Chapter 81

The calls were streaming in, being routed directly to Sgt. Digby’s desk by the communication clerk.
Digby had gone back to the detachment to watch a DVD she found in the Jack Lee’s fire-safe, and stopped at her desk to check messages.
She sat down and fielded a call every three minutes.
The phone was still ringing at midnight.
“Sergeant Digby?”
“Hi. Sergeant. It’s Cst. Matt Keith, from Wolfville. I met you at the scene.”
She relaxed a little. “Oh yes. What’s going on?”
“Are you busy? Dumb question, I guess. I knew enough to try your office, right?”
“Yeah. A lot of calls, already. Lot of calls. Listen, I heard Jack Lee was known to you, on a personal level. I’m sorry for what you must be going through.”
There was a pause. “Yeah,” he said, sniffing with his nose. He sounded bummed, but not emotional. “It’s not easy to think about them like that. They were good people.”
“What do you think happened?”
“Well, that’s sort of why I called-” he sounded uncomfortable. He took a long pause.
“Are you still there?” Digby said.
“Yes.”
“What’s going on? Do you want to meet somewhere?”
“No, I should just tell you. You know that reporter, Jack’s bureau reporter, Rawle Powder?”
Digby sat up and pulled a yellow note pad out of her desk drawer and scrambled for a pen that still worked. “I know the name.”
“Well, I’m a friend of his. We’re in search and rescue together. That’s how I know Jack, through Rawle Powder. Anyway’s, there’s some stuff you should know. I don’t know how relevant it is, but I owe it to the case to give it up.”
“I understand,” Digby said, writing furiously. “Thank you.” She wanted a record of everything he said. He sounded reluctant to be talking at all.
“Where do I start?”
“Anywhere.”
“Okay. Rawle and Jack Lee wrote a news story, a-ways back that talked about a firebombing…. Uh, that might have been your case, wouldn’t it?”
“Yes,” Digby said, her heart starting to pound. “Go ahead. I know what story you mean.”
“Yeah. That one. Well, ever since then, Rawle has been getting harassed really bad at home. The mother of Darroll Missions has been prank calling him and threatening him. And his wife. Someone actually put poison in his wife’s mouthwash, at work. There’s an ongoing case. Kentville Police has it.”
Digby jotted down the name Kelloway Powder, from memory. “His wife’s name is Kelloway?”
“Yes.”
“She works at Valley Regional?”
“Yes.”
“She’s a nurse?”
“Yeah.”
“We found her pay stub at the home of the Missions’ family, in Melanson.”
“You what?”
“We took a look around. We were going to execute an arrest warrant on Kurtis Missions. We found her pay stub hidden in a desk drawer. It looked like it had been rummaged out of the garbage. I think I still have it here, somewhere.” She kept the phone to her ear and unlocked her bottom filing cabinet. She kept spare ammo in there, and sometimes ‘evidence’ of interest.
The paystub was there.
“Here it is. Annapolis Valley Health Authority.” She turned it over. “There’s a handwritten note on the back that says she’s an ICU nurse and she works eight to eight dayshift-“
“Oh my God.”
“Yeah. I stole it, but I can put it back, if Kentville PD wants to find it there.”
“Yeah… I just can’t believe it. That means Rawle was right. He’s never right about anything.”
“Okay. So, what about the story, were you saying?” She wanted to say: What are you calling for? but she couldn’t think of a nice way to say it.
“Anyway, the story was really written by Jack Lee, but Rawle says he pulled his byline off it so nobody could connect it to Dee Lee, the drug dealer. Rawle thinks Dee Lee was Jack’s anonymous source.”
“Ohhh…” Digby wrote everything down, word for word. That explained a few things. Dee Lee. She would have to email all this to Det. Sgt. Smith. She hadn’t heard from Smith in a while, but she still needed his help with the biker angles.
He’s was probably putting in some guilt time with the wife and kids.
Cst. Keith was still talking. “Maybe someone in the Missions family found out Jack was the real author of the story and killed him for it.”