Chapter 140

Montreal

McCreath and Digby met downtown that night at Nefertiti’s, a Middle Eastern coffee house on St. Catherine Street, not far from where Heather Dominie was raped and murdered.
They ordered two Turkish coffees and sat in the dim back corner, furthest from the window. The place was empty. There was an ornate brass hooka sitting on the table, which partly obscured Digby’s view of the Montreal detective. He was a short man with a brown buzzcut and an upturned nose. It looked like someone whacked him in the nose with a cricket bat. But despite his nose, his face was quite handsome.
He picked up a fabric-covered hose on the hooka and examined it. There were various flavoured tobaccos for sale at the café counter.
“Do you guys have a smoking ban?” Digby asked.
“I don’t think you can smoke in malls, like you used to. But, I don’t know, I never go to malls.”
“Me neither,” Digby said.
“So, you’re flight was okay?”
“No. I’m terrified to fly.” She unzipped the case at her feet and drew out the files she had prepared, plopping them on the table and sliding the stack around to McCreath, around the brass base of the water pipe.
“I get it. Enough chit-chat.” He opened the top file. The first page was a profile of Kurtis Missions. His mugshot was on the right. Name, address, employment status, known associates, gang affiliation, description, tattoos, vehicles.
“Who is this? I thought his name was Kyle Verryn?”
“This is somebody else. Kurtis Missions. He’s a possibility, too, based on an ongoing saga out in Nova Scotia, I’m still trying to make sense of. We haven’t cleared him. I thought I would bring the file.”
“What do you have on him?” McCreath sounded optimistic.
Digby did her best to give him a reality check.
“Kurtis comes from a troubled home. His father has a link to the Gypsies. He was abused as a child. He loves the woods and the outdoors. My killer camped on Crown land for a few days. And he may have snared a rabbit for food, using copper wire stripped from a local cabin. Kurtis has ties to the Gypsies as well, beyond his father. He worked on a fishing boat owned by a full-patcher named Bill Tiffen. Kurtis has a record for break enter and theft, drug possession, but nothing violent. He did no jail time. He didn’t have to submit DNA. He has minor mental health issues: Paranoia, mild symptoms of schizophrenia. He’s trained at something called Filipino Martial Arts or ‘Weapons,’ where they use canes and nunchucks. The killer in my case used ordinary sticks with extremely deadly effect.” She paused to take a breath. “It’s all in the file. The theory I was working with is that Jack Lee wrote a story that caused Kurtis’ older brother to commit suicide, or at least cast aspersions on him. Kurtis got angry. He hid in the woods where he grew up, decided to camp near where the Lee family home is, maybe he’s plotting something vaguely. Then he gets lucky. Jackand his wife come along, walking the dog. He picks up a stick and goes to work.”
“Makes sense....”
“How did your girl die?”
“Trauma. She was beaten to death with a Jack Daniel’s bottle…”
Digby nodded and continued. “So, it’s at least true that Kurtis Missions had the physical ability. It would be difficult to kill people with sticks and a bottle unless you knew what you were doing. We also haven’t been able to locate him, but according to everyone I talk to, no one has seen him since the Lee murders.”
“It’s all pretty much good theory. It needs, I guess, us finding him and testing it out,” McCreath said, sounding a little deflated. “What made you move from Kurtis to Kyle Verryn?”
“Kyle Verryn was- please don’t repeat this to anyone- he was poisoning Jack Lee. That’s a fact. Verryn was a freelancer, a stringer, at the newspaper. He desperately wanted a full-time job. I believe, he was trying to make Jack sick, so he could move in on his full-time job.” She sighed. “When I first started to think Verryn had poisoned Jack, I made the assumption he was trying to kill him. And it’s still possible, but I’m starting to think now that Verryn poisoned Jack, yes, but Kurtis Missions was the one who actually killed him.”
McCreath looked down at the file and studied it, thoughtfully.
“Kurtis is 18?”
“Yes.”
“One of my linked murders was in 2002. That means, if he did that one too, he would have been 12 at the time.”
Digby took a sip of her coffee. “What murder is that one?”
“Tina-Lynn Papineau. She was a young girl, in New Brunwick.”
Digby almost dropped her coffee cup, clattering it down on the porcelain saucer.
“Tina-Lynn Papineau? That’s Kurtis’ half-sister. It’s one of the cases we looked at already. They suspected his mother…” Digby calmed down some. “I guess it makes sense. ViCLAS would see a link. It was almost identical to theLee homicides. That was one of the reasons we suspected Kurtis. It’s possible that he witnessed or even participated in the Tina-Lynn Papineau murder. Then when he killed the Lee’s, he repeated some of the patterns, like putting the rock on them, to hold them down.”
McCreath and Digby stayed at the table for several minutes more, in silence, reading eachothers paperwork, each lost in their own investigation minutia.
“Huh. Look at this,” McCreath spoke up, finally. “Listen… ‘Description: Teeth: Four teeth missing between top two incisors.’ That’s Kurtis Missions. A young man was seen with Heather inside a strip club just down the street from us, the night she was killed. The bouncers at Pleasure-Sex say the man was being belligerent with one of the girls, so they threw him out. They described him as having two front teeth missing. But when you think about it, it was inside a dim club. Four teeth missing could have seemed like two. Then there’s this: The bouncer describes the man’s eyes as ‘very light blue.’ Your description of Kurtis says ‘Baby blue, left eye lighter than the right.’ And both descriptions say 6 foot tall, 180 to 200 pounds. And my bouncer’s age estimate matches. 18 to 25.”
“Everything else is different though,” Digby said, holding up McCreath’s notes. “The boucer says the guy had a buzzcut and was clean shaven. Kurtis has long hair and a beard.” But she digressed. “I guess he would shave that off if he was on the run.”
“Of course.”
“It could be the same guy.”
McCreath stood up. He was so short he barely reached the hoses of the hooka. “C’mon. Plesaure-Sex is just down the street. If D’entremont is working, we can show him Kurtis’ photograph.”