Deep as the Dead

by Kylie Brant

  “Did anyone else go to find Lawler when she left the booth?”

  He swung his head back and forth. “It was louder than hell in there. Hunter was the one who was plastered up against her. Thought he had the best chance with her because of it, but then he spilled that drink, she went to the restroom, and the rest of us started talking about getting out of there.” He craned his head so he could see the clock on the wall. “Can I go now?”

  “Not yet. I need you to call this number. Hunter Owens.” She tapped his name on the list. “He’ll pick up for you.”

  Resignedly, he looked at the name she was indicating. “He was heading downtown tonight. Called me earlier and wanted me to come. I’ll text him.” Alexa watched him type a message in all caps. URGENT. CALL ME. Alexa appreciated the sentiment.

  According to Kantor, Lawler had left the booth around twelve-thirty. She and Ethan had been to that club shortly after one. With the time of death pegged between two and three a.m., it was looking more and more like Zoomey’s was the place Lawler had met up with the offender.

  “We could go inside. I’d buy you a drink.”

  Alexa surveyed Hunter Owens impassively. It was rare for her to take an immediate dislike to someone, but she’d learned to rely on her first impressions. And Owens struck her as a too-too type. Too handsome, too smooth and much too sure of himself. The sort of entitled jerk she’d met on more occasions than she could count. It didn’t surprise her in the least that Kantor had mentioned Owens thought he’d had the best shot with Lawler. His sort never lacked confidence.

  “Did Bobby Kantor tell you about what happened to the woman sitting with you guys last night?” They were on the sidewalk in front of yet another club. Owens had agreed to meet her outside it.

  “Yeah. That blew my mind.” As he bent his head to talk to her, he subtly angled his body closer. “Someone we just spoke to yesterday…dead.” He shook his head sorrowfully. Alexa wished she didn’t believe it was feigned.

  “Just to be clear…” She bent down and brought out the woman’s photo. “This is the woman you spoke to?” She used the opportunity to shift a few inches away. The guy had a smarmy vibe.

  Owens nodded solemnly. “That’s her. She seemed really sweet. Friendly. All of us hit it off.”

  “Is that why you wrote your name on her shoulder? Because you were ‘hitting it off?’” It was a bluff. All Alexa knew was that his number was one of a hundred possible phone numbers. But she saw by his expression that she’d been correct.

  He shrugged, laughed a little. “Yeah. It was a joke. See, I wanted to give Jeanette my number, but her phone was dead. So…” He shrugged. “She was sitting right next to me. I wrote her on her back instead. She didn’t mind,” he hastened to add. “She was laughing, too.”

  “So the two of you were getting along.” Alexa was in no mood to prolong this conversation. “You must have been surprised when she didn’t come back to the table.”

  Something shifted slightly in his expression before he blanked it. Alexa had the feeling that surprise hadn’t been the emotion he’d experienced.

  “I was worried about her when she didn’t return,” he said piously, reaching out a

  hand to lean against the red-brick front. “It was pretty crazy in there. The lines to the restrooms were ridiculous, and I didn’t see her in them when I checked. But then I ducked out the back—”

  “You went out the back door?”

  “Yeah. It says it’s alarmed, but it isn’t.” He gave her a smile that was meant to be charming. “Most of them aren’t. Guys sometimes skip the queues and use the alley around back to ah…relieve themselves.”

  “So that’s what you did when you didn’t see Lawler.”

  “I said I didn’t see her in line,” he corrected her, reaching up with his free hand to smooth his gelled hair. “I was in a sort of in a doorway, behind the Dumpster, taking leak. And when I looked up, I saw her in the alley, hanging all over some other guy.”

  Everything inside Alexa stilled. “Another man?”

  “Yeah.” And this time, he didn’t attempt to keep the disgust from his expression. “I mean, I’m not saying she owed me anything just because I bought her a few drinks, but it was still pretty shitty for her to leave with someone else and not even tell me.”

  “Did they see you?”

  “I don’t know. Didn’t seem to.”

  “Did you tell your friends about what you’d seen?”

