Woman Chased by Crows (56 page)

“Let me help you with that stuff,” said Stacy. She relieved him of the vacuum cleaner, the mop and broom and leaned them against the wall. Chiklis laid the sign on the floor. It read, “For Lease Pilon Realty.” Stacy had a look inside the pail. It held Windex, Mr. Clean, Febreeze, a sponge and a wad of cleaning rags. “They made it easy for you Mr. Chiklis. The place is clean.”

“That's good,” he said. “You never know what you're going to find, y'know?”

“So far we haven't found much of anything. So. What can you tell me about the people who leased the house?”

“Not that much,” he said. “She was a medical professional, I believe; the gentleman was in the construction business.”

“Did he have his own company?”

“I wasn't the rental agent when they took the place. But I can get you a copy of the rental agreement if you want it. They must have had references. It's an executive-level home, all the amenities, fireplace, hardwood floors . . .”

“Yeah, it's a nice house. But it doesn't look like anyone actually lived here.”

“I understand the husband had some problems with the police, but I thought that had been straightened out.”

“It was.”

“According to his wife, he moved out last Monday or Tuesday. That's when she said she'd be leaving as well.”

“You're here pretty quick. She can't have been gone long, either. Did they leave together?”

“I don't know. I got the impression they were separating.”

“So how do you come to arrive here so fast? I mean, they've only just cleared out. Here it is Friday and already you're putting a sign out, vacuuming the stairs . . .”

“I came by yesterday morning and saw the moving truck here. It looked like everything was going.”

“Were either of them still here?”

“No, just the moving men.”

“Do you remember which moving company it was?”

“Oh sure, Dorians. Couple of guys with a big truck. Here in town.”

“Did you talk to them?”

“Yeah, for a minute. I talked to John. He's the older brother. Just to make sure they were both gone. I wasn't sure of the situation.”

“Right. Did you ask them where the stuff was going?”

“Storage. They have their own lockers.”

“Hey, Stace,” Adele was calling from the kitchen. “A minute?”

“Right there.” She turned back to Mr. Chiklis. “You go ahead Ben, you can start upstairs.” She handed him her card. “You find anything at all, you let me know, okay? Crean. Rhymes with brain.”

Stacy left Mr. Chiklis to struggle up the stairs with his cleaning supplies and headed for the kitchen. Adele was wedged behind the refrigerator. She was holding up something that looked like a boarding pass. “Bingo,” she said.

“What have you got?”

“Not a hundred percent sure. Looks like a Via Rail ticket invoice. Montreal–Oshawa.”

“She's gone to Montreal?”

“Looks like . . .” She peered at it closely. “Looks like somebody came
from
Montreal. Yesterday.”

Lorna was back.

“I am losing circulation in my hands. Can you not loosen the ropes just a little?”

“Maybe, in a while, if you help me.”

“And pretty soon I will have to pee.”

“Just give it back and it will all be over.”

“Really? Over for
me
, surely. If I help you, you will kill me.”

“No one wants to kill you, Anya.”

“Well, you may not
want
to, but it seems to me you will have no choice.”

“Here is how it could work. You tell me where it is, and then when I have it, and I'm safely on my way, I will phone someone to release you.”

“My my, that sounds most unappetizing. You phone someone, whom I have not yet seen, and they will free me? Why would they not just shoot me and be done with it?”

“We are not killers.”

“Really. And yet so many have died for that silly thing.”

“It's nothing but a burden.”

“At this moment it is the only thing keeping me alive.”

“I'm trying to keep you from being hurt. I am not the only one in this. There are others who want to use harsher methods.”

“Who can blame them? Six months of prying into my brains and you got nowhere. They must be most frustrated.”

“You won't like it if they take over.”

“Are you not breaking some important doctor's oath? Threatening torture?”

“I don't have any more time for this.”

