The Survivor (30 page)

‘I’ve qualified on this one,’ he noted.

‘Chief Chambers understands your concern, so he’s given you an option. If you’re that concerned about being issued the new gun, then you have the right to take yourself off the road and remove yourself from the case, effective immediately, until you’ve requalified. So what’s it going to be, Striker? Relinquishment, or Leave?’

Striker let out a heavy breath. As much as he hated to admit it, the Deputy Chief was right on this one. The exigent circumstances of the incident had long since passed, and for him to argue that the incident was ongoing because the gunman was still out there somewhere was nothing more than a technicality – especially when he was being given a new Sig as a replacement. Besides, the last thing he wanted to do was piss off the Chief. Chambers was a good man; Striker respected him.

‘Well?’ Laroche asked again.

Striker said nothing. He ejected the loaded magazine, withdrew his pistol, racked the slide and popped out the final round. He safed the pistol, locked the slide back, then placed it down on the hood of the Deputy Chief’s car.

Laroche seized the gun.

Striker said nothing. He took the new gun case, turned, and walked away. He reached the undercover cruiser, unlocked the driver’s side door and was about to climb inside when Laroche called out to him a final time.

‘And Detective?’

Striker turned, waited.

‘Just so we’re clear, you’re still in breach, as far as I’m concerned. I’ll be submitting my report to Internal before the day’s end.’

‘Good idea, sir,’ Striker said. ‘Do me a favour though. On your way there, keep an eye out for a guy wearing a red hockey mask – you may not have heard this yet, but he shot up a high school yesterday morning.’

Laroche’s face twisted into an angry expression, and he looked ready to say more, but Striker never gave him the chance. He hopped inside the cruiser, slammed the door, and started the engine. Once Felicia closed her own door, he tore off down Burrard Street.

The coroner was waiting.

Fifty-Four

The morgue, located at Vancouver General, is accessible only through the emergency parking on the north side. In the eight o’clock darkness, the doorway looked sinister and dangerous.

Striker parked the cruiser in Police Parking and took the cargo elevator down to the lower levels. As the booth descended, it jarred several times, causing Felicia’s claustrophobia to kick in. She let out a strangled sound.

Striker gave her a smile. ‘Hope it doesn’t get stuck.’

‘You’re such a shit.’

‘I got stuck in an elevator one time. Took over two hours before—’

‘
Jacob
.’

He let it go. The elevator continued down, stopped hard, and the doors clanked opened. Felicia sighed with relief and bolted out like she’d been shot from a cannon. Striker followed, and they walked into the morgue antechamber.

The first thing Striker noticed was the caustic stink of body cleansers. The scent was unmistakable – almost flowery, in a sick sort of way. Then he saw the three rows of refrigerated storage chambers. Each one was devoid of nameplates – except for the final three, which read
Sherman Chan
,
John Doe 1
and
John Doe 2
.

John Doe 1, the headless gunman, had originally been labelled
Que Wong
, but that name had been crossed out with thick black felt after the discovery of the real Que Wong down by the docks.

Striker had no idea who John Doe 2 was.

He stared at the chambers, losing himself, and his thoughts fell back to the past. The last time he’d been here, standing within these dreary grey walls, under the fake illumination of the humming fluorescent lights, was two years ago – just a few days after Amanda had finally succumbed to her injuries. He’d come here to identify the body – a legal necessity – and hopefully find some peace with all that had gone on.

He had found none, and to this day nothing had changed.

Felicia caught his expression, or maybe it was his posture, or maybe she just knew – she was a woman after all; they were good at that – and she gently touched his arm.

‘You okay?’

‘I’m okay.’

‘Hasn’t been that long since you’ve been here. And after all you went through, well . . .’ Her lower lip hung open as if she’d lost the words, and she gave him a distant look before speaking again. ‘You really need to tell Courtney about Amanda, Jacob.’

‘Jesus Christ, you’re bringing that up now? Here?’

‘She needs to know.’

‘Look, Felicia,’ he started, but a voice interrupted him.

‘Detectives?’

