Under the Bridge (18 page)

“Thanks a lot,” he said, but he laughed. “So you had Josephine take you to the scene. Can you tell me where it was?”

“It's by this bridge. We went under the bridge with her, and she showed us this log. That's where Reena was sitting. Josephine told us she went up to Reena and put a cigarette right out on her forehead, just
burned
a hole in her, and then everybody surrounded Reena and started beating up on her. They just beat the living crap out of her. Josephine told me she was screaming.” Anya shook her head. She was talking to herself more than to the police officer now. “I'd like to see how Josephine would go through pain like that. Just imagine that you were that person getting beaten up and thrown in the water, with your arms
broken. That is so….” She paled then, and it seemed as if she'd been hurt herself, as if she was wounded too.

“Did she say who beat Reena up? Did she give you any names?”

“Well, there was Josephine and another girl who lives with Josephine. She's a big chick. I forget her name. She's got blackish hair. She thinks she's a Miss Tough Girl. Whatever. She thinks she can beat up anybody. Josephine told me Reena was screaming! So they knocked her out by kicking her in the head, and then they took her to the other side.”

“The other side?”

“Yeah. I don't believe that part. How could they get her to the other side when she was unconscious? How could they bring her all the way over the bridge and then down to the other side? They would have to do that because there's no way Reena could have walked that far. We asked her, and she just said, ‘I have no clue.'”

“But you do believe Reena's dead?” Scott Green asked, thinking,
This is one
bizarre
story.

“Yeah, I do! She's been planning this for a while. She wanted to kill Reena because Reena lied about some guys, and because Reena was jealous of her beauty, or something. Her beauty? Come on! Give it up! Jealous of her beauty? She's kind of ugly. Sorry, anyway, she told me they killed her on Friday night around 11:00. I don't even get the point of killing someone. What's the point of doing that? What's the point of beating somebody up? Josephine is so proud of it. She goes around telling everybody. Well, someone could go right behind her back and just go to the police. I mean, that's what me and Nadja did.”

Scott Green nodded, and the girl (“a typical teenager,” he would later say) continued.

“And the other thing I don't get is: what was Reena thinking? Wouldn't she think, ‘Hey, something's up. There's all these girls who don't like me and they want me to go under a bridge.'” Anya reached for a cigarette and lit the match on the zipper of her black boot. “I'd figure it out right there. I wouldn't even go under the bridge. You know why? Because I, like, watched this movie once, and this one girl brought this other girl to a dark place and beat the living crap out of her and killed her. But the girl, the killer, she left one of her earrings behind. She lost it, accidentally I guess, and the cops found it when they were investigating, and they traced it back to the girl, the killer. So when we were down there today, I was like, ‘Josephine, did you leave any earrings? Did you
leave anything they could find if they investigate?' She goes, ‘Nope. I was being very smart. Took all my jewelry off. Went there, beat her up. I made sure I had no blood on me. I made sure that she had no blood of mine.'”

Sergeant Scott Green interrupted Anya then as soon as she reached down to put out her cigarette on the precinct floor.

“Anya, how would
you
suggest we solve this case?” he asked, and if there was a slight condescension, she was used to this in the voice of older men.

“I would suggest that me or Nadja talk to Josephine's friend on the phone and get her to admit it. You guys could record her on the phone talking about killing Reena. And if you guys had a tape recorder, I could record Josephine on the phone. You'd see how stupid she is. She is a really stupid girl. I could get her to admit everything. She would just tell me exactly what she did. She thinks no one will find out what she did. Well,
duh.
There's Reena's family. She thinks nobody will find the body. Well, come on … you guys should
investigate,
you know. Try and look for something, like blood, down at the place where it all happened.”

“Sure.”

“And do you know those people who go underwater to find a body? I think that should happen because she could be down at the bottom. And after everything is sorted out, I think Josephine should be arrested. She planned this, and it happened. And Reena's been missing since Friday, and when Nadja called her mother, she said she sounded so miserable and sad. Christmas is coming up. This is going to be the hardest thing for her parents. I think I have the right to tell you guys this. I do have the right.”

