than a building. He left his car and rode the elevator up to Level 2, walked down the corridor, and swung into the briefing hall where “A” watch gathered to learn of the day’s challenges.
North Van was a mill of hot files, unlike laid-back Rupert, City of Rainbows, up there on its rocky shore. Some crimes were bad, others worse. Today’s was off the scale, horrific, and the point-form description, even without the graphic details, rattled Leith as Watch Commander Doug Paley laid it out. A mother and daughter found dead in their home, Paley was saying. Found by a concerned neighbour. Neighbour had seen lights on all night, heard music going, too, and no sign of the residents. She didn’t know them personally, not even their names. But the lights and music had struck her as odd enough that she had gone up the back stairs this morning and peeked inside.
First-on-scene gave some details, describing the scene, the victims.
One of the dead was just a toddler. Like Leith’s own little Izzy.
* * *
Leith rode in the passenger seat with Doug Paley. Paley was late-middle-aged, heavy set, and cynical. He didn’t speak throughout the drive, and only as he pulled in to the curb and yanked on the handbrake did he tell Leith what was what. He would talk to the first responders outside, then join Leith inside the house.
The house was a modest one-storey with finished basement on the corner of 23rd and Mahon. Several squad cars and the crime-scene vans were ranged along the avenue. A crowd of the curious was gathering: neighbours and passersby. Constables kept traffic moving. At the back of a van, Leith zipped into anti-contamination coveralls. The home’s front gate was propped open, the egress path marked with crime-scene tape. He climbed cement steps to the door, identified himself to the constable at the door, was given general directions, and entered the house.
Music played, soft rock. There was an unpleasant smell, but it wasn’t the worst he had ever worked at not inhaling. Inside the front door a flight of stairs led down, and another led up. He took the flight up, and the music got louder and the smell got ranker. From the top of the stairs radiated a hallway to what might be bedrooms and a bathroom. The place looked neat and clean. Kitchen straight ahead and a combo living room/dining room to his left. The bodies were in the living room, along with the first signs of chaos: a lamp knocked over, dry flowers strewn willy-nilly, a toppled high chair.
Leith stood at the threshold and looked down on the strange tableau. The bodies. They were Asian, the child so like his own, but with downy black hair and ivory skin. She was on her stomach to Leith’s left, next to the leg of a wood-and-glass coffee table. A young woman lay ten feet away, face up, before the fireplace. She was slim, wearing blue jeans and a short-sleeved sweater, bare feet. Her long, glossy black hair criss-crossed in swaths over her face, as though draped to hide her features.
The coroner moved in with his kit and an assistant, obscuring the view.
The clothing of both victims seemed intact on first sight. No visible trauma, and aside from the upset furniture, no signs of violence, even. But all it took was a little imagination to hear the screams, to see the struggle, to feel the fear. Violence had swept through this house and left no sound but the music playing, an absurdly hopped-up pop song Leith had heard before somewhere, sometime.
Mother and child had already been pronounced dead. They remained only to be studied, charted, photographed, and stared at by people like Leith, who should be doing his job and analyzing. But he wasn’t there yet. He was thinking again of the gross error he had made in transferring his family to this city. His big responsibility in life was to keep them out of harm’s way, and instead he was bringing them right into its embrace. The north wasn’t crime-free, by any means, but the victimology was more predictable. Down here, high density brought out the weirdos and the guns, no doubt about it, which meant anybody could be mowed down, at any time.
This poor little thing was at the very same tottering age as Izzy, when the tiny legs were losing their baby fat and gaining muscle tone. She should have been learning to talk, too, stomping about with her eyes open to the wonders of the world. Leith looked sideways at Paley, who was done speaking with the coroner and now stood beside him, relaying the findings.
“Strangled, he’s thinking.” Paley was staring down at the adult victim. “Looks like bruising around the throat. There’s that tea towel. Does that look like it’s been twined into a rope, to you? That might have done it.”
“The hair over her face …” Leith said.
“Yeah, yeah. The hair placement — that’s remorse, right? Or apology, or something like that.”
“Looks more like insult to me.”
The coroner stood and moved away, leaving the assistant making notes.
“Or that,” Paley agreed. “As for the baby, she might have fallen and hit her head on that coffee table, we’re thinking.”
“Do we have names yet?”
Paley didn’t answer, too busy staring over Leith’s shoulder. Leith turned to see why and watched a young man approach from the hallway, also in white coveralls, shirt collar and tie showing under the unzipped throat of his Tyvek. He looked familiar to Leith, and not in a happy, well-met kind of way.
This was someone he had worked with in the not-so-distant past, up north in the Hazeltons, for a few long weeks through the bitterness of February. So Dion had somehow made it back to North Van, just as he had promised, and instead of being demoted to janitor, as Leith had thought most likely, he had advanced from uniform to the suit-and-tie brigade. Which meant they would be working together again. Hoo-ray.
“Well, there you are,” Paley exclaimed as Dion came to stand with them. “Heard you were back, you sneaky son-of-a-bitch, but wasn’t expecting you today.”
“All hands on deck on this one,” Dion answered cheerfully. “So to hell with orientation, they just pushed me out the door.” He glanced at the bodies, then glanced at Leith, and looked at Leith again, with surprise. Then a shockingly huge smile, as if this meeting really made his day. “I was wondering when I’d run into you! How are you doing? Got set up okay?”
As Leith recalled, their northern parting of ways had been unpleasant. But maybe it was all water under the bridge. He smiled, too, and shook Dion’s extended hand, their first physical contact, barring one brief skirmish at the Hazelton detachment. “Getting by,” he said. “How are you?”
“Great, great.”
The reunion formalities over, Dion became businesslike. He gestured at the two bodies and said to Paley, “Just talked to Dadd and got suspected cause of death and his timing estimate —”
The name Dadd — Jack Dadd, the coroner — threw Leith each time.
“— adult female died about twelve hours ago, so it happened last evening. But I guess you have the basics on this one, Doug?”
“The basics,” Paley echoed flatly.
“Strangled,” Dion said. “Petechiae and some edema visible. Damage to her tongue — she probably bit it — and narrow bruises on the neck, but no cutting. The child, at a guess, likely died of head trauma. TOD about six hours ago, he says — that’s quite a bit later than the adult, so it was probably secondary TBI.”
TOD, TBI. Time of death was common enough, but TBI made Leith think a moment. Traumatic brain injury. The new, improved Dion opened his notebook, found a page, and studied it.
