Immersed in the View Read online

  “He lived in the neighborhood.”

  “Do we know who he lived with?”

  “Jones ran down the address. Looks like friends or roommates. She’ll check social media too, and we’ll get a look at his personal effects, talk to the friends, see whether he had family who need to be notified.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Let’s take my car,” Cruz suggested. “Yours can stay here for now. I’ll drop you back here when we’re done. No point in wasting gas taking two vehicles.”

  Margie was just fine with that. It meant that she wouldn’t have to use her GPS or follow Cruz. Her sense of direction was bad enough to make her ancestors turn over in their graves.

  Cruz didn’t even bother looking up the address on his phone, he just drove directly to it. Calgary was a big city and it amazed Margie how well he knew his way around. Hungry Bear’s house was only a few blocks away, but it wasn’t Cruz’s neighborhood. Maybe he had looked it up on his phone map before Margie’s return. But even then, he’d been able to remember what he had seen on the map and to translate it to real life in order to find the house without any wrong turns, which, in Margie’s mind, was still pretty impressive.

  Cruz checked the time as he called in to let the team know where they were. “Should be late enough for people to be up, don’t you think?”

  “My teenager was up, if that’s any indication. And I don’t know how anyone could sleep once it’s this hot out.”

  “If they have an air conditioner or basement room. Teens, young adults, night shift workers, plenty of people could still be asleep now. But I’m going to assume that they’re up. If not… I guess we’re their wake-up call today.”

  Margie was on board with that. They got out of the car and walked up to the door of the bungalow. No children’s toys on the lawn or sidewalk. Grass that had been mown at least once during June and was now burning in the summer sun. No gardens. Some shrubbery around the front door and windows, which really wasn’t a good idea if they wanted to prevent a burglary. The cars on the street in front of the house were a combination of nondescript leases and older vehicles that were probably paid for. She didn’t hear any voices from inside the house as they approached. Windows were open and box fans were running as the residents tried to keep the house cool.

  Cruz rang the doorbell and knocked hard on the door. They both stood slightly to the side, always watching for anything that might be off. Anything that might indicate that they were about to walk into a meth house or a domestic situation or anything else that could be dangerous for them.

  A few minutes passed with no answer. Cruz knocked again, hard, his knock undoubtedly echoing through the house and audible to all the residents. Unless they were downstairs. Or wearing headphones. Or asleep.

  This time, Margie could make out voices. Complaining, arguing over who was going to get the door, tired and frustrated.

  Cruz knocked again.

  A minute later, the door was opened by a skinny blond woman, her hair stringy and tangled. She was swearing before she even opened the door all the way.

  “What’s your problem? People are trying to sleep!”

  “Calgary Police, ma’am,” Cruz cut her off. “Can we come in?”

  “Police?” She stopped complaining and just stood there scowling at him.

  “Yes, ma’am. If we could have a few minutes with you…”

  She pushed a hank of hair back behind her ear. “What’s this about?” She looked out the door, craning her neck to see around them. “Did someone hit my car? Or steal it?” She could apparently see it sitting there unharmed and withdrew back into the house again. “What is this?”

  Cruz stepped toward the door, turning his shoulder as if to push his way past her. She stepped back and let him in. Margie followed. They all walked into the small living room, hot and still, sealed windows preventing any air from circulating through the room. It had to be almost 40 degrees. Margie took a deep breath. Hopefully, they wouldn’t be there for too long. Cruz invited the woman to sit down.

  “What did you say your name is, ma’am?”

  “Samantha.” She looked toward the hallway. “Jonathan? Come out here.”

  There was grumbling and groaning from a nearby bedroom and, eventually, the padding of bare feet as the owner of the grumbles made his way in their direction.

  Jonathan was a tall man with a full bushy beard, a painful-looking red sunburn around white skin in the shape of the tank top he had been wearing when he’d apparently fallen asleep in the sun. He rubbed his eyes and looked at them, surprised to find visitors in his living room. He hitched up his Sponge Bob boxers and leaned an elbow against the wall.

