In the Dark

by Loreth Anne White

  As if pulled by an invisible cord, I put one boot in front of the other and find myself in front of the stairs.

  “She was brought in yesterday. A hunter called in that he’d found her in a makeshift shelter he uses. Not far from the bottom of the rapids where you say she fell into the river. She made it there . . . Being stabilized and awaiting transport to a bigger medical facility. We’re hoping she pulls through.”

  I climb the stairs, push open the door. It’s an average, small health care facility. Inside I see an admitting desk behind a glass screen. A waiting area. A corridor that leads to the back of the hospital, where the beds are.

  The admitting person is busy with a hunched old man who seems deaf and is giving the clerk trouble. Two people sit in chairs in the waiting area. One with eyes closed, another engrossed in a magazine.

  I go down the corridor, my boots squeaking slightly on the polished linoleum that smells like all hospitals do.

  I come to the first ward. Look in. Four beds. She’s not here.

  I pass a nurse’s station, which is really just a desk. The nurse is typing into a computer. She barely looks up. I keep going, like I belong. Like I have nothing to hide.

  I look into another room. There are two beds in here, one empty. A drawn curtain hides the other. I hear machines wheezing and beeping softly.

  I move the edge of the curtain aside and peer in. My heart spasms.

  Stella.

  A bandage is wound around her head. A drip feeds into her arm. A tube goes into her mouth and is strapped in place. She has bandages over her shoulder. I wonder if they took out the bullet I shot her with, or if the bullet perhaps just grazed her. Or maybe it’s still in there. A memory flashes through me. The others lying dead. Monica trying to crawl away, crying and blubbering. It had been my last chance. Monica had cracked, and it had all come out, and honestly, there’d been no way back for any of us from that point. No way.

  But Stella is still alive.

  She can still talk, and tell the truth. Which is different from my truth.

  Soft cuffs restrain Stella’s hands. Her face resembles porcelain. White and almost translucent. There’s a chair beneath the window, facing the bed. The machines hiss and squeeze, helping her breathe.

  “Can I help you?”

  My heart skitters. I spin around. It’s the nurse from the station. She’s come after me.

  “I . . . I’m looking for—I was one of the lost party. I wanted to see how Stella was doing.”

  “Oh, my dear. I heard all about it—the clinic staff told me you’d been in here, too. I’m so sorry. Thank heavens you are all right, and a baby on the way, I hear?”

  I feel a little spurt of warmth, a sense of safety. I nod, smile.

  “Congratulations.”

  “Is . . . Stella . . . is she going to be okay?”

  “I’ll leave that discussion to the doctor. She’s unconscious, but hanging in.”

  “Can I see her, just sit with her alone for a while?”

  The nurse hesitates. “All right. But not long.”

  She goes.

  I wait to be certain she’s not lurking behind the curtain. When I am, I step right inside the curtained alcove and draw the fabric shut behind me. I go up to Stella.

  “Stella?” I whisper near her ear.

  Her lids flutter a bit, and I feel scared. Like she might jump up and grab my throat.

  I steel my muscles, which helps firm my nerves. I lean closer. “Stella, can you hear me?”

  A flutter, a twitch of her fingers. She moves her head.

  At the noise of shoes on linoleum, I tense, glance over my shoulder. The nurse is back. She draws the curtain aside, smiles at me, checks a chart, takes some more readings from the machines, and hangs the chart back at the end of Stella’s bed.

  “You okay, hon?” she asks me.

  I nod. “I’ll just sit here awhile.”

  She hesitates again, noting the time on her watch. “I’ll be down the hall.”

  I don’t know how long it is that I sit and watch Stella, and the machines, the clear fluid dripping from the bag hung beside her bed into the tubes that feed into her veins. Reality sort of leaves me again. Dark, inky thoughts fill my head. I begin to suspect the nurse has forgotten I am still here.

