Helix: Plague of Ghouls (28 page)

“Any luck on Facebook?” Two-Trees asked, as he stretched and cracked his back.

“Not much,” she said. “Lots of people saying that she ran away.”

“Adults or kids?” He absentmindedly massaged her smelly feet.

“Kids, mainly. Boys, mostly. I checked Maurelli’s friend list, but Sydney wasn’t on it.”

“Well, most vice-principals aren’t hip enough to befriend street kids.”

“Not publically, at least,” Bridget said.

“Any luck tracking down parents?”

Bridget sighed noisily and wiped her face. “Scary-few people made any comments at all. Maurelli posted her own kind of AMBER Alert, and a few people shared it without comment. Otherwise . . . I got dick all, my friend. God, I hope my own kids are more engaged than that. Anyhow, that’s the popular vote: she got tired of being bullied and ran away. It’s a possibility, dude. We have to consider that.”

He knew. The Mounties were routinely called in to assist with cross-provincial runaways and suspected kidnapping cases. Most of the runaways ended up in cities, on the streets, on friends’ couches, or in shelters. For most all of them, life was shit on the streets, but flaming hell at home.

“Are you still itching?” Bridget asked.

“Why?”

She stood. “Shirt off. You’ve been squirming like a bear against a tree.” He disrobed to the waist and she applied a coat of the cold ointment he’d bought that morning from the pharmacy.

“Weird though,” he said. “When I showed her one of my forensic reconstructions, she seemed to recognize one of the male figures.”

“Oh yeah? Which one?”

She finished applying the ointment, and he sat forward to pick through the papers. It took him a second to remember which one. He showed it to her, once he found it.

“Well shit,” Bridget said. “Hang on . . . hang on . . .” She rushed to the computer and clicked through a chain of friends’ lists until she found the picture she was looking for. She called up the profile. “Jayden Russell Brown.” She turned the computer and compared his reconstruction against the profile picture. It wasn’t exact, but the resemblance was remarkable. Bridget scrolled down, showing Two-Trees the pages of comments, telling Jayden to come home, reminding him that his family loved him, begging him to contact police and let someone know he was all right. “He went missing in April.”

“From where?”

“Langley, BC,” she said, her voice wavering, then she added, “I went looking through some of his so-called ‘friends’ and the comments on their own walls. Some said he ran away because he was being bullied about his weight. Some said he went down to Seattle for a concert and never came back. A few said he had a boyfriend online, and that he’d announced he was going down there to meet him.”

“But if this kid is from Langley, and he ended up dead here . . .”

Bridget raised an eyebrow. “Then we have to ask Ms. Vice-Principal why she recognized his face. We have a lead at last!” She smiled, clearly impressed. “So what else did you get?”

“Nothing so dramatic as that.” He made a mental note to let Buckle know about his reconstruction and about the missing boy from BC. “Catherine Anne Mission—Sydney’s mother . . .” Two-Trees read from the certificate Michael Crow had photocopied. “She married John Reid in March of 2001, at Elmbury Town Hall.”

She flopped into her chair. “So that means Sydney was five or six years old when her mother got married,” Bridget said. She was looking at one of the newspaper archives she’d printed, providing additional background on the victim and suspect in the Reid murder case. The article carried a wedding picture. Catherine Mission had been twenty-something at the time, and had crooked teeth, double chins, a yearbook smile, bugged out eyes, a bad haircut, and a neck tattoo. John Reid wasn’t much classier. He looked fat and mean. Two-Trees was disappointed to see John hadn’t been sporting either a Mohawk or a mullet. “You have a birth certificate?” Bridget asked.

“Not here, no. Why?”

“Just wondering if John Reid really was the father.”

“There’s room for doubt?” he asked. “I mean, look at them.”

