Valley of the Lost (4 page)

Angry footsteps pounded up the stairs and down the hall.

Moonlight. Molly. Her poor Moonlight.

“I might as well retire for all the time I’m spending at the store.” Andy came through the door. “Tell your daughter that adult children should be living on their own. I was in the middle of signing up a big group for a family-reunion weekend kayaking trip when Molly marched in demanding that I lend her the car. As that would have left me stranded, I hurried through with the family.”

“Did they sign up?”

“Thankfully, yes.”

“You’ve found someone to replace Duncan as tour guide then?”

“You know Jeff who fills in now and again for that company up the valley? He’s been looking for regular work. I think he’ll do. Now all I need is someone to look after the books.” He glared at his wife, the office manager. “And to be left alone to run my company.”

“I have been,” Lucky said, “away from work for precisely six hours. Quite understandably the entire business has collapsed into ruins in my absence, but one must make accommodations. Suppose I died suddenly, what would you do then?”

“Don’t joke, Lucky.” Andy rummaged through the cupboards. “Ah, there you are.” He grabbed a bag of peanuts in the shell.

Overhead, a door slammed.

“As you aren’t using it, Molly can take your car to get back to town. I have to go.”

“We have to talk, Andy,” Lucky said. “About Moonlight.”

“Okay. Later. Bye.” He ran out, clutching the peanuts.

Lucky looked at Miller. Although the baby resisted, his eyes began to close. Andy’s car started up and pulled out of the driveway.

Moonlight slammed another door.

After she’d been injured in the horrible conclusion to the Montgomery murder last month, Moonlight had gone back to work as soon as possible. She’d reluctantly visited the psychologist the police department used for officers who’d experienced trauma on the job. After a week, she’d blown the therapist off as a waste of time, taken leave, and gone to Vancouver. To visit friends, she told her mother. Lucky knew that Moonlight had no friends in Vancouver. Graham’s grave was in Calgary, where his parents lived. She suspected her daughter had gone to visit the spot where Graham died. An alley in the Downtown Eastside. Lucky called Terry Richards, a good friend who’d recently moved to the coast, and asked her to go down to the Eastside and look for Moonlight. Terry had found the girl, squatting in the alley, holding a bouquet of deep purple roses, amid the detritus of Canada’s most notorious neighborhood. Lucky’d asked her friend merely to check on Moonlight, but Terry stepped forward and, not saying a word, held out her hand. Moonlight gripped it and allowed herself to be pulled to her feet and led toward the lights of the street. She dropped the flowers into the alley behind her.

Graham and Moonlight had been engaged, waiting until she got her Masters’ degree in Social Work from the University of Victoria before getting married. But Graham had died, in a totally preventable incident, working Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Moonlight quit the MSW program, drifted aimlessly for a while, and then suddenly announced that she was going to become a police officer.

As much as that career decision had horrified Lucky, she’d been slowly, and somewhat reluctantly, coming to realize that the choice might have been the right one for her daughter. Moonlight was regaining her confidence, her strength. And, to Lucky’s delight, the girl had begun to think about dating again. Encouraged by Lucky herself into a catastrophic situation, Moonlight went on her first date since Graham, only to be horribly betrayed. At first she appeared to handle it well, and Lucky breathed a sigh of relief. But then Moonlight had her hair cut: the new look startling, dramatic. Andy told her she looked good, but Lucky feared the cut was a sign of something deeper. And then Moonlight went to Vancouver.

To mourn at the site of Graham’s death.

Terry had gathered the girl up, walked her to her car, and driven ten hours to Trafalgar to deliver her to her parents’ door.

For two days, Moonlight played with Sylvester in the garden, took long walks along the river, listened to music in her room.

On the third morning, Constable Smith put on her uniform, the one with the blue stripe down the pant leg, the badge of the Trafalgar City Police (since 1895) on the shoulder, Kevlar vest, belt heavy with equipment, including the black gun her mother hated so much, and went back to work.

Nothing, Lucky knew, had been resolved.

