Tattooed (17 page)

She gave the final word to Frances. Kate felt a surge of emotion tighten her throat as her client stared straight into the camera and asked: “How can wanting to die peacefully and with dignity be a crime? Isn’t forcing someone to die a terrible death a crime? Where has our humanity gone?”

Nat let the question hang in the air. Then she said, “What is your next step, Mrs. Sloane?”

“I want to start a discussion in the public forum about this issue. Please contact my lawyer, Kate Lange, or my member of Parliament, Harry Owen, with your views. Death happens to everyone. But we should be able to choose how we end our lives.”

After a second, the cameraman turned off the light on his camcorder.

Nat unclipped the mics, packed them in the bag, and within minutes, she and her cameraman were heading out the door. “I’ll call you later and let you know how the footage turned out.”

Kate nodded. “Thank you, Nat.”

Nat squeezed her shoulder. “You did good.” Kate closed the door, and exhaled. Her skin was clammy with sweat. She pasted a smile on her face and returned to the living room. Frances’ eyes were closed, but she opened them when she heard Kate approach.

“That went well.”

“Nat was pleased.” Kate slid her notepad into her briefcase. She hadn’t actually needed it. She had been so caught up in the interview—and Nat’s questions had been so skillful—that everything she had wanted the public to hear had been said. “This is going to be aired tonight. I expect we’ll get a lot of people responding to it. I will present the responses to Harry Owen. And we’ll go from there.”

“Thank you, Kate,” Frances said. Her eyes were damp.

“It’s what you hired me to do.”

Hurt flashed so quickly through her client’s eyes that Kate wasn’t sure if she saw it. But it needed to be said.

“I’ll call you after the interview airs,” Kate said, picking up her briefcase. She turned to leave, relief already flooding through her, when Frances’ voice slurred through the vast room.

“One last favor.”

Damn
. Kate had learned that those were never good words to hear, especially when they were uttered as she made her exit.

“Yes?”

“Look under the newspaper.”

On a side table, out of sight of the television camera, sat the newspaper. Kate approached it as if it were a snake, lifting a corner with considerable reluctance.

Two envelopes lay under it. Kate’s stomach sank even farther when she saw the names on them.

“The first one is for Kenzie.” Frances struggled to enunciate her words.

“Why don’t you give it to her?” Kate asked. She did not want to be in the middle of this estranged mother-daughter relationship.

“When I die. Please give it to her.”

Kate started to shake her head but Frances said, “Please.” Her eyes pleaded with Kate.

“What’s in the envelope?” She could feel paper, but also something hard.

“It’s a key. To a storage locker. Has Kenzie’s things from her bedroom.”

“The executor of your will should do this.”

“It’s my son.” She swallowed. “They don’t get along. He might not give it to her. You’re my lawyer, Kate.”

Kate exhaled. It was a slippery slope onto which she had stepped when she agreed to that first meeting with Frances. She really wanted to suggest she appoint a new executor—but had a strong suspicion that Frances would want her to do the job.

In for a penny, in for a pound. This was small change compared to the lobbying effort. She could simply mail the envelope to Kenzie after Frances’ death and fulfill her obligation—without ever having to speak to her. “Okay.”

She gave a questioning glance at the other envelope. It had her name written on it. “This is a small gift for you,” Frances said. “Please don’t open until I’m dead.” She gave a weak smile. “You won’t have to wait long.”

“I hope it’s not money beyond my fees. I couldn’t accept it, Frances,” Kate said.

“No. It’s something more precious than that.” Her gaze searched Kate’s.

They must be photos. And if they were photos, they must be of Imogen—with Kenzie. Kate had a good collection of photos of her sister already, many of the two of them together. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to see one of her sister with Kenzie.

“Thank you, Frances,” Kate said.

Frances nodded, so exhausted her head barely moved. Kate slid the envelopes into her briefcase and hurried out of the house, as if by moving quickly all those terrible memories the house held would remain trapped within. The door closed with a hollow thud.

