Mike led her along a path to the restrooms, two rough shacks shingled on top, male and female symbols on the doors in a quaint, civilized touch. He said, “She wasn’t used to the booze like some of us. You can’t mix, my dad says. Beer and vodka. Even wine. We left her alone. And I, uh, I feel …”
He cleared his throat awkwardly and stared at the ground.
“What is it, Mike? Did you remember something?”
“I gave the bottle to her. I thought that, well, you know. And she got too far too fast. I’m not that kind of guy.”
“Of course not.”
Why did young people have to binge, and if they did, why not learn from the experience? Perhaps it had been Lindsay’s first time. Recently a man in custody had been taken to the drunk tank. He’d died hours later with triple the blood alcohol limit for survival. Yet officers swore that he had been walking on his own when they left him in his truck for a minute and tended to his friend. Apparently he’d chugged the rest of a hidden bottle. Her father had told her Dylan Thomas’s last words before collapsing: “I’ve had eighteen whiskies in a row. I believe that’s the record.”
“So she was headed to the bathroom. Makes sense. But she would have been still very drunk.”
“Why else would you get up in the middle of the night except to hit the can? She was sick as a dog, not off gazing at the moon. Course she needn’t have gone all that way to barf when the whole jungle is around.” He bit into a cuticle as if to tell himself that he was still alive through the pain.
“I’m surprised she got that far. Was there a moon last night?” She hadn’t noticed. Holly thought of her first hangover, when she and her friend Val had gotten an older cousin to buy them a bottle of Bailey’s. They had been puke sick all night. Luckily her parents had been in bed when she wobbled home on her bike and crawled up the stairs. The next morning she could barely spoon her cereal, her hand was shaking so much. She’d told her mother that she had the flu. Bonnie had flared her nostrils, but let her keep the lie. Her ebony, accusing eyes told her daughter that once was enough.
“It was cloudy, I think. And out here it’s like totally dark. You can’t see your hand in front of your face. I see where they got that old saying.”
The path widened and a few downed trees made for impromptu benches for two young people, Josh and Britt. They both stood, nearly at attention, when Holly approached. Their eyes were red-rimmed and their hair uncombed. The boy had an iPod in his pocket, but the ear buds dangled over a shoulder.
“Thanks for watching over … everything. Sorry to have taken so long.” She spread her hands in the universal gesture as she introduced herself as they walked on.
Holly got their names and a brief summary of what they had done that morning. It matched Mike’s story.
“And the other two, Megan and …”
“Justin. They’re with her. Megan was her best friend. We didn’t want anyone else coming around. Or like …” Britt shivered and pulled her hooded sweatshirt closer over her ears. Broomstick thin, she wore a pair of jeans. “Animals. Even little ones.”
“Was there anyone else at the other campsites?”
They looked at each other and gave a mutual shrug. “I wasn’t really paying attention. A few others, maybe. We saw their fire way down the beach last night. I don’t even know if they’re still here,” Mike said. Beach fires were legal below the tide line. In the draining effect of the strait, the next day everything would be washed out to sea.
Not good so far, Holly thought. If anything was suspicious, as Leonard Cohen said in “The Future,” things were going to “fly in all directions.” She looked at Britt and Josh, who had his arm around her as they walked. “How far are we now?”
“Just up the way. Officer,” Britt asked, “she couldn’t have just died, could she? She was sick, but …” Her angular face was old and young at once. Each ear had a row of studs.
“I’m not going to lie to you. We’ll know more when there’s been an autopsy. A team is on its way.” She checked her watch. Any minute now. What was taking them so long?
“An autopsy? Gross.” Brit’s face screwed up and she swiped at her pug nose with her sleeve. Big Josh, well over six feet, pulled her closer. She was an attractive redhead with a killer-whale tattoo on one arm and freckles on her nose.
This was turning into a parade. “On second thought,” Holly said, “you’d better wait here and direct the other officers and the ambulance personnel.”
About a hundred feet past the bathrooms, a narrow winding path zigzagged into the bush. It might have been an animal path, or sometimes people thought they saw an artistic shelf fungus and left the main trail to thrash around. It was human nature to want to discover why a trail diverged. Sometimes it led to an impromptu bathroom.
