a more particularized version of his first remarks while standing out in the rain. “You must have a pretty good view on the Greer house from here. Have you noticed any activity over there since you moved in?”
“It’s got a high fence,” she said. “Isn’t there some kind of bylaw saying fences can’t be more than five feet tall? That one’s at least six.”
He didn’t like the question. She wasn’t the kind of person who measured fences and lodged complaints, so what could it be but a deliberate diversion? He tried again. “I thought from upstairs, you might be able to look across, see if there’s anyone moving around inside?“
She shook her head, shrugged an apology.
He could think of nothing else. Standing on the front porch, he searched his wallet, found a business card, and handed it over. “Well, if you do think of anything …”
She seemed to find the RCMP crest — gold and blue, with its honourable motto — funny. It turned out it wasn’t the crest she was laughing at, but his name. “Calvin,” she said. “That’s so nice. Where’s Hobbes?”
Calvin and Hobbes was a popular comic strip, he knew. He was still trying to think up a reply — though what could he say to that? — when she spoke again, more seriously. “I shouldn’t laugh. This is obviously not the time for that. It’s just, I feel like we’re in a movie. You say, ‘If you think of anything …’ and now the bodies start piling up, and you save my life, or I save yours, and we end up falling in love. Isn’t that how it goes?”
He said, “That’s for sure. Good night.”
Randall watched him drop in beside her. He was still swearing at himself. Farah Jordan had all but offered herself up nude, and his response had been That’s for sure.
“What’s the matter?” Randall said. She had ridden shotgun earlier, but was now behind the wheel, looking about ready to drive off without him.
“Nothing.”
She started the engine. “Get anything good?”
“No. You?”
“Nope.”
A lot of time and one big embarrassment for nothing, then. They headed back to the city lights, leaving Lynn Valley and its secrets behind.
Five
MESACHEE
In the late morning, Leith and JD accompanied Corporal Michelin Montgomery back to the crime scene, the derelict house on Greer where a body had been stuffed so unceremoniously some months ago and removed so carefully last night. The Ident people had been working the grounds since daybreak, and the house now sat temporarily empty but for a small crew and a rotation of auxiliary constables to guard the scene.
On approach, Leith saw that daylight redeemed the place. Stepping inside, he found that even with the main floor windows boarded up, sunlight seeped through enough cracks to expunge the horror. “Not so spooky now,” he remarked.
Monty cheerfully disagreed. “Still horrifying to me, Dave. We’re just in the day-before-all-hell-breaks-loose scene. Lots of ominous music and the promise of things to come. What d’you say, JD?”
JD said she found the place freaking scary, considering a faceless killer had been crawling around here not long ago, dragging a dismembered body into the blackness underfoot. If that wasn’t spooky, what was?
Upstairs the windows were unboarded, but murky behind a buildup of wind-blown dirt. Leith stood in what once must have been the master bedroom. The floorboards were raw plywood, as someone had removed all the carpeting. The drywall was marred with nail holes and splotched with mould. All the fixtures were either gone or broken.
“If only I was a movie director.” Monty was still on topic. He stood with arms crossed in the centre of the room, staring at the floor. “What a setting. Even my shadow looks creepy.”
True, Monty’s shadow was creepy, a stiff-shouldered, bullet-headed shape stretched across the rough flooring.
“I’m told there might have been squatters in here at some point,” JD said.
“Squatters who left nothing interesting behind,” Monty replied. “A huge make-work project for the lab folks, is what it is. Food wrappings, cigarette butts, liquor bottles, and other assorted necessities of living. Nothing recent. Probably just kids.”
“And a girl’s bracelet,” JD told Leith. “On a windowsill. Fake gold, a dime a dozen.”
“Woo-hoo,” Monty called experimentally, maybe expecting an echo.
The results were oddly flat, Leith noticed. He moved to one of the two windows in this upstairs bedroom. From it he could see houses, mostly obscured by trees. Only one home would have had a clear line of sight to this one, but for the branches of a large evergreen. One of its upstairs windows was clearly visible, and if someone stood at that window, they would be able to see him in this one. They would also be able to see down into the lot, if they craned. He studied the scraggly orchard below, and in his mind’s eye he saw a figure dragging a heavy bag across to the foundations. Since this was his imagination at work, he made it a moonlight scene.
What a shock that would have been, if it had been spotted. It would surely have been reported. He put the question to JD, just to be sure. “That place has been canvassed?”
She peered across at the big maroon house behind the branches. “Of course. That whole block’s been checked off. Nobody saw anything.”
No surprise.
Monty left the room to explore the rest of the upstairs. Leith followed. On the west side was a child-sized room, also denuded of its carpeting. A peel-and-stick wallpaper border, Shrek motif, ran around its perimeter, unpeeling and unsticking. In a corner of the room Monty discovered a set of deep gouges in a small section of the plywood flooring. He squatted down for a closer look, pushing at the wood with his knuckles.
Leith crouched, too.
“If I didn’t know better, I’d say these were the scratch marks of a large Canis lupis familiaris, better known as dog,” Monty said, shooting back to his feet with an ease Leith envied more than the Latin. He rose, too, slowly and with a twinge of knee pain. Alison was right; it was time to get out the jogging gear, stop making excuses.
“But it’s not,” Monty went on. “Too aggressive, too acute. Some kind of tool, maybe. One of those gardening claws? Interesting. Get a picture, Dave. Somebody should check under that board, too. It’s got flooring nails, but it’s loose. Classic hidey-hole.”
Ident would have gotten a shot of the gouges, or they would soon enough as they continued to scour the place, but Leith took the time to snap a few shots for reference. When he was finished making a note of the details, he looked around and found JD and Monty were gone.
Their silent departure was strange. Not so much for JD, who walked like a cat — but Monty was the noisy type. Whatever he did and wherever he went, he seemed to emit a whir of enthusiasm.
Leith was quite sure he liked Monty. He had been out for drinks with him and the crew a few times since Monty’s arrival in
