Twilight Is Not Good for Maidens (16 page)

“Makes you kind of wish for a nice locked-room mystery once in a while,” she said. “An orangutan crawling in an upper-floor window.”

Stooping again, Ed paid close attention to the bruised neck.
Mmm hmm
was all he said. Chris watched and took a few notes. Quiet as paint on a wall. Ed caught Holly’s gaze and smiled at her about the rookie’s discomfort. “Can you believe this is my partner’s first homicide? Never believe it, would you? He’s a cool one.”

Chris looked like he was used to the teasing, but his face flushed under its fashionable stubble. “Knock it off, Ed.”

“Holy crow. Do I have to walk clear to Washington State, or are you gonna call me a ferry? No jokes, please. This is Canada,” yelled a gruff voice from the underbrush.

Into the grove stumped Boone Mason. He was used in cases west of the city because he lived nearby in a trailer park on the ocean. A bum knee led to his early retirement from a successful career as a private eye. Though he operated on-call with sporadic pay, the job filled lonely hours since his beloved wife had died years ago. It also limited his dates with a rye bottle. A battered doctor’s bag bumped next to him, and he was wearing washed-out work pants with a knee brace and a Toronto Blue Jays sweatshirt. On his head was a straw Panama hat which had seen better days. Stuck in the brim were two fishing flies.

“I see I’m the last one at the party,” he said.

Ed gave a wry smile. “It never starts without you.”

“Let’s see what we have here. That young, we can cross off heart attack or stroke,” Boone said. “I suppose you two have already made up your minds before the real brains got here. All bets are officially off, starting now.” His gruff exterior hid the fact that he had more compassion than almost anyone she knew.

Chris raised a polite eyebrow. Ed folded his arms and locked eyes with Holly as if to say
Here he goes again
.

“Remember that
assume
always makes an ass of you and me.”

How many times had she heard that? But she wouldn’t have traded him for Hollywood’s most famous coroner.

With a creaky protest from his joints, Boone knelt with a grunt and got to work, chatting in his usual self-distracting way. Dispatch tempered by humanitarianism. Victims were not case files. They had names and significance, even though they had died of an overdose in an alley, mourned by none. You’d never hear him referring to crispy critters or floaters. His goal was to do whatever was in his purveyance to find justice for the victim.

“The marks on her neck,” Holly said, stating the obvious. Not long ago she’d attended her first autopsy. One was enough. That was one career she’d never pursue. The open air was her territory.

“No kidding. You’re not supposed to be mucking about before I get here, you know. And how about this beach towel, fer Chrissake? Is it hers?” The corner of his mouth rose a fraction. Hair uncombed, clothes rumpled, he never failed to get to a scene as fast as he could and then take all the time he needed. “The clock’s already stopped for them,” he’d say. In his presence, even Ed stood wordless.

Holly cleared her throat in discomfort. “It belongs to another girl. I moved it to check for a pulse. There was the outside chance that she was just unconscious. No such luck.”

While they waited, Ed sent Chris on a reconnaissance, setting up a grid to prepare before the rest of the group arrived. A large team helped scope a scene, but they also crowded it. Once away from this very public place, there would be no coming back. Nature would reassume its leafy business. This was very rough territory, unlike in a home where even a vacuum could be deployed. In the rainforest were a million places for evidence to hide. And suppose they found something. Like at French Beach, who knew how long it had been there? On the other hand, there were the lucky times. The murderer of a woman in the Maritimes had left a new jacket at the scene, with no evidence of him but hair from his cat.

Minutes passed while Boone entered notes in a mini-recorder. Body temperature, rigour, condition of her clothes, discernible wounds or bruises, broken bones. His back was to them, and knowing that he didn’t like to be watched, they had turned away but couldn’t help sneaking the occasional look. “No supervising! You’re not my apprentices on a cooking show. Let me breathe, goddammit,” she’d heard him tell a few people with their necks craned too close.

Finally he turned. “I suppose you want to know all the secrets.”

“Damn straight. So spill
it.” Ed had worked with Boone over the years. He took the older man’s sharp tones with aplomb, and from the half smile on his rugged face, they were good friends.

Boone had reached philosophical mode. He popped an unlit corncob pipe into his mouth, clamped down his teeth, then drew on it for inspiration, his no-fail quit smoking method. “It’s ugly, poor kid. She’s been raped. I can tell you that. Before or after death is hard to tell at the moment.”

Holly felt as if she’d been dunked in icy water. Talk about taking it to the next step. Rape. But she should have thought of that. It was so logical. “But she’s dressed.”

Boone shrugged his bullish shoulders. “Some of those bastards can be downright fastidious. Do the dirty deed and then tidy up. Play set director. Or maybe feel remorse about what they’ve done and want to make it right again. You see it with children who’ve been killed by their mothers. They tuck their little bodies into bed and pull up the covers, as if we wouldn’t notice.” He coughed to cover up a halt in his voice. Ed took out a huge handkerchief to blow his nose.

