Woman Chased By Crows Part 48

"No, just the moving men."

"Do you remember which moving company it was?"

"Oh sure, Dorians. Couple of guys with a big truck. Here in town."

"Did you talk to them?"

"Yeah, for a minute. I talked to John. He's the older brother. Just to make sure they were both gone. I wasn't sure of the situation."

"Right. Did you ask them where the stuff was going?"

"Storage. They have their own lockers."

"Hey, Stace," Adele was calling from the kitchen. "A minute?"

"Right there." She turned back to Mr. Chiklis. "You go ahead Ben, you can start upstairs." She handed him her card. "You find anything at all, you let me know, okay? Crean. Rhymes with brain."

Stacy left Mr. Chiklis to struggle up the stairs with his cleaning supplies and headed for the kitchen. Adele was wedged behind the refrigerator. She was holding up something that looked like a boarding pa.s.s. "Bingo," she said.

"What have you got?"

"Not a hundred percent sure. Looks like a Via Rail ticket invoice. MontrealOshawa."

"She's gone to Montreal?"

"Looks like . . ." She peered at it closely. "Looks like somebody came from Montreal. Yesterday."

Lorna was back.

"I am losing circulation in my hands. Can you not loosen the ropes just a little?"

"Maybe, in a while, if you help me."

"And pretty soon I will have to pee."

"Just give it back and it will all be over."

"Really? Over for me, surely. If I help you, you will kill me."

"No one wants to kill you, Anya."

"Well, you may not want to, but it seems to me you will have no choice."

"Here is how it could work. You tell me where it is, and then when I have it, and I'm safely on my way, I will phone someone to release you."

"My my, that sounds most unappetizing. You phone someone, whom I have not yet seen, and they will free me? Why would they not just shoot me and be done with it?"

"We are not killers."

"Really. And yet so many have died for that silly thing."

"It's nothing but a burden."

"At this moment it is the only thing keeping me alive."

"I'm trying to keep you from being hurt. I am not the only one in this. There are others who want to use harsher methods."

"Who can blame them? Six months of prying into my brains and you got nowhere. They must be most frustrated."

"You won't like it if they take over."

"Are you not breaking some important doctor's oath? Threatening torture?"

"I don't have any more time for this."

At some point, someone, maybe the doctor herself, gave her a shot of something, presumably something that would make her talk. Truth serum? Is there such a thing? Whatever it was, it filled her head with clouds and hazy images of people long dead or missing. She saw Yuri in her dream. For one brief, perfect moment she saw him, as he was so many years ago, saw him in flight, hanging in the air like a great bird of prey, his head flung back, his long arms spread like wings, immortal. Is that all immortality is?, she wondered. Someone's fleeting memory of you, there for just a heartbeat, and then gone forever. And what if any memory would serve as her legacy? Who alive could even recall how she was, what she once was capable of?

And the rest? An image of Ludi in a dressing room, bouncing on her long bare toes. How we laughed about her feet sometimes, just the two of us. Mine, so hard and cramped and sore. And hers, so white, so unblemished, so plain and normal. How odd, that in this drugged state the clearest image is of someone's bare feet bouncing on a cheap blue rug somewhere. Where? A dressing room. Some small theatre. What does it matter? There's your immortality, Ludi dear, I remember your toes.

Eventually they got tired of her meandering babble and they left her alone for a very long while, left her alone to pee where she sat, they didn't care, left her to grind her wrists raw against the ropes and to rock the wooden chair back and forth. It was evening by now, the shafts of light through the barn wall had slipped lower and lower and then died, leaving her to sit in the gloom.

"You got any frickin' idea what's going on here, partner? I mean, any idea at all?"

"It's complicated, isn't it?"

"Complicated? It's a ball of snakes. And just when you think you've got one by the tail the whole thing twists around on you." She was rummaging in Stacy's glove compartment. "Should've taken my car."

"We can stop somewhere."

