Out with the Sunset Read online

  “I was going to suggest that we go out for burgers to celebrate your first day of school and my first homicide. Or… commiserate. I don’t suppose ‘celebrate’ is the right word.”

  “Yeah? And then go see Moushoom? Maybe we could take him a burger; I bet he would like that.”

  Margie hesitated. “I don’t know if he is on a special diet. We’d better find that out before we take him any food. But we could get some supper and then go see him afterwards.”

  Christina nodded her approval at this. “Where are we going to go?”

  “I don’t really know what’s good. There are a ton of ethnic restaurants on Seventeenth Avenue. They call it International Avenue. But if we’re going to go see Moushoom, maybe we should just get something quick, so we’re not stuck waiting for an hour for our food. There’s an A&W. You like their burgers.”

  “Do they have a veggie burger?”

  Margie frowned at her. “A veggie burger? Maybe, I don’t know.”

  “I decided I want to be vegetarian.”

  That was a bit of a shock. Christina had always enjoyed her meat. And even hunting. Margie hadn’t seen that one coming. Her brain immediately spun into high gear. Was Christina flirting with an eating disorder? Looking for ways to cut her food intake or calories? Would she be able to get the protein she needed on a vegetarian diet? Teen girls needed plenty of iron if they didn’t want to be anemic.

  But she answered as calmly as she could. It was probably just a passing phase. This week, Christina would be vegetarian, and next week, she would be ordering a rack of ribs.

  “I’m sure they must have a veggie burger.” Stella barked from outside the back door, and Margie took a couple of steps toward it to let her in. “Why don’t you look it up on your phone and make sure they have what you want? Then we can head over.”

  She opened the door and let Stella in. She scratched her floppy ears and cuddled her black and brown face, asking, ‘Who’s a good girl?’ Then Stella noticed that Christina was home and launched herself at her. Christina squealed and laughed and wrestled with Stella. Margie smiled at the two of them. Stella was good therapy at the end of a rough day.

  A&W did have a veggie burger, and it was pretty good. Christina gave Margie a bite and, despite her hesitation, Margie found that it tasted pretty much just like a regular beef burger. This made her wonder how much beef was in a regular beef burger and how much was fillers of some kind. You wanted breadcrumbs or something to help give it a good texture and moisture, but not too much.

  “That’s great,” Margie observed. “Maybe I’ll get one next time.” She nearly patted her stomach and commented on getting too thick around the middle, but stopped herself. She didn’t want Christina to start worrying about her weight or to model her own thoughts about her body after negative comments her mother made.

  Christina finished her burger in a few more bites and dabbled some remaining fries in the puddle of ketchup. “Where does Moushoom live? Is it far away?”

  Calgary was the big city. Not like the population of New York, of course, but it was bigger than Winnipeg, and it sprawled over hundreds of square kilometers. It could take an hour to drive across the city. Margie smiled. “He’s very close. We’ll drive over today, but you can walk there from the house. You can go see him any time you want.”

  Christina smiled broadly at that. “Really? That’s awesome.”

  She loved her Moushoom. They cleared away their garbage and went back to the car. Margie used the GPS even though she knew it was close. She didn’t want to head in the wrong direction. Once she had been there a few times, she would be able to get there without instructions. For a descendant of Cree women and explorers, Margie had a terrible sense of direction.

  Margie scanned the signs on the door to the building. They were, of course, required to wear masks while visiting. There was a hand sanitizing station to wash before going up to the living quarters and upon leaving, to protect both their loved ones and themselves. There was a long list of symptoms. If you have experienced a new cough, fever, upset stomach, trouble breathing…

  But no unexpected rules. Nothing about having to quarantine for fourteen days if they had come from out of the province. That was a relief. She had been secretly worried about it, even though she had told Christina that she could visit whenever she wanted to. They already had their masks on, so they rubbed gel into their hands and continued on to the elevators.

  Moushoom was sitting in an easy chair, watching the TV when they arrived. He hollered for them to come in rather than getting up to answer the door. When he saw they were visitors rather than staff, he sat up straighter.

  “Who’s there?”

  “It’s Margie and Christina, Moushoom,” Margie informed him. Christina stepped forward to hug him, but Margie touched her to prevent her. “We have to be careful of infection,” she reminded.

  Christina shook her head. “I’m going to hug him! I’ll hold my breath, and I just washed my hands. I’m not going to infect him!”

  Moushoom eagerly accepted a hug from Christina. “Is it really little Christina? But you were just a little girl the last time I saw you!”

  “That was two summers ago. I… grew up.”

  “Yes, you did.” Moushoom released his hold on her and looked her over. “You are turning into a lovely young lady. Your mother must be very proud.”

  “Isn’t she?” Margie agreed. She drew a couple of chairs over so they could sit close—but not too close—to him. “We have a surprise for you.”

  “A bigger surprise than this? I didn’t think they would even let people travel right now. Everything has been so crazy with the pandemic.”

  “A bigger surprise than this.”

