Seventeen
Janice McCabe wasn’t supposed to be working this Saturday, but there were never any guarantees. The detective division was
not large—one investigator who’d retired a couple of years ago had not been replaced—and two members of the team were off.
Gord Langdon was on a camping trip up in Algonquin Park, where even if there were cell service, he’d have his phone off. If
their chief complained later that she’d tried to get in touch, no signal would be his excuse. No fool Gord. And Skyler Marsden
was taking the week because her mother had passed away.
So if something happened that required McCabe’s talents, odds were she’d get the call. And she was still waiting to hear back
from the forensics people to let her know if they’d learned anything of note in the Chartwell case.
Late yesterday she’d spoken to the doctor who ran the clinic where Leah Kennard worked, but he didn’t know much about her
personal life and wasn’t even aware she had a relationship with anyone, let alone Brent Chartwell. Even during their short
in-person chat, McCabe got the impression the doctor was somewhat self-consumed and didn’t have a clue what his staff members’
lives were like, although he was the same doctor who had prescribed the Xanax the detective had found in Leah’s medicine cabinet.
“Yes,” the doctor said, “she had some issues with anxiety, but nothing particularly alarming. I wouldn’t have described her
as suicidal.”
She also spoke to Billy, the one whose name came up in Leah’s texts.
She was a cousin in Winnipeg who had a two-year-old boy, and Leah liked to receive pics and video of the toddler whenever Billy thought to send some.
Billy said that growing up, she and Leah had been close, and while they stayed in touch, she had few details about Leah’s personal life these days.
She knew both her parents had died, and that she had no siblings.
Billy did know about the guy from the Toyota dealer and was relieved when Leah had told her they were through, but she had no information about Chartwell.
McCabe wanted to still believe this was a straightforward murder-suicide, something she could wrap up and put a bow on in
short order. But her conversation with the dead man’s wife nagged at her.
Why did Catherine Chartwell ask whether Leah Kennard had a passing resemblance to her? Was it a personal thing? Why does your
husband have an affair if the person he’s having it with looks a lot like you? Or was it something more serious than that?
Did Catherine Chartwell believe Kennard was mistaken for her?
Brent Chartwell could hardly have misidentified her.
So if Catherine was onto something, it would follow that Brent Chartwell had not shot Leah. There had to have been someone
else in that room who’d pulled the trigger on that Beretta.
But then what? Brent is so distressed that he asks the killer for the gun so he can take his own life?
Yeah, that made a lot of sense.
And if some third party shot Brent and set it up to look like a suicide, well, he’d done a damn good job of it.
I’m overthinking this.
McCabe put on a pot of coffee, and when it was ready—she took it black—she sat at the kitchen table with her mug and a banana and read the news on her tablet.
She wasn’t much of a breakfast person. Caffeine and a piece of fruit were enough most days, even on a weekend, when she had time for something more substantial.
Maybe, when Moira materialized, McCabe would actually prepare something.
By the time her fourteen-year-old daughter made it down here, it would be closer to lunch, anyway.
McCabe could whip up some scrambled eggs, warm up some pancakes.
The trendy food shop she frequented sold pancakes that just had to be reheated.
Were they as good as homemade? Not even close.
Were they easier? Oh yeah. And if toaster pancakes were further evidence of her failures as a mother, so be it.
But she did feel obliged to do something nice for Moira. It had been a rocky week for them, what with McCabe hunting her down
on Thursday night, finding her out back of a friend’s house, the whiff of pot in the air. McCabe didn’t have a huge problem
with the stuff—there were cannabis shops all over the place now, even here in Yorkton Hill—but that didn’t mean she wanted
her daughter smoking it at her age. She didn’t want Moira smoking anything at her age. Or drinking either.
God, teenagers.
If McCabe’s own parents were still alive, they’d be eating this up. Payback time. Looking back, McCabe could see she’d been
a handful, done things worse than Moira—taking a bus across the border to Buffalo for two nights with her boyfriend when she
was sixteen probably topped the list—so Moira still had plenty of runway ahead of her to outdo her mom when it came to bad
behavior. McCabe sometimes believed she became a cop because if she hadn’t, she’d have been arrested by one eventually.
It would all be a lot easier if she weren’t doing this alone.
Maybe, when you go into a marriage to a man who makes his living as a professional gambler with your eyes wide open, you deserve
what you get. The thing was, Ned was one hell of a poker player, and McCabe had thought at the time, hey, it’s kind of a sport,
right? Some people are better at it than others. It wasn’t like buying a lottery ticket or playing a slot machine. It took
skill and patience, an understanding of mathematical probabilities. You had to know how to read people, and McCabe, as an
investigator, certainly knew a thing or two about tells, about bluffing. She hadn’t known, before she met Ned, that there
were actually people who did this for a living, that it was their job, but she started to read up on it and learned it was a real thing.
