Negative Image

by Vicki Delany

  Highly unusual for an affluent woman.

  “Have you seen Ms. Barton this morning?”

  “No, and I wouldn’t expect to.”

  “Do you know where she might have gone?”

  “No. I don’t involve myself in my husband’s profession.”

  “Is she likely to be in a car?”

  “She can’t walk into the mountains, you know. Rudy rented a car for their use.”

  Winters turned to Lopez. “The registration book will have a record of the plates. Ask our people and the Mounties to be on the lookout for it, and to escort Ms. Barton back to the hotel.”

  Lopez slipped out.

  “When did you last see your husband?”

  “Yesterday around six, six-thirty. He invited me to come to his room and have a look at the day’s shoot.”

  He invited her?

  “And then?”

  Mrs. Steiner got to her feet. She was much taller than Winters expected, and he looked down to see leather boots with heels like skyscrapers. Beige woolen pants, showing thin legs and lack of hips, were tucked into the boots. A tailored blue jacket nipped in at the thin waist covered a red blouse with shiny gold buttons straining to contain her more-than-adequate breasts. He knew, because his wife had told him, that women’s breasts were largely composed of fat. A large bosom on a thin body were rarely a natural phenomenon. A pair of small diamond earrings was her only jewelry.

  “I have nothing further to say to you at this time,” she said.

  “A few more questions, if you don’t mind. After you saw these photographs…”

  “I do mind.”

  “Did you and Mr. Steiner go out to dinner?”

  She remained on her feet. “Rudy didn’t like to eat in restaurants. He preferred to have something sent up to his room.”

  “Did you have dinner with him in his room?”

  She headed for the door. “I do not have to answer your questions. I am calling my lawyer, and he will advise me further. He’ll make arrangements to take me to see Rudy and do whatever needs to be done.” She smelled of something vaguely familiar, and now that she was moving he recognized it. It was the same perfume Eliza used. On Eliza the scent drifted behind her, so you weren’t quite sure what you were smelling, only that it was wonderful. Josie had splashed it on like a five-year-old playing dress-up at her mother’s dressing table.

  She reached for the handle of the door, and jumped back as it swung open.

  Ray Lopez looked startled to see her, but he spoke to his boss. “Message from Gavin. They’ve found a gun in a dumpster out back.”

  Mrs. Steiner ducked past him and left the room. Winters hadn’t been able to see her face when she heard the detective’s news.

  Chapter Five

  Molly Smith’s father looked awful. Just awful. His skin was more yellow than white, his normally cheerful plump cheeks sunken, his blue eyes flat. She’d gone up with her mother to see him settled into a bed. He was in a room for four; only one other bed was occupied. At least he got a place by the window. He couldn’t see outside, the mountains in the background, the gardens in the foreground, brown and dead after the long winter, but it was someplace for the visitor to stand and look out, when it all got too much.

  Lucky had fussed and fluffed pillows and chattered cheerfully, while Molly looked out the window and watched a gray jay searching for seeds under a pine tree.

  Andy lay there, and let his wife fuss.

  Hospitals, Smith thought, watching a hawk circling high overhead, were horrible places. She’d spent plenty of time in emergency, it was part of the job after all. Bringing in drunken adolescents, attempted suicides, transients off their meds, battered wives. By the time she’d heard about the attack on Graham, her fiancé, and made the frantic journey from Victoria to Vancouver to the hospital, he was dead. They’d cleaned him up and laid him out, and taken her to a nice confortable room to say good-bye. She hadn’t come with anyone, and the hospital staff had been so kind.

  The memories of the day their dreams of life together died were largely a blur, and Smith sometimes wondered what was real and what wasn’t.

  Upstairs in the adult wards it was darned depressing. Couldn’t they paint the walls something more attractive than industrial beige, or hang some modern photographs? Even a mass-produced print of sunlight on the mountains or a field of wildflowers would go a long way. The children’s wing managed to look bright and cheery. Maybe hospital administrators didn’t think adults needed cheering up. The machine hooked to Andy’s roommate beeped at regular intervals, and the room smelled of disinfectant, body fluids, sickness and fear, all overlaid by a thick, but not thick enough, layer of disinfectant.

