Valley of the Lost (11 page)
Lucky rocked the cradle with one foot, and drank coffee with one hand. She was taking the baby to the doctor for a check-up this afternoon; she might ask if there was something she could do to get Miller to sleep better. Surely things had improved in the child rearing department since Samwise and Moonlight were babies. She could call Sam for advice, but, to her disapproval, he didn’t seem to be involved in the rearing of his own children, and Lucky didn’t care much for his wife, Judy.
Moonlight’s bedroom was directly above the kitchen. Lucky could hear her slamming doors and stomping about. Andy had brought yesterday’s paper in, but she hadn’t read it yet. Miller’s cries were slowing down, but although the muscles in her leg begged for mercy, Lucky didn’t dare stop rocking.
She picked up the paper and turned it over.
‘Grow-op Bust’ screamed the headline. And there, in living color, for all the citizens of Trafalgar to see, was a picture of Constable Molly Smith in the foreground, while in the background men walked out of the building carrying large bags.
The front door opened. “Moonlight,” Lucky yelled.
The blond head rounded the kitchen door. Moonlight’s short hair stood on end; she looked like a frightened porcupine. “What now? I’m going into town. I didn’t think you’d be wanting the car.”
The swelling on her daughter’s beautiful face had gone down and the bruise was fading. This morning, the cut lip looked like nothing more dramatic than the remains of a cold sore. But the wounds reminded Lucky that Moonlight did have a dangerous profession. Even here in peaceful little Trafalgar. “Miller and I have an appointment at the doctor at 1:30.”
“I’ll have it back by then.”
Lucky tapped the paper with one chewed fingernail. “What is the meaning of this?”
Moonlight glanced at the headline and sighed. “Meredith again, I’ll bet.”
“What are you doing putting a hard working entrepreneur out of business?”
Moonlight’s blue eyes grew wide. “Are you kidding? It was a freakin’ grow-op. Right in the middle of town. Of course we put them out of business. And a nice long stay in prison’ll do them good.”
“Don’t swear around Miller.”
Moonlight rolled her eyes.
“And don’t give me that look either.”
“Bye, Mom. Have a nice day.”
“I read a letter in the paper from a former police officer saying that in all his years on the job he had never once been called to an incident caused by a person smoking pot. How does that compare to the consumption of alcohol? You’re a policewoman, answer that.”
“The house was rented. When the owners get here, you can come and talk to them, Mom. Ask them how they feel that their house is so full of toxic mold that the officers wore bio-suits. They’ll have to gut the place before they can even dream of living there again. Ask the neighbors if they’re okay with having a rat’s nest of uncovered wiring and illegal electricity consumption next door. There’s a school on the street over. The place was a potential bomb.”
“They wouldn’t have to go to such lengths if their product wasn’t illegal. There’s lots of good land in the mountains, suitable for growing marijuana. Why…”
“Tell you what, Mom. When the Prime Minister calls to ask for my opinion on the legalization of pot, I’ll tell him to talk to you. Until then I’ll do my job and protect the citizens of this town, whether they want me to or not. Got it?”
Moonlight slammed the door on her way out.
Lucky peered into the pram. Miller was sound asleep.
“Good boy,” she said, “If you want to be part of this family you have to sleep through the occasional thunderstorm we call a discussion.”
The phone rang, and Lucky struggled out of her chair to answer before it woke the baby.
“I’ve heard from my source,” a woman said, “that trouble’s heading your way. I’ll be there in half an hour.”
She didn’t identify herself, and didn’t need to. Lucky went upstairs to get dressed. Best to look mildly presentable. Good thing Moonlight had decided to go into town. She would not want to be here.
Jim Denton raised one eyebrow as Smith punched in the security code to let herself into the body of the police station.
“What brings you round, Molly?”
“I work here, remember. They pay me the big bucks to show my smiling face once in a while.”
“You’re not on shift today.”
“Some paperwork to catch up on.”
“I admire your dedication.” Denton looked back at his monitors. “Oh, for god’s sake. There he goes again.”
“Who?” Smith walked behind him to have a look. In five, a man was standing facing the cell door. His hand was at his crotch and his feet were spread about two feet apart. “Is he blind?” she asked. “Can’t he see the toilet in the corner?”
A howl came from below. Not a bad imitation of a wolf.
“Every couple of hours he pisses in the corners of his cell, while barking like a dog. He’s marking his territory or something.”
“Most of our clients don’t want to lay claim to their cells.” Smith laughed and went to the constables’ office.
Sure enough there was a voice mail message from Inspector Benoit. The strong New York accent provided a name and number of someone in the Vancouver police to contact regarding Julian Armstrong.
Smith scribbled the information on a scrap of paper. She leaned back in her chair. Winters had only asked her to get the contact info for him.
She walked down the hall to the GIS office. The door was open and Winters was typing with two fingers.
She knocked lightly.
He looked up and she thought she saw a ghost of a smile on his face as he caught sight of her. But she probably imagined it.
“Come in.” He pointed to his computer. “The kid you found in the alley on Saturday? The heroin overdose?”
