Hazard of the Hills, page 7
Margie was glad that she would still be able to be a part of serving the warrant.
Knowing where Wyler’s phone had been and what had happened to it would be very helpful.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
As Margie had suspected, Evie Wyler had not posted anything on social media after retiring to bed the night of her death. No early-morning shots of the sun coming up or something of interest in the neighborhood.
So they ended up at the house in Wildwood again on Sunday morning. They might even wake Vance up. He said that he usually got up around eight, so he might be up already or still be in bed. It probably depended more upon what little Ada wanted than on Vance’s preferred schedule.
He came to the door in boxer shorts and a house coat, wrapping the housecoat around him and tying it up when he saw who it was. “Officers. Is there something I can do to help?”
Jones held the warrant up. “We have a warrant for your phone, sir. With the unlock code. And any electronics that belonged to your wife.”
He stared at her. “What?”
“We would like to see your phone, please.”
“Well…” he patted at the robe pockets and came out with his phone, but didn’t immediately hand it over. “I need this, though. I can’t just give it to you.”
“It’s evidence. You are ordered to hand it over.”
He shook his head in disbelief. “You really don’t know… you can’t understand. I need it for my business. For everything. My life is on that phone.”
“And if you dropped it in the toilet, you would find a way to replace it,” Jones said unsympathetically. “We are investigating the death of your partner. One would think that you would want to help out with that.”
“Of course I do. But I don’t see what this could have to do with anything.”
Jones put out her hand, and Vance handed it over, looking sick.
“Thank you, sir. Can you tell me whether you have any location sharing apps on the phone?”
“What? Location sharing? I don’t think so.”
“The ability to see where Evie was. Where her phone was. Is.”
He stared at her, blinking, trying to process her words. “No, I don’t think so.”
Jones looked down at the phone. “Are you both on the same account? Your phone service providers?”
“Yeah. She got onto a good plan, so I switched over to it a year or two ago.”
“You’re on a household plan?”
“Maybe. I guess so.”
“I need both of your phone numbers and your logins for your phone provider and the cloud services you use. And Evie’s email address account info.”
“I have her address, but I don’t know her login. Her password.”
“Why don’t you write all of the information you know down for us,” Jones suggested. “The sooner we have everything we need, the sooner you’ll be able to get your phone back.”
But Margie suspected he would never get the phone back. If Wyler’s death was found not to be accidental, they would need it as evidence. She was starting to be swayed to Siever’s thinking. Why would Wyler go out for a walk in the early morning and just walk off the edge of the hill? Drugs or alcohol? Sleepwalking? Suicide? Just tripping or stepping over the edge seemed less and less likely the more she thought about it.
It was another hour before they had all of the information they thought they needed from Vance. It was probably more than they would use, but they didn’t want to have to keep going back to him multiple times and wanted the ability to be able to get into whatever of his or Wyler’s accounts they could. Something in there might tell the story about what had happened to Evie Wyler.
As soon as they returned to the office, Siever was there, waiting to take the phone and see what secrets he could find.
“We should be passing it directly on to the tech unit,” Jones said. “What if there is sensitive information on there that could be destroyed by us accessing it?”
“You got his unlock codes, right?”
Margie and Jones nodded.
“Then I’m not going to destroy anything. Just have a little look around. If I come across something I can’t open or something that we need recovered, I’ll send it over to IT recovery.”
Despite her suggestion, Jones seemed to be perfectly comfortable in having Siever look at the phone. She handed it over to him without further argument. Siever cradled it in his hands like it was a small, injured animal. “Give me a few minutes and I’ll figure it out.”
Margie figured that a few minutes would turn into a few hours. Computer jobs always took significantly longer than she figured they would to get done what she wanted. And everybody she had dealt with on technical issues had been the same way. “Just one minute…” quickly turned into a few hours or a few days.
But Siever had some preliminary results in less than an hour.
The bullpen was quiet; it was just the three of them there on a Sunday morning. Siever hustled them into the boardroom and pointed the remote at the big screen at one end of the room. Turning it on, he quickly worked to get a few reference slides up on the screen.
“I have a few coordinates for you,” he announced, looking at the screen rather than his coworkers’ faces. “From the night before.”
The dot on the map on the big screen showed the location of Evie Wyler’s Wildwood home. She nodded. Just where they expected her to be.
“The phone is on the move just before six in the morning. Wyler is out of her house and walking down the street.”
A couple of slides to show the dot getting farther away from her home.
“Between six-thirty and seven, she is hanging around a single location.”
Margie wasn’t good at visualizing maps when looking at the real world and, conversely, had trouble translating a flat map into the actual buildings and roads around her. Satellite imagery helped, but was still not enough to be able to fully translate between the 3D world and the 2D world.
But the big green blob on the map had to be Edworthy park, and that particular shape, the hill that they had stood at the bottom of, looking up.
