A Bodyguard to Remember (13 page)

That still didn’t address why they had to step into the garden in the first place.

Then it occurred to me that maybe the police had created the scuffs when they were looking for, or removing evidence.

It didn’t matter. I wasn’t going to discover anything the police didn’t already know, but it niggled at me. What I needed to do was look at the crime scene photos.

I’m a lousy liar, but I can weave a pretty good story and I learned the value of persistence from my children. When I called Detective Parrino, there wasn’t a lot I could tell him. In fact, I wasn’t sure exactly what I could talk about that wasn’t classified. I figured I was on safe ground telling him about my photo shoot and my daughter’s fascination with true crime.

“So I just want to compare the photos I took to real crime scene photos. They’re not secret, are they? I’m not asking for the ones taken of the body and my living room
—
you probably don’t want to release those. It’s only the ones—”

“Ms. Hartley,” Parrino interrupted, “if you want to come here, I’ll arrange for you to look at the photos on one of our terminals.”

I’m almost positive he agreed just to shut me up.

We made an appointment for the day after next. In the interim, I went over older photographs of the garden. I didn’t have any shots focussing on the back of the garden, but I found a few with my kids playing in the foreground with the back fence behind them. There were quite a few from when we first moved in, and a couple of useful shots almost every summer since. I scanned the pre-digital photos and enlarged the ones with a good view of the flower bed along the back fence. I put the lot together on a memory card and then made a cup of tea and took some painkillers for the resulting headache.

When I met Detective Parrino, he seemed to be having second thoughts about leaving me alone at a terminal. Bringing my laptop with me probably didn’t help.

“I can’t give you much time, Ms. Hartley.”

“I don’t think I’ll need much time, Detective. Mostly I’m curious about my backyard.”

He pulled up the photos. They showed footprints
—
most of them scuffed
—
on the steps and on my deck.

“How about farther into the yard
—
the flower bed along the back.”

Parrino scrolled through the thumbnails.

“Is this what you mean?”

The photos confirmed what I suspected. The garden was trampled before the police arrived. They also showed something my photos didn’t. The person that trampled the plants had come from my house.

Two people entered my home via the back door. On the way in, they took the most economical route. One person came out the back, trampled the garden, then apparently left via the gate.

“Why?” I mused. “It doesn’t make sense.”

“He might have tried to jump the fence, failed, and gave up. We didn’t find prints or fibres on the fence, but that only means that he was wearing gloves and he didn’t catch his clothing on the wood.”

For every photo I took, the police had taken at least three. I poured over them all, comparing them to mine, trying to see what I was missing.

“Ms. Hartley?”

Detective Parrino’s body language said what he was too polite to say himself. I had to pack up and let him get back to work. I started to shut down the windows I’d opened on my laptop. The last one to go showed of Hope and her friends with the fence line behind them.

“That’s it!”

“Ms. Hartley?”

He sounded mildly curious.

“Look at the fence behind my daughter’s head, and there behind her friend. Now look at the crime scene photos of the same area.”

The back fence was constructed with vertical boards alternating on either side of the supporting cross beams, so that it looked the same on both sides. On the group shot there were blocks under the exposed upper beam in two spots. They looked like braces and blended in with the wood. I never noticed them before but they were clearly in the photo taken last summer, and missing in the crime scene photos and the ones I took later. If you looked carefully, there was a slight difference in colour where whatever had been there, had protected the wood beneath.

I pulled up earlier photos. I archived most of my family shots on my laptop so I could show them off to family and friends during visits. The objects weren’t in the photos taken our first year in the house or the year after. There were no useful photos taken for the next couple of years, but among recent Halloween shots, I found them in a picture of Boone in his Spiderman costume, pretending to wall-crawl the fence.

“I see it, but I don’t get it,” said Parrino.

“Apparently, the murderer took something out of my garden
—
something that had been there for at least three years.”