  I look at the machines again. Stella’s chest seems to rise and fall ever so slightly in concert with the noisy hiss and wheeze of the ventilating machine. I come to my feet, move to her bed. I hesitate, then I think of Ewan. And him arriving tonight. To take me home. I think of the look on his face when I tell him about our baby, how happy he’ll be. And it will all be over. Almost all over . . . almost . . . I glance over my shoulder. Listen.

  Just the noise of the machines.

  I lean close, study the tubing to see where it might be easiest to disconnect—or to stop the air going into her. I reach for the tube that feeds down into her throat. I freeze as I hear a slight noise. It seems to have come from behind the curtain on the other side of the bed. I think I see a shadow move.

  My pulse races. I watch and listen carefully, very carefully, every muscle in my body primed to flee.

  But nothing happens. It’s my imagination.

  I put my mouth very close to her ear.

  “I can’t let you take it all away now, Stella,” I whisper against her face. “I can’t. I’m sorry.”

  A small moan comes from her chest. I think she can hear me. Or did I imagine that, too?

  It’s okay. Stella will understand. She knows she would do the same for her own child—she is remorseful. She should never have left Ezekiel on the dark sidewalk alone with a dog in the rain, and gone into the store without him. For wine. She killed her boy. She would not do it again if she had a second chance. I know this now. She will understand . . .

  I pull on the tube.

  NOW

  MASON

  Mason reentered the incident room where Sergeant Gord Fielding and Constable Elise Jayne—a detective with a psychological-profiling background—had been watching his interview with Deborah Strong. Fielding had brought Elise Jayne with him from the RCMP North District headquarters in Prince George to help assess Strong.

  “What do you think?” Mason asked as he set his notebook on the desk. His mind raced. He checked his watch, feeling on edge. He hoped he’d made the right call with the witness.

  “She’s off,” said Fielding. “She’s definitely hiding something.”

  “Agree,” said Jayne. “Deborah Strong might be a victim, but she’s also complicit, or lying for some other reason.”

  “Was there any change in the status of Stella Daguerre while I was in there?” Mason asked.

  “Negative,” said Fielding. “She’s still unconscious. Still awaiting transport.”

  Tension torqued tighter in Mason. He checked that his sat phone was still secured to his belt. He had his radio, too. “Okay,” he said, going up to his crime scene board. “Let’s dial this all back a bit and run through what we know about Franz Gottman.”

  He tapped the photo of Franz Gottman now up on his board. “From our counterparts in the Lower Mainland and Vancouver Island Districts, we’ve learned that Franz Gottman, who owns the lodge property, befriended Stella Daguerre on Galiano Island, where Stella had moved and from where she ran her West Air floatplane charter business flying clients up and down the islands. She also flew for Franz Gottman in his later years. Using her own aircraft—his had been decommissioned.”

  “Correct,” Fielding said, folding his arms across his chest as he regarded the crime board. “According to TSB crash investigators, the manufacturer’s serial number on the engine of the unregistered, downed de Havilland Beaver Mk 1 matches the serial number on record for Gottman’s aircraft, which he applied to decommission years ago. Stella Daguerre was flying Franz Gottman’s unregistered plane on the trip to Forest Shadow Lodge.”

  “She wanted to fly under the radar. Undetected. It was supposed to be a secret mission,” said Jayne, opening
a file of information she’d just received from the island detectives. “And according to Gottman’s housekeeper,” she said, “Stella Daguerre was a regular visitor to the Gottman estate on Galiano. The housekeeper and others on the island maintain that Gottman and Daguerre were extremely close. One observer described theirs as a father-daughter-type relationship. Gottman was paternal, a mentor, a counselor to Daguerre. This is consistent with what Daguerre’s ex-husband said. He claimed that while Daguerre always remained an expert pilot, and was highly organized, she was also extremely fragile emotionally. Which is why she’d sought private treatment twice prior to the hit-and-run death of her son. Once for depression, and once for some other as-yet-unspecified form of mental breakdown. She kept it secret so her employer and insurers would not find out.”

  “Which is what CRTV reporter Katie Colbourne dug up,” said Mason. “And splashed all over the news.”

