After the autopsy was finished, at least the part that Faye wanted them there for, Penner and Grant walked out of the room together.
‘So, my patrol buddies didn’t turn up anything on their walkabout. No one seemed to see anything,’ Grant said.
‘Not surprising,’ said Penner. ‘Even if someone did see something, they aren’t likely to talk in the streets in the middle of the night. Hopefully someone will get in touch. So, care to tell me why you stink so bad?’
‘Well, when I was on my way here, a drunk guy knocked on my window. At first he wasn’t making much sense, but then he said he knew that some big guy hurt a pretty lady in a red dress,’ Grant said.
‘Really,’ Penner said, pushing the button at the elevator. ‘Do you think he was talking about Mrs. Wong?’
‘That was my original thought, but I don’t know. That’s all he said before he passed out. Well, before he threw up all over me and then passed out.’
‘Nice. I don’t miss working beat at all,’ Penner said as the elevator arrived. ‘So, where is he now?’
‘At the hospital. I called an ambulance for him—he passed out pretty hard,’ Grant said as the elevator doors closed. ‘So, should we go see him?’
‘If he was that drunk when you were talking with him, he won’t be any use to us right now,’ Penner said. ‘Give the hospital a call and ask them to get in touch with us when he’s sobered up. Then, we’ll go see him. In the meantime, see if there was a shin-dig on tonight where dress uniforms were in order. And let’s find out if there’s any kind of connection between our latest victim and Dave from Mrs. Wong’s office. It’s a long shot, but who knows. Stranger things have happened.’
‘Sounds good, ma-am,’ Grant said as the elevator doors opened.
‘I almost forgot. Can you run this down to the FIS lab?’ Penner asked, pulling the evidence bag with the hair in it out of her pocket. ‘Ask them if they can put a rush on the DNA test. Don’t know how long it will take, but the quicker the better. We’ll notify the next of kin in the morning. Let’s touch base around ten o’clock or so?’ Penner said, checking her watch and realizing how few hours were left in the night. Without waiting for Grant to respond, she walked off to get her car.
Penner checked her watch again when she got to her office. It was late, or early, and even with all the coffee she’d had during the day, she was exhausted. ‘Thirty minutes and then I’ll head home,’ she thought to herself. If she didn’t set herself time limits, it was way too easy for her to never leave the office. She had learned that lesson the hard way years ago when she had collapsed at the scene of a crime and needed to be hospitalized for three days. Her partner at the time had reminded her that she was no use to the victims if she was incapacitated. Or worse.
She logged onto her computer, figuring she would find the name of the registrar at city hall, save some time and just leave him or her a voice mail. She saw she had an email—it was from Arden Wall, the reporter. ‘Crap,’ she thought.
‘Good evening Detective Penner. I was wondering if you would like to make a comment about the serial killer you are currently investigating. If you could give me a call with some information, it would be greatly appreciated. We will be running the story on the evening news, so I have to submit my report by three in the afternoon. I would like to interview you for the story. This is going to be the lead for the night—serial killers are big news. Give me a call. Arden.’
‘Little prick!’ Penner said out loud. ‘So he did hear. Crap.’ She picked up the phone. She had to stop this story from running, but she knew Arden. He wasn’t a big fan of co-operating when he could break a story. He had been known to release information that the police wanted to keep quiet, because it was the type of thing only the perp would know, but he didn’t care. The big story was more important than catching the criminal. She dialed Arden’s number. The phone went to voice mail. ‘Arden. It’s Detective Penner. I just got your message. I’m not sure what you mean by serial killer. There is no evidence that our two crimes are related. I don’t think you want to be reporting fake news, so you should be careful how you word your story. If you want, get in touch with our public relations officer. He would be more than happy to do an interview with you.’ She hung up. ‘Guess I have to warn the Captain what’s going on. And let PR know they’re probably going to get a call from the news guys.’
After dropping the hair off with forensics, Grant was too keyed up to go right to bed, so he went to the lab and logged onto the computer. At this time of the night, he had the whole place to himself. ‘Right,’ he thought. ‘First, let’s see if we can find any connection between Dave and our new victim.’ He did a Google search with their two names. As with most Internet searches, there were thousands of results returned. ‘Great,’ he thought as he started clicking on the pages to scan through them. After looking at the first twenty or so, there was nothing of interest. Seemed like the pages had ‘Dave’ and ‘Elaine’ somewhere in the text, or one of the two last names, but they weren’t the right people. Dead end. He decided to search Elaine’s name with Karen Wong. He figured there was a chance the two victims were related to each other in some way. Again, way too many pages were returned. He looked at the first couple of search results, but same thing, right names, wrong people. He decided to narrow the search a bit and put ‘Ottawa’ into the search string. ‘Well, this is interesting,’ he thought, looking at the first page that was returned. He read through the page, and was surprised at what he was reading. He printed two copies of the page. ‘Detective Penner is going to want to see this.’ He logged off and grabbed the print-outs.