“That much I get,” he said, rolling his eyes. “I don’t get what
it
is.”

I had an idea, but I didn’t like it.

I pulled out my phone. Merrick wasn’t available, so I left a message to call me.

“I want to email these photos to Sergeant Merrick,” I told Parrino.

“He has copies of all the crime scene photos and reports.”

I shook off the objection.

“Even so, I’d like to send him the photos we were looking at
—
yours and mine. Then it won’t matter where he is when he picks up his voicemail.”

“You don’t know where he is?”

Merrick checked in with me regularly, but I had been bumped down his priority list. I think it was because nothing conclusive came out of the publicity gambit. Zeke stayed in touch via email. Through him, I got the impression they were involved in a related case
—
but I was only guessing.

“His work takes him all over, and I’m just one case.”

I hated thinking of myself as a part of Merrick’s job, but it was the truth. It wasn’t the whole truth, but it was enough for Parrino.

The detective produced a memory card and I uploaded the key photos to it. He then downloaded the images to the terminal and started composing an email. I read over his shoulder while packing up my laptop. He gave the short version of me coming to him and offered the photos for Merrick’s consideration. Once the message and attachments were on their way, I prepared to leave.

“You shouldn’t mention this to anyone else, Ms. Hartley,” Parrino said, offering his hand.

“Don’t intend to. You have my cell phone number, right? Because I’m not going home. My ex asked me to check in on his place if I had the chance. I’ll stay there tonight.”

I picked up Chinese food and barricaded myself in Seth and Sarah’s guest room with the food, a pot of tea, and a couple of romantic comedies. I was midway through
While You Were Sleeping
when Merrick called.

“Where are you, Hartley?”

I told him.

“Am I being paranoid?” I asked.

“He can’t be sure, the quality of your home photos aren’t good enough, but Zeke is almost positive that the objects were surveillance equipment. Probably cameras.”

“Then I’m not being paranoid.”

“No, Hartley, not paranoid. You understand the implications if the murderer placed that equipment?”

“It wasn’t a chance encounter, at Starbucks. The guy who ended up dead in my living room was looking for me.”

I took a deep breath. Chinese food had settled my nerves and I was determined not to let the Singapore noodles and General Tao’s chicken be consumed in vain. My idea had been borne out and I liked it even less than when it first occurred to me.

“Why me?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “If that surveillance equipment was in use for three years, you’ve probably been an unwitting courier in the past.”

I fought down the chicken with willpower and green tea.

“It’s a convoluted but clever idea. It’s probably one of the reasons we’ve never been able to get anything on the ringleader. Even the people who work for him don’t meet him directly.”

“Will these people think I know who he is?”

I had to wait for an answer either because Merrick didn’t know or didn’t want to tell me.

“Could that be the reason I was attacked in the hotel?” I asked. “I mean, the murderer would know that I didn’t know what was going on
—
that I’d have no answers to the location of the missing data card. But someone working with Nadar might have thought I knew something.”

“That is a logical conclusion.”

He was starting to sound Vulcan again.

“The ringleader probably never showed up at the book signings because he knew where to find me all along.”

“Probably true,” he agreed.

I blew out a noisy sigh.

“It was a waste of time then?”

“Not in the least, Hartley. We’ve identified a couple of people of interest
—
people who might have supplied data via his delivery system.”

“You mean me. But I didn’t recognize anyone I didn’t already know.”

“Nevertheless, I want you to look at them again.”

I wasn’t sure what else to say about the situation. If we were right, I was an unwitting traitor. A dupe. All I could think of was, why me? To voice the question again smacked of whining. I might be a dupe, but I was no whiner.

“When do Hope and Boone get home?” Merrick asked.

“In two days. I don’t want them to come back to this.”

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll have things wrapped up here by then. For now, go visit your friend in Toronto for a couple of days. I’ll meet you there the day after tomorrow.”

“And my kids?”

