The Vanishing Track (28 page)

“I've got a photo of Mr. Oliver now. I'll make sure all of the patrol officers have it in the next couple of hours,” said Lane, as she looked over the map.

Finally, she said, “I can see why you think this is linked to the Lucky Strike.” Cole and Denman looked at her. “As I said to Ms. Rose this morning, I think we're dealing with something else all together.”

Cole stepped forward, pointing to the tight cluster of X's surrounding the hotel. “If the disappearances aren't connected to the Lucky Strike, then I don't understand why all five people who disappeared seemed to hang out within a block of the place.”

Lane continued to study the map.

“Ms. Lane,” said Denman. She looked up at him. “Have you read the arrest report on the two men who assaulted Cole?”

She nodded.

“You don't think that's connected?” asked Denman.

“I didn't say that. I just don't think
this
,” she said, pointing to the Lucky Strike Hotel's lot, “is connected to the disappearances.”

“Then why are they all in such close proximity?”

Lane put a finger to her lips. “Individual preference would be my guess.”

“What do you mean?” asked Cole.

“My hypothesis is that these disappearances are all connected, but I think we're dealing with one individual who is taking people from the street.”

“And doing what?” asked Cole.

“I don't know.”

“Why just one?” asked Denman.

“A hunch. Look,” she said, pointing at the pattern of X's. “All the people who have gone missing are, well, they are all in pretty rough shape. Addicts, a former prostitute, a native man with
FASD
. These people aren't big, strong men who can defend themselves. Our perp isn't taking out drug dealers or enforcers. He's going after the weakest people on the streets.”

“I don't know,” said Cole. Denman looked at him. “If we're dealing with one evil dude who is stalking homeless people, why haven't people gone missing from other areas? It's all happening right
here
,” he said, tapping the map with his finger.

“You tell me,” said Lane, looking at Cole.

Cole held her gaze. “Well, you know my theory.”

“It doesn't hold up, Mr. Blackwater.”

Cole opened his mouth then closed it. He looked down at the map and crossed his arms. Five X's, all clustered around the Lucky Strike Hotel. “The perp is on foot,” Cole finally said. “That's why he's working such a tight geographic area. Because he can't get around.”

“If he's on foot, what's he doing, walking his victims somewhere?” asked Denman.

“We don't know. We haven't found any bodies,” said Lane.

“Yet,” said Cole.

“Hopefully never,” said Denman.

“Don't be naive, Denny,” said Cole, not too gently.

“I'm afraid statistics are against us on this one, Mr. Scott. Chances are—”

“I'm not willing to give up on these people.”

“Nor am I,” said Lane. “But—”

Cole interrupted again. “If the perp is on foot, how does he dispose of the bodies? Wouldn't the bodies turn up if he was knocking people off right here in the city? It's not like he could bury them or anything.”

“There are lots of places to hide bodies in the city.”

“Really? Places that don't get checked at least once a week when the trash gets picked up?”

“I've had my team looking into the obvious places.” They all looked at the map.

Cole put a finger on the map. “What about here?” he said, pointing to a patch of green next to Centennial Pier.

“Portside Park?” said Denman.

“Or here,” Cole said.

“In Burrard Inlet,” said Marcia Lane. She was already reaching for her cell phone.

WHEN GEORGE OLIVER WAS TWELVE
, his brother and some of his friends tied him up with a skipping rope and left him to sit in the sun for most of the afternoon. Eventually George had worked himself free, dislocating his shoulder in the process. The injury had never been attended to by a doctor, and to this day, George could pop his shoulder out of joint by simply pressing it against a door jamb.

He waited in the darkness. The pain was bearable. He'd endured worse.

The hardest part was not being able to free the other two men who were in the stinking cell with him. In the total darkness of the room, George couldn't even see them, though he was aware of their presence. He had seen the man with the flat eyes who called himself Sean come in with each of them. Each had been unconscious when Sean had dragged them down the stairs and into the concrete bunker. Through the light of the open door, and then by the dim glow of the dust-caked florescent tube, George had watched Sean beat them with that strange metal object on their backs, legs, chest, arms, and neck.