“Of course you do.”

“Just imagine the pain she was in, and Josephine's so proud of herself,” Anya said, but she noticed the constable seemed like he wasn't listening to her anymore and perhaps was even smiling. She had offered to tape the killer, but he did not take her up on this suggestion.

She looked at the officer once more, before leaving the room.

“Your hair is really weird,” she said, and she smiled at him while he walked her to the door.

Nadja was more forthright with Scott Green and she did not even notice the strange pattern of his hair. “I saw the cops yesterday at Seven
Oaks, and I almost had a heart attack. I was like, ‘Oh my God. What are they doing here?' I asked you guys specifically to keep this confidential.”

“We will. We've only told the supervisor at Seven Oaks because we had to get permission to speak to Dusty and Josephine.”

“Well, you can't trust people. I certainly don't. Anyway, Josephine took me to the bridge this morning, and she showed me the place where it happened. It's on the other side. They finished beating her up and threw her in the water. I don't know how they got her to the other side. I think she mentioned something about low tide, so maybe they dragged her over there if the tide was really low. I asked Josephine how she got her over there, but she said she wasn't there. All I know is Josephine set it up. She's planned this for a long time. She didn't do it, but she was the one who caused it. She did most of the beating, and Kelly killed her.”

“Why did she want Reena dead?”

“She told me the first day we met. I was going to bed, and she just starts telling me. She said Reena lied to her all the time and made up stories, and Josephine got pissed off. She said Reena was jealous of her and hated her for her beauty. She told me she knew how she wanted it to go, in her mind. She wanted Reena killed. And then Kelly phoned her up on Saturday morning and said, ‘She's dead.' Kelly drowned her in the water.”

“And you believe her?”

“At first I thought she was bullshitting me, but now, I do sort of believe it. But it does bother me, the part about her getting to the other side. If Reena was heavy, how could they carry her? I find that weird. I don't get that part. But you guys said Reena is really missing, and she hasn't been found. Josephine gave me Reena's mom's number, and her mom said Reena hasn't been home since Friday and she's missing and she's worried. So just in case it's true, I thought I should tell you guys. Maybe it's a fluke. I don't know. Maybe those girls found out a girl named Reena is missing and they decided to make up this story. I just don't know if it's true, but I want to know if it's true! I haven't had much sleep since Josephine keeps bragging to me about this fucking murder shit. My sister thinks it's true. I just don't know, but if it is true, I guess I'm going to pack myself up and get out of that house. I'm not going to share a room with those two psychopaths.”

“Yes, that could be hard on the sleep. Now, do—”

“Josephine's pretty stupid, you know. I keep asking her all these questions, and she's not even getting suspicious. Dusty's really worried though. She's miserable. Oh, I know something else!”

“Go ahead.”

“She said they ditched Reena's shoes downtown in the garbage. And she said Reena's jacket is missing. They went back on Saturday, and they looked for Reena, and they looked for her clothes, and they couldn't find this Adidas jacket. She said there was blood on the jacket. Somehow, somewhere. And another thing, I'm scared for my little sister. I don't want her being taken back to school in a cop car. Can you get her a taxi?”

“Yes, we'll have a taxi take you back.”

Nadja sighed. The thought of anything cruel or violent happening to Anya troubled her, and she suddenly wanted to leave the station. “That Mr. Officer, I spoke to before I met you, he was being a real shithead to me. Sometimes you cops are nice, but he was
really
mean to me.”

“We'll make sure that the officer who takes you back is nice.”

Nadja sighed once more. She did not ask for anything in return for her bravery, and no medal of honor was offered on this particular day. She thought again of the waters and the darkness. She raised her voice suddenly, and she stared at the detective so directly that he looked away.

“I told you this on Wednesday,” she said. “I've been wondering why haven't you guys searched the water.”

