A dance of cranes, p.7
A Dance of Cranes, page 7
Verity pulled off the road onto a narrow track so overgrown with vegetation Traz would have missed it completely if he had been alone. The Jeep rattled along the track for a hundred metres or so and emerged into a small clearing. A shallow pond of still water was fringed by the same tall grasses as at their previous stop, but here, a pair of large blackjack oaks leaned in from the water’s edge, bathing half of the clearing in cooling shade. Verity drew the Jeep to a halt beneath the nearest tree and put an arm on Traz’s as he moved to get out. “No need.”
On the far side of the pond, a small dance of cranes stood still, their elegant stances reflected in the mirror-smooth surface of the water. It was a family group, two adults and their single off-spring, a colt with rusty colouring still trailing up its neck. Raised last year and ready now to begin the single-most important flight of its life, the one that would show whether the route it had taken on its southbound journey last autumn had imprinted itself deeply enough to allow the bird to return safely to the breeding grounds of Wood Buffalo National Park in Canada.
On some unseen cue, the birds all turned and lifted into the air, their wing beats as slow and effortless as an unfolding dream. In seconds, they had disappeared from view. Traz looked at the empty pond. Not a ripple disturbed its surface. It was as if the birds had never been there at all. Vanished from the face of the earth, he thought. How close we had come. The thought stayed with him for a long moment until Verity spoke.
“You all ready to head out?”
“I am, but I’ll have to check with the rest of us.”
The smile that met Traz’s mischievous grin seemed just a touch colder and more forced than Verity’s usual efforts. There were no-go areas for all of us, he thought, and he had just touched upon one of his travelling companion’s. He was sure there were going to be plenty of topics they would have fun with during the next few days. Verity Brown’s speech patterns wouldn’t be among them.
The shrill ring of Traz’s phone saved him from the uncomfortable silence that had settled between them. “JJ,” he said delightedly as soon as he recognized the voice. “I’d heard you were back on this side of the pond. Is Lindy with you? … Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. But hey, I’m sure you guys will work everything out eventually. So what’s up?” he asked, ensuring his tone didn’t reveal the true sadness he felt about the news of his friend’s breakup with Lindy. “I’m in Aransas,” he said in answer to Domenic’s question. “I was just thinking about you, as a matter of fact. Know what I’m looking at right now? A Scissor-Tailed Flycatcher.” He looked at Verity and pointed up to a dead snag on one of the oaks where a bird with an extravagantly long tail was perched. Even from below, the delicate salmon pink flushing on the bird’s sides was clearly visible, contrasting with the soft grey plumage of its back. Verity didn’t seem too enthralled by the sight and it occurred to him that she probably saw these birds all the time down here. “I seem to remember that’s one you’ve dipped on a few times. Did you ever see one?”
He smiled at the answer he heard. “Really, wow. Pity you’re not down here, then. They’re all over the place. In fact, there’s another one now. And another. Are you kidding me? Another one just dropped in, right in front of me. Man. It’s just raining Scissor-Tailed Flycatchers down here.”
Verity hadn’t seen any other birds come in, but when she looked at Traz, he gave her a big wink. “You should see the travelling companion I’ve picked up, too, JJ,” he said. “Gorgeous body, and looks to die for.” Verity raised her eyebrows in surprise and he offered her a smile. “A 455 V8 under the hood, with a Rochester Quadrajet four-barrel carb and Positive Traction differential. A Buick Riviera GS boat-tail. She’s a dream. I’m also with a pretty special woman who’s going to be road-tripping with me for the next few days. Her name’s Verity. Want to say hi?”
He handed his phone over.
“So you’ve actually met him and you’re still prepared to travel with him?” said Jejeune.
Verity laughed. “Yeah, he seems harmless enough. We’ve only just met, but we found out we were heading the same way, so everything just kinda worked out. It’s cool when stuff like that happens, huh?”
There was a beat of silence. “It is,” agreed Jejeune.
Traz came back on the phone. “You’d love her, JJ. She studies Whooping Cranes. Her field is brain activity.”