  Margie looked at the old man with great affection. He still looked just the same as she remembered him. He wore his buckskins, beadwork, and sash proudly. He was always reminding them of their heritage. Telling them not to forget their history and where they had come from. It was all important. It wasn’t just where they had come from; it was a piece of who they were. Maybe he was a little shrunken, a little more gray than she remembered him, but otherwise, he looked exactly the same. Her own Moushoom.

  “What could it be? What is it?”

  “We bought a house just a few blocks from here,” Christina burst out. “So we can come and visit you all the time.”

  His eyes widened in surprise and delight. “Are you pulling my leg? How could that be? You lived in…” It took him a minute to dredge it up, “in Winnipeg.”

  “We did,” Margie agreed. “But I got a job with Calgary homicide. And now we live here.”

  “That’s great!” Moushoom enthused. “It will be so great to have you close by!”

  Chapter Five

  Margie wasn’t thinking that it was so great when she was driving downtown before dawn the next morning to get a head start on her investigation. She felt guilty about having gone home so early the day before, leaving the rest of the team to handle the investigation while she went home to be with her family. No one had complained, but of course they would be watching her to see whether it was a regular thing and whether she was going to take advantage of them. They probably figured that she would have some special privileges, being female and Métis, because if they complained about her, they could be accused of being sexist and racist, of not understanding how difficult things were for her as a single mom and a minority.

  She didn’t want to reinforce those stereotypes. She had always been a hard worker. She hated to be classified as a ‘lazy Indian’ and did everything she could to avoid being seen that way, even if it meant putting in more hours and effort than anyone else on the team. Even when it meant driving to work while it was still pitch black outside, with not even a sliver of light on the horizon.

  Calgary’s cold and changeable weather destroyed the roads, the water seeping into cracks and then expanding when it froze there, widening the gaps even more. It was too difficult to do roadwork when it was thirty below
. As the joke went, there were two seasons in Calgary: winter and construction. So Margie avoided the potholes, lost her lanes due to construction pylons and tape, and followed detour signs until she finally made it downtown and pulled into the underground parking. The lighting was dim, but what could be safer than a police parkade? There wouldn’t be anyone lurking around there looking to cause trouble.

  She sat down at her desk and checked her physical and electronic inboxes to see what had come in the afternoon before or overnight that she could start working on. She saw that videos had been loaded onto the server space for the new case. Lots of video. That was great, possibly giving them a way to narrow down the time of the murder and who had been in the area at that point. And it was also bad because it meant that she would be staring at the screen for a long time, processing hours of videos from various camera feeds.

  Detective Siever had sent her an email outlining what video had been uploaded. She tried to remember his face. Middle-aged, round face, buzz cut. He had seemed like a nice guy when they had been introduced.

  Camera feed 8302 is the camera closest to the crime scene. Start with that.

  Bless you, Detective Siever. Margie started with the video prefaced with 8302. It ran from midday until about the time that Margie had reached the scene. That was what, eighteen hours of video? Margie breathed out slowly, trying to figure out how to approach it. She wasn’t going to start at the beginning. Midday was way too early. There would have been a lot of people and dogs through the park at that time. Since the body had not been discovered until early the next morning, she had to assume that Robinson had been killed either shortly before or sometime after the park had closed. Referring to the park’s website, she found that to be ten o’clock.

  She started at the end of the video and began scrubbing backwards. She watched as all of the emergency responders backed out of the scene and the frame was empty except for a man and a dog. They reversed off the screen. Margie could not see Robinson’s body with the distance and angle of the camera location, but she could see approximately where it was. Not right on the pathway, but a ways into the woods. She scrubbed backwards some more, watching for anyone else walking along the pathway or through the camera frame. There was one passerby in the wee hours of the morning, and she stopped and played the video at normal speed to watch a homeless man push a shopping cart loaded high with garbage bags past the camera. He didn’t leave the pathway or deviate from his course. Margie made a notation of the time and a short explanation and continued to scrub backwards.

  No golf carts. No other homeless people. No sign of Robinson himself. Back, and back, and back, until she crossed the time stamp for ten o’clock. Margie hesitated, wondering if she had missed something. But it was possible that the homicide had occurred before ten o’clock, so she kept going. She started to see the last few stragglers before the park had closed. She froze the video and took screenshots, getting the best pictures she could of the people leaving the park, walking toward the camera. She made notes of the timestamps and quick descriptions of the people. Woman with dog. Couple walking hand-in-hand. Man in hoodie. Cyclist. Skateboarding kid. Then she reached a point in the tape where there were people both coming and going, which made it more complicated. The last few people who had taken their late-evening walks on that pathway. Some of them she recognized because she had already seen them leave. The couple walking hand-in-hand. Skateboarding kid.

  Then the victim. Margie watched him walk by the camera. His back was to it so that she couldn’t see his face, but he had been wearing a coat. It was getting chilly in the evenings. Down to six degrees lately. She paused the video and searched for the photos taken at the scene to compare the man’s attire to Robinson’s. It was him, or someone dressed exactly the same way. She noted the time. She now had a much better idea of the time of death. Sometime after eight-thirty. Probably between eight-thirty and ten. Unless the killer was the homeless guy she had seen after ten. There hadn’t been anyone else around. Not visible on that camera.

