To Keep a Secret (2 page)

The woman waved me closer to where she sat on the couch. She was wearing a flowery blue dress and sturdy black shoes. Her hair was pulled back into a severe bun. A long-haired grey cat stretched across her lap. I sat in one of the Lazy Boys and pressed my knees together. I felt like I was visiting the principal’s office.

“My name is Pam Rendell,” she said. “Retired Grade Four teacher. My husband left me two years ago and made off with most of our money. I was forced to sell my house to pay off his debts. So here I am. Jada comes for coffee now and then. I’m telling you this so that you know I can be trusted. Now, can you show me some ID?”

Does she think we’re secret agents?
I found my wallet and pulled out my driver’s licence. Pam held it up to the light.

“Right,” she said. “Jada told me to only share this information with you. The young lad, her brother Henry, was in a terrible state this morning. He should have been in school. Jada showed up and took him away.”

“Jada took him away?”

“Isn’t that what I just said?”

“Do you know why or where?”

“No. She told me that you would show up looking for her tomorrow. I’m to tell you ‘Brenner stakeout.’ I assume that’s code for something.”

I let my mind scramble back six years. The Brenner stakeout was for an armed robbery suspect. Jimmy Wilson was on that case. He spent a week parked outside the Bluebell Motel in the south end of the city. A tip from the public had led the police there. It was a good tip in the end. The suspect’s brother owned the Bluebell. Seven days after the robbery, Randy Brenner showed up in the middle of the night, and was arrested.

“It tells me her location. Why didn’t she just call me?”

“No idea, Miss Sweet. I suggest you ask her.”

“Believe me, that’s just what I plan to do. Do you have any idea why Henry was upset?”

Pam shook her head. “He was scared out of his wits about something, but not talking. Also his clothes were dirty and he was walking with a limp.”

I stood. “Thank you for passing along Jada’s message. I’ll go see what I can do to help.”

“One last thing.” Pam lowered her voice even though we were alone. “Jada said to make sure you aren’t being followed. Said you were to be careful . . . and to tell no one. She and her brother are counting on you.”

I
took side streets and shortcuts through shopping centre parking lots to make sure I wasn’t being followed. I had no idea why, but Henry’s fear made me want to play along. Just before nine thirty, I pulled up to the Bluebell Motel. Jada’s black Sunfire, a car that should have died five years ago, was angled in front of door number two. I parked my car in the empty spot next to her. Doing another check to make sure I wasn’t followed, I got out of my car and walked up to room two. I knocked and waited. No sound of movement in the room, but the door to number five opened wide. Jada waved me over.

“What’s going on?” I asked as she grabbed my arm and pulled me inside. She kicked the door shut behind her. I saluted Henry, who was lying on the far bed watching TV. He lifted a hand and waved back. I turned to face Jada.

“Anna, this is my brother Henry. Thanks for coming,” she said. “Did you bring any cold beer?”

My jaw dropped. “Are you
kidding
me? I was a tad busy making sure nobody was following me over here. You give your neighbour lady Pam a message for me to get here urgently . . . and you ask me about
beer?
Are you out of your ever-loving—”

Jada shot me a little smile and I stopped waving my arms. Henry chuckled from the bed.

“I’m sorry,” Jada said. “But until I know what we’re dealing with, I have to play it safe.” She flung herself onto the bed closest to us and looked up at me. Her eyes were worried.

I lowered myself into the only chair in the room. I rested my elbows on my knees and leaned close to her. “So what’s going on, Jada? Why are you and Henry in hiding?”

She glanced over at her brother. “Maybe Henry should tell you. It’s his story.”

Henry was even more attractive in person. He had Jada’s bright eyes and smile, not that he was smiling now. He pushed himself up and sat on the edge of the bed with his feet on the carpet. “It’s all my fault,” he said. “I never should have let Mandy talk me into her hare-brained scheme.” He thumped his hand against his forehead. “Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.”

“This isn’t the time, Henry,” Jada said. “You can get mad at yourself later. Tell Anna what happened.”

Henry nodded. He looked at me as he spoke. “Mandy Blair is a girl at my school. Kind of a hard ass. Her idea of a good time is scaling a cliff or biking across Canada. She doesn’t take any guff from anybody. She’s also freakishly brilliant about computer systems.”

