by Vicki Delany
Smith, the cop, looked through the things on the top of the dresser. A hairbrush, a stick of deodorant, almost finished, a scattering of colorful elastic bands, three baby bottles, clean. A tin of formula and a blue pacifier.
It was all Marigold could do not to shove the cop’s nosy hands aside. These were Ashley’s things. She didn’t have much, but it all deserved to be treated with respect. Smith opened the dresser drawers while her boss watched. Marigold wondered why a woman not much older than she would be working as a cop. Dressed like a storm trooper, doing what a bunch of old guys told her to do. She felt that Constable Smith was judging her, and Ashley as well, by the way she picked through Ashley’s few things.
Not that she’d had much: piles of disposable diapers, sleeper suits, blue mostly, neatly folded. For herself, summer clothes only, long skirts, loose tops. “Do you know if she intended to leave at the end of summer, Marigold?” Winters asked.
She shrugged. “No idea.”
Practical white underwear. A single pair of sturdy sports sandals standing against the wall. Smith found six books underneath Ashley’s underwear in the bottom drawer. Mass-market paperbacks, well-read, by big name authors. She handed them to Winters and he checked the flyleaf and flicked through the pages. Marigold could tell by his face that he didn’t find anything of importance in the books.
A book was half under the bed. Smith bent over and pulled it out. She showed it to Winters. He sighed, heavily. The book was on caring for your baby.
Smith dropped to her knees and peeked under the bed. “It’s dark, and hard to see,” she said. “Bring me a broom, Marigold, so I can fish around under here.”
No point in arguing. Marigold did as she was asked, resentment at being ordered around by a woman her own age building up inside her.
Smith pulled out a crumpled tissue, another pacifier, a small amount of dust, and a crumpled flyer protesting the Grizzly Resort.
The woman handed the flyer to the man. He read it. “Was Ashley interested in this issue?”
Ashley was intensely interested in the Grizzly Resort. It was about the only thing, other than Miller, that Ash seemed to care about. Marigold shrugged. “She said we have to take steps to preserve the environment now or there won’t be anything left for children such as Miller to appreciate.”
She hadn’t, in fact, said any such thing. She’d been interested in the resort, without taking sides. But that’s what people who were opposed to the resort said, so Marigold repeated it. Something to keep the cops happy.
Winters held up the flyer. “Did she go to this demonstration? Or any others?”
She had. And came back unusually subdued. She hadn’t said much about it, or what she thought of the protesters’ arguments. When Marigold tried to discuss it, Ashley said she hadn’t made up her mind. Personally Marigold figured that if the resort went up, the bears would go somewhere else. Plus it looked like there’d be some nice bars and restaurants at the resort, and she was hoping to apply for a job. The tips were bound to be a lot better than she got at The Bishop and the Nun.
She chewed her lip. The people who cared about grizzly bears weren’t the type to kill someone like Ashley. And the people who were developing the resort were under enough pressure from environmental groups without having the cops investigating them. They might just pack up and take their resort money to China or somewhere. And Marigold’s hopes for a job with them.
“I don’t know,” she said, looking directly at Sergeant Winters. “She didn’t say if she’d gone or not. I didn’t think to ask. Sorry.”
Winters said nothing. The silence hung in the room. Out on the street, someone yelled and a woman laughed. The room was hot and stuffy and the scent of baby—dirty diapers, baby powder, warm skin—still lingered.
“Look,” Marigold said at last, “I have to be getting ready for work, so…”
“We found a key to the apartment on her,” Winters said. “Do you know if she had any other keys?”
Ashley kept the key to her safety deposit box inside one of her socks. The cop hadn’t felt it when going through Ashley’s things. A couple of times, Ashley had gone somewhere for the whole day, and returned with enough cash for the rent and what little she and Miller needed. Marigold didn’t know where she went, or who she got a lift with. None of her business. As long as Ashley came back with rent money.
“Nope,” she said in answer to his question.