“Well, we need more help to find out if this did in fact happen.”

She raised her voice even louder now. “I want to know for a fact if this happened or not!”

“So do we,” he said, meekly, agreeably.

“I'm getting told this is true. I'm giving all this information to you. I don't even know if it is true. All I know is this girl Reena is missing.” She screamed then, at the silent room, and the silent man. She screamed: “How many Reenas are there in this goddamn world?”

T
WO YOUNG GIRLS
have come forward and told us they've heard about a girl who was killed. It's our belief that it is a suspicious circumstance. We don't have a list of suspects, though it seems that they're all young girls living in the vicinity of View Royal. The girl, the alleged victim, is named Reena Virk. She has been missing for a week.”

A week? Sergeant John Bond thought to himself. A week, and we're just talking about this now? John Bond, a charismatic detective with a shaved head and abundant energy, had been called in to attend the Joint Forces meeting. Bond was considered one of the best detectives in View Royal, for, as one admirer says, “He just gets people to confess everything. They feel like he's their big brother. He's the kind of guy you just want to bare your soul to.”

“Maybe she's walking the stroll on Government Street,” he said.

“No. There's no indication that she's been involved in the sex trade.”

“Well, has she ever run away before?”

“Yes. She was at Kiwanis for a few days. But she's always been accounted for.”

Okay. Every night for the past fourteen years, she's accounted for, and now she's not accounted for—for seven days, John Bond thought to himself. Something's happened here. He glanced at the file on the table marked “Barusha: Suspicious Circumstances.”

“Any boyfriend in the picture?” Sergeant Ross “Roscoe” Poulton asked. He was a healthy-looking man, with a neatly trimmed mustache and piercing blue eyes. Like Bond, he'd been a cop since the age of eighteen, and yet due to the peaceful nature of the island, both men had dealt with fewer than a dozen homicides.

“No boyfriend,” Shannon Lance said, and she handed the two detectives the photo provided by the Virk family. It was Reena's last yearbook
photo, and in it, her lips were almost black. The photo was not particularly flattering and yet anyone could see the clear hope in her closed, broad smile.

“There was possibly some type of encounter under the Craigflower Bridge,” the detectives were told.

A list of names—in police lingo “the players”—was written on a blackboard. Josephine, Dusty, Kelly, Laila.

“Some of these girls are supposed to be from Shoreline School, Krista,” an officer said to the young constable who worked in the Street Crime Unit in View Royal. “Do you know any of the girls who might be involved?”

Krista thought of the young girls she often encountered when she broke up parties on Shoreline field. The only Kelly she knew was Kelly Ellard, the daughter of her husband's good friend Lawrence Ellard. She'd known Kelly for years, even gone camping with her.

In a small town coincidence, Krista had been at Kelly's house last Saturday, the night after Reena Virk had gone missing, sitting in the kitchen, eating chili. Her husband and Kelly's father drank beer and talked about their slow pitch softball team.

She remembered now how Kelly had come downstairs, saying she was going out to “look for a missing girl.” Seeing Krista, the cop, at the kitchen table, Kelly's face went white. “My husband said, ‘What's Kelly's problem? She looks like she saw a ghost.'”

“A light bulb went on,” Krista recalls of that moment in the Joint Forces meeting. “I thought to myself, ‘This is going to get ugly.'”

“I knew Kelly better than any investigator on the file, and I thought, ‘She's the type who could get away with this.' I wanted to walk away.”

Out loud, she said, “The only Kelly I know is Kelly Ellard.”

Another detective spoke up. “We got the records from Shoreline and Kelly Ellard is the only Kelly in the school.”

“What do you think we should do?” the detectives asked Krista, for she seemed to be the one with the most knowledge of the teenage players.

“I have a kind of bond with this girl Maya. She's a good friend of Kelly's, and if Kelly was involved in something at Shoreline, chances are Maya would have been there.”

“Why don't you talk to Kelly if you know her?” a detective asked.