Читать книгу Charlie McKelvey Mysteries 3-Book Bundle - C.B. Forrest - Страница 4

It was past midnight when Twiggy squeezed her bulk through the gap in the bushes and slithered down the slope towards the darkened gully, guided more by feel than by sight. Three days’ worth of old newspapers were tucked under one pudgy arm, and a battered garbage bag dragged along behind her. She held her bottle tight in her hand, but most of the rum was already singing through her veins. The soggy ground was slippery, but at least the ice had melted, and below her she saw the black water glisten in the aqueduct as it drifted slowly towards the old pumphouse.

Twiggy felt laughter bubble up inside her. April was her favourite time of year, when the squirrels and the leaf buds began to appear again. When the sun warmed the frozen ground and beat down on her secret hideout. After six years on the streets of Ottawa, she knew all the best spots — the ledges under the bridges, the back doors and vents of the indoor parking garages, the window wells of old office buildings. And best of all, this hidden sliver of trees and water running through the city core almost within sight of Parliament Hill. Cars whizzed by on the roads up above, but only a few regulars knew the old aqueduct existed beneath the canopy of trees. Twiggy had hoped it would stay that way, but every year the bulldozers and backhoes ripping up the Lebreton Flats rumbled ever closer to this little corner of history.

She’d had enough of her fellow man after a winter of stinky, crowded shelters, noisy drunks, paranoid psychos and ridiculous rules. She’d been waiting all month for the moment when she could finally return to her cubbyhole near the water’s edge, spread out her belongings in the shelter of the graffiti wall and settle in for the summer. Her living room, she called it, complete with wall paintings from the most renowned street artists.

During the summer months, she had her regular panhandling spot next to the Tim Hortons on Bank Street, just a few blocks away. She had a special deal going with the day manager, who gave her day-old doughnuts and newspapers at the end of each day in return for her not crowding the door and for being polite and respectful to his customers. He said he’d rather have a friendly, middle-aged woman sitting quietly against the wall than a surly, in-yourface punk with piercings and tattoos all over the place. She usually made a pretty good haul during the tourist season.

Earlier that evening, she’d got a full meal at the Shepherds of Good Hope before linking up with a couple of friends to pool their take and party a little. She’d even had a little snooze in the side doorway of a hotel before some security guard kicked her out. So she was really groggy when she finally stumbled down the ravine toward her favourite spot in the shelter of the graffiti wall. The moon was high, and the looming silhouette of a steam shovel shimmered in her vision like a massive insect ready to scoop up her private paradise. So close now! Above the gurgle of the water, there was no sound. No giggles of stoned teenagers, no grunts of hurried sex or wails of homesick drunks.

Twiggy wavered dreamily along the stone embankment until her foot hit something solid, pitching her forward onto her face. Her fingers encountered hair. Masses of long, tangled curls and cool, doughy flesh. She jerked back in panic and groped the length of the body, feeling high boots and denim stretched tight over a boney ass.

Some little whore had passed out cold, half dangling in the water.

“Lucky the little bitch didn’t fall in,” Twiggy muttered, staggering to her hands and knees. She tried to drag the girl farther from the water, but in the end could only budge her a few inches. In disgust, she hauled her garbage bag up to the shelter of the wall, shoved the wad of newspapers under her and collapsed with a grunt to fall asleep.

The cold woke her just after dawn. Pale sunlight speckled the ravine, and the morning rush hour was just revving up. Frost had settled onto the ground, and her breath swirled white around her. She curled herself stiffly into a ball, trying to warm up as she gathered her rum-soaked thoughts.

Jesus, was her first thought. She’d jumped the gun. It was still too fucking cold to be sleeping outdoors. Tonight she’d have to grit her teeth and go back to the women’s shelter. No one in their right mind was out here this early in the spring. No one except...

A vague recollection fluttered down, like a forgotten leaf from a barren tree. She rolled over and lifted her head to peer at the body by the water. Saw in the daylight that the woman was still there. Blonde and long-legged, but scrawny as a chicken and wearing a man’s old jacket. She was curled on her side with one hand flung out and her face tilted towards the sky. A fine layer of frost had settled on her cheeks and eyelashes, and not even the faintest puff of white mist drifted between her parted lips.

