Running Cold: A Novel, page 19
“Bull elk.”
“Where’s Jarvis?” I asked.
The muscles in Stafford’s jaw tightened.
“Simon?” I braced myself for bad news, but nothing could have prepared me for what he said next.
“He didn’t make it, Monique.”
Tears erupted from my eye sockets as a sob exploded from my chest. I shook my head, trying to make it not true.
“He died on impact,” Stafford said. “There was nothing to be done.”
I knew it was unprofessional to cry in front of my recruit, but I couldn’t stop. Jarvis meant so much to so many people. He had a wife, kids, grandkids. This was far and away the worst thing to ever happen to the Banff police force, and it happened on my watch.
“Sorry,” I squeaked.
“Don’t apologize. I know how close you were to him.” He reached over and grabbed a box of tissues from the tray. I took a handful and pressed them to my face.
“Poor Marlene.” J. J.’s wife knew police work was dangerous, but her husband had served thirty years without incident. The news must have gutted her.
“Chief’s been to see her,” Stafford said, and I felt a rush of guilt. We should have gone together. I was the last one to see him alive. I didn’t blame myself—it was not my decision to venture out in the storm. But he was still my man and my friend and such a deeply good guy.
I wanted to know how I’d gotten here, who pulled me out of the wreckage. But there was something else I needed to know first.
“What about the suspect?”
Stafford pulled out his phone and showed me security cam footage of a body wrapped in what looked like aluminum foil being fireman carried into the hospital.
“Who’s that?”
“You.” I leaned in for a closer look. At first I didn’t know which one was me. Then I realized the answer to How did I get here? and What happened to the suspect? was one and the same.
“Oh my God. Did Julie Adler . . . ?”
“Save your life? Probably.” Then he upgraded his answer. “Yes.”
“Where is she now?”
“We don’t know.”
“So . . . what? She just dropped me off and left?”
He let the video run a little longer. I saw the nurse press the button to open the double doors to the emergency ward. I saw Adler, my apparent rescuer, walk through them and set me on a gurney, then walk right out the front door.
“Most of the cameras in town were out because of the blizzard,” Stafford said. “She could have gone anywhere.” Banff had a smattering of cameras—on buses, street corners, in front of ATMs and hotels. But the buses weren’t running. And most of the establishments in town didn’t have backup generators.
“What time did the power come back online?”
“Not until after seven this morning.”
“So she had all night to move around without detection.”
“Unfortunately, yes.”
My body ached, and my head was as heavy as a block of concrete. But I couldn’t stay in bed while a murder suspect was on the loose in my town.
“I have to get to work.”
I tried to push myself out of bed. Pain shot through my right arm.
“Careful,” Simon said, catching me as I nearly fell out of the bed. “I think your arm is broken.”
I looked down at my arm. It was splinted with an Ace bandage around it.
“You took a pretty bad tumble. I think you should stay put for a while, boss.”
Julie Adler saved my life, but she was still a killer. And I wanted her in custody.
“Go find her.”
CHAPTER 49
Izzy
I don’t know about the other girls, but I didn’t sleep a wink. We didn’t have to leave for the airport until ten thirty, but I still got up at the crack of dawn to pack. After the horrific events of the last twelve hours, immediately was not soon enough to, as they say, get outta Dodge.
The girls and I had gotten ready for bed in silence. I think we were in shock. It was inconceivable that Julie had murdered someone. She was our friend. Our brunch buddy. My emergency babysitter. Plus we were with her almost the entire day. Yes, she was grieving and under stress, but she could handle stress better than anyone I knew. So she didn’t want us to know she was working as a maid? That’s hardly a crime.
I took a shower, towel dried my hair, then got dressed in my “plane outfit”: sweatpants and a matching hoodie. I never understood people who got gussied up to fly. Airplanes are wall-to-wall germs. First thing I want to do when I get home is throw my clothes in the wash. Why on earth would anyone want to wear dry-clean-only on a plane?
I was slipping into my UGGs to go downstairs and grab coffee when—
Bam-bam-bam!
“RCMP!” An aggressive visitor pounded on the door. My heart sped up without a caffeine boost.
“One sec!” I called out, pulling on my other boot. Christa and Suki were dead to the world in their earplugs and eye masks, so I went over and shook them.
“Guys, the police are here. Get up!”
The dead bolt thunked. I hurried over to the opening door.
“Hey! We’re not decent in here!” I said, grabbing the door handle. And that’s when I saw him: Julie’s French Canadian boyfriend. Standing there holding the key to our room.
“What are you doing here?” I asked. My eyes floated down to the brass nameplate on his lapel. Why does he have a name tag on? And then it hit me. “Wait, do you work at the hotel?”
“I’m the manager,” he said, tucking his key back into his breast pocket.
Behind me, Christa and Suki were scrambling to get dressed. I stepped out into the hall and closed the door behind me.
“You can’t just come into somebody’s room,” I informed them. “What if we were naked?”
The skinny cop standing next to Julie’s dreamboat boyfriend pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket.
“We have a search warrant,” he said, holding it up for me to see. He had a nameplate pinned over his left pec too: Kyle Purdy.
