“Sergeant,” Sgt. Digby’s 60-year-old civilian clerk Kimberley Black ducked her head around the cubicle. “I’m going to lunch. You have a call from a Detective McCreath, Montreal city police. Line one.”
Montreal? Digby picked up the phone and cradled it in her ear. It had not stopped ringing all day.
“Go ahead. Sgt. Digby speaking.”
“Hello….” A voice chuckled, warmly. “Ah good, Sergeant….”
“Hello?”
“Yes. I have you listed as presiding a double homicide. Jack Walter Lee, Tamara Rose Lee-Schofield.”
“That’s correct….” Digby leaned forward in her chair, happy to take a break from the reports on her desk.
“My name is Peter McCreath with Montreal homicide squad. I have a homicide which occurred a couple days after your double. Heather Dominie, a first-year student at Concordia.”
“OK,” Digby said, pulling her fingers through her hair, as if subconsciously trying to make it grow in faster.
“We got a link. In ViCLAS.”
Digby dropped the papers on her desk and started listening. She was confused. As far as she knew, she hadn’t filled out her violent crime linkage analysis system paperwork.
She couldn’t imagine she could have linked with a case in Montreal.
“How did we link….?”
Keetch, she thought. Staff Sgt. Keetch was technically the lead investigator. He must have filled out her booklet and dropped it off in Bedford, after the Verryn shooting, to make sure there were no loose ends when Codiac RCMP investigated the circumstances of the shooting.
She was supposed to fill out a ViCLAS booklet for every violent crime she worked, in a timely fashion, but she was always slow with hers, on purpose.
The ViCLAS program required that investigators share highly sensitive details of their cases, with unknown fellow RCMP officers.
The kind of cops who ended up working at the Bedford ViCLAS office were those that had been pulled off active duty, because they were either injured on the job, burned-out mentally, or they screwed up something, bad. Either way, Digby didn’t trust them to make her morning coffee.
As much as she was a loyal Mountie, Digby could acknowledge that the Membership contained its share of permanently corrupted officers, like Cst. Paul Astephen, who had to be recognized for what they were, and boxed-in, so the damage they could do remained minimal.
“Alright,” she said, apprehensively. “You say our cases linked?”
“I just got the results yesterday. I figured we should share information.”
“Okay.”
“Should we get together, in person?”
Digby rubbed her face. “I guess so. Can you tell me a bit more about your case? Do you know why we linked in the first place?”
“Sure.” He cleared his throat. Digby got the sense he was feeling uncomfortable.
“My victim was found in an alley, downtown. Underwear was ripped. We established in the autopsy that a tuft of her pubic hair was cut, above the vagina.”
“Cut?”
“A tuft of her pubic hair, cut off, yes, and her vagina had snow inside it. Uhh-“
McCreath sounded awkward. He was telling Digby his own sensitive case secrets, or maybe all the pussy talk was making him blush.
“Okay,” Digby said, prodding him. “He cut off pubic hair. To keep a memento?”
“Actually, if you can keep this quiet, the theory is, he cut whatever hair may have contained his semen. We recreated that the sex happened in a doggy-style manner….”
Digby pictured Darroll Missions, elbowing his girlfriend in the back while having sex with her doggy-style. She would always picture that now, whenever anyone mentioned the words ‘doggy-style.’
“-As he ejaculated, some semen must have dribbled down onto her pubic hair, above the clitoris area- See what I mean?”
“Yeah, thanks a lot,” Digby joked. “I’m picturing that. So much for my Boston cream donut.”
There was a long pause on the other end of the phone, then McCreath realized it was safe to laugh.
“Hahhaha! Yes.”
“Go on.”
“So, some hair with semen matted in it, was cut off, then he washed her vagina inside with snow.”
“Okay. He tried to remove his jizm from the crime scene…”
“This was a high-profile case, in Quebec,” McCreath said. “The Ops NCO told me not to worry about expenses. Heather was a pretty girl, an Anglophone from Ontario. Her picture was in all the newspapers, all over Quebec, Ontario. We had a shitty case too. No witness, no boyfriend… She was murdered on a rooftop in the middle of the downtown core.”
