Mosquito Man

by Jeremy Bates

  Copyright © 2019 by Jeremy Bates

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

  First Printing: 2019

  ISBN 978-1-988091-32-7

  For a limited time, visit www.jeremybatesbooks.com to receive a free copy of the critically acclaimed novella Black Canyon, WINNER of Crime Writers of Canada The Lou Allin Memorial Award.

  CONTENTS

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  2004

  PROLOGUE

  1981

  CHAPTER 1

  38 YEARS LATER

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  EPILOGUE

  A FEW MONTHS LATER

  NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The novels in the World’s Scariest Legends series are based on real legends.

  PROLOGUE

  1981

  You would think a missing person case would be a pretty straightforward affair.

  The person goes missing. They either turn up alive, or they turn up dead.

  If it’s the former (which is usually the case), you can get all the answers you want straight from their mouth. If it’s the latter, you can piece together what happened to them with a combination of investigative work and forensic evidence. The woman who embarked on an evening run and ends up half naked and dead in some park bushes: rape. The kid who didn’t come home for dinner and whose body parts are discovered beneath cement in the neighbor’s dingy basement: pedophilia. The gambler or drug addict whose wasted body is found decomposing in an alleyway Dumpster: bad debts. The hiker whose skeleton is uncovered in the spring thaw at the bottom of a gorge: misadventure.

  Yet it’s when the missing person never turns up that things get tricky.

  Because now you’re not only dealing with the relatively straightforward questions of why they ran away, or who took them, or what happened to them. Now you have to start exploring a plethora of other possibilities. Were they being held against their will? Were they alive? Were they going to be alive for much longer? Were they in an accident? Were they suicidal? And so forth and so on. The questions chain ad infinitum, and until you have a body, be it warm or cold, they are unanswerable.

  These were the thoughts going through Chief of Police Paul Harris’ mind on a wet August night in 1981, as he sat inside his beat-up Crown Victoria out in front of the Chapman’s log cabin that overlooked Pavilion Lake, British Columbia.

  Two hours earlier, Troy and Sally Chapman’s seven-year-old boy, Rex, had been picked up on Highway 99 by the local pest and rodent expert, Shorty Williams. Shorty had been coming back from an extermination job in Cache Creek. Rex had been walking barefoot along the shoulder of the highway, fifteen kilometers from Pavilion Lake and forty from the town of Lillooet, to which it appeared he’d been heading. He was white as a ghost and mute as a fish. When Shorty dropped off the boy at the police station, Paul’s wife, Nancy, fixed him a bowl of chicken noodle soup and a glass of warm milk, but he wouldn’t do anything but stare hauntingly at his hands in his lap. Wouldn’t say a word to Nancy either, who was about as threatening as a permed Cockapoo, or to Paul himself, who had a friendly Good Cop way with kids. So Paul got in the Crown Vic and cruised down Main Street until he spotted Ed Montgomery, his volunteer and sometimes sober deputy, eating dinner at the picnic table at the Esso gas station, and together they drove out to the Chapman’s place to see what was up.

  Given the spooked state of young Rex Chapman, Paul had expected to find Troy and Sally in the midst of some nuclear domestic dispute, cussing and shouting and slamming doors, perhaps Sally bloodied and beaten. Or the worst case scenario: both of them, along with Rex’s older brother, Logan, dead in a double murder-suicide.

  Yet what he and Ed found was…nothing. Not a thing. The cabin was in perfect order. No toppled furniture, no broken tableware, no blood, nothing to indicate anything sinister had taken place.

  So what had driven Rex to flee barefoot to the highway?

  Where had Troy and Sally and Logan gone?

  Was an outside party involved? Had he kidnapped the family, with only Rex escaping? But who would do this? And why? And where would he take them? And were they still alive? And were they going to be alive for much longer?

  All those damn missing person questions.

  Paul shot a Marlboro from his pack and lit up, winding down his window a few inches to let the stuffy air out of the cab.

  Ed wound down his window too and said, “Car doesn’t stink enough of cigars? You gotta add cigarette smoke to it?”

  Paul’s father and the previous Chief of Police of Lillooet had smoked three cigars a day for most of his life. One after lunch, one after dinner, and one before he went to bed. He was a man of habit and almost never varied from this routine. Paul’s mother had forbidden him from smoking the stogies inside the police station or the constable quarters above it, where they lived, so he smoked them in the patrol car, where he could relax while listening to whatever baseball game he could pull in on the radio.

  Paul had believed from a young age that it was his birthright duty to follow in the footsteps of his father. So when he turned nineteen earlier that year, he “applied” to become a deputy. Getting the job had been as easy as it had been during the days of the American frontier, when all you had to do was show up at the sheriff’s office with a revolver and an impressive mustache. Paul had neither the facial hair nor the six shooter, but with the chief being his dad, he had only to fill out the required paperwork and that was that. He received a uniform, boots, handcuffs, a portable radio, a weapon, and ammo—along with the sage advice to try not to shoot anyone.

  When his father died unexpectedly two months ago at the age of fifty-two due to a stroke, Paul also got the beat-up Crown Vic with 250,000 kilometers on the odometer.

