Flashback (23 page)

He snaked by me and around the bed, which was unmade. On the far side he checked and began barking, his head low to the ground.

I followed him in, taking a moment to shove the bathroom door open and glance in. There was no light but the room was small and I could see that it was empty. Then I turned to Sam and saw what he was barking at. Beside the bed lay the body of a small, bearded man, head lolling on a broken neck.
 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 13

 

 

The owner asked, 'What is it?' in a nervous voice.

I whirled to her. 'Don't touch anything. Stay there, please.'

'What's going on?' Her voice was shaky with fear. 'Something smells bad.'

'There's a body here, it's a man. Stand outside, please.'

She gave a low, frightened wail and stepped out, holding on to the doorjamb for support. I crouched and felt for a pulse in the man's neck. There wasn't one, of course, but the body was still warm. I hushed Sam and stood up, looking around at the room. The bed was unmade. There were a few personal things, women's lotions and a hairbrush, on the chest of drawers. A brown grip with the lid flopped down stood on the canvas stand in the corner. I looked in and saw it was full of women's clothing. That reminded me of the other case and I went outside and brought it in, again lifting it with the flat of my hands on either side so as not to get prints on it. I stood it beside the door.
 

'Can I use your phone?'

'It's at the office.' She was breathing fast and shallow, hyperventilating. But I needed answers. 'What did he look like?'

'Big. Your size. I couldn't see his clothes except that he had dark pants and a light shirt. He wasn't wearing a jacket. And I think he had dark hair.'
 

'Thank you. Now relax. Hold your breath for a while if you can.'
 

She drew in a big breath and held it as she led me to the office. I ran ahead of her and dialled the Parry Sound OPP.

The man on the desk told me they had two cars on the way. One of them a patrol car, should be there any moment, the other had the inspector in it. That was good news. It meant they had jumped the same mental hurdle I had and suspected that the affair was tied in with our homicide investigations. 'Get on the horn. Tell him there's a dead man here, looks as if it could be Jeffries. And the guy who did it is around six-one, one-ninety. He has dark hair, a light shirt, dark pants, no jacket.'
 

'Will do,' he said.

I looked up at the owner. 'Can you remember anything at all about the car?'

'It was blue, I think. But it was too dark to tell properly.'

'Dark blue, light blue?'

'Dark. A small sedan, looked foreign.'

I passed the information on to the dispatcher and hung up. The owner had settled down again now, here in her own familiar surroundings. I put her more at ease. 'Play down the shotgun when you talk to the OPP. You're not supposed to use it, but I'm glad you did.'
 

'It didn't stop him taking her,' she said ruefully.

'The case he left behind will be useful. We'll find him. Now, could you tell me your name, please?'

'Joyce,' she said, 'Joyce Graham. What do you want to know?'

'OK, Joyce. What did the woman look like?'

She hadn't seen the woman herself but remembered from her daughter who had registered her that she had arrived alone, without a car, saying a friend had dropped her off and that her husband would be in later. That had been the previous day.
 

'Can I talk to your daughter, please?'

'She's at a party, I'll call her.' She picked up the telephone.

'Don't say anything about the body. We don't want a crowd of people here cluttering the place up.'

'Right.' She dialled and when the phone was picked up I could hear the music through the phone from four feet away. She had a tense little conversation with the daughter, who didn't want to come home, but eventually she agreed and Mrs Graham hung up. 'She's on her way.'
 

'Fine. Now tell me, have you been into the room at all since yesterday?'

'No. I offered to clean up this morning but they told me they didn't want it, so I left them alone.'

'Them. Did you see the man?'

'Yes, a little guy with a beard. He said his wife was in the shower. Polite but not friendly if you know what I mean.'

'Did he sound American?'

'Yes, Michigan or some place, I thought.'

'And did they have a car here?'

'No. I wondered how he'd got here but they'd paid for two days in cash so I didn't push it.'

