Batshit Crazy On Murder Island E-Book

Kenna McKinnon

• Herausgeber: Next Chapter
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

What happens when a gang of vicious drug dealers hit the sleepy Canadian town of Serendipity?

After waking up to the sound of gunshots, Annie rushes over to Ben ‘The Butcher’ Rough's meat shop, only to find out the man has been shot and killed. Digging deeper, she discovers disturbing connection with the now-deceased butcher and the Canadian criminal underworld.

Struggling with schizophrenia, Annie attempts to pieces together the clues. Together with her partner, RCMP Detective Mark Snow, can they find the perpetrators and bring them to justice?

A suspenseful, fast-paced mystery, Batshit Crazy On Murder Island is the second book in Kenna McKinnon's Annie Hansen Mysteries series.

Leseprobe

BATSHIT CRAZY ON MURDER ISLAND

ANNIE HANSEN MYSTERIES BOOK 2

KENNA MCKINNON

CONTENTS

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Acknowledgments

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About the Author

Copyright (C) 2021 Kenna McKinnon

Layout design and Copyright (C) 2021 by Next Chapter

Published 2021 by Next Chapter

Cover art by CoverMint

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the author’s permission.

1

Ben the Butcher’s life ended in a cacophony of bullets. From the Albert-01R handgun, an enhanced missile crashed to spiral past the line of swinging pig carcasses into the back of the Butcher’s head. His brain exploded. More projectiles followed, rendering the brawny man’s crown a bloody piece of meat. The basement room reeked of old bleach and fresh blood. Meat muscle slammed to the floor.

“Bull’s Eye!” shouted the murderer, called the Bloodhound. “Pig’s Eye, I should say. This ain’t called the Butcher’s Den for nothing,” continued the hitman, extracting white sacks of cocaine from the pigs’ innards after he holstered the smoking Albert. The bags were sewn into the carcasses. He ripped them apart with a ten-inch knife.

“Anybody come between the boss and the coke trade is found here or in East Van with bullet holes in their skulls. Now to look up the rest of the Butcher’s men and see if they need persuading to work with us. It weren’t easy to trace him, but this is Big City junk with small-town dealers. He didn’t count on an early morning raid or the Bloodhound’s patience.”

The hitman passed the bags to the three figures shadowed behind him in the basement room of the meat shop. “When we find the paperwork, we’ll know when the next shipment is due from Miami and on what flight path. Give me his tablet. He had quite a sweet business here as the middleman between Nanaimo and the coast.”

The shadowy figures toted the sacks up the stairs through the back door of the butcher shop, and into a waiting black van. The van had mirrored windows and a local license plate recently installed.

“His men ought to be close by. Maybe it’s too early for the bodyguards– good luck for us,” said one of the thugs. “He wasn’t expecting trouble. Piece of cake.”

“Yeah,” the Bloodhound said, backing away toward the stairs. “Let’s go. You drive. I’ll keep a lookout in the back of the van. Someone’s sure to have heard the shots.”

In the parking lot, the men heaved the last of the cocaine into the van.

“Those two lazy cops in the station won’t be on duty yet,” said one, picking at his ear.

The hitman chortled. “No, but the detective’s still here and that crazy female private eye, too. Remember the doctor and crooked mayor two years ago? She solved those crimes when nobody else could. It was on the national news at the time. Her partner is a detective in the RCMP. He’s part of their major crimes unit and specializes in homicides. Our East Van cartel knows about the– er– challenges here. Shall we say? Somebody big in East Van has their eye on us, let’s say.”

“You got contacts all around, boss. Good,” the other thug said.

“Of course. In high places. Not the bruiser Ed Adonis in East Van but above him.” The hitman sniggered. “Serendipity is a hellhole now. Ed will be popped soon, too, along with us if we don’t deliver.”

“Piece of pie, boss.”

Over the Courthouse to the north swung the last white silver of moon. The Butcher’s Den was closed and almost dark. One basement light remained that signaled to any curious onlooker that the Butcher was cutting up and packaging today’s meat, as was his custom from Tuesday to Saturday. Not until the first customer rang the bell would the grisly discovery be made. Perhaps not then. The Butcher’s hours were erratic.

The black van belched oil and blasted down the dirt road toward the First Nations reserve near Modge Bay, but didn’t stop there.

“Wonder when they’ll find out there won’t be steaks from the Butcher for the barbecue tonight?” the hitman said with a chortle.

