Lullaby for the Nameless (10 page)

Kurdy jumped to his feet. “You get the hell outta my face.”

“Strike a nerve, Kurdy?”

The man shoved Tain hard. If it wasn’t for the fact that he was of a slim build, no more than five-seven with pencil-thin arms, Tain might have had to step back to regain his balance.

As it was, he didn’t even flinch.

He grabbed Kurdy by the shirt and pinned him against the wall, the bar again going quiet. Kurdy looked over Tain’s shoulder, then pressed back against the wall. “You got no fuckin’ right.”

“You seem awfully nervous for someone who’s innocent.”

“Maybe ’cos you got me backed in a corner an’ shoved up against a wall.”

Skittish eyes darted to and fro as though he was hoping someone would morph out of the floorboards and come to his rescue.

He tightened his hold and pushed Kurdy harder. “You better watch yourself, ’cos I’m keeping an eye on you. Next girl that goes missing…”

“What? You gonna drag me out back and scalp me, Red?”

Tain pushed Kurdy up until he felt the full weight of him lifted in the air. “I find out you’ve been up to your old tricks, I’ll see to it your cell mate’ll do things to you that’ll make you cry for your mommy.”

“Guess they haff ta pull in losers like you on somethin’ like this. Nobody else gives two shits about your kind.”

“Is that what you count on, Kurdy? Think nobody’ll mind if you snatch a couple Native girls off the streets?”

“Maybe I should ask your wife about your hobbies.”

The man in his grasp tried to swing with both arms, and Tain struggled to keep his hold.

“You stay the hell away from her,” Kurdy hissed, eyes wide.

“Tain.” The voice came from beside him, not the man pinned against the wall in front of him. “Let him go.”

Slip his hand to the left and he could wrap it around Kurdy’s throat.

“I said let him go!” He knew that voice.

Kurdy’s gaze flickered from Tain’s face to the person to Tain’s right, and he showed off his broken tooth again.

The drop against the floor wasn’t enough to hurt him, but it shook the smirk off his face for a second. Tain stepped back.

Kurdy lifted his hand and looked like he might shake a fist, then pointed at the person beside Tain. “You keep him the hell away from me or I’ll make a complaint.”

Nolan stepped forward and grabbed Kurdy by the shirt. “You want to go running to our boss, say you don’t like the way you’ve been treated? That you think we should be nicer to guys who rape kids?”

Kurdy swallowed. “I didn’t know she was fourteen.”

“So you say.” Nolan let go of the shirt as he gave him a small shove. “Thing is, I don’t believe you, and I don’t think your wife will either.”

Kurdy seemed to have decided arguing was pointless. He marched toward the door, stopping only when the bartender got in his way and demanded he pay his tab.

“So help me, Tain, next time he threatens to make a complaint about you, I should offer to drive him to the station myself.”

“I’m warning you, Tain, the sergeant will only put up with so much of this.”

“Go run and tell on me if you need to, Nolan. Just get out of my way.”

Tain brushed past him, but Nolan wasn’t about to be left behind. When they’d exited the bar, Nolan continued, “Don’t think the color of your skin and local politics are going to save your ass if you’re harassing people. I’ll go to Sullivan myself if I have to.”

“I expect as much from a sorry excuse of an officer like you,” Tain said as he spun around. “You stay the hell away from me.”

“Don’t you even care about those missing girls?”

“More than you do.”

“Yeah? Prove it! Stop jeopardizing this investigation. You keep running off, doing your own thing, not checking in with anyone, threatening people for no reason.”

“I have my reasons.”

“Yeah? How about filling the rest of us in? Sharing your alleged leads? If you’ve got something on Kurdy, put it on the table so we can get surveillance, bring him in for questioning. You running off trying to save the day on your own is holding us back.”

“Yeah?” Tain shifted his gaze deliberately to Craig Nolan’s left, then right. “And where’s the little chick the sergeant told you to partner with?” He looked Nolan in the eye. “Waiting in the car? Or did you ditch her at the office first chance you got? Don’t you lecture me about playin’ it solo. Not after what happened to Winters. I’m under no delusions about who isn’t watching my back, Nolan. Not unless you think you can put a knife in it, that is.”

And that left a few possibilities. Nolan’s instincts could have been better than Tain wanted to give him credit for, or he might have gotten lucky.

Or he had a source.

Tain yanked the car door open and slammed the key into the ignition as he formed a mental list of everyone he’d seen in the bar, anyone who’d noticed him when he went in. It had been the usual crowd of underemployed or hired by the job, off-the-books types who practically lined up outside waiting for the doors to open.

