Beautiful Lie the Dead (9 page)

Whelan leaned on the table, propping his head in his hands, but at Green's last words, he lifted his head and blinked in surprise. “There's more, sir. It looks like she may have been alive on Tuesday morning.” As he explained about the ATM withdrawal, everyone held their breath and even Bob Gibbs stopped typing.

“Someone could have been using her card,” Peters said.

Whelan reached into his pocket and pulled out a computer memory stick. “That's why I brought the video from the ATM camera for that day.”

“Have you looked at it?”

“No sir, I only just pried it loose from the bank.”

Jesus! Green looked at the man in astonishment. For ten minutes he had sat there listening to them discussing wedding dresses and family secrets, while all the time he was sitting on a piece of evidence that could potentially throw the whole basis of the investigation out the window. Whelan's eyes drooped and his fingers fumbled as he groped through his file. He would probably fall asleep within two minutes of starting to watch.

Green instructed Gibbs to load the stick into the computer, and the entire table watched in silence as the distorted, fish-eye view of the small ATM booth came up on the screen. In the bottom right corner, the seconds ticked by on the date recorder.

“Do we have the time of this transaction?” Green asked, trying not to sound impatient. Whelan consulted the accounts print-out. 10:38 a.m. Gibbs flashed ahead to 10:35. A hazy figure was standing at the machine, back to the camera. Gibbs backed it up a couple of minutes and caught the figure pulling open the glass door and entering the booth. It looked like a woman, but she was wearing not only a scarf wrapped around her neck and chin but a coat with a fur-trimmed hood pulled up over her head. Large sunglasses completed the camouflage.

“Jesus, that could be anybody,” Peters muttered.

Gibbs zoomed in on key parts of the figure, trying to pick out distinguishing features. The person wore gloves throughout the transaction, so that it was impossible to identify rings. She worked quickly without consulting any notes, more like someone familiar with the PIN number and the transaction process than someone trying to remember, read or guess an unfamiliar PIN or trying to choose between unfamiliar accounts. She kept her head bowed as she punched the keys, never giving the camera a chance to capture her full face.

“Our subject does have a winter coat with a hood,” Whelan said, still awake. “The family could probably tell if this was it. Also the purse. Women's purses are pretty individual.”

Green's thoughts were way ahead. He was beginning to get a queasy feeling about this whole business. The person at the ATM had been very clever, using posture and clothing that seemed very normal and yet completely concealed their identity. If Meredith had come to deliberate harm, the person responsible would have easy access to the clothes and purse needed to impersonate her at the bank machine. And to throw the investigation completely off track.

But Whelan was right. Follow-up with the family was the next logical step, but Whelan would probably wrap his car around a lamp post before he got there. Green sent the exhausted man home and had Gibbs print out stills from the video. He checked his watch.

“Bob, get over to the bus station and grab those drivers before they go off again. After that you can follow up with the families.”

Sue Peters was hovering behind Gibbs's shoulder, and finally she broke in. “Sir, can I help Bob with the follow-up? Maybe check out the Harvey Longstreet suicide angle?”

Green eyed her carefully. She looked wide-eyed and bursting to go, almost her old self. He suspected the true intent behind her carefully vague request. The old Sue Peters let loose on Elena Longstreet was not a pretty sight, but on the other hand, she now knew the case as well as anybody.

“Let's get confirmation that she went to Montreal first, before we do any kind of follow-up. Once Gibbs has that, we can discuss it.”

Peters grinned widely but Green thought he detected a flicker of alarm on Gibbs's face. This office romance could get tricky, he thought.

Barely thirty minutes passed before Gibbs phoned in his report. The bus driver doing the morning route to Montreal last Monday remembered the missing woman well, and he'd been wondering whether to call the police. She hadn't done anything wrong, in fact she had not been acting strangely at all, but he had later wondered whether the police were looking in all the wrong places. Maybe she'd dropped out of sight in Montreal, he said to Gibbs. She didn't look like a bride excited about her wedding. She looked worried, as if she had something big on her mind, and she'd sat curled up in her seat by the window, staring out and ignoring the young guy who tried to pick her up.