  She watched Robinson walk down the path and wander off into the woods. Not taking pictures. Not, as far as she could tell, meeting someone else. Sneaking off to relieve himself? Just enjoying the green trees and lengthening shadows? Going to a favorite clearing to meditate or walking to the edge of the river she had seen when scouting the area earlier?

  He didn’t come back into sight after disappearing off of the screen. He had been killed out of view of the camera. Margie let the video play forwards, watching each of the people who arrived and left the park after Robinson. Was one of them the killer, or had he managed to avoid cameras? Was it a planned attack? Had the killer scoped out all of the cameras first and then avoided them? She thought about the injury. A single stab in the middle of the body. Not multiple wounds. Not someone who had gone for the throat or had been aiming for the heart. What did that signify? A professional hit? An accident? A lucky shot? It didn’t strike her as a crime of passion. Not that a death in the middle of the park sounded like a crime of passion anyway, but she hadn’t ruled it out completely.

  As the video rolled forward, she made sure that she had noted the arrivals and departures in her list and hadn’t missed anyone. She scrutinized the faces she could see. Anyone who was upset? Angry? Overwrought?

  She didn’t like the people whose faces she could not see. People with masks, baseball caps, the guy with the dark hoodie. She wanted to be able to see their expressions, to be able to identify them if she saw them again. She wanted to compare the faces to those she’d had taken of the bystanders in the morning. Had one of them stuck around to watch what happened once the body was discovered?

  “Patenaude. Detective Patenaude. Pat. Hey. Patenaude!”

  Margie pulled her focus from the video to the room. People had arrived without her taking any notice of the fact. Cruz was leaning close, trying to get her attention. When she finally heard him and saw him, Cruz chuckled and shook his head at the rest of the team.

  “Now that’s focus!”

  “Sorry, I was lost in my own little world,” Margie apologized.

  “We have a morning briefing. You ready?”

  “Uh… yeah. Give me just a minute.” Margie looked at her watch and then at the papers and notes scattered around her. Morning briefing, and it wouldn’t just be MacDonald briefing the team, but Margie briefing him on what they had accomplished so far, sharing progress with the rest of the team, and making assignments. It was one reason she had wanted to get there as early as she could to get a head start on the work she had left incomplete the afternoon before.

  “Five minutes,” Cruz advised. “And Mac doesn’t like people to be late.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  Margie tried to gather her notes together in some semblance of order. She looked at herself in her phone camera to make sure that she looked presentable.

  “Funny time to take a selfie,” Jones commented. “You should be getting a move on it.”

  “Not a selfie. Just making sure I look okay.”

  “Look fine to me. Let’s go.” Jones motioned toward the conference room. Margie took a deep breath and preceded Jones into the room. She was momentarily disconcerted by the fact that everyone was standing around the table, no one sitting down. Was this some kind of chivalrous behavior? The men waiting until the women were seated, or showing Margie respect because it was her case or her first briefing? She reached to pull one of the chairs out, and Jones put her hand on Margie’s arm.

  “No, it’s a stand-up meeting.”

  “A stand-up meeting?” Margie repeated stupidly, trying to process it.

  “MacDonald says we think better on our feet. It keeps anyone from falling asleep and ensures that meetings are as quick as they can be.”

  “Okay, then.” Margie put her papers down on the table in front of her and waited, like everyone else, standing around the table.

  Staff Sergeant MacDonald entered the room. A tall man with short-cropped gray hair, thin-rimmed glasse
s, and a deeply lined face. He looked around at the team and nodded briskly. “Let’s get to it, then. How are we doing on the Fish Creek Park case?” He consulted his notes. “Jerry Robinson.”

  Everyone’s eyes turned to Margie. She cleared her throat. “We are still waiting for the full postmortem results, but apparent cause of death was a single stab wound to the abdomen. Robbery does not appear to be a motive. No missing person report had been filed and there was no answer when Cruz knocked on his door, so we suspect that he lived alone; no partner or children. I have been going through video. I’m still just beginning my review of the video, but I believe I have identified Robinson entering the area at 8:23 p.m.”

  There were murmurs from the team.

  “If it’s him, that helps quite a bit with the time of death.”

  “Yes. We’ll get confirmation from the medical examiner, but I don’t think she’ll be able to narrow it down any more than that. I’ve been making notes of everyone else that I can see entering or leaving after Robinson’s arrival—looking for any aberrant behaviors, emotion, someone who is running or appears distressed. Nothing so far. I don’t see anyone who seems to be out of place or behaving strangely.”

  “No one covered in blood?” Cruz joked.

  Margie shook her head. “Sorry, no. No one covered in blood. No one who seems to be in too much of a hurry. There are not a lot of park-goers there after Robinson, so it isn’t a huge pool of suspects, but of course, it’s going to take some work to identify them all.”

  “They’re probably mostly regulars,” Jones suggested. “If we were to go back there around the same time tonight, we could probably get ID’s on a good number on them, and maybe some suggestions on how to find the others from the regulars. These are probably people who are local who use the park all the time.”