  The jay took flight and Smith turned and gave her parents a forced smile. “It’s almost six, Mom. I have to go back to the station and close out my shift. Then I’ll go down to the store and relieve Flower and lock up.” She looked down at her uniform. “I’d better go home and change first. Neither the city nor the customers want me running the cash register dressed like this. Did you hear what I said, Mom?”

  “Yes, dear. Would you like a drink of water, Andy?”

  “No.”

  “Is there anything I can bring back?” Smith asked.

  “Get some granola bars,” Lucky said, “and some fruit and nuts so your father can eat when he wants and not at whatever ungodly hour they bring in the meals. Take some of the water bottles from the store and fill them. You know I can’t abide bottled water, but your father needs to be able to have a drink whenever he wants.”

  “Don’t talk about me as if I’m not here, Lucky. I am capable of asking for a glass of water.” His words were slightly slurred around the edges and his eyes didn’t quite focus. Pain-killers probably. An analgesia pump was beside Andy’s bed; from now on he’d be able to manage the pain himself.

  Lucky walked to the bottom of the bed. “Do you want me to crank your head up a bit higher, dear?”

  “If I wanted you to crank me up, I would have asked you.”

  It was unlike Lucky to be making such a fuss over him. Lucky firmly believed that adult men were capable of looking after themselves.

  “I’ll be back later,” Smith said. “Mom, have you called Sam?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Do it, or I will.” She kissed her father on the top of his head, the way he always did to her. As she left the room, the other patient lifted his hand in greeting, and a nurse bustled in, all crisp efficiency, needles, and bottles.

  She went back to the station, accepted everyone’s kind wishes for her father, finished some paperwork, went home to change, and then to the store to help Flower close up. It was early for closing, but Flower said business had been slow all week, and no one was likely to come pounding on the doors for some last minute, much needed item.

  Trafalgar was a small town and everything from the police station to the store to Molly’s apartment was only a few minutes’ walk.

  She was trying to remember if there was a pizza in the freezer or if she should stop and get something when her cell phone rang. It was her brother, Sam. Lucky had called him. Sam was, not surprisingly, full of excuses as to why he wouldn’t be able to make it down right away.

  “Up to you what you do,” Smith said. “I think you should come. He’s going to be okay, but Mom’s worried and it would make her feel a lot better if you’re here.”

  He muttered something about speaking to his secretary and rearranging his schedule and checking to see what his wife had on this week and hung up. She wondered when her fun-loving, free-wheeling older brother had become such a stuck-up prick. About the time, she reminded herself, that he became a lawyer, a corporate lawyer for an oil company, which upset Lucky even more than Molly becoming a police officer, and married a social-climbing, rich-bitch wanna-be.

  She wanted to talk to Adam about her dad, to tell him that she was worried about him. A bunch of the Mounties had gone to a bar to watch the hockey game on the wall-sized TV. If sh
e called him, said she needed him, he’d come. But he’d tell all the guys where he was going, make a big deal of being needed, wink, wink, and they’d grin at her next time they saw her.

  Perhaps she was over-sensitive, but she couldn’t bear the idea that people were gossiping about her.

  She checked the door to the alley and the single window in her mom’s office, switched off all but one light in the front window display, and flipped the sign to closed. She locked the door behind her and stepped into the street. The temperature had fallen below freezing and what had earlier been the run-off from melting snow made for treacherous going.

  A man stepped out of the dark doorway of Rosemary’s Campfire Kitchen, the shop next door. He was dressed all in black, with a toque pulled low over his forehead. “Evening, Molly.” He stood in front of her, blocking the sidewalk.

  “Fuck off.”

  “Nice night, eh? Can I walk you home?”

  “No.”

  He stepped aside and she passed. He fell into step behind her. She stopped and turned. “Go away, Charlie.”