Chapter Four

As John Winters walked into the GIS office, his partner, Detective Ray Lopez, was carefully removing a few dead leaves from the row of African violets he tended on the sunny windowsill overlooking George Street. He had not been happy to return from his daughter’s wedding to find that Winters hadn’t bothered to water them. Two of the plants almost died, and Lopez was carefully nursing them back to health, tossing angry glances at Winters every time he did so.

Looking nothing like his name might suggest, Ray Lopez was blue-eyed and redheaded, pale with a splash of freckles across his cheeks. He’d been adopted by a Spanish family. The Celtic looks were a startling contrast to his sometimes casual Latin habits.

Winters dropped into a chair and rolled it across the floor. “Heroin overdose for sure, Doc says.” He looked at the painting on the wall. His ugly words a sharp contrast to the scene of a child playing in a mountain meadow filled with yellow flowers.

“Poor kid.” Lopez shook his head. He was a good bit shorter than Winters, compact muscle slowly turning to fat on his wife’s famous cooking and meals served at their legendary family gatherings. He had four daughters of his own, and a soft spot for young women in trouble. “Regular user?”

“Apparently not. Tracks on her arms, but Lee says they’re more than a year old, at least, and she couldn’t see anything more recent. Except for yesterday’s, of course.”

“Only takes one.”

“Yup.”

“Who was she?”

“There’s the funny thing, I don’t know. No last name, no friends I can find. No sign of a boyfriend. Gave cash to her roommate to pay the rent, never got any mail. Kept to herself, her and her baby. Lucky Smith said she came to the support center sometimes. I’ll pop by and talk to Lucky later, ask if she’s remembered a last name since we talked.”

“You got any idea where she might have gotten the stuff?”

“I hate to think it might have been here in Trafalgar. Check with your guy if he’s seen the dead girl with any of the people he’s watching. If so, it’s bad news.”

Marijuana was plentiful in Trafalgar; plentiful, inexpensive and, according to the users, of the highest quality. Harder drugs were not unknown. Lately a bit of heroin had been spreading through the Kootenays, and the RCMP thought it originated in Trafalgar. Lopez was working hard trying to find the source.

“There may be a complication,” Winters said. “There were signs of restraint around Ashley’s wrists and ankles, very recent, put there within a day or two, Lee said. And it looks as if the girl struggled against them.”

“Sex games gone beyond her control? Maybe she was a working girl?”

“That’s what I thought, at first. But the roommate says Ashley never left the baby.”

Lopez laughed. A laugh without mirth. “After all these years in this job, John, nothing would surprise me. It’s possible she specialized in turning tricks for guys who get a kick out of doing mommy while baby watches. You might want to have the kid checked out.”

Winters looked into his partner’s blue eyes, and his stomach turned over. But Lopez was right. “I’ll get Barb to call a public health nurse to have a look. Ashley paid her rent in cash. Like the heroin, she had to get the money from somewhere. Someone has to know who she is.”

Winters rubbed his thumb across the face of his watch. “The paper called earlier, looking for a quote,” he said, to himself as much as to Lopez. Winters often thought out loud; he liked to have a sounding board. “Haven’t had a chance to call them back yet. We’re not letting anything out about the cause of death, or that we think it’s suspicious. Just saying we’d like to talk to people who knew her. She went out most days, the roommate said. In the morning.” He stood up and went to stand at the window. The sun was shining, but it was raining. A laughing couple, young, happy, ran up the hill, one arm around each other’s waist, the other trying to fend off the raindrops. It wouldn’t matter if they got wet, he thought, they’d have fun drying each other off. Jolene, who worked at Big Eddie’s, came down the hill, the beads in her hair bouncing behind her.

He idly stroked the leaf of one of Ray’s violets.

“Step away from the plant,” Lopez said, his voice pitched low and slow to make him sound like an American TV cop. “And no one gets hurt.”

“Sorry. Forgot.” Winters turned back to face the room. “Okay, this is how we’re going to play it. You have to remain on the heroin case. We have too much going on to drop it now, and anyway there might be a connection with the girl Ashley. You don’t have any more daughters getting married this summer, do you?”

Lopez grinned. “Vacation all finished for the year, boss. Although I do have a ticket in tonight’s big lottery. Thirty mil on the line.”

