A giant house belonging to the wealthy Mr. Landon, Lia's father, overlooks the heart of Vancouver. Currently, five police vehicles and an ambulance are parked on the street in front of it. Yellow crime-scene tape blocks the main door. Police officers are all posting guard, and many wealthy neighbors have stormed out in their nightgowns and pajamas to observe what is happening down at Mr. Landon's house.
A crying nanny on the porch buries her head deep between her knees. She is a white, university graduate student, twenty-four years old. Two female officers attempt to comfort her.
The oldest officer, thirty-nine, speaks first. "My name is Claudia. This is my companion, Rich. She will be asking you a few questions today. Is that okay?" She looks at the younger officer who steps forward from the shadow of Claudia's command.
"My-my name is Kayla," the nanny says.
Taking out a yellow notepad, Rich nods to Claudia to head inside.
"All right, Kayla, do you mind telling me what happened?" Rich asks, attentively marking all the little details about this encounter. While Rich knows nothing of the things she writes, her partner will always tell her that more information is better than less. You can never go back to a crime scene expecting it to be as fresh as the day it opened.
Claudia steps up to the porch without saying a word. Two male officers move aside, both raising the yellow crimescene tape across the door, allowing her to enter the house.
So this is what the most prized lawyer in the city can buy.
To her left is a living room. Inside are a white couch and a white La-Z-Boy tucked in opposite corners. All four walls are painted snow white, and the floor is white carpet. From the large window that hugs the wall closest to the street, blue and red lights splash inside, covering the furniture in a dance of both colours.
To her right is a large maple staircase. She takes note of the neat foot rack beneath it, not a shoe out of line. She walks under the staircase towards the kitchen. She notes the modelesque atmosphere of the home: not a painting off center; not a speck of dust in the house; not a trace of life.
In the kitchen, she is met with more of the same. The black marble top looks almost brand-new, and the dishes in the sink are perfectly clean and neatly stacked. The ceramic floor beneath her sparkles. But as she turns to her right, she sees a corridor, and at the end of the corridor are two big doors that remind her of the entrance to a cathedral. A police officer is taking photos near the doors, with yellow cones marking what appear to be blood spots and bloodied sizeeight shoe prints that lead to a pair of bloodied sneakers.
She walks down the corridor, taking notice of the perfect wooden flooring. Not a mark. Not a scratch. Not a creak. One door has been smashed in; the lock has been cleanly ripped from the adjacent door. Clearly considerable force was used here.
"Is there a body?" she asks. Outside the room, a kneeling officer is taking photographs. He stands and turns to face her. His camera drops and hangs from the strap around his neck. He looks very young—probably no more than two years on the force she guesses. His pale face and empty eyes tell her that he's shaken. "No. Not yet, but I don't know if this is worse."
"What is it?"
"Take a look yourself," he says. He resumes taking photos of potential evidence.
Claudia steps forward and pulls a pair of surgical gloves from her jacket pocket. She puts them on both hands, pushes the door open, and enters the room. Immediately, she sees about half a dozen high-ranking cops talking, taking photos, and examining the crime scene. In the middle is her boss, Big Boy Gord.
BBG turns around and opens his arms for a hug. "Isn't this the person I wanted to see!" he says with a huge grin. He walks towards her; his arms are wide like a hungry hippo. His big belly moves up and down, shifting beneath his toosmall suit.
She accepts his hug, yet her eyes gaze over his shoulder at the room. She feels overwhelmed. The room is large and dim, with purple carpet. The fireplace on the back wall still burns, pervading the air with a light vanilla scent. In front of the fireplace is an extravagant chair that towers over a massive mahogany desk with a gold-plated plaque that reads "Johnathan Landon."
It feels cozy and warm. And yet, on the desk sit perhaps hundreds of glossy white squares three or four inches in size. Hundreds more cover the carpet surrounding the desk. There are so many that they seem like mini-soldiers besieging a castle. Before those squares, at the rear of the battle and in the middle of the room, sits a small isolated chair. She steps past her boss to examine this area.
