The Dead List (2 page)

Often when calls came in late at night he’d remind Drake or one of the other officers how lucky they were. He’d tell them that Hope had been underserved for years, and they were fortunate they didn’t have to make the long, dark drive along the base of the mountains that his father and grandfather had to make.

Thiessen was conferring with Rempel and nodding while Drake drew blank stares and shakes of their heads as he questioned the few bystanders who had gathered around. He knew some of their names and most of their faces, but all he received was the odd leer as they told him in no uncertain terms that people on their street didn’t talk to police officers.

Sergeant Thiessen stood in front of him with his face frozen in a sarcastic smile. He didn’t speak, but Drake knew what the question was.

“Judging by the severity of the split on the victim’s head, I think he had some help hitting the ground, Sarge. I don’t think this was an accident.”

“I saw the body. I think he fell. I don’t know how many dead bodies you’ve seen, Drake…”

His superior waited for an answer, and for a moment, Drake considered telling him the truth. He paused while Thiessen tilted his head to the side impatiently. He couldn’t do it. He kept his ghosts hidden away and evaded the question.

“I saw the native fellow who had the heart attack in the pub after ordering his pint.”

Rempel was still complaining in the background. Thiessen bristled and stood upright, staring hard at Drake. Shadows from the two men fell across the road as the light from the streetlamp showed the contrast in their builds. Thiessen was a couple of inches over six feet – every bit as tall as Drake, but he was slimmer. Drake had a deceiving build that men whose bodies are predisposed to muscle often have. On first glance he looked like a slightly larger than normal thirty-eight-year-old man, but he was carrying bulk, and that bulk was muscle. It was in his arms and shoulders and upper legs. Thiessen had the piercing blue eyes and four very prominent stripes on his shoulder though, and he used both assets to his advantage.

He spoke loud enough for Rempel and anyone else listening to hear, including the crowd of onlookers who still hadn’t been pushed back. “It’s on your head, Drake. It looks accidental to me, and the senior attending medic concurs. MCU is on their way from Vancouver.”

It was Drake’s turn to bristle.

“Major Crime? I called for General Investigation Services.”

The sergeant smiled his sarcastic smile once again. “MCU will be investigating. Dispatch called Chilliwack and Surrey for GIS, but they were all busy. You’ve got the top dogs attending, and it’s too late to stop them now. Go back to the office and type up a report and then get back here. I don’t care how tired you are, or how long you’ve been on shift. I want to be ready for these guys.” He raised his voice again, again making sure everyone could hear him. “This is your call, and I want you on site when they arrive.”

Drake returned the stare from his sergeant’s icy eyes.
Control. Need to control.
He took a deep breath and restrained himself.
In another life, you’d be lying on the road beside the dead saint for talking to me like that.
He breathed in and let it go, then spun on his feet – military-style. As he climbed into the squad car, his stomach rumbled from the lack of cheese pizza. He’d been here before. He was a little more familiar with dead bodies than he’d admitted. He knew they had a way of causing problems. It didn’t matter if you were the one cracking the skulls or cleaning up after them. They usually had a way of messing up your evening.

It did not rain on the first day he drove into Hope. It was one of those rare days of autumn, or fall as the Canadians call it, when the sky is clear, a chill is in the air and the sun looks as large as the sky. It was the end of the year, the beginning of a new century – 2001, and the start of a new life.

An agent from the relocation team had furnished him with a map and a short written description of the area so he could familiarize himself before arriving. He didn’t go directly to the police detachment. He exited the highway at the optimistic sign that read “Welcome To Hope,” and parked his old pickup truck on the banks of the Fraser River. The sound of the rushing water drowned out the traffic noises from the highway. An eagle flew overhead toward the trees and made that strange sound that only eagles seem to make – its high-pitched wail piercing above the noise of the river.