“That ticket wins and we’ll be closing the whole department. We’re all in on it. I’ll back you up and take the Ashley case. In my gut, I think she was killed. Tied up and shot full of heroin. Whether the dosage was intended to be enough to kill her’s for the courts to decide. But even if she was tied up, quote-unquote, voluntarily,” he made marks in the air with his hands, “and took the drug of her own free will, I intend to find out who and where she got it from. We done?”

“Done, boss.”

Winters walked down the hall to the office administrator’s office.

She was at her desk. Typing with a speed that had her fingers a blur of motion. Barb was the longest serving member of the department. Even more than Jim Denton, the daytime front-desk constable. The young guys joked that over the ages Denton had worn an imprint of his big boots into the floor underneath the console.

“Barb,” Winters said, very politely. They were always polite to Barb, otherwise she might report her displeasure to the Chief Constable, who lived in fear of her. “Can you please find out who the Ashley Doe baby’s been placed with? Then find a public health nurse and set up an appointment for us to go and have a look at him. When you have a minute, but sooner would be better than later.”

“Sure,” she said.

“And remind me what the number for the
Gazette
is. For some reason I keep forgetting.”

“I’ll e-mail it to you,” she said. “Or you’ll lose it between here and your office.”

“Thanks. The cop brain is genetically programmed to avoid any and all contact with journalists. I couldn’t remember that number if I tried.”

“But you won’t try. You haven’t told me what you’ll be bringing to the annual summer pot luck at my place.” Barb turned back to her computer. “I expect the Winters’ family specialty.”

“We’re working on making a decision. It’s not easy.” He himself couldn’t cook anything that didn’t involve a microwave, and Eliza was worse. They’d have to buy something, and hope it looked homemade. As always, the thought of his wife lifted his heart just a bit. Twenty-five years of enthusiastic sex verses home cooked meals. He’d always known that he’d made the right choice.

***

Lucky Smith, nee Lucy Casey, had never had a fondness for the police. Pigs, she and her friends called them in their youth. She’d been arrested for assaulting a police officer at the infamous Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968. When, in her opinion, the police had rioted. She’d worn that arrest as a badge of honor for many years. She’d been a sophomore at the University of Seattle when her boyfriend, a math student who failed his year because he spent more time on campus politics than on math, had been drafted. Andy Smith had asked her to come to Canada with him. Until the day he died, Andy’s father, Andrew Smith Senior, had refused to have anything to do with his draft-dodging son.

But Andy Smith Junior and Lucy Casey had settled in Trafalgar where they’d set about making a life and a family of their own.

With one child a lawyer for a big oil company and the other a cop, Lucky sometimes reflected on the irony.

She’d finished feeding Miller, and was settling the baby down for a nap when the phone rang. Sergeant Winters asking if he could stop by to talk about Ashley. Moonlight aside, Lucky still didn’t care much for the police, force of habit perhaps, but there was something about John Winters that made her think she could be persuaded to change her mind. He was in his late-forties, early fifties maybe. Tall and lean and long-legged, with short black and white hair and a neat silver mustache. Few men these days could carry off a mustache without looking gay, but John Winters managed. When they were in college, Andy had sported a highly-fashionable “Fu Manchu” mustache that dripped down the sides of his chin. Blond, for heaven’s sake. The very thought of it made her cringe.

Lucky heard the car before she saw it, and went to the door to greet her visitors. John had brought company. A short fat woman, with dull brown hair tied in a tight bun and round red cheeks got out of the van.

John was dressed in casual beige pants and a loose brown shirt. The shirt, she knew from asking Moonlight, was worn untucked to cover his gun, baton, and handcuffs.

“Alice,” Lucky said with genuine pleasure. “What brings you here?”

Alice Stanton flushed, and looked for John Winters to answer.

“I’m sorry to bother you, Lucky, but I need Alice to have a look at the baby. Miller, is it?”

“Yes. But he’s sleeping.”

“I’ll try not to disturb him, Lucky,” the nurse said, giving her an uncomfortable smile. “But, well, it’s required, you see.”

“He’s perfectly fine. You saw him last night, John. I haven’t starved him in the meantime.”