“I remember.”
“Before they’d release him from the hospital, they made him agree to start going to the methadone clinic.”
“Did he say where he’d gotten the stuff?”
“On the street. Doesn’t remember what street. Medium sized guy, no identifying features. Come to think of it might even have been a woman. It was dark, blah, blah, blah.”
“Let’s hope he sticks with the program anyway.”
“What’s up?”
“I came in to check if Inspector Benoit had returned my call.” Smith held the paper up as evidence. “She did, and said to contact a Constable Czarnecki.”
“Thanks, Molly, but you could have checked for messages from home.”
“Home,” she said, “is not exactly a relaxing place, now that we have an infant in residence.”
Winters held out his hand, and Smith was about to hand over the paper, when Lopez came in.
“Morning all,” he said, with his usual cheerful smile.
“Ray,” Smith said. “You have kids. How come you’re still sane?”
“Normal people say hello to their co-workers first thing in the morning.”
“Hello. My mom’s looking after this baby, and it screams all night long.”
“There’s your answer,” Lopez said. “Your mom’s looking after it. Madeleine looked after our kids. I worked nights for seven years straight, sometimes had to beg the other guys to switch with me. Sorry to tell you this, Molly, but you’re the wrong gender.”
“Don’t believe a word he says,” Winters said.
Smith smiled. She’d seen Lopez with his daughters. Hard to imagine a more involved father.
“You coming?” Lopez asked his sergeant.
“Yeah,” Winters got to his feet. “I have to go, but as you’re in anyway, Molly, do you mind giving this Czarnecki a call?”
Of course she didn’t mind. That’s why she was here on her day off. “Okay.”
“Find out what he knows about Armstrong, if anything. I’ll call you when I’m done and you can fill me in.”
She went back to the Constables’ office to make the call. If they had to play phone tag, Smith feared that Winters would take over. As she’d hoped, Czarnecki answered on the first ring. She identified herself and told him why she was calling.
“Hold on a sec,” Czarnecki said. Smith heard the click of a computer keyboard. She looked out the window onto George Street. A middle-aged woman, overweight, dressed in a red Bermuda short set and a wide-brimmed purple hat, struggled to walk up the steep hill. The woman stopped to catch her breath and fan herself with a tourist map of Trafalgar. The EMTs would be busy in this heat, what with over-eager, out-of-shape tourists wanting to climb mountains. It was so hot that one of the constables had almost fainted yesterday while patrolling the streets in the early afternoon.
Czarnecki came back on the line. “Oh, yeah. I remember him. Not a crime to be a sleazeball, unfortunately.”
“What do you mean?”
“Couple complaints about sexual impropriety toward his clients.”
Smith’s stomach turned somersaults. “Go on.”
“Complaints were laid that he offered his sexual favors as part of the healing process.” Smith heard papers shuffle. “Nice work if you can get it.”
“Kids? Youth?”
“No. The complainants, there were two, were adult women. Very adult women, if you get my meaning.”
“Any charges?”
“Due to the age of the complainants, it was decided that there was no reason to lay criminal charges. If we could charge every sleazeball who calls himself a therapist, we’d run out of room in the jails. In one case the complaint was laid by the husband, and it looks like the wife wouldn’t back it up. No names here, Constable Smith, but between you and me, I’d suggest this complaint came to us because the husband, is… ahem… an esteemed member of the police board of a community in the Lower Mainland. You might want to talk to Armstrong’s professional organization. My notes say that that at least one of the women intended to take her story to them. That’s all I know.”
Smith said her thanks, with promises of a beer next time she was in the big city, and tried to cover up her disappointment. She’d hoped to dig up a rash of charges by teenagers and young mothers. Something she could use to confront Armstrong and have him confessing to an inappropriate relationship with Ashley Doe.
Still, Armstrong had come to the attention of the police, even though charges were not laid, which might indicate that, as Sergeant Winters suspected, he’d left Vancouver under less than favorable conditions. Plus, if two women went to all the trouble of reporting his behavior to the police, odds were good there were plenty others who hadn’t complained.
She typed up a report of the conversation for Sergeant Winters.
Report filed, she leaned back in her chair and checked her watch. Ten o’clock. The day stretched in front of her. She could go hiking, alone. She could go home and fight with her mother. She could look for an apartment and/or a car. But it was too bloody hot to be tramping around town.
She picked up the phone and dialed a number from memory.
***
To the consternation of her cloth-coat Republican parents, Lucy Casey had been involved in progressive politics almost since she began to talk. When she and Andy came to Canada, Lucy Casey morphing into Lucky Smith, she hadn’t changed her stripes. And over the years, she had made many friends of like mind.
A car pulled into the Smith driveway. Three women got out. They all had well-earned lines carved into tanned faces, much gray in their hair. One back was heavily stooped, and one proud woman walked on a cane, refusing any and all assistance.
They didn’t bother to knock on the door to announce their arrival, but found comfortable seats on the wide veranda at the front of the Smith home.
Miller was, at last, sleeping soundly.