“Boss,” the driver said as dirt billowed from the churning tires, “do we know the schedule the Butcher left? Ed the Bruiser wanted it.”

“Yah. Took a look at his tablet while you were loading the merch. Everything’s on there. Adonis will be happy with us.”

“A course. Cup of soup for you, boss. This went smooth as goose shit on a hardwood floor.”

“There’s a shipment next week on a private plane that lands on Vancouver Island, coming here on the ferry from Campbell River. It’s in bags labeled, coarse Kosher salt,” the hitman replied.

“He was taking a chance.”

“Sometimes it IS coarse Kosher salt,” said the Bloodhound. “Though the Butcher was a careless man.”

The other man slammed on the brakes in front of the ferry dock. “Obviously that worked against him.”

The Bloodhound laughed and spittle flew from his rough lips. “I’d say so.” He removed the Albert from its holster and wiped it clean of prints. “What Butcher-boy?”

The four men climbed out of the van and slammed the doors. The hitman consulted his mobile.

“The jetboat meets us here in five minutes. You two hike back to our warehouse in the bush to scout out the Butcher’s boys the rest of the day, and the two of us will pack the dust into the boat when it gets here. There’s a car you can use hidden in the warehouse. You’ll like it. Only used a few times but enough so the townsfolk know it as belonging to local dudes. I’ll take the van on the ferry after we load the snow on the boat. This has been slick, dudes, and I thank you for your help.”

A tall, lean thug nodded. “Yeah, boss. No problem.”

They shook hands and parted. The hitman and his companion slouched in the front of the van and waited. The ferry would be there in a couple of hours, and they would be on it after the powder was on the jetboat headed for East Van.

Ammo enhanced with chemicals slammed into the black vehicle as the jetboat docked in a swirl of foam. Something exploded. A flamethrower ignited the vegetation. The Bloodhound cranked the engine to life and turned the wheel to escape but his blood erupted from a blasted artery in his temple. He was dead before his torso slumped across the dash.

The van crashed into a Douglas fir. The tree splayed the metal like a surgeon’s hands would open a heart. Running for their miserable lives, the other two thugs crashed lifelessly into the undergrowth in a torrent of bullets.

Shadowy figures scooped the bags of cocaine into a waiting red truck. The incoming jetboat reached the Cove and partially exploded in a fiery broadside. The pilot tore it away from the dock and zig-zagged out to sea, streaming smoke, oil, and curses.

Perhaps because the town still slumbered in darkness, no one responded to the bedlam and screams of the dying criminals. Annie Hansen and her partner Detective Mark Snow slept in their little white house near the Cove. Her father, who returned to Canada alone from his dalliance with the buxom Dutch woman from Curaçao, drank his first whiskey of the day in Annie’s float house.

“Hmmm,” her father, Albin Hansen, mused. “Gunshots.” He frowned and tipped the glass to his lips. “Nobody’s safe no more.” He turned up the volume on the television set and settled back to watch Global News.

Out in the Salish Sea, heading toward the Gulf Islands and the mainland, the jetboat swerved, leaving a crimson trail of blood in the foam behind it. There was no cocaine on board. The driver and his companion thought they were lucky to escape with their lives, let alone the drugs. They left behind a murder scene that would lead to Florida and beyond.

2

Annie was startled from a dream of witching fairies and satyrs. The nightmare caused a bothersome premonition. She slipped an arm over the sleeping form of her lover. She had never been a morning person, but something awakened her early – a sound of gunfire and the blat of a jetboat taking off from the Cove, a quarter of a mile away.

Their recently adopted golden retriever, Chuckles, moved his muzzle from his crossed paws of soft fur. He woofed and leapt from the bed. Annie smiled and leaned over to pet his darling head. Not since her mother’s cat, Tigger, had she felt such love for a helpless fellow creature. Chuckles depended on them. She smiled then remembered the sound that had awakened her. Chuckles whined and gazed up at her with soft brown eyes.

She touched Mark’s muscular shoulder and addressed Chuckles, their newest family member. “There’s something out there, boy, isn’t there?”

“Whazzup?” murmured the lean, tanned man beside Annie. He threw the duvet from his defined torso and poked a leg over the side of the bed. “Your friends Pepsi and Samir at the door again from the mainland? Haven’t they got enough of you, their blood sister? Or is it your father, drunk at this time of the morning and wanting bacon and eggs?”

