Cold City Streets
Authors: LH Thomson
COLD CITY STREETS
Amazon Kindle Edition
This edition uses U.S spellings of common words.
Copyright 2016 J.I. Loome. This work of new crime fiction is licensed for your personal enjoyment. This book may not be re-sold or given away. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to the Kindle Store and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
The man has not moved for some time and his eyes are open, staring emptily at the winter sky. His skin appears frosty. These are not good signs.
Lying on his side undiscovered in a pale brown winter coat, he stands little chance of survival. Edmonton, Alberta, sits in northern Canada, at the fifty-third parallel. In the dead of winter here, a person can freeze to death in minutes. The same cold that knocked him to the pavement will beat him solid, until his very bones ache. Then it’ll stiffen his limbs remorselessly and watch as the life drains out of him, pink warmth and softness fading to a greying countenance as hard as stone, lashes frosting, lips the color of blueberries.
The barest sign of life flickers behind his pale blue eyes.
If he’s lucky, help will intervene. First, someone will need to find him, or even just notice. But people who pass won’t necessarily stop; it’s a big city, and the unknown frightens them. Someone lying in the street is probably just another alcoholic Indian, they’ll figure, or a crazy homeless guy. If they get involved they might get sued, or assaulted, or worse.
His life is already shitty
, the passerby will tell himself or herself.
Nothing I do will change that
.
Perhaps the man will be offered compassion before the cold grabs him and drags him under. But this is a city that runs on the fumes of the oil industry’s largesse and the social divisions run deep; a lot of folks are well off but many are poor, unable to afford a petroleum economy of high rents and urban sprawl, a place built for drivers with big vehicles and equally big money clips, where people come to earn a living and instead sometimes find themselves confused, alone and addicted. These two types of people, these opposites, they do not attract.
For people to find him in the first place, of course, it would help to be near a busy area, an intersection where the vast numbers and law of averages suggest one decent soul will open a car door, step out into the snow and lend a hand. If he’s unlucky, he’ll wind up on some residential side street, the kind of neighborhood no one leaves after nine o’clock, especially in winter, and no one will see him in time to call the ambulance.
If he’s really unlucky, it will be because someone got to him before the cold, someone vicious and predatory, a product of a predatory environment. They’ll make him the latest statistic in a homicide rate that has grown with the high rises, stabbings and shootings common enough to make people in the wrong parts of town worry after the sun goes down.
He’ll be motionless in his plain flannel suit and pale brown winter coat and thick winter boots, being slowly covered by the drifts. He’ll lay there as blood from the two gunshot wounds seeps out of the back of his head and is absorbed into the stark white snow around him, the crystalline flakes slowly turning pink, then red.
The police cruiser’s lights and siren cut through the darkness of the dead-end street, broad swatches of red and blue and white rotating their way across the icy roadway, briefly illuminating the faces of the modest old homes on either side, glinting in window panes and off of the thick flakes of snow that drifted to the ground like glitter.
It was an old street in an old neighborhood, from a gentler age; the homes were the type people got free plans for in the Twenties and Thirties, from the ever-helpful folks at the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. They were small, twelve-hundred square feet and under, two-bedroom mostly. Each had widely spaced backyards, from when the western land was infinite and empty. Two out of three were bungalows with light-colored wood siding walls and shingled roofs, some refurbished or modernized, a few showing their vintage, their paint and plaster crackling, fading around warped window frames.
The snow had been coming down for a few hours, and everything had a top cover of a few new inches, a dusting by local standards. It covered the front yards, the cars parked at the curb, the tall elm trees that separated the sidewalk and road. There were handfuls of dim street lights barely illuminating the sidewalk from high above, battling shadows from tree branches.
Midnight had come and gone, but the lights and the initial sirens from the first unit on scene woke up a few people. As soon as the cruiser pulled up to the curb, the interiors of the homes began to come to life, living rooms and kitchens suddenly visible through the glass from outside.
The homeowners were older, befitting the surroundings. They peeked out at the cacophony from behind floor-to-ceiling curtains and aging wood shutters. After ten minutes more, another pair of squad cars and a police van arrived and parked near the top of the street. A few people came outside in their dressing gowns with just coats over top, despite the cold, to ask one of the officers on scene what was going on. A woman with her hair in rollers and with a thin, lined face crossed her arms as the black-uniformed officer with the grey turtleneck and heavy vinyl winter coat gave her what little information he had and asked her to keep back from the scene while the forensic team worked.
The detectives arrived twenty minutes after the first responder and after most residents returned inside to stay warm at vantage points by front windows. Even though it was after midnight, both were on shift, dressed in dark suits and ties, winter jackets thick and necessary. They parked the dark-brown unmarked sedan by the top of the road, just ahead of the first cruiser.
Det. Peter Carver was short and stocky like a running back, with a heavy, rounded face and glasses. His typical English cap covered his bald head, even with the chill in the air. His partner Det. Jon Mariner was tall and thin, with a bony face and a short, brushy brown moustache. He wore a more sensible Edmonton police wool hat.
Mariner thought Carver’s cap pretentious; he wasn’t entirely sure about his new partner yet, either. Carver was sharp and good police, but he could be a real hard case, always looking for a debate about the inefficacy of the system, how understaffed they were, how hard the modern cop got it from the court of public opinion.
As they walked to the scene, they watched the neighbors through the front windows, looking for any immediate sign of discomfort or strange behavior, something that might tip it as a local dispute. But the rubberneckers were just that, curious and surprised, a few looking shocked, a couple who just appeared worried.
The area around the body had been cordoned off with yellow police tape, a twenty-five-foot perimeter that gave them a little extra room to search for physical evidence without worrying about public contamination. Carver nodded to the officer nearest the tape as they approached, while two analysts knelt to study the body and scene.