Marigold led the way to the door. Winters was still holding one of the paperback novels and the flyer.
The police walked down the stairs. The bulletproof vest the woman wore must be a nightmare to wear in this heat, not to mention the dark clothes and all that equipment she had to lug around.
Ashley hadn’t told Marigold much about her life. She was a private person. But they’d sometimes shared the odd bottle of wine on Marigold’s nights off, and she’d confessed that her real name was Jennifer, Jennifer Watson. Not as awful as Joan Jones, but still you couldn’t blame her for changing it. She was from Oakville, Ontario, which was near Toronto. Marigold was from Winnipeg, and she figured that beat any city on the boring scale.
If the police managed to discover Ashley’s real name, Marigold thought, they’d just hand Miller over to Ashley—Jennifer’s—family. Better that the baby find a nice new family to adopt him.
***
Winters carried the dog-eared paperback and the torn flyer advertising a demonstration against the Grizzly Resort down the steps. A man eyed Smith, in her uniform, suspiciously. He was old, probably her parents’ age, with gray hair tied into a pony-tail that fell almost to his waist and a beard to match. His mustache curled up at the edges. She wondered if all that hair was designed to cover up the fact that he had almost nothing on top of his skull.
“What’s interesting about that book?” she asked.
Winters stopped walking and flipped the book open to the inside front cover. Smith leaned closer to see. The page was stamped with the faded address of a second-hand bookstore in Vancouver.
“If Ashley bought this book herself, which is a big if, as it seems to have been passed from hand to hand since,” he flipped to the front matter and read, “it was published in 1998, then we know she was in Vancouver at sometime in her life. Christ, Molly, every broken-down Canadian kid ends up in Vancouver eventually. This gives us nothing. Absolutely nothing.
“A murder investigation starts with the victim,” he said, more to himself than to Smith. “Who hated/feared/loved/had an accident with/even a chance encounter with the victim so that he or she ended up killing her? It all flows from there. But this girl, Ashley? No past, and not much of a present. If I can’t figure out who Ashley was, how can I figure out who killed her?”
Chapter Six
From his office window, John Winters could see over the roofs of town, past the rows of houses clinging to the lower slopes of the mountain, and up to Koola Glacier, still snow-topped in high summer, sparkling in the hot sun. He wondered if it was ever possible to get tired of this view.
That Marigold was lying was so plain she might as well have hung a banner over Front Street to advertise the fact. She was probably lying about everything she knew about her roommate. Which might not be significant if, as Winters suspected, Ashley hadn’t told her much. But she went into overdrive in the lying department when Smith found the flyer advertising the protest against the Grizzly Resort. That demonstration had been held out of town, on the highway near the construction site, so the Mounties would have been watching. He’d circulated Ashley’s morgue photo to the RCMP, and gotten nothing positive back, but he’d ask them to have a second look with the demonstration in mind. Not that it would probably matter much—so the girl was opposed to the development. Most of the town’s population under thirty were.
He figured he could have Marigold singing her heart out in five minutes flat—send a car around to her place as she was about to leave for work, bring her into the station for a private chat in the interview room, a uniformed
officer present.
The girl could wait.
He rubbed his eyes and went back to his desk.
Ray Lopez had reported that nothing happened last night. The officer they’d brought in to play the sting had, once again, not been approached. Maybe he’d been made. Regardless, soon they’d have to send him back to his regular job. The entire complement of sworn officers of the Trafalgar City Police numbered twenty; no good for undercover work as every drug dealer in town knew where they went for lunch.
Winters had spent most of his career in Vancouver, the later part on the rough streets of the Downtown Eastside. Canada’s worst neighborhood. He hated drug dealers with a white-hot passion.
His phone rang, and he picked it up with a barked “Winters.”
“My little ray of sunshine.”
“Sorry. Just angry at the world.”
“You’re entitled, sometimes,” Eliza said. “Look, as strange as this might sound, we’ve been invited out to dinner with the M&C Development partners.”
