by Jon Redfern
“Seems the chief is still at it.”
Billy had walked through the reception room and joined Dodd in the main hallway of offices. His ear was against Butch’s door.
“Chief suggested I show you the mother’s statement if he got held up. Looks like we have time if you want to, sir. We got it on tape earlier this morning.”
Dodd led Billy along the hall to a staircase. They walked down two flights, through a set of glass doors, along another hall, then into a ten-by-twelve windowless room. Dodd snapped on the overhead fluorescents. There was a cabinet and a television on a table. A VCR sat on a shelf under the TV. There were three metal chairs set out. Dodd opened the cabinet with a key he took from a hook beside the door. He turned the lock. Rows of tapes were lined up vertically. Each tape had a cardboard sleeve and a white label.
“Here she is.”
Dodd handed the cassette to Billy.
The label of the cardboard sleeve read JUNE 29, SHARON RIEGERT, FILE NO: 64.
On the screen, the woman looked pale, tired, her acne-scarred face pudgy and ill-fed. Her voice was hoarse from cigarettes. Billy watched her eyes dart as she told Dodd about her last twenty-four hours, what she could remember. The sergeant’s voice interrupted her at times, trying to keep her on track. Behind her, the wall was white. Her hands were folded in her lap.
“No, I didn’t even see my little boy go out. No way he shoulda been there, no way. She’s been stealing him and all those kids from us. She made him die. She killed my baby.”
“She was hard to keep on track, sir. She was out of it.”
“What else do you know about her?”
“Not much. No driver’s licence. On welfare. She and her boyfriend, Woody, spend a lot of time in her rental place, a two-bedroom bungalow. Seems he lives the rest of the time in his own place a few blocks away. Sharon Riegert is divorced. Darren’s father left her when the boy was born. No relatives in town. We ran a quick check on her. No arrests. No record.”
“Anything on him? On Woody?”
“Not yet. I’ve only had time to do her.”
“Roll it again.”
This time Billy took mental notes. The woman said she’d been at home all night. She’d been at home the day before as well, though she couldn’t prove it. Only the boyfriend, Woody, was her witness.
“Where’s the boyfriend’s statement?”
“Uh, we didn’t get that far, sir, like I said. He was real upset. Shouting and slamming doors. We had him restrained upstairs while she talked for the camera. He was drunk, I think. Smelled of rye when he came in. Chief said we could do him later. Now he’s got the two of them together.”
Billy sat still and thought for a moment. He straightened his back.
“Okay. Thanks, Dodd.”
They went back upstairs by a different hall and staircase. Dodd pointed out two interview chambers and the records room. There was a computer and three vertical filing cabinets. “We are on-line now with every police station — both civic and RCMP — in the province.” Dodd beamed. The window in the door showed a narrow room no bigger than a horse stall. The computer sat against one wall. Maps of the city and the province were tacked up by a filing cabinet. Also, there was a desk the size of a TV table cluttered with paper. At it a woman sat alone staring into the computer screen. “She’s the best computer jockey and filing clerk at the station.” Billy quickly memorized the room number. As they continued, he decided to get some professional history from Dodd.
“You’ve done homicide before, Dodd?”
“A couple of cases. But mainly I do commercial crime.”
“What were the cases like?”
“The homicides? Husband shot his wife last October, hid the rifle in the basement in the washing machine, then turned himself in. Worst case was the postman. He’d been having an affair with a woman on his route. When wifey found out, she went off the deep end and stabbed the man in his privates.” Dodd laughed.
“You think homicide is funny, Dodd?”
Dodd’s expression stiffened. “No, sir. I didn’t mean any harm.”
Billy wondered if the man’s awkwardness might be a cover for naïveté or disdain.
Dodd’s young face reddened. “I meant no harm,” he said again.
Billy nodded. You can let it go for the moment, he thought. They moved on, stopping by reception, where Dodd picked up the mail for Butch. “So,” said Billy, “why is this mutilated body promising trouble?”
Dodd stopped. “From what I saw, this was no normal killing.”
