Serious Crimes (A Willows and Parker Mystery) (4 page)

“Smile, Jack!” yelled Dutton. Willows heard the firemen laughing. Orwell, too. His knees ached from contact with the rungs. The ice moaned again, as if it was in pain.

Willows got close enough to reach out and touch the hunched figure of Kenny Lee, and stopped.

Lee was naked. His entire body was covered in an encrustation of ice. In his lap, the ice was perhaps three or four inches thick. Icicles hung from his nose, the lobes of his ears. Dribbles of ice ran like veins across the smooth ice that coated his arms. His feet were sheathed in ice. Fat drops of ice lay like huge warts across his ice-encased shoulders. Stalactites of ice fell from his bent legs to the surface of the pond. He was burdened with a back-pack of ice. His mouth was wide open, as if he’d died screaming. A frozen waterfall poured out from between his lips and down his chest. He wore a tight skull-cap of ice. Everywhere Willows looked, there was ice.

Lee’s face was thin and bony. His features were softened by the layer of ice that covered him, and in the pale, bleached light of early winter, his eyes looked like two frosty balls of frozen slush.

Willows crept along the ladder, so he could take a look at Lee from a different angle. He could see the outline of Lee’s spine through the ice. The man was extremely thin, almost emaciated. There were no visible wounds, but under the circumstances, that didn’t mean a thing.

Willows called out to the firemen for an axe.

It took him almost half an hour to chop the corpse free of the ice, hack a circle all the way around the body. By the time he’d finished he was soaking wet and trembling from the cold, his knuckles were scraped raw and his face stung from splinters of ice.

He managed to get his arms around Lee’s body, tried to pull the corpse up on to solid ice.

“You want a hand?” yelled Orwell.

Willows ignored him. He used the axe to smash a larger hole in the ice, took a deep breath and jumped into the water.
Christ!
Naked, Lee weighed maybe a hundred and thirty pounds. Dressed in his suit of ice, he was twice as heavy. Willows tipped the corpse at an angle, managed to get the flat base of ice over the lip of the hole. He pushed hard, and Lee slid several feet across the surface. There was a ragged cheer from the crowd of cops and firemen. Willows dragged the ladder over the hole. He climbed up on it and moved closer to the corpse, reached out with both hands and shoved hard. Kenny Lee, still sitting bolt upright with his legs crossed and his hands in his lap, rocketed across the ice and bumped up against the stone wall surrounding the pond.

Willows crawled slowly back down the ladder, climbed stiffly over the stone retaining wall. His hands were numb. His body was so cold he couldn’t shop shaking, he was out of control.

“Nice work,” said Orwell. “Dutton must’ve taken about a thousand pictures. Here, have a souvenir.” Grinning, he handed Willows a Polaroid.

Parker drove Willows back to 312 Main, dropped him off at the back entrance and wheeled the unmarked patrol car into the underground garage. Willows took the elevator down to the basement. There was a spare change of clothes in his locker, but his hands were trembling so badly he couldn’t work the combination lock, and had to ask a passing cop to do it for him. He stripped off his clothes, grabbed a towel and headed for the showers.

When he walked into the squad room, half an hour later, there was a six-inch-tall stuffed penguin standing in the middle of his desk, in a small puddle of water. He glanced around, but only Parker would meet his eye. The half-dozen other detectives in the room didn’t seem to have noticed his arrival. He slid open his desk drawer and pulled out a letter-opener, used the blade to viciously disembowel the penguin and then tore its head off and tossed the gutted and decapitated bird into Eddy Orwell’s wastebasket.

“Nice throw,” said Parker. “How you feeling, a bit hungry?”

“Yeah, maybe a little.”

“Nothing like a good swim to sharpen the appetite.”

Willows said, “How would you know?”

Parker smiled. “Let’s go grab something to eat.”

She took him to the Ovaltine Cafe, on Hastings, just around the corner from 312 Main. They found a booth near the back. The waitress was about sixty years old and balding. She looked at Parker and said, “Pot of tea, and a blueberry muffin.” Parker smiled and nodded. Willows ordered a full breakfast — eggs over easy, sausages and hash browns, toast.

