The Vanishing Track (35 page)

“No, the kid said Gore.”

“What was his name? Let me run it that way.”

“Livingstone, first name Sean.”

More keys. “Well, I have this fellow in our files alright,” said the staff sergeant, looking up. “There's nothing yesterday. Last time we saw young Mr. Livingstone was a couple of weeks ago.”

Denman held up his hand. “Look, between you and me, I think our boy is crying wolf. I'm actually a little worried about this kid. I think . . . well, I think he's not entirely stable. I ran the trap line along Gore and Main this morning. Nobody saw anything go down last night. Can you ask around and let me know if anything did? If so, I'm going to file a complaint, but it's going to be light on the superlatives. If it didn't, I'd really like to know. Okay?”

The cop took a breath. “You got a card? I'll give you a call.”

Denman handed the staff sergeant his card and thanked the man for his time. He headed for the door. He felt his heart beating and wasn't sure why. He reached for his cell, but before he could dial, it rang in his hand. “Scott.”

“It's Cole. You know that meeting we had when we talked with Livingstone?”

“Yeah, his name was all over the paper this morning. Part of
your
Lucky Strike Manifesto.”

“It's not
mine
, it's Nancy's. Anyway, something has been bothering me, and it jarred loose this morning. It was a photo he had on his desk, a family picture. The kid in the picture was at Macy's when you, Juliet, and I were there on Friday. You talked with him. That kid is Charles Livingstone's son.”

“Fuck,” said Denman, looking around in a mild panic. “I can't believe I missed that.”

“What is the son of a rich lawyer who is working for the biggest developer in Vancouver doing bumming on the streets of the Downtown Eastside?” asked Cole.

“I don't know,” said Denman, breaking into a run, “but I'm about to find out.”

NANCY ARRIVED IN
a taxi and raced through the rain into City Hall. She held her cell phone to her ear and had to yell over the din of the traffic and hiss of the rain. “Say that again?”

Cole repeated, “Charles Livingstone's son is a street kid. Both Denman and Juliet have dealt with him.” He explained how he knew. “Denny didn't make the connection. Lots of Livingstones, I guess.”

“Is this kid connected to the Manifesto?”

“We'll find out soon enough,” said Cole.

“What do you mean?” Nancy stepped into the mezzanine and handed a security guard her
ID
card.

“I'm in a cab. I'm heading to Juliet Rose's place right now. Denny says that she has been letting this Livingstone kid sleep on her couch the last couple weeks.”

“Holy moly.”

“Yeah, I know. It's crazy. I guess she takes her work home with her. I'll call you if anything turns up.”

“Right. By the way, I guess you ought to know there's a riot outside City Hall right now.”

“Seen one riot, seen 'em all. Just another day on the West Coast,” said Cole, and hung up.

Nancy snapped her phone shut and found a seat. She looked at her watch. It was two minutes before noon.

ANDREWS SAT IN
his office. Sometimes he wondered if he shouldn't have just stayed a beat cop. Maybe he could have done so much more good that way. Instead, he had climbed the ladder, moving quickly through the ranks, from constable to sergeant to staff sergeant and now divisional commander. But for how long? He had been waiting for the phone call all morning. He knew it would come. When this whole Lucky Strike affair had started, he hadn't intended for things to get to this point.

He had agreed to get involved because he thought he could control the process. He had looked around the room and believed he could out-flank anybody there. While some of them had money, and others had courage, he had the power of the police force at his disposal. He had been wrong. He had been wrong because he had forgotten one of the most elemental rules of warfare: know thy enemy. He hadn't known who his enemy was. Then five weeks ago, people had started to disappear.

People going missing hadn't been part of the plan. Andrews couldn't be certain, but he guessed that someone had gone too far. Someone had gotten overly enthusiastic. As people began to disappear, the press began to ask questions, and people began to poke their noses into his business. He knew that he had made a mistake when he pulled in officers from the Investigation unit. Someone on Vice or Missing Persons or Homicide had started knocking street people around. But dumping the bodies off Centennial Pier? That didn't jive. He scratched his head and watched the rain fall in sheets on the gunmetal roadway.

