She turned and left the boardroom. As she was walking to the elevator she saw Sam Rice standing at a desk, a phone to his ear. The look on his face told her more than she wanted to know. “Ava, wait!” he yelled.
She didn’t stop. The elevator doors opened as soon as she got there and she stepped in. As the doors closed she saw Sam Rice running towards her. He moved quickly for a big man, but not quickly enough.
Ava was starting to give the taxi driver the gallery address when she caught herself. The street would probably be closed to traffic. She directed him instead to the Fletcher Hotel.
Sitting in the back of the taxi she tried to calm herself down. I don’t know, she told herself, what happened on Church Street. But the dull throb in the pit of her stomach wouldn’t go away.
Her cellphone rang. Harrington’s. “Ava, we’re on our way. Sam and I are getting into his car as I speak,” Frederick Locke said.
“See you there,” Ava said, turning off the phone and throwing it into the bottom of her purse.
As the cab pulled into the Fletcher Hotel, she looked up Church Street and saw police barriers and what looked like the blinking lights of police cars and ambulances. She went into the hotel and almost threw her bag at the concierge. “I’m Ms. Lee. Tag my bag and store it for me. I’ll be back.”
She walked slowly towards the gallery, trying to let the scene develop gradually in her mind rather than erupt before her. She was accustomed to the yellow tapes used to seal off crime scenes, the wooden barriers to keep onlookers — two and three deep around the outer perimeter — back. She tried to find a gap in the crowd, and at the north end she saw an opening and wormed her way to the front.
Three ambulances were parked outside the gallery. Waiting, Ava thought. Uniformed police stood in a small circle next to their cars; others in plain clothes huddled by the gallery’s door. Beyond the ambulances Ava saw two television trucks, and to her right, cameramen stood with reporters holding microphones.
“Do you know what’s happened?” Ava asked the woman next to her.
“Bit of a shoot-up, I gather. Robbery attempt maybe.”
One of the television crews moved towards Ava as the cameraman tried to find a good angle for his shot.
“Excuse me,” Ava said to the reporter. “Do you know what happened here? I’m acquainted with the people who work at the gallery.”
“A shooting. Actually, shootings.”
“How many?”
“Three.”
Ava paled, the throb in her stomach now beginning to pound. “You wouldn’t have any names, would you?”
“Nothing official,” the reporter said. “You say you know the people at the gallery?”
“Yes, two of them. Edwin Hughes and his assistant, Lisa.”
The reporter checked her clipboard. “We came up with those names ourselves, but they haven’t been confirmed.” She moved off, following the cameraman, who had found a position that gave him a clear shot of the doorway.
It’s strangely quiet, Ava thought. The uniformed police were standing like sentries, staring back at the onlookers, while the plainclothes officers whispered back and forth and occasionally walked in and out of the building. When they moved, Ava saw a gurney, flanked by two ambulance attendants and a policeman, rolling out of the gallery. There was a white body bag on it. The crowd gasped, and Ava heard several women moan. The man next to her said, “God love us.”
They pushed the gurney to the last ambulance in the row, and another gurney began its progress from the gallery, with an identical white zippered body bag. Ava stared at the bags, almost willing herself to see through them. The bodies are small, she thought. Female probably.
A third gurney came through the door. A pair of brown leather wingtips lay beside the body bag.
Ava gagged. The man next to her said, “Go easy, there.”
She breathed deeply through her nose. Then she started to move away, back towards the bakery door where only a few days before she had lain in wait for Edwin Hughes.
It took ten minutes to clear space for the ambulances. As they drove away, the crowd began to disperse. Ava walked towards the crime scene, her eye on the television reporter, who was in deep discussion with one of the plainclothes police officers. She watched them talk, the reporter making notes and then calling over the cameraman to film her report, the hughes gallery sign prominent in the background as she spoke into the camera.
The reporter did three takes before she was satisfied. The cameraman went off to get more exterior shots and the reporter walked to her car, which had been parked behind the ambulances. Ava caught up to her as she skirted the barrier.
“Did you get the names?” Ava asked.
It took the woman a second to recognize her, and then she looked around to see if anyone else was listening. “The two you mentioned, plus a third, a woman named Bonnie Knox. They think she was a customer.”
“How did they die?”
“I’m not sure I should say anything more.”
“Please, this is important to me,” Ava said.
The reporter lowered her voice. “They think it was some kind of gangland thing. The three of them were shot in the back of the head, and were probably on their knees when it was done.”
“But why the women, the customer?”
“Innocent bystanders, they think — a robbery gone bad. Hughes must have tried to resist and the women got caught up in the mess,” she said. “It’ll be all over the news in the next hour or two and the police will make some kind of statement before the afternoon is out. Until then, keep this between us, eh?”
Ava nodded and began walking slowly back to the hotel. She met Sam Rice and Frederick Locke on the way. “I couldn’t find a bloody parking spot,” Rice said, breathless. “I’ve been circling for ages.”
“You didn’t miss anything,” Ava said quietly.
“What happened?” Locke asked.
“You can hear about it on the news in an hour or two, I’m told.”
“Is Edwin all right?” Rice said.
She looked away. “No, he’s not, and there’s nothing we can do to help. Now I need to be alone for a while, and you should go back to the office.”
“Ava — ”
“No, Sam, I can’t talk to you or anyone else right now. I’ll call you later and we can continue the discussion we were having this morning. Although I suspect it might be irrelevant now.”
She half walked and half ran to the hotel. “Do you have a room available?” she asked the front-desk clerk.
“Of course, Ms. Lee, and welcome back to the Fletcher Hotel.”
(32)
Ava lay in the dark with the drapes tightly drawn, the digital clock by the bed unplugged. Her mind was jumping from one scenario to another; her feelings oscillated from confusion to rage to grief in an instant. Underlying it all was the sickening realization that she had been betrayed.
She didn’t know how long she had been in bed before she finally found the energy to get up. She opened the drapes to a sunny day, the Gardens lit up like — what, a Fauvist painting?
She turned on the television and flipped channels, looking for news of the shootings, but there was nothing. Leaving the TV on, Ava went into the bathroom. She stripped and climbed into the shower, the water as hot as she could bear. For ten minutes she let it pelt her, more punishing than cleansing. Feeling no less lost, she wrapped herself in the hotel’s terrycloth bathrobe, a towel around her head, and went back into the bedroom.
She crawled back into bed. Even in the robe she felt cold, and she pulled the duvet up to her chin. She was listening to a quiz show when she heard the host’s voice interrupted by a reporter’s and the words “multiple shootings.” Ava sat up.
The presenter sat at a desk with three photos displayed behind him. She recognized Edwin Hughes and Lisa. The third picture was of Bonnie Knox, a woman in her early thirties, the mother of two young children. The news report cut to the scene outside the art gallery. The reporter she had talked to was conducting an interview with one of the plainclothes officers. He was subdued, confirming only that three people had been shot dead. There were no suspects and no apparent motive, although they were treating it as a robbery. The reporter pushed the officer to confirm that the three victims had been killed execution-style. “We have no firm motive and we can’t speculate,” the policeman repeated.