George closed his eyes. The sick fuck had tied him to a chair with rope, his hands behind his back, his fingers free. He taped George's mouth shut with thick strands of duct tape. Then he pulled his fingernails out one at a time.

George had passed out after the fourth nail.

The one Sean had called Aluminum Man hadn't lasted past the second nail. He had pissed himself, the dark stain emerging through his already filthy pants, then his head slumped forward onto his chest, a thin stream of vomit leaking from the corner of his mouth to congeal in his ragged beard.

The third man Sean had brought down just that morning. He had “introduced” him as Pigeon Boy. He had managed to thrash in the chair while Sean worked on his fingers and flipped over backward, cracking his head on the concrete floor of the bunker, knocking himself unconscious.

George thought that was lucky for Pigeon Boy. Sean had stopped working on his fingers, and instead wiped his hands on an oily rag to clean off Pigeon Boy's blood. The white coat he wore was covered in blood.

Pigeon Boy hadn't moved since, and George wasn't certain now if he was unconscious or dead.

Now George hunched in the darkness where he thought the door to the shelter must be. He had rocked his chair until it fell over. Then he was able to wiggle out from under the rope. His hands were still bound, but by dislocating his shoulder, he had been able to slip his hands under his feet and get them in front of him. If he was wrong about where the door was, Sean would come into the bunker too far away for George to knock him down and get away. Or Sean might knock George over as he came through the door to the concrete room. But if he was right, he might have just enough time to bowl Sean over and reach the road, and safety.

He huddled in the reeking darkness for what seemed like an hour, then fell asleep.

He woke suddenly to the sound of the outer door to the fallout shelter being pushed open.

JULIET SAT IN
her office for an hour after Marcia Lane had left, thinking about their conversation: a psychopath, on the loose in the Downtown Eastside. Now, faced with the very real possibility that there was one prowling the streets killing homeless people just for kicks—or for some other bizarre motivation only the psychopath knew—Juliet felt overwhelmed. She sat at her desk and looked at the bulletin board on the wall. Dozens of grainy black and white photos were thumb-tacked to the cork, each the image of a man or woman Juliet had come to know and care for in her eight years working on the street. She felt hot tears staining her face, and pushed them aside with her knuckles.

“Time to get back in the game,” she said to herself.

THE NEWS WAS
about to break all at once.

Nancy reached Water Street and hailed a cab. On her way to the
Vancouver Sun
office, she tore open the envelope and read the missing names—the signatories to the Lucky Strike Manifesto.

“Oh, no . . .” she said, as her eyes fell on one of the familiar names. She grabbed her cell phone from her pocket. “Pesh, it's Nancy. I've got the rest of the names.”

“Where are you?”

“I'm two minutes out. I need some help on this, and I've got to call a couple of people. This needs to all happen at once.”

“I'll have two senior writers in your office in five minutes.”

Nancy paid the five-dollar fare and ran through the
Sun
's lobby, catching the elevator just as it was closing. When she stepped out, Pesh was there. She handed him the list as they walked through the corridor to her office. He read as he walked.

“Well, that one's no surprise,” he said, pointing to a name. “But that one . . . Ah shit, this isn't going to be pretty.”

“Frank, we're not going to be able to get these people to talk.”

“I know.”

“What about Veronica?”

“She'll have to live with it. She works for
me
. You got your source face to face. That's going to have to be good enough.”

Nancy reached her office. Two of the
Sun
's senior City Desk writers were already standing there. “Okay,” she said. “Here's the plan.”

They began to prepare material to post on the web, and after making several phone calls, Nancy joined them. As she was writing, her cell phone rang.

“Nancy, it's Cole.”

“Can't talk now,” she said. “I just got the missing names.”

“Can you tell me?” Cole asked.

