Extensions (31 page)

JUST WHEN I WAS FEELING SMUG about leaving shift work behind, our team got called in. I was about to find out the trade-off involved in giving up regulated hours.

It was the morning after New Year's Day. Tessa was telling me about the party I missed when Wayne announced an infant abduction on Colleen Street. He grabbed his jacket and took off with Tessa in one vehicle while Dex and I followed in another. Sukhi was still on holiday visiting his wife's relatives in Kelowna. The two-storey house in question stood in a middle-class neighbourhood, but had been redone in grey stucco — the old-fashioned kind where tiny pebbles are thrown onto wet cement — black shutters and cream trim. Located at the curved end of Colleen Street, it gave the impression of not wishing to stand out in its good taste among the split-levels from the '70s, some freshly painted in taupe or celery, some left with their original orange or turquoise trim. The site was swarming with patrol cars and officers; one was cordoning off the yard, three more were in the back, and another was trying to calm a woman in her bathrobe at the front entrance.

“My baby, my baby,” she cried in an accent. “I thought it was the paperboy.” She stopped to sob against the constable's stiff vest and he patted her shoulder lightly. Male officers were cautioned against making this kind of physical contact. Women in distressed states could — and did — easily misinterpret such gestures. Without hesitation, Tessa gently took the woman's arm and guided her through the foyer toward the staircase.

“Come, Mrs. Kubik, I'll help you dress and we'll take you to the hospital to be with your baby.”

Tessa impressed me more every day; she always seemed to do the right thing. I had been in these situations many times myself as a first responder and the procedure was second nature to me, but this was my first call with Serious Crimes, so I followed Wayne and Dex through the house, whose owners clearly had expensive tastes. I had shopped with Retha, after all, and knew high-quality leather sofas when I saw them. A stainless steel kitchen opened onto a back patio through French doors, and we used them to join the other members examining the fish pond and grass around it for clues. They told us what they knew so far.

At 7:30
AM
, Selena Kubik, Caucasian female, thirty-nine years of age, native of the Czech Republic, answered the doorbell with her four-month-old son Anton in her arms. A Caucasian male, mid-to-late thirties, stood outside and without warning, snatched the baby from her and ran around the north side of the house. She took the shorter route through the house to beat him, grabbing the portable phone from the kitchen cupboard and dialling 911 to scream her address as she ran, but in the few seconds it took to reach the back patio, he had disappeared. She found her baby lying unconscious, face down in the murky winter water of the pond. He had a gash on his head. The emergency team arrived within minutes, but Mrs. Kubik's agitated state interfered with the swift measures necessary; she had to be restrained so the ambulance could take the baby to Burnaby General.

This was where we came in. Just as Wayne said Tessa and I would take Mrs. Kubik to the hospital in one of the cruisers, the two of them appeared from upstairs. Dressed and made up, Selena Kubik was more chic than pretty, in an angular, high-strung way. Her black hair was held back with a clip; her jeans had a perfect flare over mahogany leather boots. The grey turtleneck looked like cashmere and her espresso leather car coat was probably tanned from the same herd of exotic cattle as her furniture.

In the back seat of the cruiser, I noticed her face had gone from hysterical to stony; had she popped a tranquillizer in the bathroom? I took the wheel and Tessa began to share what she had learned, including Mrs. Kubik in the conversation.

“Her husband is out of the country on business. He called her yesterday to say he would be home late tonight.”

“What business?” I asked.

“He is an engineer. He has been in Kosovo building bridges.” Her voice was deep and throaty, like a European spy in a James Bond movie.

“No cellphone?”

“It is off. He is in transit.”

“Blackberry?”

She shook her head. “I do not text.”

