Last week in Killer on the Kame (Stop. If you haven’t yet read Episode 1, the best way to catch up is to find it here. Spoilers ahead!) Out walking her beagle Milo, Emma comes across a crime scene—a dead body at a construction site in East Lofthill. When she gets home, she tells her husband, Matt, that it’s the same man who came to their house the day before, selling insulation. Matt remembers the man acting oddly in their basement. On a hunch, Matt takes a sledgehammer to the basement floor and discovers a buried toolbox filled with slender gold bars. Then the doorbell rings. It’s the police.
Episode 2 THIN MINTS
Matt hurriedly put the laptop to sleep. “Get rid of them.”
“It’s the cops, Matt, we can’t just get rid of them.”
The doorbell rang a second time. Milo ran down the hallway and back again, baying like he was in beagle nirvana.
“Okay, go answer the door, I’ll be right there. Don’t let them in.”
Emma walked quickly down the hall, but by the time she got to the entryway she was starting to get mad at Matt. Who the hell was he to be barking orders? She caught her breath and opened the door.
It was just one cop, young, late twenties probably, wearing the black Niagara Constabulary Service uniform, and Emma thought she recognized him from the crime scene earlier. She said, “Yes?”
“Good afternoon, ma’am. I’d like to ask you a couple of questions if you have a moment.”
Milo kept barking. Emma bent down and grabbed his collar.
“Okay, okay,” she said to the dog. “Okay,” she said to the cop.
“Yesterday a man was going door-to-door in the neighbourhood, asking about the insulation in the houses. Did he come here?”
Milo stopped barking but Emma stayed bent over, holding his collar.
“No.”
“Were you home all day?”
Emma took a couple of seconds. She was wondering where Matt was, why he wasn’t beside her by now, and then she said, “Yes, all day.”
The cop smiled. “You didn’t go out at all? Not even to walk the dog?”
“Oh right, I did take him out a couple of times. But my husband was home.” She looked up at the cop. “He works from home.”
“Is he here now?”
Emma nodded and turned her head, calling, “Matt, you there?”
The cop waited until Matt got to the entryway and then said, “I’d like to show you a picture.”
Matt assumed Milo containment duty and Emma released his collar.
“Okay,” said Emma.
“You may find it disturbing.”
“I think I’ll be okay.”
The cop held up an iPad. “Would it be okay if I came in? Might be easier to see it.”
Matt said, “Yeah, sure, of course,” and moved aside a little but stayed right by the door so the cop could step just inside but no farther. He let go of Milo’s collar saying, “Be good now.”
A street sweeping truck turned the corner and headed toward them.
The cop swiped the screen.
“All right, have either of you ever seen this man?” He held up the tablet.
Emma started a little but she was sure the cop didn’t notice. The man’s face had been cleaned off but there were still traces of blood and dirt, and his eyes were closed unevenly, one eyelid askew. Emma was surprised by how freaked out she was.
“It’s okay,” said the cop. “It’s always shocking to see a dead person.”
“Yes.” Emma took a breath and said, “No, I’ve never seen him before.”
Matt said, “Nope, never seen him either.”
“He didn’t come to your house yesterday?”
Emma looked at Matt. “Not while I was walking Milo?”
The street sweeper was getting close enough that they had to raise their voices over the brushing. The truck started a wide turn around a parked car.
Emma couldn’t take her eyes from the dead man’s face. His skin was so white that it was nearly translucent. Whiter than Matt, the whitest white man Emma had ever met. They used to joke that he needed sunscreen just to walk to the mailbox in winter.
Matt was shaking his head. “Nope, didn’t come here.”
“Okay, well, thank you for your time.” The cop swiped again at the iPad. “Friendly beagle you have there.”
“What’s that?” asked Emma.
“Friendly dog,” half-shouted the cop.
“He is,” Emma said. “Wish we could be of more help.”
The cop nodded with a businesslike smile and left. The street sweeper rumbled past, the driver exchanging a little wave with Emma.
After the door closed she let out long breath and said, “Wow, that was so weird. Look at me, I’m shaking.”
