Really Dead

  “You’re the least crippled person I know,” Glenn laughed, “and you don’t seem to have had much trouble identifying me.”

  “Given the fact that I’ve known you since you were three and heard every creak and crack of you maturing into that distinctive FM-DJ voice, that’s not surprising.”

  “And I did call to tell you I was coming.”

  “Nevertheless, for future reference, identify yourself more clearly when the person you’re greeting can’t see you!”

  “Point taken.” Glenn watched Doc wrap the wire mostly around the headset and then put the mangled mess on top of the talking book machine on the table. “What are you reading?”

  “John Gould’s Seven Good Reasons Not to Be Good. Have you read it?”

  Glenn shook his head and then backed his visual response up with words. “Never heard of it.”

  “The critics were right. It’s a damn-near perfect book.”

  “Oh.” It was the only response Glenn could think of. “Where’s everybody else?”

  “Up at the cottage.”

  “Why aren’t you there?” Doc usually spent all summer, every summer, at the family’s cottage in Muskoka.

  “I came down to the city for a transfusion and decided to stay for a bit.” Doc popped open the top of his Braille watch and felt the metal hands inside. “It’s a good thing you called to tell me to be home.” He snapped the watch closed. “Stephanie and I had a date to go hiking part of the Bruce Trail this morning.”

  “You’re up to that?” Subtlety wasn’t Glenn’s strong suit and with Doc Butler he didn’t even try to fake it. He knew that Doc would respect honest bluntness more. The fact was Doc had some weird-named cancer of the blood. But he sure didn’t act like someone with a terminal illness. Yeah, he was looking a little pale and maybe a bit thinner (if that was possible), but his spirit was as strong as ever.

  “I wish you’d all stop obsessing about my Waldenström’s macroglobulinemia.” The two words (or maybe three?) hadn’t tied Doc’s tongue up in a knot the way they would have Glenn’s. “We’re all dying, Glenn. Some of us will just take longer to do it than others. As for my demise, it’s a long way off, I assure you. Now, tell me again, why am I about to do a telephone autopsy on a foot?”

  Glenn brought Doc up to speed quickly, checking his own watch every so often. Ria would be calling in a few minutes and Glenn wanted the chance to pick Doc’s brain before the phone rang. “If it is a real foot, what I don’t get is why someone would cut it off.”

  “There could be numerous explanations for that.”

  “Care to name a few?”

  “Well, for one, she might have cut it off herself or had someone do it for her. Back when I was practising, the desire to become an amputee was classified as a sexual deviation. That was a psychiatric classification, though, and as we all know Freud put sex into everything. He should have just had sex with his mother and been done with it, in my opinion. Since my time a few psychologists who, on the whole, aren’t quite so sex-centric, have studied a phenomenon or unclassified condition that they’ve named Body Identity Integrity Disorder.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Dead serious. I remember reading a case study on one patient in particular who had always wanted to get rid of his leg. He tried to find a doctor to amputate it for him, but there weren’t any takers. As far as I know there’s been only one documented case of a doctor removing healthy limbs. Smith, I think his name was, but I doubt he had anything to do with the girl in the Caribbean. He was doing his thing in Scotland back in the nineties. As for the patient in the case study, he eventually did get his wish, his leg was amputated, but only after he’d frozen it in dry ice for several hours. He deliberately inflicted the damage that made the amputation medically necessary, not cosmetic.”

  Because of his job, Glenn had heard about some weird stuff over the years — but this stuff was the weirdest yet. And Doc wasn’t done.

  “Then there’s somatoparaphrenia, a neuro-psychiatric disorder, usually caused by a brain malfunction brought on by stroke. Sufferers truly believe that their left arm or leg doesn’t belong on their body. Although, it’s only a temporary condition, so I doubt your girl had that.”

  “You’re talking real fringe stuff here, Doc. Shouldn’t we stay more mainstream, like in the realm of normal?”