She plucked another article from their scattered pile, this one from 2007, immediately following the Pritchard Park incident. In this reprint, the newspaper had included recent mug shots from both Reid brothers. John Reid had a fleshy, baggy face and an unready smile, but he and Sydney had the same eyes, mouth, hair, and nose. Luke Reid was fleshier and looked a little high at the time of his arrest, but otherwise, he was his brother’s twin. There wasn’t even a distinguishing mark between them, no scars to differentiate them, no unique squint. They both bore a likeness to the Padre, too, but only in the way uncles might resemble a nephew. In the photograph, it looked like John Reid had rapidly lost weight. His cheeks had fallen into jowls.

“Brother Luke could have been the father, for all anyone knows,” Bridget said.

“You read too many romance novels.”

“Soap operas. Evil twins twice a season, every network. Weird that we didn’t pick up either Sydney or Catherine. After Pritchard Park, you’d think we’d have quarantined the whole damned town.”

“I know,” Two-Trees said. “I don’t remember seeing them on the k/c/q list.”

She rolled her eyes at him. “Dude, you’ve got a good memory, but not a photographic one. They could have been assigned to someone else. We can check Wyrd files. See why they were missed.” She tilted her head. “When did John get diagnosed? Do you remember?”

Two-Trees referred to his notes. “January 2006. Late stage pancreatic. Luke followed suit in October the same year.”

“And when did John and Catherine get divorced?”

He didn’t have it written down, so they both went rummaging through the scattered papers. Bridget found the article first.

“Divorce was filed in December of 2005,” she said. “From Vancouver. Huh . . . I wonder if there’s a connection between Sydney and the missing kid from Langley.”

“Maybe. Vancouver’s a big place, and so’s Langley. Anyhow, she probably wouldn’t have been in physical contact with the Reids after they’d started taking treatments from Dr. Grey,” Two-Trees said. “That’s why we left her and Sydney off the k/c/q list.”

She shrugged impulsively. “We must have assumed Sydney went to Vancouver with her mother. She could have stayed home with daddy.”

Two-Trees stared back dubiously. “John Reid has a rap sheet as long as my leg. Even dumb judges would know better than to award him custody.”

“Who said anything about custody?” she asked. “She’s already got a history of running away. What if she ditched Mommy-Dearest in Vancouver and hitched a ride back here?” She sat up. “I mean, obviously she came back at some point. Question is, how long has she been back—”

“If she ever left,” Two-Trees agreed, gloomily.

“And did her return overlap that time between John Reid’s infection and the Pritchard Park incident?” She clenched her fists as if celebrating a mighty victory as quietly as possible. Then her hands relaxed. “Except it still doesn’t line up.”

“Why not?” he asked.

“Second generation victims had a life expectancy between a year and a half and three years. She would have died in 2010.”

“Assuming nobody screamed, ‘Agh, bloody werewolf!’ and shot her dead before then.”

“I wonder where Brother Luke was during the separation and divorce? Did wife and brother-in-law ever hook up?” Bridget shivered. “What happens if you put a restraining order against one of a pair of identical twins? The order is against the father, John, but the person who shows up swears he’s Brother Luke and provides ID and everything—except that he really
is
Father John . . . See, this is why identical twins freak me out.” Two-Trees laughed but she was serious. “Only thing that freaks me out more is thinking about all the ways a father could infect his own daughter.” She stood up to grab another can of Coke from the twelve pack he’d picked up. The beer they’d save for later. She cracked the can open and drank better than half of it in one breath. “God, how’d we ever avert a global catastrophe?”

“Blind luck,” Two-Trees said. He scratched his nose. It always itched when he lied. Disaster had been narrowly averted by abduction, pyromania, and murder. It had nothing to do with luck. For that matter, he wasn’t sure they’d averted anything at all. Six years on, they were finding new bodies, and quite likely, new disease vectors.

“What about Brother Luke?” She tapped her lips with her fingertips. “Is it possible he followed Catherine and Sydney out west, after his treatments?”

“No, he stayed in Ontario.”

“Right,” Bridget said. “He’d been remanded to a halfway house in Toronto, hadn’t he? Or just got out after a couple of months in prison on an assault charge, right?”