“You’re not being accused of anything, Lucky. Please, let Mrs. Stanton check the child out. I have a few questions to ask you about Ashley anyway. Is that coffee I smell? I haven’t had a cup since breakfast.”

Lucky stood aside and let the visitors in. She could tell when she was being manipulated. Coffee indeed. Like cops didn’t drink coffee all day long. Jody Burke may have sic’ed the authorities onto her, but Lucky knew they’d find nothing wrong with the way she was looking after Miller. However, it did seem rather unusual to find an officer as senior as Sergeant Winters sent out to check on an abandoned child case.

“While I’m here,” he said, “I’d like to ask you a few questions, Lucky. If you don’t mind?”

Whether she minded or not was irrelevant. “Pull up a chair. I’ll get the coffee.”

Alice found the baby, asleep in his bed by the oven, without directions. The good people of Trafalgar had gathered enough baby goods to supply every child in Oliver Twist’s orphanage. Formula, jars of baby food, clothes, blankets, mobiles, books, rattles, toys. Plus baseball bats, footballs, building blocks, and puzzles. Even a pair of soccer shoes, which would fit a healthy teenager. Everything but a stroller. Fortunately, the women at the support center had found an old-fashioned baby carriage, the type called a pram, with big wheels and a high handlebar. It might have been the height of fashion in World War II, but it was better than keeping the baby in a basket on the floor.

Alice leaned over and gathered the sleeping bundle into her arms. “Why don’t I leave you two to chat,” she said. Sounding as falsely cheerful as a character in a Grade One school play.

“Sure,” Lucky said.

Alice carried the baby into the living room.

“I haven’t had him for twenty-four hours.” Lucky poured coffee into mugs. “No time to call my coven to gather and practice our child abuse rituals.”

“I don’t want coffee, so please sit down,” Winters said. His eyes were dark and serious, his mouth set in a tight line. “This child was found in highly unusual circumstances. You’d be surprised at some of the things that go on in this world.”

She fell into a chair. “Surprised, probably not. I’ve been around the block a few times myself. I’m sorry, John. I sometimes make inappropriate comments when I’m feeling tense. I made chocolate chip cookies a bit ago, would you like one? I don’t cook much any more, what with the store and all my activities, but now that I’m home with Miller, when he was sleeping I discovered an urge to bake. Probably something going back to the stone age—throw that mastodon on the fire while the kids are busy playing with rocks.”

The edges of his mouth turned up. “A cookie would be nice.”

Miller cried out in the other room, and Lucky’s ears pricked up.

“You know Alice is taking care,” John said.

“She’s a good woman.” Lucky got to her feet and pulled a square tin down from the shelf and arranged cookies on a white plate. And tried not to listen to the sounds coming from the next room. Alice wouldn’t find any signs of abuse on the baby. But Lucky worried, nevertheless.

Winters took a cookie. It was rich and heavy with butter and chocolate. Lucky served coffee. “You might think you don’t need it,” she said, “but nothing goes better with cookies than good coffee.”

He accepted a cup and added neither milk nor sugar. “Tell me about Ashley. Last night you said you didn’t know much about her, not even her last name. Have you remembered anything?”

Lucky nibbled on a cookie of her own. “I’ve been thinking about it all day. She never gave us a last name, and we don’t insist. The purpose of the center is to help young mothers with basic skills—caring for their babies, of course, but also things like preparing nutritious meals for older children. That’s what I do there. I give cooking lessons. Nothing fancy; I just try to show them how to prepare a healthy, satisfying meal on a budget, and discuss shopping tips. You’d be surprised at how many of these young mothers think choosing food and preparing their own meals is too expensive. And too difficult. They only need to be shown how much better value, and nutrition, they get from fresh food. We teach them how easy it can be.”

“When did Ashley start coming to the center?”

“A month ago, maybe. Six weeks.” The girl had been an enigma. Hanging at the back of the group, reluctant to come in. Sometimes gone before Lucky had finished the class. But always with her baby tied to her side in a wrap-around blanket. “She bottle-fed Miller,” Lucky said. “We supplied her with formula. It’s one of the services we provide, although we encourage the women to breast feed. I remember that because it’s unusual around here. Young women these days are so keen on breast feeding. And more power to them.”