Chapter 17 Rachel
RACHEL
Rachel knocks back the last of the cold drive-through coffee she stopped for in Kitchener as she merges onto the Gardiner Expressway, headed for Grosvenor Street right downtown where the Centre of Forensic Sciences office is located.
She left Bayfield at dawn to try to avoid some of the worst of the rush hour traffic into the city, with marginal success.
She finds some overpriced parking just off Bay Street and heads through the financial district up Grosvenor to one of a cluster of government buildings surrounding Queen’s Park.
Once she’s through the security checkpoint, she’s led into a large tiled lobby, where Sawyer is waiting for her in a crisp grey skirt and white lab coat, her dark hair clipped short like Winona Ryder’s in Reality Bites. She offers Rachel her hand and a brief smile.
“Nice to see you, Mackenzie. I hope the traffic wasn’t too bad.”
“Oh, it was.”
Sawyer chuckles, and Rachel feels a silly little swell of pride. A chuckle from Sawyer is a belly laugh from anyone else. “Come on this way.”
As Sawyer leads Rachel to an elevator bank, they make brief small talk that echoes in the dark but expansive foyer.
They descend to the basement levels, and after another security check outside the evidence-bay doors in the windowless corridor, Sawyer hands her a pair of gloves, keys in a passcode, and guides them to Jane Doe’s locker.
Rachel has only ever seen smaller evidence bins and storage, nothing bigger than the size of a high school locker.
This feels a bit like stepping into the giant walk-in refrigerator they had at Two Scoops, only slightly warmer and without droplets of fudge and squashed strawberries stuck to the floor.
It’s temperature- and humidity-controlled down here, and silent as a library.
Sawyer ushers Rachel through the door, and a motion-sensor light flickers to life overhead.
“It’s a drying cabinet,” Sawyer says. “I didn’t want to contribute any more to the rot it had already been subjected to. Although as I said on the phone, I’ve seen worse, for the age of it. Go ahead.”
Rachel pulls her file and notebook out of her bag and squats down as Sawyer hangs back. The photos Sawyer sent her were good, but she always needs to see her evidence in person. Feel it, smell it. Get to know it.
The casket is laid out on a table in the centre of the small room.
Rachel pores over it, squinting closely at the stamped serial number, then asks to see the smaller items: some remnants of fabric and the brass plaque.
Sawyer takes her out of the walk-in cabinet to the outer room, where she fetches two plastic bags from a storage wall similar to a library’s card catalogue.
She lays them out for Rachel on a stainless-steel table beneath a harsh overhead light, then picks up the bag with the fabric, hands it to Rachel.
“They’re tiny,” she says. “I’m not sure how far it’ll get you. It’s just blue dyed cotton, nothing fancy or distinctive.”
She waits silently until Rachel hands the bag back to her. There really isn’t much to see. Sawyer passes over the brass plaque. “Did you get a lead on that?” she asks.
“Yes, actually,” Rachel says. “It’s definitely a coffin maker, and they’re still in business, up in the Junction.
I’m headed there next.” She looks down at the plate in her hand, runs her gloved finger over the raised letters.
Cartwright-Cambridge Co. is probably where she’ll find her next breadcrumb, or possibly even the whole sandwich, if they happen to have a name on record for the Jane Doe in the casket.
After finishing up with Sawyer at the CFS, Rachel heads north toward the Junction.
The Cartwright-Cambridge Co. warehouse is at the end of Old Stock Yards Road, backing onto the railroad tracks.
She parks near the loading dock and pulls her navy blazer from where it’s hanging above the back passenger seat.
It’s too hot for it, but she shrugs it on anyway, covering up her white sleeveless blouse, then pulls her long brown hair up into a tight bun.
She’s had enough experience interviewing men to know that she can’t look too appealing, and needs to up the ante on the professionalism.
Green, on the other hand, can wear whatever the fuck he wants to an interview.
She slings her bag over her shoulder and heads toward the metal door labelled “Office” as a freight train chugs loudly along the tracks to her left, covered in graffiti.
She’s had plenty of self-defence training, knows how to handle herself.
She even has a firearm. But solo calls to these sorts of secluded locations that are all but soundproofed to the outside world still make the hairs stand up on the back of her neck.
Because it’s all part of the invisible cage women find themselves in, every day of their lives.
