“We can’t be sure of anything at this point. It is all very preliminary. All I can tell you is that it appears to have been an accident.”

  Pete Ramsey put his hands over his face, letting out a sob.

  “I’m so sorry,” Margie told him. “This is a terrible loss.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “We fought,” Ramsey said, his voice sounding stretched and painful. “Before he left. That’s why he went out for a walk so late. He wanted to clear his head. I knew it was too late. I begged him not to go outside.”

  The gears were turning in Margie’s head. She didn’t have any proof, but she suddenly suspected that the two men were not just friends sharing the rent. Ramsey’s words suggested that it was a more intimate relationship.

  “I’m sure Tristan would know that you didn’t mean any harsh words,” she assured him. “Sometimes things just come out when we are arguing.”

  “But the last thing I said to him…”

  “He knew you. He knew that you cared about him.”

  Ramsey nodded. He wiped his eyes with his palms. “I don’t know. I don’t know what to do with myself. Do I have to call his family? Do I have to make the arrangements? What happens now?”

  “You don’t have to do anything right now. It would be good if you had some support from some family or friends. Is there anyone you can call?”

  “Tristan was my support.”

  “I understand.”

  Ramsey sobbed.

  “Can I get you a glass of water?” Margie suggested. “From the kitchen?”

  He nodded without removing his hands from his face or looking at her. He just moaned.

  Margie arose and walked into the adjacent kitchen. She looked through a couple of cupboards and found the glasses. She checked the fridge for a jug of water or built-in water dispenser and, not finding any, turned the cold-water faucet on and waited for the water to get properly cold.

  It was a pleasant, airy kitchen with modern, sleek surfaces. As with the living room, everything seemed to have a place and to have been recently tidied. Had Tristan cleaned up before he had left the day before? Had Ramsey had nothing better to do while he was waiting for his partner’s return and had tidied and polished, hoping that Tristan would be pleased to come to a nice clean house?

  Margie filled the glass and returned to the living room.

  “Mr. Ramsey.” She bent to hand him the glass, touching him gently on the back of the shoulder to get him to lower his hands from his face and take the glass. He straightened up and took it from her, but closed his eyes as if he couldn’t bear to see anything else.

  Margie resumed her seat on the couch. “Are you sure there isn’t someone we could call?” she suggested. “It would be best if you had someone here with you.”

  “No, there really isn’t anyone.” He sniffled and took a long drink of the cold water.

  “You don’t have a friend or family member who could stay with you a bit today? We don’t like to leave someone alone after a notification like this.”

  He made a frustrated noise, a sigh, and a growl of disgust together. “I’ll call someone if I need them. Right now, I just want… I don’t know what I want. I want this to all make sense.”

  “It was… already dark when Mr. Elliott left the house?” Jones asked.

  “Yes. I told him it wasn’t safe to be walking around in the dark at night. Inglewood is a safe area, but we’re close to downtown, and sometimes we get people who have left the bars on Ninth Avenue or homeless who should be at the Drop-in Center. We have an active community watch group. We don’t want this turning into a place where people come to shoot up. Or squat in the park. That’s unacceptable.”

  “But Tristan obviously thought it would be safe,” Margie said.

  “He was naive. He always walked or went to the park when it was dark out. Early in the morning, before sunrise. Late at night. He said he’d never run into any problem and I worried too much. It helped him stay centered and keep his head on straight.”

  “Was he a birder?” Margie asked.

  Ramsey opened his eyes and squinted at her, frowning.

  “A birdwatcher?” Margie clarified. “Did he go to the bird sanctuary to spot rare species?”

  Of course that didn’t make much sense when talking about his going to the park at night. The only birds that would be out then would be owls. Everything else would have gone to sleep.

  “No… he was more into wildcrafting.”

  Margie looked over at Jones to see if this was something that she understood. She gave her head a tiny shake. Margie looked back at Pete Ramsey. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what that is.”

  He eyed her. “You should know.”

  Margie tried to catch something in his body language or tone that would suggest what it was and why she in particular should know what it was any more than anything else. It certainly wasn’t anything to do with law enforcement.

  “Foraging your own food,” Ramsey told her impatiently. “Roots, berries, bark, whatever. He was really into it. He would go to the park to meditate and clear his head, but also to pick chickweed or mushrooms. Berries, bark, dandelions…”

  “Oh, I see.” And Margie should know all about it because she was Indigenous. It was in her blood, foraging in the wild to feed herself and her family. Margie tried to keep her expression neutral so that Ramsey would not sense her irritation at this stereotype. “Of course. I’ve just never heard it called that before.”

  Some new hipster thing. Foraging or gathering sounded too low class for them, so they had to make up a new name. Make it something fresh and exciting and hip.

  “So do you think that’s why Tristan went to the park last night? To wildcraft?” Margie tried to imagine what he might have been able to gather in the dark. If he was at the park at least daily, he would know where the various plants that he needed were. He would only need to turn on his light briefly to see the plant and take what he wanted to.