Claudia sits on the small chair in front of the desk. She feels small, insignificant to the world, yet as if she is being watched. She can only imagine how someone sitting here felt, over and over, day after day. Looking up, she sees many naked women staring down at her from the shelves that line the walls. Hundreds of Playboy magazines, face out, are pointed directly at this chair. This was done on purpose.
She looks down at the white squares at her feet and realizes that they are in fact Polaroid photos. She picks up one and examines it in the dim light from the fireplace. It shows a child no older than six sitting naked in the same chair she sits in now. She picks up several of the nearby photos: more images of the same girl, a bit older, but none older than eleven or twelve. The last one she picks up is covered in spots of blood. The blood, still wet, oozes down the photo, covering the young girl in red.
Then it hits her. In this particular photo, Claudia sees the desk behind the young girl and how it was—an oak colour, not mahogany. She watches how the blood drips down the Polaroid and finally hits the oak desk in the background, tinting it red. Immediately she looks up at the actual desk, and in the low light of the fireplace she sees the blood, so much blood that it drips off the edges like from a running faucet.
A hand touches her shoulder, and she jumps. It's Gord.
"No body?" she whispers.
"No body" he says, staring at the desk.
"Look, Claudia, I'm assigning you the case head on. You bring this—"
All the pieces start falling into place. She swallows her tongue, stands up from the chair, and jumps back into the conversation. "You believe the daughter is the killer?"
"We do." He smiles. "Looking at the crime scene, the photos here, we guess more along the lines of a sexually
abused child finally loses it and kills her father."
"Yet, where are the other family members?"
"We don't know; they are missing. We think the mother and son could have been kidnapped, or forced to flee with the daughter. But the vehicles remain in the garage."
"So we have an unknown—"
"Yes, an unknown—"
"Who is most definitely male, strong, and has great technique," she interrupts him.
"You know this how?"
"The door was locked and someone of immense strength and technique needed to break down that door. Just one quick look at it and you can see the lock was not broken but ignored."
"You think a strong person alone could break a door like that? That's solid wood."
"Not just strength. Like I said, technique. A very talented individual knew how to break through that door."
"What are you thinking then?"
"An accomplice. The motive is not standing in front of us, for sure. This crime scene isn't black and white. Serious child trauma. Just sitting in that chair, you can feel it. But with the mother and son missing... You can only wonder if they are together—" "Or apart." He grins.
"Yes, but we need a body or bodies. We don't know if the mother and son are dead or alive. After all, the cleaning lady or whatever—"
"The Nanny comes Wednesdays and Fridays," Gord says, and Claudia smiles. This is why he loves her, and this is why she loves him when it comes to solving crimes. They are almost always on the same page.
"That leaves a pretty big window for her to kill her family members."
"Yes, we are checking in on her parents' workplace to see if they missed any time away."
"You don't need to worry about that, Gord. This happened no more than a short while ago."
"You know this how?"
"You see the blood here?" Claudia raises the Polaroid in his face, watching the blood drip off the picture. "It's still fresh."
"So you're saying—"
"I'm saying that the daughter and the unknown wanted the Nanny—"
"Claudia."
Claudia turns around to see her partner in crime, Rich, standing behind her. She has a yellow notepad full of words.
The nanny divulged a lot of information.
"The Nanny was having an affair with Mr. Landon."
Claudia grimaces and mimics a gun with her hands and fires. "Bingo, bulls-eye. Thanks, Rich."
Rich looks stunned. "How do you—?"
Gord smiles. "You're one smart lady."
"I'll tell you later if you remind me," Claudia says to Rich, then turns her attention back to Gord. "Anyways, it's not relevant to the case. We need to search ideal bodydumping grounds within a ten-kilometer radius. Check farms, construction sites, anything. Gord, I need you to search all the neighbours houses and see if they have anything on their security cameras indicating what vehicle we are looking for."
"What are you saying?" Rich asks, stepping next to Gord. Rich is like that little sister who wants in on all of her older sister's secrets. Rich is obsessive of her partner Claudia, always wanting to listen, but never wanting to learn.
"If we find the unknown person," Claudia says, "the homicide solves itself. As it stands, the case is too complicated to put together on our own. It will require weeks of psychological digging into the years of family history. Time we don't—"
"There's an empty vault over here!" an officer calls from the far side of the room.
