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Harry One Sigh
The Fraud Murders
By Gar Mallinson iUniverse
Copyright © 2014 Gar Mallinson
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4917-4666-0
CHAPTER 1
The library entrance was only fifty feet away when Jenny Durwent turned to the blonde standing a step below her. They were eye to eye now. Jenny was a short, dark Irish girl from the city, a little stout in that strong kind of way, and Lydia, the blonde, was six two, a tall lanky Scandinavian on a student visa to Vancouver Island University. Jenny had her arms full of books she was returning before hitting the stacks. Lydia had only a popsicle stuck in the corner of her mouth. Neither girl noticed the young man leaning against the cement post at the bottom of the stairs. He was dark-haired like Jenny and handsome, lean and chisel-faced. But the eyes, as he glanced up at them, held no warmth, not even the interest one would expect.
Lydia was here from Denmark to study Business Administration. The university had a graduate program leading to a doctorate in the subject and had advertised internationally for students. Texts and tuition she'd covered already, but accommodation had proven a little more expensive this year than anticipated, and besides, she wanted some spending money now she had some free time.
Lydia had met Jenny in the student union building where they'd both picked up some coffee and pizza slices and had ended up at the same table in the crowded cafeteria. It was supper time. Conversation around bites of pizza and later over coffee had brought up both girls' current problems: money for Lydia and an assistant for Jenny who was finishing her thesis and had a serious deadline. Her subject wasn't that far from the sort of stuff Lydia was interested in anyway, and corporate fraud sounded intriguing to the young foreigner. They had reached an agreement quickly, had started that very day.
Jenny grinned at her new friend, "You gonna take that thing in with you? You won't get far. The security's pretty stiff and popsicles just don't cut it."
Lydia popped the popsicle out, "But it's cherry, my fave, and if you'd stop running up these damn steps, I could finish it." With that, she stuck it back in her mouth and crunched down. Chewing rapidly, she finished off the whole thing, grinned back with her lips a vibrant red. "Okay Jen, done. Lead on!"
It was fairly early in the evening. The light was still pervasive, but the sun had fallen behind the inland mountains at least an hour before. The two of them finished the steps, pushed open the glass door, and dropped books off at the desk. Jenny waved to the security guard and hit the up button on the elevator. The elevator let them out on the top floor where the stacks were. They walked down the aisle, turned left between two rows of stacks, and went to the end where Jenny had her little cubby-hole. Here, they talked a bit about procedures, and Jenny sent Lydia off to search out a couple of fairly obscure sources. They spent most of the evening working, then took a break and talked about more personal stuff.
The dark-haired man had spent the previous two days on campus watching the activity. On the first day, he'd been a redhead with a neatly trimmed moustache. He'd spent the morning on stairs that led up and down the hill the university was built on. There were six levels. He'd checked buildings outside and in. He'd located both the library and the security office on the top level, and had watched the flow of uniformed men heading toward various areas of the campus. He'd followed along when two of the guards walked toward the library. He'd entered behind them and gone into the reading room beside the main desk. From that vantage point, he could easily study the guards' schedule. It appeared random but wasn't really. There was a pattern that stretched over a two-hour period and then got repeated. He'd sat quietly and watched. He'd done that for the afternoon and early evening of the first day.
The second day, he looked different. He was much stouter, and his dark hair was speckled with grey. He walked differently too. He still had a book bag slung over one shoulder as he had the first day, but it was a different style. He wore glasses with dark Banana Republic frames. He looked more like a young professor than a student. He'd followed one of the guards onto the elevator and into the stacks. He'd nodded to the guard as the two of them stepped off the elevator, had watched him start his route around the stacks, and then had spent an hour following along, well behind, to confirm that it wasn't aimless wandering. The security guard had followed a predetermined route. As the man followed the guard, he'd checked for security cameras and had found none.
He'd left the library much later than the guard. And as he'd passed through the glass doors to the outside, he'd smiled to himself. In the two days he'd spent surveying the venue, the only security cameras he'd found had been around the security office itself. There was some irony in that.
Quite late, the dark-haired man passed the front desk, a rucksack in one hand, and took the same elevator the girls had to the stacks. He stepped off the elevator and turned left. As he approached the two girls he'd been watching from the bottom of the library steps, he stopped, reached up, and took a volume of Forensic Accounting from the shelf. He turned and smiled at them as they looked up. Then he raised his hand, pointed a 38 at them, and shot one after the other, the silenced gun making little more than a psst sound as the suppressor released its gasses. Neither girl had a chance. Jenny went first, and Lydia, staring in horror at the man, went next. It was over in seconds.
