Brooks sneered. “I s’pose you think I should be grateful for your sympathy, eh, McCall? Well, I’m not. It’s your goddamned fault she’s in there.”
“How is it my fault, sir? I didn’t attack her.”
He jerked his chin at Matthias. “He said she was working. You should’ve been with her.”
“She’s gone on dozens of jobs on her own,” I said.
“Yeah, but it’s just this one that counts, isn’t it?” He waved me away. “Get out of here. Go. You’re not needed here.”
Anger boiled up in me. I wanted to hit him. “If anyone’s not needed here, it’s you,” I said, teeth clenched so hard my jaw ached, fists knotted at my sides. “When was the last time you saw her? When was the last time you even spoke to her? She told me the other day she hasn’t seen you in months and that the last time she did see you, you were drunk and feeling sorry for yourself.”
Suddenly, he was on his feet, in my face again, before Matthias could stop him. “She’s still my daughter,” he shouted as I backed away from him. “There’s fuck all you can do about that, you pissant faggot punk. Get out of here. You, too,” he added to Matthias. “Neither of you has any right to be here.”
I opened my mouth to tell him that I had just as much right to be here as he did, maybe more, but Matthias put his hand on my arm.
“Tom, there’s nothing to be gained by arguing with him. Let’s go. I know the staff here. They’ll call me if there’s any change in her condition.”
Brooks smirked as Matthias led me toward the exit.
“Does he know you and Bobbi are seeing each other?” I asked, still seething, as we left the hospital.
“No, I don’t think he does. Although I doubt right now it would make much difference to him.”
“He must’ve been a hell of a cop,” I said.
“Don’t judge a man till you’ve walked in his shoes, Tom. As you said, what if it was your daughter in there?”
My anger evaporated.
“What’s the problem between you and him, anyway?” Matthias asked.
“I don’t know what his problem is,” I said. “Mine seems to be him.”
We rounded the corner onto Oak Street. His personal car, a Saab 950 Turbo, was parked in a restricted zone. I couldn’t remember where I’d parked my Jeep Liberty, which I’d bought to replace my venerable old Land Rover. It was a few minutes after three. Sunrise was still two hours away.
“Do you want me to help you find your car?”
“No, it can’t be far away. I’ll just walk around till I find it.”
“You’re sure? I don’t mind.”
“Thanks, yeah, I’m okay. You’ll call me when you hear something?”
“Of course. The RAS — Robbery and Assault Squad — investigators will likely want to talk to you.”
“I’ll be available,” I said.
We shook hands. He got into his car and I went looking for mine. It didn’t take me long to find it. Or the parking ticket under the wiper blade.
chapter three
I drove home, undressed, and got into bed. I was exhausted, but I couldn’t sleep. My eyes kept sliding open and it was too great an effort to keep them closed. I got out of bed, went downstairs, and out of desperation made a cup of camomile tea from the box Reeny had left behind. After the first sip, I poured the vile stuff down the drain. I trudged upstairs and climbed back into bed, to lie staring into the dark for another hour, unable to erase the image of Bobbi, battered and bruised, surrounded by muttering machines, with tubes down her throat, needles inserted into her veins, and electrodes glued to her head and chest. I didn’t know what frightened me more: that she might die, that she might never wake up, or that when she did wake up she wouldn’t be Bobbi anymore.
I finally gave up trying to sleep, got out of bed, showered, dressed, and at ten past six was standing on the quay by the main entrance to Broker’s Bay Marina. The sun was rising over the coastal mountains. The fog of the previous day had moved out and the cool morning air was so clean and clear it had an almost surreal quality, like cut crystal. Gulls wheeled and shrieked, squabbling over the carcass of a big fish in the water by Fisherman’s Wharf. Above and behind me, thirty metres over Anderson Street and the entrance to Granville Island, morning traffic hummed and rumbled on the Granville Street Bridge, the deeper notes resonating in my chest cavity.
It hadn’t been difficult to locate the Wonderlust. She was a fifty-foot-plus motor yacht, easily the largest pleasure boat in the marina, occupying the full length of the T at the end of the fourth and longest of the marina’s eight floating docks, almost directly opposite Fisherman’s Wharf. Although she was a bit dowdy and her chrome was dull and her hull grungy from neglect, she was a sturdy, well-equipped boat that would sleep eight without crowding. Although I was no expert, I guessed she would easily fetch a quarter of a million or more if she was cleaned up. It struck me as odd that Ms. Waverley had wanted photographs of the boat before she was shipshape. A few dollars invested in sprucing her up would have added considerably to the price.
The marina entrance was gated, but the gate was propped open, despite the sign that read “Do Not Prop Door” in large white lettering. I walked down the ramp and out to the end of the floating dock to where the Wonderlust was moored. I climbed the short, portable gangway onto the afterdeck, and knocked on the hatch to the main cabin. A few seconds later, I knocked again, harder. Then harder still. The hatch rattled in the frame. If Ms. Waverley was aboard, she was a very sound sleeper indeed. I tried the handle; the hatch was locked.
From the afterdeck of the Wonderlust, through a thick forest of masts and spars and booms, I could see the area under the Kitsilano end of the Burrard Street Bridge where Greg Matthias had told me Bobbi had been pulled from the water. The shoreline of Broker’s Bay, from the western tip of Granville Island — technically not an island at all, but a mushroom-shaped peninsula joined to the Kitsilano mainland by a thick stem of land — around to the little park known as Cultural Harmony Grove just east of the Burrard Street Bridge, looked like one continuous marina. It was really three marinas: the Broker’s Bay Marina, the False Creek Harbour Authority, and the Burrard Bridge Civic Marina. The latter extended a hundred metres beyond the bridge and had moorings directly beneath the span. I didn’t know precisely where Bobbi had been found by the off-duty paramedic in his kayak, but I guessed it must have been somewhere near the docks under the bridge.
I returned to the quay.
Bobbi was supposed to have met Ms. Waverley on the Wonderlust at eight. Matthias had said she’d been found just past eleven. Where had she been between eight and eleven o’clock? What had she been doing under the bridge? Had she been fleeing from her attacker or attackers? Or had she been attacked somewhere else and dumped into False Creek under the bridge? At some point while I had lain abed and sleepless after returning from the hospital, it had occurred to me that I hadn’t asked Matthias if the police had found the van. Had someone assaulted and dumped Bobbi in order to steal the van and the photo equipment? That didn’t explain how Bobbi had ended up in the water under the bridge. She’d have parked the van in the nearby lot between the boat works and Bridges restaurant and pub. It wasn’t there; I’d looked.
I was still standing on the quay at a few minutes to seven, wondering if I really wanted to walk around the bay to where Bobbi had been found, when a man in a red squall jacket and a Seattle Mariners baseball cap arrived to open the marina office. He wasn’t alone. With him were two uniformed cops. The cops worked out of the Granville Island Community Police Office and I knew them both. Constable Mabel Firth was a friend, a strapping dirty blonde in her forties whose husband Bill