Lullaby for the Nameless (6 page)
“You’re wrong. Maybe I used to be.”
“So you proved you aren’t perfect. You’ve still got an old man with rank. I’m sure if you called him—”
Craig grabbed Mac’s arm and pointed at him. “She made the right decision.”
Instead of jerking his arm free, Mac stopped in his tracks and turned around. “You’re okay with this? You really don’t have a problem being pulled off the manhunt for…this?”
“I’m at one with the universe.”
“Bullshit, Nolan.” Mac pulled his arm from Craig’s grasp. “You’ve been wound tighter than a homophobe in a gay bar the whole time I’ve been working with you.”
“All of what? Three days?” Craig pushed past Mac and started walking. He heard footsteps behind him.
“You shouldn’t be on this case, Nolan. It already doesn’t look good. If it goes bad, they’ll hang you.”
Craig kept walking. The universe may have deliberately set him up, but the RCMP hadn’t. They hadn’t taken shots at Craig and Mac so that they could set a series of events in motion that would ultimately lead them to the spot in the woods where a partially exposed body lay.
The RCMP may have had its share of scandals and blunders over the years like any other police department, but they hadn’t conspired to hang Craig with this case. Call it God, fate or a cruel joke the universe was playing. Call it whatever you want, it had just happened. The fact that it had happened to Craig wasn’t something he was particularly happy about, but even he had to admit that if he’d been in Yeager’s shoes, he would have done the same thing.
Mac’s blatant disapproval wasn’t going to make it any easier, but maybe if Mac got it through his thick skull that Craig wasn’t going to back down, he’d just shut up and do his job.
He’d never pegged himself for an optimist either.
HAPTER
F
IVE
“I’ve already made a few calls,” Ashlyn said as she marched across the room, yanked the top drawer of the filing cabinet open, riffled through a few folders, pulled one out and slammed the drawer shut. She was halfway back to her desk, gaze fixed on the pages in front of her, before Tain even had a chance to respond. “There are a lot of gaps. Seems she didn’t stay in the system for long. We’re going to have to piece together the past few years, which won’t be easy, given Millie’s history.”
“Didn’t she have an aunt or a cousin still living?” Tain said, instinct kicking in, the words out before he had a chance to recall them. He hadn’t seen Ashlyn this energized in months. He glanced at her desk, already cluttered with checklists, a few other folders and old notebooks.
While he’d been talking to Steve she’d been busy.
Ashlyn snapped her fingers and set the file on her desk as she spun around to look at Tain. “You’re right. A cousin. If we can find her, she might be able to—”
“Whoa.” Tain held up his hand. “Are you okay?”
Ashlyn’s eyes narrowed the tiniest bit. What Tain thought of as her look of mild annoyance. It was always fleeting, an instinctive motion comparable to swatting at a fly, but it hinted at what was going on beneath the surface. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
A defensive response. One that suggested more than slight irritation.
“Ash.” He reached out and squeezed her arm. “You got pretty worked up in there.”
“I’m just tired of all the crap. I want to get to work.”
“But this case? You said yourself—”
She held up her hand. “We’re on it. And if anything was going to convince me it’s the right thing, it’s the bosses trying to pull us off.” Ashlyn slid out of his hold, sat down at her desk and automatically got busy leafing through the papers in front of her.
Mechanical actions. Lacking her usual thoughtful scrutiny of the details.
“That wasn’t what Steve was doing.”
“Really? You could have fooled me.”
Tain sat down across from her. “He was pushing your buttons to see how you’d respond.”
She glanced up at him. “Don’t they ever get tired of playing games?”
“Look, you—”
“Do you trust me with this?”
“I wouldn’t have fought with him if I didn’t.”
She stared back at him for a moment, appearing to consider his words. “Then why are we even having this conversation?”
“I just want to make sure you’re okay.”
“How do I look?”
“Ash.” The growl in his voice sounded harsh to his own ears, which wasn’t what he’d intended. He tried to soften his tone. “This isn’t going to be easy.”
“If I was looking for an easy job, I made a big mistake joining the RCMP.”
