Sea to Sky (7 page)

“And Brent. What did he do?”

“Nothing. The young lady left, but Brent just sat there, pretty much ignored Mike. It wasn’t long after that when you came in, and … you know. Brent paid for his drink and left soon after Mike did, if I remember right. I don’t expect you would’ve have noticed him.” He drained his beer and turned around in his chair, looking out at the room.

“Listen. I got some friends here now.”

“Thanks, Todd. I appreciate you taking the time to talk to me. If you think of anything else that might be significant, maybe you could call.” Hunter reached behind him where his jacket hung on the back of the bar stool to search his jacket pockets for the card Sergeant Pike had given him, and handed it to the man. “Call Sergeant Pike, okay?”

The man glanced at the card, seeming surprised. “Oh. The RCMP guy. Right.” He tucked the card in his wallet, nodded to Hunter, and left to join his friends.

Hunter slid his beer back and forth on the granite surface of the bar, thinking about how to find this Brent Carruthers fellow, then pulled out his wallet and signaled the bartender for the check.

He still had to find the watching woman.

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    FIVE

After another hour and a half sitting in the lobby, Hunter was considering the wisdom of staying where he was when he saw John Irwin, Mike’s father, walk from the elevators toward the bar. The man’s gait was slow, but his back was straight and his shoulders squared. Hunter took a deep breath and headed to intercept him.

“Excuse me,” he said. He knew it might not be easy to get the man to talk to him.

“Yes? Oh, it’s you. Alora’s friend.” There was no animosity in his voice; it was flat and weary. “Under normal circumstances, I might be apologizing for my son’s behavior last night, but these aren’t normal circumstances.” He took a deep breath and let it out again. “My son is dead,” he said simply. John Irwin’s face was drawn, with dark crescents below his eyes.

“I know. I’m very sorry for your loss, Mr. Irwin.” Hunter waited for a reaction, but there was only a blank stare, as if the brain behind the eyes was too distracted to process what they were looking at. “Can I speak with you? I’d be happy to buy you a drink, if you have the time.”

“A drink? Yes, I’d like a drink. That’s why I came down.” He ran his hand absently over the grey bristle on his chin. “I just had to get out of the hotel room for a while.” He headed toward the bar and Hunter followed at his elbow. “My wife took a sleeping pill and she’s finally resting. The mother always takes it the hardest, you know?”

Hunter introduced himself, once again implying that he was helping the RCMP with their investigations, and the older man nodded, saying, “When I saw you last night, I thought then that you looked like a military man, or a policeman at the very least. Please, call me John.”

The bar was filling up with the after dinner crowd, but they were able to find a quiet table near the wall. Hunter adjusted his chair so he still had a view of the bar’s entrance along with a corner of the lobby. A tiny halogen fixture hung above the table, giving off a muted amber light. John slumped back in his chair with his eyes closed and heaved a sigh, then as if calling on a reserve of energy from within, straightened up and looked Hunter in the eye. “Do you have any idea who killed my son?” he asked. “Do the police?”

“They have their suspicions.” Hunter suppressed a smile.
And I’m one of them.

A tall young woman dressed all in black came to take their order. A double scotch for John, a bottle of Labatt’s Blue for Hunter.

“They have their suspicions, do they?” said John. “Do you?”

“I know it wasn’t me,” said Hunter.

“That’s always a good place to start.”

“Do you know why anyone would want to hurt your son?”

John snorted softly. “Yes. My son could be abrasive.” He paused. “More than that. My son was not a kind man. He didn’t seem to care who he hurt. I can imagine someone would want to hurt him back. But for someone to feel strongly enough to decide to end his life?” He shook his head. “My poor, dear wife. I wish I could spare her the pain.”

The drinks arrived, and John took a hearty slug of straight scotch. “What about you? Any theories?”

Hunter shrugged. His cell phone started to ring, so he reached into his pocket and killed the sound. “It appears that your son had made some enemies in business.”

“I’m not surprised. But I’m afraid I don’t know anything about his work.” He tilted his glass of scotch, staring into it, as if studying its color. “… and little enough about his home life. We were never really close. The military life takes its toll on families, keeping them apart.”