Jenny's head, what was left of it, lay on the book she'd been reading. Blood ran down the spine and dripped off the edge into her lap. She'd been shot in the head just left of center above her eye. Lydia lay on the floor where she'd fallen. She too had been shot in the head, but she'd been standing, bending over the desk, her head close to Jenny's. Her body had turned as she fell. Her hair covered part of the damage, but blood, bone fragments, and brain tissue were all visible and had left a long smear across Jenny's side. The smell was intense, a mixture of blood, cordite, and the almost immediate soiling that occurred when the girls' bowels released. The man replaced the book he'd been holding at his side, retraced his route, and took the elevator to the ground floor.
He left the building tugging his rucksack along in one hand, sauntered across the quadrangle to the parking lot, got in his car, a rusting, primer-coated Camry, and drove down the long hill away from the campus. By the time he cleared the city limits, he was his usual blond self. The wig he'd discarded in a city waste bin, the makeup he'd scrubbed off in a parking lot beside an office building. The gun went into the Mist River as he crossed over the big bridge on Highway 1.
CHAPTER 2
The fifth floor of the Harding Building remained undeveloped. It was littered with construction debris, and dust covered everything, turning the whole floor a dull grey, and softening the piles of materials used in its construction. There was one roll of heavy plastic in a corner that had escaped the dust, however, and the odd construction light still working, glinted along its shiny length. It had a strange enlarged section in the middle as if, like a snake's lunch, something was lodged part way down. Smudged footsteps in the dust on the floor led from that roll to the far side wall and to the black hole that was the elevator shaft attached to the side of the building. As well as these marks in the dust and the large hump in the middle of the roll, a dark stain had crept from one end and pooled in an indentation in the poorly finished cement floor.
It was quiet on the floor, the kind of quiet places have when they've been abandoned. The fifth floor was like all the others above the first, left to the elements months ago when the project suffered severe labour and financial problems.
The first floor, however, was still active. The construction company kept a large storage area there. There was also a room for the rotating guards who monitored the area. At the moment, besides the battered table and filthy coffee maker, it held three men: one in a dove grey Armani suit, a yellow tie with a barely discernible pattern, a crisp white shirt, and a pair of highly polished Italian loafers now streaked with dust from the floor. He was standing stiffly in the middle of the space next to the stained table, his grey eyes locked on the other two in the room. They too were dressed in suits, both black, both off the rack, and both ill fitting. They looked uncomfortable, and neither would meet the Grey Man's eyes. The tension in the room was palpable and for long moments, remained unbroken.
"You do realize, don't you," the Grey Man said, "that if this deal unravels, both you and others in the group will be financially ruined, and most of you will find yourselves charged with offences of which fraud will be the very least, given what's upstairs. It would displease me greatly to have that happen. It would cause me some embarrassment in certain quarters as well. See that I am not placed in that position."
With those words, the Grey Man turned abruptly, crossed the raw cement floor, and passed through the plywood door held open by his driver, a black man also in a black suit. Smiling at the two men, the driver cocked a long black finger in their direction and said in a scratchy whisper, "Bang!" He left, closing the door quietly behind him.
The two men who remained glanced at each other, wiped their hands on their pants, sighed almost in unison, and disappeared back into the gloom of the first floor. They passed unseen through the fenced construction yard and lifted a sheet of ply in the hoardings at the end of the block. They ducked under it, and disappeared into the dark of the street.
The limo waiting down the block near the water moved slowly in their direction and stopped beside them. The two men did not immediately get in; instead, they leaned against the side of the car and talked. Eventually, both straightened, and the taller of the two walked off up the hill toward Stewart Street, blending quickly into the night. The other, shorter and much heavier, watched until he could no longer see his friend, then opened the rear door of the limo and disappeared inside. Almost soundlessly, the car pulled away and lost itself in the darkness, running quickly and silently up toward Terminal Avenue, the main drag through town.
The derelict construction site lay along the channel between the city's two harbours on a narrow strip of land between the seawall and Stewart Street, the four-lane road that paralleled the channel and fed ferry traffic into downtown. The second harbour, the one toward which the limo was heading, had no industry, only another sea wall and a crescent pebble beach stretching along the far side. A federal biological station was farther down at the base of a hill. On the near side, lay thee three active ferry berths with a fourth under construction beside them. The one under construction was to house the new ferries being built in Germany. They were going to be the largest double-ended ferries in the world. Beside the ferry berths, two high cranes reached into the night sky, their red warning lights flashing. They were part of the construction of new ferry terminal buildings to take the extra traffic.
