“And if I find nothing suspicious? If Jasmine was leading an ordinary life and simply had a terrible accident?”
“Then I will know that, too. Then I can bury her feeling I’ve done right by her.”
Angie killed the call, put her head back, and closed her eyes as Maddocks’s words from last night looped through her brain yet again.
Just know one thing, Angie—I love you. If you want to stay engaged, if you want what I want, to get married—I’m here. I’m yours. But it’s your call. You pick up that phone only if and when you’re good and ready. Until you make that call, we’re over.
She opened her eyes. This was it. This case, this job—it was her way back to Maddocks. To that dream.
She wanted to marry Sergeant James Maddocks, find a house, and make it warm with a sense of family inside. She wanted to open her own PI agency and run it from the schooner down at the marina, with three-legged Jack-O as the office mascot. She couldseeit,tasteit. All of it. She was going to hold this vision clear as glass in her mind as she went forward. She was not going to let it drop and shatter. Ever. She’d show him. She’d find a way, find something concrete to prove to him that she wanted the same things he did.
Putting her vehicle into gear, she exited the parking lot.
CHAPTER 14
MONDAY, NOVEMBER19
Kjel Holgersen dumped two more file boxes onto a table in the small incident room. Leo entered the room behind Kjel and hefted his own load onto the table. Swearing, Leo slapped dust off his pants. He’d loosened his tie, and his face was red, beads of perspiration glinting along his upper lip. He smelled like old liquor.
“So you was late at the Pig again yesterday?” Kjel said as he lifted the top off one of the boxes.
“Drowning my sorrows, yeah. Why in the fuck did Maddocks pull me from homicide into iMIT anyways?” Leo flung his arm at the mounting stack of boxes. “Just to stick me in this shithole? These cases are dead, I tell you. Stone-cold dead. While the rest of the team is out there working the hot major incident stuff, we gotta go throughthiscrap?” He shoved a metal desk into position under the window as he spoke, bagging the best spot in the room. “Maddocks is fucking getting back at me for talking to Grablowski about Pallorino being the cradle baby. He figures I leaked Pallorino’s story and thatIam responsible for the book Grablowski’s written.”
“You did leak it,” Kjel said.
“Well, I’ll tell ya something—I didn’t write that goddamn book. That forensic head shrink would’ve been all over Pallorino’s true crime story with or without me. I just facilitated it, sped things up a bit.”
“For a fee.”
Leo ignored the jab and ambled over to the coffee machine. “Question is, why is Maddocks sideliningyou, eh, Holgersen? What haveyoudone to earn this special treatment from the new boss man, eh?”
Kjel shunted his own metal desk into position against the wall next to the whiteboard. “Because he figures I gots what it takes to boost the entire department’s homicide and missing persons solve rates. But hey, if we do score, if we makes some of these cases hot again, we gets more staff, a higher profile. Not a bad gig.”
“Dream on, buddy.” Leo poured himself a mug of coffee and set it on his desk. He went back to the boxes, took the lid off one, and began rummaging through old homicide files. “Where in the hell do we even start with this shit?”
“Right there. Like you’re doing,” Kjel said. “We go through each cold case, document it in our new computer system—”
“System’s not even up and running yet.”
“Will be by the end of today. Techs are due in an hour. Once we’ve entered a case, we gives it a rating in terms of solvability, public interest, potential to generate new leads via social media, potential to apply new DNA tech, potential links between other old cases, potential witnesses who might still exist and who have decided to talk, and so forth. Then once we’s ranked the priority—like applying triage—we starts running the top cases past the crime analyst. We starts feeding those to the soc media unit, and we starts getting DNA and fingerprint evidence into the crime lab queue. When and if we get hits, we run with them hits. When and if we need more staff, we ask. Simple.”
Leo snorted and opened a murder book. He scanned the contents. “Well, for starters, we can ditch some of these.”
“Some of what?”
“Dead junkies.” Leo jabbed his hairy finger on a young woman’s mug shot. “Deceased homeless vics like this useless tweaker here. Found overdosed down a bank near the Gorge five years ago.”
Kjel went over to look. He read the victim’s name. Seema Solomon. Someone’s daughter. Maybe a sister. Maybe even a young mother. A human being who’d deserved respect. A human being who’d ended up in a bad place and was now dead. Under suspicious circumstances.
Leo shut the file and put it to one side on the table. He returned to ferreting in the box.
“So what you gonna do with that dead tweaker file, then?” Kjel said.
“Nada. That’s going on the dismissal pile.”
“Just ’cause the vic was part of a marginalized population?”
Leo stilled and shot Kjel a glance. “You kidding me? Ever since pig farmer Robert Pickton started hunting street workers in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, now every missing or murdered street person could be a victim of some serial murderer?”
