Kill Me Why?: Gray James Detective Murder Mystery and Suspense (Chief Inspector Gray James Detective Murder Mystery Series Book 2)

by Ritu Sethi

  The clouds above loomed low enough to reach, their morphing gray surface almost claustrophobic. She scanned the purple horizon, the bubbling sea, and the windswept brown sand and rocks up the beach. It really wasn’t safe to swim.

  A thrill overlaid the underlying peace. Nature looked its best in this angry state. Like an uncontrolled, wild force that could sweep away all superfluous existence in an instant.

  The tide attempted to pull her away from shore. Fighting back, she reached the sandy surface and pulled out of the surf. Her feet whipped pebbles and coarse sand behind her as she ran, arms tightly wrapped across her chest against the now spitting rain. She ran all the way back to her truck.

  Inside, dampness had steamed the windows. Emmy’s swimsuit stuck to her skin, and the dry clothes she pulled on felt rough and scratchy.

  A few minutes later, she was looking through the fogged windshield and squishing wipers sweeping from side to side. She pulled into a parking spot in downtown Searock, immediately in front of one particularly nasty storefront.

  Farrah’s art gallery looked open yet empty.

  Emmy grabbed a chocolate bar from the glove compartment and devoured it. In a province where heroine sold for less than marijuana, and drugs were as rampant as the common cold, Emmy’s addictions amounted to swimming in cold water and sugar, sugar, sugar.

  She really was a child. Which made facing recalcitrant adults particularly distasteful.

  The art gallery door swung open easily in the wind. It slammed open, sweeping in wet, colorful autumnal leaves: magenta, yellow, and a few of them still green. The layer of debris littered the white marble floor, no longer impeccable.

  Three white walls stood dotted with vibrant canvases: scenes painted by local artists depicting summer, fall, winter, and spring around the coast and surrounding mountains. Modern sculptures stood strategically in the middle of the large space.

  Her nemesis leaned against a headless torso carved of local stone.

  “What do you want?” Farrah said. Her bony face had such sharp edges, it was a wonder the skin atop didn’t slice through. All the color in those cheeks came from rouge; none was natural and healthy.

  “An explanation.”

  “You’re not getting one. Now, get out before I call the police.”

  So the tables had turned. Emmy still rode the high from her swim, a sense of righteousness. This woman and her minions had dared to touch Emmy’s specimens today. And Emmy wasn’t going to give up her livelihood without a fight.

  “Your mindless entourage trampled two of my specimens. They broke a limb I’ve been studying for months, and severed a skull from the neck.”

  “Yuck,” Farrah said. “How can you talk about rotting corpses like that? They’re disgusting, and so are you.”

  “Good people donated their bodies to science. They trusted the institute, trusted me.”

  “And you failed them,” Farrah shouted.

  “I didn’t. You’re guilty of assault. Months of research got contaminated. Do you have any idea what you’ve done? Those two bodies represented an integral part of the entire project. The loss can’t be corrected.”

  “Good. Then you’ll close done and crawl back under your rock.”

  The reality of the situation was becoming increasingly clear to Emmy. Slope wouldn’t defend her or the farm against this woman – not while he had his eye on Delilah Atkinson. Emmy had to take care of this herself.

  Rage made her head hot. We all had a monster within us. She wanted Farrah to see hers.

  The gallery lay quiet enough to hear a pin drop. Two employees watched them from the sidelines, unmoving.

  Emmy spoke softly, slowly. She wasn’t bluffing.

  “If you cause any more damage to my facility, I’ll burn this gallery down.”

  Farrah’s eyes turned into deep pools. “Did you just threaten me?”

  Emmy stepped closer, unblinking. “Oh, Yes.”

  She decided whether or not to mention the other thing she’d discovered – what Seymour and the Inspector must surely know.

  No wonder the Inspector had flipped out when she’d described the body lying dead at the facility. The entire town must dread such horrid evil returning to their supposedly idyllic community.

  “Teddy told me,” Emmy said through clenched teeth.