  “Or what, Molly? Not so tough when you don’t have your gun, are you? I know you’re not allowed to carry it when you’re not in uniform. Not like in the movies, eh? Do you find that’s a problem?”

  “Are you threatening me, Charlie?”

  “Of course not, that would be a crime. I’m just having a friendly chat. Telling you what I think. When you’re out here, on the streets, you’re no different than the rest of us.” He looked her up and down. “In running shoes and jeans and a long scarf. You might wanna be careful wearing that scarf, it might get caught on something. Without all the gear, you know what you are, Molly? You’re just a woman.” He cracked his knuckles. “See ya around.”

  He walked away. She watched him go, a swaggering bundle of muscle and hatred. Although it was early evening, the streets were suddenly deserted. Lights shone inside the restaurant Fleures des Menthe, but no one was coming in or out. A single car drove past, the driver staring straight ahead, isolated in a world of glass and steel and engineering. Her heart was beating very fast.

  Charlie Bassing. He’d beaten up Smith’s friend Christa, been charged and convicted, spent four months in jail. He was out on parole, under an order to stay away from Christa. But he’d lost interest in Christa: he now blamed Molly Smith for all his problems. He’d approached her over the winter, and let her know that as far as he was concerned they had unfinished business. Since then he’d been watching her, making childish gestures such as aiming and firing a gun, occasionally following her, never more than a block or two as if he happened to be going in the same direction.

  Not wanting to look as if she were overreacting, she hadn’t done anything about it. She hoped he’d give up and go away. Tonight, for the first time, she felt vulnerable. Scared. Here, in her hometown, the place she loved and where she belonged, less than a block from her own apartment, less than two blocks from the police station.

  Tomorrow, she’d have a word with Sergeant Winters, ask his advice. She’d also, she decided at last, tell Adam. It would hurt her pride, but perhaps Charlie would think twice if he knew her boyfriend was looking out for her.

  She walked home, feeling a good deal better.

  ***

  “IHIT’s arriving tomorrow, first thing,” Paul Keller, the Chief Constable, said. “What have we got to tell them?”

  Ron Gavin stared at the table top and said nothing.

  Keller had come to the hotel for a meeting to go over what preliminary evidence the forensic team had uncovered. Winters and Lopez were there, along with Gavin and his partner Alison Townshend. The conference room in the hotel was larger and much more comfortable than any office in the police station. The kitchen had provided more drinks and sandwiches.

  Townshend shot Gavin a look, waiting for him to speak. She was new, recently transferred from Yellowknife. In her early forties, short and stout, she was perpetually cheerful. Her gray hair was a wild mop, and the edges of her mouth were always turned up, as if she were remembering a private joke.

  When Gavin didn’t say anything, she selected a ham and cheese croissant and began. “It’s pretty certain Steiner died in the bathroom. Probably right over the toilet where he was found. Blood spatter is fairly conclusive about that. No signs of injury or damage in the main room. Getting identification out of a hotel bathroom, as you can imagine, Chief, is a nightmare. Hundreds of people could have been there in the past year.”

  “And they all leave something behind,” Keller said.

  “That floor was renovated about three years ago, which means that maybe a thousand people have pissed down the toilet. Tomorrow, when we have some more manpower, we’ll be digging out the drains, which is gonna be a lot of fun.” She wiped crumbs off her chin.

  “What exactly will you be looking for?” Lopez asked.

  “There was plenty of uneaten food in the room,” Winters said. “Along with unused place settings and glassware for two.” The photograph continued to burn a hole in his pocket. He had not called his wife to tell her the trip to San Francisco was off. He still didn’t know what he was going to say to her, if anything, about the picture. “Mrs. Steiner said she didn’t have dinner with her husband, but before I could ask if she knew who he was planning to entertain, she walked out and has confined herself to her room, awaiting the arrival of her lawyer. It’s possible Steiner invited a friend up for a drink and a snack, they had an argument, and the friend offed him. If we’re lucky the shooter dropped his wedding ring or high school graduation ring, maybe a cigarette butt brimming with DNA, in the toilet.”

