Holly saw three young men standing around a small campfire. Dave grinned, forming a dimple on one cheek. “Hell, we all were young once. They piped down before I got up to ask them.”
His wife nodded. “They seemed like nice young men. No girls, so maybe it was a case of boys’ night out. Their licence said Washington State.”
A child about five years old rolled up on a bike with training wheels, making
vroom vroom
sounds as he rode. “Our grandson, Tyler,” the woman said, ruffling his short hair. With the bike, he might have been all around the area, at least before dark. This was probably the lad that Maddie mentioned.
“Did you see anyone else around the campground last night?” she asked him, kneeling down to his level. Uniforms were scary for kids. “Other than those guys down there?”
His eyes got wide as pie plates as he smiled broadly, revealing the family dimple. “Just a monster like in the movies,” he said, leaving them all laughing.
His grandfather tousled his hair. “Tyler is into action figures.” The boy wore a Spiderman sweatshirt and jeans.
“He had a big head and bright green eyes. Lasers maybe,” he insisted, making gestures to imitate pop-outs like the cartoons.
Holly gave him a sceptical look, though she tried to conceal it. “When was this, son? Can you tell time?” She noticed a huge children’s watch on his wrist. Didn’t they all learn in kindergarten? Or was that the alphabet?
“It was darrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrk,” he said, making more
wooooooo
sounds. “It was eleventy seven o’clock.”
“You didn’t leave the tent after we went to bed, did you, little monkey? I told you to wake me up if you had to go,” the woman asked, eyes narrowed in grandmotherly suspicion. With a smirk, the boy picked up a Hulk figure from the table and ran around with it, making buzzing noises. “We just got him the watch yesterday. Kids. Quite the imagination, God bless them,” the woman said. “When do we lose that spontaneity?”
After taking their contact information, Holly moved on. At the other site, a Mazda SUV with a Washington plate sat next to two tents. One young man about twenty in a tank top and board shorts sat on a picnic table with a can of beans, spooning them directly into his mouth. Another male rustled inside the tent, and a third fiddled with the car radio. Not much came in this far west except NPR, which would make them feel at home in the news and weather at least. She doubted if they liked classical music.
“Hi, guys,” she said, flashing a friendly smile.
“’Sup? Hey, that’s one weird police dog,” the man at the table said, putting down the can to squirt in some ketchup. An elaborate M
a
¯ori-style tattoo ran around the top of his shoulder and down his arm. Holly could feel her stomach churning from so much coffee but no food. As soon as she got home, she was heading for a plate of bacon and eggs.
Shrugging off his question about Shogun, she started her questions, but they looked puzzled. “Geez,” said the first, whose name was Barry, “it was deserted around here last night. Except for that chick down the way. We were gonna invite her over for some marshmallows, but she didn’t seem that friendly. Wouldn’t come over when I waved.”
As she took their names, Ryan Warren and Sean Coates joined Barry Raines at the table, glancing from one to the other. Maybe they were in the right demographic for a sexual assault charge, but Holly doubted that they would have the nerve to attack someone on the grounds like a pack of beasts. Still, they didn’t seem that relaxed. Their eyes darted to the SUV. Other body language like shifting their stance and folding their arms made her suspicious. Acting casual, she got up and strolled over to the vehicle. There was a case of empty beer bottles in the back, partly covered by a towel.
“Party time?” she asked with a straight face.
Sean looked away into the bush. Ryan rubbed a hand on his weekend stubble. Jumping in first, Barry cleared his throat, but one corner of his mouth rose. “No way. We collected those cans by the roadside. Gonna take them back for recycling.”
Odd that they were all Snowqualmie PGA brand in a neat cardboard box. Not available anywhere around here. Holly gave an internal shrug. They didn’t seem drunk or even hung over. Whatever they’d consumed was ancient history. Certainly alcohol was enjoyed privately in tents as long as no one reported it and the drinkers stayed discreet. As for soft drugs, even harder to prove except for the tell-tale aroma. Here was another question of knowing when to press the issue and when to back off.
“What’s this about, officer? That family over there didn’t report us, did they? I mean we were up a bit late, but we weren’t exactly having a wild party,” Barry added.
Time to cut to the chase. She’d turned a few screws on them as it was. Holly mentioned the attack on Maddie, watching their faces for reactions. All she saw was total surprise. Or they were super actors.
“Poor kid. We weren’t even sure she was alone. We should have been keeping an eye on her. Right, guys?” Ryan smacked one ham-size hand into his palm. The others nodded.