At the point where the path petered out were hummocks of grass and hand-slicing sedges. Standing to the side were Megan and Justin. She was softly crying into his shoulder. He was patting it, but looked stricken enough to join her. The death of a peer was an unusual tragedy for the young.
Lying face up with a small beach towel over her head was Lindsay, dressed in a man’s shirt and shorts. Her father’s maybe. Norman had given Holly a hand-me-down for her first year in university. Dads did that. Holly snapped on latex gloves, knelt, and tried for a pulse. A thick broom bush partially hid her from the students. In the torpor, its black pea-like pods snapped.
Holly turned with a
guarded frown. This was no time for accusations or hostility. “Did you find her like this? With the towel?”
Megan said with shaky tones short of a whimper, “No, it was my idea. I’m sorry. She looked so helpless. She wasn’t breathing. We checked for that. I took CPR last year. If I’d stayed with her last night, maybe she’d be alive now. Some friend I was.”
Holly bit back a comment. The moment was bad enough. The kids had done what they thought they should. They weren’t trained nurses and doctors. “That’s all right. Just as long as we know. It was your towel, then, Megan? Not hers?” Megan nodded. Holly introduced herself and took the information. “Mike, please stay. Megan and Justin can go back and wait with the other two, please. When the team comes, they’ll give you more instructions.” Her watch said nine-thirty already. What was keeping them? She hoped Ashley was keeping a sharp lookout, but she wouldn’t put money on it.
Lindsay’s gold-flaked brown eyes reflected only the sky. When Holly looked below her chin, despite her self-control in front of Mike, she gave a short gasp.
The bruised neck, its circumference reddened by the same tell-tale marks told the story more than any words. Alcohol had been only one factor. The girl had been incapacitated, but Holly would bet that she hadn’t choked on her vomit. She’d finished being sick long before that. She gave a quick scan to the scene as Mike stood, hands dully at his side. He seemed like the natural leader, perhaps a year or two older. Perhaps that discretion made him turn away from the body.
Lindsay’s small mouth was bruised as if a fist had connected. Gingerly Holly lifted the lip and saw that the front teeth were wobbly. What struck her as odd was that Lindsay wore only one black pearl stud in her left ear. The bare right lobe looked red and irritated.
“One earring,” she said in a whisper louder than she intended.
“She had both of them last night. Megan was admiring them. Lindsay said she got them when her family took a trip to Hawaii to the Big Island. They were going again at Christmas. Now …” His shoulders rose and fell as if he were taking deep breaths. Then just as quickly he composed himself.
“I asked you to stay, Mike, because I wanted you to tell me more about Lindsay.” She did a ballpark assessment. About her own height, five feet six, average weight, say one hundred and twenty five pounds, eighteen or nineteen years old if she were a freshman. Her rich chestnut hair fell in light waves to the top of her shoulders, spread out like a halo. Megan had said that they had turned her over. If someone had killed her and left her in a certain position, that information was gone. But wouldn’t it have been obvious to Megan?
Who is she? Who was she? Who did she hope to be? The answers were moot. Setting aside the possibility that one of the students did this, something that the team would not dismiss out of hand, how long would it have taken? A minute or two? Three to pass out? Five to die and begin the inevitable processes as the spark left the cells one by one? Boone had told her about determining the time of death from stomach contents. This far from the tents, no sounds would have carried. The wind had been up last night. Even from her window, she had heard waves crashing on the beach half a mile away down the natural amphitheatre at Otter Point.
Lindsay wore an unlaced pair of runners and no socks. Easy to slip on and off while leaving the tent. So she had come out here herself, with enough wits to put on her shoes. By her still hand was a mini flashlight, its glass head cracked. Used as a defensive weapon, or dropped on the rocks, or both? Too much to hope that it belonged to the person who had killed her? Another one for the detectives.
“Is that her light, Mike?” she asked.
“I gave it to her to use our first night. She’d forgot to bring one.”
Holly took out her notebook and jotted a quick summary of the last few minutes. “You and your friends will be asked to stay around until things get organized. Then you’ll probably have to go to West Shore to make a more complete statement.”
“But you’ve been taking notes, so why …”
“Get ready to do it again, Mike. It’s necessary.”
“God, I can’t believe this is happening.” He looked at Lindsay. His voice, cracking with emotion, trickled off and all was still except for the call of the varied thrush, which her father called the telephone bird. It always unnerved her.