  Jayne nodded. “It cast additional aspersions on her parenting ability. Her state of mind in general. Her character. It turned public sentiment against her. And it fueled another breakdown. In the end, it all cost Estelle Marshall her career with Pacific Air.”

  “Along with her marriage,” said Fielding.

  “Stella’s ex-husband confirmed he’d always blamed his wife for causing their son’s death,” said Jayne. “He blamed her for leaving six-year-old Ezekiel outside the liquor store that day. In dark and rainy conditions, with a lively young puppy in his control. The media coverage intensified her husband’s feelings, made it all worse. Gottman apparently empathized with Stella. Believed it was cruel she’d lost everything. According to the ex-husband, who knew of Stella’s relationship with Gottman, the eccentric billionaire believed Stella should have been offered counseling, treatment, empathy, instead of dismissal. She was a good pilot, had been loyal.”

  “Gottman was probably right,” Mason said.

  “Life ain’t fair,” said Fielding.

  Mason glanced at the lead detective. Personally, he felt for Stella—he knew exactly how losing a young son could crush a soul. He, too, had been thirsty for revenge. He’d wanted to kill the punk who’d murdered Luke and Jenny—rip him apart with his bare hands, even though it had been an accident born of inexperience. “Yeah,” he said. “Sometimes good people are dealt crap cards.”

  And then they run afoul of the law.

  “And Gottman was a game player,” said Jayne. “Judging by the contents of his house. Chessboards, computer games. Puzzles. Scripts for more reality shows that never went into production. His bookshelves show that he had a particular interest in tribal and group psychology and old mysteries, true crime.”

  “So you think this was all his idea?” Mason asked. “This plan to come up with a design—an elaborate and open-ended script—offering something that would hold appeal to each participant in Ezekiel Marshall’s death, lure them to a remote location, cut them off from civilization, and kill them one by one?”

  “It would be consistent with what we know so far of Gottman,” Jayne said. “And Daguerre bought into his scheme and followed through with the script, the idea, despite Gottman’s death from cancer a few months ago.”

  “This is consistent with the props found in the lodge,” said Fielding. “The Agatha Christie book positioned next to the checkerboard. The rhyme inside. The carvings on the checkerboard that were beheaded one by one. The painting of Katie Colbourne’s daughter in the room upstairs.”

  “It’s all vintage Gottman,” said Jayne. “Particularly if you look at the reality shows he scripted. He was an eccentric, an old Hollywood crazy with billions at his disposal. His last partner described Franz Gottman as a creative genius, a man with a tenuous—‘interesting’ was the word he used—relationship with reality. A man who believed he could mastermind and reshape the truth of the world around him. And Stella Daguerre was fragile, in that she needed his understanding, the sense of kinship that came from plotting revenge. She needed someone to absolve her of her feelings of guilt.” She paused. “Stella Daguerre needed love. A very basic human craving, and a powerful psychological driver. My take is that this codependency sustained their relationship. Perhaps Stella Daguerre never intended to go through with it in the beginning. And she humored Gottman. But the terminal illness diagnosis, then death, of her only close friend and paternal figure could have been the trigger that galvanized her to follow through with it. In Gottman’s memory. She’d lost her last good friend, or perhaps only friend, and might have felt she had nothing else to lose. And this became a life endgame of sorts.”

  Jayne walked up to the crime scene board and worried her lip with her teeth. “What’s inconsistent, however, in my opinion, is this.” She tapped the morgue photo of Katie Colbourne’s body with the protruding tongue. “And that.” She tapped the photo of Bart Kundera’s body. She turned to face them.

  “The meat cleaver in the back of this man’s skull? Looking into the mother of a young child’s eyes, and hanging her? Plunging a knife into Jackie Blunt’s neck, not once, but twice?” She shook her head. “It’s too raw. Too bloody. Too personal. Too violent. Close range. It doesn’t feel like Stella Daguerre’s MO based on my psychological assessment of her.”

  “Despite Deborah Strong’s statements?” Mason said.