“It’s fine,” Matt said, “We’re good. What do they call it in the TV shows—canvassing the neighbourhood? That’s all they’re doing.”
“I’ve never lied to a cop before.”
“Sure you have,” Matt said, “You told that cop on the QEW you didn’t know how fast you were going and you knew perfectly well you were doing one-twenty-five.”
Emma laughed. “This is so different.”
“Not really,” Matt said. “All right, let’s find out how many of those bars we’ve got.”
He walked down the basement stairs and Emma followed. She was a little impressed at how cool he was but also a little surprised. And she was really surprised at how much she liked it.
Detective Sergeant Janice Cleary sat behind the desk in the Mobile Command Center, the RV the Niagara Constabulary Service had recently bought and kitted out with advanced communications equipment and riot gear, and said, “Our dead guy. His name was Leonard Bouchard. You think he went by Len or Lennie?”
She looked up at Detective Constable Trent Frayne, who was still standing by the door he’d just come through. He thought for a second.
“Old friends still called him Lennie, but he didn’t like it.”
“He just got out of Joyceville in September.” Cleary tapped a pen on the desk. “How do you go from a prison cell in Kingston to dead in a Lofthill field in a month.”
Frayne sat down, rubbing his hands. He was surprised Cleary didn’t have the heater going against the chill. The trick-or-treaters were really going to have to bundle-up this year. He nodded at her. “What was he in for?”
Cleary read from the monitor, “Theft over five thousand dollars.”
“B and E?”
“Construction equipment.”
“That’s quite a bit over five thousand.”
Cleary scrolled down.
“A couple guys he was arrested with were charged with theft over two hundred thousand.”
“That’s more like it.”
“They’re still inside.”
“Too bad,” Frayne said, “would have been a good place to start.”
“Maybe I’ll call them. Feel like a little drive around the lake?”
“Kingston’s all right.”
“Fond memories of puck bunnies?”
Frayne arched an eyebrow.
“I don’t think we’re supposed to say that anymore.”
Cleary nodded. She liked Frayne all right, but she didn’t like to let him know that. He was barely thirty, a little over half her age, and on first impression he was just another guy who didn’t make it past junior hockey and fell into police work because it looked less boring than working a call centre or selling Toyotas, but she thought he might actually get good at it. Then she remembered that’s what she thought about her ex-husband, when they were both working uniform, and yeah, turned out she was wrong about him.
She said, “Okay, how’s the canvassing going?”
“They’re just getting started.”
Cleary looked at the computer monitor.
“His parole officer says there’s no next of kin, father is deceased and mother’s whereabouts are unknown. He doesn’t have a vehicle registered in his name, and he didn’t rent one with a credit card in his name.” She doodled “Bouchard” a few times on her notepad. “He had to get here somehow.”
Frayne nodded at the window. “Niagara Transit has those minivans at the community centre here, it’s a hub. What was his last known address?”
“Toronto.”
He gave a little smile.
“Of course. Maybe he was working with a partner and they had a fight. Bouchard got left behind.”
“That’s the most likely,” Cleary said, standing up. “Too bad the partner didn’t take the body with him back to Toronto and dump it there.”
“Or her,” Frayne said.
“Of course—or her. You’re Mr. Feminist today.”
Cleary headed for the door. It opened just as she reached for the lever.
Media Relations Specialist Jason Ridolfi hopped up the metal step and said, “Big crowd out there.”
Cleary looked past him, “Still? The body’s been gone for an hour.”
“Anything for me?”
“You’re the Media Relations creative,” Cleary said. She could smell Ridolfi’s splash of cologne. That and the hair product and the elevator shoes left it evident that Ridolfi liked playing his part with the press, especially the female press. Well, he did have to look decent on camera, Cleary conceded, though it was known in the service that reporters weren’t overly fond of his abrasiveness.
“I heard you had an ID.”
“That sounds like an unsubstantiated rumour.”
Ridolfi tilted his head and said, “That’s funny. He had an ID on him, did it check out?”
Cleary shrugged.
“Not officially. His ID said Leonard Bouchard and the database said someone with that name and date of birth has been arrested a few times and just got out of prison. I emailed a picture to his parole officer who says it’s him but you can’t say that.”