  “Champagne, cheese, stuff like that,” Lopez said. “Doesn’t suggest to me an old high school buddy. Sounds like what you lay on to impress a woman.”

  “Sounds like what you lay on, Ray,” Townshend said. “The sort of guys I used to date think a six pack and left-over pizza’s enticing.”

  The men laughed.

  “What do we know about the guy?” Keller sipped at his tea. “Steiner. German?”

  “Just pretentious,” Lopez said, checking his notebook. “Born Albert Jones in Sydney, Nova Scotia. Rudolph Steiner is his professional name. Nom de something-or-other. Fifty-six years old, lives in Vancouver. Married for the fifth—note that’s fifth as in five wives—to the former Josephine Marais. He’s a photographer, apparently some kind of hot-shot in the world of glamour. High fashion stuff. You know, skinny women who never learned how to smile wearing clothes that make them look like they crawled out of a dumpster.”

  “Or failed clown school,” Townshend added.

  Winters shifted in his seat.

  “I’ll start digging into his finances. And his wife’s,” Lopez said.

  “At a guess,” Winters said, “the former Josephine Marais doesn’t have much in the way of finances to investigate. She looks like a gold digger, and my impression is that she was trying to put on a show of grief, but not feeling much emotion.”

  “Think she might be behind it?” Keller asked.

  “Not ruling her out,” Winters said. “The first person she wanted to speak to after getting the news was her lawyer. He’ll be here tomorrow, probably on the same plane as the IHIT guys.”

  “Money, then,” Keller said. “If the lawyer’s rushing right over. Always complicates things. No one suspicious seen hanging around the hotel?”

  “I want to speak to the person Steiner ordered the champagne for,” Winters said. “The chambermaid who found the body confessed that she had a couple of good slugs before going into the bathroom.”

  “I can testify to that,” Townshend said. “Found it all over the floor. Some cheese and little green grapes too.”

  “Point is,” Winters said, “the bottle was open, but either nothing was drunk or only a very small amount. Same with the food. The person Steiner was expecting might have failed to show, or, if he did come, he might have not wasted time on pleasantries. So far, no one’s come forward to say they saw anyone in the room
, heading for it, or wandering around reading the door numbers. Mrs. Steiner has the room next door, and she says she didn’t hear anything. I think she didn’t hear a lot of things.”

  “Steiner was kneeling over the toilet,” Keller said. “Was he sick into it?”

  “Doesn’t look like it,” Townshend said. “His stomach might not have gotten the message to upchuck before his brain ceased to compute.”

  “You have such a lovely way with words, Alison,” Lopez said. “The maintenance man was apparently on the floor late afternoon or early evening, something about a broken lamp. That room is at the other end of the hall from Steiner’s, but he might have seen something. He’s not working today. I’m trying to track him down.”

  “The gun?” Keller asked.

  “It was wiped clean,” Townshend said, swallowing the last of her sandwich. “No surprise there. Unregistered, which is definitely not a surprise. It’s the type used to kill Steiner. We’ll run tests, of course, to ensure it’s the actual one.”

  “Not much doubt,” Keller said. “Guns are not in the habit of showing up in Trafalgar garbage.”

  “For now,” Winters said, “my money’s on the assistant. She seems to have done a runner. I’ve issued an alert for her, across the province and at the borders with Washington, Idaho, and Montana.”

  Lopez’s phone rang. “Yeah? Escort her to the hotel right away. Someone will meet her at the front.” He put the phone away.

  “Speak of the devil. The assistant, Diane Barton. Horseman stopped her heading toward town on Highway 3. She’ll be here in about ten minutes.”

  “Drat. If that’s it for now?” Winters looked around the table. They all nodded. “I’m meeting IHIT at the Castlegar airport at noon tomorrow. We’ll come straight here. They’ll want an update.”