  Farrah widened her stance. The bony legs looked fragile enough to snap in two. “What did my fiancé tell you?”

  “About the body found fifteen years ago, not far from my premises.”

  “Just spit it out,” Farrah said.

  “Don’t you know about it? Didn’t he confide in you?” Emmy’s heart beat fast and steady. Elation surpassed her fear and anxiety.

  “I don’t have to listen to this. Get out.”

  “Careful,” Emmy said, taking a step forward. The other woman’s strong and fruity perfume splinted her breath. She hated perfume. Didn’t understand why anyone felt naked without it. “Or you might become the next victim.”

  Farrah’s eyes shot sparks at her. But they fizzled before covering the distance to Emmy. Might as well bring the threat home.

  “Or you might end up a corpse on my body farm – with your lips sutured together. Like the one I found yesterday; like the unsolved murder fifteen years ago.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  T HE THINGS WE LEAVE behind after death don’t represent us, Gray thought.

  Slouching under a tarp tied to trees on all four ends, he examined the overnight bag found in the trunk of the abandoned Honda Prelude.

  Slope’s men found the car easily since it stood a mere kilometer from town, hidden away on the side of an infrequently used road leading up into the mountains.

  Rain pounded the tarp; wind ruffled the sides, whipping the plastic tips and rippling the surface in rhythmic beats, pulsating rain all around.

  Gray unzipped the black leather bag. Inside, a toothbrush, paste, a brush, and various other toiletries filled a side compartment. A crisply pressed chambray shirt and a pair of relaxed fit jeans lay in the bottom. Nothing else. The man must have only expected to be away from home a night, two at most. Gray found no cell, no laptop.

  They were too close to town. The presumed dead man, Donovan Price, might have visited hundreds of nearby houses before his death. Nothing in the car helped to narrow down the search of why he’d come to Searock, and who he might have seen.

  Gray almost wished they’d found the vehicle further in the mountains. That would have narrowed the possibilities of where Price might have traveled before meeting his.

  As it was, Price could have met anyone, anywhere near town. Hell, the killer might have moved the car afterward. So where did that leave them?

  “Emmy wasn’t lying,” Gray told Slope.

  The sergeant had the nerve to look entirely unapologetic — annoyed even — almost as though Gray, Emmy, and Seymour had personally delivered this evil to his ordered and serene village.

  “Yeah, this guy might be dead,” Slope said, waving a careless hand. “But who’d kill this guy, only to remove the body from that god-awful farm.”

  “These are questions you should have asked before rain and residents trampled the crime scene,” Seymour said. He’d silently crept up from behind.

  Gray put down the bag. “Find anything in the vicinity, Doctor?”

  “On preliminary examination, nothing to indicate a murder happened nearby. But SOCO will find something in this jungle. They always do. Even if it’s a candy wrapper from a year ago.”

  Gray gave him a look. Seymour shrugged.

  “I want that email from the first missing girl,” Gray said to Slope.

  “What?” the sergeant said.

  “The first alleged victim — the babysitter found by a child — you told me about it in the cafe.”

  “Oh yeah,” Slope replied. “I’ll get on that. You’re taking an awful lot of interest in this case.”

  “Whatever keeps me away from cabin fever, Sergeant. You’ll get there one day
yourself.”

  “Oh, I’ll never become a workaholic, Sir. I don’t have that flaw.”

  He dared to look smug. Gray felt the urge to hit him again.”

  After Slope left, Seymour nearly jumped out of his skin. “I’ll come with you.”

  “No.”

  “You have a name now. And an address from the car registration. Instinct tells me you and I are driving to Vancouver today.”

  When Gray moved to protest, Seymour held up a hand. “You know I’m right.”

  “The sea to sky drive won’t be pretty, John. Hell, it’s out and out dangerous in this weather.”

  “We’re both Vancouverites now. What’s a little spitting rain?”