“I know. What about cause of death?”
“Did you see him?”
Ridolfi frowned. “You want me to say a brick was halfway embedded in the back of his skull?”
“That’s not official yet. Talk to Dr. Geffen.”
“So he was killed somewhere else and the body was dumped here?”
“Waiting on forensics.”
Ridolfi shook his head. “So nothing?”
“Investigation is ongoing, information will be provided at a later date. The usual copy-and-paste.”
Frayne studied his nails, staying out of it.
“I heard he was going door-to-door with some kind of scam?”
“You’re not going to put gossip in this statement are you.”
“I thought someone in the crowd this morning identified him, said he was selling something. Trying to sell something, anyway.”
“Not officially.” Cleary paused and then said, “But yes, that’s what it looks like. Yesterday afternoon he knocked on some doors, looked in some houses. Mentioned insulation.”
“One of the homeowners killed him?”
Cleary pointed a bingo finger.
“People get fed up with these scammers. They snap.”
Ridolfi stared and Cleary sighed. “No, Jason, it seems unlikely a homeowner beat a man to death with a brick just because he tried to sell them insulation they didn’t need.”
“You never know.”
“Now that’s true.”
Ridolfi checked his watch.
“We’re going to have to release a statement before five. That gives us three hours.”
Cleary held open her hands. “Come back and see me. I’ll give you what I have then.”
“The Chief is going to want us to get out ahead of this as much as we can.”
Cleary’s smile was tight. “We all understand how important media relations are to the Chief.”
Ridolfi started to say something but stopped. Then he said, “I’ll call you in a couple of hours.”
Frayne bent slightly to watch through the window in the RV’s door as Ridolfi headed back across the street.
“Who did he piss off to get stuck with this job? Wasn’t he a reporter at one of those local stations— Windsor maybe?”
“I’ve heard it suggested that he didn’t have sufficiently ‘TV hair,’” said Cleary. “Plus he was an asshole to work with.” Cleary didn’t add that Ridolfi’s uncle happened to be senior NCS brass and greased his nephew into the position.
Frayne popped a knuckle. “If I had that receding hairline I might be a little bitch too.”
“Right,” said Cleary. “Your vocabulary is improving. Let’s see how the canvassing is going.”
They stepped out of the command center into the crisp afternoon. Frayne put on his sunglasses against the autumn sun, low and orange beyond the community centre. A Legion sandwich board promoted a fish and chips night.
“Guess rain is on the way,” said Cleary.
Frayne shielded his eyes and looked at the sky.
“How do you figure. Not a cloud around.”
Cleary twirled a finger. “True, but feel the breeze. And hear that?”
Frayne turned his head and paused. A distant wail was just audible over the traffic from Royce Road and Highway 20.
“The train horn? So?”
“Folk wisdom down this way. When you hear those horns from CP’s switching yard, south of the river, weather is headed up from the States.”
“Couldn’t it just be a little wind from over the lake?”
Cleary put on her own sunglasses. They walked toward their car.
“Obviously. But throw that tidbit into conversation with a farmer out in Farnwick and suddenly you’re not just a city slicker cop, you’re practically family.” Cleary shrugged. “Well, not really, but you get the point.”
“I do. Anything to establish rapport.”
Cleary nodded. “You’ll deserve that badge yet. So, where are we on Leonard Bouchard’s movements.”
“The person who said she recognized him, the older lady with the Labradoodle? Said she didn’t let him in her house?”
“Is that a question?”
“The uniforms started the canvassing at her residence—it’s in a new subdivision, maybe three years old. Doesn’t look like he went to all that many houses.”
“Maybe he went to other subdivisions. There are a lot of them around here.”
“We’re knocking on a lot of doors,” Frayne said. “Not getting much response.”
Another train horn moaned in the distance.
“Now we know how Bouchard felt.”
Matt leaned back, jotting a final mark on the envelope.
“It’s a million dollars.”
They were in the basement, the bars neatly piled now in stacks of ten on top of the laundry table. There were more in the toolbox than they thought at first. A lot more.
Emma took a breath. “No way.”
