A Cuban Death Page 2

  McDonald arrived at the little pool in the cabana section and peeled off his shoes, socks and shirt. He couldn’t do lengths here but he could get the sweat off. He wasn’t all that hot anymore but he was too lazy to go up to the room and shower. As he waded into the water he thought about what he had just seen. Poor bugger. He had come for a vacation in the sun, and ended up face down in his own blood. McDonald wondered briefly who he was and then put the whole incident out of his mind.

  He was reminded of it later, though, when he went out onto his balcony to hang his suit on the railing to dry. His room was on the sixth floor and he had a terrific view of the pool area and the ocean in the background. He also discovered that the body from earlier was almost directly underneath his unit, still lying on the path. He wasn’t the only one checking out the scene either; as he looked around, he saw plenty of other hotel guests, on his floor and lower ones as well, leaning over and watching the activity below. McDonald craned his neck upwards and saw that that there were more people above him doing the same thing.

  The authorities were doing something about that, he could see. Screens had been set up earlier, to keep nosy parkers from coming along the path and ogling the gruesome sight. And now as he watched, sheets were being strung across the tops of the screens. The staff had belatedly realized that they needed to block the view from above. The police had arrived too, he now noticed. McDonald had been on a city tour of Trinidad earlier in the week and he recognized the uniforms these cops were wearing; there had been a number of them in the town directing traffic.

  It was still none of his business, though. He wondered briefly who the dead man was – he was young, that was all he could say for sure from the views he’d had – but then he resolved to think no more about it. Nothing more could be seen now in any case. Besides, he had his day planned. He would go snorkelling this morning, followed by lunch at the beach bar and a siesta. Then he would check out the action by the main pool, if it wasn’t off-limits, and maybe try his hand at sailing one of the little boats the resort had available for the guests. If he were lucky, maybe he would have a companion to go with him. And perhaps she would stroll down the beach with him at sunset, and who knew what might happen then?

  Detective McDonald went back into his unit and prepared to go down for his breakfast.

  three

  The Riverwood Rapist. Detective Sergeant Nicholas Drumm didn’t like the label but he had to admit it was accurate. It was early in the morning and Drumm was taking a break from another fruitless examination of the evidence in the case. He had his feet up on his desk and his hands were clasped behind his head. His chair was tilted backwards so far that if he went an inch or two further, his large frame would end up in an undignified heap on the floor. His eyes were locked on a photo on a bulletin board but he wasn’t really seeing it. The picture was just one of many that were pinned up, all of women in varying degrees of distress. His desk was littered with papers and there was a stack of files threatening at any moment to slide off onto the floor.

  There had been five rapes so far, although these kinds of attacks were always referred to as sexual assaults. But rapes they were, and brutal ones too. A strong pattern linked them: a woman by herself, always just off a bus, walking home along a street late at night. A lone attacker grabs her from behind, puts a knife to her throat and threatens her, and forces her into a park or behind a building. And because all of these assaults had taken place in roughly the same area, a section of the city of York called Riverwood, the media had started saying the police were hunting the Riverwood Rapist. Drumm could hardly blame them.

  They were hunting but they weren’t catching. The attacker had either been very good or very lucky. Drumm favoured the former theory. Each chosen spot had been away from busy areas and potential security cameras, and there had never been witnesses, other than the victims themselves. And what the women could tell him wasn’t much good: the Riverwood Rapist always wore a ski mask. They knew that he was tall and strong, and that he was white or possibly Hispanic. He didn’t speak much beyond telling his victims what he would do to them if they didn’t cooperate; he had a deep, raspy voice. They knew he didn’t use a condom and that he was rough and getting rougher. They knew he didn’t discriminate; one victim was Asian, one was black and three were white.

