She peered across at the big maroon house behind the branches. “Of course. That whole block’s been checked off. Nobody saw anything.”
No surprise.
Monty left the room to explore the rest of the upstairs. Leith followed. On the west side was a child-sized room, also denuded of its carpeting. A peel-and-stick wallpaper border, Shrek motif, ran around its perimeter, unpeeling and unsticking. In a corner of the room Monty discovered a set of deep gouges in a small section of the plywood flooring. He squatted down for a closer look, pushing at the wood with his knuckles.
Leith crouched, too.
“If I didn’t know better, I’d say these were the scratch marks of a large Canis lupis familiaris, better known as dog,” Monty said, shooting back to his feet with an ease Leith envied more than the Latin. He rose, too, slowly and with a twinge of knee pain. Alison was right; it was time to get out the jogging gear, stop making excuses.
“But it’s not,” Monty went on. “Too aggressive, too acute. Some kind of tool, maybe. One of those gardening claws? Interesting. Get a picture, Dave. Somebody should check under that board, too. It’s got flooring nails, but it’s loose. Classic hidey-hole.”
Ident would have gotten a shot of the gouges, or they would soon enough as they continued to scour the place, but Leith took the time to snap a few shots for reference. When he was finished making a note of the details, he looked around and found JD and Monty were gone.
Their silent departure was strange. Not so much for JD, who walked like a cat — but Monty was the noisy type. Whatever he did and wherever he went, he seemed to emit a whir of enthusiasm.
Leith was quite sure he liked Monty. He had been out for drinks with him and the crew a few times since Monty’s arrival in September — because how do you say no to an invitation that comes with a hearty slap on the back?
The reasons for liking Monty were virtually endless. He had an impressive curriculum vitae and thrilling life stories that he seemed only too happy to share. Far from being self-centred, he was curious about his workmates and wanted to hear their life stories, too. If he found out you had kids, he wanted to see your wallet photos. If you were short of pocket change, he’d pay for your beer. He was also going places. With the force for thirty-plus years, he’d spent the past seven of those just over the bridge, in Surrey, the province’s largest detachment. North Van was just a stopover, he had told the gang at Rainey’s the other night, as the International Operations Branch would be taking him overseas within the year. Where exactly, he wouldn’t or couldn’t say, but it sure as hell wasn’t going to be boring.
In short, everybody liked Monty. He had verve, and charisma, and brains. Unlike Leith, he lit up the room when he walked in.
Actually, correction: Leith didn’t like Monty. Because how much verve can a person stand, in the long run?
Leith was working on banishing these uncharitable thoughts when he left the child’s room, turned the corner, and froze. A corpse floated in the dim light at the end of the hallway, its head twisted, eyes rolled back, outstretched hands frozen into hooked claws.
Of course it wasn’t a corpse, and it wasn’t floating. It was standing on its toes and just kidding. Monty was whooping it up now, not a man in his fifties, but a teenager who had just pranked a buddy. Leith’s arms had gone up in self-defence, and they came down now in fists of anger. “Jesus, Monty!”
JD climbed the stairs to see what the commotion was.
“Sorry, but I couldn’t resist,” Monty laughed. “I mean, look at this place. When will I ever get the chance again?”
He maybe saw something in Leith’s face that said not cool, and his grin faded. “C’mon, man. It was a joke.”
Leith brushed past him and stomped down the stairs. JD shadowed him. Out in the light of day, Monty’s apologies took on a note of impatience. “No harm done, right? So what’s the problem?”
The problem wasn’t Monty’s verve, really. Leith’s problem was Leith. He was homesick for the prairies, the togetherness of his once-large extended family, now scattered across Canada. He was sick of the North Vancouver traffic. He was sick of renting. He was socially awkward, mysteriously guilt-ridden, and on top of it all, inexplicably lonely.
“Better get used to it,” he told Monty. “I’m a natural-born stick-in-the-mud.”
“He is,” JD confirmed.
But Leith wasn’t done. “Frankly,” he said to Monty, “if our ranks were reversed, I’d tell you a thing or two. I could have shot you. You know that, right?”
“You didn’t reach for your gun, I noticed.”
“I’ve seen enough movies. You can shoot a zombie full of holes, but you won’t kill it.”
“Sure you can kill it. You just gotta aim for the brain.”
“What brain?”
Leith smiled at his own snappy repartee. Their nonsense had popped the tension, and the rift was mended. In a better mood, the three of them went on to explore the boundaries of the lot, looking up into the tree branches and down into the shrubbery. They went out the back gate into the alley — more of a weedy mule track running between woods and home — that had once provided a place for long-ago residents to store their junk, judging by what remained; old car parts and appliances sat heaped along the fence.
The gate at the back, like the one at the front, had been securely chained and locked against trespassers when the police had arrived on the night of the call-out. The chains on both gates had been cut and were now left unlocked for investigative purposes. Whoever had used the property for squatting had apparently gotten around the difficulty of chains and locks by stashing a shabby old stepladder in the woods behind the house. Inside the fence, shoved in amongst the lilacs, were a couple of plastic milk crates that had probably done the job for getting back out. Ident had seized ladders and crates and taken the lot of it in for analysis.
“Wasn’t just one quick visit, then, was it?” JD said. “Or kids finding a hangout to smoke pot. Somebody was living here, coming and going, for a while. Same people who used it for a body dump?”
Leith walked along the back fence, looking along its top for wood scuffs and dents that might tell him where the ladder had leaned. “Here,” he said. The marks looked relatively fresh and ladder-width apart. The story was starting to come together. But, as JD had said, did the squatters have anything to do with the murder?
Back at the side of the house, they had another look at the access hole in the foundations. The autopsy had not yet begun, but Jack Dadd had told Leith he believed their John Doe had died of blood loss. Mauled to death. Could have been a knifing, except the wounds were shallow and chaotic, more suggestive of an animal attack. Probably a large dog. Hard to say, as the flesh wounds were old and had lost definition. Post-mortem animal predation also had to be taken into account, of course.
“Even if dogs killed the poor guy, they sure didn’t bag him up and drag him in there, did they?” Monty said.
Leith agreed that a dog probably couldn’t work a decent half hitch. “The knots might tell us something.”
Monty snorted. “They’ll tell us what we already know. The guy didn’t know when enough knots is enough knots.”
“Like he was afraid the thing he’d bagged could get out if he didn’t tie it up real good,” JD suggested.
“Anyway, hopefully our experts will give us more,” Leith said.
Like Corporal Hillary Stafford, for one, the toolmark specialist who also analyzed bite marks. She would look at the remains and try to determine the what, where, when — if not why. She might provide knot analysis advice as well, but it was the weapon Leith was mostly