Chapter 77

Sgt. Digby was at the crime scene for several hours. She couldn’t believe there were reporters on the scene already. Before her.
She went down to the parking lot to help collect statements from relatives and area neighbours.
Cpl. Agarwal was visiting a nearby gas station to see if they had a security camera. If so, he would request all video taken since Thursday night.
At about 5, that evening, Sgt. Digby stopped in at the Lee family home, which was located a kilometre at most from the crime scene, across the lake.
A couple of FU cops were combing the property for clues.
One of them, Cst. Ken Elliott, had sent her a curious Blackberry message: “SECRET ROOM. DIGBY YOU SHOULD SEE THIS.”
She pulled into the pine tree-lined driveway and walked up to the house’s back entrance, facing Sunken Lake. It was a cold, but serene day on the lake, apart from the flashing lights ove rat the beach parking lot. The sun was just beginning to set over Digby’s left shoulder.
The intriguing question, of course, was: What might a reporter keep in a secret room? Documents? Photographs of a politician and his cheating whore?
Digby would love to get her hands on a nice cherry like that some day, especially if she ever made Inspector, just to have to hoarde over the head of some asshole politician, like the Kings-Hants MP, What’s-his-face.
She already knew that according to drug officer Cst. Paul Astephen, Jack Lee liked to grow a little marijuana on the side. She was pretty sure, the secret room would turn out to be a standard grow-room.
At the back door, she saw Cst. Elliott’s face, like a ghostly image, through a tiny, filthy basement window. He was peeling a sheet of sticky black aluminum paper from the yellowed pane of glass. The extremely small window had been blacked out with the sticky paper, another sure sign the room was being used as a grow.
Growers used high-power sodium lights and usually ran them day and night. The black papering kept the room looking dark at night and of course kept nosy cops from peeking in and seeing marihuana plants. When Digby was a constable on probation in the Valley years ago, this same black tinfoil paper had prevented her from successfully busting a grow op. She had recieved an anonymous tip, more than likely from a competitor or jilted lover of the grower. She checked out the property and noted the black papering on the basement window. She verified some details given in the anonymous tip and later detected abnormal white heat images in the basement with a thermal imaging camera. The camera technician signed an affadivait to the effect that the images were consistent with lighting used for growing indoor marijuana. The warrant was granted by a JP. They busted in on the young woman renting the house and seized 30 plants, each with nearly a pound of mature buds hanging from them like cones of sumac berries. 30 pounds of marijuana. The Crown prosecutor went all the way. Cultivation for the purpose of trafficking.
Then the judge ruled the anonymous tip too vague, and the black paper and heat readings not evidence of a crime. The search warrant was quashed and the case immediately tossed in the gutter. It was Digby’s first failure as a police officer.
Cops needed to feel that kind of disappointment, she knew. Every cop needed to see weeks of their hard work -and the truth- get tossed in the toilet.
The grow-op case reminded her to this day never to stop when she first got the confidance that she had the goods.
Get them by the balls –and by the book- or don’t bother getting them at all.
She crouched in the cold snow dust outside Jack Lee’s back door and rapped on the glass with her knuckle, gently.
Cst. Elliot looked up, surprised, then smiled when he saw her. He pushed the window pane open on a tiny metal track. “There’s trouble,” he said. Sphincters of wrinkled skin tightened around his eyes when he smiled.
Digby smiled back. “Doing some home renovatin’?”
“He-yeah. You know me. I prefer my windows see-through. Don’t worry, I got lots of photos of this stuff. It’s just, you can’t see a dang thing down here with this junk on the window.”
“There’s no light down there?”
“Nope. Not no more. I’m assuming there was, at some point judging by the electric sockets. The outlets are the kind you use for the clothes dryer, know what I mean? The big ones.”
“For big grow lights,” Digby said.
“Probably. Either that, or the Lee’s were operating a coin laundry-mat without a permit.”
Digby smiled politely. “Are you in the secret room?”
“One of them I guess. This is pretty neat, Dig. I’m in the secret grow room, but there’s another room off this one. And you can’t get to that one without coming here, and you can’t get to this one without crawling through a wall.”
“Okay…. How do I get to where you’re at right now? Besides squishing my bum through this window?”
He looked over his shoulder. “Ever see People under the stairs?”
“No. Should I?”
“Well, just meet me at the basement staircase.”