“What do you mean, normal?”
“The blood, the . . . it was like a lynching, sir. Like someone was crazy or enraged. It sure spooked the chief, I can tell you.” Dodd went silent for a second. “It was one of the worst things I ever saw.”
“Yes, Dodd. I can imagine.”
“What’s your take so far?”
“Let me see the site first.”
“Even after the body’s been removed?”
“All the more reason. A body can be a big distraction. If your site is intact, you’ll sometimes find clues.”
Dodd raised his eyebrows. “Is that so?”
By this time, they had stepped through the swinging door leading to the main hallway. It was quiet as Dodd and Billy went to knock on Butch’s office door. Billy hardly had time to step out of the way as an overweight blonde wearing a pair of dirty jeans pushed by him, her face reddened from crying. Sharon Riegert. With Darren’s mother was a tall thin man hunched in a leather jacket. He sported a short ponytail. He glared at Dodd and Billy in passing. A constable came up the hall and took firm hold of Woody Keeler’s elbow and led him and Sharon Riegert down the hall. Billy took note of the hair band around the ponytail: red elastic, the kind Safeway uses to hold together fresh spinach.
Billy gazed at last into Butch’s office. Chief Bochansky was a big man, over six feet and built broad and round, a foil to Billy’s compact, slender frame. Lorraine, his wife, once described him to Billy as chunky, by which she meant, Billy presumed, overweight and needing a good diet. “No,” she said when Billy asked her to explain. “Not at all. Chunky means hunky to me.” She then remarked with pride on Butch’s huge upper arms, a legacy from his boxing days. Butch’s eyes were blue and frequently flashed with sudden temper. He was standing beside his metal desk crumpling up a piece of paper, his face creased by fatigue.
“Billy!”
“Morning, Butch.”
“Am I glad to see you.”
Dodd pressed his bulky frame into the open doorway.
“What we up against, Chief?”
“Hell, high water, and more hell.”
“Johnson’s not back yet, Chief. You want me to get a hold of Hawkes?”
“Yes, Dodd, I do. I won’t know if it’s murder until he’s done his autopsy.”
“Yes, sir.”
Butch drummed his fingers on the desktop, then yanked open the drawer and pulled out a dog-eared blue notebook. He signalled to Billy to step inside the office. “See you later, Dodd.”
“Can I get anyone a coffee before I go?”
“No thanks. Just get the door,” Butch growled.
Cigarette smoke floated like a wave in the still air of the office. A large computer sat by one wall — screen, keyboard, printer, and above it a bookcase full of pamphlets and official-looking yellow binders.
“That yours?”
Butch turned and nodded at the framed colour photograph of a waterfall hanging over his desk.
“Took a Nikon course last year. Some guy from Toronto on a tour. Pretty good. Finally learned how to use the camera Lorraine gave me for Christmas seven years ago.”
Billy sat down in an armchair by the computer. His sensitive nose picked up the smell of Woody Keeler’s cheap aftershave. Butch coughed, ran his hands through his thinning red hair.
“You look dapper. That your old outfit from Vancouver days?”
“Felt I should dress up for my official visit to headquarters.
”
Butch was wearing khaki pants and a green golf shirt open at the neck. Billy wondered if his suit made him look overdressed for this station. In Vancouver, among the Asian community, his blue suit had commanded respect, granted him “face.”
Butch went over to a filing cabinet. “How’s the bum knee?”
“Behaving itself. Dodd showed me the Sharon Riegert tape.”
“Not much on it, was there?”
“What’s she been telling you the past hour?”
“How the world turns, according to her. How she’s been a victim and couldn’t help beating her own son. Claims the ponytail sidekick who came with her was the only real father figure Darren ever knew. Poor bastard.”
“They both have alibis?”
“Both at home, drunk, though I’ll get Dodd over to their neighbours to verify. Boyfriend Woody says it was Miss Bird who harmed their darling boy. Somehow, Miss Bird had the two of them pretty scared. Must have warned them that child abuse was a no-no and that she might have to take the kid away.”
