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Chapter Thirty-five
I awoke suddenly in a panic attack. The playlist had run through and shut off.
The waiting room was empty, silent, the perfect petri dish for my corrupted brain chemistry. My heart banged against my breastbone, every breath seemed fraught, and I felt as if I were being buried alive.
Pull off the earbuds.
Stand up.
Breathe and walk.
Engage in the movement of the living.
I went to the elevator and rode to the lobby where the crowd snapped me out of it. Then I found the meditation garden. I wasn’t alone. A couple of nurses were talking on one bench. I sat away from them, the dream still vivid in my memory.
&n
bsp; I was in Matt Pennington’s office again. Outside, it was night and through the windows the city was glowing like thousands of Christmas lights. I could smell the body decomposing. I could hear his Naval Academy ring scraping the floor from the movement of a dead hand. The phone rang and it was the same man as before, talking to me…
Fully awake now and calmer, I studied the landscaping and the slant of the sun. It was a beautiful place. My neck ached from where my head had fallen forward as I had conked out. My watch said three p.m.
But what the man in the dream said…
And he said it in a voice I nearly recognized…
Then I realized, part of this was not a dream. He had actually said it yesterday on the phone in Pennington’s office. I only remembered it now.
“They say she was a Mountie, you know.”
He had said that about the hitwoman, that and her name.
It didn’t jibe with the Southern accent, but people can imitate dialects.
Ottawa, headquarters of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, was on Eastern Standard Time, two hours earlier. I didn’t know who to call or what to ask and anyone in authority was probably going home right now.
Instead, I pulled out the MacBook Air and started searching for keywords.
“Amy Morris” and “Mountie” wasted several minutes. “Amy Morris” and “RCMP” only showed me some news stories about a dog bite in Surrey, British Columbia. This Amy Morris was “policy and outreach officer” for the local Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
So I dropped the “Morris” and spread a wider net. After twenty minutes of different keywords, I found the first promising lead. The Google summary was about the murder of an RCMP officer’s husband and daughter in Calgary.
I pulled up the story and there she was.
The news was three years old, but the photo was unmistakable. A woman with straight, reddish-blond hair parted slightly to the right and falling to spread out a couple of inches onto her shoulders. Heart-shaped face, blue eyes, so-so nose, and full lips in a slight smile. She was wearing civilian clothes.
The girl next door, teacher of the year, young mom at the park.
She would catch your eye and you would think she’s attractive, but the memory wouldn’t last. Men caught a glimpse of Lindsey and didn’t forget her.
The caption said, Sergeant Amy Lisa Russell.
The woman in the photo was Strawberry Death. There was no doubt.
I read the story, read it twice. The sergeant had been on duty when her husband and child had been found “slain” at their home in the Bridgeland neighborhood. I had visited the city only once, years ago, to lecture on the Great Depression at the University of Calgary. It had reminded me of Denver.
I searched for more stories about the homicides but there was nothing but rewrites of the original news.
Then I matched “Amy Russell” and “RCMP.” Her name came up in some official documents regarding something called the Immediate Action Rapid Deployment unit. It sounded like a national SWAT team, very elite. If she had served in this branch of the Mounties, she would have learned the moves she showed when we fought on the front lawn and I lost.