“To look for what?” I asked. “Stolen minis of gin?”
“They’re looking for Julie,” Remy said. And everything about that confused me.
“What do you mean?” I turned to the cop. “You arrested her—she’s in jail.”
He looked at me blankly. So I looked at Remy. He raised an eyebrow.
“I’m going to have to take a quick look around, ma’am,” the officer said. What the cop was saying made no sense, but I could tell from the look in his eye that he wasn’t going away.
“My friends need to get dressed. Just . . . give us a minute.”
I didn’t have my key, so I signaled to Remy to unlock the door. He pressed his card to the keypad. Thunk!
“One minute,” I repeated, then went back inside. Christa was on the toilet and Suki was riffling through her suitcase looking for clean underwear.
“What the hell, Izzy?” Christa said, pulling up her pants.
“Guys, you’re not going to believe this,” I said, not sure I believed it myself. “But I think Julie escaped from jail.”
“What?!”
“They can’t find her.”
“Do they think she came here?” Suki asked.
“I don’t know. But they have a warrant to search our room.”
The girls threw on bras and T-shirts, and I let the policeman into the room. Remy stood in the doorway while the cop looked in the closet, the shower, under the beds, even out the window to see if Julie had jumped four stories into the snow.
“If she gets in touch with you, you need to let us know,” Officer Kyle Purdy said, handing me his business card.
“If she’s running, it’s because she’s innocent,” Suki interjected. Christa put a hand on her to stop her from saying anything more.
“If we hear from her, we’ll let you know,” Christa promised.
I nodded in agreement. None of us believed Julie was capable of murder. But turns out we didn’t know her as well as we thought.
CHAPTER 50
Julie
I left the hostel in my stolen ski pants with thirty-five dollars in my pocket. The sun was rising, but the temperature was dropping. I didn’t need to see the weather forecast to know a cold front was rolling in. I could feel it.
The streets were coming to life. People were digging out their cars, walking their dogs, loading their skis in their Thules. Here in a ski town, a day with fresh powder and sunshine was called a unicorn because of how rare and magical it was. The ski hill would be a zoo: the perfect place to hide in plain sight.
The bus stop was two blocks from the hostel. There were a half dozen snowboarders already waiting there, so I got in line behind them.
“Ah, shoot, I forgot my GoPro,” one said.
“You can take a run with mine,” another replied.
I tried not to think about the cameras. They would be everywhere, including on the bus. And no doubt the police had eyes on as many feeds as humanly possible.
The bus pulled up, and we all got on. I tightened my hood and tucked my chin inside my coat. There was barely room to stand. Normally, I’d be annoyed to have the sharp edges of someone’s skis pressing into my back. But I was grateful for the crowds today.
As the bus pulled out into traffic, I kept my gaze down and my ears open. The sound of boots thumping and ski pants crinkling brought me back to simpler days, when all I’d had to worry about was skiing fast and shooting straight. Training was intense, but I loved it. I never felt more like myself than when I was on the snow. I would never call following Jeff to California a mistake—I loved him and would be forever grateful for how deeply he loved me. But if losing him meant starting over, where would I go from here? My friendships with Izzy and the girls were complicated—even more so now. Over the years, Izzy had given me way more than she had taken. But her betrayal stung. And it was hard for me to imagine going back to California without Jeff.
The road to Norquay was a steep swirl of switchbacks. The road had been plowed, but it was still slow going. As the bus chugged and swayed, I went over what I knew.
Jeff had been working with Mackenzie since before we were married, so for over three years. He’d called the $3 million he got from Mac and his investor group “seed money.” That seed money was meant to be used to develop a prototype that demonstrated how his quantum dot technology worked. Once they had a prototype of the solar panel they were building, they would start shopping it to companies who could take the concept to market.
Jeff and Mackenzie had been practicing their sales pitch for months. Jeff was extremely stressed out. A multibillion-dollar energy company was on the verge of buying them, and Jeff was desperate to impress them. He and his lead electrochemist, a former MIT classmate named Fang Li, sometimes worked well into the night. Those late nights were not good for his health, or our marriage. But he promised it would soon be over. And I left him alone, misunderstanding the meaning of over.
My thoughts turned to the missing money. What had happened to it? If Jeff needed more, why didn’t Mackenzie pony up? Did Mac not know they had burned through their cash? Was Jeff afraid to tell him? Had he mismanaged it? Is that why he did what he did?
And how did Ceci tie in to this? Her death two short weeks after Jeff’s couldn’t be a coincidence, could it? And why was I a suspect? Had someone framed me? Who would do that?
There was a piece missing. And somehow, on the run from the RCMP, with a cold front rolling in and thirty-five dollars to my name, I would have to find it.
CHAPTER 51
Monique
I was stuck at the hospital waiting for the guy from orthopedics to set my broken arm, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t working.
The Telus store didn’t open until ten, so I used the landline in my room to make calls. The first one was to the Ventura County Sheriff’s Office to request the police report from Jeff Adler’s suicide. If that’s really what it was. If Julie Adler had killed once, it wasn’t far-fetched to think she’d played a role in her husband’s death too. If there was anything suspicious about that incident, I wanted to know.