“They want to have dinner with me?”
“Of course not. They want to have dinner with me, and reluctantly agreed to include my spouse. That would be you, the ever cheerful Sergeant Winters. José’s been invited as well.”
“Who’s José?”
“My other husband.”
“Please, Eliza, I’ve a ton of problems on my plate and I don’t want to play games.”
“Okay, okay. José’s the male model they want to work with me. We’ll be together for shots of a happy retirement couple enjoying the benefits of Grizzly Resort. You know, golfing, fine dining. Of course there isn’t yet a golf course, or a restaurant to photograph us enjoying, so they want shots of José and me on the resort location with the mountains and river in the background, and take us to Whistler for fine dining and golf background.”
“I thought you didn’t want the job.”
“I said I’m not sure.”
“This dinner’s tonight?”
“If you’re busy, I’ll make your excuses. I want to go. I want to talk to José, because I don’t know anything about his portfolio. And before I make a decision, I want to get to know the partners a bit better.” Her voice dropped into serious tones. “I know you’re busy, and I love you because you care about your job and all the garbage you have to deal with. Dinner’s at Feuilles de Mentheat eight. I’ll leave home at five to. If you can come with me, that’s good. If you want to drop by, that’s fine, and if you can’t face it, that’s all okay too.” Her voice lifted. “Time to check out the wardrobe. I hope they haven’t invited someone to join us who expects to see the face that was on the cover of Vogue thirty years ago. If so they’re going to be crushingly disappointed. Love you, muchly.” She hung up.
He stretched his legs and put his feet on the stack of boxes containing papers from some long-forgotten case. José, eh? Most of those male models were as gay as the balloons at a seven-year-old girl’s birthday party, but it never hurt to be on guard.
Nine would be a good time to arrive. Let José have a drink, or two, and be feeling comfortable but not too smashed to make trouble.
Before going to dinner, he wanted to make some sense of this Ashley girl. He’d contacted his former colleagues in Vancouver. But with no last name, and a description that would fit a good number of the young white women in Canada, they couldn’t do much to help. Her fingerprints weren’t on record. Which either meant she was a clean, responsible citizen, or had never been caught.
Maybe someone in town would recognize the photo they had of her. Taken in the morgue, it was impossible to hide the fact that she, poor thing, was dead. He’d sent the photograph to the RCMP, and all the towns in the area. He’d also sent feelers across the country and down into the States looking for info about a newborn white boy who’d disappeared a couple of months ago.
It wasn’t just that if he was to find out who killed Ashley, or cold-heartedly watched while she died, he had to know more about her. If Miller was to be returned to what relatives he might have, they needed to find out about Ashley’s background.
Ashley Doe had to have some family. Somewhere.
His phone rang again. “Winters.”
“Good news, we’re ready to go.” It was Paul Keller, the Chief Constable, calling from his home.
For a moment Winters thought the boss had found something out about Ashley. But then he remembered that she wasn’t their only problem.
“When?”
“Tomorrow afternoon. A nice quiet Sunday in suburbia. The yellow stripes,” Keller used the not always polite nickname for the RCMP, “will be joining you, but it’s your show. They’ll be in position at sixteen hundred hours. They’ll have the dog and I’ve told Al Peterson’ll you’ll need to take two of his constables to watch the street.”
“I’ll handle it.”
“I know you will. Good luck.” Keller hung up.