  “I don’t remember. When I got back, they were ready to leave, so I went with them.”

  Alexa bent and got the sketches of the UNSUB from her bag and showed them to Owens. “Is this the man she was with?”

  “I didn’t see him from the front. And hey, this guy is old.” He shook one of the sketches.

  “We think he was wearing a wig in that one. What did you mean when you said Jeanette was hanging on him?”

  It was the wrong question to ask. Owens took the opportunity to demonstrate, leaning heavily on her, one arm thrown around her shoulders. “Sort of like this.” Alexa gave him an elbow jab that had him dropping his arm and stepping away, but not without a self-satisfied grin on his face. “She was pretty drunk. I suppose he could have been helping her to the car.”

  The blood began to pound in her veins. “A car. Not a van?”

  “What? No, it was a car. Toyota Camry, I think. Black or navy…hard to tell in the dark.”

  “But you could see well enough to know the make?”

  “I drive a red Camry so I recognized it. I can tell you it had a light interior, though. Saw it when the dome light went on.”

  “Which door did he open?”

  Owens thought a moment. “Back driver side. Which is weird now that I think about it. Unless she was so drunk, he was just going to have her lay…” His eyes widened. “Hey, you don’t think…that couldn’t have been the killer, could it?”

  Handsome, Alexa thought again. But maybe not too bright. “Yes. I think that’s likely.”

  The last pastor had spoken. The people in the park were holding candles high, singing a hymn and swaying to the music. Ethan supposed it would be a moving sight, had he not been on the watch for a killer.

  A fruitless effort so far.

  The candles that had been given out by the sponsors of the event did provide one service: they lit up the face of the person holding them. Ethan and his men were crisscrossing through the crowd in a grid pattern now. Looking at faces. Watching those who held no candles at all.

  He thought again about the odds of the UNSUB coming. Although it was out of character, an obsession could compel a person to take risks they ordinarily wouldn’t. Risks that just might get the man nearer to Alexa.

  He looked in the direction of her stand-in. The offender would have to get fairly close to Dara now to identify her. Maybe he’d never shown up. Perhaps he’d wait to make his move when she was leaving. Frustration mounted. And maybe this whole thing had been a complete waste of time.

  Moments after he had the thought, three loud reports sounded behind him. “Gun!” a male voice shouted. He whirled, pulling his weapon in one smooth move. People began screaming, pushing at each other in their rush to get away. Candles were dropped in the frenzy. A few sparked and flamed in the grass. He ran toward the fountain where he’d last seen Dara and the uniforms. They were spreading out in an arc across the southeast corner, weapons drawn.

  Ethan mentally cursed. “Position two,” he said into the phone, “reassume your original stance.” Without waiting for them to do so, he continued, “It’s a distraction. Look for someone approaching Lavoie.” Pandemonium reigned for a few minutes. One uniformed officer was shouting into a megaphone, trying to bring order to the exodus. Others were rushing to put out the small fires that had sprung up where the candles had been abandoned or aiding people who had fallen.

  There were no wounded as far as he could tell. Because there hadn’t been a gun at all. To Ethan’s trained ear, the noise had likely been firecrackers.
A planned distraction.

  Because, Ethan thought as he ran through the jostling crowd, this was the effect the offender had wanted. Exactly this.

  There. The uniforms had resumed position around Lavoie, probably too late. A figure was peeling sharply away from the trio and heading diagonally for the nearby street. “Positions eight and nine. Southeast corner behind the fountain. Dark pants and cap. Oversized gray shirt.” He holstered his weapon, running now, but he was slowed by people fleeing the area. With relief, he saw two of officers racing in his direction. “Spread out. Cut him off.”

  But once out of the park the figure sprinted across traffic, dodging cars. Tires shrieked as the vehicles jerked to a stop. Horns blared. Ethan and his men followed suit. The stranger ran down a block and then veered into an alley.

  “Position eight take the street on the south side of the buildings. Nine opposite.” Ethan’s cell was still at his ear. He winced as he banged his hip against the car that had barely avoided mowing him down, and headed down the shadowy passageway in search of the stranger.