“There’s five hundred of them,” Matt said. “At twenty-two hundred each that’s one million, one hundred thousand.” He was using the calculator app on his phone.
“But we won’t be able to get that for them. That’s what those places charge, that’s retail.”
Matt shrugged. “Even if we only get two grand, that’s still a million. A very cool million.”
“But they’re stolen, they have serial numbers on them, we wouldn’t get close to that. We’d probably get arrested trying to sell them.”
Matt nodded. “That’ll affect the price, for sure. Hell, even if we get half the retail price, eleven hundred each, or even a grand, that’s still half a million.”
“Doesn’t the price of gold go up?”
“I guess so.”
“So we hold on to them, just sell a few now, say ten,” said Emma.
Matt considered it. “For a thousand each.”
“That’s ten thousand dollars,” Emma said. “That would buy a lot of fancy coffee beans.”
“And then when we need to sell more they’ll be worth more.” Matt smiled and said, “I guess you’re okay at project management after all.”
“But who will we sell them to? We can’t just look up ‘gold dealers who accept stolen gold.’”
“Why not?” Matt typed on his phone. “That guy in Toronto who’s always yelling about how he buys your gold, look, he got arrested once, didn’t he?”
“How does that help us.”
“Oh wait,” Matt said. “Not him, it was a different I-buy-your-gold guy, and he was arrested for taking out a hit on another gold guy. Huh.”
“That’s not good.”
“But it’s also not bad—it means the business is full of crooks who won’t care about serial numbers.”
“They might.” Emma was looking at her own phone. “There are a lot more places that buy gold than I thought.”
“Maybe we should try Buffalo,” Matt said. “Or Detroit.”
“Yeah, that’s a good idea, we should drive to Detroit and try to sell stolen gold bars. That’ll work.”
“Why not?”
Emma said, “You’re serious?”
“We just look for the shadiest dealers, the ex-cons.”
“You think a guy who’s already been arrested for buying stolen gold will buy more?”
“No, you’re right,” Matt said. “I’m sure the prison system offered excellent rehabilitation programs and retraining in a different field.”
“Don’t be a jerk.”
“I’m sorry, okay, I’m nervous, too. But come on, there are all kinds of gold bugs out there.” He held up a couple of bars in the light coming through the window.
“Look at it, it’s hypnotic.”
“It’s dangerous.”
Matt stared at the bars for a few more seconds and then said, “Okay, we don’t have to do anything today.” He started packing the gold back into the toolbox and nodded at the floor. “We need to fix that.”
Emma said, “I don’t know. It’s pretty deep. Do we just put cement over it?”
Matt started up the stairs and Emma followed.
“Easy enough to find out. Thank god for Google.”
Lofthill’s main business street was like those in a lot of small towns in southern Ontario since the exodus from Toronto really started to kick in a few years before— architecturally a mix of warm heritage and cold modernity. It was also hard to tell sometimes if a business was brand new and just opened by over-inked millennials trying to fake the retro, or if it had really been in the same spot since before one or both world wars.
The dry goods and hardware store had been there for generations. It was one of the first places Matt and Emma had walked into when they’d moved to town, and they loved it. The plastic tubs of bolts. The off-brand spray paints. The Whirlpool skyline of bright white appliances ranged along the wall. They weren’t sure if they loved it ironically or just appreciated that the store almost always had what they needed and the people working there knew what they were doing—and actually seemed happy doing it. Cheeriness was in short supply lately.
But now the guy behind the cash was saying, “I don’t know where you’d go for that, not around here,” and this surprised Matt. He looked at Emma and smiled a little.
The customer, a middle-aged man Emma recognized from their street, said, “I can get it online, I guess, I just didn’t want to wait.”
He turned and walked out, the little bell jingling as the door closed, and Matt said to the guy, “I’m pretty sure you have what I need—a bag of pre-mixed concrete.”
“That we have. What’s it for?” He led the way to the back of the store and Matt followed.
“Just a patch job.”
“Outdoor, indoor?”
“Indoor,” Matt said. “Basement floor.”
“Old house?”
“Not that old, three years.”
“These new houses are just thrown together. They need to be fixed more than the old ones.”