  The man had come from behind in each case and only once had the victim sensed his approach. It had done her no good, though, as he had thrown a strong right hand across her mouth, choking her and preventing her from calling out, just as he had done with all the other women. His left hand always held a knife at the side of her throat, and three of the women had suffered nasty cuts as a result. The attacker wore no gloves and his fingers were covered with wiry black hairs; he had no visible tattoos. His fingernails were dirty and chewed short. He was wearing in every case some kind of black windbreaker and black sweatpants, as well as a black ski mask with eyeholes. His eyes were blue, “a weird, pale blue”, the second victim had said with a shudder. “And there was nothing in them but hate.”

  Drumm wondered what the guy would do in the spring, if they hadn’t caught him by then. The first assault had been in early December, and there had been a new case roughly every ten days or so. A ski mask made sense in the winter; a man could walk down the street wearing one and nobody would think it strange. But in the spring? Maybe the rapist would change his m.o. Drumm thought that the guy must not only have the balls of a burglar but also some kind of insensitivity to the cold. Personally, he wouldn’t want to be dropping his pants in the kind of weather they’d been having, but he supposed if you were desperate enough or angry enough, it would be worth it.

  They had the attacker’s DNA, and plenty of it. The rapist wasn’t shy about leaving it behind. He had in every case finished his business. He had always forced the victims to a secluded area out of sight of the street; Drumm assumed the man had chosen the spots in advance. Once there he had taken his time, forcing the women to the ground. Here his method had varied depending on what the victim was wearing. Sometimes he ripped her coat and clothing off, using both hands, the knife beside him on the snow. Sometimes he put the knife to the woman’s face and ordered her to remove her own clothing. His voice was always pitched low and hoarse like he had a cold, and he used as few words as possible. Always his eyes had bored into his victim’s, promising violence and demanding obedience. When he was finished, he pulled up his pants and forced the victim to stay on her stomach on the ground. And there he left her, face down on the remains of her clothing, while he ran off into the dark.

  Having the rapist’s DNA wasn’t doing them any good, because there was no match to anybody in any of the police databases. Clearly the Riverwood Rapist knew this or he would have been more careful. Or maybe he didn’t know anything about DNA at all. Maybe he was ignorant, one of the few people in all of York who had never watched a cop show on TV.

  One nurse, one hotel worker, one dispatcher for a taxi company, one student and a waitress at a downtown restaurant. That was the rapist’s tally so far, and if there was any kind of pattern there, Drumm couldn’t see it. The women worked until late at night and then they were unfortunate enough to take the wrong bus home; that was all. The student was in her twenties, the nurse forty-seven, the maid, the dispatcher and the waitress all in their thirties. There was nothing in that either.

  One of the women, the nurse, had suffered minor frostbite because she had lost consciousness during the attack. Drumm wasn’t sure how long she had been out but it was long enough to cause damage to her nose and cheeks. She’d woken up in time and stumbled out to the street where she had been helped by a passing motorist. Of the five victims, she was the most traumatized. But all five women had been badly shaken by what had happened to them. It wasn’t just the physical assault or the helplessness, it was the chilling way the attacker had treated them that affected them the most.

  “I come up against some mean mothers in my time,” said the taxi dispatcher. “But this dude was
evil. He stuck that knife right up into my face. And the way he looked at me…” And she shuddered.

  The man was getting more violent all the time and Drumm suspected they would soon have a murder to investigate if he wasn’t found and stopped.

  Drumm sighed and took his feet off his desk. He stood up and went over to the bulletin board to look at the photos again. There were thirty-seven in all: drivers’ license photos, knife wounds, bruised body parts, ripped clothing. There was a sketch of what the attacker might look like, complete with ski mask, and almost completely useless, with no facial features visible. He’d looked at all these things so many times that he could see them in his sleep. But he was getting nowhere – going around in circles – and he knew it.

  The York Police Services had increased uniformed patrols in the area and assigned undercover officers to walk the streets. They had alerted the media to the cases, in order to make women aware that there was a sexual predator in Riverwood. In the news release they had provided the best description they had: a white or Hispanic male, approximately six feet tall, wearing a ski mask and dark clothing. The other details had been withheld, the facts about his fingers and the way his voice sounded.

