Then he crossed to the driver’s side and got in. The Chevy slid forward into a parking space.
They sat there as the clock ran. Maybe she was making him a promise.
Finally, Peralta’s head appeared. He walked over to his truck and retrieved the old license tag from the garage floor by the back bumper. Then he was inside the cab and pulling out.
The digital readout on the camera feed said 11:58.
Afterward, I put on my earbuds, leaned back, and listened to Susie Arioli, Billie Holliday, and Frank Sinatra…
Chapter Thirty-five
I awoke suddenly in a panic attack. The playlist had run through and shut off.
The waiting room was empty, silent, the perfect petri dish for my corrupted brain chemistry. My heart banged against my breastbone, every breath seemed fraught, and I felt as if I were being buried alive.
Pull off the earbuds.
Stand up.
Breathe and walk.
Engage in the movement of the living.
I went to the elevator and rode to the lobby where the crowd snapped me out of it. Then I found the meditation garden. I wasn’t alone. A couple of nurses were talking on one bench. I sat away from them, the dream still vivid in my memory.
I was in Matt Pennington’s office again. Outside, it was night and through the windows the city was glowing like thousands of Christmas lights. I could smell the body decomposing. I could hear his Naval Academy ring scraping the floor from the movement of a dead hand. The phone rang and it was the same man as before, talking to me…
Fully awake now and calmer, I studied the landscaping and the slant of the sun. It was a beautiful place. My neck ached from where my head had fallen forward as I had conked out. My watch said three p.m.
But what the man in the dream said…
And he said it in a voice I nearly recognized…
Then I realized, part of this was not a dream. He had actually said it yesterday on the phone in Pennington’s office. I only remembered it now.
“They say she was a Mountie, you know.”
He had said that about the hitwoman, that and her name.
It didn’t jibe with the Southern accent, but people can imitate dialects.
Ottawa, headquarters of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, was on Eastern Standard Time, two hours earlier. I didn’t know who to call or what to ask and anyone in authority was probably going home right now.
Instead, I pulled out the MacBook Air and started searching for keywords.
“Amy Morris” and “Mountie” wasted several minutes. “Amy Morris” and “RCMP” only showed me some news stories about a dog bite in Surrey, British Columbia. This Amy Morris was “policy and outreach officer” for the local Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
So I dropped the “Morris” and spread a wider net. After twenty minutes of different keywords, I found the first promising lead. The Google summary was about the murder of an RCMP officer’s husband and daughter in Calgary.
I pulled up the story and there she was.
The news was three years old, but the photo was unmistakable. A woman with straight, reddish-blond hair parted slightly to the right and falling to spread out a couple of inches onto her shoulders. Heart-shaped face, blue eyes, so-so nose, and full lips in a slight smile. She was wearing civilian clothes.
The girl next door, teacher of the year, young mom at the park.
She would catch your eye and you would think she’s attractive, but the memory wouldn’t last. Men caught a glimpse of Lindsey and didn’t forget her.
The caption said, Sergeant Amy Lisa Russell.
The woman in the photo was Strawberry Death. There was no doubt.
I read the story, read it twice. The sergeant had been on duty when her husband and child had been found “slain” at their home in the Bridgeland neighborhood. I had visited the city only once, years ago, to lecture on the Great Depression at the University of Calgary. It had reminded me of Denver.
I searched for more stories about the homicides but there was nothing but rewrites of the original news.
Then I matched “Amy Russell” and “RCMP.” Her name came up in some official documents regarding something called the Immediate Action Rapid Deployment unit. It sounded like a national SWAT team, very elite. If she had served in this branch of the Mounties, she would have learned the moves she showed when we fought on the front lawn and I lost.
By this time the garden was empty, so I called the RCMP headquarters and got the runaround, nothing could be done until Wednesday at the earliest, I would need to speak to superintendent so-and-so, did I want to leave my name and agency? I did.
Then I went to the RCMP home page and tried to find some other options. The Mounties were organized into four separate districts for the province of Alberta. Calgary had its own city “police service.” It had investigated the killing of the husband and child.
The next call went straight through to the Calgary homicide unit. I gave my name, department, and badge number. Two minutes later, a man picked up and identified himself as Inspector Joe Mapstone.
We spent a few minutes trying to find adjoining branches in our respective family trees. When we discovered no common ancestors, I asked him about the Bridgeland murders.
“They were never officially solved,” he said.
That was a telling word. “Officially?”
“Amy Russell was in the RCMP organized crime task force. Her work sent three members of the Malicious Crew to federal prison, box cars for every one of them.”
I asked about the slang. “Box cars” meant two consecutive life terms.
“The Malicious Crew is one of our worst outlaw motorcycle clubs,” Inspector Mapstone told me. “Our theory was that the homicides were revenge. Amy might have been killed, too. She should have been home but was called to her headquarters that day. Her husband picked up their daughter at school and went home. That’s where the killers were waiting. We never released the details but it was nasty stuff.”
“Which was?”
His tone stiffened. “What exactly is your interest in this case, Deputy?”
There was no reason to soften it. “She’s a suspect in a murder here.”
“Amy?” He almost shouted her name. “That’s preposterous. I worked with her. Everybody loved Amy.”
“That may have been true but there’s no question. The identification is positive. It’s the same woman pictured in the Calgary Herald story about the murders.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Because she pointed a gun at me. She said she would have preferred to ‘suicide’ my wife and me. Then she shot my wife.”
“My God…”
It was a good two minutes before he spoke again. I waited him out in silence. By then he had mastered his emotions.
“Her husband was bound with duct tape,” he said. “He was forced to watch their six-year-old daughter raped, burned with cigarettes, and then slit up the middle from her vagina to her sternum. Six years old. Who would do such a thing? They covered him with her intestines. Then they started on him. It took awhile. A message was being sent.”
“Who found the bodies?”
“Amy did, when she came home that night. We haven’t been able to make the case yet. This is still active and open. Because it involves a police officer, it continues to merit special attention.”
Civilians didn’t realize how often cases were called “open,” but the cops were pretty certain about the suspect. Certainty didn’t always make a case.
There were probably hundreds like that here. Bob Crane of Hogan’s Heroes fame had been killed in Scottsdale in 1978. Add in videotaped sex and it had caused a national frenzy of news coverage. Almost from the start, the detectives had identified a suspect and had begun gathering evidence.