Nancy looked around the room. “No. I'll call you when I'm posting to the web. I'm afraid you won't be surprised.”

“Well, I'm calling with a heads up. Mary took a call from a female caller at City Hall, leaking the news that the mayor is making an announcement tomorrow on a new project called ‘A New Vancouver.' You heard about this?”

“Just what he told me last week when I interviewed him after the riot,” Nancy said, typing. “It's supposed to be his response to homelessness, poverty, crime, etc.”

“Details?”

“I got none.” She cradled the phone in her shoulder as she typed. “What time will it be?”

“Eleven. City Hall.”

“I guess I'll see you there,” said Nancy.

“I'll try to be there. Hey, Nancy . . .”

“Yeah.”

“Well, Denman and I braced Charles Livingstone this morning.”

“Really?” She stopped typing.

“I guess I went a little overboard.”

“Surprise, surprise.”

“Funny. We almost got our butts thrown in the cooler. He's tied up in this. His client is Frank ‘Captain Condo' Ainsworth.”

“Cole, Charles Livingstone's name is on my list. So is Frank Ainsworth's.”

NANCY POSTED A
teaser story on the web at 4:15. By 4:45 Livingstone, Grey and Barnes had called the
Sun
demanding an explanation and threatening a lawsuit. Veronica White, grinning, encouraged them to file. Calls came in from City Hall, the
VPD
, and other media seeking confirmation of the information before they posted or aired it over the radio and
TV
.

Nancy sat in her office and looked at the names. Her cell phone rang again and again. She checked the call display and ignored most of the calls. She picked up at Cole's number.

“Sorry, I forgot to call.”

“It's okay, busy afternoon. Wow. You're right. I had my suspicions.”

“Yeah, it's still going to hurt.”

“There's something else. Denman and I met with Marcia Lane this afternoon . . .” Nancy smiled and was about to say something, then thought better of it. “I showed her the map. We got to hypothesizing. You know, where have these missing people gone? If they weren't put on a bus, why haven't they shown up somewhere? A dumpster? In a dark alley? Lane says she's got a dozen uniforms prowling for this sort of thing. We were sitting there looking at the map, and thinking about who might have done this, what kind of person. I'm not giving up that this is connected to the Manifesto, you know? But Lane thinks differently, and I'll admit, she made a few good points.”

Nancy felt suddenly weary. “Cole, what are you getting at?”

“Bodies, Nancy. Where are the bodies? These missing people, they haven't turned up. No bodies. So I looked at the map. Only a few blocks from where all of the missing people were last known to hang out is a place called Portside Park. It's right on Burrard Inlet. I think Lane dispatched divers there this afternoon.”

“Jesus, you're kidding me!”

Nancy hung up the phone and ran from her office to Frank Pesh's door.

“Frank, I need a photographer, now!”

SEAN LIVINGSTONE SAT
in the backyard of Juliet Rose's Salisbury Street home, listening to the sound of birds in the trees and watching the momentary band of sun that had pushed its way through the opaque gray sky. He studied the clouds and thought that by midnight there would likely be rain again.

He looked around the yard and up at the house where he had been a guest for a week. It was a great setup, he thought.

Sean took a moment to appreciate how his plans were coming together. Though he had known for a long time what his end game would be, he hadn't figured out
how
he would get there until one evening two years ago. His father had a couple of business associates over for dinner and afterward they retired to his study to talk, smoke fancy cigars, and drink port. Sean had made himself scarce, but when he heard the men enter his father's den, he crouched outside the door, his heart racing. He simply couldn't help but eavesdrop.

“We're running out of room, Frank,” he heard his father say.

“In the West End, Charles. But there's always more land.”

“We're running out of room in the West End, in Kits, in Yaletown, and even on the North Shore,” said his father.

The man his father addressed as Frank said, “It's simply a matter of waiting for the economics to be right. Burnaby is already attractive. So is Mount Pleasant. Who would have imagined
that
ten years ago?”