said she was in deep shit, and that’s what she meant by ‘muddy death.’ I think they’ve got Sophie down there!”
As Arbuckle stared back at me, there was an explosion of barking from out back. The police dogs had found s
omething. We grabbed our coats and went out through the kitchen door and down into the yard. It was dark and very cold. There was a brisk north wind coming off the harbour and it was starting to snow. The gate was built to be indistinguishable from the fence; I showed Arbuckle where to unlatch it. We made our way towards the source of the noise and flashing lights, to where the dogs and several officers were focused.
What they had found was not the perpetrator but a long-time occupant of The Jungle who was too inebriated to be let into the homeless shelter for the night. He was doing his best to stay out of the elements by hunkering down under a tree in a haphazard structure made out of old, wind-whipped plastic, fallen branches and sheets of cardboard. He’d been unsuccessfully attempting to ignite a few twigs when he had been discovered by the dogs. His late-night cocktail appeared to be a can of Lysol, which would account for his completely docile stupor. Mercifully, the cops opted to move him to a cell for the night. They called in the paddy wagon and then huddled together in a brief meeting.
Arbuckle called a halt to the search out back, but instructed the dog wrangler to stand by at the station while he organized our visit to the excavation site. He assumed there would be a security guard there, but he wanted someone in authority to accompany us. His plan was to go to the station, track down a project manager from the engineering firm, then come back and get us. Harvie and I saw him to the front door. As he left I couldn’t stop myself from blurting out, “Please be quick. Every second counts.”
As soon as he was out the door, I ran upstairs to change into warmer layers and find a coat for Harvie to put on over the light jacket he had worn.
“No point in getting pneumonia,” I said to Harvie, handing him a heavy wool coat.
“Good idea Roz, thanks. And do you have a hat? Like a toque or something for this bald head of mine?”
“Sure. I can find you something…Won’t be a minute.”
I scurried back upstairs and into the spare room, where there was an old trunk in which I kept winter clothes. The overhead light was burnt out so I had to make my way across the room in the dark to turn on the bedside lamp. I thought I heard a noise coming from the closet and I stopped cold. Suddenly the cat leaped up onto the spare bed. “Oh aren’t you everywhere,” I said to her, turning on the lamp.
I went over to the trunk and lifted the lid. I was digging through old mitts and scarves when a shadow caught my peripheral attention. “I’m sure I remember seeing a wool toque in here, Harvie.” There was no reply. I turned and there in front of me like a living nightmare was my scar-faced attacker. I opened my mouth to scream but he was too fast. He clapped his hand over my mouth.
“We’ve had enough noise from you tonight,” he said as he ripped a cloth belt from a hook on the closet door and wrapped it around my mouth. He hissed into my ear, “All those pigs trying to track me down and where was I? Halfway up the iron ladder on the back of your house! The idiots never even looked up. By the time they got the dogs here, I was already inside. You should learn to lock your bathroom window.” He was grinning as he forced me down onto a straight-backed chair. I winced when he tied my hands behind me with a leather cord from his pocket. He closed the spare room door and leaned on it, looking at me.
“Okay. We know the kid brought the file to the girl’s apartment and we know you went there after we delivered the cellphone. You must have taken the file because it didn’t just disappear into thin air, and I don’t believe you gave it to the police. Now if you want to save your friend, you’ll tell me where it is.”
Just then I heard a voice in the hall. It was Harvie. “Roz? Are you ready? They’ll be back to get us in a couple of minutes.”
I started to grunt as loudly as I could. I tried to make my grunts sound like “NO.” The attacker stepped aside so the door would mask him when it opened. More frantic no-grunts from me.
“Roz? Are you ok?” Harvie pushed the door open and looked at me. My eyes darted to behind the door to alert him—but of course it was too late.
The thug startled Harvie and let him have it with a good punch in the face. Harvie went down fast, but grabbed Scarface’s leg on the way down and knocked him off balance. They wrestled and punched and made a lot of noise. The fight was fierce and I could hear Molly barking from downstairs. I was relieved when she finally stopped—I didn’t want her to get into the fray. Harvie was valiant but he didn’t stand a chance. As the thug hauled him to his feet and slammed him against the wall, I was horrified to see blood running down from a nasty cut under his eye. This had gone far enough. I started making sounds that were as close to “OKAY” as I could, attempted to stand, then banged the chair back down on the floor. Scarface was winding up to hit Harvie again, but he stopped and looked at me. I nodded vigorously.