I began to have a bad feeling. “Does what you are about to tell me involve hacking?” I asked.

Henry’s frown deepened. “No . . . well, not really. Maybe, sort of . . .”

“Spit it out, Henry,” Jada said.

“I need to know all the bad bits if I’m going to help you,” I added.

“Okay,” Henry took a deep breath. “We were just messing around on the computer a few months ago after school at my house.”

“You had a girl in your
bedroom?”
Jada asked.

“You were at work. Nothing happened. We were trolling through some of the second-level sites.”

“What do you mean, second-level?” I asked.

“There’re the top-level sites that are easy to access—the ones everyone sees—and then there are the sites harder to get to. They’re the ones keeping secrets.”

“The underworld.”

“Yeah. You could put it that way. Anyhow, Mandy found this dating site for married men. You needed a password and they had security, but Mandy had a way to get past that. We figured the married men just wanted privacy. But then we realized that the women on the site looking for men were teenagers. None under sixteen, though, from what we could tell.”

“Legal,” I said. “But just.”

“Yeah, that’s why we didn’t turn the site over to the police. So, Mandy came up with another idea. She’s seventeen but looks about fifteen when she dresses young. We set up a parallel page and contacted some of the men from Ottawa. Mandy met them at a coffee shop and recorded their conversations. I was at another table and filmed the meetings with my cellphone. Then we blackmailed them.”

“For money?”

“Not for us! We told them to donate two thousand dollars to a girls’ charity. We destroyed all the evidence once we saw the donation in their name on the charity’s site.”

“How did these men know that you hadn’t made copies?”

“Because Mandy promised. Plus, they had no other option. For them, two thousand dollars isn’t much of a gamble. We got two of the men to pay and one more was thinking about it.”

“Did any refuse?”

“Nope. We only contacted the three.”

I thought some more. “Could the owner of this site have known what you were up to?”

Henry shook his head. “Mandy contacted the men directly once they signed up on the site. The page she sent them with her picture wasn’t actually on the site.”

Jada and I exchanged glances. Henry and Mandy had been playing with fire—cornering men who had everything to lose if their secret lives came out.

Jada frowned. “And that isn’t even the worst part. One of the men must be a computer genius. He figured out Mandy’s and Henry’s names and where they live. They’ve each received a death threat. Somebody tried to run Henry down on his way to school this morning.”

“Did you get a licence number?”

Henry shook his head. “It happened so fast. I think it was a grey car. By the time I picked myself up, it was around the corner.”

“Where’s Mandy?” I asked.

“I can’t reach her,” Henry said. His eyes filled with worry. “She’s stopped answering her phone. Jada called a cop friend to check up on her.”

“Johnny Shaw is looking into it,” Jada added. “I’m not leaving Henry until I know what we’re dealing with.”

My cellphone began to ring in my pocket. I took it out and glanced at the name. I looked over at Jada as I held the phone up to my ear. “Shaw,” I said. “Let’s hope he’s got something good to tell us.”

S
haw and I had not been friends when I was on the Ottawa police force. In fact, I’d disliked the guy. If he had a sense of humour, I hadn’t been able to locate it. He was rough and tough, a cop nearing retirement with missing social skills. Nobody was more surprised than me that we’d become a crime-solving team—off the record, of course.

“What have you got?” I asked.

“Hello to you too, Sweet. You up to speed?”

“Pretty much.”

“Well, there’s nothing pretty about what I’m about to tell you. I didn’t want to call your partner’s phone in case this whack job’s tapped into it.”

“I’m with her and Henry now.” I looked across at the two of them. Both sets of eyes were studying me like a couple of hawks on a mouse.

“Good. You should get down here as soon as you can. Have Jada stay with the kid.” He paused as if searching for a way to tell me something bad.

“What is it, Shaw?”

“We found a girl’s body in a dumpster behind the Gadfly Bar on Elgin. Her ID says Mandy Blair.”

“I’m on my way.”

I ended the call. I kept my voice even. “I’m going downtown to check something out.” I tilted my head toward the door. Jada took the hint and followed me outside.

“Tell me,” she said. Her face was a grim mirror of my own.