Unknown to anyone except the Grey Man and his cronies, both the derelict building and the ferry dock were worked by the same consortium. The first site wouldn't pose a problem for long since the building was about to suffer a very hot fire that would leave only a shell of unstable concrete walls. The demolition of that site would, of course, be carried out by an arm of the construction company that had built it to begin with. Nothing much got built or demolished in Harbour City that didn't involve the city's primary construction company and its multitude of subsidiaries.
The only real fl y in the ointment, if a very small one, was Harry, a local PI. The first attempt to discourage him had involved a researcher at the local university who had fed Harry a lot of information from her work about fraud in the construction industry. That had been taken care of, and there would be no leads. The press had gone wild, but the investigation had turned up nothing. Since local law enforcement was pretty inept, the case had been turned over to the RCMP and was still open. The clean-up of that ill-conceived attempt had resulted in the leaking roll of plastic, the anger of the Grey Man, and the planned destruction of the derelict building and its contents.
The Grey Man had come personally from his headquarters in New Westminster to raise hell. He was appalled at the senseless murders. The Grey Man normally concerned himself only with the management end, hence the talk with the other two. The warning would go up the chain of command and, he hoped, nip any overzealous reactions there. He had no need to do anything further; his security chief could handle the rest. He'd return by private jet to Vancouver immediately.
Harry had a late breakfast at the Modern, wondering over his toast and eggs what had happened on Victoria Road and the crescent. Not a single hooker or dealer strolled the blocks above and below the old fire hall where at the very least, a covey of the younger ones could always be counted on to add charm to the place. Harry wondered if the city fathers were once again trying to get rid of the stroll by either rounding up everybody or pushing the whole operation farther out past Milton. They'd tried both before and neither had worked for long. Everybody shifted for a few weeks, then drifted back. It was like one of those songs that went round and round. And besides, there was nothing much the city could do about the Sally Ann. They'd just built a new dorm on Terminal, and every morning and evening they serviced a congregation of the less desirable who made use of the same streets. The seedy flavour, Harry thought, was sort of appealing in a city a little too uptight about its tourist attractions.
Eggs pretty well blotted up with the last piece of toast, coffee cup drained of anything worth drinking, Harry sighed, raised himself off his seat reluctantly, strolled out the door, and stood undecided. A little early for the bar, he thought, and that left work. He sighed again and set off for the second-floor office and Willow, who was complaining about her brother again. That useless jerk was back with the Angels and getting into jams like before. Harry was determined not to help him again whatever Willow said. Waste of time, he thought, bailing him out. Waste of money too. Then there was Willow's nagging about the office files. She'd started that once she'd finished the course at the college and thought she was getting a new computer. Bloody things were expensive, and work was a bit spotty these days.
Harry didn't hurry. He thought about a cappuccino at Spenser's on the corner, settled for a newspaper from the cigar store, and took his time wandering down the street to the office. He climbed the stairs to the second floor, peeked around the door, and let out his breath. Willow wasn't in. Harry smiled. He'd had enough of her whining for a bit and sat back to enjoy the quiet.
The office was a second-storey walkup above an artsy new tapas bar called "Glow" for some reason no one understood. The building was only a couple of blocks away from downtown on the crescent. This was the south end, well, the beginning of it anyway, and the crescent here was usually full of hookers at night and always had a few during the day. Harry's building was an old fire hall, from back when fire halls had steeples. The steeple on this one rose above one corner of Harry's office. The old hole for the bell rope was still in Harry's ceiling.
Most of the street girls who hung around the crescent were the tawny-skinned teenage Natives who'd been hooked on hard stuff by the local Hell's Angels and worked the street to feed their habits. As long as they were beautiful enough, they were kept around, but when they began to show the inevitable dissolution, they were moved out to the lumber camps and the small towns crawling with guys who were happy with whatever came along. Occasionally, Harry ran into a blond in this stretch. He always appreciated them but wondered where they came from. They were never around for long. He sometimes thought that the pimps who ran the place had visions of a clientele that just didn't exist, but might if the cruise ships kept coming and the guys from the Alberta oil patch kept buying up everything in sight.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Harry One Sigh by Gar Mallinson. Copyright © 2014 Gar Mallinson. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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