Читать книгу Winston Patrick Mystery 2-Book Bundle - David Russell W. - Страница 22

When you try to explain Canada to Americans who haven’t been here, the comparison is often made between Seattle and Vancouver. Most Americans know that Seattle is legendary for its rain, a reputation Vancouver shares. Many Americans—particularly those who view Canada as a snow-covered, dog-mushing wilderness—are surprised to find out that Vancouver gets even less snow than Seattle.

The South Granville area, running the roughly seven or eight blocks from Broadway to 16th Avenue, is an upscale shopping area paling in price and variety to the trendier Robson Street downtown, but still pricey enough to be beyond the reach of average Vancouverites. The area includes designer clothing stores, salons and recently a garish big box bookstore chain, which, despite its monumental size and rather tacky appearance, has done much to bring needed foot traffic into the area.

Of course, one of the other key characteristics shared between Seattle and Vancouver is their passion and near obsession for coffee. Both cities are overrun with Starbucks and myriad other coffee houses, from the chain stores to the mom and pop operations. Despite the wealth of choices, one of my perennial favourites was none other than Seattle’s Best Coffee, a brand name sold in many private coffee houses, but also with its own café on Granville at 11th.

After meeting—or waking me—for breakfast that morning, Andrea and I had arranged to meet at Seattle’s Best at four thirty to figure out what we each had learned about Tricia’s death. Andrea was likely to have the most information, since her plan for the day included going to the office to find out surreptitiously as much as she could about the murder investigation from the perspective of the detectives assigned to the case. Of course, she also took the greatest risk, professionally anyway. Though police files were not officially locked away and kept secret from other detectives, it is considered bad form to poke around someone else’s investigation. Detectives are notoriously territorial, and the thought that another cop might take an unhealthy interest in one of their cases is enough to start a departmental feud. Furthermore, Andrea’s friendship with me was well known in her department; snooping through Furlo and Smythe’s notes would not win her any friends. The last thing I wanted on my conscience was my contribution to the destruction of my best friend’s career. I hoped she would be very careful. I also wasn’t expecting she would have found out much.

I sat alone in the front corner of the café. The booth was recessed and provided at least some semblance of privacy. Andrea walked in as I nursed my latte, a decaf, in hopeful anticipation of repeating my successful previous night’s slumber. As usual, a few heads turned as she walked up to the counter to place her order for what I knew would not include any low fat or decaf product. Andy’s metabolism burned at a rate that required no special restrictions on her intake of calories.

As she waited for her order to be filled, Andy opted to stand and gaze around the room, checking out products on the shelf and potential partners in the store. She was disappointed by both. Though she attracted the attention of a few patrons, none would live up to her exacting standards. No one in the room looked like they could consistently run a seven-minute mile in a ten-kilometre race.

When her order arrived, she ambled over to my table as though spotting me for the first time.

“Nothing too promising?” I asked her as she sat down.

“The whole world isn’t a smorgasbord,” she replied. “That would be too easy.”

“And so would you be.”

“Sleep has not made you any less a smartass,” she observed. Nothing short of surgery was likely to do that. It was how I kept myself at a distance from anyone I didn’t want too near. Of course, it also kept at a distance some of those I might want to have near. “How has your day been?” she added.

“Well, I spent a chunk of it at the local jail.”

“You used to spend half your life at the local jail. One afternoon there is a step up.”

“True.”

“How’s your client?” she asked with real concern.

“About as good as he can be, I suppose. A first taste of incarceration usually convinces people they do not want to be there. If we get him out of there, I’m not worried that he’s ever going to do anything to put himself back again.”

She nodded thoughtfully as she took a sip of her latte. There are two kinds of people in the world: those who like their drinks absolutely piping, smoking hot and the rest of us. Andrea always orders her drinks extra hot, what she describes as “lawsuit temperature.” She has lips of steel. My bland, sensitive British stomach pretty much required the cooling of my caffeine to somewhere between lukewarm and kind of hot.