“Coffee?”

Willows nodded.

“Be right back.” As a rule, cops were a tight-fisted bunch. But the waitress knew that this one, when he was with his partner, sometimes left a generous tip.

Parker said, “Yang didn’t seem too pleased when you told him we’d have to drain the pond.”

“He didn’t seem too pleased about anything.”

“The
Chinese
Times
guy. Kenny Lee. How long had he been missing?”

Willows shrugged. “A couple of weeks. Nobody was all that worried about it. I forget who told me, but apparently Lee disappeared once before, about a year ago. He was gone about a week and then his wife got a phone call from Reno. Lee’d gambled away all his cash, run his plastic to the limit, sold his return ticket and couldn’t even cover his hotel bill. I called Tommy Wilcox but he was out.”

Parker nodded. Wilcox was Missing Persons. The food arrived. The blueberry muffin had come with two pats of butter. She sighed, and put the butter off to one side, where it couldn’t do any harm.

Willows said, “You worried about your weight again?”

“None of your business.”

Willows wiped his fork on a paper napkin, sprinkled pepper on his eggs. A quartet of uniforms strolled past, all four men covertly eyeing Parker.

Willows shovelled a forkful of egg into his mouth, chewed and swallowed.

Parker said, “Did Lee have any children?”

Willows shrugged. Plucked a fresh napkin from the dispenser, wiped his mouth.

Parker said, “There were no threats, demands for money? Somebody snatched him, held him a couple of weeks and then killed him. That’s it, end of story?”

“We don’t know how he died. Maybe it was suicide.”

“Yeah, sure.”

“We don’t know how long he’s been dead, either. Yang said the gardens had been closed all weekend. And for all we know, Lee’s been in cold storage since the day he disappeared.”

“That’s not the point, Jack.” Parker checked the pot, fished out the teabag.

Willows said, “Pass the ketchup.”

“The guy gets kidnapped. He’s a businessman, owns a newspaper. Anything there that might have landed him in trouble?”

“I don’t read Cantonese. Or Mandarin.”

Parker watched him douse the sausages with ketchup.

Willows glanced up, caught her eye. He said, “I know what you’re thinking, and you’re right. But it tastes good.”

Parker ate some muffin. It was stale. She stared at the pats of butter. “We need some help on this. Maybe Fred Lam.”

Willows nodded. Lam was one of four Chinese-Canadian constables on the force. He wiped his plate with his last slice of toast.

Parker said, “We can get Tommy to pull the file. See what’s there. Know what I think?”

“I think you’re going to short tip the waitress because you just realized she forgot to bring the lemon for your tea.”

Parker smiled. “That, too.”

“What else?”

“I’ll bet you the price of breakfast whoever killed Lee was in contact with the family. I’ve got a gut feeling we’re looking at a failed extortion attempt.”

Willows shrugged. “Maybe. And then again, maybe not. Lee ran a newspaper. He was owner and editor, and he was bound to make enemies. Plus, he was a part-time, out-of-control gambler. Could’ve been a hundred people wanted him dead.”

“They dumped the body where it would be found right away, be sure to cause a stir in the community. Soften things up for their next shot at it.”

Willows’ beeper shrieked.

“Got a quarter?” Parker gave him a look, fished around in her purse and gave him two dimes and a nickel. There was a payphone at the front of the restaurant, near the cash register. Willows dialled, spoke briefly, hung up and made his way back to the table.

“That was Tommy.” Standing, Willows finished his coffee.

Parker said, “You want the rest of this muffin?”

“Next time, ask
before
you pick all the blueberries out.”

*

Tommy Wilcox offered Willows a chair, went over to the big gray legal-size filing cabinet next to his desk and pulled the Missing Person Report, numbered 90-027, on Kenny Lee. Wilcox wore a white shirt, plain blue tie, brown tweed jacket and dark brown pants. He had sad, pouchy brown eyes and looked as if he’d seen it all before and expected to see it all again. Wilcox worked alone, and he was a very busy man. In the City of Vancouver, three to three and a half thousand missing person reports are filed every year, and Wilcox handled every single one of them. He sat down, adjusted his jacket, flipped open the file.