Annie rubbed her eyes and yawned. “Neither one.” Her size ten feet hit the floor in a hulk stomp.

“What then?”

She pulled her designer jeans over her pajama bottoms. “I heard something. Chuckles heard it, too. It was loud and close. Didn’t you?”

“I thought I was dreaming,” Mark answered. He stood by the open window, dawn streaming at an angle onto the monstera deliciosa plant in the corner.

He was magnificent, Annie thought, and her stomach churned at the sight of her naked lover with sunlight falling over his light brown chest hairs and thighs like oaks.

“So quiet here since O’Halloran became mayor,” Mark said. “He keeps a tight watch on the crime in our little town. A tight watch or else he’s into it, too.”

He got up and pulled on boxer shorts, khakis, and a light blue shirt. He then slipped into brown sandals.

“It’s too quiet,” Annie agreed and shrugged on a navy tee shirt embroidered with ‘Lewiston, Michigan’ and a stylized lake. “We should of known it wouldn’t last. I heard gunshots and I’m sure a boat at the pier took off early this morning. Dammit, the dog didn’t wake us, Mark, and we’re halfway responsible for law and order. Let’s go.” She grabbed his revolver and holster and threw them at him. Before bolting for the door, she pulled on the rest of her clothes. Mark followed. “Don’t let the dog out.”

Too late. The golden retriever bounded across their front yard by the yellow hibiscus and lifted a leg.

Constable Tom strode up the dirt path from the Bay. “Annie,” he called.

As the young woman ran, she wiped a hand across her face. Where is the Sarge?

“I heard a noise from Modge Bay,” she called. “Sounded like a crash. Gunshots, too. Mark didn’t hear it. Some sleuth he is.”

Mark was close behind her. He shouldered his gun.

Annie’s legs pumped along the path. “The sun wasn’t up yet. This happened about half an hour ago, I figure. Damn me for not rousing us sooner. They got away in a powerboat. That’s how it sounded. I heard a jet engine.” The schizophrenia, mostly controlled by coping skills and medication, was present as she turned to peer at the pink rhinos preceding them up the path. She sidestepped one and continued after the Constable and Detective Mark.

“There’s a black van with fake Island license plates wrapped around a Douglas fir a few yards from the Cove,” Tom said. “And debris in the water from a jetboat spewing oil in its wake. The suspects in the boat must have used it to make a getaway after blasting the occupants of the van. All four of those thugs are dead. Our funeral home hasn’t been so busy since the last Mayor got popped.”

“I remember.” Annie sidestepped a flaming bush in the middle of the path. “Don’t mind me, Tom, I’m a little cray-cray this morning. Thought my delusions was what the noise was, truth to tell, or I’d have been there right away. And the dog and Mark were sleeping like dead logs. Useless man and his faithful companion. They did get up from their gaseous beds when I called.”

The constable nodded. “Thought you should of heard it. Sarge’s cordoned off the crime scene and asked for Mark. We’re collecting bits and pieces in an official container as evidence. A bag of cocaine was split open and left, and snow is scattered around what’s left of the black van. Our department in Victoria is on it. They asked if they should send a couple Mounties, but we don’t need the feds, do we? Not with you and Mark here. And Mark’s tied to the West Shore detachment of the Mounties and the mainland, too.”

“This sounds like the dope’s going to Vancouver – might be a good idea to check it out with the detachment there,” Mark said. He loped past Annie on the narrow path. “Last time we had a murder in Serendipity the feds and media got involved. Let’s try to keep this quiet until at least we know what happened.”

Constable Tom quickened his already rapid steps. Annie spread her arms wide to the quiescent sun and the pink and red cloud cover in the east over the ocean which they were approaching. She heard Hawaiian music. The sun split in half and two suns rose, one violet and one yellow.

Beautiful, she thought. I wish Mark could see this.

Mark continued ahead, oblivious to but not surprised by his lover’s hallucinations. Schizophrenia can be a beautiful thing, he thought. But also challenging, and he would rather not have encountered it in his sweetheart Annie, who nevertheless fought the good fight.

She chuckled behind him and he knew the sunrise was exploding in beauty for her. Sometimes the visions were good. Sometimes horrific. Sometimes she saw and heard things that were inexplicable and horrible to him. It was a good thing he loved her like he did— nothing made a difference to their lives together. But their shared history helped them both accept the grisly details of what they were about to encounter.