“A rooftop?” Digby vaguely recalled seeing a story on the murder now, on one of the cable channels. “I think I remember this actually.”
“Yeah. We believe, either she or the killer used the rooftop as a hang-out, previously, or a place to sleep.”
Digby got back to the subject of the semen. “What were you going to say, about the semen? Did you get his DNA?”
“Yes. They flushed her out. We did find some, despite the snow-job. We shared a sample with the RCMP for a check of the national registry. Fifteen days later we got no matches. But then, recently we got matched to another anonymous DNA sample, found at another unsolved case, right here in the city. This one, the sexual assault of a very young child.”
Digby rummaged her drawer and took out a fresh notebook. “Wait…” she said.
Yet again, someone was mentioning child sexual abuse to her, in relation to the Lee case.
What the hell is going on?
“A sexual assault on a child?” Digby’s curiosity was drivingher crazy. “Okay. Let’s go back. Why are you calling me? How did you connect with my murder case?”
McCreath sighed, making a static sound over the phone. “I asked for links from violent crime analysis.”
“Yes?”
“Yes. And your case was one of them. So, I had one case linked by DNA, but with no name. Then yesterday, my ViCLAS links came. Basically, what I want is, a warrant for the DNA of that reporter, Kyle Verryn,” he said, delicately, “to see if his DNA matches my semen.”
There was a long pause.
Digby relived, once again, killing Kyle Verryn.
“He tried to shoot me,” she mumbled, more to herself than McCreath.
“I know,” McCreath said. “I read about it in the Gazette. Reporter shot by cop. I have to know if he was my guy. Did you take a sample from him?”
Digby was fidgeting with her filing cabinet. Ever since the shooting, she had been fidgeting a lot, especially when she had to talk about it.
“I think we can get a sample, yeah.”
It had been her first killing as a police officer. Her first time using her gun, in fact, against a living target.
She kept seeing Verryn’s face standing at her car window in the Student Union Building parking lot.
Are you following me, or am I following you?
Verryn’s words had a whole new meaning now tha he was dead. She’d followed him before she killed him.
Now his ghost was following her.
“Why did our cases link?” she asked, flat out. McCreath had still not given her an answer. “What evidence was it based on, specifically?”
“I think it was because… Did you receive links?”
“No. But I filled out my forms late.”
“Fine. I’ll summarize. There’s three cases that linked, all blunt force trauma, crimes of passion. In all cases, the beatings are savage and the weapon is a random object that seems to have been grabbed up at the scene. A weapon of opportunity. The bodies were all moved from one location to a new location, then covered with something. In my case, she was moved down to the alley from the rooftop, and covered with garbage. In your case, they were covered with heavy rocks and thensnow, and in another case, in New Brunswick, it was a rock, as well.”
“Okay.”
“We have a vague description of a young man who might have been seen with Ms. Dominie at a strip club, the night she was murdered. We want to take Verryn’s DNA, and some photos to the bouncers at the club, to see if they recognize him.”
“What about the girl, who was molested? Did she give a description?”
“She was far too young. They left her alone.”
“How old?” Digby asked, feeling her heart lump up in her throat, like cartilage.
“Four years old. We cut the semen sample from her bangs. She was beat up, as well, and her wrist has a rotational fracture, probably from being grabbed and pulled into a van.”
Digby kicked back in her chair, looking up at the ceiling. She felt streaks of sadness move through her ribcage.
“Okay. I can send you the photos. But, I can tell you right now, I don’t think my guy could have been in Montreal two days after my murders.”
McCreath went silent. “Why not? It’s not that far, is it?”
“I’m pretty sure he was here in Nova Scotia, at that time, because he was writing stories for the newspaper. I was reading stories and his name was on them, like every day.”
McCreath puffed air like he was lighting a cigarette. “You know how it is. If it’s technically possible, at all, I would really like to try. If I can rule him out even, it would be well worth the trouble.”
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