  Was that what had attracted the beavers? Another creature foraging in their territory? If he had been peeling the bark off of a birch or willow tree, would the beaver have attacked, seeing it as eating his own food? Even the most placid-seeming dog could attack if someone approached its bowl while it was eating.

  Ramsey made a wide motion with his hands. Who knows?

  He rubbed his forehead, looking fatigued. He probably had not slept the night before. Not much, at least. Even if he’d gotten a few hours in, it would have been disrupted with thoughts and dreams, his worry over his partner constantly on his brain. He pulled out his phone and looked at it, then slid it back into his pocket. Checking the time? Looking to see if he’d received a call or text from Tristan, something he had probably done dozens of times since his partner had walked out? Ramsey sighed.

  “I don’t know if he would have picked something in the park. Maybe. Sometimes he did and sometimes he didn’t. But he didn’t go over there just because he wanted food. He was upset.” Ramsey shook his head and wiped his fingertips along the outside corners of his eyes, though Margie didn’t see any actual tears there. “We were both upset. I thought he just needed some time and space. But I waited and waited, and he didn’t come back.”

  “How long was it before you were concerned?”

  “I don’t know. An hour. And when it was two, I was getting really anxious. I called him a few times, but he wasn’t picking up. I called around to some of our friends. Even to the hospital. But no one had seen or heard from him. It was… maybe three when I called the police. They weren’t keen on taking a report, said it hadn’t been very long, but I told them that he was never away for more than an hour or two at the park and always answered his phone. I knew that something had happened to him. I just knew.”

  “You did the right thing,” Margie said. “Because of that report, we were able to identify him right away and had your contact information. If you hadn’t made it, you might have been waiting hours longer before we got ahold of you. He had identification on him, of course, but we wouldn’t have known to inform you.”

  Ramsey shook his head. This didn’t make him feel any better, of course. Learning of his partner’s death sooner wasn’t quite what he’d been hoping for when he’d made that report. He had hoped that Tristan Elliott had been in an accident and might be in hospital. Or arrested for jaywalking. Or something else that meant he could still come home safe and sound.

  “What did he usually do when he went to the park to cool off?” Margie asked. “Did he ever say anything about the beavers?”

  Ramsey looked at her like she was crazy. And what did she think he was going to say? “Yes, he was trying to infiltrate the colony and get them to accept him as one of them?” Did she really think he would say that Tristan had any interest in the beavers?

  But if he went to the park every day, he might know some of the individual beavers and their habits. He might think that they were used to him. He might stand for long hours watching them, which could be what he was doing when he was attacked the night before.

  “What about the beavers?” Ramsey demanded. “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m just wondering if he ever mentioned them. That’s fine; I didn’t expect him to.”

  Ramsey shook his head again, rolling his eyes at Jones. He clearly thought that Margie was out of her mind. And maybe she was, asking a question like that out of the blue.

  “What were you and Tristan fighting about?” Margie asked.

  Ramsey passed his hand over his eyes, rubbing them tiredly. “I don’t even know,” he said, his voice on the edge of breaking. “It was just one of those things. You live so closely with someone and something just rubs you the wrong way. You get impatient with each other. One of you snaps and hurts the other’s feelings. I don’t even know what triggered the argument or what we said to each other. It seems like… that’s all buried under a fog right now. It wasn’t anything important. It wasn’t anything I ever want to remember. Why would I fight with him? Why did I have to do that?” He rubbed his eyes and forehead. “I never knew they would be our last words.”

  Margie nodded sympathetically. “I’m so sorry for your loss. I’ll leave you with my card, and if I can help you with anything, just let me know. We’ll keep in touch. Let you know when you can… begin making arrangements.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Margie needed to take care of a few necessities before checking in at the office, where she would also have to give Sergeant MacDonald a summary of the case. And probably answer the questions of everyone on the team about beavers and the statistics on how often they killed.

  Before that, she needed to get some actual breakfast rather than just more coffee. And she should make it something more than just a fast-food breakfast biscuit.

  “Do you want to go somewhere together?” she asked Jones.

  “No, I already had breakfast. And coffee. And more coffee. I’d better head back to the bullpen and get some more work done. You probably won’t be long. Another half hour?”

  “About that,” Margie agreed. “Just long enough for you to answer everyone’s questions about beavers.”

  Jones laughed. “It’s real easy for me to answer questions about beavers. I’ll just let everyone know that’s Parks Pat’s area of expertise.”

  “That doesn’t seem fair.”

  She shrugged. “Well, it works for me. If it doesn’t work for you, that seems like a you issue.”

  Margie was sitting at a table at Phil’s with a plate of scrambled eggs and toast when the call came through. Margie looked at the screen and answered the call. It seemed way too soon to be getting a call from the medical examiner’s office.

  “Detective Patenaude.”

  “How is my favorite Detective Pat?” Kahn’s measured voice inquired pleasantly. “Up with the birds this morning, were you?”

  “I was up before the birds, thank you very much. Unless you’re talking about the owls.”

