Murder as a Fine Art (9 page)

Moments later, the police arrived, the lights of the cruiser flashing red and blue against the walls of the music huts. When Laura saw Corporal Lindstrom getting out of the passenger side, she changed direction and hurried over to the police officer. “Karen, that studio
belongs to a friend of mine — Erika Dekter, you remember her, don't you?” The corporal nodded and Laura went on, “I can't find her anywhere. I'm going to her room to see if she's there.”

“You do that,” said the policewoman crisply. “And report back to me right away.”

Frantically, Laura pounded on Erika's door. Rattling the doorknob, she yelled at Erika to wake up, but there was no answer. Maybe she had taken a sleeping pill and was dead to the world. Heart pounding against her ribs, Laura tore down the hall and ran back with a wooden chair, the one the janitor dozed on while he waited for his afternoon shift to end. She smashed it against the door until it finally broke apart in her hands. Dropping the remnants of the chair, she called out to Erika in a despairing voice. There was no answer. By now, she wasn't expecting one. Sleeping pills or not, no one could have slept through the unholy racket she had made.

The boat studio had burned to the ground and the firefighters had shifted their efforts to trying to save the rest of the colony. Streams of water arced skyward as they soaked the trees on the perimeter of the fire. Fortunately, there was no wind to send the flames leaping from treetop to treetop. Laura thought of her own studio and the months of work represented by the paintings in it. But that was swept aside by the unthinkable possibility that Erika had perished in the fire. Once again, Laura scanned the crowd of onlookers in the garish light of the flames, but this time with diminished hope. She saw Corporal Lindstrom panning the crowd with her video camera.

The Mountie wasn't the only one taping the fire; Laura saw John Smith at the edge of the crowd squinting through the viewfinder of his camera. He would
probably use the footage in one of his performances. Or maybe the fire
was
his performance. The idea was not as preposterous as it first seemed.

Laura pushed her way through the crowd and tapped a Mountie on the arm. He turned around and she saw it was Constable Peplinski. He recognized her, and she told him she had to talk to the corporal. He waved Karen over, but she had already spotted Laura and was heading toward her.

“She's not in her room,” Laura shouted frantically against the sound of burning trees, hissing and steaming as the streams of water hit them. The Mountie's lips twisted in a grimace and she motioned toward the fire chief who was standing nearby, glumly surveying the remains of the studio. It was reduced to nothing more than a pile of ash, blackened with the torrents of water that had been dumped on it. The boat's iron rudder still stood defiantly upright. It and the concrete piles on which the boat's cradle had rested were the only things left standing. The fire chief winced when the corporal told him that there might have been someone in the studio.

“It's completely saturated with water so it'll be cool enough for us to take a look,” the chief said. “You going to join us, Karen?”

She nodded mutely, and he asked if she had ever seen the body of a fire victim. When she shook her head, he muttered something about there having to be a first time for everything in their line of work and, with the corporal following him, went off to detail two of his men to join in the search.

A few tendrils of smoke still rose from the charred branches and trunks of the burned trees, but the flames had been doused and sparks no longer flew. The other studios were safe. Laura registered that fact somewhere in the back of her mind, but all her attention was
focused on the policewoman and the firefighters as they gingerly stepped onto the sodden rubble that had once been a studio. A murmur of excitement and apprehension rippled through the crowd as they realized the grisly purpose of the search.

Behind Laura, the colonists were clustered together at the barricade as if seeking comfort from each other. As usual, John Smith stood a little bit apart, his camera focused on the firefighters sifting through the rubble. Jeremy, wearing a fur coat over his pyjamas — trust Jeremy to have a fur coat — was pushing his way through the crowd towards Laura. “My God, do they think Erika's in there?”

His question put into words what they were all thinking. Taking a quick glance over her shoulder, she replied, “I don't know. But she's not in her room and I can't find her anywhere.”