“Okay, the initial call was fielded on the first of January, twenty-two hundred hours, by the Communications Centre. The non-emergency nine-eleven number. Mrs Lee was worried because her husband was late getting home from work. Communications suggested it was too early to be concerned, told her to call back in the morning.”

Willows nodded. Standard procedure.

“Okay, she called back at seven hundred hours. An early bird. Distraught. We took Lee’s description and broadcast it to all units. A copy of my report went to Communications.” Wilcox’s shirt collar was too tight. He scratched his neck, adjusted the knot of his tie. “Mid-afternoon, she called us again. None of his friends or business acquaintances had seen him. He’d missed an important meeting. I put the info on CPIC.”

“When?” said Willows.

“Soon as I hung up.”

CPIC was the Canadian Police Information Centre, a computerized database shared by police forces across the country. Wilcox hadn’t wasted any time.

“While she was on the phone,” Wilcox continued, “I asked her would she mind coming down to the station. She showed up a little before five, right at the end of my shift.”

Willows glanced out the window. It looked cold out there. Low, heavy dark clouds. He wondered if it was going to snow again, if the winter would ever end.

Wilcox took a disposable lighter out of his pocket, turned it over and over in his hands. He hadn’t had a cigarette in almost three full days, and he was just about ready to explode. “Mrs Lee had everything I asked for,” he said. “The usual background info, a pretty good head and shoulders shot — recent and decent. I checked the sudden death reports with the coroner’s liaison. Phoned the hospitals, looking for John Does that fitted his description. No joy. Next couple of days, I got on the phone and talked to the people who’d seen him last. People who worked for him, his friends, the neighbours. Nobody had any ideas. I got some copies of the picture out to the media, and went to work on my backlog.”

Wilcox put the lighter back in his pocket. There was a pack of nicotine-substitute gum on his desk. He helped himself to a stick. Yeah, better. He pulled out the lighter again, stroked it fondly.

“Three days later, he’s still missing. But the guy pulled a disappearing act a few years ago. Turned out it was a trip to Vegas. His wife says it doesn’t happen anymore. Okay, fine. The guy doesn’t drink. There’s no problems with other women. His business was doing good. I phone the Vegas cops. They don’t know what I’m talking about. Okay, I ask Mrs Lee for permission to talk to his doctor. Doc tells me Lee was healthy as a horse. No sign of depression. I get his blood type, checked the availability of X-rays. What else… Phoned his dentist and asked for a copy of his dental chart.”

Wilcox flicked his lighter, sparking long tongues of flame. “By now, a week’s gone by and I got the guy figured for a homicide. Maybe somebody’ll stumble across the body, and maybe he’s buried so deep we’ll never find him in a million years.” Wilcox glanced out the window. It was still January. He sighed. “A couple days later, I think it was the tenth, it’s in the file, I get a call from the grieving widow. She says her husband’s safe at home, we can call off the dogs.”

“Any explanation?”

“Nope.”

“You confirmed it was really Mrs Lee that called?”

Wilcox chewed furiously on his nicotine substitute, which was suddenly doing him no good at all. “It was her voice, Jack. No doubt about it. Also, she knew the case number.”

“Just asking, Tommy. Do the Lees have any kids?”

“A son and a daughter. The girl’s thirteen, attends a local high school. The son’s twenty-two years old, for the past three years he’s been living in Boston.”

“Doing what?”

“Business admin at Harvard.”

“And that’s it, you never heard from Mrs Lee again?”

“Nothing, not a word. I figured the guy had taken another trip to Vegas, got cleaned out. Was wandering around in the desert in a barrel. Or maybe got himself mixed up with a showgirl, something along those lines.”

“I want the names of the people you talked to, his friends and neighbours, everybody.”