“Evening all. Let me guess: he slipped on the ice and twisted his ankle?”
Crime scene tech Bernard LeVasseur looked up from a few feet away. It was the thirty-third homicide of the year, and Carver always wanted a quick answer. It made Bernie nervous. “Looks like two in the back of the head, double tap. Very clean, lots of scorching, very close range on the first, at least.”
“He have any ID on him?”
LeVasseur held up a clear plastic evidence bag containing the man’s wallet. “That’s all. No money or credit cards, but his driver’s license says he’s Brian Featherstone. Business cards say he’s a vice-president of a company called PetroMas.”
“I know them.” Mariner wagged a finger, trying to remember how he recognized the name. Carver waited for it to come to him; the younger detective had a strange gift for obscure recall. One of his few admirable traits, as far as the senior detective was concerned. Mariner was a stickler; sticklers got in the way of the job.
But he had his uses.
“Some deal with one of the big oil companies; a pipeline or something. It was in the papers a few months back.”
Carver was more of a sports guy and didn’t pay much attention to business or politics; too many serious issues on the job to consider. He looked around at the modest street, typical of the city’s northeast, where housing prices and rents tended to be lower and crime more of an issue: small houses, larger old lots, not much within walking distance other than more housing. In fact, the further northeast people went, the closer they got to the Edmonton Max, one of Canada’s largest maximum security penitentiaries.
But this wasn’t that far out. The prison’s part of the city hadn’t even been built when the old homes went up on the dead-end street. In a lot of ways, it was the type of nice neighborhood you didn’t see much anymore, with walking access to the North Saskatchewan River Valley, and just a few minutes from the downtown high rises. But the way crime had been lately? Carver felt glad he didn’t live there. Not when the guy who robbed you once could get out in six months and do it again.
“What the heck was he doing here, then? Big money doesn’t hang around here a whole lot. Maybe down on Ada Boulevard, but not here.”
“May have been dumped,” the tech suggested as they continued to probe the body. There it was, Carver asking for answers no one could possibly yet have. Bernie knew he had to be careful, guard his position. “Blood loss here is significant but there should be a whole lot more. It looks like any spatter was covered by snow, which was coming down pretty heavy over the last two hours –
if
he was done here.” He looked up and around for a quick second, gauging the weather. “We’re going to have to go carefully here, try and stay ahead of the snowfall.”
“So they moved him?”
“Tough to say right off,” LeVasseur suggested with a shrug, which mildly irritated both men. Getting anything definitive at the scene usually involved a leap of logic, and the analysts didn’t like guesswork. LeVasseur’s young partner began gently dusting snow from around the body, trying to find a spatter pattern.
They weren’t always the best at straight talk, either. “Bullets could have become lodged between the brain and skull, minimizing the amount of rupturing; or maybe it’s just so goddamn cold everything coagulated more quickly than it should.” The tech stood up. “So much snow, it’s difficult to say.”
Carver looked around, but just a handful of the small orange evidence flags were planted at the scene: one for the wallet, one for the body, one for a boot print.
Fucking winter
, he thought. “So, probably dumped… but maybe not. No casings at all?”
LeVasseur shook his head again. “We backtracked in a full circle for ejection points. If he was shot here, whoever did it picked up after, or they’re covered up already. Then again, looks like a pretty professional job, so maybe…” As long as Carver gave him time to work, Bernie knew, he could get something solid established.
The wind gusted, making the minus-eighteen conditions sting; steamy breath wafted away from their mouths and noses, caught in the light of the street lamps like cigarette smoke. Both men had learned to expect little help from immediate evidence unless it was something obvious, usually something very public. This was neither. “Where’s your partner?” Mariner asked the nearby constable, who stood ten feet away with his gloved hands jammed into his pockets for extra warmth.
“Taking statements from the neighbors.” He gestured up the street, towards the main road. A half-dozen houses away, a constable stood at a front door talking to a middle-aged couple, scribbling notes with a felt pen, aware that a ballpoint would freeze in the subzero wind. A thick, black winter coat partly covered his black uniform. They invited him inside for a moment and the door closed behind him.
Good instincts
. “We should join him,” Carver suggested to his less-seasoned partner. “You take the east side; I’ll take the west.”
Most of the houses didn’t require a door knock, with the owner or residents hypnotized by the strobe of the police light, perhaps afraid at the potential for violence so close to home, perhaps worried about their own indiscretions. Mariner talked to four homeowners and got four head shakes; an elderly lady began to shut the door before he’d even finished the question; a younger black woman in a white dressing gown at least waited for the question before turning him down. No, they hadn’t seen anything or heard anything; no, there were no vehicles on the street when they came outside; no, they didn’t hear a gunshot or see the man in the street. A retired pastor shrugged his shoulders; a young architect said he’d like to help, but he and his wife slept right through it. It didn’t matter that the neighborhood was middle class; when it came to witnesses, the city seemed to have an eyesight problem.
Across the street, Carver’s luck was similar. One house was empty, another home belonged to a couple who both had their hearing aids turned off. At the third, a middle-aged blonde woman with bunny slippers opened the door, looked out and saw Carver, then pushed it shut again, giving him just the barest glimpse of a headshake.
The wind numbed his nose, and he sniffed to clear it. He wondered if someone wanted to help but just felt too scared. The longer he’d done the job, the less he expected things to come easily.
The nine-one-one call had come from a pale yellow two-story A-frame with no porch, concrete front steps leading to a white screen door. The man waited in his dressing gown, front door slightly ajar, the top step brightly lit from above as Carver approached.
“Mr. Martin?” Carver asked. The door opened fully. The man on the other side was maybe six-feet-six, older, but towering over the veteran cop; he was balding, hair a salt-and-pepper crown.