With Jeremy standing by her side, Laura turned her full attention back to the burned out studio. A firefighter was bending down to lift a charred timber that had once been a rib of the boat's hull. The fire chief was leaning toward Corporal Lindstrom, saying something in her ear.

“Smell that?” asked the chief.

Corporal Lindstrom sniffed and almost gagged. Mixed in with the acrid smell of smoke was another odour, so cloyingly sweet it stuck in the throat.

“She's in here somewhere,” the chief grunted. He pointed to where the prow would have been. “That's where the couch was. See that piece of metal spring? If she fell asleep, this is where she'll be.” He nodded to one of his men who carefully began to remove lumps of sodden ash with his gloved hands. It was awful, far worse than anything Karen could possibly have imagined. The object resembled nothing human. Rivulets of
fat ran down the sides of the shrivelled torso, two pathetic stumps were all that remained of the legs, the head had shrunk to a third of its size and what had been a mouth now looked like the beak of a bird.

Karen gasped and turned aside, fighting back the nausea that rose in her throat. The fire chief looked away until she had regained her composure. “What a horrible way to die,” she murmured, straightening her shoulders.

The fire chief nodded. “That's one of the worst I've seen, and I've seen more than my share.” Motioning his men to cover what was left of Erika's body with a tarpaulin, the chief went on, “The fire must have been white hot to incinerate the body like that.”

“Meaning it could have been set?” Karen's investigative instincts were now back in control.

“We won't know for sure until the arson squad checks it out, but everything points that way. The only times I've ever seen a body burned like that have been in fires that were deliberately set.”

John Smith stepped up to the barricade and zoomed his camera in on Karen's face. “Erika's dead,” he announced. “I can tell it from the look on that Mountie's face.”

Laura felt her knees buckling and would have fallen if Jeremy hadn't grabbed her around the waist and held her up.

“Holy Jesus!” Jeremy muttered. All the hoses had been turned off and everything was still and eerily quiet.

John Smith shut off his camera and intoned sepulchrally, “She wouldn't let me protect her.” It sounded as if he felt Erika deserved her fate.

“Are you all right?” Karen had come over and was looking anxiously at Laura.

“I'm okay now.” Laura released her hold on Jeremy's arm. “Is it Erika?”

“We won't know for sure until we have the dental records checked. All we know at the moment is that there are human remains.”

“How could it have happened?” whispered Laura as if asking herself.

“Did she smoke?” asked the fire chief. “That's how it usually happens. They fall asleep with a lighted cigarette and they're overcome with smoke before they wake up. At least that way they don't suffer,” he added as if to comfort her.

“Erika didn't smoke.”

Before the chief could reply he was called away by one of his men. “Can I speak to you alone, Corporal?” he asked when he returned.

“I'd like Ms. Janeway to hear what you have to say. She's been helping with my investigation of another unexplained death in the colony.”

“I heard about that one. Guy fell down the stairs.” The chief shook his head. “I've been telling Kevin Lavoie for years that damn railing was too low. Maybe now he'll listen.” Shrugging massive shoulders, he said to Karen, “If you want the lady to listen in, that's okay with me. We're going to call in the arson squad from Calgary, but I don't need them to tell me the studio was torched. There are a couple of spots where you can see that the fire was especially hot. In fact, the heat was so intense that it actually burned the soil underneath. That's where the arsonist would have poured the gasoline or some other incendiary material, and lit it. Gives them away every time.”

“One of those spots being underneath where we found the body?”

“Right. Whoever it was didn't want to take any chances.”

“So it's murder,” said the policewoman.

“The person who set the fire might not have known there was someone in the studio,” Laura pointed out.

“It's still murder,” replied Karen. “If someone is killed in the course of a criminal act, it's murder, regardless of intent.”

T
here was no sleep for anyone in the Centre that night, and the fire and the ensuing commotion brought many of the townspeople to the scene. At breakfast in the Banquet Hall, where there was an almost palpable silence instead of the usual hum of conversation, a hollow-eyed Laura watched Karen struggling to swallow a piece of toast, finally managing to wash it down with some milk. If what she had seen in the fire was enough to put a professional police officer off her food, it must have been truly awful. Laura pushed her bowl of granola to one side. The two women smiled wanly at each other.