When she asked if they had seen anyone else around the park last night, two said no, but Ryan shook his head. “You guys remember that I left to go down to the crapper. Someone was in it, and I couldn’t wait, so I went over to the main parking lot where I knew there was another can. I saw a small car drive down through the main parking lot.”
“And that was about …” Why would anyone be coming in after dark? Looking for trouble?
He stroked his chin, where two days’ worth of beard bristled. “Nine maybe. Car cruised through. It parked. I heard a few clanks, doors closing. When I got finished, I flashed on the licence. Whoever had been in the vehicle had gotten out. I didn’t hang around.”
“So you didn’t see anyone.”
“No, but I have a good memory for numbers. Have to be since I’m in accounting.” He tapped his temple with a proud grin.
“Show off,” Sean said, punching him on the shoulder. “You flunked it last semester.”
“Good memory,” Holly said. It was amazing to find such a perfect witness. Was he making it up as he went along?
“It was a B.C. plate. Dark little compact car. A Jetta. Corolla. I couldn’t say. The number was 549 JXC.”
“Nice going, genius. There’s hope for you.” Sean gave him a high five.
An unexpected lead. Or part of the “too good to be true” department. The boys were visiting from the University of Washington and had come over to surf at Jordan River. A car-top carrier had a couple of fancy boards. Low tides and serene seas had nixed that, so they were camping at French Beach instead, heading home that day. The van had a U of W decal on the back window and a bumper sticker: “Lacrosse Men Do It With Sticks.” Holly checked their vehicle registration. Little details made up the major steps of police work.
“There’s a bottle depot in Sooke near the cemetery and grade school,” she added as she left, tongue in cheek. “It’s closed today, but you could leave them off. Unless you want to haul those back across the border.” As she left to manly shrugs and one self-conscious grunt, Holly smiled to herself.
At the car with Shogun, she sipped from the water bottle. So much for her final tour. What more could she do? Contracting her brows, she decided to take one last look at the yurt. Ben Rogers, her mentor, had always said that checking twice never hurt. “Like carpentry. Measure twice. Cut once.” Then he’d died when a deaf boy shot him with a .22 that they’d thought was a BB gun. Ben was months from retirement, and he died in her arms. That had taught her an ugly lesson, but every time she had doubts about going the extra mile, she knew she owed him.
It was now total daylight, and as the sun began its cycle the guardian trees cast long shadows over the area. As she approached, she kept her eyes on the ground, searching for the incongruity of shape or colour like she did when she hunted for mushrooms or plants in her youth. Except for the indeterminate scuffle of shoes in the dirt outside the open door, nothing indicated that anyone had been there at all. She stepped over the doorsill and knelt down, peering under the empty bunk. Along with desultory pine needles and duff was a tiny white fragment in the corner.
She considered its microscopic nonentity. It might have come from anywhere, now or a week ago. The wind was up, and it might have blown in this morning while the door was open. This wasn’t a hotel, and no one vacuumed daily. From her mini-kit she took a pair of tweezers and placed the fragment inside a collection envelope. Whitish paper, very thin with no writing. About a quarter the size of her small fingernail. What in the hell was she going to do with it? The inspector would think she was around the bend. Better to look foolish than to avoid the problem through ignorance.
Monday, en route to
work, Holly turned at West Coast Road and Otter Point. The sign “No Gas for 130 Kilometres” was still up, a timely warning for tourists about what dragons lay ahead in the Grand Circle route through Port Renfrew and east all the way through Clearcutland back to Cowichan.
Only a few hundred lucky souls lived in quiet Fossil Bay with a convenience store/gas station, a grade school dating from 1930, and Nan’s restaurant. With land too rugged for the large-scale farming that opened up the eastern island, only loggers and fishermen had lived there. Then their cottages began to be purchased as weekend getaways by urban dwellers. Development on a large scale had not yet arrived, leaving the village in a pleasant time warp. For a year or two, they might be safe from “prosperity.”
She pulled up in front of the remodelled white clapboard cottage with a Canadian flag and the RCMP/GRC crest on the door, St. Edward’s crown adopted for Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth. The lone Impala cruiser, a seven-year-old castoff from West Shore, was parked beside Ann’s new Outback. Behind the building was their ancient four-wheel-drive Suburban for off-road or snowy routes high in the hills. Few realized that on the tops of the San Juans along the coast, as many as twenty feet of snow fell and stayed all winter.