Swallowing a lump in her throat, Holly imagined the makeup of such a twisted mind. And the white-knuckling nerve. Taking his time when he might have been discovered by five other people. And all in the dark. “I just noticed those scratches on her arms. Was she fighting for her life?”

“Look closer. Trailing blackberry canes. Still all over the ground at this time of year. There are traces in the wounds.” Boone looked around, then pointed. “He might have pulled her over where they wouldn’t be seen as easily. Not dragged, though. Heels are clean.”

Coming back in time to hear this, Chris mumbled something and lurched off. “Sensitive type. Had the jitters myself the first time. Not so many murders out here that it becomes a habit,” Ed said, shaking his head. “Bar room brawls for the most part. Drugs more recently. Don’t feel so sorry about those lowlifes. They knew the risks. But this….”

Holly felt colder although the sun was brilliant and they were sheltered from the shore breeze. “Like French Beach. I’ve been telling Ed.”

Boone asked, “I never heard about that. You had a rape there?”

“A sexual assault, or so it seemed.” She gave Boone the basics. “Two weeks ago. If someone hadn’t come along, it might have had this ending.”

“He ran out of luck the first time. Maybe that made him madder.” Ed looked at Boone. “But you gotta admit, this is a strange place for an attack. Damn sight far from everything.”

“The scene at French was impossible. The inspectors couldn’t find a thing. But …” Holly paused for effect, watching a new spark of interest in their eyes.

“But what? Don’t keep us in suspenders,” Boone said.

“In the yurt where the girl was pushed, I found a small fragment of paper. At the time, it didn’t seem important. We had no reason to believe … that’s why no one …”

Ed had a minor coughing fit. When it subsided, he made another note, and slapped his book shut, tucking it in his overcoat pocket. “Where the hell is it now? We have a murder on our hands. Nothing should be overlooked. I’m going to have to read the report Crew turned in on the assault. Guess he didn’t think anything special of it, or he would have mentioned it. Lucky bastard’s off in Calgary for a week of seminars.”

“He thought the attack was a one-off.” Holly felt attacked by both sides. Call it an instinct from being first on the scene before procedures started clicking, something had felt very wrong at French Beach.

“When I tried to have it tested, I couldn’t get authorization from Inspector Crew. He said that thousands weren’t going to be spent on a simple groping. Not with budget cuts and backlog. Maybe if …” As she reined in her opinions, her voice trailed off.

Ed put his hands in his pockets. “They’re not lying. It’s a real logjam, especially in times of cutbacks. One death took a year to be labelled a homicide. Several cases have been tossed out of court because of the unreasonable delay. But I want that paper. I’ll send a man to your detachment to get it as soon as you’re back.”

Boone held up a hand like a traffic cop. “Wait, wait, wait, my friends. Remember what I said about assumptions. Eliminate all the long shots. What about someone in the group doing this? You got to them first. What’s your gut say, Holly?” That Boone used those words without a patronizing smile made her an equal, which pleased her.

Holly told him about what Mike had admitted about giving Lindsay too much to drink. “With all the time that passed before I got here, there could be alibis all around. But these kids are part of a drama cast. It’s hardly a scene for wild sex.” Though she wouldn’t have discounted what happened in the privacy of the tents.

“I’m convinced by the strangulation. This is the same person,” Ed said. “With the rape, there may be conclusive evidence, unless our guy’s as smart as he seems to be.”

“We’ll get the word from the M.E. on whether there was an ejaculation. Left here like a piece of garbage. It bloody well makes me sick. Anything else about the scene, corporal?” Boone asked. He tucked the pipe in his hip pocket, its amber stem scored with bite marks.

Holly ran over the last few hours like a mental Mobius strip. Boone had come to hear the most important witness. A silent scream, he called it. Tell her story so that others might live safely. Holly related what she had learned from Mike and the others.

“One more thing. I took a nail scraping,” Boone said, and eyebrows went up. “Unless I’m crazy, we got something under there. Course it could be her own tissue from clawing at that line. We’ll get samples from the rest of the group for elimination.”

“The women too?” Holly asked.

“Death is an equal-opportunity employer,” Boone said with his usual wryness. “And just to make things interesting, someone still drunk could be easily overtaken with a wire like that. She was on the small side. For all we know, she was poaching on another girl’s boyfriend and paid the price. Stranger things, and all that.”

Boone began packing up. Ed moved off to the side to converse with Chris. Holly pictured Megan and Britt. As killers? Impossible. “Even with our advances, criminals are getting smarter.” Holly adjusted her cap. “Next
they’ll
be wearing protective suits and latex gloves.”

“Too much television. Didn’t used to be that way before DNA. Secretors, non-secretors. Blood type didn’t narrow it down that much.” Boone rubbed his knee as he hobbled by. “Damn. I’ve got to start the ball rolling on getting a replacement. Just don’t want to be out of commish for six months. Anyway, one thing’s certain. Traffic’s going to be way down on the trail once this hits the papers.”