I sensed her impatience with my questions at the same time as Tessa touched my leg gently to let me know they had been through this. Soon we were at the Burnaby General Hospital and pulled into an emergency slot. The car was in uniform, but Tessa and I were not, thus we were able to escort Mrs. Kubik to pediatric intensive care quickly and discreetly. A nurse took her to the baby's room where Cory, another member, stood guard outside. Sometimes an abductor tried again, especially if it was a husband. A flash of the inaccessible engineer re-entered my mind. Cory nodded toward the door and Tessa and I took turns peering through the glass. All we could see of the baby through the clear plastic crib were his black hair and tubes and wires extending from his motionless body. Moments later, two physicians — a young pretty woman and older man — came up from behind and went into the room. The four of them — Mrs. Kubik and the nurse on one side, and the two doctors on the side closest to us — stood clustered over the tiny boy. The older physician put his hand on Mrs. Kubik's shoulder and pulled up a chair for her next to the crib. Leaving her with her baby, the three then came out of the room together. When Tessa and I showed our badges, the lady doctor stepped away from the door and spoke.

“He's barely hanging on. The contusion on the side of his head came from a pretty hard blow. Bad enough, but then the water — a baby can hardly survive trauma like that. We're doing everything possible. Prayer might be all that's left.”

The doctor patted my arm and walked back to the nursing station, giving Tessa and me another chance at the glass window. Selena Kubik sat stroking her child's black hair from the chair, the same vacant expression on her face. People dealt with crises in different ways and in various stages. Stupors were not uncommon — the mind's method of distancing itself from pain. I tiptoed in to tell her we would leave her here and be back later. Was there anything she needed?

“No,” she said without looking up. “Thank you.”

I stood next to her for a moment watching little Anton Kubik, who was unaware he was fighting for his life. Smiling in his mother's arms one minute, smashed against the side of a pool the next. I thought of Macy and Clancy at this age — or any age — and what Monty and Gail would be going through. Visions of Sara and Janet also pressed in, of the blows they took through death and separation. A sudden cramp gripped me in the area around my heart.

On the way back to Colleen Street Tessa filled me in on what she had learned from Selena upstairs between sobbing spasms. She had been in the kitchen feeding Anton when she heard scraping outside the front door. She thought at first it was a paper boy with flyers. But she heard it again and opened the door. A strange man was standing there. It was just getting light on an overcast morning and she could not see his expression clearly. She believed he was trying to rob the place when she surprised him. Alarmed, he said a few words in a foreign language, then grabbed the baby from her arms. He ran around the side of the house and she thinks when he heard her screaming inside, he got scared and threw the baby in the fish pond.

“Description?”

“Average height. Dark hair.”

“Caucasian?”

“She thinks so. Could be central European like herself, though she didn't recognize the language.”

“How many does she speak?”

“A lot more than we do. Czech, English, French, German at least. She wondered if it was Albanian — a Kosovar.”

“What's the Kosovo connection? Isn't that where her husband is? Do you smell something fishy about that relationship? Wouldn't you think a husband that far away would leave a line of communication open to his wife and baby son?”

Tessa shrugged. “Sounds more like she doesn't want to use it. What can he do in the air?”

“Seems strange to me.”

Tessa shrugged again, as she turned back onto Colleen Street. Next to our unmarked cars, we recognized the forensic identification team vehicle. The two members whose cruiser we had taken met us on the sidewalk to reclaim it. They would be back shortly for guard duty and alerted us that media vans were on their way. They often picked up news from police scanners; luckily they knew enough to wait for our publicity spokesman Tony and not to expect anything from us. Ident was already in the backyard with gloves, vials, and plastic bags, questioning Wayne.

“How's the baby?” Dex asked.

“Critical. We'll go back in a while.”

The yard was enclosed on three sides by a five-foot cedar fence with a gate on the north side and a solid short stretch on the south. To reach the back, he would have had to open the gate with the baby in his arms. But if the latch were not secure at the time, it would have offered no more resistance than a swinging door. From the back, four escape routes were possible: over the fence into a neighbour's yard on the left or the right, into Charles Rummel Park bordering the back, or around the south side of the house and over that short joint of fence and onto Colleen Street.

