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Chapter 3
A glimmer of light snuck through a crack in the drawn shades. Eckhart heard a buzzing sound and saw her purse jumping madly on the night table. She reached over a glass to snag the cell when her hand knocked the remote to the floor with a crash, sailing it across the room. The volume button caught the side of an armchair, and an automobile chase down the streets of San Francisco blasted from the television.
“Ah, shit. Go figure.” She slid off the bed and jammed at the toggle, prepared to hurl it out the window. Silence, at last.
“Eckhart.”
“There’s been a murder,” Cooper said.
“Where?”
“Lawsons Lane.”
“I’m on my way.” She hung up and dialed the inspector.
“Gibson.”
“It’s me. There’s been a murder.”
“What?”
“I’ll come get you.”
“Okay. I’m at Just Roasted Cafe. Do you know the coffee shop on Lakeshore?”
“Yeah. Won’t be long.”
Eckhart stepped outside to a white light that washed the sky of its blue. Dawn had abandoned its coolness to the sustained warmth from the day before. A blistering sun beat down without mercy. Birds holed up in still foliage sounded random trills in revolt. She fired up the truck praying the vents would bring relief from the stifling air. Her sunglasses dropped to the floor as she wrestled with the overhead compartment. She picked them up. One of the lenses had cracked.
“Shit. It’s going to be one of those days.” She tossed the sunglasses into the centre console.
Her skin glistened, and the nape of her neck was already damp. She mopped at a bead of perspiration on her forehead and headed out of Port Dalhousie. The waterfront neighborhood was undergoing rapid gentrification. Fifties houses fought in a battle with new multi-storey condominiums. Vivid greens, pinks and yellows splashed storefront buildings. Developers were the big winners.
Eckhart zipped across the bridge that spanned Martindale Pond. The powder-blue water paralleled the colourless sky. Since 1903 the Royal Canadian Henley Regatta had called this pond their home. She had enjoyed viewing the race, and the rowers’ muscular calves and sculpted arms. She pulled around the intersection and hopped the curb. Gibson darted out of the café and jumped into the passenger seat.
“What a nightmare.” She leaned in and whiffed a scent of musk aftershave.
“What happened?”
“I don’t know yet. I just got the call.”
“When did it happen?”
“It was last night. I didn’t have my phone on.” Her sultry gaze flitted to Gibson and down to his hand, a white mark where his ring should have been.
He looked away from the subtlety of her remark, a blush rising behind his collar.
Bright sunlight reflected off the road, causing a feathery haze that wavered in her eyes. Eckhart drove down Lakeshore Road through the suburbs to a vertical-lift bridge over the Welland Canal. The man-made forty-three-kilometre shipping lane traversed the Niagara Peninsula from Port Weller to Port Colborne connecting Lakes Ontario and Erie. It was a bypass of the Falls providing ships passage through the Great Lakes system by its eight locks. Gibson gazed down the canal as they passed over, the tires singing on the crisscross steel grate. A black bow rose high in the air, giving the sense it would spill onto the roadway. He cringed at its colossal size. In the other direction, a ribbon of water glimmered in the sunlight along the flat landscape.
Eckhart proceeded on past the East-West Road, flying by a few vineyards and fire lanes. The Expedition bounded over the uneven roads without any problems. As she rounded the next corner, the Jacobs Landing sign cropped up in the distance. The yellow and red board was pinned to a steel pole adjacent to the street. In the bottom right-hand corner, it read Since 1945. She turned left onto Lawsons Lane and sped toward the waterfront.
DC Jones leaned on a post wiping the glow from his brow with his shirttail, although fresh beads developed immediately. He stabbed out his tongue and panted. Eckhart spun to a stop metres away, corkscrewing dust into his face.
“Sorry,” she shouted and lifted her hands in surrender. A smirk pulled up a lip at the corner.
Jones shrugged it off, brushing at his pants. Gibson stepped out into the absolute heat. A light burst of refreshing air surged past him off the lake below, not salty like his beloved Pacific Ocean, but cooling.
“That’s better,” he said.
“Yes, sir. It’s a bit of relief,” Jones agreed.
Eckhart dipped her chin and accompanied Gibson down the shaky stairs. The detectives leaped off the final step. Yellow tape surrounded an indentation in the dark-stained sand. Cooper hunkered in the shade of shrubbery against the bank. He scrambled over to stand with the bosses. The scorched sand shimmered silvery diamonds. Gibson placed his hand on his forehead to ward off the glare and gazed across the wind-ruffled water, keeping his face up to detect the puffs of air. It was a wrestle between the sunlight and the breeze. He longed for the balmy temperate weather of the coast. Here it was thirty-three degrees and climbing. He wiped his brow again.
“So, what happened here?” Eckhart asked.
“There was a firework display on the property at the top of the stairs. On the left. A couple came down after the party for a stroll on the beach.” He looked at his notes. “The guy phoned it in, but he wasn’t the person who found the body. That was a Gregory Cunningham.”
“Who is the victim?”
“Elsie Webber. She runs the store at Jacobs Landing along with her husband, Todd.” He pressed his lips together.
“Anything else you can tell us?”
He shook his head.
“Okay. We’ll head over to the morgue.” She could sense that Cooper wanted to ask her something by the way he was fidgeting. She wasn’t going to tell him why her cellphone wasn’t on.
“Should Jones and I head back to the station? There’s nothing left for us to do here. All the evidence was taken to the lab.”
“Has Todd been notified?”
“Yeah. He was here last night.”
“Here. Like at the party?”
“No. On the beach.”
She nodded and turned to walk away.
The cooling breeze had died. The buzz of flies around the blood in the sand grew louder.
Chapter 4
A lazy breeze fluttered the curtains, and a spicy fragrance of the honeysuckle on the trellis drifted in through the open window. David rubbed his tired eyes and raked his fingers through his unruly hair. The sun had barely risen. He sat on the edge of the couch, elbows on his thighs, hands held in prayer at his mouth. The flaming sphere breached the horizon and shattered the blues of the night. Streaks of sunlight zinged through the glass. The brilliance clawed at his face, his eyelids flickered. Not a cloud in the sky to check it. He pulled himself up and trotted across the scarred wooden floor, arms crisscrossed over his barrel of a trunk.
An indistinct movement and the hint of a squeak made Jackie stir from an edgy rest. She opened her eyes lethargically inhaling the dread of the night before. A flat but regular breathing emanated from the bed where Savannah took cover under a scattering of sheets. Her cheeks puffed with each rise and fall of her rib cage. Jackie let the blanket she had clung onto for security all night slide to the ground. One final look and she tiptoed out of the bedroom.
“Hi.” She stretched her arms to shake off the tiredness that lingered.
“Should we go?” David looked down at his dusty toes. He uncrossed his arms and reached for her arm, stopping midway. “Are you all right?”
What a dumb question. None of them were okay. They gathered their meagre belongings and stepped out the door, the heat forcing into them like an unwanted visitor.
“Uber?”
“Let’s hope so. We should have driven ourselves.”
David dialed from his phone app. He crossed his fingers. Thank goodness someone answered. They waited fifteen minutes in the shade of
the store veranda, one that may never open again. A white Acura SUV glided into the parking lot. A youthful fellow rolled down the window.
“Hi, hop in.”
“Thanks.”
“Where to?”