“Officer?” She looked at his fresh face, grown older in the last hour. He sounded totally serious, even though his words were out of a drama. “My great grandparents had closed caskets. I’ve never seen a dead person before. She’s not coming back to life. She’s gone.”
When you were young, you thought you were invincible. “And that’s why life is so precious. Because it can be over in minutes. Sometimes a bad decision, sometimes just fate.”
“Lindsay was going to be a nurse. We talked about that. And I’m in pre-med.” He spoke so low that she could barely hear. “Some doctor I’m going to make. Jesus. Maybe I’d better stay in research. Not sure I can hack it.”
“You’ll be fine. The next time it will be a little easier. Good doctors never quite get used to it. But that’s okay. Empathy means you have human feelings.” That brought a nod from him as he sat on a log, hands on his knees. Memories of what Boone had told her about his experience as a coroner returned to her. Every call involved a death. Why was she complaining about police work, which often involved a happy ending and smiles all around?
Each one returned to his own thoughts. Part of Holly wanted to start putting together the case right now, to collect all the testimony and evidence. But that wasn’t her bailiwick. Half an hour passed with only the distant sound of the waves and muted birdsong meeting their ears. The sun sliced through the clouds and began to warm their backs, protected from the wind. Nature was going about its amoral business, bees collecting nectar, snakes swallowing frogs, and one-lunged banana slugs scouring the detritus of the forest floor. There were two types of people: those who avoided banana slugs and those who targeted them. Sociopaths in the making. To their fractured thinking, everything moving and helpless needed to be killed. Was that what had happened to Lindsay?
At last, she started at a noise down the path. Mike caught her eye and stood. Bushes moved, and voices rose. It was the Integrated Major Crimes Unit, led by two detectives with three other constables. West Shore had put this together with the last attack and brought in the big guns after Ann had filled them in.
“Over here,” she called. Chubby Ed Smith she knew from an orientation seminar her first week on the island. He had warned her that policing the long strings of parks was like confining a toothless snake in a cotton sack, but a hell of a lot less exciting. They shook hands. He was a spark plug of a man, who barely met the height requirement, but he made up in gumption what he lacked in stature. His face bore a scar down one cheek, testimony of a clash with a biker gang, where he stepped in front of a barmaid facing a punk with a broken bottle. In plain clothes like all inspectors, he wore a light jacket over a tan shirt with chinos and the same short boots she wore. He was breathing hard. Running wasn’t in his job description.
He took one look at Lindsay’s neck and shook his head. “You did good to call us in right away. This is no bloody accident,” he said. “What the hell is happening around here?”
“I took a long shot myself, but didn’t want to postpone things. What you see is what you get. She’d been doing some drinking, though. Whatever error in judgement she made, she paid the final price.”
“Hell, yes, I’ve got a sixteen-year-old myself. First time she stayed out past midnight, I nearly lost my mind,” he said, letting out a long breath. “Think we have a follow up from that French Beach attack? From the throat marks, it’s a no-brainer. What about the other people in the party?”
“They’re a close-knit group, and I suspect that their alibis will hold up. This guy is escalating.”
And in my territory
. “You’ll notice that an earring is gone. At French, the girl was missing a bracelet.”
“That should help. Good catch on the coincidence.” He gave her a thumbs up. She liked Ed. He’d make up in shoe leather what he lacked in genius.
Ed introduced his new partner, a gum-chewing, fresh-faced man a few years older than Holly. “This is Chris’s first case. And it’s going to be a tough one. He just transferred over from Port Coquitlam. Thought he was going to enjoy a permanent vacation.” He gave the man a light punch on the arm in the force’s camaraderie.
“Ma’am,” Chris Braddock said. He ran his hand through his clipped blond hair, as if for want of something to do. The more he looked at Lindsay, the paler he got. A small piece of tissue stuck to his sideburns area, indicating a fresh but hasty shave.
“Took us long enough to get here,” Ed said, kneeling by the girl. “Where’s Boone? Thought I heard that junker Jeep of his pull in just as we took the path. Should have dropped him in by ’copter, the way he walks these days, poor old geezer.” He glanced at Mike and shot a questioning look at Holly.
“This is Mike,” she said. “I’ve already talked to him. As for the towel, one of the girls put it there.”