Kate drove down the long driveway, blocking images of the last time she had left this house, and instead noted that the leaf buds on the trees overhead were about to unfurl.

She turned onto the highway. She definitely deserved another cup of coffee.

As she passed the spot where she had crashed her car so many years ago, she glanced at the water.

It was a shining expanse of blue.

The sun glowed behind the fog, incandescent and mysterious.

Soon it would break through.

18

I
t was moments like these that made Ethan both love and hate his job. He stood on the front porch of the house belonging to the victim’s parents, Allan and Cathy Rigby. Next to the entrance, the orange-pink petals of an azalea bush glistened in the softness of the morning light.

He yanked up the collar of his jacket and gave the property a once-over. It was a modest home, with pale yellow vinyl, a small yard and a little poodle that barked from the moment he rang the doorbell.

Heather had grown up in this house, according to his notes, and had still been living at home the night she went missing. She had possessed that cared-for look about her, he recalled. Hers was a safe neighborhood, a well-kept street, the kind of place that people bought to raise their kids with the confidence that all was right with the world. Their world, at least.

A man in his late fifties answered the door. He wore an open-necked blue and taupe checked shirt and tan trousers. Once upon a time, he was a suspect. Now, he was simply another grieving parent.

“Mr. Rigby?” Ethan said, holding up his badge. “I am Detective Ethan Drake, with HPD Cold Case.”

“Detective, please come in.”

Mr. Rigby led him to a living room decorated with pale blue curtains, beige fabric sofas and dark blue carpets. A woman whom he presumed was Heather’s mother perched on the sofa. A tray of tea and small sugar cookies sat on the glass coffee table in front of her. “Detective, this is my wife,” Allan Rigby said.

Distress had supplanted any welcome in Cathy Rigby’s face. “You are sure it is Heather?” She clutched a large framed photo of her dead daughter, who smiled prettily into the camera.

An image of Heather’s body lying in the peat bog superimposed itself in Ethan’s mind. The memory of his shock of seeing her head, encased in a rubber witch’s mask, kept popping into his head at unexpected moments, throwing him off stride.

He gave himself a mental shake, lowering himself into the chair facing the victim’s parents. “The dental records are a match.”

Cathy Rigby looked at her husband. He frowned at her. “My wife is worried that the police will stop looking for Heather because this body was found.”

“Mr. and Mrs. Rigby,” Ethan said. “Your daughter
has
been found. I’m sorry.” He hesitated. Now was the moment to reveal his past association with her, as scant as it was. But he couldn’t bring himself to breach that professional barrier. There was a reason it was in place. “Now we turn our efforts from searching for her to searching for her killer.”

A sob broke out of Mrs. Rigby’s throat, a harsh, cawing sound. “I hoped she was alive somewhere.”

Her husband put his arm around her. “I know, Cathy, I know.” He gazed at Ethan. “We never gave up hope. Ever. Heather was a fighter. She would have found her way home if she could.”

He had heard those words before. He knew, if he were in their shoes, he would believe them, hold on to them, keep them close to his heart. But the reality was Heather had probably been killed within hours of disappearing from the bar, had probably no chance of survival, no chance of escape, no inkling of what she had been up against. Killers had their own rules. Victims rarely understood how to react—until it was too late.

“I’m sorry,” Ethan said. “We have evidence to suggest she was a victim of homicide.”

“The night she went missing?” Hope and pain warred in Allan Rigby’s face. Hope, that his daughter had been killed quickly and thus did not suffer unduly. Pain, that if she hadn’t been killed that night, there had been a window of time to find her—and they had failed.

Ethan kept his gaze level. “We can’t say for sure. The medical examiner is not able to give an exact time of death, it’s been so long…” He deliberately trailed off.

