“I stopped at the marina on my way here. The Wonderlust is gone. The woman in the office told me the police towed it away because it was a crime scene. Is that where Bobbi was attacked? On the boat?”
“The crime scene people found blood traces and evidence of a struggle,” Matthias replied. “Someone tried to clean it up, but didn’t do a very thorough job of it. Maybe they watch forensic shows on television and thought it wouldn’t do any good. We won’t know for sure if she was attacked on the boat until the test results are back. As for how she got from the boat to the bridge, the Wonderlust’s Zodiac is missing. Her attacker may have transported her from the Wonderlust using the Zodiac. The footpath between Granville Island and the bridge is well lit and fairly busy, even late at night. If she were dumped from shore, her attacker would have had to transport her by foot half a kilometre or more along the seawall and the promenade overlooking the False Creek Harbour Authority. Someone would have seen something. Likewise, if she ran and he caught up with her under the bridge, she’d have screamed for help and someone would have heard. Unfortunately, the scene under the bridge was too badly contaminated by paramedics and curiosity seekers to be of any help. We’re canvassing, but so far haven’t turned anything up.”
“If he moved her by Zodiac,” I said, “why dump her in the shallows in the middle of the civic marina?”
“I dunno,” Matthias said. “Maybe she came to, struggled with her attacker, fell overboard, and tried to swim ashore. We’re just going to have to wait until she wakes up.” He paused, looking at Bobbi, then started to add something else.
“Don’t say it,” I interjected quickly, before he could speak.
He nodded and said nothing.
“Did you check out Loth?” I asked.
“Kovacs and Henshaw talked to him, but I don’t think anything came of it. I’d have heard.”
“What about Anna Waverley? Could she be involved?”
“She could be, of course. She admits to being at the Broker’s Bay Marina at approximately nine o’clock that evening, although no one seems to have seen her. And how likely is it that the woman who came to your studio pulled Anna Waverley’s name out of a hat? Other than that, though, so far there’s nothing to connect her to Bobbi or you or the boat.”
“Except that she admitted to being on it once or twice.”
“Except that.”
“Maybe the woman who came to the studio was trying to set Mrs. Waverley up for something. She and her husband are pretty well heeled, aren’t they?”
“Comparatively, I suppose,” Matthias said. “I’m sure Kovacs is considering that angle.”
We sat in silence for a few minutes, watching Bobbi sleep, listening to the soft whir and murmur of the IV pump and the medical monitors.
“How are you getting on?” Matthias asked eventually.
“Trying to keep busy,” I said. I remembered my visitor, and told Matthias about him. “He wouldn’t tell me his name, but he wanted to know who hired us to photograph the boat.”
“Could he have been the owner’s lawyer, trying to head off a personal injury suit?”
“That’s what I thought at the time,” I said. “He was too blunt and to-the-point for a lawyer, though, leastways the ones I’ve known. But he could be employed by the boat’s owner in some capacity, I suppose.”
“Give me his description again,” Matthias said.
I did, then we sat for a while longer without speaking. A nurse came in, smiled at us, then checked Bobbi’s IV, catheter bag, and the readings on the medical monitors. She smiled at us again as she left. It was nine-thirty, but visiting hours were flexible. It didn’t hurt, either, that Matthias was a cop, and familiar to a number of the nursing staff.
“I spent some time here last year,” he explained when I commented on it. “My partner was recovering from an injury.”
I’d met his partner only once the year before, but I remembered her well, a strikingly handsome woman named Isabel Worth. “She was shot?”
“No,” he said with a dry smile. “She broke her arm when she fell off the Stanley Park seawall while trying to apprehend a suspect.”
“Are you still partners?”
“I should’ve said former partner,” he replied. “She retired six months ago on partial pension and moved to Pemberton to raise horses and run a mountain trail guide business with her uncle. I’ve got a couple of years to go before I pull the plug, then I’m going to join her.” He looked at Bobbi for a second or two, then back at me. “What you said about you and Reeny Lindsey, that you liked each other well enough but that there was something missing? Same with me and Bobbi. Well, Isabel and I discovered after she retired and moved to Pemberton that whatever the thing is that’s missing between you and Reeny or me and Bobbi isn’t missing between me and Isabel.”
As we left Bobbi’s room and walked to the elevator, I said, “Last night, on the local news, there was a story about Bobbi’s attack. It reported that she was still in a coma. Do you think there’s any chance that whoever did this might try to finish the job? I mean, when she wakes up, she’s probably going to be able to identify him.”
“That kind of thing only happens in the movies,” Matthias said. “Besides, this place has good security. All the staff wear picture IDs and after ten-thirty you can’t get in without clearance from the ward.”
“Are visitors screened during the day?”
“No,” he said, “but it’s pretty busy during the day. You’d have to be crazy to expect to get away with harming a patient without getting caught.”
“Crazy is just what I’m afraid of,” I said.
“Security is aware of Bobbi’s situation and will be keeping an eye on her. Look, Bobbi isn’t the first assault victim who’s been here for a while. We haven’t lost one yet.”
I was comforted, but not much.
chapter seven
The strangely unseasonable weather had moved in again. Fog haloed the street lamps, the lights of the cars and shops, the bulbs strung along the frame of the freight crane in the parking lot, hanging like a shroud over False Creek and cool on my face as I walked from my car toward the ramp down to Sea Village. It had been only two days since Bobbi’s attack and I told myself it was unreasonable to expect the police to have made much headway in the case, but I was discouraged nonetheless. Nor was I encouraged by the rate of Bobbi’s progress. I blamed it on being raised on television, where the bright young detective catches the bad guys or the brilliant but irascible doctor pulls his patient back from the brink of death just in time for the final commercial break. Real life didn’t work like that, I had to remind myself. In real life, the bad guys often got away. In real life, likely as not the doctor working on your kid’s case had graduated at the bottom of his class, drank too much, and was in the middle of a messy divorce. Who needed real life?
A man was sitting on the bench under the lamppost by the top of the ramp, wreathed in fog and cigarette smoke. He stood as I approached, a little unsteady on his feet, dropped the cigarette, and ground it out under his toe. It was Norman Brooks. Swell, I thought. Reality, as someone once said, bit. After which, I supposed, it sucked.
“Were you at the hospital?” Brooks asked gruffly, breath stinking of alcohol.
“Yes.”
“How is she?”
“The same. Haven’t you visited her today?”
He lowered his head. “They kicked me out.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,”