Constable Tom stopped near the dock. He gestured to a pile of molten metal and fiberglass a few yards away. A twisted engine was tilted against a Douglas fir. Pieces of a black van were scattered across a section of mud and burned grass. A bag spilled white powder onto the smoldering earth. Crimson fingers of blood churned with black oil on the ocean.

Mark put a finger on the side of his nose and sniffed at the white powder. He tasted it. “Cocaine,” he said. “This is bad. Meth dealers are happy dudes. Cocaine? Bad international dudes. I think we should ask for help.”

Constable Tom nodded. Volunteers commissioned as deputies and the Sergeant marked the evidence behind the yellow crime scene tape. Under the Sergeant’s instruction, the deputies covered the bodies with tarps and waited for the coroner to arrive from Vancouver Island. After a series of photos by the Constable, the local auto wreckers backed up to the van and hoisted the engine and remains of the mangled fiberglass and steel body. Smoke and dust marked the spot. Mark made notes and spoke with the Mayor’s aide, who had been summoned by Sarge. Mayor O’Halloran and his assistant were absent.

Unicorns frolicked in the woods beside Annie. She smiled and waved at them, not knowing if they were real, as her hallucinations drew her more fully into themselves.

One of the reasons she hadn’t been given a gun, thought the Sergeant while observing his most trusted crime buster, the lovely frizzy Annie.

She shook her head and grimaced. “I’m all right.”

“Your meds are overrated,” Mark said as he caught Annie’s embarrassed glance.

Her mythical animals disappeared with a rushing sound like Wendigo through the poplars. Maybe it was wind, she thought, watching the rainbow rumps disappear into wisps of fog. Shite. Time to see the psych on Vancouver Island again. If time permitted. No time to be crazy, she thought. One, two, three, she counted the gulls as they swooped overhead. Four, five, six, pick-up sticks; her mother’s OCD genes kicked in big time. Annie muttered under her breath and made fists, tucking her thumbs under. Seven, eight, lay them straight…Damn.

“Go to hell,” she responded to Mark and picked up a blackened piece of metal. “A gun,” she said. “It was illegal by the looks of the enhancement. What happened last night, I wonder? Or early this morning. And why? Looks like the van was running from something or someone. Or maybe to meet someone?”

“A drug deal gone bad,” declared the Sergeant.

Constable Tom nodded.

The Sergeant glowered at the tall, lean Mark. The SOB was so good-looking and popular with the women, he thought. The Sergeant knew his corpulence and personality didn’t give him a chance with the lovely Annie, especially since the young Detective Mark had arrived on the island two years ago and never left. A pity. That is one large, luscious woman, that Annie. The policeman snapped back to reality as Annie had done moments before. He was embarrassed. Fat and ugly as he was, and slow, no woman would want him, he reasoned.

He scratched his belly with a pencil and thought hard. There was something fishy about this case. What would suspects from the mainland or Vancouver Island or the Gulf Islands, maybe, want with his little town, and how much coke did they load on the jetboat before it got away and where did they get it? Something didn’t add up. Since Doc Hubert had died in a horrible way, the methadone and heroin traffic had slowed. The Doc was a fancy drug pusher. Everyone knew that. Meth especially. All the town addicts got their fix there when they couldn’t afford the real thing.

To be replaced by coke? He left the rotten underbelly of crime to the experts. The Sergeant was happy as long as his town remained quiet and polite and drew in the tourist trade for the money that filled the Council coffers. Everyone knew something underhanded was going on, but the Sergeant thought, Let sleeping pigs lie.

Chuckles sniffed around the rubbish and the smoking van. His withers trembled. He seemed eager to solve the case. My police dog, thought Mark. He’ll help us; good choice. Annie had wanted to adopt a Shih Tzu at the rescue center. Mark chose between the little black and white companion or the golden Chuckles they named for his good nature. Together they made a happy family, he thought, and good work partners. Chuckles would be very useful as a police dog, though certainly a lover, not a fighter.

The dog’s nose is very different from ours. Dogs have up to 300 million smell receptors in their noses, compared to about six million in humans. And the part of a dog's brain that analyzes scents is about forty times greater than ours. That could be crucial to solving a case. Or, for the placid retriever, maybe not.

The Sergeant glanced at Mark and his beautiful female partner. He’d need their help. The pair had proven themselves before.