“You’ll turn over the file?” he asked.
I nodded again.
He untied my hands, and as I stood up I indicated the gag and grunted. He pulled that off too. He pushed Harvie into my chair and roughly tied his hands to the rungs, using the sash that had been wrapped around my mouth.
“Okay, let’s go,” he ordered.
Feeling shell-shocked, I stepped into the hall and moved towards my bedroom. He was following me at about three paces. I turned into my room and walked over to the closet where I had hidden the file earlier. I opened the closet door, bent down and started to move my shoes and boots around. He stood right behind me, towering above me and breathing hard, “I don’t see it,” he grunted. “Where is it?”
“It’s under the floor here,” I replied. I was shaking.
“No tricky business. Hurry up!”
In the next moment there was a commotion, a loud crack and he crashed to the floor so close to me I covered my head with my hands. I heard a familiar voice saying, “Down you go, pal. Now we’re even.” I turned and looked up.
“McBride! Thank god!”
Chapter Fifteen
I started to laugh and cry at the same time. The cat, who had been attempting to get her beauty sleep during the fracas, jumped down off the bed, walked over and sat down beside me. She looked at the motionless Scarface lying halfway in the closet, face-down in my shoes and boots, and then up at me. It was oddly comforting.
The doorbell rang, startling me into action. I jumped up and ran into the spare room to untie Harvie, who had heard the commotion and was relieved to see me still alive and well.
“What happened in there, Roz?”
“Just a second. That’s gotta be Arbuckle. I have to go let him in.”
I sprinted down the stairs and opened the door, just as he was ringing the bell for the second time.
“Let’s go!” he said.
“I’ve got a present for you first, courtesy of McBride. Come and take a look.”
McBride had given Scarface such a good crack on the head that he was down for the count. Arbuckle didn’t waste any time and called an ambulance, which arrived within three minutes. In the meantime, Harvie introduced himself to McBride and was filling him in on the night’s events as the paramedics got the patient onto a stretcher. Scarface was taken to the hospital, followed by a couple of police officers who would keep careful watch over him. Harvie decided to go along in the cruiser to have the cut under his eye tended to.
McBride, Molly and I, accompanied by Arbuckle and his team, drove down the hill to the excavation, where we were to meet up with a project manager from the sewage treatment plant’s engineering firm. Climbing out of his enormous SUV as we pulled up, Rich O’Toole was clearly not pleased to be gotten out of bed before dawn on a Sunday for what he considered an unfounded whim.
“First of all, you’re twenty minutes late. Didn’t you tell me this was urgent? And secondly, if there was a body or a prisoner down there, I would bloody well know about it.”
“Not necessarily,” I said. “If Sophie is down there, she would have been taken there just this afternoon or rather yesterday afternoon.”
“That’s ridiculous! The place is very well secured�
�” he fairly snapped at me. “No one gets in here on the weekends.”
“Look,” Arbuckle said, taking the engineer aside. “We know this is an uncommon situation, but better to be safe than sorry. We have some indications that the girl might be down there, and we’re going to search the place and find out. We need your help. Now do your best to co-operate and try to think of any and all possibilities. It’s a huge site and she’s not going to be in plain view.”
Arbuckle had the bit of material from Sophie’s skirt, and the wrangler had brought their best tracker dog, a lanky German shepherd named Speed, who, like a true professional, was managing to ignore Molly. As for Molly, she was so delighted to be with McBride again that she wasn’t allowing for any distractions.
The engineer typed a code into the electronic lock on the gate and as we walked through it, we were greeted by the night guard, who was dressed for the weather in a standard issue winter coat, heavy gloves and a hat with fur flaps that came down well over his ears. O’Toole grudgingly explained what the police were doing there in the middle of the night and asked him if he’d seen or heard anything. The guard said he’d just finished doing the rounds of the site and had seen nothing unusual. He added that he’d been on a double shift and that everything had been very quiet.
O’Toole shot a hostile look at Arbuckle. “You see? You’re wasting your time.”
“Look, we’re going down there, O’Toole. Now let’s go,” Arbuckle said.
The guard led us over to a lift platform that would take us down about sixty feet. As the others got a little ahead of us, McBride said to me: “I feel like I’ve met the guard before—possibly he’s one of the men who escorted me out of City Hall the other day.”
We all descended into the depths. Because the elevator was just an open cage, it was possible to see all around and below, and to feel the frigid air surging past us as we descended.