Knowing what he meant, choosing to avoid it.
When he saw the woman who was clearly in charge at the scene, Craig suddenly felt old. She looked as though she’d barely graduated from high school, although that
wasn’t to suggest a lack of maturity, just that she looked young. Her olive skin was framed nicely by dark, curly hair that was swept back off her face into a loose bun. As she snapped on gloves, she barely afforded Craig and Mac a quick glance.
“Are you the ones who found the body?” she asked.
“Constables Nolan and MacDougall,” Craig said, with a quick gesture to indicate who was who.
“Not exactly an answer to my question,” the woman said briskly as she bent down beside the remains Craig had found earlier that day.
Craig knelt on the other side of the body. “There was a team of us out here, searching the area.”
“Must be your lucky day.”
“Excuse me?”
“You drew the short straw and got pulled off the manhunt.”
Craig paused. “I suppose that’s one way of looking at it.”
“Boys chasing a suspect around in the woods with guns or a partially decayed frozen body that actually smells better than it looks.” She glanced at him. “There’s nothing sexy about this.”
“I’m here to do my job.” He heard the defensive edge in his words, despite his efforts to extricate it.
The woman looked up at him silently, then glanced at MacDougall before turning back to Craig. “You got any experience dealing with a partially decomposed body?”
“She looks good, considering how long she’s been dead.”
“And how long is that, exactly?”
The heat rushed straight up into his face. “What I meant was—”
“I’m Dr. Winters,” the woman said coolly. “And I believe I’ll be the judge of how long she’s been dead, how long she’s been lying here and what kind of shape she’s in. Unless, of course, you’re just being modest. Perhaps
you have more experience than I do and don’t want me to be intimidated by the fact that you’re really a forensic anthropologist.”
She stared at him and after a moment said, “Well?”
“Well what?”
“Are you?”
“No.”
There was a tiny tinge of color in her cheeks as she glanced back down at the body. “Now that we’ve cleared that up, I must admit from what I’ve seen so far, she does appear to be in good shape.”
The doctor looked at him for a second. Was the hint of a smile on her lips or was it his imagination?
“You didn’t answer the other question.”
Question? Craig scrambled to remember what she’d asked, then nodded. “Sorry. Yes. I’ve dealt with decomps before.” He didn’t add that it was on a case he’d rather forget, a case that could tie directly to the body in front of them.
Behind him, Mac cleared his throat. Craig didn’t avert his gaze, but the doctor looked up and a shadow flicked across her face before she turned back to Craig.
“Then you know we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us, and this won’t be pleasant.”
He looked down at the body again and nodded. There was a lot of work ahead of them, not just in the next few hours but in the coming days, and he suspected the only thing about the case he’d find pleasant would be closing it.
HAPTER
S
IX
Craig rolled the driver’s side window down as he pulled out onto the road. It was an archaic motion, one most people had forgotten performing, but he’d been unwilling to give up the ’91 Rodeo that he’d had rebuilt when he’d purchased it years before. It wasn’t the most fuel-efficient vehicle—something that he’d been reminded of constantly in recent months of winter and mountain driving—but it was sturdy and reliable.
Part of him felt that the problem with new vehicles was that there was so much more wiring, it only increased the probability that something would go wrong. Maybe that was the problem with people. So many options, so many choices, opening doors to darkness they might not otherwise have conceived without the twenty-four-hour news cycle and easy access to accounts of barbarity both old and new, foreign and domestic.
His eyes burned in protest of every set of headlights in the oncoming traffic while his body shivered from the cold air. He guessed it was near freezing, if not below, but he needed the cold to help him keep his eyes open. It was almost 11:30 p.m., and his stomach had long since given up complaining about the lack of food and abundance of coffee, a substance he wasn’t terribly fond of but occasionally drank when necessary to stay awake and alert.
He’d started drinking it a few months earlier, when he’d left the Lower Mainland on temporary reassignment.
One temporary reassignment after another.
The good thing about constantly being shuffled from one team to another, usually because of an emergency, was that he was continually forced to adapt to a new environment, deal with new people. He was living life on the high end of the learning curve, which required him to devote his energy and attention to the here and now.