“What’s she doing with you, trying to establish a baseline?”
“Ah, comedy gold. I’m so glad you decided to carry on when Curly and Moe called it a day. From here we’re heading to Oklahoma. Know what the state bird is? Why, that would be the Scissor-Tailed Flycatcher. I hear the place is just lousy with them. They’re a garbage bird up there.”
A dirt bird, Jejeune’s British birding acquaintances would have said. He knew Traz’s use of the derogatory term for over-common species was just to needle him. In truth, his friend despised the phrase as much as he did.
“Is it Verity’s work that’s taking you up there?”
“No, she’s heading up with me to her home in Scenic, South Dakota.” There was a long silence on Traz’s end of the line. “Hold on,” he said eventually. He held up a finger to Verity and climbed out of the Jeep, retreating to a safe distance along the dirt track before speaking again. “JJ, I’m in Aransas because Damian asked me to come here.”
“Is that what his text to you last week was about?” Jejeune didn’t say it was Damian’s last text.
“You don’t know about any of this, do you? Damian sent me a list of coordinates and asked me to check out the sites. They run in a straight line north from Aransas to North Dakota and then veer off to the northwest.”
“Whooping Crane stopover points?”
“Couldn’t be anything else. I was at a loose end, so I said sure.”
“Did he say why he wanted you to check those sites out?”
“No, but I’d really like to know, if you’re planning on asking him.”
Traz knew when Domenic spoke that he had not imagined the uncomfortable pause.
“I would if I could reach him, Traz. His tracker is off. He’s somewhere in Wood Buffalo Park, but there’s no way of getting in touch with him.”
Verity and the Jeep were still a long way down the track, but Traz lowered his voice and hunched over the phone slightly anyway. “Damian didn’t want me talking to anybody about what I was doing, JJ,” he said guardedly. “Anything I found out was to go straight back to him. I don’t know what your brother’s mixed up in, but you know Damian, it’s probably nothing good.” Traz gave a momentary pause of his own. “If Damian is out there in the middle of Wood Buffalo and he’s gone dark, that could mean he’s in a lot of trouble, JJ.”
“Yes,” said Domenic quietly. “That’s what I was thinking, too.”
12
The room seemed different. Everything in it was familiar, but DCI Jejeune had left a large gap when he returned to Canada. Salter was surprised at the impact the absence of such an unassuming personality could make. But other things had changed within the room, too. There was a new dynamic to the association between the two occupants. It filled the space between them like an awkward piece of furniture, and it wasn’t something Salter intended tiptoeing around for very long.
“Sarge, we’re okay, you and me?”
To Maik, the question came from nowhere. He looked at Salter for a moment before answering. “We are,” he said earnestly.
“I mean, this new situation, this new relationship between us, I suppose you’d call it,” she said with a half-hearted laugh.
“You’ve worked hard to get your promotion, Sergeant,” said Maik. “It’s well deserved.”
If it wasn’t exactly what Salter had been asking, she’d accept the response for now. Maik had his music on, as usual. From his laptop, the Temptations’ “The Way You Do the Things You Do” provided a backdrop to the silence between them. Tony Holland had complained about Maik being mired in songs of melancholy and loss recently, but this one was lively enough. Come to think of it, the other songs Maik had been playing since she’d returned to active duty had been noticeably upbeat, too. She began to walk towards his desk and Maik looked up. In the past, she had often come over for a chat, but this time her approach seemed just a touch more hesitant. “Would you mind if we listened to something else today?”
Maik muted his laptop and looked at her over the top of it. “Did you have anything particular in mind?”
She held up a flash drive. “The Shammalars. Wattis Wright wrote their songs. I’m not really expecting to get any clues from them, but I thought I should probably give them a listen anyway. You know, just to be thorough. Only, I wouldn’t dare listen to this stuff at home. Max already thinks that I spent my teenage years eating dinosaur meat. If he thought I was listening to this kind of music, it would only confirm to him that I’m older than dirt.”