  He pulled his weapon again. He had no way to be certain the man he was chasing was the UNSUB. But the stranger had run, and that was suspicious in and of itself. He flattened himself against the wall of a building and moved swiftly down the alley, swinging around at every doorway, weapon ready.

  He kicked through piles of rubbish piled high enough to conceal someone. The Dumpster was pressed up against the wall of a building. He moved around the three free sides before flipping open the lid. Checked inside. A foul odor emanated. Ethan pulled out his cell and turned on the flashlight app. The receptacle was full. He watched for several moments. Was there the barest movement inside? Could be a rat.

  Or it could be a two-legged rodent. Ethan lowered the lid, keeping an eye on the Dumpster as he quickly finished searching the rest of the alley, before backtracking, checking the entrances into the buildings that lined it. The doors were all locked.

  Meechum and Kelly were waiting at the end of the alley. Ethan tucked his phone in his pocket and silently waved them toward the Dumpster. It was large, made of hard plastic instead of steel, with a split top. He positioned himself at the back end, while the other two men took the front

  Ethan held up fingers for a silent countdown. Three. Two. One. In unison, the three of them heaved and pulled at the container, finally managing to tip it forward, its contents spilling onto the ground.

  Ethan pulled his weapon and crouched down in front of it, while the other two officer flipped the lids up. “You’ll need to crawl out. Slowly,” he said conversationally to the figure cowering inside. “Because I’m sure as hell not coming inside to get you.”

  The stench emanating from the man on the other side of the table in the Halifax PD room was enough to turn Ethan’s stomach. He had a feeling that just his brush with the Dumpster had left a similar smell clinging to his clothes. The glamour of the job, he thought sourly, just never quit. Not to mention the frustration. Because whoever it was that they’d hauled back to the police headquarters, it was easy enough to see that it wasn’t the UNSUB they sought.

  “I didn’t do nothing wrong,” the man insisted stubbornly. He had a few days’ growth of beard on his jaw and was missing his front teeth. He’d refused to give a name and carried no ID. He did, however, eagerly drink the can of Pepsi Meechum had fetched for him, objecting angrily when the officer took it away before he finished it. The officer would lift a print. If the stranger were in the system, they’d find out soon enough.

  “Then why did you run?” asked Ethan logically.

  “’Cuz you was chasing me!”

  “You had firecrackers in your pocket when we searched you. You deliberately caused a commotion that could have caused serious injury to a panicked crowd. There is any number of charges we could bring.” He paused, letting that sink in for a moment before continuing. “Maybe it wasn’t your idea, though. If that’s the case, you need to let us know.”

  “She said it was just a prank. No one would get hurt.”

  Ethan stilled. “She?”

  “The old lady who stopped me on her way to the park. She said there was a service going on over there. Gave me ten bucks to light the firecrackers when it got dark.”

  “An old lady did that.”

  Stubbornly, the man nodded. He looked like he was in his mid-sixties, Ethan figured, although a hard life had a way of carving years onto a face prematurely. “She had long brown curly hair and a big hat on. One of those long flowered dresses with a sweater over it.” He lowered his voice. “She wasn’t much to look at. A woman her age shouldn’t wear her hair that long, you ask me.”

  Son of a bitch. It didn’t take much imagination to know the man had talked to the UNSUB. Ethan thought quickly. If they were lucky, maybe one of the video cameras around the park had picked up the offender. But he needed more.

  He took copies of the two sketches out of his pocket and showed them to the man, who studied each intently before slowly shaking his head. “These are men. I talked to a lady.”

  “Look at the faces,” Ethan instructed slowly. “Are any of them the same shape as the woman you saw? Are the noses or mouths similar?”

  The man’s jaw dropped. He stabbed a finger at the sketch Patrick, the boy in Truro, had helped develop. “You know what? If this didn’t have a mustache, and maybe longer hair, it could almost look like the lady’s brother!”

  “There. That’s her. Him.” Ethan, Nyle and the officers who’d manned the video cameras were in a conference room at the police department. A TV and video equipment had been carried in and hooked up so they could watch the feed from each of the cameras. They were fast-forwarding through most of it, slowing it only when something of interest came up.

