Skimming Over the Lake Read online

  “Anton Carter,” he introduced himself. “Parks Pat!” he said after a minute. “I have heard of you, ma’am.”

  “Well, yes, that’s what they’ve been calling me.” Margie was a little embarrassed by the name. But it was so much better than the other names that she imagined her fellow law enforcement officers giving her, she didn’t fight it. Parks Pat was a little ostentatious, but that was all.

  “You are the lead?”

  “No.” Margie pointed to Siever. “Detective Siever is in charge. I’m happy to help, of course, in any way I can, but I’m only assisting on the case.”

  “I do not see anything wrong with the raft.” Carter poked and prodded at the seams. “And it should be sturdy enough to hold his weight, even though he is a big man.”

  “What do you think happened, then? He fell out?”

  A nod. “That’s usually what happens in these cases. Like falls off of ladders while people are painting. They think they can reach farther than they can, and overbalance.”

  “I guess you probably see a few of those too.”

  “Ladders? Yes ma’am. If we’re the closest first responders, we will take the call until paramedics can get there.”

  Another of the firefighters showed Margie the remote control boat. She leaned in closer and studied it with interest.

  It wasn’t like she would have imagined a remote control boat. She had pictured a child’s toy, like a normal boat, only reduced in scale and made of plastic. Like she had played with in the tub as a child. But it was wider and flatter, not looking much like a pleasure craft or any speedboat she had seen in real life. She wasn’t sure what it was constructed of, but it didn’t appear to be plastic or metal.

  “Where is the engine?”

  He turned it around and opened up an access panel to show it to her. “This one takes nitro. There are others that are solely battery powered.”

  “Which is better?”

  “You could research that all week long and not be able to decide. Everybody has a different opinion. It really just comes down to your personal preferences.”

  “Do you have one of these?” She assumed by his familiar handling and lingo that he knew something about it.

  “My brother does. I gave it up years ago because he always beat me or wrecked my boats. It can be an expensive hobby. We’ve had a better relationship since we aren’t competing against each other. I can just go to a race day and cheer him on.”

  “That’s too bad. It sounds like it could be fun.”

  “Yes, if you don’t get too obsessed about it and are just in it for the fun. But many people… take it too seriously. Takes the fun out of it, in my mind.”

  He had the experience, so she assumed he knew what he was talking about.

  “Do you know the victim? If you’ve gone to your brother’s races, maybe you’ve run into him at some point.”

  The firefighter shook his head. “No, I wouldn’t recognize anyone. Don’t go often enough to remember anyone else from one meet to another.”

  He looked the boat over one more time and then handed it to her. “I guess you’re going to want that.”

  Margie pulled on a pair of gloves before taking it. “Yes, I guess we’ll need it as evidence until the ME confirms that it was an accidental death.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The van from the medical examiner’s office and techs arrived at around the same time, and neither of them paid any attention to the fact that there was no road from the parking lot and simply drove out onto the grass. Margie could understand their not wanting to carry a heavy stretcher all the way across the grassy expanse or to have to carry their various bits of equipment from the van to the scene to collect the forensic evidence.

  Margie stood back and let Siever give directions to the team. Not that he needed to tell them where to go or what to do; everyone knew his job without being told. Margie nodded at them as they went by. They went to the body first so that the techs could gather any necessary evidence before the investigator touched the body. They took pictures, tweezed a few bits that Margie couldn’t see from where she was standing, and eventually nodded to the death investigator that he could go ahead. Margie watched him check for a pulse and put on a stethoscope to check for respiration or a heartbeat before starting. Despite the fact that they all knew the body had been face down in the water for over an hour already. Margie didn’t see how he could have survived that, but supposed that it was part of the prescribed routine.

  The death investigator took some pictures of his own, examined the body in situ, and looked out to the point that the firefighters pointed to on the lake. Carter showed him the raft that they had brought back in and described the positioning of the raft and the body.

  During his examination, the man retrieved a wallet and held it out to Margie. She opened it up to reveal that the victim was one Simon Hustler. She did a quick flip through the wallet but didn’t find anything of note. No pictures of family, but who kept those in their wallets anymore? It was all on phones.

  “Did he have a phone?” Margie asked, looking back at the body. The pathologist patted all the likely places. “Not that I see yet. Maybe it went in the drink.” He looked over his shoulder to the lake. “Or maybe it’s with his things by the water.”

  Margie looked at the backpack and luggage that Hustler had obviously used to carry his boat and equipment in, which he had left on the shore when he went into the raft to go after his RC boat. She hadn’t touched anything yet. Let the tech guys go through the cases and contents and collect any evidence they needed. If there were a phone in there, it would turn up. But if it were in the water…

  “Maybe he dropped it in the water and that’s how he ended up tipping out of the raft. Trying to dive after it.”

  A shrug from the investigator. “Possible.”

  People kept their lives on their phones and, even if their information were stored in the cloud, it would be natural for Hustler to reach or jump after it in a split-second of panic, only realizing afterward that he had made the wrong choice.