“The attack at French is easier to understand. The sites were clean around the road.” Holly said to Ed with a sweep of her arm. “Here the terrain is wicked. I’m still wondering about the other groups down the beach. Good luck checking them out if they’ve already hiked west.”

“It’s opportunistic, all right. Like someone waited to get her as far away from the tents as possible.” Chris seemed to have come to himself and offered an opinion.

Ed set his jaw with a slight narrowing of the eyes. “Bare-hand strangling is one of the coldest ways to kill and one of the hardest to prosecute. Imagine looking at a face that close. Hearing the gasps for air. Squeezing the neck, tighter, tighter.”

As he talked, Holly’s imagination was working. It was becoming harder to breathe. To snap herself out of it, she spoke. “There’s something I don’t get, Boone.”

“Don’t feel bad. Admitting that you don’t know can move you forward.”

“The wire. Is the assailant wearing gloves? Wouldn’t this hurt his hands or fingers?”

Ed spoke up. “A garrotte. Wooden pegs or something to turn on the ends. Make them take the pressure.”

“Could be.” Boone adjusted one suspender that had twisted his belly. “I’d vote for thick gloves. Gardening ones.”

Holly’s heart sank. “You can get those anywhere. But wouldn’t they be too clumsy? The fine motor movements would be impeded.”

He met her gaze with his wise old oyster eyes, pouches below from years in the trenches. “Maybe one will turn up in the site search. The wire, the gloves, what we find at the autopsy. With just two out of three, we’ll be halfway to an arrest.”

“Only halfway? That’s depressing.” In dramas, cases passed from beginning to end within an hour on screen. But she knew that weeks or months could go by. Normally the accused headed to another state on day one. And when he or she was brought in, the interrogations were almost comical. Holly loved the way the detectives told the killers to “man up,” using the stereotype against them. Women seemed to do better at this kind of soft persuasion. Tears would flow down the faces of young criminals in Miami, Nashville, or Dallas.

“Cases like this where the victim probably doesn’t know the killer are a bitch to solve. If you want justice every time, stick to crime novels.” Ed had gone back to his notes and been finishing up a page as he stood nearby. He looked at his watch with a world-weary expression. “You’re free and clear to go back to business as usual, corporal. A late lunch is better than none. Sometimes I miss those good old days when I went home and waved goodbye to work at five on the dot,” said Ed.

Holly walked out behind Boone. He hadn’t been this incapacitated since they’d met. He’d be in a lot of pain tonight, but he needed the money. Regular cheques from his small cocktail of pensions went to his late wife’s extended family in India. When he turned sixty-five soon he’d be eligible for another five hundred a month for the Old Age Security. “A girl had to die. That’s a sad way to force action on that paper fragment,” she said as they walked back down the path slowly at a slug’s pace.

“It’s a real long shot. And you know something else, too, don’t you?” His voice left little doubt in the possibilities.

“You mean that it might happen again? And soon?”

“Exactly. You’re starting to think like me. The first time was a quirky assault. This time, it’s goodnight, nurse. The papers will be full of it. It’s going to be a rare woman who goes out on her own until there’s an arrest.” He put a hand on her shoulder in a fatherly way. That he’d never mentioned having kids didn’t mean he had none. Many men were like that. Women couldn’t wait to tell you about their brood.

“I don’t want to think that we’ll meet again over this … or worse.”

“Small thin piece of paper, you say? How big?”

She picked up a piece of debris from the path. A fragment of peat or shard of wood about the size of a quarter of her small fingernail. “Like this.”

Boone gave her a cautious smile and winced as he navigated a rock in the path. “Cases have been solved with less.”

As they passed Lindsay’s tent, she stopped, something she hadn’t been able to do on arriving. It was a weighty old canvas model. The boys had probably helped Lindsay lug it to the beach, showing off their muscles. Had it had been for decades in the Nanaimo family, part of happy outings? They’d probably process it on the long-shot notion that Lindsay might have been initially assaulted there. She knelt on the rough boards of the platform like a suppliant, opened the flap and peered in. As Mike had said, it looked like someone had merely stepped out for a moment. Laid out were a sleeping bag, pillow, pile of clothes, jacket, a candy bar and chips, bottle of water, presumed barf bag clumsily folded, and a lop-eared stuffed pink rabbit. A peppermint smell from an empty bottle of schnapps made her nauseous. The reek of vomit was strong. She gave a slight cough.

“It’s pretty foul,” Mike said, coming up behind her.

“The team will do what it needs to do.”

“That rabbit,” he said. “It plays ‘Easter Parade.’ Andy, she calls it. Her good luck charm. She always brought it to class and left it on the desk during tests.”

Luck ran out, Holly thought with a tug on her heart. Funny how college students were little kids inside. To her horror, he reached for it and pushed a lever. “In your Easter bonnet,” a fluty voice sang.

“Put that down, please,” she asked as heads turned their way.