“Derek on board?” she asked nonchalantly. I knew Andy was not at all happy at my choice of co-counsel, at least from a personal perspective. Anyone who might in some way reconnect me with my ex-wife was essentially persona non grata in her eyes. Andy also suspected, as did I, that Derek carried if not an Olympic-size torch, at least a camping-size one for her. Most would consider Derek an ideal catch. Andy couldn’t get past his connection to Sandi. Her disdain for my choice of first marriage knew no bounds.

“Yep. He’s going to handle Carl’s first appearance on Monday.” I filled her in on the details of our conversation and laid out my initial plans for how Derek might handle some of the work my teaching might prevent me from getting to. She nodded her consent, though I wasn’t particularly looking for it.

“That’s good,” she sighed, sitting back and taking another sip of her latte. “That’s good,” she repeated, nodding as though deep in thought. “I think you’re going to need the help on this one.”

“Thank you,” I countered. I knew full well Andrea did not mean her comment as disparaging in any way. Still, it’s sometimes useful to make her feel guilty.

“Don’t be a shit,” she scolded. This was obviously not one of those times. “You already knew this case was bigger than what you’re used to. I’m telling you, it’s got big and complicated written all over it.” This was her way of segueing into telling me she had found out something important during her afternoon of snooping.

“What have we learned?” I asked, not wanting to beat around the bush any longer.

She reached into her backpack and pulled out her notebook. She is a meticulous note keeper, writing down things that everyday people take for granted. I knew she would not have been able to take notes while she was hunting for information on Tricia’s case; she would have had to sneak out her data quickly, then find a quiet place to quickly record all of the information she had learned. This she did in a typical, spiral bound police notebook that every cop on television and in real life carried.

“For starters,” she began, “this is big.”

“You said that already,” I intoned.

She looked up from her notes to scowl at me. “I thought it was big enough to merit repeating the cautionary note.” I loved it when she talked official.

“My apologies. Please continue.”

“Detectives Furlo and Smythe were out of the office, I think finally taking a few hours of downtime and to catch a little bit of sleep. They’ve pretty much been going around the clock since the discovery of the body.”

“So I gathered. Furlo made a point of telling me how hard he’s been working to lock up my client,” I told her.

“Furlo is the kind of cop that would like you to know how hard he is working. He would be telling you that even if the case fell into his lap, which in some ways, this one did.” She paused, ostensibly for dramatic effect. She wanted me to prompt her along. I obliged.

“What do you mean it ‘fell into his lap’? You think the case is bogus?”

“No,” she was quick to clarify, not wanting to cast any inaccurate aspersions on the professionalism of her colleagues, even one she wasn’t particularly fond of like Michael Furlo. “Furlo is the kind of cop who is looking for advancement, but he’s not going to risk his chance of promotion by busting someone he doesn’t believe is guilty. If Carl is behind bars, it’s at least in part because Furlo believes him to be guilty. Also, there’s no way in hell Jasmine Smythe would be part of any plot to arrest someone for political reasons. She is too straight-up for that. But the politics are huge.”

“There’s interdepartmental squabbling on this one?” I asked, assuming personalities within the police command structure were coming into play in the investigation. While this could make individual officers a bit pissy to work with, it didn’t really concern me that much, at least in its impact on my defence.

“The politics extend way beyond the detective division,” Andy continued solemnly. “The case file is still pretty preliminary at this point, since Furlo and Smythe are still working hard to gather evidence and haven’t had much time to complete a lot of the paperwork. But there are a few really interesting notations in the file.”

My heart rate kicked it up a notch. “You actually went through the case file?” I nearly shrieked at her. “Jesus, Andy! I wanted your help, but you’re going to get yourself fired! I can’t take on a wrongful dismissal suit while I’m in the middle of a murder defence.”

“Relax,” she told me and took a sip of hot liquid. “There was no one around, and I just took a few quick peeks. If anyone knew I had been in there, I would have known about it by now. There’s nothing I’m going to tell you that wouldn’t be disclosed to you during discovery anyway.”