I stood a moment, thinking. It was no use rushing back down to the highway. The car had a twenty-minute start. It was up to the OPP to stop it. Maybe they'd put roadblocks out if they could spare the manpower, but even if they did, he'd probably turn off when he saw the line-up and vanish down some side-road. In daylight it might be possible to find it from their helicopter but until then he was lost to us.
 

'I'm going back to the room,' I told her. 'There's a couple of cars coming. Show them the room, and let me know when your daughter gets here.'
 

'Right.' She nodded. 'I'll put some coffee on.'

I went back to the room and looked at the body. Whoever had killed him had been strong; aside from that, no clues. But the suitcase drew me. Jeffries, if this was Jeffries, had been killed for the case. What was in it?
 

I heard a car siren and went to the door of the room. The car pulled up in front of me and a woman officer got out. I could see that a number of the doors had opened now and anxious-looking people were poking their heads out.
 

The policewoman came over. I knew her slightly and said, 'Hi, Elaine, step in.'

She came in. 'I heard there's a body.'

'Over here. Mind where you step.'

'Right.' She followed me and looked down at the body. 'That's Stu Jeffries,' she said. 'I was in his store once to get a picture framed.'
 

'The woman with him was taken away. The guy was after that suitcase.'

'Wonder what's in it?' She looked over at it, glad to look away from the body.

'When the inspector comes we'll open it. For now, the best thing we can do is canvass the other units, see if any of them saw anything.'
 

'Right. I'll start at the far end. Can you secure this place and take the other end?'

'Yeah.' I stepped out after her and placed Sam in front of the door, telling him to keep.

I went to the other end of the building and checked with all the occupants. They were all anxious to help but in the end they had nothing new to contribute. They all mentioned hearing shots and one of them said that there had not been a car parked in front of unit nine. So Jeffries and the woman had been stranded here. It made me wonder who had dropped them off. Had someone picked them up from where they had left their Magic Wagon and brought them here? Another mystery.
 

Elaine and I met to compare notes, just as the inspector arrived, a guy called Dupuy, a good copper. He was driving the car and he had the crime scene man with him. Stinson looked as if he'd been dragged out of a party somewhere and there was a smell of beer on the night air, but the inspector wasn't commenting.
 

Elaine and I were briefing them on what we'd found when a car pulled in and a young woman got out. The motel owner was standing in the shadows and she scurried out and brought the woman over to us. 'This is my daughter, Aileen, she was here when Ms Baker checked in yesterday.'
 

Dupuy took over. 'Thank you for coming to see us, Aileen. What can you tell us about Ms Baker? What did she look like? Did you see anybody with her, any visitors?'
 

It turned out that the girl didn't know much more than her mother had already told me. She had a description of the woman, who sounded like a twin for the body I'd found in the car trunk. The only thing she could add was that she had an American accent. That gibed with what I'd heard about Moira Waites.
 

Dupuy left Stinson to talk to the woman and we went to the room. He wrinkled his nose. 'Smells like his bowels gave out.'

'His neck's been broken. It happens, I guess.'

We went and looked at the body. Dupuy crouched and checked the angle of the neck. 'It would take a strong man to do that.'

'Kershaw, the guy on the lam from Joyceville, I'm sure he's up here. His name has come up in my inquiries. This could have been him.'
 

'What makes you think that?' Dupuy asked, not looking at me, his eyes flicking around the room.

I told him about Waites having been his lawyer and very tentatively aired my theory that Waites might have arranged for Kershaw to kill his wife.
 

'Sounds farfetched,' Dupuy said, but not dismissively. 'We need more than a theory. Does his description match the guy the owner saw?'
 

'As far as it goes, yes.'

'Well, that's something. We'll know when we've printed everything in here.'

'He was trying to steal this suitcase,' I said. 'I lifted it back in, by the sides, flat-handed. Other than that it's untouched.'

'I'll get Stinson to open it for us and we'll search it.' He left the room and came back with his assistant, who was pulling on a pair of surgical gloves.
 