He wondered what Marcia Lane was saying to the media. He simply couldn't face the press. Not with her. He knew that she was the leak. But what could he do about it? If he still had a job at the end of the day, it would be a miracle. If he fired her for insubordination, she'd end up a hero. There was no way for him to win.

Andrews had been correct about one thing right from the start. He had guessed it would be Beatta who would come undone first. That was no surprise to him. She was, after all, a bleeding heart first and foremost. That reporter had known exactly who to call. He had told the others that during their first conversation. They insisted that when the Lucky Strike Manifesto finally became public—something that wasn't supposed to happen for another year, long after resettlement had begun—they would need her for legitimacy. Now Beatta had joined the missing.

The phone rang on his desk. Andrews calmly picked it up to receive the news he had been expecting all morning.

He said “Okay” into the phone and hung up. He stood and pulled his badge from his wallet. He placed it on the desk. Then he put on his coat and stepped from his office, closing the door behind him.

JULIET BENT TO
pick up the rain-drenched, torn sleeve. She looked around her yard, suddenly very cold, her back involuntarily quivering and her shoulders hunching up toward her ears as a chill drove through her body. She unzipped the backpack that lay in a puddle and looked inside. Balled into a plastic shopping bag was a white smock and a box of plastic gloves. Juliet carefully opened the bundled-up smock. It was soaked with blood.

She dropped the shopping bag.

Beneath the smock, near the bottom of the pack, nestled a number of items. She put her hand to her mouth. She recognized the kits that she handed out to people on the street to help with the prevention and spread of disease, along with various personal items, including those for at least one woman: articles of clothing, a hair brush, a pair of fingerless gloves, a sun visor, a small make-up compact with the word “Peaches” scrawled on it in childlike writing, a wallet with a faded and worn driver's license belonging to George Oliver.

Juliet's mind began to race. Sean was in the hospital but she hadn't been in touch with him that morning. The gravity of her misjudgment suddenly bore down on her and she felt a wave of nausea wash over her. She doubled over to vomit on the sodden lawn. She wiped her mouth with the sleeve of her soaked sweatshirt and tried to focus her eyes.

She turned again in the yard, trying to corral her stampeding thoughts. The stairs heading down the side of the house caught her eye.

Juliet moved toward the concrete steps that descended to the root cellar, and the fallout shelter beyond. She halted on the second step. A long, oddly shaped tool sat in the pooling water there. She stooped to pick it up. It was heavy. She lifted it closer. Caught in the chain that wound tightly around a pulley on one end was matted hair and what looked like human skin. She dropped the tool.

Juliet looked around her, her eyes wild with panic. She reached into her pocket for her cell phone, but it wasn't there. She hadn't left the house yet that morning and hadn't completed her morning ritual. The cordless phone by her bed seemed so far away.

She could see that the door at the bottom of the stairs was closed. She put her foot on the next step down.

SEAN TRANSFERRED BUSES.
He felt a wave of euphoria wash over him as he relished the task at hand. He would go home, get cleaned up, maybe take a hot shower, fix a late lunch, and then attend to his guests. It was going to be a great day.

DENMAN RAN HARD
into the rain toward Juliet's house. He had his cell phone in his hand and hit redial again. He listened—his hand a few inches from his ear—to her voice mail click in for the tenth time. Fuck it, he thought, better to be safe than sorry. He punched in 911 as he ran.

BY THE TIME
Don West walked from his office and into the mezzanine that doubled as a press gallery, the unrest in the courtyard outside had been quelled. As he took the podium, the five members of City Council from his right-of-center party filed behind him, Ben Chow among them. The reporters leapt to their feet and fired questions at the mayor and at Councilor Chow.

“Please,” he said into the bank of microphones. “Please, take your seats. I have an announcement, and then I'll take questions.”

But the reporters were not satisfied. Someone yelled, “Are you asking Councilor Chow to step down?”

