Lullaby for the Nameless (Nolan, Hart & Tain Thrillers)

by Ruttan, Sandra

  A lot of possibilities had gone through Ashlyn’s mind as she’d made the trip to BC’s Interior. The one thing that hadn’t occurred to her was that she might find the station locked with no sign of anyone around.

  Ashlyn turned. The crisp morning air had a surprisingly strong smell of smoke. She wondered if wood-burning fireplaces were that common in the area. Would she have a wood stove in her temporary accommodations? She didn’t even know where she’d be living.

  The transfer had been that abrupt. Nighthawk Crossing didn’t have a large RCMP detachment, but a few bad headlines had put the small town on the provincial map for all the wrong reasons, and it had become a focal point for politicians who wanted to give people the idea they were actually serious about doing something about crime.

  Accused serial killer Robert Pickton had been on trial since January, and the press hadn’t been content to cover the courtroom drama. They’d been eager to remind residents that the police had failed the women Pickton was accused of murdering, that prejudice against sex-trade workers and the homeless was rampant in society. The number of missing women bore witness to a pervasive indifference, but while most citizens were comfortable living with their prejudices they were also willing to assert that the people paid to serve and protect should not allow their own biases to cloud their judgment or dictate how they handled their jobs.

  In other words, the police should care, even if the rest of society didn’t. That was the convenient thing to say when the eyes of the world were looking down their noses at a police force that had allowed a pig farmer to murder forty-nine women before being caught.

  Pointing out he’d only allegedly murdered forty-nine women didn’t help much.

  With the police, it was possible to understand. Call after call, arrest after arrest—they did what they could to get women off the streets. And court date after court date, they watched the women walk back out onto the street after serving a minimal time behind bars or having their bail paid by their pimp.

  The truth was, if one of those windblown citizens had been mugged for so much as twenty bucks or harassed by a squeegee guy on East Hastings they would have begrudged the lack of police response because of reassigned manpower dealing with the serial-killer case. As long as the police were still there to take the call when an upstanding taxpaying citizen had his mailbox covered with graffiti, they shouldn’t embarrass the nation with their prejudices, although that was the condition inferred silently. Nobody wanted to be the one to actually say it. It would confirm the bias—the belief that some victims were more important than others—wasn’t a police prejudice. The police worked on the scale of priorities within the limits of the manpower and resources they had available and the political pressure they were under. It was people who decided some victims were more important than others.

  Reporters had been quick to capitalize on the story, and when interest in Pickton’s victims began to fade, they pointed to the stalled investigations of unsolved missingpersons cases and the disappearances of several teenagers in the Interior, in the Similkameen Valley. More accusations of police negligence followed. The first girl had disappeared more than eighteen months earlier, while the most recent girl to disappear had already been missing for a few weeks before her mother had reported her disappearance. During the months between, nine other girls had vanished. The fallout from the finger-pointing had prompted officials to form a task force, and under normal circumstances that would have taken some wind out of the critics’ sails.

  Not this time. Instead, the mudslinging had intensified. Native girls had been disappearing in the area for over a year and a half and nothing had been done. It had taken missing white girls from decent middle-class families to get the attention of politicians. Until then, the various officers investigating individual cases hadn’t even been considering a connection between the missing Native girls and missing white girls.

  Oddly enough, as many people seemed to be upset by the use of the term Native as by the lack of action from the police. The problem with changing the language to be politically correct was that you couldn’t change what had been ingrained in the minds of people for decades, said with no offense intended but now taken as an insult. Ashlyn had never wrapped her head around the term Aboriginal, and First Nations sounded so general, so vague.

  So…sanitized. “Black” was offensive, and now “Native” wasn’t the preferred label. She wondered when someone would decide “White” should be banned. Perhaps she’d have to start calling herself a European-Canadian.

  Bickering over semantics aside, the RCMP was being forced to look over every unsolved missingpersons case in the area over the last five years that could be connected to the missing girls.

  Ashlyn paced back and forth on the sidewalk by the entrance. Some members of the team were at least a few weeks ahead of her. The task force had been created in August, and she knew some of the men had worked in Nighthawk Crossing and the surrounding area prior to being reassigned, but for some reason she was being transferred in now, and with only thirty-six hours’ advance notice, there hadn’t been much time to get a handle on what was going on.

  A glance at her watch told her she was ten minutes late. Shit…Had she set her clock back when she’d crossed the border from Alberta? Maybe she was actually early. She’d been a bit behind schedule. The Trans-Canada Highway cut through the center of Calgary, and an accident at the intersection with Center Street had forced drivers to weave through residential areas, trying to make their way around the mess. Canada’s fourth-largest city desperately needed a ring road, but politics had stalled the process. Billions in oil revenue pumped into the local economy annually, but there wasn’t enough money to build the highway. Wasn’t that always the way?

  She’d still found time to stop at the candy store in Banff and stock up on treats for her nieces and nephews and her cousin’s daughter.

  Those things were clear in her mind, but what had happened when she’d continued west and crossed the border wasn’t.

