Echoes of the Past (23 page)

“PCO
lab.
Rick speaking,”

“Good morning, Rick. This is Michelle Thomas. I’m
at the Lake of the Mountain Resort near
Picton
, and
I’m dealing with a compromised crime scene. I need an independent pick-up of a
car and a canoe for analysis. What have you got for me, and how soon can they
get here?”

“You think the local LEOs aren’t playing ball?”

“Let’s just say they’re taking a lot longer than I
like providing me with vital information. It’s a small place. I have a feeling
someone might be trying to push their weight around, maybe influence the
investigation. Is there anything nearby I can piggyback on?”

“I can send someone to you within the hour.
There’s a joint RCMP/OPP task force doing a drug investigation that’s been
going on for some time. We’ve got a couple of
indies
working for us in the area. The man can take the car and canoe to Kingston for
examination. Will that work? Belleville’s closer, but if you think someone’s in
bed with the law, it might be too close.”

“I agree. I almost wish my cadavers were in
Kingston too. No one pulls my chain.”

Rick laughed. “No one would dare, Dr. T. You’d
have them for breakfast.”

Michelle’s dogged determination to get to the
bottom of things was well-known in the coroner’s office.

“You’re right.” She chuckled. Her earlier good
humor reasserted itself. “What’s this guy’s name so I know I’m releasing my
evidence to the right man?”

“Undercover RCMP’s named
Stevens.”
Rick answered. “He’ll be driving a pickup with a towing rig on
the back. The truck has the vanity plate,
BRN
T B WLD
—born to be wild. What do you want Kingston to look for?”

“Prints in the car, mud on the
tires—anything to point to where the vehicle’s been in the last seventy-two
hours.
Anything on the canoe—prints, etc. I don’t think my victims were
in it, but I need to know for sure.”

“I just contacted him. You’re in luck. He’s on the
island. He should be there in twenty.”

“Thanks, Rick.”

“Anytime, Dr. T.
It’s
always a pleasure doing business with you.”

Michelle hung up the phone and checked her watch.
Rick had said twenty minutes, which meant the operative must be near
Picton
. Maybe she’d ask him a few questions when he
arrived. She might even mention Tony’s suspicions and see if they fit with their
drug investigation. Meth labs had sprung up all over the country, and they were
bad news. If there was one on the island, and it was dumping its sludge into
the lake, Tony was right—the results could be catastrophic.

Michelle walked along the beach over to the marshy
area to the north where Tony had seen the ghost. As she expected, there were no
footprints to show anyone had walked this way. She turned back toward the canoe
and the crime scene, and continued beyond it until she could walk no farther.

The sound of a truck pulling into the parking lot
startled her. She glanced at her watch. Fifteen minutes had passed. She crossed
the lawn to the edge of the parking lot. A large man, unruly hair half hidden
by a Blue Jays ball cap, wearing green, oil-stained coveralls, stepped out of
the truck. She scanned the license plate to make sure it was the one she
wanted.

“Dr. Thomas? I’m Chad Stevens. I got a call from
my friend Rick. He said you had something for me to pick up?”

“Hi, Chad.
I do. That old
Chev
,
and the red canoe down there. Sorry, I don’t have keys for the car.”

Chad walked over to the car, and looked in the
window.

“That’s because they’re in the ignition, see?
People dumping cars often do that. Don’t want to get caught with the keys. It’s
a dead giveaway.”

He went back to his truck and pulled a thin metal
bar out of a toolbox in the back. Within seconds he had Aaron’s car door
opened. He reached for the keys, turned them, and the engine roared to life. He
backed the vehicle up, and loaded it onto the tow harness he had attached to
his pickup. When he was done, he came over to her.

“One down, one to go.”

They walked down the lawn to the crime scene. Chad
stepped over the crime tape and held it down for her.

“I heard about the
drownings
—rumor
has it the bodies were in an odd configuration. News travels fast here. I also
heard those kids thought they’d found evidence of meth being cooked around
here.
Were they using?”

Michelle looked up surprised. “Don’t know yet, but
my gut says no. I’ve ordered a drug screen. How do you know about the meth? The
professor told me they’d kept that information quiet.”

