Creep. R.M. Greenaway
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“Anybody can talk to the man who called in the complaint,” JD said.
“I’m not anybody.” Randall was a head shorter than JD, but a few decibels louder. “I was first on scene.”
Leith opened his mouth to deliver his final no, but Monty beat him to it with a compromise. “If Mr. Lavender is willing, go talk to him, but leave the canvassing for now. As Dave here has just advised your partner, another few hours isn’t going to change things. The first forty-eight is long gone.”
Randall opened her mouth, but Monty made a motion like a magician sending his assistant up in smoke. She gave a brisk shake of the head that said, Wow, I’m working amongst idiots, and tramped away.
“What a little fireball.” Monty grinned. “That girl’s going places.”
There came exclamations from the area of the tent, and JD jogged over to hear the news. Leith and Monty followed. The dead male had been shifted over to expose his bad side, and his body on display was now speaking out — or screaming, more like. The left arm had been amputated at the elbow, and the face was mostly gone. Not taken by rot, but like flesh had been ripped from bone. The mouth gaped as though whatever agonies the man had suffered still coursed through him, showing a set of teeth chipped and knocked from the gums.
“Here’s the arm,” somebody said.
The severed limb was lodged between the dead man’s knees.
Leith wondered about the significance of the crude packaging. A deliberate insult, or a matter of disorganization? It didn’t strike him as either symbolism or panic, but it did point to a certain spontaneity.
He turned away from the body and its attendants, taking a break from the view. He had been through some scary cases in Prince Rupert, and in other postings during his years in the service. Transferring down to the metropolis sure hadn’t gotten him into a better class of crime. But whether in Prince Rupert or North Vancouver or Happy Valley, horror happens.
Some days ago he had told Alison — maybe trying to convince himself more than her — that down here in the big city, there was at least a better support system. The more mules, the lighter the load, right? He had told her as well that his North Van workmates seemed like an exceptional bunch. Broad-minded, empathetic, and smart.
Beside him, Monty said, “Hoo-boy, that’s some bad mincemeat job. Almost enough to turn you vegan, eh, Dave?” and laughed.
Four
CHARMED
Considering the length of Constable Randall’s interrogation of Mr. Lavender, Dion wondered if she had eyeballed the man as her prime suspect, instead of a harmless retiree who had called the sanitation department to report a vague stink on the breeze. The sanitation department had told Lavender there wasn’t much they could do about it, so Lavender had called 911.
On his climb up the front steps, Dion had predicted five minutes of conversation, at most. But five had turned to ten, and Randall was still harping at Lavender about wind direction, garbage removal days, troublesome neighbours.
Lavender seemed to enjoy having late-night visitors. He drew out every answer and ended it on a hook. Dion began to feel it was strategic. When Lavender invited them to move from the porch where they stood to somewhere more comfortable within, Dion decided he was one cop too many and told Randall he was going back to the vehicle to catch up on his notes. When she didn’t object fast enough, he left.
Out in the rain, he looked back at the house, at Lavender’s closed front door. Maybe Randall was right, and Lavender was now pulling out the machete and chasing her around the living room. But then there would be the sound of police-issued 9 mm gunfire — and a whoop of triumph, probably.
Jackie Randall could take care of herself. All Dion had to worry about was getting from here, under the covered archway at Lavender’s front gate, to his parked cruiser down the road without getting soaked. The neighbourhood looked sound asleep. The sky had reneged on its ceasefire and was doubling its efforts to drown the planet. Water drummed down, hit the pavement under lamplight, and crawled toward Dion like a league of ghosts. Randall’s flood had arrived with a vengeance.
It was probably her flood that had flushed the odours out from under the abandoned house and set the alarm bells ringing, leading to John Doe. He thought about the body lying on the tarp and reeking.
He hadn’t stopped to look, because that death smell had a way of coating a person for days, and getting stuck with the smell was no longer part of his job description. All he could guess from what he had seen in passing was that the body had been there a long while.
Randall was more explicit. She had looked and listened, and then reported to Dion what she knew. The body was a young male, and far from fresh. Monty had told her the first forty-eight was long gone, but so what, she argued. In a way, it had just begun, now that there were police buzzing about the scene, advertising their presence in a big way. It changed the game, and somebody in one of these apparently sleeping houses could be hastily doing god knows what. Packing their bags, making a call, flushing the evidence.
Dion thought Randall had a good point, but he wasn’t going to encourage her.
He walked down the road, assaulted by the pouring rain. On the other side of the bushy spur named Greer, a house facing Lynn Valley Road stood out like a beacon, and he stopped to look at it. Unlike its neighbours, this one was lit up. It was one of the older homes, a double A-frame, painted maroon with cream trim. Clapboard siding, conventional landscaping, but not so well maintained, as if the homeowner had lost the will to trim those laurels. There was a driveway and a carport off to the side, a little white car parked within. The gutter spouts drizzled noisily.
He could almost see into the main floor of the place, as the heavier drapes were hooked back, leaving only a gauzy screen to obscure the view. White-gold Christmas lights sparkled everywhere, strung across the window and sparkling like stars amongst the foliage. It looked like the kind of place he could walk into and never want to leave.
Somebody standing behind those drapes was returning his stare, he realized with a start. He turned to go, but the front door opened, and the woman who had been watching him called out. “Hey you, hello!”
He called hello back to her. She was oddly dressed for a cold October night in baggy shorts — maybe boxers — a plum-coloured cardigan, and tall rubber boots. She was a dark-skinned woman with a mass of goldish-black hair. She stood blurred behind rain falling from the eaves like a flickering bead curtain. Dion knew that from where she stood, he must be a human bead curtain himself.
“What’s happened over there?” she asked. “Was somebody hurt?”
A reasonable assumption. The commotion of emergency vehicles, lights, and noise made it obvious enough. He pushed open the gate and walked to the bottom of the stairs so he wouldn’t have to shout, but even here he had to project his voice over the din of rainfall. “There’s an investigation underway.”
“At the Greer house?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, thinking she was more a hippy than a ma’am. She was around his own age, near the thirty mark. Her casual clothes and her tangly hair and her unkempt garden all pegged her in his mind as some kind of poet.
“Don’t ma’am me,” she said. “Or I’ll sir you. Who got hurt? Is it serious?”
“There’s been a death, so there’s going to be some activity around. Just letting you know.”
“A death? I’m sorry to hear that. How awful. I did wonder, a bit.”
From the bottom of the stairs, he watched her. A follow-up question sprang to mind, but that would be somebody else’s task. “If you’ve noticed anything out of the ordinary happening over there in the last few months, we’d appreciate hearing about it,” he said. “Somebody will be around tomorrow to get your statement. Just let them know, if you could. Anything’s helpful.”
She