  She drew in a breath and let it out slowly. The way it pricked her throat was a reminder that summer was in its twilight. When she’d gotten out of her car, she would have described it as a crisp morning, but as she stood on the sidewalk, wondering if she hadn’t set her watch back, she changed her mind. It was chilly.

  She pulled out her cell phone to solve the mystery, then adjusted the time on her watch. Early.

  Instead of returning to her car to warm up, Ashlyn started to walk around the building. The station was small, not designed for task forces and long-term investigations that required plainclothes officers. It didn’t take long to make her way around to the back.

  When she reached the back of the building, a quick scan of the area took in the back door of the station and a handful of vehicles filling up most of the staff parking.

  Ashlyn frowned and turned to look at the back door again. It wasn’t flush against the frame, and as she stepped closer, she could see what appeared to be a dark plastic bag that had been caught in the bottom. She crouched down and looked at the bag, which she guessed must contain a ream’s worth of paper, if not more. Ashlyn ran her hand along the edge of the door and looked in.

  It wasn’t closed.

  Someone had dropped the bag, probably without realizing it, and failed to secure the back door.

  They must have left in a hurry. A bundle of five hundred sheets of paper had some weight to it. How could anyone not notice?

  Ashlyn grabbed the bag and tugged on it, but failed to dislodge it from the door. She paused.

  Her top priority should be closing the door to secure the station, but she had an opportunity to get inside. Part of her disliked the idea of literally sneaking in the back door.

  She thought about the locked front door and glanced around the parking lot again. There were too many vehicles on site for the station to be empty, so she pressed her head up against the side of the door.

  No voices, no cough, no hum of a photocopier at work or f
ootsteps down the hall. She jumped when she heard a phone ring in the distance. It rang half a dozen times before it stopped. No one had answered it.

  After one final glance around, Ashlyn pulled the door open, wedged herself in the opening and picked up the bag. As she looked up into the station, she listened to the silence.

  Close the door, go back to her car and wait? Although she was early, she had no idea how long she might sit there, and without access to the station, she also didn’t have access to the temporary accommodations she was being provided with, so she had nowhere else to go.

  The door was open. She could go inside. Ashlyn glanced at the bundle in her hand. How could a trained officer drop a bag filled with papers and not notice it?

  She’d assumed they were dropped when someone was leaving. What if someone had dropped them on their way in? She thought about the unanswered phone.

  They could be in the bathroom or, worse, in need of medical assistance. Only one thing was certain. Something wasn’t right.

  Ashlyn stepped inside. The back door opened to what amounted to a large closet that the hall went through, before turning. It was still possible someone was there who hadn’t heard her at the front door.

  After a deep breath and quick glance at the fully shut door behind her, Ashlyn walked through the entry area and turned to go down the hall.

  “Who the hell are you, and just what the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  Said as the file she was reading was snatched out of her hands with so much force the chair she was sitting in wobbled. She’d been leaning back, the front legs off the ground, her feet propped up by the bottom desk drawer, which had already been pulled out. Had it not been for her presence of mind and ability to grab the corner of the desk beside her, Ashlyn doubted she would have stayed upright.

  The hands that had grabbed the papers reached for her then, and she was yanked up out of the chair before she had a chance to say anything. “You have any idea what kind of trouble you’re in?”

  “I—”

  Native. First Nations. What was she supposed to call him? Whatever the label, the man reeked with the acrid smell of smoke, though it wasn’t from cigarettes. It was like a heavily condensed version of what she’d smelled in the air outside earlier.

  Not what she’d call conventionally good-looking, but he had magnetic eyes, hair long enough to pull back in a ponytail and was made of lean muscle. She could tell from the grip he had on her.

  He looked down at the papers she’d tossed on the desk.

  They were the ones she’d found wedged in the back door. After a quick search of the station, Ashlyn had concluded it was empty. The only thing she was sure of was which room the sergeant worked from and which room was being used for the investigation, because a hastily scrawled sign with the name of her team had been stuck against the door with sticky tack. Inside, there were more desks than the room—which was shaped like a backwards capital L—had been designed to hold. Three were pushed up against one another at the far end of the room, with two facing each other in the center.

  She’d scanned the desks. Other than the usual assortment of family photos and a picture of a pretty girl on the desk marked Nolan, there hadn’t been much on the surface to take note of. The bulletin boards weren’t much better. Nothing had been left out, available for her perusal, and she was reluctant to leaf through closed folders on desks or files in drawers. After gleaning all she could from the few exposed scraps of paper lying around, Ashlyn had sat down at the one lonely desk closest to the entrance, tucked up against an extra corner where the room narrowed, presumably for a closet or storage space for the room beside this one. The desk shared space with a fax machine, while a portable metal shelf beside it held a printer. She’d sat down and pulled out the bag of papers she’d found.

  Jackpot. Copied documents detailing the investigation.

  In her initial excitement over having something concrete to study while she waited, she hadn’t even stopped to consider the obvious, and now, as she stared into the dark eyes of the man who held her by her shoulders, she realized just how bad it looked.

  “I—”

  “Tain, where the hell do you get—”

  As the voice cut in from the hallway, the man dropped his hold on Ashlyn’s left shoulder and spun, pulling her beside him by the right arm.