  Drumm gave it up for the moment and went out for some coffee. He poured himself a cup in the communal kitchen which was empty just at the moment and went over to the large window overlooking the park. There were tables and chairs in the room but he preferred to stand and look out at the trees. They were bare of course and lightly dusted with snow but he enjoyed the sight nonetheless. It was one of the few positive things about the recent reorganization of the force, the view from this spot out over Sunrise Park. Even on this cold winter day there was activity out there. A young mother was pulling her child on a toboggan across the snow, her pink parka a bright blotch of colour against the white. And Drumm could see a man jogging along in a black tracksuit and matching toque, his breath forming little clouds of vapour as he went. The guy was the correct height, he judged: that could be the Riverwood Rapist right there. Drumm sipped his coffee and watched him until he was out of sight.

  The York Police Services had moved into a new building. The change made sense because they had outgrown the space in the previous one. In the old place they had been on top of each other all the time. They had been making do but the need for more room had become increasingly obvious. This facility was much larger and it was right beside the morgue and the labs. It would save them time, and it was equipped with all the latest technology. It was all much more practical but the changeover had not gone smoothly, and they were still working out the kinks. There were still boxes of junk all over the place and telephones and other equipment that malfunctioned.

  The YPS had not only changed buildings, it had reorganized the structure of the force. Drumm was no longer a detective in the Violent Crimes Unit; he was now in Homicide and the VCU had ceased to exist. The growth of the city of York meant not only new streets and new subdivisions, more shopping malls and factories, but also an increase in crime. The proximity of the city to Toronto ensured that many criminal activities had migrated north. “Shots fired” was now a common phrase heard on the police radios in York, there were more than two dozen identified gangs in the city and drug-related crimes were an almost daily event. There were two different and competing biker clubhouses in the city. Violent deaths were still not a common occurrence but the trend was there for all to see, and Drumm knew it wouldn’t be long before they were approaching Toronto’s or Vancouver’s death rate.

  As a homicide detective, he was expected to handle serious shootings, stabbings and other violent crimes, such as the Riverwood Rapist. He could be called out to investigate any questionable or unexplained death, as well as suicides, drownings, crib deaths, overdoses, seizures or any other type of incident that could cause a lot of attention to fall on the York Police Services. On any given day, he could be looking down at a decomposing body in a forest, a suicide in a bathtub or an addict passed out in a washroom. If a body was fished out of the river, he would likely be there. Recently he’d been involved in the investigation of a local politician, a councillor suspected of taking bribes. It was one of the things that appealed to him the most about the job: the constant variety.

  All of this was fine with one Nicholas Drumm; he had been doing most of this anyway as a member of the VCU. What was not okay with him was the ignominious way that his superior, Staff Inspector Mark Chappell, had been forced to retire. And what was worse: that his replacement was Harold Drennan, as hard-nosed and unpleasant a Staff Inspector as the YPS could have found. If they had been looking to send a message, they could hardly have done a better job. Drennan made Chappell look like a saint. And even worse from Drumm’s point of view was that he’d had a run-in with Drennan in the past. The new Staff Inspector had no cause to love Detective Sergeant Nicholas Drumm.

  Unwillingly, Drumm’s thoughts went back to the incident with Drennan. When was it? Two, no nearly three years before, it must be. Drennan had been with the Sex Crimes unit then, and Drumm was investigating a particularly nasty attack on a teenager; he’d been frustrated with his lack of progress. Drennan had been cool from the start, and uncooperative. Drumm didn’t take it well, and Drennan had called him “teacher boy” and suggested he take himself off somewhere else and let the real police deal with it.

