“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 also worked for the city. Mabel’s partner, a former professional football player named Baz Tucker, was younger and bigger and blonder. Neither appeared pleased to see me.
“What’re you doing here, Tom?” Mabel asked. Before I could reply, she said, “Go home. Let us do our job.”
“I won’t get in the way,” I said.
“Since when?” she said.
“I just want to talk to Anna Waverley, the woman who owns that boat.” I pointed toward the Wonderlust. “Bobbi was supposed to meet her last night, to take some photographs of the boat. Maybe she saw who attacked her.”
“Have you spoken to her?”
“No. She’s not aboard.”
“Leave it to the RAS investigators, Tom. They’ll be here in a minute. Go on home now,” she said sternly, as if speaking to her ten-year-old. When it was obvious I wasn’t going to leave, she said, “I understand how you feel, Tom. Bobbi’s my friend, too. Look at it from our point of view. You could be a suspect yourself. I know,” she added quickly, holding up her hand to cut off my response, “it’s ridiculous, but tell that to the suits. As far as they know, you and Bobbi could’ve had a falling-out over business. It happens all the time. Or maybe you were more than just business partners and had a lover’s quarrel. See how it can get complicated?”
“Heads up,” Baz Tucker said quietly as two men came along the quay, dressed almost identically in suits so plain they were like uniforms.
“Which one of you is Firth?” the older of the two men asked. He was in his mid-fifties, with watery blue eyes and a pale, acne-scarred complexion. His partner was in his thirties, with a smooth, olive complexion, and full, almost voluptuous lips that I imagined many women would envy. There was nothing even remotely feminine about his piercing, dark eyes.
“I am,” Mabel said.
“I’m Kovacs. He’s Henshaw. Who’s this guy?”
“Tom McCall,” Mabel said. “The victim’s partner.”
“As in husband? Boyfriend?”
“Her business partner.”
“Okay,” Kovacs said. “But he still shouldn’t be here.”
“I told him that.”
He turned to me. “We’ll come find you when we need to talk with you.”
“I’ll save you the trouble,” I said.
He turned his head slightly, squinted one pale blue eye and peered at me with the other. “Are we gonna have a problem with you?”
“A problem? With me? Heck, no.” Mabel looked as though she wished she were home in bed.
He scowled and shrugged and said to Mabel