  “What’s this, then?”

  “Police,” Samantha said.

  “About what?”

  “They were just gonna tell me.” She sounded aggrieved, as if he had done something wrong instead of just coming out when she’d asked him to.

  “Would you like to sit down?” Cruz suggested to Jonathan.

  “No, I’d like to stand. What’s up?”

  “Do you have a roommate in the house, a Bruce Hungry Bear?”

  “Is that who you’re looking for? Bruce!” Jonathan went into the kitchen, calling down to the basement. “Bruce! The cops are here!” He returned to the living room, shaking his head in amusement. “That should bring him up here.”

  Margie and Cruz looked at each other.

  “Actually, I don’t think it will,” Margie said in a soft, measured voice. “We’re here about Bruce, not to see him.”

  “Oh.” The roommates looked at each other. “Is he in some kind of trouble? Did he get arrested?”

  Samantha blinked, looking around, reaching back into her memory. “They were talking about setting off some fireworks. I told them they’re not supposed to do it within city limits, you know, ’cause of the by-laws. And it’s so dry with all of this heat. But I didn’t think you’d arrest someone for something like that…”

  “Bruce hasn’t been arrested, ma’am,” Cruz said gently. “I’m afraid that this morning, his body was discovered in a nearby pond. He was dead.”

  Cruz had done enough notifications to know not to leave any doubt in the recipient’s mind that the person was actually dead. Not gone away. Not hurt or sick in hospital. Unequivocally dead. Leaving room for misunderstanding was not a kindness.

  “Dead?” Jonathan swore. “Are you kidding me?”

  “No, sir. I’m afraid not. Were you and Bruce close?”

  “We were friendly… I mean, we didn’t know each other before we rented the house together. But we got along. All of us were… pretty chill with each other. Let everybody do their own thing. You know.”

  Cruz and Margie nodded. “Do you know if he has any family or friends in the city?” Margie asked.

  “Yeah, his folks are here,” Samantha offered. She ran her fingers through her long, blond hair and looked at the man as if expecting him to contribute something.

  He just shrugged. “I guess.”

  “Do you know their names? Where they live?”

  The two shook their heads. “Maybe… the northwest somewhere?” the woman suggested.

  “Could we see Bruce’s room? He might have something that will help us to find them.”

  “They would be on his phone,” Samantha said doubtfully. “It’s not like anyone these days has an actual address book.” She gazed at Cruz as if he were ancient.

  “His phone was in the water. I don’t know if we’ll be able to retrieve anything from it,” Margie advised them. Of course, they would be able to get his phone logs and see who he had been in contact with, but that might take a few days. It was better if they could contact his parents the first day, not wait until they had heard it from someone else or come to the police to report him as a missing person.

  “I don’t know. Yeah, I guess you can. You’re the cops.” She still seemed hesitant. “You don’t need, like, a warrant or something?”

  “Not if you let us
in.”

  Neither of them got up to show Cruz and Margie to Bruce’s room. Margie exchanged a look with Cruz. He gave her a slight nod, encouraging her to take point. While Cruz generally came across as pleasant and non-threatening, a woman was less intimidating.

  “Is there something you’re worried we’re going to find?” Margie suggested. “We understand that you’re not responsible for whatever we find in his room.”

  “Well… I don’t know what he could have. None of us are big partiers or anything, but what people do behind closed doors…” The woman gave a one-shouldered shrug. “Well, you just don’t know.”

  “Understood. Like I said, we won’t blame you for anything we find there. You’re just helping us out by giving us access to the room so that we can find Bruce’s parents and let them know. You wouldn’t want them to be wondering what happened to him.” Margie saw an opening. “Or calling you or coming here looking for him. You don’t want to be the one having to break it to them.”

  Samantha’s eyes got big. No way she wanted to do that. She pushed herself to her feet. “Yeah, I guess it’s okay. He would want his parents to know.”