“Has John Andrews been fired?” called another.

“Please,” continued West. “I'm here to tell you about ‘The New Vancouver,' and then I'll take your questions about this exciting initiative.”

The press would have none of it.

“Councilor Chow,” shouted a woman from
CTV
News standing behind Nancy. “Are you going to step down?”

“Today,” West said loudly, “I'm here to announce ‘The New Vancouver.'” He spoke over the questions of reporters and one by one they sat and became quiet.

“We live in a great city. We live at an exciting time. We have a prosperous future. But we have challenges that we must face if we are to meet our own lofty expectations,” said West, looking down at his text. “Crime in our city is still too high. We have too many people who live on our streets without food and shelter. ‘The New Vancouver' is a four-year program that will attack crime in this city and cut it off at the base. We're going to attack the drug trade in this city, get the dealers off the streets, and put their bosses behind bars. We're going to ensure that every member of our society has the opportunity to have a good life with a roof over their heads and food on their plates. There will be no free lunch in this city. People will have to work for their living but we'll make sure that there are opportunities for all.”

West looked up at the crowd of reporters, blinking, and forced a smile. He was sweating under the glare of the lights.

“You're a fucking moron!” came a shout from the back of the room. The reporters turned to see a man standing along the back wall, just behind the television cameras. “You don't care about the homeless! You don't care about people who live in poverty. All you want to do is push the poor and the homeless out of the way so all the people who want to can buy condos. You're a fucking Nazi!” yelled the man, reaching into his coat.

In the seconds that passed during the rant, Nancy watched as West's face turned ashen, then bright red. His hands gripped the podium and his eyes looked wildly about, first for the source of the angry voice, and then for the police who were supposed to have kept protestors out of the media event. Nancy shifted her focus from West to Chow, who stood serenely behind him. She could swear a faint smile came to his face, and she watched as his eyes calmly moved from the mayor to the protester, and then to two well-built men with mustaches standing next to the entrance to the media room.

The men seemed to straighten when Chow looked their way. Then they reached for the protester, as if to escort him from the room, but the man saw them coming. His right hand emerged from his coat holding a balloon.

The lights of the
TV
cameras fell across the protester's face, and the flash strobes of digital cameras raked him. The protester threw his balloon between the two approaching men. The balloon exploded on the corner of the podium and thick red paint sprayed out, roping Don West with cords of rouge. Someone screamed. The two men managed to grab the protester and slam him into the floor. His face made contact and his nose exploded.

The media in the room erupted in a frenzy, while the mayor shouted for restraint. Nancy watched as Ben Chow faded into the shadows of the room and slipped through the double doors into the Council Chamber.

THE DOOR WAS
locked. A heavy new padlock dangled from a rusty clasp. Juliet rattled the door in futility. She pressed her palms against it and looked around her. She was at the bottom of a dead-end staircase, flanked by concrete walls on either side. Storm clouds pressed down overhead, and the rain fell mercilessly on the fair, dark city of Vancouver.

SEAN WALKED SWIFTLY
through the rain. He could see the neat, yellow home just a few doors up the street. He grinned. He felt great. Maybe he would skip the shower and get straight down to business.

THE CAB ROUNDED
the corner too quickly, its tires squealing on the wet surface. Cole leaned forward from the back seat.

“There, that one. That's it!” he said, digging into his pocket and jamming a twenty into the driver's hand. Without waiting for change he jumped from the cab and rushed into the rain. He ran up the walkway to the house and banged on the door. He could hear nothing from inside the house. He pressed his ear to the door. Denman's last call had sounded desperate. Cole pounded on the door again and tried the knob. It was locked. He jumped the railing of the porch and hit the walkway running, racing around to the back of the house.

SEAN PAUSED ACROSS
the street as a cab pulled up outside the yellow house. The cab door opened and a man in a black coat raced up the walk. Sean watched him pound maniacally on the door. Sean felt his fists tighten and his vision narrow as the man leapt over the railing. He started to cross the street when he heard a shout from very close and turned to see someone barreling toward him.