He brushed the dirt off a large boulder and unfolded his map, tracing his fingers along the lines. If he headed south, a two-hour drive would take him into Vancouver, the largest city in the province, or if he forked off in the other direction he’d be right at the US border. His guidebook told him that north of Hope lay the tourist-friendly towns of the interior with their wineries and lake districts. Like Vancouver, those were towns with too many people – areas he knew he’d never visit. Hope sat miles away from them, surrounded by logging camps and farmland. The camps sounded like the mines from back home. The handwritten notes in his guidebook stated that local men and women typically worked for several months at a time at the hazardous profession, earning large sums of money. Then they came back to town where they’d pay a few bills, leave some money with their families, and blow off steam in the local taverns. Later he’d learn that some of those loggers lived in houses like the ones on the street where the man lay dead. They’d stay in rented houses along Cobalt and the neighboring streets during the winter before returning to work in the logging camps in the spring.

He didn’t hear about the pilgrimage until he’d been in town for a couple of months. If he’d known, it might have altered the initial feeling of relief he experienced when he first sat by the river. He was trying to stay invisible and fit in at the same time. One of his fellow officers told him about the annual springtime event. A famous actor had shot a movie in Hope twenty years ago, and every year since then, for one week, fans from all over the world descended on the little town, revisiting the settings where scenes from the movie had been filmed. They visited the site where the gas station was blown up, the wooded area where the disgruntled Vietnam veteran, who was the main character, ran away to, and the place where the old courthouse from the movie – the actual courthouse of the town – still stood. Each year there was a rumor that Sylvester Stallone, the actor who played the main character, would attend the gathering. He never came, but the rumors always surfaced, and fans were sure this would be the year. Movie buffs from Sweden, Australia, Great Britain, and across the border from the United States all visited, and that’s what concerned Drake. It wasn’t just the strangeness of the whole subculture of fans; he could deal with that. There were too many of them. He’d moved to Hope to hide, not to be confronted by someone who might remember.

There were two different groups of fans. The more civilized of the two camps spent time posing in front of the movie’s landmarks while talking to each other about their favorite scenes. They could often be overheard reciting dialogue they’d memorized or attending screenings at the local theater where the film was played almost continuously. The less-civilized of the two groups were there to get drunk. Some would wait until the evening, but for others the drinking took place all day long.

The pilgrimage was a boom to the local economy, and there was often pressure on the police officers to overlook certain incidents. Public drunkenness was deemed acceptable during the one-week period unless it got out of hand. On occasion some of the men reenacted fight scenes from the film, and it sometimes ended in arrests and a trip to the small hospital. Once when a couple of combatants had seriously injured each other, they had to be air-lifted out to the neighboring town’s hospital for emergency surgery. The first time Drake was called out to deal with some of the troublemakers, he discovered how passionate the participants really were.

He hadn’t been there long. After attending Depot, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Training Academy in Regina, Saskatchewan, in the middle of Canada, he was assigned, with the assistance of the relocation team, to serve on the West Coast. He went from the frozen flatlands of Regina to the rainforests of British Columbia. It was the end of May, and his uniform still looked like it was straight out of the box. With military precision and a hot iron, he’d managed to keep the creases in his pants and shirt firm and straight. He’d been sent out as backup to Memorial Park, right in the center of town, to assist with a disturbance. When he arrived he saw Banman, one of the general duty officers, and another officer whose name he couldn’t remember, standing beside a group of men. They were watching two fighters circle each other, swinging drunkenly at the air between them and occasionally landing a blow.

Their backs were to Drake, but he recognized their attire. They wore shirts that had the sleeves torn off and frayed blue jeans with holes in their knees. And they sported bandannas tied haphazardly around their foreheads. These were their badges of honor, modeled after the character from the movie.

When Drake moved toward the melee, Banman motioned for him to grab the combatant closest to him – a particularly burly looking fighter. He stepped forward and grabbed the person from behind, expecting Banman and the other policeman to hold on to the other fighter. Drake put his hands on the combatant’s arms and pulled back. When he heard the cursing he knew he’d made a mistake. He dropped his arms and stepped back.