Chapter Seven
The morning fog was so thick, she couldn’t see the building across the street. Still, Rachel Ferguson thought, it was a better view than what she saw in the small mirror she kept in her desk drawer. With a light hand, she ran a stick of pale pink color across her lips and tucked a strand of loose hair behind her right ear. The caramel highlights in her brown hair were beginning to fade and the neat bob was looking a bit ragged. And was that a coffee stain beside the top button of her white shirt? She’d been roused out of bed at three a.m. and had pulled on the blouse she’d worn the day before, not realizing that she’d still be working fourteen hours later. The three a.m. had been easy enough: responding to a call to 911, uniforms had found the ex-boyfriend sitting in the middle of the living room, the gun tossed in a corner, sobbing over the body and saying he was sorry but she’d forced him to do it. There wasn’t much for Ferguson and her partner, Al Jacobi, to do but supervise the gathering of evidence. They’d been about to pack it in, and go home to grab a bit more sleep, when another call came in. A drive-by. One dead, a known gang member. And more suspects than would fit into a city bus. That one had kept her on the move most of the day. Then back to the office to finish up some paperwork. She’d been about to pack it in for the day with enough time for a quick nap before meeting her sister for dinner when the phone rang. The boss, wanting an update on the Allenhart case.
Her heart sunk. There was no update to give him. Which meant that he’d have nothing for his superiors.
For which he, political to his core, would blame Rachel Ferguson.
She’d worked long and hard to be assigned to homicide. Be careful of what you wish for, wasn’t that the old saying? Rachel Ferguson had joined the Seattle Police’s homicide section, her long awaited dream, only one day before the Allenhart killing.
A murder in the kitchen of one of the biggest estates in the Pacific Northwest. And after two months of an intense investigation Detective Rachel Ferguson had nothing to show.
She stood up with a sigh, tugged at the bottom of her suit jacket to straighten the hem, and glanced at her watch. With luck the reaming out, the demands that she and her team do something, wouldn’t take too long and she’d be able to get to dinner on time.
But the nap was probably a lost cause.
***
Molly Smith left the Lizard Lounge through the door onto the alley. Thin lights from the back of the bar and the nearest intersection showed her a woman pressed up against the wall. Her shirt was shoved up around her throat, her shorts were in a puddle on the ground, and her legs were wrapped around the grunting man holding her up.
“Take it inside,” Smith said.
The woman screamed. The man dropped her.
“Fuck,” he said.
“Not here,” Smith said. “You have one minute to be out of my sight or I’m taking you in. Public indecency, we call it. Might even make tomorrow’s papers.”
The woman scooped her pants up, but her partner was already disappearing into the night, zipping his fly as he ran.
“That is not a gentleman,” Sm
ith said.
The woman was young, too young to be allowed into the bars. Her hair was long and straight, and her pants barely reached her pelvic bones. She pulled her T-shirt down over breasts not yet completely developed.
“Dyke,” she said to Smith.
“Go home, Lorraine. Please. You don’t need this. Why don’t you go to the support center tomorrow? You know my mom works there sometimes. You can talk to her.”
“I do that, I’ll turn into a dyke cop. Screw you, Molly.”
Smith watched as Lorraine walked up the alley, wiggling her hips as she struggled to fasten the zipper on her shorts. She wasn’t a hooker, just a lost girl whose neighbors were always calling the cops to come break up the battle raging in her kitchen. She was looking for a man to love her.
Smith wanted to spit.
Instead she kept walking. The rest of the alley was quiet. Something rustled in the hedges on one side. A cat mewed softly and she caught a flash of yellow eyes.
She passed behind Rosemary’s Campfire Kitchen, the store next to her parents’ place, and Wolf River Books. She crossed Elm Street. The scent of the day’s baking still lingered in the air from Alphonse’s bakery. Ahead of her, she could hear laughter coming from Feuilles de Menthe, the new, expensive, highly fashionable restaurant.
The sun was setting and the light over the back door of the restaurant was weak.
A black shape lay in the alley. At first she thought it was a garbage bag. Then it cried out. She ran forward. It was a man, small and slight. He’d wrapped himself into a tight ball. He gripped his stomach, and moaned. She dropped to her haunches beside him and shouted into the radio at her shoulder asking for an ambulance. The scent of ripe vomit overpowered that of bread and garlic. “Hold on, buddy. Help’s on the way.”
Round white eyes stared up at her. “No,” he whispered. “Fine.”
“I can see that. But let’s get a second opinion, okay?”
“No,” he said, as he passed out.
