Misery Bay: A Mystery (2 page)

“What nationality are you?” he asked.

“We are all Ukrainian girls,” she answered, proudly. “They told us we would have good jobs and be able to send money home to our families.”

“Same old story,” said Alvin.

“All right,” Garrett said “We’ll take you to headquarters. You won’t be charged. What’s going on here isn’t your fault. We’ll try to put you in touch with your families.” He reached out a hand and gently touched the smallest girl’s head. “You’re going home,” he said.

He turned to an officer. “Get them into a car pronto. They’re not dressed for this weather.” Several of the girls were visibly shivering. “And tell the Harbor Police to board and search any craft in the area that looks likely.” He stared out at the disappearing fishing boat and swore.

Without a word, he jumped into the sedan and turned the key. This time, thank god, it started.

Alvin stared at him through the window. “What are you doing, Garrett?”

But there was no time to answer. The car leaped forward, forcing two officers to jump out of the way. The vehicle made an awful sound and was hard to control as the deflated tires shredded. Garrett knew the channel here. The boat would pass around the end of the breakwater, just feet from one of the towering cranes. If he got there in time, he might pull it off. All he could think of was the small child who’d been thrown onto the deck.

The car was powerful and flew across the parking lot, tires spraying bits of hot rubber into the night. It crashed through a padlocked gate and careened out onto the breakwater. Twilight had given way to blackness. Garrett prayed that the men on the boat would be concentrating on the narrow passage they had to negotiate. The car ground to a halt, fishtailing, in front of three huge boulders that blocked further progress. He was still thirty yards from the end.

He could see the boat beginning to change its tack, concentrating on the narrow channel, edging in closer to shore. There just might be time. Sprinting the remaining distance, he timed his leap and crashed onto the deck, rolling and coming up hard against a metal bulwark that took his breath away.

Groaning, he looked up to see two men in the wheelhouse. They were concentrating on their course maneuvers and hadn’t seen his little melodrama in the dark. But another man had. A depressingly large fellow stood on the open deck, one hand holding onto the girl as though she were a doll, the other grasping an ugly-looking steel hook at least three feet long. He tossed the girl to one side and advanced on the intruder.

Garrett barely had time to stand up and take a painful breath before the man was on him, swinging the hook down in an evil arc. It missed by inches, struck the side of the boat, and flew down the deck.

Garrett reached for his gun, only to discover it was gone, lost somewhere in his tumble. Then the big man was on him, landing a crushing blow that glanced off his shoulder as he ducked at the last instant. His entire arm went numb.

The man turned away and went after his hook. Garrett looked around desperately for some sort of weapon. There was a pole with what appeared to be a weight on one end. Some sort of fishing implement. It looked like a perfect club. He grabbed it and almost fell over backward. The thing must have been a float of some kind, probably made of cork. It wouldn’t knock the foam off a latte.

His adversary retrieved the hook and advanced once again, pausing long enough to glance at the wheelhouse. He yelled as loudly as he could, but the men inside were insulated by the enclosure and the noise of the engines. They couldn’t hear him.

There was nothing Garrett could use as a weapon. In desperation, he picked up a coil of rope and flung it. Miraculously, the coils ensnared the man, catching on the hook and tangling his arms.

In an instant, Garrett was on him. He looped one end of the rope around the man’s middle and used it to fling him off the boat into the water. Maybe he could swim, maybe not. He couldn’t care less.

He stood, staggering slightly, still feeling the numbness in his arm where the man had clubbed him. The girl huddled on the deck. She might have been eleven years old. He approached her slowly, trying to speak in soothing tones, because he was certain she couldn’t understand English. She said something unintelligible and shrank away from him. Men had never meant anything but pain and suffering in her brief life. Garrett was simply one more.

He stopped and made a gesture for her to stay where she was. Whether she understood or not was unclear. He turned his attention to the wheelhouse where the two men were still oblivious to the events on deck.

They were now exiting Halifax harbor. Garrett could see the black silhouette of McNabs Island, home to many World War II installations, where heavy submarine cables and nets had once stretched to Chebucto Head. Only one Nazi U-boat had ever made it through the netting, by following in the wake of a ship. It had then proceeded to torpedo a Canadian warship before making its escape.