“Can I ask why you’re requesting that report?” the deputy asked after I told her who I was.
“His wife is a suspect in a murder case here in Alberta,” I replied. And there was an incredulous pause.
“You don’t mean Julie?”
“Julie Weston Adler, yes,” I said.
“Julie wouldn’t hurt a fly. Did you know she volunteers at the animal shelter every other Saturday? And helps out the fire department from time to time. We have a very dedicated core of volunteer firefighters, and let me tell you, that woman can handle a hose. She puts those men to shame. Did you know fifty feet of fire hose can weigh up to nine hundred pounds?”
“I did not.”
“Julie and her husband, rest his soul, started an annual 5K road race to fight child hunger. The whole town comes out. We get food trucks from all over the county.”
“That does sound nice,” I said. “But I’d still like to see a copy of the report, if you don’t mind.”
I gave her the police department’s email, and she promised she’d get it to me “right quick.”
While I waited for the police report, I called Purdy to see how his search of the hotel was coming.
“The friends’ room was clear,” he said. “Do you want to detain the three of them for questioning? They’re scheduled to fly back to the States this afternoon.”
“No, they can go home. Just get their contact information in case we have questions.”
“Copy that.”
As I hung up the phone, Officer Stafford walked in with my laptop, a new cell phone to replace the one I’d lost in the accident, and a cup of coffee.
“Oh, God bless you, Stafford.”
“I have an update,” he said.
“Go ahead.”
“Teresa back at the station has been calling all the local hotels,” he said as he pulled up a chair. I had asked our secretary to call around and find out if anyone had tried to get a room while I’d been a frozen burrito awaiting unwrapping.
“And?” Given the weather, I figured there were only two varieties of people who might have checked in to a Banff-area hotel last night—a local with frozen pipes in search of a shower, and a suspect evading arrest.
“While she was doing that, she got an incoming call from the hostel in town. Apparently someone stole some long johns and a pair of ski pants from a locker.”
The hostel was a breeding ground for petty thieves. A missing pair of underwear was hardly cause for concern.
“I imagine that happens all the time,” I said.
“Yes, it does. But Teresa still asked them to check the registry of guests.” He had my interest now.
“And?” I brought the coffee to my lips with my good arm.
“Your name is on it.” I lowered the cup.
“My name?”
“Your driver’s license number too. Someone showed your ID to get a bunk.”
I put the cup down and swung my legs over the side of the bed.
“Hand me my jacket.”
Stafford passed me my coat. I patted down the pockets.
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“What?”
“She stole my wallet.”
“Bold.”
I pulled the coat on over the splint. “Help me get my boots on, would you?”
Stafford drove us the four blocks to the hostel on freshly plowed streets. My head was pounding, and my heart was shattered. I couldn’t breathe this air without thinking of J. J. As the pain of losing him rose up in my throat, I clamped my lips together and hoped Stafford would think the sheen in my eyes was because of the cold.
The snowbanks on Banff Avenue were six feet high. We couldn’t pull over, so we left the squad car in the middle of the road with the hazards on. Not ideal, but everyone was skiing anyway.
The bell on the front door jingled when I opened it, and I shook my head at the low-tech security. A dark-eyed girl with a tattooed neck looked up from the book she was reading as we approached the desk.
“Hello, Officers,” she said as she snapped her gum.
“Someone reported a theft?” Stafford asked. An armed response for a petty theft was probably a first, but the girl didn’t ask questions she knew we wouldn’t answer.
“She’s upstairs.”
“Can you take us?” I asked.
The tattooed girl got up from behind her plexiglass enclosure and started up the stairs. I followed her, and Stafford followed me.
“Mia, right?” the staffer said to a tall girl sitting on a bottom bunk. “Cops want to talk to you.”
“Is this about my stuff?” Her voice was hopeful, like she thought we were there to help her get it back.
“When did you notice your things were stolen?” I asked.
“About an hour ago, when I was getting dressed.”
Stafford made a note on his trusty pad.
“How long have you been staying here?” I asked.
“Five days, including today.”
Stafford’s eyes flicked up from his notebook. We both knew that just because Mia had noticed her pants and long underwear were gone this morning, it didn’t mean that’s when they’d been stolen.
“There was something weird, though,” Mia said.
“Go on.”
“Whoever took them left these.”
She held up a pair of red leather pants. That told us not only when her stuff had been stolen, but also who’d taken it.
CHAPTER 52
Julie
The sun was a fuzzy, yellow flare on the horizon as I exited the bus at the base of the ski hill. The cold front that had pushed the clouds away was plunging the temperature into the negative teens. It would likely get to –20°C by nightfall, even colder after that.
Despite the frigid temperatures, the resort was insanely crowded. The lines to get on the lifts fanned out in all directions. For someone who wanted to ski, it was a nightmare. For someone who wanted to disappear, it was ideal.
A ski resort is a terrible place to buy food. Everything is twice as expensive. But the last thing I’d eaten was a McDonald’s hamburger, and that was before I’d hauled 120 pounds of human cargo ten kilometers in a blizzard. So, as my fellow bus passengers hurried to get in the lift line, I veered off toward the lodge.