“We read the papers,” Mrs. Rigby said fiercely. “They are calling her the bog body. As if she was a specimen.” Her lip quivered. She stared at the photo of her daughter. “No one is talking about
her
. About the fact that the ‘bog body’ was a real girl. Whose life was taken when she was much too young—” The sobs that had been building in her voice now erupted. “She was only eighteen! Eighteen! She was a good girl. She was in university. She was so full of life… .” She buried her face. Her husband leaned over her, his eyes resigned, mute in the face of grief that was as stark and raw as when Ethan had seen them first interviewed on television seventeen years ago.

Sweat began to prickle his neck, his underarms.

Cathy Rigby wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “We’ve had to live without her for seventeen years. Seventeen years of wondering where she was, what had happened the night she went missing, was she alive or dead, had someone hurt her…”

Mr. Rigby closed his eyes, his face working, his arm tight around his wife’s shoulders.

“And now all they want to talk about is how a bog body has never been discovered in Canada before!”

“I understand how insensitive that is,” Ethan said, treading carefully through the land mines of their grief. “The media are making a big deal about this. However, we have not released your daughter’s name, so they can’t really speak about the victim besides what they have found out for themselves. We plan to release your daughter’s name to the press. But we are not going to share any more details beyond that due to the nature of our investigation.”

“How was she murdered?” Mr. Rigby asked, his eyes reflecting an agony that Ethan had seen too many times. And still had not inured himself to.

“I can’t give you more details than that while the investigation is under way. I am very sorry.”

“Was she dismembered, like those other girls?” Mrs. Rigby asked, darting a terrified glance at her husband.

Ethan swore silently at the media. Heather Rigby’s family had read the speculation about whether the bog body could have been “victim zero” of the Body Butcher.

“No. She was not. We do not believe, at this point in time, that her death was connected at all to the Body Butcher.”

A tear rolled down Allan Rigby’s cheek. “Thank God.”

“I know that you’ve been asked these questions many times before, but I’d like to go through Heather’s movements leading up to the night she went missing.”

The tea and cookies went untouched—as Ethan knew they would—while he led Heather’s parents through his questions. He was about halfway through, when he asked, “Did Heather have any piercings, tattoos or cosmetic surgery?”

“Like breast implants?” Mrs. Rigby asked. “No, she never had anything like that done. Did the body have it?”

Still hoping it’s not your daughter.

“How about piercings or tattoos?”

“Well, she had her ears pierced, if that’s what you mean. She was wearing earrings with skeletons dangling from them.”

“I think she had her belly button pierced, too,” her father murmured. Mrs. Rigby shot him a startled look.

Oh, so the father was in on his daughter’s little rebellions
.

“No, she didn’t,” Cathy Rigby said.

Allan Rigby gazed at Ethan with regret in his eyes. He didn’t want to cause his wife more pain—he didn’t want to remind her that her beloved daughter had concealed things from her.

“And tattoos? Any of those? Girls her age often got them on the lower back, the ankle, sometimes on the shoulder… .”

“Absolutely not,” Cathy Rigby said. “She knew our opinion about those.”

Ethan looked at Allan Rigby. He shook his head. “None that I am aware of,” he said.

“Did she have a fascination with birds? You know, did she collect pictures or have a pet bird, or anything like that?” Ethan asked. Cathy Rigby was already mouthing no before Ethan had finished.

“No, I don’t think so,” Allan Rigby said.

“Any other animals or mystical creatures?” The tattoo artist could have been wrong. Never hurts to check.

“She loved rabbits. We had one when she was a little girl. She called it Fou Fou. You know, after the song ‘Little Rabbit Fou Fou’?” Cathy Rigby stared at the photo in her lap. “She really loved that bunny.”

Ethan wrote down “rabbit.” Could the raven actually be a rabbit? Seemed unlikely that a rabbit could be mistaken for a bird, but nonetheless…

The rest of the questions yielded nothing new. Ethan stood, relieved to have this duty completed. He had tried to be as compassionate and respectful as possible.

When he walked outside, he heard the dog run after him. “Come here, Fou,” Cathy Rigby called. He glanced over his shoulder.

She picked up the poodle, and buried her face in his fur.