repeated what the nurse had told me. It didn’t seem to reassure him. He naturally wanted to go to the hospital immediately. “There’s nothing you can do,” I said. “She won’t even know you’re there.”
“They say that p-people in comas are aware of what g-goes on around them,” Wayne said.
“Maybe that’s true,” I said. “I don’t know.”
I wanted to be with her, too, so that someone she knew, besides her father, would be there when she woke up. Was it fair to tell Wayne not to go? Probably not. Definitely not, given how he felt about her. Let him get it out of his system, I thought. He’d be next to useless until he did. Besides, what could it hurt? There was something he wanted to get off his chest before he left, though.
“She shouldn’t have been alone,” he said, an edge of angry disapproval in his voice.
“In retrospect, you’re probably right,” I said. “But what do you think she’d have said if you’d said that to her?”
“Uh, she’d have t-told me to stick it in my eye.”
“I’m not sure she’d have picked that particular part of your anatomy,” I said. “But she wouldn’t have appreciated any suggestion that she isn’t capable of looking after herself.”
“Especially since she started taking those stupid karate lessons,” Mary-Alice said.
“She was studying k-kung fu,” Wayne said.
“Kung fu, feng shui,” Mary-Alice said dismissively. “Whatever, maybe it made her overconfident and she tried to fight rather than just let them take the goddamned truck and camera equipment.”
“I’m not sure robbery was the motive behind the attack,” I said. They both looked at me. “The woman who hired us to photograph the Wonderlust wasn’t the owner of the boat. The real owner is some numbered corporation. Anna Waverley likely wasn’t her real name, either. The real Anna Waverley is older. She and her husband own a sailboat at the same marina, though.”
“Waverley,” Mary-Alice said. “There’s something familiar about that name. I’ve heard it before.”
“Like here, yesterday?” I suggested.
She shook her head. “No. I’m sure I’ve heard it somewhere else. I can’t put my finger on it.” She shrugged. “Maybe her husband is one of David’s patients.”
“Why w-would someone hire us to t-take photographs of a b-boat they don’t own?” Wayne asked.
“I haven’t any idea. The police think it may have been a set-up to lure me or Bobbi — or maybe both of us — into a trap.”
“You can be a jerk sometimes, Tom,” my sister said. “But who would want to hurt you that much, or — better yet — Bobbi?”
“Another good question I don’t have an answer for,” I said.
In the end, Wayne went to see Bobbi, but was back within an hour. Bobbi was in the ICU, he reported, and only immediate family members were allowed to visit. She was still in a coma, but according to the nurse he talked to, she was stable, out of any immediate danger, and would probably be released from the ICU in a day or two.
“Was her father with her?” I asked.
“I d-don’t think so.”
If he wasn’t there, maybe later I could try passing myself off as her brother again.
We got back to work. At a few minutes past 1:30, Greg Matthias emerged from the elevator into the studio, sandy eyebrows rising at the mess. A semi-official visit, he said, explaining that they were treating Bobbi’s case as attempted murder, given the circumstances. Due to his association with Bobbi and me, he wasn’t the primary investigator, but his rank and seniority afforded him certain privileges. After he told me that there hadn’t been any change in Bobbi’s condition, I told him what I’d learned about Anna and Samuel Waverley from the marina operator that morning, and about my subsequent conversation with Detective Kovacs.
“Jim Kovacs is a good guy,” Matthias said. “And a good cop. But he doesn’t take kindly to civilians getting in the way of his investigations. None of us do, really.”
“I’ll be careful,” I said.
Matthias smiled thinly. “Kovacs and Henshaw interviewed the real Anna Waverley at her home in Point Grey this morning. The description you got from the marina operator is accurate as far at it goes. Kovacs described her to me as quite attractive, but cool and somewhat patronizing. ‘A redheaded ice queen’ is how he put it. Her husband, Samuel, is a fine art and antiques dealer. He has a gallery in Gastown. However, according Mrs. Waverley, he’s away on a buying trip in Europe with his assistant, a woman named Doris Greenwood, and isn’t due back for a week. Kovacs got the impression she wasn’t overjoyed that her husband was travelling around Europe with another woman, but that she wasn’t too upset by it, either. I don’t suppose it will come as any surprise to you that she denies hiring you to take pictures of the Wonderlust. She’s never heard of you and has no idea why anyone would impersonate her to sell it, especially as she doesn’t own it.”
“Does she know who does own it?”
“She confirms what you learned from the marina operator, that it’s owned by a numbered corporation and that they’ve been trying to sell it for some time. In the meantime, they rent it out for parties, business meetings, and such. She and her husband have been on it a couple of times, she says, but she has no idea who the real owner is. Kovacs isn’t sure he believes her,” he added.
“How reliable are his instincts?” I asked.
“After a while in this game, you get so you can read people. If he thinks she’s lying about something, she likely is.”
“Where was she last night?”
“When she was asked to account for her whereabouts, Kovacs said she was mildly offended, but she answered. She told him she runs from Jericho Beach to Granville Island and back a couple of times a week, usually stopping to check on the sailboat she and her husband keep in the same marina, before returning along the same route. Last evening she got to the marina around nine, a little later than usual, spent half an hour or so on her boat, then headed back. She didn’t talk to anyone and couldn’t say if anyone saw her or would remember her if they did.”
“If she runs along the shoreline path,” I said, “she’d have gone right by the place where Bobbi was found.”
“Kovacs says that when he pointed that out she was quite upset that she might have gone right past someone in the water without noticing. But the path is more than fifty metres back from the water at that point. Unless she detoured along the path through Cultural Harmony Grove east of the bridge, she couldn’t possibly have seen anything. Besides, the off-duty paramedic found Bobbi just before eleven and neither he or the doctors think she was in the water for more than twenty minutes to half an hour.”
“It doesn’t take half an hour to drown, does it?”
“No. Just a couple of minutes. The paramedic found her near shore by the docks under the bridge. Maybe whoever attacked her didn’t want to get his feet wet and dumped her in the shallows