Claudia, like a dog, raises her ears to the news and smiles. They all rush to the far side of the room, opposite the fireplace. In the wall, behind two book shelves, is a vault about a foot deep sunk into the wall. The police officers take out the removable shelf to access a vault door that is open a hair.
With her white surgical gloves still on, Claudia pulls on the small vault door, and the officer who found the vault shines a light inside. The vault is empty except for a piece of paper written on in ink: 55, $950, with the date May 19, 1998. The last date the money was counted.
Clearly this vault hasn't been touched in a while, as it's now early August.
"Well, doesn't this make things interesting," Claudia says.
"What are you thinking?" Rich asks.
She passes the piece of paper to Rich and turns to her boss. "Well, I'm not thinking. This tells me that the mother opened this vault and took all the money and that they are also alive and well. At this time, I'm not sure if she is an accomplice, but she took the opportunity to capitalize on her husband's death."
"You know this how?"
"If you were a father who taught your daughter that she is nothing more than a sex object, abused her, and possibly sexually violated her, would you give her the power to your things?"
"No."
"Exactly. A man like this his existence is based on the power he holds above others, the only one closest to him— with not equal power, but some power—would be his wife. While Mr. Landon would never give her the code, a wife usually knows her husband better than he himself. This
wouldn't be hard to find the code."
"A little farfetched, don't you think?"
"Could be. But we can see what Mr. Landon did to his daughter. Could you imagine what he did to his wife? This man was out of control. I don't believe the wife found it hard to get over her husband's death."
"Do you think she killed her?"
"I don't know. At this point, this vault opens more questions than answers. But, like I say, finding the vehicle will be the first step in the search for the murderer."
"Boss!" an officer calls from across the room. "We got another room!
Another twist, she thinks. Later, Claudia will sit down with a bottle of vodka, next to Rich, and say she wished she had never entered that room and had allowed her friend to do it instead.
Hastily, she runs up to the officer who is standing by a bookshelf that has fake plastic books glued to the shelf. Claudia, Rich, and the male officer push the bookshelf to the left, dragging it against the carpet with slight resistance. The secret entrance is about four feet tall and three feet wide. Claudia steps forward, offering to go inside. Gord, on the same page, passes her a flashlight without question.
She steps inside and is immediately hit with a faint scent of rotting meat and musty, but warm, air. Staring ahead, she places her hand on the right wall, dragging her hand against it as she walks deeper into the little room. Walking along, she has a sense of the room getting smaller around her. Her feet brush a solid object, like a small cube, and she feels it slide in a thick, syrupy paste like pushing a sponge through halfdried soap.
She stops and looks down, shining her flashlight on several kids' alphabet blocks sitting in a small pool of blood. She swallows her tongue and follows the trail of blood leading from the blocks. At first, it's a couple of drips, blood spots here and there, but slowly the blood spots get bigger and bigger until they meet a pond of blood, with a pair of shoe soles staring at her.
He's here, she thinks. Sweat drips down her face. She lowers the flashlight as her hands brush against a light switch. She turns off the flashlight, closes her eyes, and takes a deep breath, knowing that this is the climax of the homicide. Either there would be three bodies in here, or one. She hopes it's the latter; she hopes it's just the father.
She begs it's the father. But when she turns on the light, nothing could ever have prepared her for what she witnesses.
In a flash, the room goes from pure darkness to a child's room. Dropping her flashlight, she covers her mouth with both hands and screams. In the middle of the room is a chair knocked over, with Mr. Landon connected to it by eight, sixinch nails sunk into his skull.
Seeing his eyes that look like deflated basketballs, Claudia keels over, failing to contain her lunch.
She turns around and hurries out of the hidden room and out of the tunnel like a mother giving birth, her skin ghost white.
Gord rushes to her side. "Are you okay?"
She nods, and nods. But before she can speak, she looks down and sees her boots covered in blood. Her hands, from touching the light switch, are covered in blood. So much blood. How can a body have so much blood?
She looks Gord straight in the eyes. He knew that this would be a case she would never forget. The other officers step inside.