Lucky stood at the living room window and watched her friends take up their positions. She looked beyond them toward her garden. She kept a large vegetable patch on the south-facing slope leading down to the river. The land surrounding the house and garage was lined by overflowing perennial beds and terracotta pots of varying sizes filled with colorful annuals. Over the years, she’d constructed arrangements of stone and rock to add accent to the gardens. Lately the heat had been so intense, the rain so infrequent, and Lucky so busy with the baby, that the plants were calling out for water, dying like a remnant of the Foreign Legion, lost in the Sahara.
She made iced tea from the pot of English Breakfast prepared earlier, and the women outside chatted amongst themselves. But before the ice cubes had melted, and the last of the grandchild photographs had been admired, a dark SUV came up the driveway. It was followed by a white truck with Trafalgar City Police painted across the sides.
Jody Burke jumped out of the car and Constable Dave Evans emerged, without much enthusiasm, from the police car.
They walked toward the house.
The women on the porch rocked rocking chairs or settled back into cushions. One woman had brought her knitting—balls of white wool spread around her feet like the ground beneath a copse of cottonwood in spring.
Jody Burke stopped about five yards before the stairs. “I’m here to see Mrs. Smith.”
“She’s busy caring for a baby.” An elderly woman peered at the intruders through thick, black-trimmed glasses. Her gray hair was thinning on top and a network of deep lines carved through the skin of her sharp-boned face. She wore Birkenstocks with white socks pulled up to her knees, colorful shorts and a matching top. Her right arm was wrapped in a cast. Jane Reynolds, former professor of physics, was retired from active teaching and research, and these days spent her time visiting her grandchildren and traveling the world as an internationally known peace and environmental activist.
Burke planted her feet into the ground. Dave Evans fingered his belt, adjusted his hat, and watched a large black raven cross the blue sky.
Jane had suggested that Lucky stay out of sight and let her handle things. Lucky peeked out from behind the living room blinds. Sylvester was shut in the pantry, howling.
Burke looked at Jane. “I’m here to speak to Mrs. Smith.”
Moving with great care and deliberation, Jane got to her feet. She walked stiffly toward the steps, as if her old bones were hurting her. “Mrs. Smith is busy, as I may have mentioned.”
Burke took a deep breath. She stared at the three aging women blocking her way.
Jane held out her hand. “May I see your authorization to take the child, please?”
Burke shifted. “I was hoping we could do this without any fuss.”
They were so desperate for good foster families in the province, Lucky almost expected a call asking if she’d like to take another baby, or maybe two. Why Burke had it in for her, Lucky couldn’t imagine. She’d never met the woman until the other day.
A good friend of Jane’s worked mornings at the lawyer’s office directly across the street from the police station. From her office she had an excellent view of the front door, the door that members of the public walked in and out of all day. Jane’s friend didn’t seem to get too much work done (she was the mother of the senior partner) but she was a mine of information about the comings and goings of the police and public. When Lucky told Jane about Jody Burke and her determination to take Miller, Jane said she’d ask her friend to keep an eye out for any attempts to involve the police in the custody of Miller Doe. Jody had marched into the police station this morning; the lawyer’s mother called Jane, and Jane called her supporters and ordered them into position.
“Without any fuss,” Jane repeated, her voice pitched as if she were lecturing to a hall full of first year students. “Or legally? Dave, it’s nice to see you, dear. I hope you’re well?”
“Yes, M’m,” Evans mumbled, looking as if he wished aliens would descend from the skies and kidnap him from this very spot.
Dave Evans had broken Jane Reynolds’ arm when he’d shoved her to the ground to protect her from a fire bomb.
Small towns
, Lucky thought, feeling a small knot of pleasure in her chest. There was no way Dave would ever arrest, or even speak firmly to, Jane.
“Ms Burke?” Jane said, her hand still outstretched. “May I see your legal papers ordering the surrender of the child in question?”
Burke stood her ground. “As you may not be aware, I am authorized by the province of British Columbia to act on its behalf. I don’t need a court order.”
“You mean you couldn’t get one,” Jane said. “Dave, why are you here?”
Evans shrugged. “Ms. Burke came into the station and asked for a police escort. She, ahem, said the baby might be in danger if Mrs. Smith wouldn’t hand him over. Sorry, Mrs. Reynolds, but the Sarge told me to come. I don’t know anything more about it. But, well, if you don’t have a court order, Ms. Burke, you can’t go into Mrs. Smith’s house, and I can’t ask her to bring out the child.”
A light breeze rustled the tops of the cottonwood trees by the river, and a hummingbird hovered in the air, its wings moving to a beat faster than the eye could follow, searching for nectar in the feeders Lucky had hung on either end of the porch. They were empty, and the tiny bird darted away.
The door opened and Lucky stepped outside. The heat enveloped her like a
burka
. No one said a word. The windows of the police truck were down and they could hear the radio crackle to life as Evans called in, asking—begging—for instructions.
Burke stared at Lucky. Her eyes were cold and hard.
She turned and walked back to her car.