  Seymour had purposely misunderstood him. “Not on the way there,” Gray said. “I’m referring to the way back. Things could suddenly worsen even if the storm isn’t due for a couple of days. I’m coming back come hell or high water to meet Vivienne at the cottage. Are you sure you want in?”

  “Absolutely,” Seymour said. But his lower lip quivered.

  They covered the first twenty kilometers in good time, despite poor visibility.

  At Dad’s insistence, he’d taken the truck instead of the Lotus, much to Seymour’s obvious relief.

  The doctor looked a little green glancing at the near vertical drop on the passenger side, leading straight into the ocean. Grey, jetting surf stretched out as far as the eye could see and faded into a cobalt horizon.

  The winding sea to sky highway always intimidated those unaccustomed to its twists and turns of the cliffs, but Gray grew up here. He had traveled this road countless times, on snow and ice. What was a little rain and wind?

  “Take it slow,” Seymour said. “No one’s racing you there, James. The man’s dead. We have plenty of time to rift through his underwear drawer undetected.”

  “I don’t have permission for this. The office in Vancouver can’t know.”

  “You could get a warrant.”

  “In a couple of days. By then, we get rained out at Searock, and a killer sutures a fresh pair of lips.”

  “You have such a charming way of putting things, Chief Inspector.”

  “I call them the way I see them.”

  They reached Donovan Price’s Kitsilano basement apartment in record time. Wind and rain whipped about their hair, and waves crashed in English Bay, only one small street over.

  The lack of house keys presented no problem, not for Gray. He jimmied the lock within fifteen seconds.

  “This area’s damn expensive, even to rent,” Seymour said, both of them aware that the average Vancouver bungalow by the beach went for four million dollars.

  The one-bedroom space hadn’t been renovated since the eighties. Gray recognized the tiled kitchen countertop, the parquet floors, and yellow backsplash. He secretly liked the retro look but wouldn’t admit that in front of Seymour.

  Despite the dated decor, the space possessed an air of forced order to the point of obsession. Every piece had its place, and no knick-knacks or mementos littered the tables or shelves. The apartment could have been a corporate rental, containing nothing besides the necessary dishware and clothing for a short stay.

  “Let’s look for any clues about his profession,” Gray said. “Better to know tonight than wait to hear back from the department.”

  They’d put in a call to Vancouver headquarters to get all information available on Donovan Price, which wasn’t much since the victim had no form or even a parking ticket to his name.

  A squeaky clean citizen if Gray had ever seen one. So how did that kind of straight shooter get himself violently killed?

  He wasn’t the first victim either if Slope’s report of the babysitter was to be believed. The sergeant had promised to forward the email the girl had allegedly sent to her family. Getting the full story from the family, instead of the local cop, was preferable. He spotted Seymour’s profile and knew just the man for the job.

  Price’s bedroom was as bare as a monk’s. The bedside drawers contained nothing of interest, except for one solitary photo tucked amongst a pile of pressed shirts.

  Gray picked up the black and white snapshot, its edges graying and crumpled from generations of handling.

  The picture was of an abstract painting; one Gray failed to recognize. Still, the style of the work seemed familiar, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. Dad could.

  Without a second thought, he slipped the photo into his inside jacket pocket.

  Seymour entered the room and raised his eyebrows. Gray showed him the snapshot, but he didn’t recognize the abstract either.

  “Anything else?” Gray asked.

  “Nothing. It’s as though the man doesn’t exist. More likely, he had some form of an obsessive need for order. Nothing superfluous left to collect dust. You know what I mean? All documents online, all personal photos scanned, none printed or hanging etcetera. I would have expected to find more of the pink underwear, at least. Even his fridge has a single use carton of milk.

  “Has it expired?”

  “Not yet.”

  “He wasn’t in Searock for long, then.” Gray stroked his jaw. His stubble felt itchy. “Let’s find his computer.”

  “It’s not here, James. And no one would leave something like that in their car during the winter.”

  “Meaning we might never find it. The killer took care of the phone and laptop. There’s no desktop here.”

  Seymour tried one last tack. “What if he has an office elsewhere?”