“So she went there on her own, but then waited.” Margie took a swig of her cold coffee. “So now we know for sure. She was meeting someone.”
“I haven’t gone through all of her previous activity,” Siever warned. “It could be that she goes and sits there with a coffee and a journal each morning. Or something good to read. Or just her phone.”
“Okay… it appears that she was there waiting for someone.”
Siever nodded, happier with this statement. “Shortly after seven…” He changed the slide. The dot was farther inside the park. After the fall.
“So it is still out there,” Margie observed. “Is this map accurate enough that we can use it to find the phone now?”
“It would be,” Siever said, flipping to another slide. “If it were still there.”
Margie stared at the map without any dots on it. “Wait, what?”
“Someone removed it from the scene”
“Maybe it just ran out of juice,” Jones suggested.
Siever shrugged. “It’s possible… but I don’t think so.” He flipped through a number of screenshots. “It disappeared within a few hours. Most people don’t want their phones dying halfway through the day. They charge them during the night so that they are fully charged and ready to go before work in the morning. But Wyler’s phone dies far too early for that.” He left up the last screenshot before the phone disappeared off of the map.
Margie checked the time stamp. “That’s right after we released the scene.”
Siever nodded. “That’s what I figured too.”
And if it wasn’t coincidence that it had disappeared right after they released the scene, then what?
Then someone had picked it up and shut it off or destroyed it.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“Who saw it and removed it from the scene?” Jones asked.
They all looked at each other, thinking back to the scene that day and trying to figure it out.
“The first scenario is that it was just picked up by someone random. People find dropped and lost cellphones all the time,” Siever contributed.
“Right. They might have turned it in or advertised it somewhere but, since no one has identified it as Wyler’s phone, no one has claimed it,” Jones agreed.
“But right after we released the scene?” Margie asked. “And it was turned off, not transported somewhere else.”
“Yeah. That’s weird.”
“It could have been damaged in the fall,” Siever said. “And it just didn’t die immediately. If it was wet or the battery damaged, it might have taken a few hours to short out.”
“That makes sense.” Jones nodded. “And if so… we should still be able to find it at the location on the map.”
He nodded. “Possibly. And the other possibility is… someone was looking for it, or knew where it was, and was just waiting until we released the scene so that they could get their hands on it.”
Margie had a knot in her stomach. Was that possible? Had they been working under the eye of a murderer, just waiting for the chance to wipe out any clues of his presence?
Margie rubbed the bridge of her nose. She was starting to get a headache. She really did not like where the investigation was going. It had seemed so obvious that it was an accident. To have everything turned around now…
She could accept that one of the other possibilities was more likely. She liked the idea that it might have been damaged in the fall and had survived Wyler by a few hours. Then it could still be an accident. They could go back to the park and referring to the phone’s last known location, find the broken phone.
Or maybe not, if the parks service or someone else had already picked up the broken phone and tossed it in the garbage.
“Do we have pictures of the bystanders?” she asked Jones
“They might appear in a couple, but no… we were taking pictures behind the screens. We did some wider scene shots for perspective, but we didn’t intentionally take pictures of all the bystanders. Most of them arrived there quite some time after the body was discovered. They were just attracted by all the activity and wanted to know what was going on.”
“Most of them, probably. But people do return to the scene of the crime. They want to make sure that everything is unfolding the way they expected, that nobody suspects them, or that they’re getting the kind of attention they wanted to. If Wyler was pushed, it’s possible that the killer attended at the scene later to see how things were playing out. And it’s possible that he could have seen her cell phone and removed it later.” Margie shook her head. “It really seems like a long shot. How would he see the phone when we didn’t? We didn’t see it when we were looking for evidence at the scene, and we didn’t find it when we went back with the drones.”
“The drones,” Jones repeated.
“The phone wasn’t there anymore when we took the drones,” Siever reminded them. “It was removed on Friday.”
“But there was a drone. There was the drone that one guy was using at the scene. Gagnon was trying to get rid of him.” Jones looked at Margie. “And you got him to go. Did you get his name?”
“Yeah. I wrote down all his information.” Margie opened her notebook and flipped back, looking for the details. “I wanted to put a scare into him. Make him fly straight.” She chuckled at her inadvertent pun. “Make him fly straight and respect the law in the future. Here it is. Howard Ross. And I’ve got his address, driver’s license, and birth date.”
Jones grinned. “Color me impressed. I’ll reach out to him. See whether we can get him to send us a copy of the pictures.”
“I’ll see whether I can plot the last location of the phone against the scene photos that we have,” Siever offered. “In good conditions, we should be able to plot it within five to ten feet.”
“Sounds great.” Margie had an impulse to offer to do something that would help them to clear the case as well, but there wasn’t much else she could do at the moment. It was Sunday and she should be home with her daughter, not hanging around the office any longer than she was required to be. “I think I’ll head home, if no one has any objections.”