  Eventually, the remains were bundled up in a double layer of body bags and prepared for transport.

  “Do you have a preliminary cause of death?” Margie asked, unable to hold her tongue.

  The pathologist raised his brows at her. “Nothing to indicate that it was not drowning. Pretty good guess, to begin with. We’ll know better after the autopsy.”

  Margie nodded.

  Her last drowning case had turned out not to be drowning.

  But this one seemed to be pretty clear. Guy had been out there alone on a raft, retrieving a boat that had stopped working. Somehow, he tipped himself into the water and wasn’t able to recover.

  It would be an open and shut case, easy to clear.

  Eventually, all the evidence had been collected and taken back to the lab. Siever talked to the dogwalking man and the birdwatching woman, getting the same statement that he had gotten from them the first time. Margie couldn’t detect any discrepancies or any sign that either one of them was not telling the full truth.

  Neither of them professed to know Hustler from other visits to the park. They had just happened to be the lucky ones to stumble across the body.

  Margie knew what that was like!

  Her stomach was growling loudly and she felt like it was going to eat itself from the inside out. She should have grabbed a couple of granola bars on her way out the door. Just drinking a cup of coffee was not nearly enough to last her all morning. Had she even finished her first mug of coffee? Margie suspected that she had not. Siever looked around the scene for anything that they might have missed.

  “You didn’t find anything significant in the trees on the way over here?”

  “No,” Margie admitted. “Oh—but I did run into a woman who was complaining about the noise of the RC boat this morning. She said that six o’clock was too early to be racing it out here, that it disturbed everyone’s peace and quiet.”

  “She was s
ure of the time?”

  “She used the sundial in the corner. It’s pretty accurate; I tried it out myself.”

  “Well,” Siever nodded. “Assuming she did it right, that gives us a window for time of death.”

  “She showed me how to use it. So she definitely knows how.”

  “Did you take her name and contact details?”

  “Uh… no. It was just a casual conversation while I was coming to see you. I should have. I’ll come back here a few times to see whether she comes back. Sorry about that. She seemed to know the place pretty well, so maybe she walks here every day… or at least a few times a week.”

  “Yeah… if you could find her, that would be good. We can find out if there are cameras recording people as they walk into the park. Or taking pictures of their license plates. I assume there’s some kind of security other than just saying it is closed at night.”

  “If we’re done here… I should be getting home to my daughter.”

  “Do you want a ride back to your car?”

  Margie looked across the lake to the parking lot on the far side. It was a beautiful day, the clear blue sky reflected in the water. But she had been on her feet for hours and didn’t really feel like walking all the way back, either the way she had come or via the other side of the lake, which she had not yet walked.

  “Actually, that would be really nice.”

  He started to take down the yellow tape to allow people to walk through the area. “You should have just come down this end to start with.”

  Margie shrugged. “Then I wouldn’t have run into the woman at the sundial. So it’s probably a good thing that I did.”

  Siever tilted his head, then nodded. “Maybe you’re right.”

  Margie started at the other end of the tape and they worked together to take it down, meeting in the middle.

  Siever dropped Margie at her car. She got settled and touched Christina’s name on her phone before pulling out.

  “Hi, Mom.”

  “Hi! How was the rest of the parade?”

  “There were different floats, marching bands, and stuff. There were a couple of Indigenous groups. The Stoney Nakoda and Niitsitapiiks. The parade was kind of cool. Seemed more… small town-y than I expected.”

  “It had become pretty big and commercial the past few years,” Margie said. “Probably good for them to scale back a bit. Are you hungry? I thought I would stop for something on the way home.”

  “Yeah, lunch would be good.”

  “Burger King?”

  “Get me an Impossible burger?”

  “Sure. You want a shake? They have those mini ones right now.”

  “Yeah. Strawberry.”

  “Okay, I’ll be home soon!”

  The afternoon was more relaxing. Margie watched a few highlights of the parade and discussions of the special rules the Stampede was working under and gave Stella a thorough brushing, which hadn’t been done for a while. Margie figured she had enough extra fur for a whole new dog.

  “I’m going out with Tracy for a while,” Christina told her, marching into the living room and tucking her phone into her pocket.

  “Whoa, wait! I thought we were going to go see Moushoom.”

  “Tonight, you said. I can go out for a few hours.”

  “With Tracy?” Margie remembered that Tracy was a boy, not a girl, from Christina’s school. Were they dating now? Was this a thing? “Why didn’t you mention anything before?”

  “We just decided. We were both kind of bored and didn’t want to stay inside all day. You said you wanted me to have friends and that I’d be able to do things once the restrictions were lifted.” Christina stood there, looking expectant, one eyebrow raised.

  “Sure. I didn’t say you couldn’t,” Margie reassured her. Though she wished that she had a good reason to ask Christina to stay home. “I’m just surprised. You kind of ambushed me.”

  “I’m just hanging out with a friend for a while. It doesn’t have anything to do with you.”