  “I don’t mind the smell,” Paul said, staring straight ahead through the windshield at the black night. “Sort of grows on you.”

  “Maybe they went for a walk?” Ed said, referring to the Chapmans. Ed Montgomery was sixty-nine, hawk-nosed, and gray-headed, and still as randy as a man thirty years his junior. He’d been an acclaimed chef when he was younger, and had worked at some of the top vacation resorts in British Columbia (in the summers) and Florida (in the winters), where he spent almost as much time orchestrating romantic trysts with the guests as he did cooking meals for them. Nowadays he liked to remind people to call him “Monty,” a nickname Sean Connery had allegedly bestowed upon him during a round of golf at a Tampa Bay country club. Nobody in the Lillooet Country believed this to be true, and so nobody called him Monty. Paul wasn’t an exception. The old coot was, and always had been, Ed to him. Just plain old Ed.

  “A walk?” Paul said thoughtfully, streaming a jet of smoke out the window. “Where are they going to walk, Ed? It’s forest in every direction. And don’t forget about the boy. You don’t get all shook up like that because your family goes for a walk without you.”

  “I’m
not forgetting about him, Paulsy. I’m just throwing out ideas here. They obviously didn’t drive anywhere. Car’s right there.” He tipped his head to the wood-paneled station wagon parked ahead of them on the driveway.

  “Troy was some sort of middle manager, wasn’t he?”

  Ed nodded. “Ayuh. In a Canadian Tire. The one time I had a drink with him at the sports bar—he was buying—he wouldn’t stop talking about how good his goddamn pension was. So what?”

  “Middle management isn’t a seasonal job. He wouldn’t be up here for the summer. Probably just up for the weekend to visit the missus and kids.”

  “So what?”

  “Maybe they had two cars? One for Troy, one for Sally.”

  Ed was silent as he thought about that. “Maybe. But I’ve never seen Sally in town driving anything at all. And a Canadian Tire middle manager with two kids and a wife that doesn’t work, I can’t see a man like that affording two cars.”

  “He can afford a cabin on the lake.”

  “Nu-uh. That’s something else we talked about at the bar. He inherited it from his pa. It’s been in their family since it was built back in the Gold Rush days.”

  “So maybe he inherited money to buy a second car too?”

  “Then what the fuck’s he doing middle managing a Canadian Tire if he’s got all this fucking money? C’mon, Paulsy. Let’s not get carried away with speculating here.”

  Paul tapped some ash from his cigarette into the ashtray, took another drag, then snuffed the thing out. “So they didn’t go for a walk in the woods. They didn’t drive off anywhere. You think someone took them, Ed?”

  “I’m not saying that. ’Cause you have something like that happen, you have a struggle, don’t you? But there was no struggle. No sign of one, at least.”

  “Not inside,” Paul said. “So maybe they were outside. Someone comes by when they were all already outside. The struggle coulda been outside. We won’t know until we can look around properly tomorrow morning in the daylight.”

  Ed grinned. “Hey, Paulsy, maybe you got some of your pa’s thinking inside you after all. I reckon that’s a possibility. Someone got ’em when they were outside.” Ed shifted his body a little so he could reach a pocket in his jeans. He produced a red apple and offered it to Paul. “Wanna bite?”

  Paul frowned. He’d seen a bowl of fruit on the Chapman’s Formica kitchen table. “Did you take that from inside, Ed?”

  “So what?”

  “It’s evidence.”

  “Evidence, right. It’s just a fucking apple.” He took a loud, crunchy bite. He began chewing almost as loudly. Sinking back into the seat, he closed his eyes and kept chewing. Around a full mouth he said, “Wanna know what’s messed up? When you close your eyes, you’re still just staring straight ahead. Like right now, my eyes are closed, but I’m still just staring straight ahead. My eyeballs are just staring.”

  “It’s time we get going, Ed. Get an early night. We’ll come back tomorrow morning—”

  A loud bang on the driver’s side window made Paul jump. Ed choked, coughing out a pulpy piece of the chewed apple.

  “Shit!” he gasped, slapping his chest hard.

  Paul wound down the window all the way. A grizzled, bearded face peered in at him. A moment later the lone-wolf face of an Alaskan Malamute appeared next to its master’s, its pink tongue lolling out of its mouth.

  “How you doing, Paulsy!” Don Leech said. Squinting past him, he added, “You okay, Ed? You having a tough time eating over there?”

  “You scared the shit out of me!” Ed sputtered, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “I’m sixty-nine, for Christ’s sake. You trying to kill me? I oughta sue your ass for attempted murder, that’s what I oughta do.”

  “Can’t sue someone just ’cause you can’t eat properly, Ed. It’s a simple concept, really. Food goes in and down. You’re doing it all backwards.”

  “What’s going on, Don?” Paul asked, scratching the dog between the ears.

  “You tell me, Paulsy. If you and Ponch are on a stakeout or something, you’re not being too discreet about it, parked right here in the driveway like you are.”

  Paul explained.

  “Oh, jeez.” The banter left Don’s demeanor. “Is little Rexy all right? I just seen him the other day playing down at the lake. Him and his brother, Loge. I can see them from my dock.”