  She led them through the kitchen to the stairs. The man didn’t follow them, and Margie could hear water running and the toilet flushing while they were partway down the stairs. She hoped he wasn’t flushing whatever stash he had. They weren’t going to search his possessions, and flushing pharmaceuticals was just bad for the water system.

  Samantha led them down a hall. There were several closed doors. She stopped at one and looked at them, fist closed as if she had been planning to knock.

  “Do you have a key?” Cruz suggested.

  “It’s… not locked. We all had keys to the house, but none of us bothered to lock the individual doors.”

  A pretty trusting group. Cruz nodded and angled to reach past her and open the door. She stepped back and gave him room. Cruz turned the handle and pushed the door open, he and Margie standing just to the side of the door. As far as they knew, the room was vacant, but way too many police incident reports started with, The residence was believed to be unoccupied.

  They waited for a moment, then Cruz reached around the door frame and felt for a light switch. He found it and flipped it up. They looked around. No one there. There were places they couldn’t see—under the bed, in the closet, against the wall that the door was on—but no one obviously lying in wait and no one sleeping in Bruce’s bed waiting for him to get home. No pit bull or psychotic cat.

  Cruz gave Margie a nod and they moved into the room. “Thank you,” he told Samantha, and closed the door behind them.

  The two of them quickly checked the various blind spots to clear the room and ensure that they were alone. There was no desk. There was a laptop computer on the bed. Cruz pressed a button to wake it up. Miraculously, there was no lock screen. No need to enter a password or provide a fingerprint. Cruz clicked and tapped for a few moments.

  “There we go. Mom’s phone numbers are in his contact list. Two of them, one will be a landline traceable to an address. Only an email address and single phone number for Dad.”

  “Sounded from the roommates like they still live together.”

  “Sounded that way. If not, I’m sure Mom will have Dad’s information. Maybe she’ll even want to be the one to inform him.”

  Not likely. Margie looked around the room. “Give it a quick once-over?”

  Cruz nodded. “If you want to take a look around, I’m going to spend a minute in his email. See what’s been going on in his life.”

  Margie shook her head as she started looking through the man’s drawers. “Twenty-somethings don’t use email,” she told Cruz. “Try Snapchat, IM’s, Discord.”

  She could feel Cruz rolling his eyes at her. It was the second time in ten minutes he’d basically been told that he was old. “Kids these days,” he quavered in a grandpa voice.

  Margie chuckled. She pulled a couple of plastic bags out of Hungry Bear’s bottom drawer and tossed them on top of the dresser. There were a few pill bottles in his top drawer, but none of them were prescription. Just over-the-counter stuff. Tylenol, cold pills, caffeine.

  Cruz looked at the packages of herbs. “Weed?”

  “No, I don’t think so.” Margie continued her search, checking the backs and bottoms of drawers for any stashes. The closet, including the pockets of jackets and toes of the shoes littering the bottom of the closet. It all seemed pretty innocuous. As Samantha had said, he wasn’t a partier.

  Cruz closed the lid of the computer and walked over to the dresser to take a look at the packages. Margie returned to look at them with him. Cruz frowned, rubbing his thumb over the contents of one of the bags to shift the contents around. He didn’t open the package to smell it. That’s what a cop on TV would have done. Cops in real life didn’t taste unknown white powders or smell-test baggies of dry green leaves. There were labs to do proper tests.

  “What are they, then?” Cruz asked.

  “Tobacco,” Margie informed him, pointing to one. “Sage,” pointing to the other. She’d seen and handled both of them enough to easily recognize them on sight.

  “So… he uses snuff and cooks turkey?” Cruz asked, giving her a puzzled look.

  “No. They’re sacred herbs. For ceremonies.”

  “Oh. Indian—Aboriginal stuff. Would he smoke them?”

  “More likely smudge. But he could.”