“House arrest, thank God, or we’d have had to put the whole prison in quarantine.”

She sighed and rubbed her forehead. “Look, I know we’ve got to find her, but this isn’t helping us figure out who died, how, or why. I mean, we came here to find a murderer.”

“Or murderers. Bridget, two bodies show up and Sydney goes missing, all in the same week. Sydney, who’s had prior contact with both Reid brothers. Sydney, who might have had contact with at least one of our dead kids. Hell of a stretch, I know, but I don’t believe in coincidence.”

“Damn it,” she said, by way of agreement. “If she was living on the street, she might have got involved in some kind of gang. Is jungle punk like a gang?”

“Is ‘Goth’ a gang? You must have been one of the most unhip, white-bread moms—”

“Hector. Focus, damn it.” She smacked the back of his head for good measure. She sat at the computer again and typed “jungle punk Ontario” into the search bar, while Two-Trees searched for traces of war paint on Sydney’s missing persons pictures. There was no sign of tan lines.

Bridget’s search results led them to fan sites dedicated to some of the more popular jungle punk bands, most of which were based in Oregon and Washington State. There were a couple of news articles about riots following cancelled shows; in both cases, the concerts had been cancelled due to fire hazards and other safety issues, since the bands and the fans tended to congregate in abandoned buildings that had been reclaimed by nature.

Bridget snorted. “Throw them in Wyndham Farms, and they’d have thought they’d died and gone to heaven. Place was nothing
but
condemned buildings. But this might give us something to work from. Jungle punks like modern day ruins.”

“Sure.” Two-Trees nodded. “But do you have any idea how many abandoned farms there are in this county? How many condemned foundries, factories, and
mines
? You wouldn’t catch me dead in one of those mines.” It was a poor choice of words, but Bridget let it slide by. “The paper mill’s derelict too, and it’s been a hang-out since
Superman III
. That’s why I was trying to poke around there, before Palmer got ahead of me.”

Bridget wowed at a picture she’d stumbled across. “Look at this one.” It was a stunningly artistic portrait of a young jungle punk crouching on a low tree branch as if he’d either just leapt onto it or was about to pounce from it. He’d pasted on long black nails, painted curling thorn branches on his cheeks, donned a wolf-pelt vest and a tattered deer skin shirt, put on a pair of oversized black contact lenses, highlighted his eyes with mascara, and he’d mussed his hair into loose, curved spikes, like something out of anime cosplay.

Two-Trees blushed. It looked exactly like his own Boy Trickster costume.

Grandfather predicted an entire subculture fifty years before its time.

On the next page, he expected to see a girl with a mane of matted white hair, with matching fur bracelets and anklets.
White hair, pale skin, but not albino. Blue eyes.
The moon’s granddaughter.

“What about Holly?” Two-Trees asked.

“What about her?”

“Instead of the Padre posing as a cadaver dog, could Holly do it?”

“I don’t know.”

“I mean, is she like you? Or could
she
pass? Given a choice, I think I’d rather work with her. She doesn’t look half so likely to bite my balls off.”

“He does hate us,” Bridget said. She rocked her chair onto its back legs.

“Can you blame him?”

“Nope. We dragged him from church and threw him into hell.”

Her cell chirped on the hotel dresser.

“Do you think your friends at the OPP could loan us a helicopter or something?” Bridget asked, reaching for the phone.

“I doubt that,” Two-Trees replied, as she answered the call. “Any idea how much that costs?”

“Hey Holly,” she said into the phone. “What’s wrong with you? You sound like you’ve got a cold or something. What’s wrong with your voice?” She listened for a moment before interrupting with more questions. “Listen, you guys on your way back yet or what? We’re going to need a topographical map, the most updated we can—”

She may have stopped speaking, but her lips kept moving. Colour rose between her freckles and dark spots. She sat forward very, very slowly, setting the front feet of her chair on the carpet.

“You have
got
to be shitting me,” she said.