I stepped close to her to make sure Henry couldn’t hear. “Looks like they’ve found Mandy’s body.” I grabbed onto Jada’s arm as she slumped against the wall. She clamped a hand across her mouth to keep Henry from hearing her curses.

“I know,” I said. “This is a nightmare.”

“How . . . ?”

“I’m going to find out now. Shaw says that you’re to stay here with Henry.”

“What am I going to tell him? He’s going to be destroyed.”

“I know. We have to keep Henry safe now. I need you to get the names of the men and their contact information from him. Can you do that?”

She nodded. “I’ll get him to write it all down. Are you coming back?”

“Me or Nick. I’m going to bring him in on this case if that’s okay.” I wrapped an arm around her shoulders and gave her a hug. “Stay strong, partner. Tell Henry to hang in there too. We’ll find who did this to Mandy and make them pay. I promise you that.”

• • • • • • • • • •

The Ottawa Police had taped off the crime scene by the time I arrived at ten forty-five. My long night was about to get a lot longer. Shaw was standing with another officer just inside the tape. Lights had been brought in and the area was as bright as day. Mandy’s body was lying on the ground, covered with a white sheet. The coating of snow from earlier that evening hadn’t stuck around. The air had actually warmed, with a southerly breeze gusting in. Officers in white suits and with bags over their shoes were busy taking photos and looking for evidence. Shaw called me over.

“Who found her?” I asked.

Shaw pointed toward the back entrance of the restaurant. “The cook came out for a smoke. He had a small bag of garbage to throw in the dumpster. When he opened it up, he saw the body.”

I looked over at a man sitting on the ground. A police officer kneeled next to him. I looked back at Shaw. “Do you know how she died?”

“Strangled. Her parents reported her missing when she didn’t come home from school. Her mother checked and she was in class today. That narrows time of death to after three thirty.”

“No idea where she went after her last class?”

“No. Her parents said that she often went to the mall. They don’t seem to know her friends.”

Car doors slammed. We all turned to see a frantic-looking man and woman racing toward us.

“Here we go,” Shaw muttered. He ducked under the tape and headed them off.

I watched him calm the woman, who had to be Mandy’s mother. She was tall and slim with curly brown hair. The man was shorter than she was, probably five seven, and balding. He looked fit in jeans and a leather jacket. Shaw talked for quite a while until the woman appeared to accept what he was saying. She took the man’s hand and they moved closer together. Then Shaw had an officer pull back the sheet from the body. I glimpsed long brown hair and a heart-shaped face. Young. Much too young.

Mandy’s parents stood frozen, their faces crumpling in shock and pain. The man nodded at Shaw, and the woman turned to bury her face in his shoulder. Her sobs filled the silence. I blinked back my own tears.

“Anna!”

I turned as Nick reached me. I’d phoned him on my way over and told him what was going on. He took a look at my face.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Sure. I’m not the one who just lost my kid.” My words came out rougher than I’d meant them to.

Nick didn’t respond to my anger. Instead, he handed me a folded piece of paper. “I went by the motel and got the list of men from Henry, like you asked. He quickly looked them up on the computer in the motel lobby.”

I took the page and opened it up. I read the names to myself: Derek Lee, teacher. Frank Campbell, city bus driver. Rudy Vine . . . I lifted my head.

Nick was staring at me. “Jada said you’d recognize the last name,” he said.

“Yeah,” I tucked the list into my jacket pocket. I looked over Nick’s right shoulder. “Rudy Vine is Johnny Shaw’s sergeant. That’s Vine standing right over there.”

Vine seemed to sense that we were looking at him. Just over six feet tall, he was a bull of a man. Shaved head, arms like tree trunks, and the palest blue eyes I’d ever seen. He walked over to Shaw, who was standing several feet from us. Vine pointed in our direction and said, “That one looks familiar. Who is she?”

Shaw turned and looked at me. He shrugged. “Just an interested citizen.”

Vine spat on the ground. “Well, get those vultures out of here. This is a crime scene, not a bloody gawk show.”

“Nice guy,” Nick said as Vine stomped over to talk to the line of reporters who had gathered at the edge of the crime scene.

“Yeah.” I studied Vine for a few seconds before turning to leave. I glanced at Nick as he started walking alongside me. “Let’s just hope he’s not a killer, too.”