The Sergeant’s mobile rang from the 911 number. When he answered, a woman screamed, “The Butcher’s been shot! Come quick!”

The Sergeant knew, as did every half-bright individual in Serendipity, hints of the Butcher’s real business in town. Sounded like it had caught up to the big fellow, probably hanging on a hook now with his pigs.

He sprang to the cop car and twisted a knob. Blue and red lights revolved, and the siren screamed.

“Let’s bring our bikes,” Mark said. “Give us a ride to the house, Sarge.”

Once there, they bounded to the shed in the backyard and onto their motorcycles. Chuckles panted alongside them, leaped into Mark’s sidecar, and they were off to the Stanley Cup, as Annie’s mother often said.

The town (formerly a hamlet) of Serendipity on the small island of Serendipity had been quiet for more than two years now after she and Mark solved the murders of the former mayor and unpopular physician Doc Hubert. Her life was changed by the handsome Mark Snow in her arms, and her father’s unexpected reappearance. She let her errant father stay in the float house which her mother had bequeathed her. She and Mark lived together since they found themselves in one another’s arms after the serial murders were solved. Like elegant dancers on a waxed floor, enchanted fairies in a moonlit forest, waiting for excitement, waiting for adventure like that which had knit them together. Stardust and mentally aberrant visions sprinkled Annie’s brilliant but eccentric schizophrenic mind. Mark remained a beacon of sanity for her.

Like a thunderbolt, the murders crashed upon their little town. The murders destroyed serenity, destroyed their island’s restored reputation, destroyed the secure illusions of its citizens. Scorching their spirits, the crimes flamed away any semblance of normalcy. They were a couple again with a purpose living on what the press two years ago called, ‘Murder Island.’

3

As Annie and Mark, Chuckles, the Sergeant, and Constable Tom clambered down the stairs to the Butcher’s back room, the scent of rancid blood assaulted them. The stench wasn’t from hanging meat or smoked hams and bacon, it was metallic and dark, congealed in a mess under the body and from holes in the back of the Butcher’s head as he sprawled face down on the bare planks.

A head wound bleeds profusely, Annie remembered and paused to vomit in a pail containing water and rags. Chuckles whined and pressed his soft body against hers. Mark held her shoulders until she stopped shaking.

“I can only guess why this happened,” the Sergeant said. He prodded the cavity of a pork carcass. “Cocaine.”

Bags wrapped with twine were hidden in the swinging meat. A trail of white powder led outside. They could see the back entrance from the bottom of the steps but had missed it coming through the front door.

“They must have acted quickly,” Mark said. “They were interrupted.”

“Or feared interruption. One, two, three, four, five pigs,” Annie muttered. “Yes, though it had a silencer, the handgun would have made noise, and the Butcher’s customers get to the front counter early. Someone would’ve gone looking for him to see why he wasn’t there. One thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three seconds…”

“Will you cut that out?” said Mark. “We have to think.”

A speckled snake uncoiled from the pail in front of her, unraveling from the pile of rags, water, and vomit.

Is it real?You’re no good, the voices whispered. You can’t figure this out. Mayor Spacey’s death was a fluke you almost missed. Doc Hubert’s death was something so obvious that an incompetent like you could figure it out.

“This is over our heads.” Annie shuffled her feet to a better advantage under the window above, which allowed enough light to illuminate the back of the Butcher’s mangled head.

“One bullet couldn’t do all that.” The Sergeant phoned for a hearse or ambulance, yellow tape, and markers. “Is there a coroner in town?”

“I think so,” Mark replied. “Ask the aides at Town Hall. And tell Mayor O’Halloran’s office to put a news blackout on the island and what’s going on here. It’s like a big city crime scene. The Butcher was hiding the drugs in the carcasses and then his henchmen must have brought them to the mainland on jetboats, or maybe bribed the ferry captain. The drugs would’ve been flown to Vancouver Island then loaded on the fast-boats here for processing. That’s why we had the colorful crafts around so often. It wasn’t entertainment. It was big business.”

“You’re sure about that?” asked Constable Tom, gagging at the sight of clotted blood.

Chuckles hunched on the sidelines by Annie’s side and whined. Annie patted his soft golden head. This is no police dog, she thought, and smiled at the trembling feathery canine that tried to hide behind her.

