Arrow's Rest by Joel Scott (best books to read all time .TXT) 📗

another. The police had posted a guard at the door, but the family was scheduling their own surveillance. The last watch at a hospital, the one involving Bert and Ernie, was still fresh in everyone’s mind.

Jaimie and Erin came through the door and joined them and the discussion turned to Danny’s projected run north up Georgia Strait the following day and the sectioning of Desolation Sound into manageable search areas. Then they talked about the Redonda Islands, which were located further north, and the lonely fjords stretching off beyond them. The whole thing sounded hopeless to Clarke and Merlynn and after a few minutes they made their excuses and left. Danny set up a radio sked with his brothers, then went down to the docks and made ready to leave at first light. He phoned Cat on the off chance she had heard from Jared, but her cell phone was shut off. He wasn’t concerned until he phoned her office later in the day and the receptionist told him that she hadn’t turned up for work or phoned in.

“That’s unheard of for her,” the woman said. “She always lets us know ahead of time, unlike some of the others.”

Chapter 42

Ronald Ivery sat in his ten-thousand-dollar wheelchair and watched his TV sets. He had his laptop in front of him and made occasional trades as the New York and Toronto stock exchange numbers flowed across the big screens. He had people employed full-time under his direction in his company office two floors down doing the same thing on a much larger scale, but this was his recreation. Hell, face it, he thought, this was his life. That was not to say he didn’t have personal relationships. He loved Thomas like a father, and he had a few friends whom he met up with downtown once in a while, but he didn’t have a romantic relationship to speak of. There were the occasional high-end escorts, and he treated them well, but he supposed that didn’t really count. He was fond of some of them, Greta in particular, and he thought she liked him, even apart from the money and the occasional stock tip he gave her, but when it came right down to it he didn’t even trust her enough to give her his actual name.

“Just call me John,” he’d told her the first time they’d met, clearly establishing the boundaries for their relationship. Given that it had been going on now for almost a year, he suspected that she knew who he was, but he wasn’t worried. They were friends now, and he was comfortable with the situation. He didn’t harbour any Julia Roberts Pretty Woman illusions.

There’d been a woman he’d met by chance a year back whom he’d gone out with a few times, and who had meant something to him, and he thought she might have felt the same way about him. But something must have happened, he didn’t know what, and she had stopped returning his calls. Thomas had made some discreet inquiries and learned nothing apart from an unconfirmed rumour that she’d been assaulted and robbed. Her roommate said she’d given short notice and left immediately, forfeiting her deposit. Ratchett, the detective on Ivery’s payroll, said the department had received no incident complaints involving her, and that was an end to it. He just accepted that some things weren’t meant to be. Ronald had a lot of practice at that kind of thing in his life.

He still thought about her occasionally: Rita Allen, a musician and member of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra where she played the harp. Ronald supposed there was a subtle irony in that given his past derelictions, but the affair terminated, and he moved on from philosophical dissection. He was a donor to the symphony, and had gone to several concerts since they’d broken up, but she hadn’t been performing at any of them. When he asked around, the director said she was away on a six-month leave of absence, and he had let it go.

The TV tuned to the local channel flashed Breaking News across the screen and a chyron rolled across the bottom. Something about a missing boat called Rainbow. The name seemed vaguely familiar to Ivery, and a minute later the accountant’s face popped up on the screen under the headline “Missing at Sea.”

“I’ll be damned. Bill Lacey. What are the odds?” Thomas said as he came in from the kitchen and turned up the volume. The story spilled out in the overheated tones of a small-town broadcaster getting her big break. They listened in silence.

“So he was heading south at the time?” Thomas mused.

“Yes. Well past Vancouver on a course towards the Juan de Fuca Strait.”

“Seems damned odd at that time of night.”

They sat and thought about it.

Ronald said, “Remember John Newcombe? The organizer who did some work for the party during the last campaign?”

Thomas shrugged. “Not really.”

“Not surprising. He was a quiet, low-profile guy who kept in the background. Ratchett tells me he’s disappeared and they’re treating it as suspicious. And the lawyer Richard Sullivan has been missing for going on a week now. Also being treated as suspicious. And now there’s Bill Lacey. What these three men have in common is that they all worked for Albright and now they’re all missing or dead. That explosion was not an accident.”

“Albright doesn’t strike me as a careful long-term-plan kind of guy,” Thomas said. “He seems more the full-on in-your-face type. Acts as if he knows something you don’t and is looking to take advantage of it. I knew people like that in the ring. Guys who might have had a chance for a win if they’d laid back, played it safe, and waited for an opening. But they never did.”

“So what are you saying?” Ivery asked.

“The first two, Newcombe and Sullivan, maybe. They just disappeared, could have been taken right off the street far as we know. But Bill Lacey? This one seems different. Blowing the boat