“A garbage bag came tumbling out and thudded onto the floor. The boy had been stuffed into the bag and crammed into the fridge. Rufus told Arnie later that it was the garbage bag that really got to him—the fact that someone’s kid had been put into a trash bag like that. Just some rubbish to be thrown away. Why stick the child in that bag, he said, if you’re going to put him in the fridge?” A long pause. Rain began to fall harder outside. The boughs of the yellow cedar sulked lower as they dripped water.
“Rufus never got over it, I think,” Wanda said, her voice going raspy with emotion. “That and all the other stuff those city cops had to deal with. Years later he tidied up his affairs. Washed all his clothes. Laid all his shoes out neatly in his cupboard and in the boot room, side by side. Then he went and lay down on the railway tracks. At the bottom of North Van.” Another break of heavy silence descended over Wanda. She cleared her throat. “That’s when Arnie finally put in for his retirement. People don’t understand the toll that job can take on a police officer or his family. They don’t know how we all have to tiptoe around the ugly side of the job, the mood swings, the depression, the drinking.” She looked out of the window, her gaze going distant. “Sometimes when Arnie came home after a bad shift, I couldn’t talk to him for hours. I just had to let him lay on the couch and watch mindless television and have a couple of beers, and then he’d finally come around and be himself again. It wasn’t easy being married to him. But I loved him.” She returned her gaze to Angie. “I miss him.”
Angie’s chest clutched at the rawness in Wanda Voight’s eyes. She hesitated, then awkwardly she forced herself to cover the woman’s hand with her own. “I’m sorry,” she said.
Wanda inhaled deeply. “No, I’m sorry. This was not supposed to be about me.” She extracted her hand, fumbled for a handkerchief in her pocket, blew her nose, and then came to her feet. “I asked Sharon to bring Arnie’s boxes up out of the basement. She put them by the sliding door for you.”
“What boxes?”
“They’re over here,” Wanda said as she got up and made for the glass slider.
Angie lurched to her feet and followed, her pulse suddenly racing.
Wanda pointed to two cardboard file boxes that rested side by side on the floor behind a sofa. They were sealed with yellow tape. In fat black Sharpie along the side of the front box, someone had scrawled the words BOX 01 JANE DOE SAINT PETERS #930155697–2.
Shock slammed through Angie. She bent down and moved the first box aside.
BOX 02 JANE DOE SAINT PETERS #930155697–2
Her gaze ticked up to Wanda. “Are these the angel’s cradle case files?”
“Like I said, it got to Arnie. He never did stop looking in his own way. He always wondered if that child might return one day as a grown woman to ask him questions. He knew she’d been adopted. He knew that she’d been taken in by a good, kind family. He even called the child’s adoptive father a few times to check on the child and to see if she might have remembered anything about that day, or about her life before. Or whether the adoptive family had ever been contacted by anyone suspicious. Arnie also thought that maybe a relative might eventually come to him in search of the child. But no one did. He never did find her family, nor the men who’d fired the guns outside the church that night. When he learned that the evidence was going to be destroyed, he went and got these boxes. He wasn’t supposed to. They used to incinerate anything in evidence that was to be destroyed, with witnesses watching. Sometimes they’d return property to families if they could find them. In this case, since there was nothing valuable in there, no weapons or anything, they let Arnie take it. He told them he was going to keep working it on his own. He brought the boxes home.”
“Did he work on it?”
“He opened the files up several times, extracted some notes, poked around a bit. In the end he resealed the boxes. When I sold the house after he died I brought them here and they went into the basement.”
Angie stared at the boxes. Deep inside her belly, her muscles began to shake.
Is it possible?
Could the forensic evidence that Jenny Marsden had told her about be inside those boxes—lab serology results, prints, ballistics info, rape kit—things she could have retested for DNA?
“I think Arnie would like you to have them,” his widow said softly. “He’d like to know that someone was still looking.”
Angie’s heart galloped up into her throat and her skin turned hot as she continued to stare down at the two boxes on the floor. A potential portal.
To her past.
Her future.
CHAPTER 6
Angie circled the city block three times before she found street parking near the Starbucks entrance—she wanted the Nissan close by so she could keep a check on her boxes. Hurriedly she exited her car and stuffed coins into the meter. It was already past two. She jogged toward the coffee shop, her bag slung across her body. Wind blew cold, but at least the rain had stopped. Heart beating fast, she pushed open the door.
Warmth and the scent of coffee greeted her. The place was bustling, noisy with chatter, different staff working behind the counter. Excitement punched through her as she caught sight of her target—an elderly Asian man bent over a newspaper at a small round table in the back.
Angie threaded her way through the lineup and approached the table.
“Morning,” she said, tempering her voice.
He glanced up. Angie judged him to be in his seventies. He was small, bent like a question mark inside his oversize houndstooth jacket. His ears stuck out like mug handles from beneath a monk’s fringe of white hair that circled a smooth mahogany pate dotted with liver spots. Beneath his pronounced apple-shaped cheekbones, his jaw looked hollow, as if he might be toothless. Eyes, deep and brown, peered at her quizzically from behind small silver-rimmed glasses.
Angie offered him a smile and said, “My name is Angie Pallorino. The barista working here last night told me I might find you here today. I believe you operated the Pink Pearl Chinese Kitchen?”
He frowned. “Yes. For many years. My family owned it. I worked in the restaurant, many, many years, since my twenties.”
“Could I join you for a moment? I’d like to ask you a few questions.”
He frowned and adjusted his glasses, hands trembling slightly with age or illness. “I was . . . just about to leave. My show comes on television in fifteen minutes. I always watch it.”
Angie’s muscles tightened. “I’ll be really quick.”
He hesitated, then held his hand out to the vacant seat in front of him. “Please.”
“Could I get you another tea?” Angie said as she pulled out the chair. “Something else perhaps?”
“No, thank you. Like I said, I’m about to go.”
She seated herself, spoke quickly. “Was your restaurant here in 1986?”
“Well before that. My parents opened the Pink Pearl in ’82. My sister and I sold it only five years ago. It was a piece of Vancouver history, if I say so myself. Many eras in this city that we have seen come and go.”