“You need protecting, don’t you, bud?” she asked. He looked up with gentle brown eyes and whined. “Yes. Let’s get out of here, Mark.”

Mark put a tissue to his mouth. “I’ve seen drugs before on the job in Victoria and the mainland,” he said. “Never thought we’d run into a cocaine smuggling ring in our town. But we never thought Serendipity would harbor a serial killer, either.”

“Anything’s possible,” said the Sergeant. He placed a protective, beefy hand on Annie’s shoulder. “Are you all right, Annie?”

She shrugged him off.

The Sergeant removed his hand. He closed his flip phone with a snap. “Coroner’s on his way.” He sighed. “With an ambulance that’ll double as a hearse. We’ll need two or three strong fellows to lift the Butcher into a body bag after the evidence is secured.” He gestured to Tom and Mark.

Annie spread her feet wide and flexed her arms. “I can help,” she said.

The speckled snake morphed back into a pile of rags, water, and vomit and disappeared. She smirked. Mark eyed her with some concern.

“Are you all right, Ann?”

“Fine,” she said. He’s testing you, whispered the voices. Don’t admit to anything.

“He wasn’t expecting trouble, was he?” asked Tom. He took hold of a massive arm and leg and heaved. The Butcher’s stiff corpse flopped onto its back, one arm splayed grotesquely across his mangled face where some of the bullets had exited.

“You’re right,” said the Sergeant. The three men gazed silently at the bloody form of what once had been a powerful individual, capable of throwing a young steer over his shoulder and carrying it to the slaughter pen.

“The killer, or more than one, shot him in the back of his head at point-blank range with a powerful handgun and rushed to get the cocaine out to a waiting vehicle. The Butcher probably didn’t hear them coming.”

“Who were they?” asked Tom, shuffling his feet and gagging. “I hope the coroner gets here soon. I’m going to be sick.”

“They got their comeuppance at the dock.” Mark put a protective arm around Annie. Chuckles got between them and pressed against Mark’s leg, gazing at his owner’s face. The Sergeant glared. Mark continued. “Somebody blew them away, blew away their vehicle with firepower we can only imagine, and got away on the jetboat.”

“The jetboat was damaged.” Annie put her hands in her jeans pockets and rocked back on her heels. “Yet the dead suspects they left behind appear to have been taken entirely by surprise.”

“Somebody else is involved?” asked the Sergeant and his hand went to his side where the Glock nestled in its leather holster.

“It would appear that way,” said Mark.

A door opened at the top of the stairs. A lanky man with a neat, grey beard and short haircut clambered down the steps with a bag in his hand.

“The coroner’s here,” said Tom. “Now can we get the time of death?”

“We know it’s got to be sometime around five a.m. That’s shortly before we heard the gunshots and explosions when the black van was blown up and the suspects were popped.” Mark brushed a piece of lint off his shirt. “I guess we can get to business now. I can hear the ambulance jockeys breaking through the door.”

“Don’t exaggerate,” Annie cautioned. “I think I’m going to get sick again.”

“You moved the corpse,” the coroner admonished.

The Sergeant nodded.

“Evidence, but in this case not conclusive. It’s okay,” the coroner said, kneeling. He opened his bag. A couple of uniformed medics waited behind him at the bottom of the stairs. “If the body is moved after death, but before rigor mortis begins, I could apply a technique known as hypostasis or livor mortis where the blood pools to the lower extremities due to gravity and looks reddish-purple. In this case, the body is already stiff. Could be four to six hours since death. Maybe longer. Certainly not before. It’s hot in here, though. Speeds up the process.”

“I thought it looked black,” the Sergeant said. They all fell silent as the pathologist examined the body. “The skin on your scalp has more blood vessels than anywhere else on your body.” He heaved the body over again.

The coroner continued to examine the riddled and bloody corpse and spoke into his recorder. “A hail of bullets appears to have entered the back of the occiput at the craniocervical junction. A bullet to the skull isn’t necessarily fatal, unlike what you see in the movies. But this man was dead on his feet.”

“That’s obvious,” said Annie. She then threw up in the pail.

Chuckles sniffed at the watery vomit and then tried to eat it.

4

The next day was an idyllic summer morning. Annie and Mark chatted about the preceding day’s happenings, uncertain what the RCMP detachment in Victoria or Vancouver would order them to do. They had their own ideas, wildcats that they were.