  Cruz looked around the room. “Nothing else? No alcohol?”

  Of course, Margie might have found alcohol but not drawn his attention to it as she had the herbs. There was no reason he shouldn’t have alcohol in his own room.

  Margie might have taken offense at the question, accusing him of assuming, like the forensic tech, that Hungry Bear was a drunk just because of his heritage. But she didn’t. She understood where the answer would lead them.

  If Hungry Bear had not been drunk or high, then how had he ended up stumbling into the Valleyview pond?

  CHAPTER SIX

  Back in Cruz’s car, they didn’t discuss the question, both of them content to just ponder on it for a while themselves. Margie would put the question in the back of her mind and let her subconscious chew over it for a while. See what her brain came up with.

  “You want to go to the northwest to talk to the parents?” Cruz asked. “I can drop you at your car if you want to go home and spend the rest of the day with Christina.”

  “Uh… let me talk to her first. You can find out if there is an address tied to that landline.”

  They each took out their phones to make their inquiries. Margie tapped Christina’s name in her favorites.

  “Hi, Mom.” Christina answered before the third ring. “I took Stella out for a walk, and we’re back home. When are you going to be done?”

  “Well, that’s why I’m calling you. We need to make a death notification, and it’s over in the northwest. It will be at least twenty minutes’ drive each way, plus however long it takes to talk to the parents. If I go, I’ll be at least another hour.”

  “You should go.”

  “I’m supposed to be off today. So I can bow out and just let Detective Cruz take care of it.”

  “No, Mom,” Christina said immediately. “You need to be the one.”

  Margie was bemused. “Because I was the one to find the body and pull him out?”

  “No.” There were a few beats of silence before Christina explained. “Because… you said he is Siksiká, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then… you should be the one to tell them. So they have a friendly face. Someone who looks like them, not some white dude.”

  “Detective Cruz is not a white dude.” Margie laughed. But Christina made a good point. Hopefully, Hungry Bear’s parents would feel better knowing that their son’s death was being handled respectfully by someone who had at least a basic understanding of their culture. Someone who would not immediately jump to conclusions or make judgments.

  “Hispani
c, then,” Christina said impatiently. “Whatever. But he’s not Indigenous.”

  “Filipino,” Margie informed her. “And you’re absolutely right. I think I should too. You don’t mind? You’ll be okay for another hour or two on your own?”

  “Time without you looking over my shoulder telling me I should get off the computer and get out for some fresh air?” Christina countered. “Yeah, I think I can handle it.”

  “Okay. Love you, sweetie.”

  “You too.”

  Margie terminated the call and slid her phone away.

  “A white dude?” Cruz asked, obviously having heard part of the conversation.

  Margie laughed. “Sorry. Kid’s not always politically correct.”

  “Well, thank you for setting her straight. I wouldn’t want anyone going around thinking I am a white dude.” A fan of wrinkles appeared around his eyes as he smiled. “So are you going with me?”

  “I am.”

  Cruz chuckled. “Teenagers don’t mind being left home alone for a while.”

  “No,” Margie agreed. “That didn’t seem to be a problem.” She adjusted to a more serious tone. “She’s a good kid. We had plans for today, but she wants to make sure that I’m the one doing the notification. So that they get it from… someone like them.”

  “Not some white dude.”

  “Yeah. I don’t think she has anything against white dudes or Filipinos. She just knows… well, the racism that this family faces.”

  He nodded his agreement. He shifted the car into drive.

  “You got the address?” Margie asked. “That didn’t take long.”

  “Got it.”

  “Did you put it into your phone GPS?”

  He tapped the side of his head. “This one here.”

  “You really know the city well. How can you know all of the little crescents and cul-de-sacs? They can be so confusing.”

  “I’ve had longer to learn than you have. You’re still pretty new.”

  “Yeah, but I’m crap at directions. By the time I’ve been here five years, I might be able to get to a few places from memory. But I’m not going to remember every place I’ve ever been.”