But in order to make a real go of it, Ned had to travel. He was always heading somewhere for a poker tournament. Vegas, Reno, Atlantic City, Monaco. Sometimes he won, sometimes he lost, but he always came out ahead in the end. The ones who always lost were Janice and Moira.
Eventually, Janice realized she couldn’t live like that. Either get a real job and live with us, or live on the road and don’t come back.
Ned chose Door Number Two.
He sent home money pretty regularly, and once or twice a year he’d show up and be the Hero Dad, but when it came to day-to-day
parenting, he was AWOL.
Around ten, she heard a toilet flush upstairs.
Moira shuffled into the kitchen five minutes later, still in her sleeping tee, poured herself some coffee from the pot, and
sat at the table, all without saying a word.
“Morning,” McCabe said with restrained cheerfulness.
Moira said, “Mmmf.”
McCabe didn’t have to ask what she’d been up to the night before. After Thursday night’s episode, Moira was grounded for the
weekend. If she’d been up late, it had been from watching TV or scrolling her phone, texting her friends about the various
human rights abuses she was enduring. Maybe she’d been emailing Amnesty International, McCabe thought.
“Pancakes?”
Moira said, “The toaster ones?”
“You have to ask?”
“Two. Lots of syrup.”
McCabe got up, put them in the toaster, hovered over the appliance to make sure they didn’t burn, slapped them on a plate
and drowned them in butter and maple syrup.
“Bon appétit,” she said, putting the plate, and a fork, in front of her daughter.
While Moira ate, McCabe asked what she might like to do with her Saturday.
“I dunno.”
“Was thinking we could hit the mall. The bra I’m wearing is from the Obama administration and I want to look at some new runners.”
“How long am I a prisoner?”
“You’re not a prisoner. You’re grounded. There’s a difference. Prisoners don’t get to go to the mall.”
“Don’t prisoners get field trips?”
“You’ve been grounded one night, one more to go. Suck it up.”
Moira had a bite of pancake. “I’m sorry I didn’t let you know where I was.”
“Sorry doesn’t cut it. I have to know you’re not going to do something stupid again.” Of course she would, she was barely
into her teens, but you liked to give it your best shot.
“Look,” McCabe said, “you don’t need or want another lecture from me but you were lucky it was me who found you and not someone
else from the police who wouldn’t be interested in cutting you any slack just because your mom is a colleague. It’s illegal
for anyone under nineteen to have or use or share pot.”
“I wasn’t smoking it.”
“Wouldn’t have made any difference.”
“I need a new pair of jeans.”
“There you go. We’ll leave in an hour.”
“Fine,” she said.
McCabe’s cell, sitting on the table next to her coffee, started to buzz.
“Here we go,” Moira said.
McCabe picked up the phone. “Yeah.”
“It’s Jase.”
Jason. When the reports from the forensic science center came in, they landed in Jason’s inbox.
“Whatcha got for me?”
“So that Beretta had recently been fired, the slugs in the Kennard woman and Brent Chartwell came from that gun. There was
gunshot residue on Chartwell’s right hand, and his prints were on the gun.”
“Okay.” Slam dunk. Murder-suicide.
“So Chartwell shot the woman, shot himself.”
At the mention of the name Chartwell, Moira glanced at her mother for half a second, then went back to her pancakes. She’d
finished off the first and was drowning the remaining one in more syrup. She used the edge of her fork to cut it.
“That would seem to be the conclusion,” Jason said. “No powder burns on the woman, though.”
McCabe thought about that. They’d been in bed together, so close that when Chartwell shot her, one might have expected to
find gunshot residue on the victim. But he could have shot her from elsewhere in the room, then got into bed and turned the
gun on himself.
Slowly, McCabe said, “I can think how that might have happened. All seems pretty straightforward.”
“Not necessarily.”
McCabe sighed. “Hit me.”
“The gun was not registered to Brent Chartwell or Leah Kennard. Neither held a license to own a firearm. No luck so far tracing
it. Maybe it came in from south of the border at some point. Checking records down there, but so far, big fat nothing.”
“Okay.” No surprises there. And in the grand scheme of things, maybe it didn’t matter.
“But there was something,” Jason said. “You sitting down?”
McCabe listened to him tell her the rest of what he’d learned. When he was done, she ended the call, put the phone down slowly,
and stared straight ahead, as though looking for something that wasn’t there.
Moira swallowed the last of her second pancake and said, “We’re not going to the mall, are we?”