"No, I don't want to stop somewhere. I want to grab some people by the neck and shake some straight stories out of them. I mean, come on! Dilly's the bad guy. His fingerprints are all over this thing. Maybe not his actual fingerprints, but you get my drift. So we've got him just about backed into a corner and pow! Some new a.s.shole we aren't even looking at blows him away. Now where's that at?"

Stacy concentrated on her driving for a while. "You sure you don't want to stop for a burger or something?"

"You hungry?"

"I'm confused is what I am. Same as you. I wouldn't mind a minute to talk about things."

"Good. Fine. Anything coming up?" Stacy made a quick right turn into the West Mall shopping centre. They had a choice of an A&W, a Taco Bell, a Pizza Pizza and a Subway. Adele clapped her hands. "f.u.c.k. It's the motherlode."

"Knock yourself out. I'm going into Foodland to get something my body can actually use."

"Whatever."

Adele decided on a Mama Burger, onion rings and a root beer. Stacy came back to the car with two bananas, a bag of almonds and a small carton of orange juice with pulp. They sat in the parking lot with the doors ajar and concentrated on chewing and slurping for a while. After polishing off the first banana and a few almonds, Stacy spoke. "What don't we know?"

"For starters, we don't know who shot Dilly O'Grady in the f.u.c.king head."

"Has to be someone he knew. Sitting beside him in the car. Somebody he trusted."

"Got a list? Wife? His a.s.sistant, Chris, Cam, whatshisname?"

"Cam."

"Him? Why? f.u.c.ked his career? What does he care?"

"This was his shot at the big time." Stacy finished the second banana and left the car to find a garbage can.

"Yeah. Drastic though," Adele said. "I'm leaning more to somebody close to the jewel business." She followed Stacy across the lot and tossed her garbage as well. They both stood beside the trash bin. "Yeah, gotta be somebody involved in the Nimchuk thing, or those other Russkies, can't keep them straight. The guy in the park, the beaky one in Montreal, and let's not forget Louie."

"And Louie's kid, Darryl."

"I don't see him getting his act together enough to pull it off."

"Me neither," said Stacy, "but if we're making a list we should put everybody on it we can think of."

"Who else is there?"

"We're back to the doctor."

"But no connection."

"Well, no connection to O'Grady that we know of, but we've got a big connection to the jewels. According to Mr. Tomashevsky . . ."

"Wow. Are we dealing with some odd ducks on this or what?"

"He says the doctor was sent to Canada to find that big rock. She drops off their radar, winds up in my town where she's been hiding out for at least six months."

"Hiding out and working on our dancer."

"And getting married, too?" Stacy asked.

"Hunh?"

"She shows up in Dockerty, a small town in the middle of nowhere, ostensibly to get close to Anya and, what, she meets this guy, falls in love, gets married? Does that sound plausible?"

"Right, who is this guy?"

Stacy had three almonds in the palm of her hand. She held them out to her friend. "Have one. Good for you." Adele took one, Stacy ate the second one, and then without hesitation whipped the last one across the parking lot to bounce with a distinct ping against the side of a dumpster. "That's what I'd like to know. Who's this Harold Ruth? The poor guy in the wrong place with the wrong gun in his hand who was treated like c.r.a.p by the cops and set free because he didn't do anything."

"So after that n.o.body looks at him again because he's just a poor shmuck who got some c.r.a.ppy treatment." She burped and tossed her root beer cup into the trash can. "Let's get back to the station. I want to talk to Hong and Siffert."

When Constable Maitland inquired of Mr. and Mrs. Wallace if he might look at the pictures they'd taken with their new Sony Cyber-shot that morning, they asked him, more or less politely, to get off their porch. When he explained that it was possible that they had captured an image that could help the police locate a missing woman, they relented, but not until Mr. Wallace had secured Maitland's promise to tear up the parking ticket. There was of course no guarantee that they had anything useful in their little camera, and Maitland knew that he might be stuck paying the ticket out of his own pocket, but he agreed to the bargain provided he could borrow the camera for a few minutes.

Mr. Wallace followed Maitland to his cruiser and watched him transfer the images to his cellphone, and when he gave back the camera, Mr. Wallace (rather smugly Maitland thought) tore the ticket in half and handed it back with a facetious "Have a nice day."