The harbor entrance faced south, and Garrett could feel the boat turning northeast, heading straight for Ireland. He knew Alvin must have contacted the harbor patrol, so at least someone would be looking for them. What he had to decide was whether it made more sense to hunker down and wait for help or try to overpower the two men by himself. The decision wasn’t all that difficult. He was sore all over from the leap onto the boat and the blow from the man on deck. He couldn’t find his weapon in the dark. The men could wait.

He eased over to the girl, who stared at him cautiously like a wounded animal. He avoided touching her and sat a few feet away. “Well, darlin’, it’s you and me. Let’s hang out for a while and see what develops, okay?”

She started to cry and his heart melted for the poor creature. He shuffled over to her and put out one arm. After a moment, she moved in, and he hugged her tightly, talking to her in a low voice. “We’re going to be just fine … just fine,” he said over and over.

Twenty minutes later, a Coast Guard cutter and a harbor patrol boat loomed out of the darkness. Simultaneously, a helicopter appeared and hovered overhead, bathing the scene in light. Alvin had called in the cavalry.

The fishing boat slowed, her captain aware there was nothing he could do against such a force. Twenty minutes later, Garrett and the girl were wrapped in blankets and sitting in the warm cutter, drinking hot chocolate and smiling at one another.

2

“
D
EPUTY COMMISSIONER’S LOOKING FOR YOU,”
said Martha, her eyes avoiding him.

Garrett stopped in front of her desk. “As you can clearly see, I’m not here.”

“He said to be sure to tell you that you
were
here and that you should get your F-ing blank the F up to his office.” There was a smile at the corner of her mouth.

“I assume he did not actually say, ‘F-ing.’”

“He was more colorful, but a demure, overeducated, highly trained personal assistant is not aware of the meaning of such language.”

“You are all of those things except the first, Martha.” He sighed. “Thanks.”

He took the stairs two at a time, satisfied that the effort produced no discernible limp, nodded at two officers, and presented himself at his boss’s door.

Alton Tuttle had been Deputy Commissioner for six years. He was the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Commanding Officer in Nova Scotia, known as “H” division. In Halifax, as in many municipalities outside of Ontario and Quebec, the RCMP was hired on a contract basis to provide police services in rural areas. Recently, local police commissioners had been considering ending the relationship, giving local RCMP officers the option of transferring to the municipal force. The business had been controversial and was one reason Garrett had decided to retire. He despised the bureaucratic runaround.

Tuttle sat at his desk, unlit cigar in his mouth, head buried behind a stack of files. He was in his mid-fifties and wore a navy dress shirt, sleeves rolled up, the shirt tight across his bulging abdomen. He’d been a muscular high school wrestling champion three years running. But the years sitting at a desk had taken a toll.

“Nice of you to drop by,” he said.

“Martha said you wanted to see me … in somewhat more colorful terms. I figured you wanted to rehash things again,” Garrett replied in a tired voice. “Frankly, it’s all been said. I’m on my way out, Alton. You know that. Twenty years on the Halifax force is enough. I’m tired of people who can do this sort of stuff to young girls. I’m tired of people who can do this sort of stuff to me. My retirement, my garden, and my boat await me.”

Tuttle scowled at him. “Damned if I can understand young officers these days. You’re forty-two years old, for Christ’s sake. Most experienced sex crimes officer I’ve got and you want to hang it up while you’re still in diapers.” He spat the cigar onto the desk, where it spun around, stuck to a piece of paper, and slowly began to spread a brown stain. “The guy who invented pensions ought to be shot. What the hell are you going to do with yourself—grow pansies all day?”

It was an old conversation, one Garrett had no interest in rehashing. Besides, he didn’t much care for pansies. He also wasn’t a young officer. His title was Special Constable with expertise in prostitution. The nature of the job allowed him to go without uniform, working primarily undercover.

Seeing there would be no reply, the Deputy Commissioner sat back in his chair. “I’m going to make one more effort with you, Barkhouse,” he said. “What you need is a break from the big city. Get back to the hinterlands—use your damn boat too, if you want.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Misery Bay.” Tuttle scratched himself.