'Might be best if we searched the room first, Inspector. If this thing's locked, maybe the key's in the deceased's pockets.'

'OK, dust the outside while we look around,' Dupuy ordered and Stinson set to work while we started investigating the scene. We chalkmarked the location of the body and had Stinson take all the essential shots. Then we rolled the body over and examined it closely. Aside from the broken neck there were no apparent wounds. The hair was pulled up from the scalp as if the killer had grabbed him by the hair. 'How did he break the neck that way?' Dupuy wondered.
 

'That's an unarmed combat trick, left arm around the throat, then roll the head forward, using the left elbow as a fulcrum under the jaw to snap the neck,' I said. 'It's quick and quiet.'
 

'Where would a guy learn that?' Dupuy asked. 'That's not the kind of trick you learn at a storefront karate class.'

'It's standard unarmed combat training. Maybe he learned it in jail from some ex-soldier.'

'What was he in for, refresh me.' Dupuy frowned.

'Bank robbery, took a hostage.'

'He sounds like a real rounder. This could be his work,' Dupuy said. 'We're going to need guys. I'll make a call. You look around but don't move anything.'
 

He went to the phone and I started checking the floor and all the exposed places. There wasn't anything unusual. In the bathroom I found an electric razor but aside from that everything was feminine, shampoos and lotions. There was a purse on the night table. I was holding it when Dupuy came back.
 

'What a time for this to happen,' he said angrily. 'A third of my people are on leave. I've had to call guys in from days off, the Midland detatchment is setting up road blocks to the south, I've got one guy blocking Highway 69 outside Parry Sound and I've sent Elaine up to help him. I've been on to Toronto and they're putting a team together but they won't be here until morning. And I've called Holland. He's getting back to the office.'
 

'You can count on me as long as it takes, Inspector.'

'Thank you. What did you find so far?'

'Not much, except for this purse.'

'OK, take a look in it,' he said.

It was a big, practical purse, some kind of woven raffia construction, and inside it was the usual jumble. But there were two wallets. I took them out one at a time. The first had ID and cards in the name of Carolyn Jeffries, along with a few dollars. The second one belonged to Moira Waites. It had three hundred and forty-six dollars in Canadian cash and a US hundred-dollar bill.
 

I showed them silently to Dupuy. He shook his head. 'Why would she keep both sets of ID?' He looked at the drivers' licences side by side. 'They look near enough alike that she could have used the Jeffries woman's credit cards, I guess.'
 

'That must have been it,' I agreed. 'But she must have known it would have made her the prime suspect for killing Mrs Jeffries if we found her with both IDs.'
 

Dupuy had been a cop long enough to see the argument with that. 'She could have pleaded ignorance, just keeping the wallet for her friend when she saw her. It wouldn't have put her away, would it?'
 

'I guess not.' I finished searching the purse but found nothing that helped.

At last Dupuy said, 'You go ahead and search the rest of the room. Dave and I will search the body.'

He waved me on and I opened all the drawers. There was nothing much in any of them but under the sink in the bathroom I found a bottle of J. & B. Scotch, half consumed.
 

'Can we get some prints off this bottle?' I asked. 'It could be the one from Waites' room.'

Dupuy looked at it. 'That's the brand that was taken from Waites' room, right?'

'Right. And the suitcase has Waites' monogram on it as well. So we've wrapped up one homicide.'

'Yeah, the one that's not on my duty sheet,' he said ruefully. 'Big deal.' He called Stinson in to print the bottle and while he did that, Dupuy and I stripped the bed, finding nothing hidden. Then we looked into the closets and the open suitcase. It was filled with woman's clothes. 'Did you notice that Jeffries doesn't have anything of his own here,' I said. 'The suitcase Dave's working on was taken from Waites' room. That's Waites' monogram.'
 

'You're saying that this guy didn't know he was going to be away overnight?' Dupuy asked, pointing a toe at the body.

'Seems that way. And I wonder why? What was he involved with the first day that stopped him going home again?'