Karen's cell phone rang. She listened to the brief message, said “10-4”, and switched it off. “The Crime Scene Unit has dusted Erika's room, so we're free to check it out.”

“Banff has a Crime Scene Unit?”

“It's just two regular officers who have been trained to do the work when necessary. As it is in this case.”
Karen, energized by getting back into action, adjusted the angle of her cap and led the way out of the Banquet Hall.

“If your friend was murdered,” Karen said, “the key might be something in this room. Let's check out things together. You could recognize the significance of something that I would overlook.”

“Okay. Incidentally, your Crime Scene Unit will come up with my fingerprints. I've been in and out of this room practically every day.”

“I know. We'll have to fingerprint everyone who had a legitimate reason to be in the room. For elimination purposes. I hope you don't mind?”

“Not in the slightest. So long as they're destroyed when the investigation is over.”

“That's standard procedure. Let's get started.”

Laura opened a bureau drawer and smiled sadly to herself as she gazed down at its contents. Like Erika herself, her things were exquisite. The bureau drawers were filled with neatly folded silk under-garments, and smartly-styled dresses and suits hung in the open closet.

“Everything is so neat and tidy, it's impossible to tell whether anyone has been here before us,” Karen sighed as she unfolded a filmy garment and placed it to one side. “All they would have to do is put everything back the way it was. Well, let's try her desk.”

“I can't understand why it's not here,” Laura muttered after they had gone through the drawers of the built-in desk.

“What isn't here?”

“A copy of her manuscript. Or at least a computer disc.” Laura went back over to the clothes closet and ran her hand along the top shelf. She stepped back and shook her head. “It's just not here. We've looked every place it could be. A manuscript isn't the easiest thing in the world to hide, either.”

“Have you ever seen this manuscript?”

“Bits and pieces. She kept it in a locked drawer in her studio. She probably had some of it stored on discs, but they're not here either.”

“Maybe her publisher will have a copy.”

“She didn't have a publisher. She was writing the book on spec.”

“You mean the book she was working on no longer exists?”

“It looks that way. God, how she would have hated that! To die without leaving something behind.”

“Are we looking at a possible motive here?”

Laura shrugged. “She was writing a book of scholarly literary criticism. Not exactly the sort of thing one kills for.”

“People can be mighty touchy about their reputations. Especially artistic types.”

Thinking of the courtroom battles between Montrose and Jeremy, Laura had to agree. Hesitantly, Laura opened the card case they had found in the top drawer of Erika's desk. It contained her New York State driving licence, a couple of credit cards and, tucked inside the back flap, Geoff's business card. Until then, Laura had only known Geoff's first name, but here it was: Geoffrey Hamilton, partner in a law firm with a Wall Street address.

“Find something?” asked Karen.

Laura handed her the card. “That's the man Erika had a relationship with. But it's over. He broke it off not long before she came here.”

“
He
broke it off?”

“Apparently he decided he couldn't leave his family. Erika was badly hurt, but I have the feeling she was beginning to get over it.”

“If he's the one who did the breaking off, it doesn't give him much of a motive.”

“Maybe I should call him at his office. He has a right to know about Erika. Do you have any objection?”

“I've been given an office in Donald Cameron Hall to work from. Let's make the call from there.” Karen glanced at her watch. “They're probably out to lunch in New York, but it's worth a try. Here's a calling card number you can use.”

Geoff Hamilton wasn't in his office, nor was he out to lunch. He was out of the country on business, his secretary said in imperious tones, but if Laura cared to leave her name and telephone number he would get the message when he called in and would be in touch with her. Karen frowned thoughtfully when Laura hung up. “Interesting that he's out of the country at the same time his ex-lover was killed. When he calls, Mr. Hamilton will have to verify his whereabouts for the last twenty-four hours.”