* * *

Inspector Michael Green eased the clutch out and inched his car eastward in the bumper to bumper morning traffic along Albert Street. Up ahead, the light at Booth Street turned red yet again. A long line of buses snaked along the transitway, waiting to turn left onto Albert Street. Green craned his neck to search for any signs of obstruction and spotted flashing red lights through the brush on the north side of the street.

As he drew closer, he saw a uniformed police officer directing traffic and a police vehicle blocking access to the municipal parking lots on the north side, throwing hundreds of downtown commuters into confusion. Lined up on the back street behind the parking lots were four squad cars, two unmarked Malibus, an Ident van, and a black coroner’s van. Just beyond the official vehicles, the land fell away to a scruffy mix of trees, construction fencing and neglected scrubland that surrounded the city’s old aqueduct. The entire parking lot, scrubland and aqueduct were cordoned off with yellow police tape.

Green hesitated. This was obviously a major incident. The coroner’s van meant there was a body, and the sheer number of officers suggested the cause of death was far from clear. All crimes against persons fell under Green’s command, and even though he had a team of major crimes detectives to handle the frontline fieldwork, he could never quite trust they actually knew what they were doing. Especially since Brian Sullivan, his oldest friend and the backbone of the Major Crimes Squad, was off playing Acting Staff Sergeant in strategic planning, and CID ’s new superintendent Barbara Devine was trying to control every dime and man-hour expended, so that her stats would look good in the annual report.

At this very moment, in fact, Barbara Devine was probably pacing her colour-coordinated office, tapping her red fingernails on folded arms as she waited for him to show up for his weekly report. That image alone began to shift the scales in favour of checking out the scene. Then he spotted a young woman with a cloud of frizzy red hair and a hideous black and white checked suit clumping down towards the water’s edge.

The sight of Detective Sue Peters was the final straw.

He pulled out into the opposing lane and jumped his car up onto the curb, ignoring the outraged looks of the other drivers and thankful for the Subaru’s all wheel drive. He drove along the grassy verge until he reached the parking lot, then clambered out of the car. Logging in with the startled officer guarding the scene, he ducked under the cordon and slithered down the frost-slicked slope. Sue Peters swung on him in surprise. Her green eyes danced irrepressibly. “Good morning, sir!”

He nodded to the group clustered by the water. “What do we have, Peters?”

“A body, sir. Looks like a working girl stayed out too late.”

Green shot her a scowl, bristling at the flippancy in her tone and the haste of her conclusions. The body wasn’t even out of the scene. He prayed someone other than Peters was in charge. “Who’s lead?”

The dancing eyes faded slightly. She nodded toward the parking lot. “Bob Gibbs. He’s up at the car.”

“Do we have an ID?”

“She had no wallet or purse on her, sir. But Gibbsie’s running her specs through the system, and maybe Missing Persons will come up with a match.”

Green raised his head to scan the scene. As he’d expected,there was no sign of any of the NCOs from Major Crimes. A brawl in one of the Byward Market clubs two nights ago had resulted in the stabbing of two college students in a room full of underage witnesses, who had scattered before the police arrived, tying up a dozen detectives in the search to track them down and leaving enough prints and blood spatters to keep the entire Ident unit poring over their microscopes for a month. There were precious few resources left over for this luckless Jane Doe, and with Barbara Devine clutching the purse strings, Green feared there was little chance of more.

The one positive was the presence of Sergeant Lou Paquette, an Ident officer who drank too much and whined too much, but who’d lived and breathed forensics for over twenty years. He was crouched by the stone bank, snapping photographs. When he moved aside, Green glimpsed a lanky figure on his knees beside the victim, his wild white mane of hair tumbling into his eyes. Green’s pulse quickened. Dr. Alexander MacPhail was the region’s senior forensic pathologist. What had prompted Gibbs to call in the big guns?