Hunter couldn’t help thinking about his own family, how his wife had accused him of not being there for his daughters for highlights in their young lives: school plays and soccer games, birthdays and broken hearts. “It’s my job,” he would say to her. “You knew it when we first got married, that being a police officer is more than a nine to five commitment.”

Once she had replied, “Screw your job excuse! I’m tired of hearing it. The worst part is that you don’t even seem to care!” It seemed the more she hurt, the more she needed to hurt him back, and the harder it became for him to get close to her.

He took several long swallows of beer before speaking. John seemed unbothered by the break in conversation, both men lost in thoughts of the indelible past.

“I hear you,” he said to John. “You think you can make it up to them when they get older, but before you know it, the years go by and they get busy with their own lives, their friends, their jobs … you can try to catch up, but you never do.”

“That’s right. And then suddenly time’s up. Here, let me get the next round.” John signaled the young woman, pointing to Hunter’s half empty glass, then continued. “I had a real good friend, almost like a brother. We were in the same Marine battalion early in the Vietnam war, saw a lot of men die …” His voice faded, his eyes drifted as if he were lost in horrific remembrance. “Most of them started out as scared, skinny kids, but that war made men out of them in a hurry.” He paused, his face grim. “So, Scott, my best buddy, we went through some hellish things together in Nam. Back home, we both lived in L.A. County so we’d keep in touch — times like this,” he gestured at the drinks on the table, ”talking things out, things we’d seen, adapting to life back in the States, our wives, our kids.”

Not so different from me and Ken, thought Hunter.

“My wife’s a strong woman. We had three children. Do you have kids, Hunter?”

“Yes. Two daughters in their late teens.”

“So you know how it feels.” He shook his head. “They can break the heart of the toughest marine without even trying.”

Another silence followed, then John spoke again. “Our oldest son fought in Iraq — good kid — came home wounded, married a nice girl and they live in her home state of Texas. We try to visit them once a year, seems they’re too busy with their lives to come out west. Our only daughter died of a brain tumor when she was only nine.”

“I’m sorry.” Hunter couldn’t imagine losing Lesley or Jan at that age, or at all. He wondered if the good kid’s choice to live in Texas was a heartbreak as well.

“Like I said, Beth’s a strong woman. She coped. Mike — well, you met Mike. But I was telling you about my friend Scott. He had one child, a daughter. His wife wasn’t a strong woman, and she had some pretty heavy demons that she couldn’t shake loose of. She killed herself when Kelly was barely in her teens, so Scott had to be both mother and father to that little girl. He made me promise to take care of her if anything happened to him.”

Hunter thanked the server for his beer, suggested another scotch for John. John shook his head, and said he’d switch to beer himself, asking about the local beers but deciding on a Budweiser. Hunter waited for John to continue.

“Scott passed away when Kelly was still in college. She was a bright girl, had a good head on her shoulders. We always kept in touch with her, invited her for Thanksgiving and Christmas, looking out for her, almost like a daughter. Our Mike went through Cal Berkeley on a football scholarship. He was popular, attractive, liked to party — then got a good job in his field in Southern California. We were happy when he settled down with a smart, attractive woman like Alora. She was a school teacher then; Beth thought that boded well for grandchildren. After she left him — Beth never understood that, still blames Alora for it — I guess his ego took a hit. Next time he saw Kelly — Thanksgiving, I think — well, I guess she was young, pretty, I want to say wholesome but that doesn’t quite capture it — and we figured it was just what the doctor ordered, for both of them.” He sighed.

“Kelly’s his wife?”

John nodded. “Sorry, I lost my train of thought again. I meant to say that Scott died unexpectedly — he had a heart attack, they figure, and his car hit the pillar of an overpass at freeway speed — and suddenly there was no time left for him to tell his daughter anything he might’ve left unsaid. You know what I mean? Sometimes there’s no second chances.”

They both fell silent as the server delivered John’s beer.