  Like a woman in a flowered dress and large hat.

  “Matches the description Rogers gave us.” Joe Rogers, the man they’d flushed out of the Dumpster. Meechum had gotten a hit on his prints. A vagrant, with a few bumps for public intox. Exactly the type of person who would jump at the chance to make a few bucks with no questions asked.

  “She didn’t come to the park alone,” pointed out the officer who’d operated that camera. “She was with another couple, which is why I didn’t think anything of it. They walked in together, and she stuck with them, at least in this frame.”

  Ethan stole a look at the clock on the wall. He was glad he’d had Nyle run the debriefing after the vigil before joining them. They were going to be here half the night as it was. The last time Ethan had checked his phone, he’d found a text from Alexa. She’d headed back to the hotel hours ago. Had been gone when Nyle had checked in the equipment back at the RCMP headquarters. It was just as well. Maybe one of them would get a few hours’ sleep tonight.

  “Okay, let’s look at the next one.” It was a laborious process. They were going through all the films, watching enough on each to piece together the UNSUB’s progress from the moment he entered the park. Ethan noted how he inched closer and closer to the front, as if in search of a better view. Each time he changed position he was careful to attach himself to someone nearby. He’d known that a single attendee would draw more attention than one in a group, although once the park had gotten congested, it was hard to tell the difference.

  An hour later, Ethan jabbed a finger at the screen. “And there he is after the firecrackers went off.” The crowd was scattering, but the UNSUB was moving with a single-minded focus toward Alexa’s stand-in.

  “You can see the limp now,” Nyle murmured.

  “Not enough to slow him down much, but it’s there,” Ethan agreed. Patrick had proven to be their most observant witness so far. “What’s that? In his hand?” Without breaking stride, the UNSUB had reached into the purse he carried and taken something out.

  “Let me see if I can enlarge it.” The officer running the film paused it, backed up to the spot Ethan had indicated and zoomed in. The larger image was fuzzy. But there was no mistaking something long and narrow extending from
the offender’s closed hand.

  “A needle.” Ethan sat back in his chair, half-stunned. Had the UNSUB thought he’d have a chance at Alexa in a park full of cops? “Resume the film.” He watched the offender approach Lavoie and the uniforms. Saw the trio break apart, drawing their weapons and facing the crowd. Ethan bit back a curse when the figure in the long flowered dress stopped. The UNSUB abruptly changed course and attached himself to a passel of vigil-goers and was lost in the mob.

  He scrubbed both hands over his face. The offender had gotten close enough to see that they’d used a female decoy. It was all too easy to imagine a far different scene if Alexa had been at the park. If the two uniforms on either side of her had broken rank, as they had in the film. Leaving her exposed for a few instants. He still didn’t understand, even in that scenario, how the UNSUB had hoped to get her away from the area without being observed. But it hammered home to him just how far adrift the man was from his usual behavior.

  And his unpredictability just heightened the danger.

  “Let’s pick him up from his exit.” The videos were changed and they tracked the man being jostled in the throng as he made his way back toward the other end of the park. They weren’t able to get a full-figure shot until he veered toward the opposite end, head tipped down as if in a purposeful effort to avoid the camera the nearby plainclothes officer held. He reached into his purse with a now-empty hand. Withdrew… Ethan squinted. Car keys? He watched until the offender cut away from the park and walked quickly down the street.

  “Back up to where we saw him take the keys out of the purse,” Ethan ordered. Once the officer had obeyed, he said, “Zoom in there.”

  A key was held pointed outward. Ready for use. Had the man been parked nearby? That was the area where Rogers had said he’d been approached.

  “Looks like an insignia on the keychain,” Nyle observed. He was closer to the screen than Ethan was. “Can you enhance just that area?”

  “Getting beyond my technical skills,” the officer replied, but he attempted to do so. He got down and pressed his face almost against the screen to peer at it. “Can’t quite make it out, but the shape of it…does it remind anyone else of the CarsNow rental logo?”