Green took a quick breath to steel himself before heading over for a closer look. He loved the thrill of the hunt, but quailed at the gut-churning stench and gore of death. Images of splattered brains and amputated body parts crowded his subconscious, clamouring for memory whenever he approached another death. Three years behind a desk had not improved his defences either.

To his relief, the victim looked almost peaceful curled upon her side on the cold stone bank. Her eyes were half shut,and she had no apparent marks on her. A working girl, Peters had concluded, but at first glance Green didn’t think so. She looked thin and sick, as if she’d taken a beating from life, but her clothing had been chosen for warmth rather than titillation, and her porcelain-white face had not a trace of make-up. Crow’s feet were beginning to tug at the corners of her eyes and her matted blonde hair was shot with grey.

MacPhail was bent over her, inspecting her face with a powerful flashlight.

Green crouched as close as he dared. “What can you tell me?”

MacPhail cast him only the briefest glance of surprise.“This is an interesting one, laddie,” he announced in his customary Scottish boom. Green had never known the man to whisper, even in the presence of the most heart-wrenching death. MacPhail waved his beam. “See the colouring on this side of her face?”

Green forced himself to study the woman’s face carefully.Where the frost had melted, beads of moisture clung to her lashes and to the down on her cheeks. But beneath the waxy pallor of death, he saw what MacPhail meant. Faint red blotches discoloured one side of her face.

“She’s been moved some time after death,” he said.

“Aye. Now the lass who found her..." MacPhail cocked a brow towards a group of people clustered at the base of the graffiti wall. In the middle sat a familiar figure with a mop of stringy grey hair and a paramedic’s blanket draped around her massive frame. Calling her a lass seemed a stretch. Nonetheless, MacPhail continued with no trace of irony.

“She says she tripped on her last night in the dark.”

“That would be enough to dislodge her, certainly.”Considering the weight differential, Green thought.

“Aye.” The pathologist’s blue eyes twinkled briefly. “But not to roll her over. I’ll know more when I can check the lividity in the rest of the body. However, my considered opinion, based on having seen a few corpses in my day, is that she was dumped.”Green glanced at MacPhail sharply.

The pathologist madeno attempt to suppress the broad smile that cracked his features. So that was why Bob Gibbs had called in the big guns. Sharp boy, Green thought with a twinge of pride. “So we’re talking what?” he said. “Murder?”

“Or a simple cover-up. She could have OD’d, and her friends didn’t want the police snooping around their hang-out, so they brought her out here. Pretty isolated this time of year.”

Green glanced around at the surroundings. MacPhail had a point. Lebreton Flats had boasted a colourful history of sex and wild times since the years when fur traders and lumbermen first ran their goods down the Ottawa River in the late 1700s. But in the past fifty years, the area, which sat virtually in the shadow of Parliament Hill and constituted some of the choicest urban real estate in the country, had gone to seed while politicians and bureaucrats bickered about what to do with it.

During that time, street people and squatters had filtered in, bringing sex, drugs and booze to the decrepit shores of the abandoned aqueduct. Recently, though, construction had begun to clean up the Flats for fancy condos and museums,and now the Flats were crisscrossed with construction fencing.Heavy machinery sat idle amid piles of dirt, and in the middle sat the old stone pumphouse through which the aqueduct ran.But above the pumphouse, tucked in below an old wall and invisible from the street, a little pocket of trees still formed a natural hangout. In summers past, the area had been popular with transients and street artists, who had painted the wall with huge, colourful images. At this time of year, however,with the ice barely gone from the shoreline, the street trade would be nonexistent. Whoever brought the woman here had probably hoped she’d go undiscovered for days.

“Can you give me a preliminary cause of death?”

MacPhail shone his flashlight at the victim’s nose andmouth. Pinpoints of red dotted her eyelids and some water clung to her upper lip and the corners of her mouth.