“I don’t think they are in any danger. Most likely, you aren’t either as long as our broker doesn’t suspect you know he was using you. Just in case, Nate can take them camping. He was going to suggest it earlier, but I said you’d probably want to spend time with Hope and Boone before school started.”

“Good call . . . on both counts.”

*    *    *

The day I returned home, my ducts were cleaned. That is, the man and woman who came to my door were in the overalls of a local heat and air service company, but the ID they showed was RCMP. I was impressed with their thoroughness as they scanned my house for devices. They even cleaned my heating system. It was a great cover for checking the house, except for one thing.

“What’s up? We just had our ducts cleaned last November,” Walter said, having let himself in the back door.

He’d knocked first but, as usual, he didn’t wait for me to let him in. He’d been in and out of my house so often doing minor repairs, he no longer observed that formality. A short
bing
announced his arrival. It told me when a door or window was being opened.

“That ringing has got to get annoying after a while,” he added.

“I’m getting used to it,” I said. “As for the duct cleaning, I was offered a deal for early cleaning.”

“But we usually do ducts every other year.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, thinking fast, “but with the smoke bomb earlier this year, I didn’t want to risk there being residue in the ducts. Besides, the price was right.”

Free.

“Maybe I should see if they can do my place,” Walter said after consideration. “I don’t want to turn the furnace on in October and have another allergy attack. I’ll tell you, that smoke bomb almost put me in the hospital.”

Now what? I decided to let the pros handle it.

“I’ll go ask. Why don’t you pour yourself a coffee?”

They were good. They offered to do Walter’s ducts for the price that I was allegedly paying. They even told me that they’d put me down as the referral and the office would be sending me a discount voucher for my next cleaning.

“The kids will be home today, right?” Walter asked, after signing the work order.

“They’re off camping for a week,” I said. “I miss them, of course, but they’re really enjoying themselves so . . .”

“Oh well, at least you’ll get lots of work done, right? I’m looking forward to your next book launch. I think I’ve found you a new fan, a lovely lady in my square-dancing group. Not her, actually, but her teenage son. He’s really into sci-fi. Let me know when you’re doing your next bookstore appearance and I’ll bring him to meet you.”

Walter excused himself shortly after that and I locked the back door behind him. It was a habit I had to get into. Despite the murder, Detective Parrino’s lecture, Kallas’s earnest advice, and Merrick’s rules, I still kept forgetting.

No longer. Not me. No more surprise guests if I could help it.

I didn’t get my wish, but my next surprise started off very pleasantly. Geoff came down from Toronto to visit for the day. I put together a picnic lunch and we ate it in the park by the river. Since he was one of the few people I could talk to about what was going on, I had talked to him when I’d visited Paula. Now he gave me reason to regret it.

“I have a proposition for you,” he announced.

I waggled my eyebrows suggestively.

“Not that kind of proposition,” he chuckled. “I have a friend, a cop, who’s taking a course locally. He needs a place to stay for a few months
—
a semester I guess. If you have a spare room, he could board with you a while and . . .”

“And guard me when he’s not in class?”

I’d been there and done that with Nate. In fact, I was wishing I could take the kids back to Ottawa and our protected life there. It wasn’t just that I felt more secure, I missed having Nate around. I wasn’t sure I wanted a stranger in my house, however.

“I doubt Merrick will go for it,” I said.

“Will you let me ask him?”

Since I figured Merrick would say no anyway, I nodded. A day later, Merrick invited me out for coffee at one of the campus coffee shops, explaining that he didn’t want to come around the house and tip off anyone keeping an eye on me.

He pulled out his tablet and pulled up the photos he wanted me to look at. I went through them twice before a memory was twigged.

“I’ve seen her before.” I pointed out a mousy looking woman who could have been my age or ten years older or younger. It was hard to tell. “I’ve seen her at Starbucks. She doesn’t hang around any longer than it takes to pick up a half dozen coffees of various descriptions.”