Did she speak to anyone, Gibbs wanted to know. Or speak on her phone? Text or email?

She was writing notes, the driver said, and she checked her cellphone often as if she was expecting something. But then kids these days checked their cell phones sometimes fifty times an hour.

Did she have any luggage, Gibbs asked. Nothing big, maybe a daypack, the driver said, scrunching up his face as he tried to remember. An experienced guy, Gibbs said to Green. Fluent in both languages and been doing the routes around Quebec and Ontario for ten years. If Meredith hadn't looked worried, he would barely have noticed her. He'd pegged her for a student going home for the holidays, maybe worried about the exams or term papers she still had to face.

The bus driver doing the afternoon route back to Ottawa had had little time to think of anything but the road. The bus was packed with students travelling home to Ottawa or to the small towns in the Ottawa Valley. At six o'clock it was already dark, and the snow had begun blowing in thick, horizontal gusts that formed icy sheets on the road and swirled into drifts at each curve. The four-lane divided highway between Montreal and Ottawa was bleak at the best of times, passing through acres of desolate bush and farmland. In a blizzard, it could be lethal. The bus driver counted himself lucky to have stayed on the road while smaller cars and less experienced drivers spun out into the ditches.

All the passengers on the bus seemed to sense the danger, he said, because there was none of the laughter and rowdiness of most holiday season buses. They had stayed pretty quiet as if afraid to distract him, but no one had slept. Everyone watched the road and the pinpricks of red light from the cars up ahead.

The driver stared at Meredith's picture for a long time as though he were trying to place her in the bus. “She was in a window seat about halfway back,” he said finally. “I remember because she was upset about something. She had this clipboard and she was always scribbling on it and flipping through pages to look at things. I caught a quick look at them while she was looking for her ticket, and it looked like pages of death announcements, like from the paper? I thought maybe someone had died in her family.”

“Did she use her cellphone?”

The driver looked blank. “Like I said, once we were rolling, I hardly took my eyes off the road.”

“Did she talk to anyone on the bus?”

“Not that I saw, but I couldn't see much.” he shrugged, his long, jowly face sad. He looked like a man who was ready to retire, weary of the long hours on the road and longing for more time in his armchair with his favourite sports show.

“Well done,” Green said once Gibbs concluded his report.

He felt his excitement mount. “This puts a whole new spin on things. We need to find out why she went to Montreal and what she was so upset about.”

“I thought of that, s-sir,” Gibbs said with a hint of pride in his voice. “I got the passenger manifest and put out a media call asking anyone who spoke to Meredith on either leg of her trip to phone us. Maybe she told someone where she was going. Or maybe her seatmate was able to see more of what was on her clipboard.”

“Good thinking. Bring the manifest to the station for Sue to work on while you follow up with the families.” Green glanced into the main room, where Peters had been working at her computer. Her desk was vacant and her winter jacket gone from its peg. He felt a flash of consternation. Had she grown fed up with playing back-up and gone off herself, ready to confront the family with only half the facts?

Good God, was the old Sue Peters truly back?

SEVEN

W
hen Frankie Robitaille finally had a chance to sleep, he didn't wake for thirteen hours. During the two-day storm, which saw wave after wave of snow and sleet blanket the capital, he had put in eighteen-hour days behind the wheel of his plow, keeping himself awake with Tim Hortons coffee and endless country and western songs on his iPod. For over two days, he managed no more than the occasional break to grab some food and a catnap on the couch before heading out again.

By Wednesday evening, the snow was under control and his shift supervisor had sent him home before he became a serious hazard on the road. Dinner, a quick stop to give his kids a goodnight kiss and a promise of Disney World at March break, and he fell into bed. He slept through the alarm the next morning and the kids' preparations for school, not waking until the dog shoved her cold, impatient nose into his face. Frankie stared at the clock in disbelief. It was almost noon.