Opening the squeaky screen door, she removed her cap and jacket and tucked them into the closet. Following her, Shogun made his way to Ann Troy’s desk in the reception area for a treat. Everyone was used to him coming to work. The kids and volunteers who stopped by loved him. This was as close as possible to the old-time style of policing where Officer Friendly walked the beat. Ann tended the marigolds, tulips, and zinnias that made the cottage look like a home. Chipper, mindful of his lower status as a constable and duties as a modern male, did the cleaning.
Nearby was his corner and desk. The other rooms served as Holly’s office, a lunchroom, and a tiny bathroom. Ann had ten years on Holly, the same one-hundred-thirty-five pounds on a two-inch shorter frame. Her clipped brown hair was curly, and she wore reading glasses, a recent but necessary surrender to early middle age. “Babysitting again, eh?” she asked.
“You know my father,” Holly said, pouring herself coffee from the carafe, the last of the Kona that Ann had ordered from Hawaii. “He wanted a dog, but somehow I get the walking duties. Kind of like a kid in reverse.”
“Another day in paradise, or so the realtors claim,” Ann said. “We don’t have a stoplight, so it can’t have changed.” This was her favourite joke.
Passing Ann the report she had typed up at home Sunday afternoon, Holly told her about the attack at French Beach, earning a raised eyebrow.
“Sounds like she was a lucky girl,” Ann said, blowing out a breath. “This is really very bad publicity. Watch it hit the local paper for sure, maybe even the
Times Colonist
.”
Holly turned to her with an ironic smile. “Inspector Crew already bit my head off to suggest that. They’ll downplay it for the sake of tourism. Maybe issue a very mild and inconsequential advisory at the most. Call it an isolated incident.” She drew air quotes. “Nothing will be allowed to tarnish our image. But you must admit that this is unusual.”
“Not the beginning of a trend, I hope. We’ve been blessed with our boring jobs for so long,” Ann said. If the alternative was gang wars, they’d settle for traffic duty. “When a strangler enters the picture, you aren’t in Kansas anymore.”
Island homicide statistics were well under the national average of about 3.2 per hundred thousand. A spousal murder, an errant drug deal, those were expected. A predator on the loose was another matter. Mainland police were still smarting from the national shame of a pig farmer with a subnormal IQ, who had murdered over sixty women. Because most were prostitutes or transients and the mainland jurisdictions overlapped, he had gone unarrested for over a decade. If the police had listened to some of the early warnings, dozens of lives could have been saved.
Holly remembered her mother fuming whenever another First Nations woman disappeared. “When a blonde, middle-class girl is killed, it’s on television 24-7,” she had complained, punishing the table with her small first for emphasis. “It’s a damn shame. Everyone has the same value.” Holly had little idea that her mother would become a statistic. She often wondered whether her mother’s dangerous job had something to do with it. Without a doubt, she had enemies.
“Let’s pray it’s a blip on the radar,” Holly said. “At least it didn’t escalate into a rape. And Maddie seems to be holding up, or as well as anyone could be.” She described how the girl’s fitness helped her put up a fight and bought extra seconds. “She was shy but tough underneath. We could use someone like her in the force. She’s wasting her time as an English major.”
Ann sat back in her lumbar-support chair, a sceptical look on her round face, much more of a pessimist than Holly, due either to age or experience. “Too bad she didn’t clock him with a Maglite like yours. We don’t stand a chance of finding this lurker. We are assuming that he acted alone, right?” Stats supported that idea.
“This doesn’t sound like a tag-team crime, but a question of opportunity. Anyway, I have the plate someone saw. I’m running it on CPIC in a minute. I stopped in yesterday afternoon, but the system was down.” Holly said. The Canadian Police Information Centre also scanned for pending cases and checked “wants.”
“Working on Sunday. This is a change. And you made the rounds of the park. So nice of Crew to allow you to assist his royal highness.” Ann popped a jot of sarcasm into her observation. Inspectors were not her favourite people, especially the men. “They don’t call it the
Peter
Principle for nothing,” she’d say, referencing a bestseller that claimed that people rose to their own levels of incompetence.
Ann finished speed-reading the report while Holly talked. “And this little kid said … oh never mind. You know kids. Imagination and embellishments.” Eye-witnesses were known for unreliability. Four people often had five different descriptions, according to their discrepancies in vision or hearing or even their preconceptions. Kids could dream up details from a fantasy world or even have it implanted by an unethical interviewer.