Had Tony lied to her? If he’d lied about that, what
else was he lying about?

Chad shook his head.

“It isn’t general knowledge, but we have
informants all over the island. We believe there’s been a meth lab in operation
in the area for about a year now. New stuff came onto the market just before
Christmas, and we traced it here, but we haven’t been able to get any solid
leads. My informant claimed he heard some guy on the phone talking about it in
one of the bars in
Picton
on Thursday afternoon. He
didn’t see the guy’s face, but he was pretty sure he wasn’t a local. My CI said
the man was a big guy with an accent—French maybe. We get a lot of Quebecers
through here.”

“So if those kids found ammonia hydroxide in the
water, it would be the kind of proof you needed?”

He whistled. “Is that what they found? That’s
huge. Where are the samples? I’ll take those back too.”

“Apparently, they’ve vanished. Tell
me,
is the mayor aware of your investigation?”

Chad rubbed the back of his neck.

“He is and he isn’t. He’s new to the area, showed
up as mayor not too long before we think the meth lab got started. It’s
probably all coincidence, but we couldn’t find a lot of information about him,
and a man with deep pockets and a sketchy past always sets my hackles on edge.
He’s a cocky son of a bitch, very sure of himself, and I dislike people like him
out of principle. He thinks we’re here because of marijuana and smuggled
tobacco. He’s given us a few leads, so he may be one of the good guys, but I’ve
been doing this for twenty years, and something about all this stinks. If those
kids found a meth lab, those deaths probably aren’t an accident. Watch your
back. For the record, he doesn’t know about me, so let’s keep this between us.”

“What about the professor?”

“He checks out, as did his students.
Nothing suspicious in their backgrounds.
If he’s right, people
aren’t going to stop dying. Where meth’s involved, they usually don’t.”

He handed her a card and picked up the canoe as if
it weighed nothing.

“If those samples turn up, I’d love to get my
hands on them. Kingston will send the results from this to Toronto, and you’ll
get them from there. Okay?”

“Yes, that’ll work.”

Chad carried the canoe up to the truck, placed it
in the back, and strapped it down. He went to the
cab,
got a receipt book with Stevens’ Towing printed at the top and completed the
form.

Michelle watched the whole process in silence,
certain her mouth was gaping open to fit the stunned look on her face.
An official receipt?

He winked at her.
“Chain of
evidence, right?
Someone’s going to want to know where things went. When
they come looking for them, and if what I suspect is true, they will, I’ll say
I delivered them to the police lab as ordered. No secrets, but they won’t get
anything out of Kingston, I promise. I’ll call Rick if anything interesting
pops up.”

She chuckled. “Thanks. I suppose they might. I
guess that’s why you’re the undercover expert, and I’m not. I’ll be in touch if
I have anything else for you.”

“Rick tells me you’re a bit of a bulldog. Don’t go
anywhere alone. If the big boys are involved here, they have a long reach. Don’t
trust anybody. I gather the mayor’s your contact on this. Mayor Ron has his
fingers in a lot of pies. What I told you stays between us. We want to shut this
operation down, not have it relocated to another area.”

She nodded.

He waved, got in the truck, and left without a
backward glance.

Michelle watched Chad’s truck turn left out of the
parking area. He’s probably heading toward the
Glenora
Ferry, the quickest way to the mainland. She turned on her heel and returned to
her cottage. Removing her boots and her jacket, she slipped her feet into the moccasins,
and carried the papers Chad had given her over to the table. After slipping the
card into a slot in her briefcase, she put the documents in a file folder. Chad’s
words hadn’t been reassuring. She might not have ruled the deaths homicide, but
she’d definitely ruled them suspicious. When whoever was involved heard that
news, she might be in danger. Michelle shuddered.