“All right, give it to me. I mean no disrespect to the victim here—I met her once, and she seemed like a hell of a kid—but what is so all hell-fired that her death is getting everything into an uproar? And who’s in an uproar?”

“For starters, there are notations of a couple of very interesting phone messages coming into the inspector of the homicide division. The first message came from his excellency’s office.”

“The mayor?”

“None other. It appears that by sometime mid-morning on Thursday, the mayor had put in calls to the chief, who had forwarded inquiries to the inspector,” she confirmed.

“The mayor is required by provincial statute not to be involved in police investigations,” I informed her as though talking to a Grade Twelve law student.

“Correct,” she confirmed, “but he is chair of the police board, which oversees operations. It doesn’t give him the right to direct investigations, and to his credit, he doesn’t normally try. But evidently he’s not the only one. Smythe made notes that calls have come into the department from the A.G. in Victoria.”

The Attorney General is essentially the top lawyer in the province. Appointed by the Premier as a member of cabinet, he or she is usually also an elected member of the Legislature, though that is not officially required. The Vancouver Police Department, like the R.C.M.P., operates at arm’s length from the legislative branch of the government, guided by the Policing Act and the Criminal Code of Canada. Though the Attorney General has a significant amount of clout in determining what types of actions may be pursued in the courts, he almost always remains completely neutral and uninvolved in criminal cases. The very fact he had made a phone call to the police department had taken the “simple” case of homicide into the political arena. It could also prove to be useful in my preparation of Carl’s defence, though I didn’t share that thought with Andrea. She had put her ass on the line for me, after all.

“Did she note what the A.G. said or wanted?” I pressed.

“Not really. Like I said, they haven’t done a great deal of paperwork yet, and I’m sure she didn’t talk to him herself. It’s probably more of a mental note that there is pretty significant pressure to clear the case.”

“Have you ever heard of the Attorney General taking a personal interest in an ongoing investigation?”

“Not since I’ve been there,” she confirmed. “And he’s not the only one so keen on seeing it cleared.”

“Other than the mayor?”

“Other than the mayor, rumour has it around the station that a call came from Ottawa.” She let that one sink in for a moment.

“The Prime Minister’s office wants a progress report on the status of a teenager killed in a park in Vancouver?” I was beginning to break out into a small sweat. I knew it wasn’t from the coffee. It was dropping below the lukewarm level.

“Not quite. But definitely from the federal cabinet. Specifically Foreign Affairs.” She referred again briefly to her notes.

“This was in their file?”

“No. The Foreign Affairs angle is just rumour at this point, because I haven’t talked to Smythe and Furlo about it and don’t really intend to unless it becomes necessary.”

“Probably a good plan.” I had made myself sufficiently unpopular with at least half of the detective duo in charge of gathering evidence against my client. Even if Andy’s career were immune to the repercussions stemming from such a conversation, Furlo in particular was not likely to be forthcoming with any information prior to official discovery procedures. “So why Foreign Affairs?”

“Turns out Tricia Bellamy was the niece of the consul general of Serbia in Vancouver. Evidently, he is making all kinds of noises in diplomatic circles about getting Carl convicted sooner rather than later.”

“Federal government has no jurisdiction over how the courts plan trials,” I informed Andrea of the obvious.

“In a perfect world,” she countered. “What crown prosecutor do you know would be immune to pressure from a federal cabinet minister about getting a high profile case before the courts as soon as possible? The police, the Justice Department, everybody is gonna want to try to avoid looking bad in diplomatic circles when the relative of a diplomat is killed.”

I thought about that for a moment. We have all kinds of checks and balances in our legal system to ensure political influence has no part in the administration of the courts. But it was hopelessly naïve to think a few well-placed phone calls wouldn’t have some impact on how things got done. I had seen that already by the speed at which the forensic evidence in the case had been processed thus far.

“Bellamy doesn’t sound particularly Serbian,” I mused aloud.

“It isn’t. That’s the step-dad’s name, and he’s long since gone. Mom’s a widow, twice, I’m led to believe. Her maiden name is Dantolovec; she’s the sister of the consul general, whose name, by the way, is also Dantolovec.”