“I had a friend like that, too,” said Hunter. He felt an unusual kinship with John, as if they’d known each other years ago, and had most of a lifetime in common. “His name was Ken Marsh, and we went through basic training at the RCMP depot in Regina together, then got posted together to a detachment in the Yukon before connecting again in the Vancouver area.” He thought about all the times he’d sat with Ken, just like this, talking things out. Ken and his wife Helen had a son. They had named the boy Adam Hunter Marsh. Where were they now? he wondered. “His wife is a strong and beautiful woman. He was the one with the demons.”

“Was?”

“Accidentally shot himself cleaning his gun,” Hunter said with an ironic smile.

“Of course.” He nodded. “The family needed his pension.”

They talked for almost an hour, through another round of drinks. Hunter related Ken’s downward spiral, his depression and how his drinking kept getting worse. “I tried to get him to look at things in a diff—-”

Hunter caught sight of a familiar figure walking past the entrance in the direction of the elevators. “I’m sorry, John.” He stood up abruptly and grabbed a twenty dollar bill out of his jeans pocket. “There’s someone I need to talk to.” He held out the twenty but John waved it away. Hunter grabbed his jacket and bolted for the lobby.

There was no time for a “see you later”.

Hunter reached the elevators just as the doors began to close on the furthest one. He sprinted the last five yards and put his arm between the doors, just in time. The doors opened and the watching woman took a step backward, her eyes wide with surprise, then said, “Shit.”

“We need to talk.”

“You talk,” she said. She looked up at the digital display above the elevator doors. “You’ve got about fifteen seconds.”

Hunter pulled his cell phone out of his shirt pocket, began to punch the numbers. “Nine. One…”

“Stop!”

“Your room or the lobby?”

She glared at him, but held up a room key. The elevator stopped, and he took her by the elbow as they stepped out. She was dressed for walking outdoors, insulated pants and snow boots and a long quilted coat. Her nose and cheeks were red and her hair still gave off a faint scent of mountain air. She was almost as tall as he was, probably very fit, no doubt was trained in martial arts, and he had to admit to himself that she could possibly take him in a fight. He couldn’t afford to let that happen. When they got to her room, he made sure to get his foot inside before she got the door open wide enough to enter.

“What do you want?” Keeping her coat on, she sat down on the bed, her hand resting on the night table beside the telephone. “Or should I tell hotel security you forced your way into my room?”

Hunter tossed his jacket on the floor and held his hands out, palms up. “All I want is information,” he said. “What was your interest in Mike Irwin?”

“Who’s he?” Her voice was clipped, her jaw set firmly.

“Quit playing games. I can have the police here before you finish packing your toothbrush.” He pulled his cell phone out again and added, “I don’t think you want the local police involved if you can help it.”

She frowned. “Who the hell are you?”

“How about if you answer a couple of questions for me first. Who are you, and what was your interest in Mike Irwin?”

The woman was silent for awhile, staring down at the floor. Hunter, standing between her and the door with his arms crossed over his chest, gave her time to think.

“I’m a licensed private investigator,” she said finally, “and I know enough not to talk to complete strangers about myself and my work. So answer my question. Who the hell are you and why should I tell you anything?”

Hunter took a deep breath, considering the best tack to take with this woman. Telling the truth was his first choice, whenever possible, and he couldn’t come up with a better option. “My name is Hunter Rayne, I’m a former member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and through a series of coincidences, I’ve become a suspect in Mike Irwin’s murder. I have a vested interest in finding out who might have wanted him dead.” He smiled. “I figure that if you were hired to kill him, you would have been on your way out of Whistler before the police reached his body.”

One corner of her mouth curled up, but she said nothing. Hunter wondered if that was exactly what she wanted him to think. Female assassins weren’t unknown.

“But I do believe that you know something about the man that could help me out. I’d like to know why you were hired to investigate him, but first, what’s your name? Can I assume you’re from L.A.? ”

The woman shrugged out of her coat. She was wearing a pale green turtleneck sweater that hugged her body, and Hunter realized he’d been right about the kind of shape she was in. She had broad shoulders, well defined biceps and lean curves from neck to waist. She squared her shoulders and threw back her head, as if defying him not to look at her breasts, appraising him in turn from beneath half closed eyelids. Hunter didn’t break eye contact.

“My name is Stella Clark, and yes, I’m from L.A. Want to see some ID?”

“What can you tell me about Mike Irwin?”