“Drowning?” Green ventured. MacPhail frowned as he probed the woman’s neck. His tone was distracted. “Possibly. I need to get her on the table to be sure. Paquette’s taking samples of the water to compare with her lungs, and I’ll need a thorough tox screen. From the looks of her, I’d say she hasn’t been putting too many healthy things into her body for the last while.”

Green studied the woman’s clothing. Her long, narrow feet were encased in a pair of worn leather boots, and her faded jeans fit neatly over her thin hips, as if they’d been made forher. Only the jacket, a man’s khaki parka which hung down over her fingertips, looked out of place.

“I guess she probably picked up that jacket from one of the missions. Or traded another one for it.”

MacPhail was bagging the hands and he barely paused to glance at it. “That’s military issue for both men and women.”

Green perked up. A lead. “Any idea what regiment?”

MacPhail moved the hood aside. “No sign of a regimental insignia, but it’s standard army. Mind you, it’s known some years. It could have been passed around like a paper bag at a temperance rally, so it’s pretty cold as trails go.”

“Still, it’s a trail.” Green turned to find Sue Peters at his elbow, clipboard in hand.

“You want me to contact the military, sir? See if they have a soldier gone AWOL from CFB Ottawa?”

“No.” Green scrambled for a safer assignment to occupy her. With only a few months of Major Crimes under her belt,Peters still had all the subtlety of a charging rhino, and Green shuddered at the thought of the military in her sights.Spotting Paquette, he gestured towards him. “As soon as Ident gets a good photo of the deceased, start showing it around on the streets, including the shelters, Byward Market and the Rideau Centre. Someone should have seen her.”

“Do you want me to ask about pimps too, sir?”

Green bit his tongue. Jeez, she was going to screw up even that. “Stick with the victim, Peters. Find someone who’s seen her, or knows who she’s been associating with.”

“Who should I report to? I mean...are you running thecase?”

Green hesitated. As he stood at the edge of the crime scene,breathing in the scent of excitement and the urgency of death,watching the ident officer combing the grounds and the pathologist circling the victim, he felt the old passion for the hunt. People suffered, people died, and all he’d ever wanted to do was to track down the tormenters and bring them to account. Nothing thrilled him as much as making the bad guys pay. But now, in the larger, amalgamated police service,he was a middle-management bureaucrat, trapped between the field officers who wrestled with flesh and blood suffering and the senior officers, whose main battlefield was the committee rooms and ledgers of Elgin Street Headquarters.He’d stopped off here because he couldn’t resist the call of the field, but he belonged, even at this moment, in Barbara Devine’s office.

Yet there were elements in the case that could use an inspector’s touch. He dredged up his best bureaucratese. “Not directly. It’s Gibbs's case. He’ll keep me apprised.”

MacPhail straightened as he watched the redhead bound eagerly towards the road. Merriment shone in his eyes. “Not directly? You’ll be getting your nose indirectly in, then?” Green laughed. “Well, inquiries with the military can be delicate. Those army guys love their ranks.”

* * *

January 15, 1993. Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Man, it’s cold out here. The wind whips off the prairie like a nor’easter coming off the sound, so cold we can hardly do manoeuvres. We’re mostly doing weapons training and PT, and the sergeant major’s working us so hard my legs feel like they’re going to fall off. He says we only got two months to get in shape, and there’s going to be some of us won’t make the cut. There are guys here from all across the country, a lot of them weekend warriors like me, really excited to be on their first tour. My platoon commander’s a captain from the Princess Pat regulars who they call the Hammer, because he comes down hard if you mess up. They put Danny and me in the same platoon, but we’re in different sections so we won’t get to work together much. Your section’s kind of like your family, you rely on them.

My section commander’s a sergeant from Winnipeg on back to back rotations to Yugoslavia. He’s been telling us horror stories about the shelling and the sniping going on all the time. But that’s mostly in Sarajevo, and we’re going to be escorting convoys and protecting civilians in Croatia, which is a little horseshoe-shaped country that curves through the mountains and down the Adriatic Sea. Maybe Danny and I can go to a Greek island on our leave. Far cry from the North Atlantic. This is our first taste of real action, and I sure hope we both make the cut.