Adele pulled her chair over to Stacy's desk. "Wayne Hong's unavailable. Don't know if he's unavailable to me or to the world, but I caught up to d.i.c.k Siffert at his mother-in-law's place. I think they were just sitting down to dinner. He was happy to have an excuse. Says she makes the worst pot roast in the universe."

"Was he okay to talk about Harold?"

"Yeah, says he doesn't give a s.h.i.t. Nothing's going to happen. Be back on the job Monday. They didn't do anything to the guy. I don't buy it a hundred percent, probably tuned him up a bit, but n.o.body's heard any talk about a civil suit. In fact n.o.body's heard anything from the guy since his case got tossed. Says the only reason they held on to him was because he dummied up, said he wanted a lawyer and they could go f.u.c.k themselves. That's why they were sure he was good for it."

"They didn't look into him? Background check? Talk to the wife? Like that?"

"Nope. Scooped him, locked him up. Figured he'd give it up if he sat in a room for a while. Then your boss started making noises and they had to send him back here."

"Too bad," Stacy said. "They might have found out a few things."

"Such as?"

"Such as, there's no such person. Harold Ruth, H&R Construction, the marriage, all BS." Stacy, as usual, had copious notes. "He doesn't show up anywhere before last September when he rented that house. Buys a truck, has somebody paint H&R Construction on the doors, but aside from renting some equipment at the Rent-All, I can't find any record that he did any construction work anywhere. No building permits, no tax returns, nothing. The doctor arrives a few weeks after he shows up, sometime in October, rents s.p.a.ce in the medical building, but she didn't have much of a practice, either. Their marriage doesn't show up anywhere. She wasn't listed with OHIP, Physicians and Surgeons, nada. Both of them totally bogus."

"Mystery couple."

"And no picture of him to show your tiny admirer."

Orwell spotted them as he came out of his office. He was heading home for an early supper and a theatre date with the entire family, if reports of Diana's visit were accurate. As the two detectives across the room seemed entirely absorbed in what they were doing, he decided to leave them alone. Roy Rawluck gave him a smart salute as Orwell headed for the door.

"Anything pressing that needs my attention, Staff?"

"Everything's under control, Chief," Roy said. "Big night tonight, is it? Her debut?" (He p.r.o.nounced it day-boo.) "I'm a Gilbert and Sullivan man myself. Pirates of Penzance and all that."

"Yes," Orwell said. "I hear you've got quite the singing voice when the mood strikes you."

"Back in my school days, of course."

"Sorry I missed it. All right, I'm off."

"Wish her merde for me, Chief." He leaned closer, as if imparting a secret. "That's what they say in the theatre."

Orwell was almost at the door when he spotted Constable Maitland climbing in a hurry. "What's up, Charles?" he asked.

"Might have a lead on the car that picked up your ballet dancer, Chief," Maitland said. "Got to check a few things first."

"Things you need me for?"

"I don't know for sure if I've got anything. Might take a while."

"Okay. Crean and Moen are up there. Work with them."

"Yes, sir."

"Keep me in the loop."

"Yes, sir."

Maitland was obviously in a hurry to get moving. Orwell slapped him on the back. "Off you go then." He watched his constable take the rest of the stairs two at a time. Darn. He was tempted to linger a while longer, but he'd probably just get in the way. He reminded himself that he should set his phone to vibrate or whatever it did. Wouldn't want Marvin Gaye going off in the middle of his daughter's big scene. That would be disastrous. He clumped down the stairs, feeling somewhat left out.

"All right, Charlie," said Stacy. Three heads were close together peering at the computer screen. "You got it all." The shot of the dark blue Chevy pulling away was beautifully framed between the bright faces of the Wallaces' smiling parents, and at over 1,600 x 1,200 pixels, the resolution was more than high enough to enlarge the small portion they were interested in and get a clear image of the license plate. One of the numbers was partially obscured behind the woman's hand raised in farewell.