Something clicked in the back of Garrett’s head. He’d grown up outside the little coastal village. The memories that flooded back were good, but he hadn’t returned since his parents had died six years ago. He kept up by reading the
Eastern Shore Chronicle
—who died, who got married, who was lost at sea. Lately, the papers had taken on a more sinister tone—coastal smuggling, illegal immigrants funneled into prostitution, bales of drugs washing up on the shore and in fishermen’s nets.

“I gather from that wistful look on your face, you’ve followed what’s been going on in the old hometown,” Tuttle said. “We’ve got Halifax pretty well buttoned up, but crime is like one of those dolls you push over and it bounces back. One of the places it’s bounced back lately is Misery Bay. I want you to go down there, establish a police presence. Place is too small for an official headquarters, but you’ll have full cooperation of the RCMP and Coast Guard.”

Garrett stared at him. Retirement had not been an easy decision. As tired as he was of the city grind, the truth was he feared being bored more than just about anything. He wasn’t at all sure he could survive simply fishing off his boat every day, puttering in the garden, and staring out to sea from the deck in the evening. Alton had a nasty smirk on his face, and he realized his boss had been planning this for some time.

“There’s a woman down there by the name of Sarah Pye.” Tuttle found his cigar, picked it up, and stuck it back in the corner of his mouth. “Her husband had his own private investigation business. We hired him to do some undercover work for us. Locals got wind of it and set him up. Planted heroin in their house. Everyone knew it was a setup but the proof was there and he got two years in prison. He was killed while he was inside.”

Garrett whistled. “Never heard a thing about it.”

“We kept it as quiet as we could. But things are out of control down there. The good citizens, few as they are, have been raising a stink and demanding we station an officer in the town. You’re it.”

“You can’t order me to do this, Alton. I’m retiring.”

“It’s your hometown, Garrett. You know the people. You going to throw them to the wolves?”

3

T
HE EASTERN SHORE HIGHWAY WAS
the sleepiest bit of road left in the province. Tourists had long since descended on the rocky, forested bays of Nova Scotia. Four thousand miles of coastline, the brochures read. For a while it had seemed the two hundred miles or so from Halifax to Canso was the only stretch yet to be discovered. No longer.

Tiny fishing villages swept past Garrett’s window: Musquo-doboit, Ship Harbor, Mushaboom, Tangier, Spanish Ship Bay, Marie Joseph. Most consisted of a few plain houses, a dock piled with lobster traps, maybe a tiny Ma and Pa grocery. The highway was narrow, two lanes, heavily patched. But signs of encroachment were everywhere. New homes sprouted on seemingly every headland with a view.

The Germans were coming.

In the past decade, German tourists had discovered Nova Scotia with a vengeance and were about as excited as Columbus must have been upon sighting Hispaniola. Like most of Europe, Germany had virtually no wilderness. As a result, her citizens were completely gaga over the rocky, remote, and—best of all—cheap oceanfront property to be had just a short flight across the big puddle. Already they had bought up every available yard of coastline from Yarmouth to Halifax. Now they were beginning to move farther up the Eastern shore. Even Misery Bay was getting in on the act. A developer had bought up several headlands sticking out into the ocean, run a gravel road out to the end, and put up lot numbers and For Sale signs. Sixty thousand dollars for a few acres and a rocky spit.

The real estate boom seeped up from the south like a poisonous red tide. Paradise, the slick brochures promised; magnificent, windswept forests sweeping down to rocky coastlines. Well-to-do Germans bought it hook, line, and sinker. Invariably, the lavish advertisements showed sparkling sunshine and swimsuited revelers everywhere.

It was all a lie. Oh, it was beautiful enough, if you liked that sort of thing, but sunshine on the Eastern shore could be as elusive as a snowfall in the Sahara. Heavy coastal fog and a cold rain sometimes set in for weeks at a time during the summer months. The water was a frigid fifty degrees in August. Garrett had once encountered a bewildered, bikini-clad German woman on a beach south of Halifax on a hot July day. As he passed her, she said in halting English: “Summer is late coming this year, yah? The water—she is very cold.”