“The Shammalars it is,” said Maik gallantly. He inserted the drive and opened the file. The sound of swirling strings and punchy brass arrangements began to drift from the speakers. Maik gave the music the courtesy of a short listen before deciding it was time to move on to other topics. “How are your inquiries progressing?” he asked.
She shrugged. “Somebody named Albert Ross is looming large. And I mean that literally. Apparently, he’s a mountain of a man. He’s an acquaintance of Wright’s. Of a sort anyway. I’m not sure what the connection is yet, but he’s one of the very few people who made it into the victim’s address book. He was heard by a neighbour in a nasty shouting match with Wright the afternoon before his death. Apparently, Ross was standing on his doorstep, literally screaming at him about something.”
Maik looked interested.
“It’s not as promising as it sounds,” said Salter. “Ross has got a file as long as your arm for public order disturbances, breaches of the peace. He’s clearly got impulse control issues, anger management, all that. There have been several spells in facilities for treatment, but …”
Maik inclined his head. “But none of the previous targets of his anger have ended up dead.”
Salter nodded. “Still, I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to have a chat with him. I mean, just because there’s been no serious afters with anybody else, he does seem to have had run-ins with most of the inhabitants of Saltmarsh at one time or another — over the most ridiculous stuff sometimes. He even assaulted a fortune teller at the Saltmarsh Fete one year, for God’s sake.”
“Was the fortune teller laughing at him?”
Salter looked puzzled. “I’ve no idea. Why?”
“I thought it might just be a case of him wanting to strike a happy medium.”
Salter laughed out loud. “You’re wasted here, Danny, truly.” She became suddenly serious. “But really, have you never considered taking the next step up the ladder yourself?”
“I’ve been out of school a long time,” said Maik frankly. “The studying might be a bit of a stretch, if I’m being honest. I get the feeling I’d have to dedicate so much time to it that the promotion would end up taking priority over the work. I suppose I just could never really convince myself that it was worth that. Besides, there’s plenty enough you can achieve working away in the background. Look at Herb Dixon.”
“Who?”
“My point exactly.”
A joke from Danny Maik was a rare enough commodity. A wink was a genuine collector’s item. But the two in combination? The effect left Salter wondering who this imposter was, and what he might have done with the Danny Maik she knew. She looked over to the vacant desk of Tony Holland, another absentee who had often filled the room with his personality, albeit in a completely different way to DCI Jejeune. “I wonder what Tony and the Met are making of each other. He said he’s enjoying himself, but you know Tony, that doesn’t necessarily mean the work.”
“You’ve spoken to him, then.”
“He called to congratulate me. He said somebody had tipped him off that I was back.” She paused to see if her suspicion was correct, and despite Maik’s impassive expression, she decided it probably was. “I have to say, he was amazingly supportive. And sincere. I’d expected a bit of banter, but he was very complimentary.” She paused and looked at the empty desk again. “Full of surprises, our Tony.”
“Well, you were missed.”
Was I, Danny? By any one individual in particular, or just by the universe in general? Why was it so difficult to talk about something that had never happened between them? Was it because the faintest glimmer of hope remained deep down inside her somewhere that the possibility was still there? She’d have given the idea short shrift if Tony Holland, or anyone else, had suggested it, but she had to at least be honest with herself.
“They know their harmonies, this lot, I’ll give them that.” Danny’s comment brought her back to the present. His expression suggested he wasn’t as impressed with the song itself. To be honest, Salter wasn’t overly taken with the doo-wop sound, either. In her opinion, if the best you could come up with for lyrics was bip bippity doop, you were probably better off leaving the song as an instrumental in the first place. But the melody was pleasant enough. And like Danny said, the Shammalars could certainly sing. To her, the silky-smooth harmonies were every bit the equal of those Motown artists Danny liked: The Temptations he’d just been listening to, the Miracles, the Four Tops. She wouldn’t say that out loud, though. Danny had obviously gone out of his way to try to find something positive to say about the Shammalars. There was no point in pushing her luck.