  “Ah. Then maybe sleep deprivation can be blamed for your negligence at the scene.”

  Margie’s heart pounded harder. Even though there was a humorous edge to Kahn’s voice, Margie didn’t like being accused of negligence in any area. She worked hard and did her best to stay on top of her training and new developments and protocols within the department or between her department and others in the City of Calgary.

  “Negligence?” she repeated.

  “How close a look did you take at this body?”

  “Uh…” Margie remembered O’Leary’s flashlight flicking quickly across Tristan Elliott’s face and then moving on to other things. The tree that held him pinned. The surrounding shrubbery for any sign of rabid beavers. The dam off in the distance, too far for them to be able to see before the sun was up. “I didn’t get a very good look. It was dark. We didn’t want to contaminate the scene, so we stayed away from him other than to confirm that he was dead.”

  “Oh, I see. You didn’t want to contaminate the scene.”

  “Right.”

  “The accident scene.”

  Margie nodded, even though he couldn’t see her. “Yes. The accident scene.”

  “Because you believed that Mr. Elliott was attacked by a beaver.”

  “Well, that’s what I was told when I arrived.”

  “I thought that you knew better than to be biased by other people’s opinions.”

  Margie cleared her throat. “What did you find, doctor? I’m sorry if there is something I missed. As I said, it was dark and I was told he was attacked by a beaver. Mostly I was just maintaining the integrity of the scene. What I thought was an accident scene.”

  “The scratches and contusions on Mr. Elliott’s face are postmortem.”

  “Postmortem? He was attacked after he died?” Margie’s brain whirled as she tried to figure out why a beaver would attack a dead body. That seemed even more bizarre than a beaver attacking a live person intruding on his territory.

  “I think you can rest assured that he wasn’t attacked by a beaver at all. Beavers have very long, sharp teeth. The scratches on Mr. Elliott’s face are very superficial, and there are no signs of similar marks on any other part of his body. Only his arms and face. An attack by a beaver would have started at the bottom.”

  “Only he was already dead. The beaver could have attacked his face and arms and nothing else if he was already on the ground.”

  “But why would it do that?”

  “I have no idea,” Margie admitted.

  “Whoever came up with this idea that he’d been attacked by a beaver seemed to base it on the fact that he was pinned under a tree that a beaver had felled.”

  “Yes,” Margie agreed. “We didn’t think we needed to collect the tree or any part of it for you, though. It had clearly been cut down by a beaver. Lots of teeth mark around the base.”

  “No. I’ll give you that. It was a tree felled by a beaver. The technicians took pictures of the tree and the stump for me. But did a beaver fell it on Mr. Elliott? Or pull it over him after he was dead?”

  “I don’t know. I wasn’t there at the time.”

  “You don’t know,” Kahn agreed. “And you wouldn’t make an assumption like that.”

  “Of course not,” Margie agreed. “I would never make an assumption like that.” She laughed.

  “Good. I don’t want my homicide officers falling down on the job. It’s important for you to keep on your toes at all times.”

  “Well, you keep us on our toes,” Margie agreed. “So if it wasn’t a beaver attack, then what was cause of death?” She started to think through other possible scenarios. A heart attack. Trip and fall. Drowning. Homicide.

  “I don’t have cause of death for you yet, detective. I have not yet started the dissection. But I can tell you that this man was not attacked and killed by a beaver.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  It was a long day. Margie went over the notes that she had taken, which were not very detailed since she had been working under the assumption that it was an accident and there wasn’t anything for her to do. She added as much as she could to them, trying to remember everything that had happened and everything she had observed from the time she had arrived at the bird sanctuary.

  The visitor’s center for the bird sanctuary was open, and the phone was answered fairly quickly. But Alexandra, the woman who answered, didn’t have much to offer.

  “This is not the kind of thing that usually happens around here,” she confessed. “Most of my phone calls are from people who want to know what time we open, or when the last sighting of a certain bird was, or if they can book the classroom for a school field trip. We don’t have… bodies.”

  “I know that,” Margie agreed. “And I’m sure this is all very strange for you. But we do need a few things from you. Whether you have video surveillance in the park or in the parking lot, any wildlife cams, whatever you can think of. I need to know if anything strange has happened the last few days or whether you have had any… dangerous interactions with wildlife occur. And I’ll need to know if you recognize the victim. I understand he liked to walk through the park. He may have been there pretty often. Daily.”

  “Whoa, whoa, slow down,” Alexandra protested. “I need to write all of this down. I’ll need to talk to the other staff members, and the board, and probably the city to see what we can and cannot release…”

  “This is a possible homicide investigation. You will be required to turn everything over.”

  “But don’t you need a warrant for that?”

  “If you insist on a warrant, we can get one. But it’s a lot easier if you agree to cooperate and hand over what you have.”

  “I’m not sure if I’m allowed to do that. I’ll need to get back to you.”

  “Fine,” Margie agreed, her teeth gritted. “I guess I’ll get the warrant process rolling.”

 

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