The yard displayed the same understated good taste as the house. A sprawling oak tree to the left had a circular bench built around its trunk over a bed of fine white pebbles. Hydrangea bushes, not yet in bloom, hugged the back of the house, and a neat border of foliage I didn't recognize framed the large patio. A trellis thick with vines provided a half-roof and sides to the concrete area. A path of irregular stepping stones led from the patio to the pond. Two bent willow chairs stood facing the water on either side of the short walk.

Deep and craggy, the pond resembled a grotto inverted in the earth. A wave of ragged rock protruded on one side and more shrubbery circled the rest of it unevenly, a deliberate effect. Custom landscaping like this could cost as much as a house in Mission. The pond had likely not been cleaned since last fall; the stale water inside must have been rainfall. Lilies or colourful fish might have brightened it in summer, but at the moment it held only a few leaves and twigs, and maybe a trace of Anton Kubik's blood. Ident had already taken a sample.

Dex was carefully examining the fence where a footprint or a scrap of mud or fibre might have been left behind, but complained that all he could find was raccoon shit. The abductor must have been agile enough to leap up to the fence rail and spring over the foot or so of slats at the top.

Hands on hips, Tessa stared at the adjoining yards and Wayne anticipated her question. “Yeah, we've spoken to the neighbours on both sides. No one saw him in one house and no one's home in the other. The park seems the obvious route to flee and will be harder to prove.” Wayne stopped and looked down. Near the pond his foot had stepped on something: a clear plastic baby soother, easy for the eye to miss on first inspection. “Could be helpful,” he said. “Makes you want to cry, doesn't it?”

Wayne called an ident member over and she photographed the soother before he picked it up carefully and slipped it into a plastic bag for the exhibit locker. One of our Serious Crimes members — today it was Wayne — collects and itemizes all exhibits to be examined later for fingerprints. The ident woman moved on to the stepping stones with her camera, shaking her head. “Not much to go on when the mother and emergency team have trampled over them.”

I decided to take the inside route to check the front entrance. The kitchen was unnaturally clean and tidy for a house with a baby in it. Given that most of the houses I attended lay at the other end of the cleanliness range, I had still never seen one this immaculate. The only evidence of little Anton was a wooden box with toys and cloth books in one corner and an almost empty baby bottle on the cupboard; it was no doubt the one Selena Kubik was using to feed him when she heard the abductor at the front door.

An open bookcase made of pewter divided the living and dining areas. Books shared the shelves with a raku pot, three photos, and a cast iron candle holder containing a spray of narrow ivory tapers. The photos were all black and white. Baby Anton with a wide, toothless smile in a corduroy beret gave me another heart cramp. The good-looking man with Selena Kubik had to be her husband: older than I would have guessed, grey-haired, tall, a cosmopolitan face and stance in an open-necked white shirt and sports jacket. He might have been the poster boy for Hugo Boss Seniors. He was standing with his arms around Selena's waist and she had stepped forward, almost as if she were trying to get away. The third photo was of the husband holding the baby, both heads thrown back in pure joy and laughter. The close-up weathered skin suggested he was in his mid- to late fifties. Around the pictures stood a few art books, a couple of atlases, some history, and half a shelf of Czech titles nudging against — surprisingly — two
Harry Potter
books. Other than those two volumes, the bookcase had been arranged carefully, as if too many books would be regarded as clutter.

The putty-coloured walls were sparsely hung with original art. Again I thanked Retha for my recognition of quality. One was an enchanting restaurant scene by Keith Holmes, a Galiano artist Mom and I had met at an exhibition on Granville Street. In fact, Dad had wanted to surprise her with one of his paintings for Valentine's Day, had she stuck around.

But that was one of the few signs of colour. The poinsettia on the coffee table was creamy; the small artificial tree on the dining table was made of white feathers and decorated with silver baubles. I kept thinking of Gail and the other young mothers I knew; most would have been bouncing their babies to Christmas carols and bombarding them with the colours of the season. Maybe Selena Kubik did — the bouncing, that is.