  “I was planning on us having the afternoon together, that’s all. Since it was my day off.”

  Christina rolled her eyes. “Yeah, and I thought we were going to have the morning together, since it was your day off.”

  Touché.

  “Okay, well… say hi to Tracy for me. What are you guys planning to do?”

  Christina’s stance relaxed slightly, reassured that Margie wasn’t going to go all hardcore and insist that she had to stay home. “Like I said, we’re just going to hang out. Go to the mall maybe, since we don’t have to wear masks and social distance and all the capacities are back to normal. We can just… be normal again.”

  They had been under health restrictions ever since moving to Calgary, so Christina hadn’t yet had the chance of a normal life and normal relationships there. It had been nice to cocoon at home and not to worry about her getting into trouble as much, but Christina had to spread her wings and have some independence. Hopefully, she would make good choices. Margie couldn’t help worrying about what else they might decide to do now that they were allowed social gatherings.

  “Have a good time. And you’ll be back in time to see Moushoom?”

  “Yeah. Of course. We’re just going out for a few hours.”

  Christina was out the door, jogging down the sidewalk to get into the car that pulled in at the curb. Margie hadn’t even had a chance to ask whether Tracy had his full driver’s license yet.

  CHAPTER SIX

  After a long weekend, Margie felt refreshed going back to the office. She had not spent as much time as she had hoped with Christina, but it had been nice to have a little downtime, and she had been able to catch up on some of the cleaning and home maintenance stuff that had fallen behind lately. She’d actually unpacked the last of the moving boxes. Only seven months after their move; that wasn’t so bad.

  Except for the boxes that she had decided didn’t need to be unpacked, that would just stay in storage in the basement. She wasn’t sure how they had accumulated so much stuff or why she had decided to move everything she had. They could have had a garage sale or given some items to relatives. But they had just packed everything up.

  Margie took a few minutes to look through her in basket before going to her email. Despite the promise of the paperless office and having had to work from home as much as possible during the pandemic, there was still a significant amount of paper floating around the department. And too much of it was just printouts of what she had already received in mail or seen posted on the case file virtual workspaces. They just went straight into the garbage, because Margie didn’t want to keep track of physical paper as well as everything else. Filing everything twice was not efficient.

  She moved on to email and reviewed everything that had happened over the weekend. Most of it she had already skimmed over anyway, unable to just disconnect from work, even when she was supposed to be off. She saw that the medical examiner had posted his report to the workspace for the Hustler file and clicked through to have a look at it.

  Hustler’s death had been determined to have been caused by drowning, Margie was happy to see. She hadn’t expected to have two cases in a row where an apparent drowning had turned out not to be a drowning. That would have been too coincidental. But as she read on, she frowned.

  “What are you looking so glum about?” Kaitlyn Jones asked as she walked past Margie’s desk to get to her own. “Didn’t you have a good weekend? Or maybe you had too good of a weekend and didn’t want it to end.” Jones gave her a wide grin. Though she had her hair pulled back in a bun, a few tendrils of wavy blond hair had escaped and framed her face, making her look younger and less like the seasoned homicide cop she was.

  “It was good,” Margie said. “This isn’t anything about my weekend.”

  “What’s up, then?”

  “You heard about the new case on Friday? A body found in Elliston Lake?”

  Jones nodded. “Sure, I saw that. And of course Siever pulled you into it. You are
Parks Pat, after all.”

  “I think it was more the fact that I’m just ten minutes from there. So… yeah. Body floating in the water, face down, under a raft that had tipped over. It looked pretty obvious that he just fell in while trying to reach for his RC boat.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “But the ME hasn’t made a finding of accidental death.”

  Kaitlyn’s brows went up. “Really?”

  Siever apparently heard the conversation and wandered over to join them. “You talking about the Hustler case? He said it needs further investigation. I really don’t understand why. It’s open and shut.”

  Margie read over the words on her screen, trying to take them in. She felt like the screen was too far away from her, the words difficult to concentrate on while the other two looked at her, waiting for her response.

  “He says that there was a lot of perimortem bruising. Which I guess would be unusual if this guy just happened to fall into the lake…?”

  She looked at Jones and Siever for their thoughts.

  “I guess,” Jones said, shrugging. “But he could have gotten bruised from a lot of different things. Not necessarily anything to do with the accident.”

  “And I guess that’s what he wants to establish. Where the bruises came from.”

  “Click the pictures,” Siever instructed, looking over Margie’s shoulder.

  She was sure that he would already have looked at all the pictures on his own computer. But she did as he suggested and brought a couple of them up on the screen. Blue-purple bruises on white skin. At seemingly random places on Hustler’s shoulders, arms, chest, and face. In a couple of places, it wasn’t just bruising, but tearing of the skin as well.

  “What the heck caused that?” Jones wondered, leaning in closer for a better look.

  “I have no idea. And I guess the ME didn’t either, or he would have made a finding based on that. What do you think?” She turned her head to face Siever. “Can you think of anything at the scene that would have caused that?”