Matt said, “That’s for sure,” and then listened while the guy explained about the different kinds of mixes.
Back at the register Emma pulled a box of mint Girl Guide cookies from the stack and put it on the counter with the concrete.
When they were paying the guy said, “It’s crazy how much prices have gone up.”
Matt had no idea how much a bag of concrete mix —or Girl Guide mints— used to cost, but he said, “Like everything else,” and that was true enough.
Emma nodded toward the door as she opened the cookies and offered them to the men. “What did that other guy want that you didn’t have?”
A shriek came from outside. They turned to see a group of tweens walking along the sidewalk. A blonde girl laughed loudly as she flirted with a shorter boy.
Matt took a cookie while the hardware guy nodded no.
“Oh, it was weird. A metal detector.”
“What?”
“Yeah, I’ve never had anyone ask for one of those before and now that was the second time today.”
Emma barely tasted the cookie as she chewed.
Matt said, “Really?”
The guy pushed the cash register closed. “You heard about the body they found over by the community center?”
“I was walking our dog,” Emma said, “I saw all the police.”
“They say the dead guy was looking for something, going through the houses in the new development—”
He handed the receipt to Matt.
“—with a metal detector.”
Matt folded the receipt carefully. “The cops said that?”
“I don’t know anything about the cops, but apparently the guy went through a few houses and you know the way people talk. Now everybody wants to figure out what he was looking for, maybe find it themselves.”
Emma looked at Matt. “That’s so bizarre.”
The guy tapped the counter. “Sure is.”
***
As they walked back to the car, Emma glanced at Matt.
“What are we going to do?”
“What do you mean? Nothing.”
“Everybody’s looking for what he was looking for.”
Matt opened the Mini’s hatch and dropped in the bag of cement. “So, let them look.” He slammed the hatch and stepped close to Emma. “They’re not going to find anything.”
“A fresh patch in the basement is going to look pretty suspicious.”
“We already talked to the cops, there’s nothing to worry about.” Matt jingled his keys. “So we put down a throw rug. It’s going to be fine.”
Emma looked at her reflection in the car’s rear window. “I don’t know.”
“Come on, we’re out here with the countryfolk now, there’s nothing to worry about. We stay cool.”
Matt walked around the car and got in behind the wheel, and after a moment Emma walked to the passenger side.
Down near the pizzeria more shrieks came from the tweens who had walked by before—and then, suddenly, real screams.
The group scattered—some pushing inside the pizzeria, the rest running back along the sidewalk toward Matt and Emma. Two skinny dogs loped behind them.
“Emma,” Matt yelled from inside the Mini, “Get in the car.”
As the kids bolted past the hardware store something slipped from one of their hands—a cellphone. It hit the concrete with a sickening crack, breaking the screen. The dogs stopped to sniff it. Then Emma realized they weren’t dogs. They were coyotes.
Two mangy coyotes, just fur and bones, one with a limp.
And now they fixed their attention on Emma, still standing next to the Mini.
Matt blasted the horn. “Emma—get in!”
The coyotes didn’t move. They tilted their heads a bit as they watched Emma, their nostrils quivering. One, then the other, inched forward.
She couldn’t believe how intelligent their eyes were. They didn’t blink, and neither did she. They were calculating the odds. She’d seen the news lately about aggressive coyotes in Niagara, even in the GTA. Constantly getting bolder.
Matt cracked open the passenger window. “Emma, for chrissake, what are you doing.”
She looked down at her hands and saw the cookie box as if for the first time. Now the animals were ten feet away. How far could a hungry coyote jump?
Careful not to aim directly at them, Emma threw the box over their heads. It split open as it hit the sidewalk.
They pounced on it, snarling and snapping at each other as Emma got into the Mini. She pressed the door lock, and fastened her shoulder belt.
Matt stared at her.
“What was that?”
She wasn’t sure why or what, but Emma realized she understood something, something she maybe didn’t want to know just yet.
“You said it was going to be fine, to stay cool,” she said, watching the coyotes chew through the box.
“I was practicing being cool.”
Episode 2 of 10. Continued next week.
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