  Jayne pursed her lips, and her brow furrowed in thought. “Stella Daguerre poisoning Dan Whitlock with shellfish, I understand. And we now have the Thunderbird hotel security camera footage that shows Stella Daguerre doctoring a plate of food outside Whitlock’s hotel room before knocking on the door and delivering it to him.”

  “And we have the timing from the CCTV footage that shows Daguerre delivered the tainted food shortly before meeting the rest of the tour group at the floatplane dock,” said Fielding.

  “Plus, the pathologist determined Whitlock’s cause of death was anaphylactic shock due to shellfish allergens. While the Thunderbird staff claim there was no seafood of any kind in the omelet they made for Whitlock’s breakfast order,” added Mason.

  Jayne nodded. “So, given that Stella Daguerre likely poisoned Dan Whitlock, poisoning Dr. Steven Bodine with toxic fungus would be consistent with her MO. Poisonings are more consistent with female MOs in general. The violence is more removed.”

  Deborah Strong’s words echoed in Mason’s head.

  “She shot him right in the face. Again in the chest. Nathan tried to scramble backward, away from her. He was sitting near the fire. She shot him, too. Through the neck. Monica fled into the trees . . . Stella fired. Into her back. She went down and Monica McNeill crawled, crying, into the forest.”

  “So you believe Deborah Strong is lying about Stella’s role in the other murders, then?” he asked the profiler.

  “What Deborah Strong stated would not be consistent with my profile of Stella Daguerre,” she said carefully. “Killing people face-to-face is actually a lot harder than people think. As a species we mostly fight each other for dominance in order to maintain a hierarchy. That means when someone cries uncle, the fight’s over. It’s a similar pattern across most species. We resolve our ranking disputes with violence, but without resorting to actually killing each other, because it helps the overall survival of the species. Even soldiers needed to be trained—conditioned to kill other humans. It’s not natural behavior for most of us, and though it can be conditioned, it takes a heavy psychological toll.” She regarded the crime scene images of the bodies in silence for a moment.

  “Killing with knives,” she said quietly, “is particularly challenging psychologically. It takes effort. Unless one is enraged, and passion is overriding the logic function of the brain. It’s messy.”

  Mason studied the photo of Deborah Strong on the board. Quietly, he said, “So if Stella Daguerre didn’t shoot and kill Nathan McNeill, Steven Bodine, and Monica McNeill in that clearing, and if Stella Daguerre did not murder Jackie Blunt, Bart Kundera, and Katie Colbourne, and presuming no one outside of their group was stalking and killing them—” He turned to face his colle
agues.

  “That leaves Deborah Strong.”

  “Who is very desperate to hide the truth of her past,” Jayne said. “Strong is also someone who might have killed before—her brother. She was accustomed to routinely slaughtering pigs. She has a reported childhood proficiency with hatchet throwing, which would make it more natural for her to pick up and throw a meat cleaver into the back of someone’s head. She has a drug abuse history. A violent sex trade background. Deborah Strong is someone who has done hard things to survive. She needed to survive, and still does. I don’t see Stella needing to survive with that kind of passion.” She paused. Her gaze met Fielding’s, then Mason’s. “And as the rhyme said, there could only be one. Deborah Strong could have cottoned on to the ‘game,’ realized what was going on, and turned the tables. She did what she could to outwit, outplay . . . outkill the others. Until there was one.”

  A chill rose in Mason’s gut as he recalled the way Deborah Strong had looked directly into his eyes as she’d informed him that Stella had killed the others.

  Or maybe there shall be none. The tension in his body went up another notch. He checked his watch.

  Fielding said, “The retired Alberta detective I spoke with about the Boris Vasiliev homicide investigation figured that Deborah—Katarina Vasiliev—was good for her brother’s murder,” said Fielding. “They never proved it. And the detective never pressed harder. He said in retrospect he’d felt it could have been a form of self-defense on Katarina’s part. Payback for all the sexual abuse. That her brother got what was coming to him.”

  “Self-preservation.” Jayne nodded. “Deborah Strong is a survivor. Someone who might do anything to live, to thrive, someone who could feel she has everything to lose now that she’s completely overhauled her life at huge personal expense.”