“Riegert’s statement leads me to think she’s torn.”
“Between what?”
“Mourning her son and protecting her boyfriend.”
“You think so?”
“We’ll definitely need a background check.”
Billy sat forward. “Sharon kept claiming Woody was home with her all night. Said it five times by my count. But she also said he went out for a time, then denied it when Dodd tried to pin her down. We need to determine when he went and came back. If she’s telling the truth.”
“You suspect Woody?”
“There’s a history in this family. Torture and abuse go together. You hear about the couple who sexually abused and tortured their three-year-old daughter? Big case, a year ago, down in Arizona.”
“Religious couple. Both got life.”
“Torture is possible given the nature of this crime. The cult connection. The choice of locale. As if whoever did it wanted it to be well known. The Arizona couple took videos of their handiwork and left the tape in the machine.”
“Jesus.”
Butch tossed a new notebook over to Billy.
“You’ll need one of these. You have a ballpoint?”
Billy grinned. “Ballpoint? How can a ball have a point?”
Both men laughed. They had invented the joke years ago. Posing the question to all the girls one slow afternoon in the study room of Lethbridge Collegiate. “I put a requisition in for your cell phone. You’ll need these, too.” Butch rummaged in a paper-filled box. He stood up, his face suddenly flushed. He handed Billy a pack of four-by-six lined note cards. “Come in handy for giving witnesses your name and phone number.”
Billy put the notebook in the upper left hand pocket of his suit jacket. He peeled off a number of the note cards and slid them into the upper right-hand pocket, leaving the rest on Butch’s desk. He noticed his friend was sweating. “You got a cold, Butch? You’ve been coughing a lot this morning.”
“The demon weed. Got back to it a month ago. Lorraine’s not too pleased.” Butch grinned, then moved his husky body around the end of his desk, where there was a manila envelope marked with a code number. Butch pulled the envelope open and spread out a series of black-and-white and colour photos.
“These are the site pics from the first hanging. In December. Cody Schow.”
Billy stood and examined the photos.
“See,” Butch said, “the Schow boy is hanging from the heating pipe. Naked. His feet are about six inches clear of the crate he’d stood on. Here, his clothes are folded neatly by the doorway. We found no evidence of foul play. No sexual molestation, no drugs in the bloodstream, no prints on the scene except those of the kid himself. Other than Miss Bird’s, of course, since she lives in the house.”
Billy picked up each photo. “You can read my statement and the dispatch reports,” said Butch, “but like I told you when I phoned, what we have this morning is not exactly like the first hanging.”
“You’ve got a mutilated body.”
“Other differences, too. There was no evidence in the room this morning, or anywhere else in the basement, of the crate or box the boy had used, even though the tie-up was similar to the Schow case, the noose flush against the underside of the pipe. There were blood splatters beneath Darren Riegert, which led me to assume he was bleeding as he was hanged. But these were not directly under the body, like you’d expect. And there weren’t any drops on the candles either, and they were placed directly below the boots and left arm, both of which were heavy with blood spots.”
“Quirk number one. So we can assume something was covering the area under the body that was then taken away.”
“I guess.”
“Pentacles were drawn in paint on one wall, am I right?”
“Right. Tommy estimated from the temperature and the initial signs of lividity that Darren had been dead from midnight or half past.” Butch coughed. “What also doesn’t sit right are the clothes.”
“Quirk number two.”
“Yes. The Schow kid’s clothes were folded. I assumed he’d undressed and placed them to the side. Riegert’s were not found.”
“In my years of dealing with killers, Butch, I was surprised at how many of them took souvenirs of the crime. But Riegert’s clothes may be hidden somewhere around the site, maybe buried near the house, since killers of a different ilk will leave a calling card.”
“Dodd and Johnson and me, we were flummoxed when we first saw the mess. You know, we don’t get this kind of thing around here very often.”
“Why the same house, the same basement?”
Butch shrugged. “Seems both boys lived in the place on and off when they wanted to get away from their parents.”