Sometimes you can even see it, if you look closely.
Women like Rachel who venture into booby-trapped fields that have been the exclusive domain of men often bear the telltale signs.
You can see the deep purple and blue marks in their eyes, the bruises that come from throwing themselves against the bars of that cage, looking for the secret latch that they just know must be there.
Sometimes those women even manage to find a key, thinking they might dare to make a run for it.
But the Cage was designed by men. It has a glass ceiling and is full of false doors and tricky locks designed to exhaust women into submission.
Outside the building, Rachel clears her throat, buttons her blazer to the top before yanking on the thick metal door handle.
Bells jingle overhead as she enters. The room is dimmer and cooler than outside.
It looks like the reception area of an autobody shop, with a couple of folding chairs, an unmanned desk, and a drip coffee maker in the corner.
Rachel sees a bell on the desk and taps it, noting the series of filing cabinets against the wall behind.
Thirty seconds later, a man emerges from a door off the main room, which must lead farther into the factory. He stops short.
“Mr. Cambridge? Detective Rachel Mackenzie, OPP,” she says. “We spoke on the phone.”
“Detective?” he asks, grinning. “You’re not, uh, what I expected.”
Her nostrils flare instinctively. She can’t count the number of times she’s had comments about a “lady detective” and that she wasn’t what someone expected. She’s dealt with a hundred guys like Mitch Cambridge before. It’s infuriating, but nothing new.
“Mr. Cambridge, I’m tracing a coffin for the purposes of trying to identify the remains found inside it. A plaque with your company name,” she says, withdrawing the photo of the casket from her file and holding it out to him, “was found in the soil surrounding the coffin in question.”
He examines the photo. “Yeah, these were our most basic coffins,” he says, “the ones the government ordered for the prisons, and that old loony bin on Queen. Just a pine box. That was back in my dad’s day. Nowadays, even the most basic one isn’t this cheap. But that’s government for ya.”
“I wonder”—she pulls out the photo of the serial number now—“if you can help me understand what this means.”
He takes it from her, letting his fingers linger on hers in the handoff. He squints at the image.
“Mmm…yeah. We stamped these sort of serial numbers on the ones we provided to the government places.”
“And what do the letters mean?”
He shrugs. “As I say, this was my dad’s stuff. But I think the different places were coded. Don’t know what ‘MWP’ is. Might be in the old records, though.”
“I’m going to need to see those.”
Mitch Cambridge looks up at her, eyes glinting now with interest as he takes in her features. It’s the look a guy might give her in a bar after midnight and too many shots of Smirnoff. At once flirtatious and undeniably predatory.
“It might take a while,” he says. “How about I find ’em, and then give you a call once I’ve got ’em? Or you could come back for ’em. I could take you out for dinner, or drinks. Make a night of it.”
“I’ll wait,” Rachel says pointedly, accenting her insistence with a smug grin.
He runs his tongue along the inside of his teeth, nostrils flaring like a tiger who’s been outrun by his prey. How quickly lust mutates into rage in the face of rejection. “It’s gonna be a while,” he snaps.
“You have an hour. But I doubt very much you’ll need that long.”
Rachel tucks the photos back into her file and strides to the coffee maker, pours herself a drink. She stands by the door and sips it, face impassive, though inside she’s raging and humiliated.
He stomps back to the filing cabinets and finds everything she needs in thirteen minutes.
“Here,” he says, thrusting some sheets at her and not making eye contact, “that’s a list of the government places my dad made caskets for in the fifties to seventies, until they cancelled the contract.”
No surprise there, if your dad was anything like you, Rachel thinks. She accepts the stack of paper and hands him her dirty coffee cup. He takes it automatically, looking confused. Then he scowls.
“I don’t know who was buried in what casket though,” he snaps. “We don’t have that. We just provided the coffins to order. Is that it?” He’s resolutely staring at a spot beside her head.
She nods. “Yes. If I need anything else, I’ll be in touch.”
She turns and leaves without another word, knowing he’s waiting until the door closes before uttering something revolting or sexist about her. But there’s nothing she can do about that.
She heads back to the car as another train rattles by, takes off her blazer, cranks down the driver’s side window to tempt in a breeze and spreads the documents over the passenger seat. She studies them, squinting in the summer light, quickly locating the information she needs.