He turned on the television as he stumbled around the kitchen brewing coffee and fixing himself a heaping plate of bacon, eggs and toast. Every muscle of his body ached. He allowed the local news show to drone on in the background with a mixture of patter, features and brief news bytes. Gradually he became aware of a story about a missing woman. The camera panned the scene of volunteers trudging through snowy streets, probing snowbanks with ski poles.

He picked up his plate and carried it to sit down in front of the TV. A police spokeswoman was asking all residents throughout the city to check their own properties for any sign of the woman, who was believed to be wearing a hooded red jacket. She had last been heard from on Monday evening, and if she had been injured, she might be lying beneath forty centimetres of snow. So far the official search had concentrated on the residential areas between downtown and Carlingwood, but the woman could have gone anywhere.

More than two days beneath the snow, Frankie thought. She's dead, no doubt about it. He got to thinking about all the miles he'd covered in those days, all the acres of pure white snow. The garbage bins, snow shovels and kid's sleds he'd tossed up from under that pristine cover. A memory rose up, of a slight bump, a flash of red on the snow behind him. Slowly he set his fork down. A strange sensation churned in his gut. Was it possible? What day had that been? Where had he been? On a residential street somewhere, in the dead of night. Wednesday. No, Tuesday.

He felt sick. Tuesday morning, more than fifty-four hours ago.

He grabbed a city map and began to retrace his routes, trying to remember where he had been plowing early Tuesday morning. Somewhere in the east end not far from downtown, but nowhere near where the police thought she might be. But what if they were wrong? After five minutes he threw the map aside in frustration. He had to see the streets for himself and replay the night in his mind's eye.

He revved his pick-up out of the drive and headed into town. The roads were clear now and a brittle sun glared on the fresh snow. Salt crews had covered the main roads, polishing them a glossy black. Frankie lived in Cumberland at the far eastern extremity of the city, but at midday it took him less than half an hour to reach the fashionable old neighbourhood nestled in the crook where the Rideau River joined the Ottawa. He had covered Vanier to Manor Park that night, but as near as he could remember, he had been around Lindenlea and New Edinburgh when he'd bumped something. Both neighbourhoods bordered the more exclusive enclave of Rockcliffe Park, home to ambassadors and wealthy CEOs, and Frankie was never sure where one area ended and the other began. Rockcliffe had no sidewalks and had an English village feel, despite the multi-million dollar homes set back on huge properties. Lindenlea was quaint and smaller in scale, but still way beyond his bank balance even if he had wanted to rub shoulders with associate deputy ministers and university profs. His black pick-up with the roof rack and the trailer hitch would look like a bouncer at a tea party among the Audis and Volvos in the drives.

Beechwood Avenue bisected the area, dividing the haves from the have-nots in neighbouring Vanier. Once he'd turned onto the narrow streets of Lindenlea, he eased off the gas and tried to visualize that night. It had been dark and dead quiet, poorly lit by streetlights. He'd been driving around a sharp curve and was just picking up a bit of speed when he'd felt the jolt. Now he drove slowly through the looping streets, searching for the right layout. Nothing. The neighbourhood was full of short, curvy streets clogged with snowbanks. He widened his net, venturing into the nearby fringes of Rockcliffe, where unassuming bungalows worth close to a million peeked from behind snowladen cedar hedges. Turning off Juliana Road onto Maple Lane, he had a memory flash. The stretch had looked like this. He had turned left just like this and had been accelerating towards a wide-open stretch when the bump occurred.

He inched down the street peering closely at the snowbanks made by plows over the past days. No hint of red. No telltale lump in the snow. He parked his truck and began to walk. There was almost no one out on the street. No volunteers probing the snowbanks or checking under the boughs of huge spruces that drooped to the ground under the weight of snow. Only a solitary woman walking her Labrador retriever off leash. The dog looked at him suspiciously and barked, like a stranger was a weird sight in the area.

The woman took in his salt-splattered pick-up, his well-worn bomber jacket and his three-inch growth—he'd left without shaving that morning—and her eyebrows shot up. “Can I help you?”

He started to shake his head then stopped himself. “I'm a snowplow operator, and I think I hit something with my plow a couple of days ago. I'm just checking around.”