Entering the kitchen, she picked up the pot Tony
had left for her, and removed its contents. She wished she could tell him about
the RCMP investigation, and the fact that he might be right about the meth lab,
but until he could prove what he’d found, her hands were tied. She couldn’t
share that confidential information any more than she could tell him that she
and his ghost were one and the same. What Chad had said about Ron bothered her
too. Audra said things weren’t as they seemed, but it seemed more people
questioned Ron’s motives than Tony’s. Her senses told her to believe the evidence,
but Audra said to believe her heart, and so far, her heart had no reason to
doubt Ron—or did it? He’d lied to her about Aaron and the professor, her
conscience prodded, was he lying about anything else?

She put the eggs on to boil and booted up her
computer. While she waited for it to connect to the Internet, she took out the
USB drive Isaac had given her. She slipped it into the USB slot on the laptop.
The computer took only seconds to load the files. He’d taken three pictures—one
from each side and one from the lawn looking down at the bodies. She stared at
that picture and enlarged it. There, half buried in the sand, caught between
Aaron’s legs, was a wine bottle. There hadn’t been a wine bottle on the beach.
Someone had taken it. Why?

She zoomed in on the picture. The bottle was
green, but the digitalization wouldn’t allow her to see the square label
clearly. She’d found a cork in Lindsay’s pocket. Were the two items connected?

Once the eggs were cooked and she’d made toast,
she sat down at the table to eat her breakfast and continued to examine Isaac’s
pictures. There didn’t seem to be anything else that didn’t fit. She connected
her phone to her computer and downloaded the pictures she’d taken of the beach.
She examined the sand carefully, but there was no wine bottle, not even a
depression of where the bottle had been, but the sand seemed highly disturbed
in that area.

Her computer dinged telling her she had mail. She
checked her inbox and found a message from Sheila with a file attached—the photographs
she’d gotten from Isaac. Maybe the local LEOS were just slow. She opened the
file, and there were the three photos. She looked at the first two, and they
were the same as the ones Isaac had given her. She opened the third and
frowned. The picture seemed different somehow. She gasped. The wine bottle was
gone. Someone had used imaging software to remove it from the picture. There
was only one reason that would have been done. Someone didn’t want her to know
about that piece of evidence, and there was someone at the local police level
ready to compromise the investigation. Thank goodness she’d gone with her
instincts and sent the car and canoe to Kingston. She wished she could see that
label. She’d send the photo to Toronto. Maybe Rick and the boys could do
something with it. That bottle, wherever it was, was key evidence in a murder
investigation.

She saved the two picture files and emailed them
to Sheila’s secure address with instructions to print copies as soon as
possible. Once the email was sent, she deleted it from her sent emails and
erased Isaac’s pictures from her laptop’s C drive. She’d copied the files to a
USB drive of her own, and had wiped Isaac’s clean as he’d asked. She might be overly
cautious here, but better safe than sorry. Someone had doctored that photograph
for a reason. No one could know she’d seen the original pictures or that
Toronto had them. She’d have to speak to Isaac, ask him not to tell anyone. She
also wanted to know to which officer he’d given the memory card. Something was
rotten in
Picton
. Could Tony and Chad’s suspicions about
Ron be right?

A scream tore the air. Michelle was outside in a
second running toward the source of the disturbance. Kara stood near the shed,
and Michelle raced over to her, not caring the lovely moccasins she wore were
getting wet. Other people came running over from the inn. She reached Kara
before they did.

Son of a bitch!

Isaac lay on the ground on his back. From the look
of it, the man had slipped and struck his head against the large granite boulder
he used to prop open the shed door. Michelle bent down and checked his carotid
pulse.
Nothing.
The only person who knew about the
missing wine bottle, other than the one who’d doctored the photograph, wouldn’t
be telling anyone. She thought of the grandson he’d mentioned. He’d never see
him grow up. A deep sadness filled her. Until she did the autopsy, she wouldn’t
know for sure, but it looked as if someone else had been murdered.

“Kara, go back to the office and call
nine-one-one.”

Chapter Twelve

Tony and Jackson ate breakfast at a fast food
restaurant in
Picton
, before driving around the far
section on the lake, trying to find a track, side road, or something that would
bring them closer to the water, close to where the lights might have been the
other night. They’d passed a few hiking trails into the park, but he wanted
something large enough for a vehicle.