“You angling for a cut on this new book deal?”
“I don’t need the money. But hey, if it comes my way, I ain’t gonna turn my back on it.” He sucked back the last of his whiskey, plunked the glass down a little too heavy-handedly. “No matter how you slice it, Pallorino is the cradle kid. And once that story breaks, it’s gonna run away from her anyway. Might as well give Grablowski a shot first.”
CHAPTER 25
Angie worked fast, like someone in the manic phase of bipolar disorder, racing to outpace the vortex of emotions threatening to overwhelm her in the aftershocks of the DNA bomb dropped on her by Pietrikowski and Tranquada.
Jacob Anders had told her on the phone that his staff had started documenting everything in her box from the moment she’d brought it in. They’d made good headway by the time she’d called him this afternoon. He’d committed to having his techs work overtime and through the night if necessary in order to meet her request for them to log, copy, digitize, and garner whatever samples they could to be tested later. For an additional price.
This was priceless to her, she’d told him. She was desperate to have it all saved before she had to hand the evidence to the RCMP.
It’s not just for me now. I had a sibling. This changes everything.
And Angie did not doubt for an instant now that Tranquada’s new DNA test would come back positive. Because it fit—all the strange disjointed memories in her mind slotted into this scenario. And it just fed her urgency, the fire in her belly to find answers. Why had she been the one to survive and not her sister? And yes, she doubted her sister was alive somewhere wearing a prosthetic, although anything was possible. But it was more likely the little girl in the lilac high-tops had come to terrible harm at the hands of one of those men with guns outside the hospital. One of those men, Angie believed, had slashed her mouth and taken both the young dark-haired woman and the other child.
Up on her whiteboard, next to the photograph that Jenny Marsden had given her, Angie stuck a photo of the dismembered foot. She’d clipped and printed it from an online Vancouver Sun news article.
Stepping back, she studied the growing collage of images. Her nerves popped and sparked at the seismic shift in her paradigm.
Two little kittens, two little kittens . . . The woman singing in the dark room—a memory that Alex had coaxed out with hypnosis—the sense of another presence in the room, a little girl calling with her hand reached out to Angie. Comeum playum dum grove . . .
Her eyes filled with sharp emotion. She swiped it angrily away.
Focus.
She checked her watch. The clock was ticking—she had to scan every single page in Voight’s files before morning. Then she needed to drive out to Anders Forensics and pick up her evidence before Pietrikowski arrived at the station to take possession of her boxes. Before he slapped her with a warrant and started rumbling about obstruction charges, because that was not going to sit with well with Vedder and the rest of the brass, who’d love any opportunity to cast her adrift, especially now. And she wanted back in sex crimes when all was said and done.
Angie set up her printer-scanner beside her computer and began to work through the files in the box, scanning and digitally filing each page as she went. Her scanner was slow and the process tedious. She told herself she could not afford to waste time in reading any of the details right now. She could go through it all on her computer later.
Inside Voight’s binders were the reports from the initial responding officers. Results of a neighborhood canvass. Witness statements taken from parishioners exiting the cathedral, other statements taken from people across the street, from the nurses and docs in ER. On the surface everything seemed to tell the same story: A woman screaming. Gunfire. Men yelling. The cathedral bells clanging, followed by the screech of tires on a street somewhere behind the hospital.
In her quick survey of the statements she was scanning, Angie noted nothing mentioned about anyone else actually seeing a dark-haired woman without a coat being pursued by two big men across Front Street. She hoped that Ken Lau’s grandmother had not just made this up, as she’d later claimed.
It was almost 1:00 a.m. when two newspaper articles slid out of a plastic sleeve and wafted to the floor.
Angie bent down to retrieve them. Clippings from the Vancouver Sun. She read the first. It was short—basically a caption under a photo of a charred wreck of a van. It was dated 1998—twenty years ago. The piece reported that an explosion had alerted CP rail workers to a vehicle fire near a train yard in the Burnaby area. Firefighters had extinguished the blaze by morning, and in the glove compartment of the burned-out black Chevrolet cargo van RCMP had found a Colt 1911 semiautomatic pistol, .45 caliber. At the time of going to press, the police had offered no further details, saying only that the vehicle blaze was under investigation.
Angie frowned. Why was this article in here?
What had Voight been thinking?
That this particular van could have been the one heard screeching outside the hospital almost seven years earlier? The one Ken Lau’s mother and the orderly smoking out on the hospital balcony had possibly seen? Did Voight suspect the Colt .45 was the handgun fired outside the cathedral?
Angie read the second newspaper clipping—a short article about a drug bust in Vancouver’s east side that occurred November 20, 1993, twenty-five years ago. A VPD officer had been shot in the head, and an innocent bystander had taken a bullet in the lower back during the bust. Both had been transported to hospital. Two men had been arrested on scene. Another two had fled in a van. The report stated that more details would follow as they emerged.
But there was nothing else in the plastic sleeve. Angie chewed the inside of her cheek. Perhaps Voight had been working on some theory that had not panned out, and he’d dropped it. Hence no follow-up articles. Possible these clippings were totally unrelated to the cradle case and had been inadvertently included in the binder—these things happened. She’d drill deeper into this angle later, but right now she needed to keep scanning.
It was past 3:00 a.m. by the time she’d copied and digitized everything.