phone rang at 5:00 A.M. I was on Albion Street and I had my mother by the scruff of her soiled nightgown, yelling at her, shaking her and yelling, angry at something she’d said or done or maybe not done. It didn’t seem to matter. She flopped about like a rag doll, and it slowly entered my head that she was a rag doll, and I shook harder, watching with detachment as the head flopped from side to side. Then I heard the phone ringing far away. I held onto my mother with one hand and with the other groped behind me, slowly changing dimensions from the dreamworld to a high-rise hotel on 12th and Cambie.
“I thought you’d be up by now.” It was Duncan. He was sounding pert and jolly, designed, no doubt, to annoy me. When I didn’t answer, he continued. “She wasn’t amused.”
“It’s five in the morning.”
“No, it’s not. It’s eight. Anyway, I’ve got meetings booked all day and I wanted to get back to you on the Patsy thing.”
I pushed myself up to a sitting position and cleared my throat. “Shoot.” It sounded more like a croak than human language.
“She went all wooden and stared at me, didn’t say a thing for a minute, then said something warm and caring like ‘Good luck in your new position. Now you’ll have to excuse me.’ Then she reached for the phone and glared at me until I was out of the office. A real people person.”
I was slowly resurfacing. “That’s it?”
“Not quite.” I waited. Duncan was going to play this for all it was worth. “Well, of course I wanted to say goodbye to Lydia, who, by the way, wasn’t at her desk. So I waited a few minutes to see if she’d come back — “
“Out of Patsy’s line of vision.”
“Possibly. Anyway, I did happen to overhear Patsy asking for Bob. Lucky for him he wasn’t there, because she wasn’t very nice. Michelle was told to find him and get him up to the fifth ASAP.”
Good old Bob. Never in the right place at the right time. So Patsy knew I had the file by the end of yesterday’s workday, making her the most likely candidate for Bob’s office visitor when I called later that evening. My head had finally cleared enough for me to remember what I’d wanted to ask Duncan. I scrabbled for my briefcase, which was lying on the other bed.
“Duncan, can you do something else for me?” He didn’t reply, so I assumed he was calculating the extra hours he could tag on to his babysitting bill. I found the Network file and pulled out the remote reference search. “Could you find out who was in the building last year on October thirteenth between one-thirty and two in the afternoon?”
“You mean you want me to say goodbye to the commissionaire as well?”
“It would be a nice gesture.”
It was a bit of long shot, but sometimes long shots paid off. The NCST building is locked on the weekend. If someone had done that search from their office computer they would have to stop off at the commission-aires’ kiosk and sign out a key to get into the building. I was pretty sure that the commissionaires’ office would keep those records for several years back.
When I had hung up the phone I briefly considered pulling the covers up over my head and refusing to face the day, but instead I braced myself, rolled out of bed, and headed for the shower. I had lots of reading to do and I needed to get my alias in order. Bottom line, Elaine could be the key to this whole damn thing, and if I was going to get her onside I needed to be prepared and have all my wits about me.
chapter six
At 6:30 A.M. I packed up my briefcase and checked the inside pockets of my leather jacket. I had had the lining especially tailored to suit my job, and right now the hidden pockets held an evidence kit, a small flashlight, a set of lock picks, and a pepper spray, none of it exactly government issue. Between a light breakfast and heading out the door I had managed to scan Riesler’s latest review article on the state of genetic techniques for stock identification. It was impressive stuff, beautifully written and logically tight, and it gave me enough of the terminology to fake my way through a conversation if I was forced into an unexpected situation. After all, I was now Dr. Morgan O’Brien, a visiting post-doc from the Canadian Genomics Institute in Ottawa. I should at least know the lexicon.
Southern BCU sits on one of the most expensive pieces of real estate in North America: the tip of Point Grey. It made driving into the university a bit like entering the magic kingdom. Water surrounded the campus on the north, south, and west, and a wide belt of parkland — old-growth forest of cedar and Douglas fir — buffered it from the city on the east. Because of the parkland and the access to beaches and water, there wasn’t a house on the point that would sell for less than $400,000.
As I moved west on 12th Avenue the houses went from the palatial estates of Shaughnessy to the funky, brightly painted wooden houses of Kitsilano, back to the upscale abodes of the Point. The peninsula narrowed, 12th Avenue fed into 10th, and I knew that if I went straight up the hill it would lead me to the main gates of Southern, but as I approached Alma Street I slowed. I could continue straight ahead or I could turn right, head down toward Spanish Banks, and take the beach road in through the back entrance. I felt my stomach contract. I would have to go down there sometime. It might as well be now.
I took a right, then a left further down at 4th Avenue. Ahead of me a steep hill rose up to the plateau of Point Grey, but just before it I turned on to a small road that dipped off to the right, almost hidden in an ancient stand of cedar. The road wove downward in a dark tunnel, then abruptly the trees thinned, the terrain flattened out, and the road made a ninety-degree turn. The dark tunnel burst open to reveal a wide ribbon of sand, a vast expanse of black water, and the fairy lights of North Vancouver sprinkled across the distant backdrop of mountains. I slowed the car. Despite the breathtaking beauty of the shore, I focused my attention on the other side of the road, the compact neighbourhood that climbed up the bluff. I’d forgotten how it looked: glass-fronted box houses that seemed to be piled willy-nilly, one on top of the other. No style and no taste, but million-dollar views and two-million-dollar price tags. I used to live along here.
I slowed as I approached our house and pulled into the parking lane. I left the engine running with the heater warming the car and stared. It was still the perfect house — a landscaped garden fronting a wall of glass that overlooked the mountains and English Bay. Once upon a time the perfect family had lived there: Daddy the doctor, Mommy the hostess, and the two beautiful, well-behaved children. Unfortunately, Daddy worked terribly hard and was hardly ever home, but that was just like all the other neighbourhood dads. And Mommy drank a bit too much, but then entertaining for Daddy was her raison d’être and she was just a social drinker. But as the two well-behaved children grew, the drinking went from social to solo, then became a full-time occupation, and the Daddy’s absences became more and more prolonged, until one day he simply never came home. Then the money dried up, the perfect house was marred by flaking paint and an overgrown lawn, and the well-behaved children were no longer so welcome at the other neighbourhood homes.
I hadn’t been down here since I was eleven. That’s when my mother came out of her alcoholic daze long enough to realize that my father wasn’t coming home. She sold the house for a fraction of its value and moved us to a rented house on Albion Street in the derelict, tough east end, and with the remaining money from the sale of the house she began the slow, painful process of committing suicide with drink.
I looked at the old house now, standing firm and solid despite our neglect, and tried to remember. I did know happiness in that house. I must have known happiness there in those early years, but all memories of that time seemed to have vanished in the