She moved her shoulders and rolled her head gently to the beat of the music. “Isn’t it amazing how something from so long ago could suddenly gain this sort of popularity again, all because of the internet? It started as a meme, you see.” Salter paused for a moment, toying with the idea of asking Maik if he needed a translation, but thought better of it. It was one thing for Maik to have a curmudgeonly contempt for today’s frivolous trends; having to confess to missing them entirely as they hurtled on by was another matter altogether. “Somebody used one of the Shammalars’ songs as a soundtrack to a video,” she continued. “Two teenage lovers who can’t find the right words, so they speak in all this shalalala doop doop nonsense instead. It was really quite sweet.” Maik’s expression suggested he wasn’t entirely being won over by her description, and Salter hurried on. “Anyway, it caught on, and all of a sudden the internet’s on fire with Shammalarmania. These things generally peter out pretty quickly, but with the nostalgia train everybody seems to be riding these days, this one’s showing no signs of going anywhere. Susan Bonaccord’s company is responsible for securing the rights for a musical, all based around songs by the Shammalars.”
“So, this is what that big cheque on his desk was for, the rights to these songs?” asked Danny. Not even a note of disbelief in his voice, she noted. He really was on his best behaviour today.
“Not exactly. The publishing rights to all the songs had long since been signed away. What Susan Bonaccord was purchasing from Wright were the dance moves. He had never sold those rights to anybody, so he still retained ownership of them.”
“You can’t copyright dance moves, surely?” said Maik in surprise. “Cholly Atkins would have spent his life in court, the number of times his routines have been copied. He was the one who choreographed all those moves for the Motown artists in the sixties,” he explained.
“Actually, you can copyright dance moves,” said Salter, “if you have visual evidence that the choreography was designed as a specific performance piece to accompany a song.”
“So Wright had some film of his routines?”
“He’d managed to hang on to some grainy old sixties film of the Shammalars in rehearsal, with him and his assistant working out the choreography with them.”
“Was Albert Ross a fan of this stuff?” Despite his best efforts, it was clear that Danny’s tolerance for eight-bar breaks consisting entirely of shamalalalalas was reaching its limit. He looked ready to make a case for justifiable homicide if Ross had been subjected to very much of this kind of music.
Salter gave a small smile. “Motive’s the thing I’m struggling with at the moment. It wasn’t a targeted robbery. If you knew Wright at all, you’d know there were no fancy portable electronics lying around. There was no flat-screen TV, his only phone was fixed to a wall, and you’d need a crane and a flatbed truck to get that bulky office equipment of his away, the photocopier and computer system and such. The only thing that seems to fit at the moment is something personal. But Wright had no family, no business associates. So again, it’s hard to see why anybody would want to kill a man who just wanted to sit at home listening to his old songs.”
“In a case like this, I might be inclined to look at the who first, and worry about the why after,” said Maik casually.
It would have been immediately obvious to the killer that the first attack had done the job. From a knife wound that had penetrated the heart, there would have been a lot of blood. But there had been that second thrust, made with extreme force, long after the first one, long after the victim would have appeared dead. It spoke to rage, and it spoke to an extremely powerful individual. A big man with impulse control issues. Shepherd may have assigned the lead investigation to Salter, but she knew that hadn’t stopped Danny Maik from mulling it over in his mind.
He stopped the Shammalars mid-song and removed the drive, holding it out to her. “Heard enough? If you need a lift when you go to see this Albert Ross,” he said, “let me know.”
13
The Demesne at Saltmarsh had created its share of controversy during the planning and construction phases, and though the active opposition had subsided now that it was a fait accompli, there was still a marked difference of opinion among the locals as to its merits. To the local Chamber of Commerce, the resort’s state-of-the-art facilities were a sign of Saltmarsh’s willingness to embrace the future. For many of the residents, however, a thirty-thousand-square-foot complex of high-tech innovation and design had no place in a quiet country town. Not even if it was set in a refurbished eighteenth-century manor house on its own twenty-acre estate and with an enviable stretch of riverfront access.