She gave them all the chance, but no one spoke up. Margie nodded. “See you tomorrow, then. I’m looking forward to the morning briefing.”
“See you,” Jones agreed. “Maybe we’ll have it solved by then.”
It had been a cooler day and Stella had more energy than she had had in the recent heat. She jumped up when she heard Margie at the door and pranced around her as she walked in. Margie was happy to see her having fun. Too many days recently, Stella had just wanted to lie on the floor, panting, too hot to show any excitement.
“Hi, Mom!” Christina called out from her bedroom in the back of the house. Margie went to the doorway and looked in on her. Christina was stretched out on her bed, phone in one hand, tapping her tablet on the pillow with her other hand. Margie smiled.
“What are you up to?”
“Looking at the pictures of the fire last night. Some of my friends posted or forwarded videos of the flames and the firetrucks.”
“What fire?” Margie’s mind went immediately to the BC forest fires. But there was no way they had reached Calgary. Especially not the far side of Calgary. They couldn’t exactly jump over the entire city to land on the other side.
“There was a fire on the train tracks night before last. Sparked by one of the train wheels, probably.”
“Where, exactly?”
Christina motioned to the south. “Erin Woods. Just over there.”
Margie knew where Erin Woods was. A little community a fleeing murder suspect had ended up in one day the previous year. Margie’s skin prickled with goosebumps and she had a chill, remembering.
Not her best day. But they had caught him. And they would catch Wyler’s killer too, if someone had caused her death.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Howard Ross had, perhaps unsurprisingly, provided copies of his drone footage to the police when requested, so they hadn’t had to chase down a warrant. Margie suspected that Jones might have had something to say about confiscating his drone so that they could get the pictures off of it themselves and to make sure that he hadn’t tried to delete any evidence. He wasn’t likely to want to give up his bird. Who knew when they would give it back, if ever?
Siever had already gone to work sorting out geotags so that the pictures could be arranged by the area they were taken in, giving them the ability to pinpoint the area that Wyler’s phone had been in at the time of her death.
Margie and Jones sat at their desks, looking at the photos on their own computers. Margie started with the pictures that were closest to the phone. Not as helpful as it might have seemed, since all that gave her was a big tree with lots of leaves and branches. The leaves were too thick to see through, so that if the phone were in the tree branches or on the ground beneath it, she couldn’t see it. She started moving outward from the tree, looking for anything else that might be helpful.
Maybe the phone had been stolen by some bird that liked shiny things. Though Margie thought that a phone would be too big and awkward for a bird to carry. Some of the ravens up north might snatch it, but most of the birds she had seen around Calgary were small and would not be able to lift something like that.
She widened the perimeter so that she should see the privacy screens, and then over them into the accident scene, including Wyler’s body. She shook her head in irritation at Ross for using his toy to trespass on the scene and to scope out the dead body. There was really no excuse for that.
She remembered Siever using the grappling hook on his drone to retrieve the purse that had become lodged in the branches of the tree. What if Ross had used the same trick to retrieve a phone from the big tree? Once they had cleared the scene, he was free to go back there, and people wouldn’t think there was anything strange about his flying a drone around the park once more. He was probably there often and would be invisible to the regular park users.
But why? Was he somehow connected with Wyler? Or had he just been interested in retrieving what was lodged in the branches of the tree for sport? Or out of macabre interest? Did he now own the phone of a dead woman? And if there were any evidence on it, how were they going to prove that he had it, unless he turned it over voluntarily?
There wasn’t anything enlightening in the photographs of Wyler’s body. She looked it over carefully, remembering everything in as much detail as possible. Was there anything out of place? Anything they had missed? Evidence on the body or nearby? Some small detail that would make a difference to the investigation?
Margie moved on to the photos taken on the other side of the tree. Not toward Wyler’s body, but the interested onlookers, craning their necks for a view of a dead body. Who wouldn’t be excited to go home at the end of the day and tell their loved ones around the dinner table that they had seen a dead body in the park that morning? Or to post it on their social media and get all kinds of views and responses?
Some of the faces were easier to see than others. Ball caps and cowboy hats used to shade the spectators from the sun also shielded their faces from the drone. Most of the time it was too high to get a good, identifiable view. She studied each of the people who were watching the scene. Was one of them a killer? Someone who had shown up not just by accident but because he wanted to view the aftermath, and to make sure that no one had seen or suspected him?
“Detective Jones?”
Jones turned away from her monitor to look at Margie. “Find something?”
“No. Maybe.”
Jones got up and looked over Margie’s shoulder for a better view. “Okay, what are you looking at?”
“You see how everyone is looking in the same direction?”
“Mostly, yes,” Jones agreed, nodding.