  They spoke to a few of the neighbors and garnered only one fact: Donovan had a sister; otherwise, no one knew a thing about him.

  “Let’s go to headquarters. I want to look up what I can about him on the central computer myself.”

  Seymour said nothing. He sat silently in the car on the drive to the VPD office on Cambie Street.

  Once at his desk, Gray performed an online search. “Price is a freelance art critic,” he said. “He writes for various starving hipster publications, meaning he couldn’t afford a parking spot in Kitsilano, let alone a basement condo.”

  “He might have inherited the money. Any relatives?”

  “No way of knowing. I’m reading one of his articles on the decline of modern art. Pretentious man.”

  “We shouldn’t speak ill of the dead,” Seymour chided.

  One of the articles showed Price with his sister.

  “Hah,” Gray said. “Talk about polar opposites. Sarah Price not only has form, we know her all too well.”

  “I recognize the name.”

  The doctor would remember soon enough. Meanwhile, Sarah’s number and address copied, Gray thought about what to procure from his West End condo before returning to Searock.

  “I remember,” Seymour said, slamming the table. “That scandal with the last police commissioner and a certain high-priced prostitute. That’s her?”

  “Yes. Price isn’t a common name, but it isn’t rare either. I didn’t make the connection until she came up.”

  A lengthy phone call with Sarah yielded little. She hadn’t seen her brother in over a year and didn’t know why he’d ever visit Searock.

  Donovan loved the city and apparently despised nature. That made him into a city hermit no one knew much about.

  A half hour later, Gray pulled the truck in front of his condo building.

  Twenty years ago, these small apartments overlooking the Pacific were prestigious rentals until skyrocketing Vancouver prices had sparked their conversion into high-end condominiums.

  From his twelfth-floor apartment, the longitudinal walls of which ran through his bedroom and living area, he had the unimpeded view of English Bay.

  He never grew tired of it; never saw it as routine or ordinary. And now, when the weather had picked up and fifty-kilometer winds blew the salt water in white-tipped peak and crashed it onto the coarse sandy beach, it looked more magnificent than ever.

  Gray opened the sliding glass door and stepped out onto the balcony. This
high up, the wind whipped even harder, and Vancouver was lit like a Christmas tree, with artsy Granville Island on the left, and Kitsilano immediately adjacent.

  But it was the thrashing and wild Pacific which drew the eye to a violet horizon. He inhaled the salty air. Anything might happen on a night such as this. Anything.

  Seymour stepped back. “I don’t like the way all these glass walls are shaking. You sure it’s safe? That glass could snap under all this pressure and slice right through us.”

  “We all have to go sometime. You haven’t visited my place during a storm, have you?”

  “No, and I don’t like it.”

  How often had Gray sat in this very spot, riveted by the uncontrolled frenzy of nature, the shaking of the floor to ceiling which could shatter at any moment?

  That he should enjoy such a site after nature had torn his son from his hands made no sense. It only proved what a twisted man he had become — how he deserved nothing, least of all, an innocent and vulnerable daughter.

  “Let’s not waste time. I’ll be back in a second.”

  He entered the larger of the two bedrooms, which was only ten by eight feet. The safe in the closet contained the item in question. He retrieved the object and tucked it into his pants. Seymour stood at the threshold.

  “Don’t bring that,” he said.

  “It’s a police revolver. I’m a policeman.”

  “Not really,” Seymour said. “You’re as much a suspect as any of the residents. Slope’s the official.”

  Gray tried to pass him, but the doctor grabbed his arm. “Gray by name, gray by nature?”

  “Most definitely.”

  Seymour didn’t have a family to defend, didn’t understand how it felt to fail the people you loved.

  But the cold, steel weapon burned a hole in his pants. That last case in Montreal, when everything was against him – even then, he’d refused to compromise his beliefs and resort to his gun. And now, something inside him had broken, but why?

  The answer was clear. He had no intention of losing any of his family to a crazed killer. Not now. Not ever.

  Gray shook himself free.