At some point, someone, maybe the doctor herself, gave her a shot of something, presumably something that would make her talk. Truth serum? Is there such a thing? Whatever it was, it filled her head with clouds and hazy images of people long dead or missing. She saw Yuri in her dream. For one brief, perfect moment she saw him, as he was so many years ago, saw him in flight, hanging in the air like a great bird of prey, his head flung back, his long arms spread like wings, immortal. Is that
all
immortality is?, she wondered. Someone's fleeting memory of you, there for just a heartbeat, and then gone forever. And what if any memory would serve as
her
legacy? Who alive could even recall how she was, what she once was capable of?

And the rest? An image of Ludi in a dressing room, bouncing on her long bare toes. How we laughed about her feet sometimes, just the two of us. Mine, so hard and cramped and sore. And hers, so white, so unblemished, so plain and
normal
. How odd, that in this drugged state the clearest image is of someone's bare feet bouncing on a cheap blue rug somewhere. Where? A dressing room. Some small theatre. What does it matter? There's your immortality, Ludi dear, I remember your toes.

Eventually they got tired of her meandering babble and they left her alone for a very long while, left her alone to pee where she sat, they didn't care, left her to grind her wrists raw against the ropes and to rock the wooden chair back and forth. It was evening by now, the shafts of light through the barn wall had slipped lower and lower and then died, leaving her to sit in the gloom.

“You got any frickin' idea what's going on here, partner? I mean, any idea at all?”

“It's complicated, isn't it?”

“
Complicated?
It's a ball of snakes. And just when you think you've got one by the tail the whole thing twists around on you.” She was rummaging in Stacy's glove compartment. “Should've taken my car.”

“We can stop somewhere.”

“No, I don't want to stop somewhere. I want to grab some people by the neck and shake some straight stories out of them. I mean, come
on
! Dilly's the bad guy. His fingerprints are all over this thing. Maybe not his
actual
fingerprints, but you get my drift. So we've got him just about backed into a corner and pow! Some new asshole we aren't even looking at blows him away. Now where's that at?”

Stacy concentrated on her driving for a while. “You sure you don't want to stop for a burger or something?”

“You hungry?”

“I'm confused is what I am. Same as you. I wouldn't mind a minute to talk about things.”

“Good. Fine. Anything coming up?” Stacy made a quick right turn into the West Mall shopping centre. They had a choice of an A&W, a Taco Bell, a Pizza Pizza and a Subway. Adele clapped her hands. “Fuck. It's the motherlode.”

“Knock yourself out. I'm going into Foodland to get something my body can actually use.”

“Whatever.”

Adele decided on a Mama Burger, onion rings and a root beer. Stacy came back to the car with two bananas, a bag of almonds and a small carton of orange juice with pulp. They sat in the parking lot with the doors ajar and concentrated on chewing and slurping for a while. After polishing off the first banana and a few almonds, Stacy spoke. “What
don't
we know?”

“For starters, we don't know who shot Dilly O'Grady in the fucking head.”

“Has to be someone he knew. Sitting beside him in the car. Somebody he trusted.”

“Got a list? Wife? His assistant, Chris, Cam, whatshisname?”

“Cam.”

“Him? Why? Fucked his career? What does he care?”

“This was his shot at the big time.” Stacy finished the second banana and left the car to find a garbage can.

“Yeah. Drastic though,” Adele said. “I'm leaning more to somebody close to the jewel business.” She followed Stacy across the lot and tossed her garbage as well. They both stood beside the trash bin. “Yeah, gotta be somebody involved in the Nimchuk thing, or those other Russkies, can't keep them straight. The guy in the park, the beaky one in Montreal, and let's not forget Louie.”

“And Louie's kid, Darryl.”

“I don't see him getting his act together enough to pull it off.”

“Me neither,” said Stacy, “but if we're making a list we should put everybody on it we can think of.”

“Who else is there?”

“We're back to the doctor.”

“But no connection.”

“Well, no connection to O'Grady that we know of, but we've got a big connection to the jewels. According to Mr. Tomashevsky . . .”