Striker turned and found the coroner standing in the doorway that led to the autopsy room. She was a tall woman, almost six foot, and thin – supermodel, finger-down-your-throat thin. Her long auburn hair was rolled up into a bun and tucked under a blue hairnet. The glasses she wore were large and only magnified her deep blue eyes. Morgue apparel aside, she was a Death Goddess. A knockout, but in a superficial way. Everything about her looked fake, cosmetic, manufactured. All plastic and paint.

Striker recalled her from his previous time of being here.

She walked to within a few feet of them and displayed her perfectly capped teeth. ‘Kirstin Dunsmuir. Medical Examiner.’

Felicia introduced herself. When Dunsmuir looked at Striker, her eyes narrowed and she asked, ‘Have we met before?’

‘You worked on my wife; she died two years ago.’

‘Oh.’ She uttered the word without emotion, then got down to business. ‘I don’t have time to talk. I’m needed at Burnaby General.’

‘Burnaby General?’ Striker said. ‘You don’t got enough on your plate now?’

‘It’s personal.’

He gave her a hard look. ‘Important enough to override school shootings? Your evidence will help me catch this prick.’

She said nothing back, and only offered him an icy stare. Striker could tell he would get nowhere with her. He wasn’t into wasting his time.

‘You at least get the report done?’ he asked.

Dunsmuir took off her gloves, the latex snapping against her skin. ‘It’s not my final issue, but it’s as near complete as it can get without the toxicology results.’

‘I need to see it,’ he said.

‘It’s in there,’ she told him. ‘Black binder on the counter, right next to Sherman Chan’s body. Feel free to look through it, but leave it where you find it. Call me if there are any questions. I should be done in a couple of hours.’

As Dunsmuir turned to leave, Striker called out to her, ‘You get a time of death on Raymond Leung yet?’

She never stopped walking. ‘Wednesday,’ she said. ‘Sometime between three and eight in the morning.’

That was the morning of the shootings. The time of death was the last detail Striker had needed for him to confirm that Raymond Leung was not in fact Red Mask. He looked over at Felicia and saw that she had made the connection.

‘Wrong blood type
and
outside the time of death,’ Striker said, and couldn’t help but feel angry that no one had initially listened to him. He stared down the hall at Kirstin Dunsmuir who was still walking away from them, her high-heeled shoes clicking oddly on the painted grey cement. It was all he could do to look at her without being irritated. Maybe it was the ici-ness of her emotions. Maybe it was just him, frustrated and tired. He wasn’t sure. She got in the elevator, the door clanged shut, and the booth made loud grinding noises as it went up.

‘Probably scheduling her boob job,’ Felicia said.

Striker smiled, then turned and walked into the autopsy room.

The area where the bodies were located was labelled
Examination Room B
. Striker and Felicia stopped inside the doorway, smocked up, and put on latex gloves. Once done, they moved over to the nearest examination table. This one was labelled
John Doe 1
.

Better known as White Mask.

Striker studied him. To his frustration, when he scanned through the report binder, he found nothing new – save for one exception: the strange scars alongside the man’s ribs were listed as possible shrapnel wounds. Interesting. Mode of death had been a gunshot wound. Not surprising, considering the man’s head had been blown right off.

Identity remained unknown.

Striker bypassed the body and approached the second examination table. He studied the thin boy on it. There was a bullet-hole in his right cheek, the skin around the area blackened and pulled inwards. The skin of his face was looser than when Striker had last seen him, and a large Y-incision had been carved in his chest, then sewn back together.

It was Sherman Chan. Black Mask. The one Laroche had deemed ‘possibly innocent’.

This was the kid Striker had killed.

He looked down at the boy. Here, dead on the table, he looked so young. Too young to be the monster he had turned out to be. He smelled bad. Of old blood and strange-scented body cleaners.

Felicia took the black binder from the counter top and flipped it open. Striker gave her time to read the report. He looked over the body and waited for her word. After a good ten minutes, she finally spoke.

‘How many shots you think you fired?’

He shrugged. ‘I don’t know, I can’t even recall changing mags.’

‘Me neither, it’s all a friggin’ blur,’ she agreed. ‘Not that it matters. He took it twice. The Forensic Firearms Unit hasn’t confirmed the round yet but, according to Doctor Beautiful’s notes, they’re going to have to test your gun first to see if the bullets match. Right now they’re proceeding under the assumption that everything matches.’