“Yeah, that kind of thing happens. Son, can you go back to the tent area and sit tight until we need you? It’s getting a bit crowded.” Ed pointed in the direction of the path.
“Sure. No problem, sir.” Mike pushed himself up off the log and trotted off.
“If I know Boone’s knee, he’ll take another few minutes,” Holly said. “There’s a copy of our French Beach file in the car. Might save you time.”
“Ann told me all about it in twenty-five words or less. If these events are connected, that’s one lucky girl. I wonder if she’ll ever know how close she came to being a fatal statistic?”
She nodded. With luck, Maddie was resuming her life with no more than a sore jaw. Holly confirmed to herself the wisdom of releasing that information to Pirjo. And yet, if the word had gotten out in louder fashion, more women might have been warned. But Lindsay had come with a group.
Now that the big boys had arrived, she felt every inch a minor player. “There’s no I in team,” Ben Rogers repeated from a distant corner of her head. Like a persistent imp, he went everywhere with her. Briefly, she sketched the last few hours for Ed.
“If I were a killer, I wouldn’t use the same M.O. each time. Good thing for us that sociopaths are faithful to their methods,” Ed said, angling the head for a better look at the damaged skin. Had Maddie been less agile and strong or Paul not come along, this might have been the result. “Wire for sure. Very smooth and large. Notice how it didn’t actually cut the skin. Bruising in a narrow area. Too thick for fishing line. Not a rope.”
Holly jumped in. “My constable thought maybe trimmer line.”
Ed pursed his thick lips in approval. “Good guess. You can find it anywhere, even in my garage, not that I have time for much yardwork. What are the other similarities?”
“Girl. Beach. Caught alone. One on the weekend. One during the week. Maybe the guy sets his own hours, has no job, or maybe he just prowls at night. No use in speculating until Boone fills in the blanks.”
“And the M.E. for the toxicology,” Ed said. “There’s no serious rigour yet. How long do you think she’s been lying here?”
“Mike said she turned in early. The rest went to bed by midnight. It’s ten now. A bit cool, but the estimate should be fairly accurate. One or two in the morning? She was pretty drunk when she turned in, so the body needed time to metabolise the booze and put her back on her feet, shaky or not.”
Snapping on gloves and kneeling, he moved one of Lindsay’s shapely but well-muscled legs. She took good care of herself … until last night. “Died here is my guess. The blood has started to pool even though she’s been turned over.”
“If she was heading for the bathrooms, given that she had been sick that would be natural. Going there or coming back, who can say? But look at her heels. Perfectly clean.”
“That would rule out dragging her. But she could have been carried. Maybe knocked out if she got clipped on the jaw. That flashlight’s too small to have done any damage.” He took a quick look at her mouth.
“Mike said it was hers anyway. Do you think the guy had his own light? Why advertise your attack with a beam?” A crime under cover of darkness again would give such an advantage. Could he see like an owl? Navigate like a bat? She shuffled her feet waiting for Boone.
The Coroners Service in British Columbia was a quirky historical tradition that would not die. A respectable person with a law or medical background could apply, but candidates often came in after retirement from the civil-service pipeline. In unnatural, sudden, unexplained, or unattended deaths, the coroner would arrive. He would establish the identity if possible, and the how, when, where, and by what means the person died. He would recommend an autopsy if necessary, sometimes against the family’s wishes, and perhaps suggest ways in which a similar death could be avoided. The different causes were natural, accidental, suicide, homicide, or undetermined. Problems resulted when one cause masqueraded as another. Some cases had been filed away as accidents for decades until someone with a secret stepped forward or there was reason to exhume the body for tests. Undetectable poisons were often involved, or sometimes a spouse was convicted of murder when their other mates died in seemingly natural circumstances like passing out in a bathtub.
“Do you want me to go back to the campsite and see what’s keeping Boone?” she asked, stripping off the hot gloves and mopping her brow in the rising temperatures. She and Ashley were needed back at Fossil Bay. More than one speeder or drunk driver had gotten a pass this morning.
“Hell no. I left a couple officers there. Five in the group of kids, it’ll be like Saturday night in a bar. One guy says this. One guy says that. One guy was loaded. They all see things different ways.” He made a grand gesture with his arms. “Some crime scene. If it were in the middle of the ocean, it would hardly be worse. Look at this place. You could lose a bloody herd of elephants.”