No time or energy to think about yesterday and tomorrow, or so he told himself.
If things ever leveled out, he might be forced to remember what had happened, to process it and come to terms with it and consider what he was going to do when the dust settled.
Deal with his guilt.
He had to double-check the number on the motel room before he put the key in the lock, and when he opened the door, there was no feeling of familiarity that greeted him or sense of being home. Just the vague awareness that this room was like so many others he’d slept in over the past few months. Swap out the generic painting on the wall, the color of the bedspread, give or take an extra blanket on the shelf above the open closet and all the temporary accommodations blended together in his mind.
It stood out in stark contrast to the memory of his own living room in Port Moody, swathed in the glow of firelight and the glimmer of the fiber-optic Christmas tree in the corner. Close his eyes and he could almost feel the warmth of Ashlyn’s presence, the touch of her skin on his arm, the way his chest tightened when he saw her walk into a room, so aware of how much she meant to him, so afraid it was nothing more than a house of cards that would be blown apart by a sudden breeze.
It’s no wonder your daddy didn’t stick around. How could anyone love a loser like you?
He pushed the memories from his mind, pulled off his boots and tossed them on the lino near the entrance.
The muscles in his back protested as he straightened up. Hot shower or bed?
He tossed his jacket over a chair, crossed the room, turned on the small bedside lamp and put his gun and cell phone on the nightstand next to the book he’d been trying to read. From there it was a short walk around the bed to the bathroom, where he avoided his reflection in the mirror as he brushed his teeth.
It was a safe guess that he looked as rough as he felt.
The act of pulling off his shirt as he walked back to the bed was instinctive, and he followed it by tossing his pants over the chair nearby, the one with last night’s clothes still hanging over it.
Back to the bathroom to shower. The cold would wake him up, and he didn’t want to spend another night looking at the ceiling, counting sheep. Or, if he was being honest with himself, counting bottles. Followed by counting mistakes. His attempts to try to forget coming full circle with the laundry list of sins he carried with him, the things he couldn’t let go.
His weapons of choice for beating himself up over and over again.
He turned the tap to hot and watched the steam cloud his image from the mirror. If only it could cloud his memories as easily.
When he returned to the main room, he paused beside the bed. He pulled back the comforter and sat on the clean sheets as he stared at the nightstand.
The drawer slid open silently, and he reached inside and lifted the bottle. There was still about a third of the whiskey left, and he held the neck for a moment, watching the light shimmer on the liquid as it sloshed inside.
He set the bottle on the nightstand, turned off the light and lay down. The cushion of the mattress should have signaled the opportunity for desired rest, but although he closed his eyes and tried to clear his mind of
the memories bubbling just beneath the surface, sleep denied him. He lingered in the semiconscious state, with a heightened awareness of the room around him, despite the dark. One thing about this motel he hated; it was in a wind tunnel, and when the gusts gained strength it sounded the way he imagined a thousand screaming banshees would, and yet it wasn’t enough to drown out the other noises.
Every creak as someone shifted in the bed in the room above him, every time someone in the room beside him flicked channels during the commercial breaks, every beat of his heart…It all echoed in his ears, despite the way the wind wailed.
Until replaced by a deafening quiet.
The stillness was unnatural and unsettling. Craig’s consciousness began to pull itself through the fog as his muscles tensed.
Sweat trickled down his back as he sat up and threw the covers off, fighting the cloud that still hovered over his brain. Where was he? What was he doing here?
As he connected with the answers, his breathing slowed and the muscles in his shoulders relaxed, but he still felt the twisting in his gut, the way the hair on the back of his neck stood on end.
Even through the thick motel curtains he could tell it was unusually dark outside his room. At some point over the past few months he’d grown accustomed to the dim glow of motel lights slipping under the door or sometimes through the far side of the window if the drape wasn’t pulled over all the way. This night, there was nothing but blackness, and he blinked a few times to reassure himself that he really did have his eyes open, despite feeling the familiar burning from fatigue.
He reached for his gun, fingers finding the recognizable metal in the darkness as he swung his legs out of the bed.