  “He’s okay,” Paul said. “Physically, that is. But he’s not saying what happened. Did you hear anything, Don? Any shouting or…anything?”

  Don frowned. “Don’t think so. I mean, I’m five hundred meters down the road. You can’t hear much from that distance. Sometimes I hear some things, sure. The boys shouting in play. Their mom shouting at them. But how do you know that kind of shouting from serious shouting from that distance?”

  “Did you hear any of that earlier today?”

  “Serious shouting? No, don’t think so. Well, yeah. Maybe I heard Sally. I was dozing, and I remember thinking she better not wake me up with her yelling. But I thought she was just yelling at her boys again.”

  “How long was she yelling for? Did you hear anything specific?”

  “Nah, it was just noise. I can’t remember much, t’be honest. I was in that halfway place, you know, between sleeping and being awake, and I was trying hard at not being awake.”

  Ed threw his apple core. It flew past Paul’s face and over the head of the malamute. The dog disappeared to track it down.

  “Your aim’s as bad as your eating,” Don said.

  “I wasn’t aiming at you or your big dog, you twit,” Ed snapped. “I was just getting rid of the apple. It was making my fingers all sticky. And you know what—maybe it was you.”

  Ed blinked, his tea-colored eyes confused. “Me?”

  “Maybe you got Troy and Sally and the boy tied up over at your place. What do you think, Paulsy? Should we go check?”

  Don snorted. “You’re crazier than a bag full of raccoons, you know that, Ed?”

  ***

  After dropping off Ed Montgomery at his meticulously kept bungalow at the end of Murray Street, which had unobstructed views of the back of the Chinese restaurant on Main, Paul returned to the century-old police station a few blocks away. He locked the front door behind him, which had one of those speakeasy-esque peepholes at a little lower than eye level, so you could see who was knocking. His office was in the back of the building, in the same room as the three stone holding cells. He spent the next hour on the phone before he climbed the stairs to the second-floor constable quarters. The Bob Newhart Show was playing on the color TV. Rex Chapman sat in Paul’s leather club chair, his knees pulled to his chest, his arms wrapped around them. He was facing the TV, but Paul didn’t know if he was watching the show or staring off into his own thoughts. Paul’s wife Nancy was on the rose loveseat reading one of her mystery novels.

  Setting the book aside, she got up, took him by the arm, and led him to the kitchen.

  “How’s he doing?” Paul asked in a semi-hushed voice.

  “How he’s always been doing since he got here. Hasn’t said a word yet.” Nancy had a cheerful, almost childlike face framed by chestnut hair and straight bangs. He’d known her since kindergarten but had barely said more than a handful of words to her over the years until he’d screwed up the courage to ask her to their high school prom. They were married two summers later, and now she was six months pregnant with their first child, the baby bump clearly visible beneath her luxe knit sweater. “Did you talk to Troy or Sally?” she asked. “What happened? Are they coming to pick him up?”

  Paul shook his head. “They weren’t at the cabin.”

  She frowned. “Weren’t there?”

  “Nobody was.”

  “What do you mean nobody was there? Somebody had to be there. They wouldn’t just leave him.”

  “There was nobody there, Nancy,” he said patiently. “I just spoke to the captain of the RCMP’s Whistler detachment. They’ll be sending some crime scene
guys out here tomorrow. I also got hold of Troy Chapman’s brother. His name’s Henry. If Troy and Sally don’t turn up anywhere, he’ll drive up from Vancouver in a few days and take custody of Rex for the time being.” He shrugged. “There’s nothing else more I can do right now.”

  Nancy appeared disturbed. “This isn’t good, is it, Paul?”

  “It’ll work itself out,” he said. “Just go on and take the boy to bed. He can sleep in the spare bedroom. I need to get some sleep myself. It’s going to be a helluva day tomorrow.”

  Nodding hesitantly, Nancy returned to the living room, while Paul continued down the hallway to the master bedroom without bothering to stop in the bathroom to wash his face or brush his teeth. He changed into a pair of striped pajamas and was asleep before Nancy slipped beneath the covers next to him.

  Sometime later he woke to a shrill, piercing scream.

  Leaping to his feet, he rushed to the spare bedroom and threw open the door and flicked on the light.

  Rex was sitting up in the single bed, his face a pale mask of terror, his eyes shiny and bulging, his mouth still open, still screaming.

  Nancy burst past Paul into the room. She plopped down on the edge of the bed and pulled the boy against her breast, rocking him, hushing him. His scream became a moan, then a breathless sob, then nothing. He wiped the tears from his cheeks and laid back down, curling into a fetal position, facing the wall.

  “You go on,” Nancy said to Paul softly. “I’ll stay with him.”

  “Do you want me to turn off the light?”

  “No, I think we should leave it on, don’t you?”

  Paul returned to bed then, more bothered than ever by the boy’s state of mind. As he drifted off to sleep for the second time that night, he wondered what answers tomorrow would bring—unaware that it would not be tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after that, but another thirty-eight long years before the monstrous truth of what happened to the Chapman family would come to light.