  “Attraction to amputation isn’t that out there. John Irving is a bestselling author, read by millions of mainstream people, and dismemberment is a recurring theme in his books. In The Fourth Hand a TV reporter has his hand eaten off by a lion. Hmmm, maybe that’s connected somehow? A TV person, amputation … two similar elements.”

  “I don’t think there are any lions in the British Virgin Islands.”

  “How about some tigers or bears?” Doc tried, unsuccessfully, to look as if he wasn’t joking around, but even Glenn recognized Doc’s attempt at Wizard of Oz humour.

  “Can we get back on track?”

  “Oh, my.” Doc gave his joke one last shot at getting a reaction from Glenn.

  Glenn didn’t give him one. “Will you be able to tell by just a description if it was cut off before or after death?”

  Doc shook his head. “I’d need to see it and we both know that’s never going to happen. I won’t even be able to say with one hundred percent certainty if it’s real or fake, but I’ll give you my best guess.”

  “Why would somebody do that? Kill someone and then cut off a piece of them?”

  “To get attention? Because he’s careless and didn’t realize he left it behind when he chopped up the body to dispose of it? Cutting up a body isn’t easy. Maybe he started with the foot and then gave up when he discovered how much effort it was going to take to do the whole job? Or maybe he’s just plain crazy? I don’t know. All I’m doing is guessing in a void of information. Now that’s something I’m an expert at — stabbing around in the dark.”

  Glenn was used to Doc’s sarcastic comments about his blindness, but he never failed to detect the sadness in them.

  The cordless phone that had been lying on the table rang and Doc handed it to Glenn. “You answer it. I don’t know which button turns the speakerphone on.”

  Once on speakerphone, Ria introduced Pam to Glenn and her father and then let Pam have some uninterrupted airtime to describe what she’d found. The details she remembered were gruesome and, for some reason, she was shouting them into the telephone. Some of her over-amplified words came out distorted. Doc leaned forward toward the table and cut into her description while she was taking a breath.

  “PAM!” He shouted as loudly as he could.

  “YEAH?” She matched his decibel level.

  “I’M NOT DEAF! My ears work just fine. Please stop yelling.”

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  Glenn took the opportunity allowed by the break in Pam’s monologue to ask a question. “Pam, Glenn here. What was the one thing that instantly made you think the foot was fake?” Sometimes the most obvious things were the most important.

  “There were two straws.”

  “Straws?” Doc asked.

  “Yeah, you know, the things they used for bones. There’s only supposed to be one, right?” Pam started to sing, “The leg bone’s connected to the ankle bone …”

  Doc rolled his eyes. “Was the foot cut off above the ankle?”

  “The cut was through the leg bone that connects to the ankle bone, but there were two of them.”

  “The fibula and tibia,” Doc muttered. “What kind of bugs did you see?”

  “Bugs?”

  “Yes, bugs, insects, maybe some flies …”

  “None. There was a starfish. Does that count?”

  “I’ve heard enough.” Doc ran his hand along the top of the table, found the phone, and pushed the disconnect button. “The leg bone’s connected to the ankle bone indeed!”

  Glenn smiled, wondering how Ria was going to explain Doc’s brusqueness to Pam. “So? What do you think?”

  “Anato
mically, it sounds like a real foot — the right bones in the right places, the waxy appearance of the skin, the thin layer of muscle, or meat as Pam called it, the marrow in the straws — all of that makes me think it was real.”

  Glenn nodded. Even before the telephone description his gut had been telling him that the foot was real.

  “However, the lack of insect activity puzzles me.”

  Glenn stopped nodding and started feeling queasy. He knew too much about the bugs that Doc was wondering about, he’d been to too many crime scenes to not know about them. They were the main reason he’d included his wish to be cremated in his own will. That wish only intensified as he listened to Doc think out loud.