  Drumm reacted without thinking. He’d grabbed Drennan’s shirt and pushed him up against the wall in his office. There had been some shoving back and forth, a lot of harsh words, and other detectives had to pull them apart. Drumm had left Drennan’s office in an angry frame of mind while Drennan straightened his clothing and muttered, and the other detectives had hidden grins. Since then the two men had kept their distance and maintained a cold silence when in each other’s company. But Drumm always had the sense that Drennan was just waiting to get back at him. And now the man was his immediate superior. Drumm sighed.

  Mark Chappell had been demanding but he was usually fair. Drumm had felt Chappell’s anger many times but the Staff Inspector was also quick with the praise when things went well. But Chappell had been forced to take an early retirement. He had made the decision to use one of his detectives on a personal matter involving Chappell’s wife, Celeste. And when that detective, Dick McDonald, had been nearly killed as a result of a stabbing, Chappell had taken the blame. And out he went. Drennan was the replacement.

  Drumm sighed again. His coffee finished, he left the window and returned his mug. Back in his office he stared listlessly at the papers on his desk. His thoughts turned to Emily, his ex-girlfriend. Their on-again, off-again relationship had put him through an emotional wringer before it finally ended some months before. The bottom line there, he eventually realized, was that she just couldn’t handle the stress of being with a cop. It had taken the two of them several failed attempts at making the relationship work and many arguments to figure that out. She had left him for a fellow real estate agent. He smiled ruefully to himself when he recalled the circumstances of her leaving. He had been upset at the time but eventually realized that it was the best thing for him – for the two of them, really. All he felt now was relief that he didn’t have to worry about her anymore.

  He really wasn’t in the mood today to handle the Riverwood Rapist, he realized; his mind was wandering all over the place. Restlessly he stood up and made his way to the washroom. At the sink he took his test kit out of his pocket and then washed his hands. He turned the machine on and inserted the test strip. Drumm went through the familiar routine of using the lancet to prick his finger and smearing the blood on the strip and then checking the readout. A few months ago he would have been doing all this secretly while sitting in a toilet cubicle, anxious that no one at the YPS should learn he was diabetic. Now he was doing it out in the open, the result of his colleague Lori Singh’s persuasion.

  “There’s no reason to hide it,” she told him. “Lots of cops are diabetic. It doesn’t make you less of a man.” And she had grinned mischievo
usly.

  In time he had come to realize she was right and he was now completely comfortable in checking his blood sugar level in public. He had become less obsessive about it too, not having to monitor it many times a day. Drumm was one of the fortunate diabetics because his condition could be controlled through a proper diet. If he were careful, his life was normal. If he neglected his diet, problems could ensue, such as when he had collapsed on the job a few months ago. Drumm and Lori, who had been with him at the time, had kept that quiet.

  Drumm put the used lancet in the little plastic box he carried with him for that purpose. Later on he would get rid of it in the yellow disposal container that the YPS provided in the health room. That was a change too, he realized; in the past he would have carefully wrapped it up and taken it home.

  His reading was 5.3, perfectly normal. He was so restless that he’d thought maybe his blood sugar level was too high, but he now realized that he was just frustrated. Or maybe he just needed a break from his paperwork. Moodily he made his way back to his office.

  He stared at the reports on his desk some more, and idly moved papers around. More than anything he needed a holiday, he realized, a chance to get away from the routines and frustrations. Like Dick McDonald, currently enjoying the Cuban sun. McDonald, popularly known as Detective Dick, was recuperating from the leg injury that had nearly killed him. Drumm smiled to himself. Knowing Dick, he was probably hobbling after every cute woman he could find down there. And annoying the rest.

  four

  Detective Dick wasn’t hobbling after anyone. He was sitting outside at a small table in the shade, finishing his third cup of coffee, the remains of his breakfast in front of him. He smiled and winked at the young waitress clearing a nearby table. McDonald had struck out with her earlier in the week, which had surprised him. He was fairly certain she was married, but he’d thought he had a good chance to score.