“Any signs of a break-in?”
“None. Miss Bird claimed the back door was open, but she admitted she had always left it unlocked — and kept it so, even after Cody Schow’s suicide — so that Darren could come and go. I got something else I need you to see.”
The two men left the office and went down a long hallway, turned left and then right. The low-ceilinged room they entered seemed all too familiar to Billy. It had tiles on the floor, walls, and ceiling, and there were two stainless steel scrub sinks. Unusual for a small police unit to have the lab and morgue on site, Billy thought. The smell of cold air and disinfectant assaulted his nostrils. Butch pulled two paper masks from a box near the scrub sinks and handed one to Billy. “Now, this isn’t normal procedure — not like you’re used to in the big city — but come take a gander. Look but don’t touch.”
Darren Riegert’s naked body lay tilted on its right side on the stainless steel surface, uncovered, the faint odour of cold dead skin filtering through the morgue’s antiseptic air. Billy unfolded two fresh rubber gloves from the morgue dispensary box and fitted them onto his hands. Butch tied him into a rubber apron that covered his chest and groin, and then Billy laid a ballpoint and his new notebook on a table by the gurney.
“Telltale sign.” Butch pointed to the semi-erect penis. “The last boy was at full mast, blue as a grape popsicle.”
Billy clicked on the overhead light. The body shone a waxy white. Pooling had already begun. Mauve patches on the lower half of the body. Rigor mortis was evident in the stiff neck, the taut look of the abdomen. Darren’s lips had swollen, and his tongue protruded slightly, blue, as if he’d been out in freezing snow. Into Billy’s mind rushed the words he’d spoken in warning to his own rookies: “Separate the cadaver from the living person. Don’t take the body home with you if you want to sleep at night.”
“See, the kid kept his boots on.”
Butch shifted, moving his hips from left to right. He kept two feet away and allowed Billy free movement around the gurney. Billy went up to the head, bent close to the neck, pressed a gloved finger gently against the mottled bruise under the chin.
“Was it a nylon or hemp rope?”
“Nylon. Standard blue half-inch.”
“Some burn here. More typical of hemp or a rough natural fibre.”
“Burn is burn.”
“Have your coroner check for hemp particles. Just in case. By the way, when does this Hawkes come to work?”
“He’s part-time and has a practice in town. He sees patients in the morning and does rounds at the regional ward after lunch. Crazy old cuss, a Brit with a bow tie. Comes in early evenings, mainly, when I call him. We don’t do a big volume here.”
Wiping his right hand with a paper towel, Billy picked up his notebook, then reached for the ballpoint. “Male — fourteen, fifteen, pooling, dried blood — dripped, streaked — on chest, pentacle shape cut into chest skin roughly between pectoral muscles. Shape five to six inches wide, five long cuts, shallow. Tongue protrusion, penis semi-erect. . . .” Billy walked down to the end of the gurney, staring at the front side of the body. “Kneecaps blood-spattered, upper left thigh blood-streaked, blood spots on toes and laces of both boots. Boots on, laced, no socks.”
“What was Hawkes’s final analysis on the Schow case?”
“Asphyxiation from ligature marks on neck, crushed frontal. No evidence of drugs.”
“Any sign of a note?”
“Suicide note you mean? No.”
“No tips or leads? Nothing suspicious?”
“The counsellor at the junior high said Schow had been in trouble with low grades, acting up in class. His mother was on welfare.”
Billy moved around the end of the gurney and began studying the back side of Darren Riegert’s body. He still felt odd examining the corpse before the coroner had seen it, but he reminded himself he was no longer with a big-city unit on the coast. Procedure back there was hierarchical, more formal. No detective touched the body until Dr. Janes had examined it with his tech unit. Here in Lethbridge, procedure was evidently more casual. And the morgue was empty except for Darren Riegert.
“Butch, who bagged this kid?”
“Tommy and Johnson. Why?”
“They bagged him facedown, right?”
“As I recall, yes. They had to. . . .”