The voice he heard was significantly higher-pitched than he’d expected. Both fighters turned on him. It was only when he saw that one of them had her long hair tucked below the collar of her shirt and noticed the feminine features on their faces he realized he was dealing with two women.

They were angry with each other and happy to beat away until one went down, but they were even angrier that a man got in the middle of their conflict. The shock at realizing that it was women fighting stunned him. The two fighters cursed at him and instantly seemed to sober up. Silently, they joined forces and ran at him, ramming their heads into his chest like a pair of deranged television wrestlers. Drake went down, winded and humiliated.

Banman laughed as he and the other officer pulled the cursing women off Drake. Drake leaned onto one side to catch his wind, and when he looked up Banman was standing over him.

“Welcome to Hope, Drake.” It was the first time he’d seen Banman laugh. He always seemed disinterested in his job and everyone around him. After serving all over Canada, he was winding down his career, back in his hometown. Drake gave him his noncommittal look. He stared up at the man, silently informing him that the situation could go one way or the other. This might have worked on a regular rookie right out of the training academy, but Drake didn’t just get here. He waited until Banman’s smile faded and then took another long moment before accepting the offer of a hand up.

Banman teetered on his heels as he helped the larger man to his feet. He stood a safe distance away from Drake as he spoke. Drake wasn’t sure if he was trying to be friendly or condescending. “Don’t worry, that’s as bad as it gets here.”

The fighting was over, and Banman, being the senior officer, decided no charges would be laid. The women ended up leaving the scene with their arms around each other while they bragged about downing the big, tough police officer. The only negative comments came from the men who had gathered around and had been enjoying watching the women fight. They wanted more and Drake had ended their fun.

It wasn’t home, but it felt like Hope was a town where a man could hide. It was less anonymous than he originally thought, but it was where he had ended up. The town reminded him of nothing and nowhere, and that was what he needed.

The older investigator from the Major Crime Unit agreed with Sergeant Thiessen that Drake should be present during his initial inspection of the crime scene. He even requested that he stand by his side while he examined the body. He wanted to know everything that Drake had noted when he first got to Cobalt Street. The man had a wrinkled complexion bordered by unusually dark hair and two bushy eyebrows that joined together when he screwed up his face. With each answer Drake gave, the investigator pondered while his eyebrows met in the middle of his forehead as though they too were contemplating what had been said. Thiessen stood off to one side with Rose, while Rempel sat steaming in the ambulance, impatiently waiting to deliver the body to the morgue.

He spoke with a slight accent – Scandinavian perhaps. “Your impression was that the injury to the head wasn’t concurrent with an unassisted fall, correct?”

“It didn’t look right.”

“Instinct or fact? What are you basing it on? Other bodies you’ve seen or just a feeling?”

It was three a.m.; he’d been on duty since noon the previous day. He’d been back and forth to the station and endured long stares from Thiessen and Rempel. A member of the Major Crime Unit had taped off the body, a photographer had taken pictures, and another investigator had recorded measurements. They had located a doctor and awarded him the duties of temporary medical examiner. He had performed his initial examination and was sitting in the ambulance with Rempel waiting for the body to be released. It had been a long day. And he was wet. The rain kept falling.

He let out a little bit of one of his secrets. “Fact. Definite fact.”

The investigator nodded immediately. “I agree. Let’s alert the coroner that this is a homicide investigation.”

Drake resisted the urge to look at his sergeant, but he did notice a smile on Rose’s lips. It quickly faded as her partner stormed toward them.

Ten minutes later the officers were crowded under a small canopy that had been erected. Along with the tent, a portable table was procured from the trunk of the crime team’s vehicle, and the contents of the dead man’s pockets were placed on it. The team from Vancouver had been in situations like this before and it showed. One of the officers hung a light under the canopy. It illuminated the table, making the policemen’s shadows dance when the poles of the tent were jostled.