  “Blowflies and flesh flies will start laying their eggs almost immediately after death, usually around the moist orifices like the nostrils, mouth, and eyes. An open wound of that size would have been like an all you can eat buffet for them. Because of the climate, Pam should have seen ample evidence of larvae activity — maggots. There is a way to slow it or even stop it — refrigeration or freezing, and Pam did mention seeing ice crystals on the muscle. So, if real, the foot would have to have been frozen immediately after dismemberment. But the same issue still arises — once it was removed from the freezer it would have warmed up quickly in those conditions. It could only have been in the tidal pool for a very short amount of time. You’d be looking for someone who had access to the foot and the tidal pool within less than an hour, probably significantly less than an hour, of when the foot was found.”

  “And the foot would have had to been in the freezer long enough to freeze it solid, right?” Glenn asked. “Which means she was probably killed the night before, right?”

  “That would be a fairly safe assumption, but again, without examining the foot and the conditions there’s no way of saying anything with certainty. You’re dealing with guesswork here.”

  “I’ve started off with less before.” But Glenn planned to add some facts to that guesswork.

  He couldn’t, or wouldn’t, believe that not one camera on an island permanently under the watchful eye of multiple cameras had captured the action, or actions, that led to Kate’s dismemberment.

  Ria had said she’d send him a list of the camera tapes that had been recorded the night before Kate disappeared and on the morning of her disappearance. There had to be something on those, right? How could someone kill and cut up a girl without being noticed by at least one of the cameras? And if there wasn’t anything on the tapes? The killer and the cutter (if they were the same person) had to be someone who knew an awful lot about the placement of those cameras.

  A short, tense buzz along Highway 401 took Glenn to the top of the Don Valley Parkway. Morning rush hour had cleared out and afternoon rush hour hadn’t yet started. It was one of those rare times when the highway wasn’t earning its nickname — the Don Valley Parking Lot. The southbound lanes were almost empty. The roof was down on his trusty ’76 MG. The sun was shining bright. He pushed an eight-track into the player under the dashboard. Lynyrd Syknyrd’s “Free Bird” started playing in mid-chorus. Brandon would have recognized it from one of his “Guitar Hero” games. That saying, everything old is new again, was sure true. The classics from Glenn’s teenage years were hits again on Brandon’s video games and even on some of the television shows he watched. The CSI series used music from The Who — CSI used “Who Are You” from 1978 (Glenn had the original red-vinyl record safely tucked away with the rest of his albums in the milk crates in his storage space), CSI New York used “Baba O’Riley,” and CSI Miami used “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” both from 1971.

  As much as he felt like a free bird buzzing down the highway with the top down, Glenn wasn’t in a Lynyrd Skynyrd mood. He was in a thinking mood and there was nobody better to think and enjoy a steady drive with than Carlos Santana. He changed eight-tracks tapes and rolled down the highway that ran through the heavily forested valley on the eastern side of Toronto while Carlos did his jazz, salsa, rock guitar thing on “She’s Not There.”

  Where was Kate?

  If someone had killed her, had they hidden her body somewhere in the hotel? Unlikely. Someone on the housekeeping staff would have found it or, at the very least, they would have found some sign of a murder. You didn’t need a CSI team to recognize blood splatter and there’d be an awful lot of blood spread around when a limb got cut off.

  If she’d been hidden somewhere outside the groundskeeping staff would have found her. Butler Hotels were famous for their landscaping. Glenn could safely assume that the entire island was crawling with an army of gardeners.

  If not in the hotel or on the grounds — where? The only obvious answer was in the water.

  But why cut off her foot? The killer had hidden the body well enough to avoid it being found. If he or she had left the foot attached they’d be dealing with just a missing person, not a missing body.

  So who on the crew had spent enough time with Kate to work up a hate strong enough to kill her, who knew where all the cameras were, and who knew enough about the workings of the hotel and its staff to be able to pull off a murder (and dismemberment) without anyone noticing a thing?

  And what about her stuff? Ria was going to confirm whether or not it was at James’ place on the other island. Who would have been able to hide it there without anyone asking any questions?

  One person fit the bill — James.

  He knew all about the production.

  He knew all about the hotel.