Ann indicated her approval with an arched eyebrow. “You scored there. A licence plate is gold.” She pointed out an “affect-effect” error in the report. Then she put down the papers and levelled her hazel eyes at her corporal, adding a long, suspicious
hmmm
.
“This guy who scared off the assailant? Sounds pretty coincidental that he was strolling in the park that late. Creepy. There’s a thin line between maintaining a community watch and being a peeper,” Ann suggested.
“Paul the Peeper? That’s good. Paul Reid lives on Seaside Drive. It’s a close-knit little community. The residents consider French Beach access part of their manor privileges. Something else was odd, too.” She told Ann about the Bible verse.
“Too bad you didn’t get a look at the rest of the book. It’s not in our purview to do that, but you’d be surprised at what can turn up. Some teens stole videotapes from a house once in Wawa, and it had kiddie porn on it. They turned it in and we put their principal away.”
Pouring herself another cup of coffee, Holly took the report and went into her office to make the corrections, calling over her shoulder, “He seemed like a decent guy to me. A little rough around the edges. Not my kind of date besides the fact that he’s several decades older.”
Ann’s sharp pencil tattooed the desk. “My brain cells are running slow this morning. Still, that name….”
In her small office, cozy or cramped depending on state of mind, Holly looked at her reminder ticker for the week. End of the month reports were due. She couldn’t help but think of Maddie. Did the girl make it to her exam? Maddie had her card. Maybe back in a safe and familiar place, some other memory had occurred to the girl. On her desk sat the envelope with the miniscule fragment of thin white paper that she had found in the yurt. Was she being ridiculous or merely cautious? She set it aside in a “wait and see” plan. Even mentioning it to Ann seemed premature.
On the file cabinet was a selection of pamphlets.
Sexual Assault Awareness
caught her attention. Things had changed since 1983, when the Criminal Code replaced rape, attempted rape, and indecent assault with three levels of sexual assault. Use of force without someone’s consent, followed by kissing, fondling, or sexual intercourse. The Midnight Choker, or so she thought of him, hadn’t gotten that far, thank God. The determining factor became the use of force itself. Contrary to what some thought, sexual assault was not a crime of passion against young, attractive women in dark, isolated places who asked for it by their suggestive dress or lifestyle. It was aggression and power, plain and simple.
Her mother had stressed that fact when Holly was nine and a pregnant woman in far-off Bamfield had been killed by her husband, despite a restraining order. “Murder is the leading cause of death for pregnant women and for babies, too. I don’t want you to be scared, but that’s a statistic that explains why I do what I do. These women are victimized by their bad choice in men.” She had made Holly a special eggnog with a half-teaspoon of rum, and they sat at the kitchen table in the old house in East Sooke. The towering firs meant that the lights were on all day.
“Mom, are you a fem … feminist?” The term tripped off her inexperienced tongue.
“Where did you learn that word?” Her mother’s light brown face wore a look of wonderment as she shifted her thick ebony braid over her shoulder. The first streaks of grey in her hair highlighting the cheekbones were making her more beautiful every year. “Are they teaching you about feminism in grade four? Maybe the system’s better than I thought.”
Holly tried to remember. “I think I heard it in a movie on TV. It sounded kind of bad.”
Her mother gave her a hurt and surprised look. “There is nothing wrong with that word. I don’t know how it got distorted in the last twenty years. It merely means equality and liberation for all, men as well.”
“But Mom,” Holly had said, wondering how her father could be liberated from what seemed like a life of total freedom. “Why did that woman have to die? Can’t the police stop this from happening? You said they were our friends.”
“Honey, there aren’t enough to go around. Many units up-island have one officer for every four hundred square miles. How can they be everywhere? It takes a community and a strong protective wall of women. Men have their good points, I won’t deny it. Your father is a gentle soul, his silly profession aside. But women have different priorities. Wars and power trips are not important to them. Housing, food, warm clothing, love, and safety. Those are their motivations. We’re hard-wired that way.”
“Hard-wired?” Holly gave her temple a rap, which made Bonnie reach over for a hug.
Now these one-man detachments were being phased out, meaning fewer officers for even more square miles. Shaking herself back to the present, Holly tapped into the database and got a name and a description which matched what the young men said. A dark blue 2005 Jetta. “Yesssss,” she said, with an air punch. The car was licensed to a Victor Grobbo on Coppermine Road in East Sooke. She made a quick call. Nobody home. No answering machine. That in itself was strange. How many times in science was the key phrase not “eureka” but “that’s funny”? But she needed backup.