A mound of golden fur stirred by Mark’s feet. A tail like a feather, a soft sleeping mouth. Mark rubbed his sock-covered foot into the dog’s belly.

“Woof,” Mark said. “Woof, Chuckles.”

“Don’t tease him,” Annie said.

“Not teasing. Loving my dog.” Mark wiggled his foot.

Soft brown eyes opened. Chuckles sprang to his feet and shook himself.

“Hey, whoa, big guy,” Mark said. “Think we can use you in our investigation?”

“He’s too lazy.” Annie laughed. “But he does have a good nose.”

“Yeah. He’s a police dog, aren’t you, pal?”

Annie snorted and rubbed the dog’s ears. “No, he’s not. He’s a rescue dog and we don’t know his history. We’ve only had him for six months and we don’t even know how old he is.”

“The vet said he’s about three. That’s good enough for me.” Mark continued to smile. Chuckles reared to his back legs and hugged the man. “Whoa. Down, boy. I know, we rescued you from the pound and you were cowering in the back of the kennel, afraid to make eye contact. Something bad happened to you, right, pal?”

“We don’t know that,” Annie said. She padded to the sofa opposite the green recliner where Mark and the dog roughhoused. “His owners could have moved.”

“It’s a small town.”

“Not that small,” Annie replied. “But a big golden retriever like Chuckles is just what you needed to make you more human, sweetheart, put a smile on that big pusser of yours.”

“Come here, Chuck,” Mark teased and ruffled the dog’s head. Chuckles panted and grinned a doggie grin. “Look, he’s smiling, do you see that?”

“He’s panting because you’ve made him hot from the little workout.” Annie lounged on the blue and green patterned sofa, her hands on her knees. “I think he has to go out.”

“My turn,” Mark said. “Hey, Chuckles. Want to go for a walk?”

The dog woofed and ran to the front door where his leash hung. His soft mouth grabbed the end of the leash and pulled it from the nail.

Woof.

“Okay, come here, boy.” Mark slipped the harness onto the big golden dog and they bounded out the door.

The trellis by the cobblestones exploded with color. Sunlight slanted off the rocks at the end of the yard where Mark had planted yellow wisteria and blooming hollyhock bushes.

“The place is transformed,” he said as the dog pulled at the leash. “Look at my plants, Annie. We’ll have to stay here for another season and watch them grow.”

“Yes.” Annie stood planted in the doorway like a bloom herself. Mark looked back. The man and his dog, she thought. I love them both.

At twenty-six, Annie Hansen epitomized her maternal Celtic heritage in mind and spirit like her fey dead mother, but also the Scandinavian family name from her father, sturdy blonde physique, and ancestral paternal lineage. Her dear mother, with her frizzy, carrot hair and green eyes of Scots blood, should have married a McDuff or MacDonald or an Archibald from Leith.

Annie sighed. As it was, her brilliant librarian mother married a philanderer of uncertain ethics, a Canadian-Norwegian whose father’s father came from Hovden— a tiny fishing village in Nordland county, Norway, on the island of Langøya. The North Atlantic Ocean, her father said, lay to the north and west of the village. So said her father of the village of the great grandfather she had never met.

Annie thought it not weird then that she should find her spirit’s ease in a small town on the island of Serendipity. “Like meets like,” she used to say. “That’s just livin’,” as she sang her way around her beloved island on her red scooter.

The money her mother left her as an inheritance, as well as the books and much-loved Persian cat, were squandered and cast aside by careless living when Annie was young and on the streets of Vancouver. She mourned Freedom, the calico Persian with the missing teeth and the plume of a tail. Freedom was loaned one fine spring day to a senior who coddled her and held her and gave her the love that Annie could not. And finally presented to Annie the ashes of the beloved Freedom in a small pink jar to keep forever in a corner of the float house. Her mother, the beautiful Blossom Hansen, would have appreciated that.

The blue float house in Modge Bay remained most of what was left of her mother’s inheritance. That was enough. That, and her Celtic spirit with the mercurial, brilliant, and flawed mind. That, and the father who left. He came back long after Annie’s mother could possibly know of his disgrace in the arms of a Dutch mistress and his eventual return to the float house and the Discovery Islands. So what goes around comes around, thought Annie. Albin Hansen had left her mother for the Dutch woman. The Dutch woman and her daughter threw him out, by all reports, long after her mother’s death. Too bad her mother hadn’t been alive to savor the second divorce. Good riddance, too.