‘Of course.’ Striker picked up a pointer from a nearby tray and placed it perpendicular to the bullet-hole in the boy’s cheek. The path through was about a 120-degree angle.

‘Read me the path-following entry,’ he said.

She found the relevant section. ‘Entered through the zygo-matic arch, passed through the nasal cavity, deflected medially and inferiorly, and eventually, the remainder of the round got wedged in the rear of the skull at the posterior fissure of the parietal bone.’ She looked up and smiled. ‘I think that means head.’

Striker held his hand flat to the boy’s chest, right at nipple level, angled approximately ninety degrees.

‘And the second bullet?’ he asked.

‘Entrance wound was between ribs four and five, left side, right at the costo-vertebral joint – that would be the back of the rib, near the spine.’

‘I know where it is.’

Felicia nodded like she didn’t care, ran her finger down the page as she read: ‘Says here that Black Mask must’ve been spinning after you got him with the first round, because the second one hit almost dead centre. It passed right through the left lung and aorta, then exited through the costal cartilage. Says here, “The resultant shock from such an injury would most likely have been fatal”.’

Striker let the pointer drop to his side, then looked at the body for a long moment before finding Felicia’s eyes again.

‘The paragraph about the first bullet,’ he said. ‘It say anything about tissue damage inside the body?’

She scanned the notes. ‘Yeah, she’s listed a few things damaged by the bullet fragments. Occipitalis and trapezius muscles – and there’s a few notes here on brain matter. Why?’

‘What about the second bullet?’

She looked through the pages, shook her head. ‘None yet.’

He said nothing for a long moment, then called her over. She put the black binder back on the counter and joined him beside the dead body of Sherman Chan. When she was set, Striker pointed to the bullet-wound beside the boy’s sternum.

‘Look at that. Not the first entry hole – I have no problem with that – but the second one.’

She did. ‘Okay.’

‘Now look at this.’ He placed one hand under the boy’s left shoulder and one under the boy’s hip, rolled him onto his right side, then used a hand to stabilise him. ‘Look at the exit wound of the second bullet.’

‘Okay,’ she said again.

‘Describe the exit wound for me,’ he said.

She gave him an odd look, but said, ‘It’s probably a half-inch in diameter, I guess, and almost perfectly circular, except for the distended skin. And it’s relatively clean with distinct edges.’

‘That sound like a hollow-tip round to you?’

She paused. ‘Well, no, actually it doesn’t – but I doubt the pathologist—’

‘With all the killings over the past two days, she’s had even less sleep than us. She’s done her examination
assuming
the rounds were hollow-tips. But they weren’t.’

Felicia looked over the wound, noting, ‘That would explain why there was less internal tissue damage from the bullet fragments.’

‘Because there were no fragments – it wasn’t a frangible round.’

‘But that doesn’t make sense.’

‘It makes perfect sense. Sherman Chan was shot in the back – and by a Full Metal Jacket round. They shot their own, Felicia.’

Fifty-Five

‘I am glad that you know Sheung Fa,’ the old man said. ‘He is a good man to know. But this wound . . . the infection is very bad.’ He spoke the words softly, with a sense of practicality.

Red Mask heard them like a flutter of wings as he fell in and out of consciousness. He opened his eyes and glanced around the room. He saw shelf after shelf, each one covered with different-sized jars. Hundreds of jars. Containing roots, flowers, stalks, fermented creatures and many other things he could not even describe.

‘Very bad,’ the old man said again. ‘The arm may be lost.’

Red Mask felt removed. He looked from the flowers to the floor to the old television set, bolted high in the far corner of the room. At first glance it looked part of a video-surveillance system, all black and white and shoddy of picture, but then the BCTV News crest lit up the screen, and Red Mask realised he was simply looking at a very old television set.

The late-night news was on.
St Patrick’s Peril
.

Looking in that direction hurt Red Mask’s neck, and he had seen enough. He turned his eyes away from the screen.

‘Bullet . . . in shoulder . . .’ he murmured.