Luck wasn’t something he believed in, but the idea that Nolan could read him or had someone tipping him off made his gut twist.

He was going to have to watch his back, more than he already was.

It turned out the only appointment she’d had with the doctor in recent years was on the seventeenth of December 2002, but between Ashlyn and the receptionist, Sue Sanders wasn’t playing with a full deck.

Ashlyn didn’t call Mrs. Sanders back to let her know what conclusion she’d reached about her tip.

Doubt was cast on another potential lead when she’d called the helpful citizen, only to discover he had no memory of calling the police at all. A third had called from a long-term nursing facility. Staff confirmed the patient in question had been a resident for two years and hadn’t been off the property in more than four months and therefore couldn’t possibly have seen a missing girl at a church dance two weeks ago.

For the very few she couldn’t refute or substantiate, Ashlyn had outlined a course of action for further investigation. In most cases it involved reassigning personnel to conduct interviews.

Part of her was tempted to reassign herself and get out of the building. The lack of windows in the room where the desks were located was starting to bother her. As important as chasing leads was, she wanted to see the town and get a sense of the local area. The one night she’d spent in a motel on the outskirts of Nighthawk Crossing hadn’t offered her much of an introduction; after all the miles she’d driven, she’d been too tired to do more than order room service and fall asleep early.

As she glanced at Tain’s desk, she thought back to the files she’d been reading that morning. That was the meat of the investigation. Although she hadn’t read it all, she’d skimmed through enough to know that the files on each of the missing girls whose disappearances were believed to be connected had been included, as well as all the leads that they’d followed up on, tips that had been eliminated, avenues of investigation that had been exhausted.

She wanted to see those files again.

Ashlyn replayed the scene from the morning and was fairly certain Tain had taken the key with him. Short of picking the lock, there was no way she was going to get a chance to see the copied documents.

The palm of her hand smacked against her forehead. Of course. They were copies. The originals had to be around somewhere, and as a member of the team, she had access. She didn’t need someone’s permission to review information pertinent to the case she’d been assigned.

When she’d looked around the desks earlier, she’d limited her survey to things clearly out in plain sight.

She’d almost forgotten the filing cabinets in the corner.

The job had required her to get out and make contact with people.

This assignment was different. A long-term investigation that involved different tactics than the ones community policing emphasized. When she’d been reassigned, she’d been told she’d be working plainclothes for this assignment and that part of the reason they were sending in outsiders was to get a fresh perspective, as well as to show the community how seriously they were taking the investigation.

It was hard to know what to think about the team and what they were dealing with. So far, they had eleven cases that seemed to be connected, and the trail was already cold. They didn’t know if this was a murder investigation or if the girls had been lured into prostitution and were living on the streets in Vancouver, a fact that compounded their problems. Every possible sighting from Victoria to Halifax, from Edmonton to Vegas had to be considered.

This wasn’t meant to be a short-term investigation, where they got in and got out fast. Despite that, she’d been told this was a temporary transfer.

It didn’t make sense.

She thought about her fleeting introductions to the other half of the team. Two of the men were at least ten to fifteen years older than she was, with more experience, but she’d read about those members of the team from old newspaper articles before she’d packed her bags. There hadn’t been any photographs, but the article had mentioned the three officers and Winters, who had been the oldest member listed, in his midforties. She hadn’t met him yet. She looked at the nameplate on the desk that was now hers and realized she didn’t even know if he was still working the case, but the fact that she’d been given his desk made that doubtful.

The youngest of the three older officers—Ashlyn guessed Campbell had at least half a dozen years on her, although his age hadn’t been stated—was a hometown boy, who’d grown up in Nighthawk Crossing and spent his entire career in the Similkameen Valley, and if what he’d said that morning was any indication, he didn’t like outsiders meddling in local affairs. He’d been defensive and hostile, and she never had gotten an answer to her question.

There was no indication any had worked in a city that had a population of 100,000. That fact alone didn’t mean that they were unskilled or incapable of being effective on this task force, but she thought back to her own training, to the common philosophies about the differences between small-town policing and city casework.

The differences between community men and career men. Not that officers who focused on community policing didn’t have careers, but major advancement often came through high-profile cases, and that meant working in urban areas where the job was divided by the nature of the crimes instead of the town boundary lines.

Nolan and Tain hadn’t been mentioned, although the article had concluded with the fact that other officers were being reassigned. Ashlyn wondered about the date and whether their transfers had been withheld from the article or really happened after.

Considering the pressure the RCMP had been under to demonstrate they took the investigations seriously, wouldn’t they want to emphasize the number of officers assigned? She hadn’t found any articles about additional staff once they’d been named.