  He had his own boat to get back and forth between the two islands.

  It would kill Ria if James was guilty of something like that.

  James. James? Glenn just couldn’t picture it. He had a temper, to be sure, but a murderous temper? The worst thing Glenn had ever seen him do was belt someone in the face — and the guy deserved it, he’d said something pretty damn rude about Ria.

  Glenn quickly added James’ partner to the short list. He knew just as much as James did about the production. Maybe James was just an accessory? It wasn’t much better, but it was some better.

  Anybody else? The woman who worked for James’ partner — the one with the strange name.

  Damn, it would be so much easier if Ria was here, Glenn thought. They’d be able to talk it through without the distance of a less-than-reliable phone service between them.

  Maybe he should go there?

  The driver of the dump truck in the lane beside Glenn realized at the last minute that his lane was ending and he cut Glenn — and his line of thinking — off.

  Glenn took the Richmond Street exit and slowed down to a crawl as he hit the city traffic. While sitting at a red light he looked around to see if there were any cops nearby, then held his BlackBerry in his lap and checked to see if Ria had sent the email with the tape information yet. The car behind him honked. The light had turned green.

  By the time he’d inched (or centimetred, to be more metrically Canadian) up to the next red light, her email, with attachments, had downloaded. He had the list. Now all he had to do was find the place where James’ company did their editing.

  CHAPTER

  TEN

  VideoPost was in an old factory building on the outskirts of the Distillery District, the largest preserved collection of Victorian industrial architecture in North America. Parking was already at a premium in the trendy area and Glenn wondered how much worse it would get when the athletes’ village for the 2015 Pan American Games was built just east of the district.

  The receptionist at VideoPost wasn’t as young or as pretty as the girls James usually hired for his production office. And she was a stickler for the rules. She insisted that Glenn sign in. He didn’t want to put his name on any piece of paper that James might see. He wrote down an investigative journalist’s name, it just wasn’t his name — C. Bernstein. Satisfied, the receptionist buzzed the editor to tell him that Glenn was on his way and then told Glenn how to find the editing suite in the catacombs.

  As he walked down
the low-ceilinged underground hallway, Glenn could understand why the receptionist had called the basement the catacombs; it was like a subterranean cemetery. He had to stoop slightly to avoid banging his head.

  A short bent-over man, who was wearing possibly the worst hairpiece Glenn had ever seen and had a face that closely resembled a pug, came walking toward him. “Are you Bear’s friend?” he asked Glenn.

  “Yeah, I’m Carl.” Glenn held out his hand.

  “Dex. Follow me.”

  Dex led him into a dark little room, illuminated only by the three twenty-one-inch flat screens sitting just above a long electronic console and a bigger fifty-inch flat screen that hung on the wall above the console. A slow-moving big blue Butler B against a white background was the screensaver on all the televisions.

  “You got a list for me?”

  Glenn opened up the email attachment on his cellphone and showed it to Dex.

  “Jesus!” Dex scrolled through the information. “Bear didn’t say it was this much. This is gonna take forever.” He sat down in one of the padded swivel chairs in front of the console, pointed for Glenn to sit down, and started to click his mouse.

  One of the small screens flashed and on it appeared a long list of what looked like places and activities: Kitchen/Cooking Challenge, Pool Patio/Elimination 11, Beach/JI Commercial (Albert Go Boom), to name just a few.

  “Help me here” Glenn asked. “I don’t know what I’m looking at.”

  “There’s a folder for each scene shot at a specific location. Inside the folders are the bins. The bins hold all the footage from the cameras shooting that scene.”

  It made sense, sort of. “Why don’t we start with whatever Bear put at the top of the list and work our way through that way?”

  “Fine, but I’m hoping you’ll be able to shorten the list down a bit. Let me know if you see whatever it is you’re looking for.” He started clicking and opened the folder called EXT. Kitchen Tree Camera/Day 37. After checking the list on Glenn’s phone again, he clicked on Scene 4, the last bin in the folder.