  “Not now, Nolan.”

  Nolan looked at Ashlyn, and his brow furrowed. “What’s going on?”

  “I—” Ashlyn started again.

  Tain cut her off. “If you’ve got nothing better to do, you can get lost while I have a little chat with our visitor. I found her snooping around my desk.”

  “Don’t worry. I doubt she found anything of importance there.” Said with more than a liberal sprinkling of sarcasm.

  The fingers dug into Ashlyn’s arm. “Coming from someone who wouldn’t know a lead if it slapped him in the face.”

  Nolan had dirty blond hair, eyes as blue as the summer sky and didn’t look much older than Ashlyn was. Now that she thought about it, the man who was still digging his fingers into her arm probably only had a few years on her as well.

  Nolan’s mouth twisted with a wry smile. Ashlyn detected the smell of smoke on him as well, almost unnoticed because of her proximity to the man called Tain.

  “You’re still pissed off because the sergeant won’t go for a search warrant. In case you’ve forgotten, you need a little thing called evidence,” Nolan said.

  “Take your shots now. You can read about them in the newspaper tomorrow.”

  The smile slipped from Nolan’s face. “She’s a reporter?”

  “Can you think of another reason she’d sneak into a police station and snoop around?” Tain had Ashlyn’s arm in a vise and didn’t loosen his grip. “Guess she’s about to get a jailhouse exclusive.”

  Nolan sighed and ran his fingers through his hair, then shrugged. “Drop her at the front desk. We don’t have time to waste with this crap.”

  “Who the hell died and made you my boss, Nolan?”

  Nolan’s voice had started off with the tone of lecturing parent but quickly filled with an acidic bite. He straightened up, adding half an inch to his height. “The sergeant gave you an order, Tain.”

  “Yeah? And he sent you in here to check up on me?”

  “In case you’ve forgotten, I’ve got the lead on this.”

  “One thing you’re in charge of and you think you’re king of the world. Run off to your little meeting, Nolan. I’m doing you a favor. You don’t even want me on this.”

  Nolan’s shoulders stiffened. “The sergeant gave us an order, Tain, or I wouldn’t waste my time or breath.”

  “Good.”

  “Good?”

  “You’re catching on. You used to be too stupid to admit when you were in over your head.”

  Nolan took a step forward, jaw clenched as he pointed at the man who still had Ashlyn in his grip. “And apparently just stupid enough to think one of these days you might get it into your head to do your damn job. If you aren’t going to be part of this team, there’s the door.” Nolan pointed to the back entrance.

  Tain laughed. “Is that the best you can do? Get out of my face.”

  Ashlyn was still constrained by the grip Tain had on her, but she felt a tension in the man that was a direct response to Nolan’s approach. For half a second, she thought Tain was going to hit him. But instead of lashing out physically, he grew still. Initially, Tain had given Nolan his halfhearted attention, but now he was staring at the man with the same intensity she’d felt when he’d yanked her to her feet.

  Nolan hesitated as he stared back. Then he looked down at the desk.

  “What’s this?” he asked as he reached for the pile of copied papers Ashlyn had been reading.

  “None of your goddamn business.” Tain slammed his hand down on top of the stack of sheets.

  “Nolan, don’t you—”

  Another voice, from the hall. This one was familiar, and Ashlyn p
laced it immediately.

  Sergeant Mike Sullivan stepped into the room and around Nolan. In one hand he held a folder, but it dropped a little as his focus shifted from the papers inside to the people in the room. There was no color in his cheeks, no hint of a smile or lift of his eyebrows to indicate any surprise or annoyance at the scene in front of him.

  “Constable Tain.”

  “Sir.”

  “Would you care to explain why you’re manhandling Constable Hart?”

  Ashlyn felt the grip loosen, although Tain didn’t let go.

  “Sir?”

  “Constable Ashlyn Hart, the newest member of our team.” Sullivan stepped forward and extended his hand, forcing Tain to release her arm. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here to meet you this morning. A local hotel caught fire yesterday evening, and we were out there all night.”

  Which explained the smell of smoke.

  Sullivan glanced at Nolan and Tain. “I trust they’ve made you feel right at home.”

  Not an ounce of sincerity in his words.

  Ashlyn offered a slight smile. “It’s good to be here, sir.”

  “Since you’ve already met your partner, I’ll let him show you around. After he wraps up the meeting, that is.” Sullivan glanced at his watch, looked up at Nolan, then turned and started walking out the door. “She can have Winters’s old desk, Nolan.

  “Oh, and Tain? I’d like a full report on the meeting on my desk this afternoon.”

  The sergeant disappeared around the corner, far enough away to not hear Tain’s muttered “Yes, sir” response.

  Nolan almost smiled before he turned on his heel and marched out of the room without another word to Tain or his new partner.

  The Native wasn’t quite so forgiving. He yanked the top drawer of his desk open, grabbed the papers Ashlyn had been reading and dropped them inside before slamming it shut. “I ever catch you snooping around my desk again, I’ll deal with you myself.”