Here is a free sample of Ghosts in the Ground for your reading pleasure!
Chapter 1
Stella bounded ahead of Margie along the pathway and then turned and dashed back to her. She ran off the trail to examine a tree with great attention and again raced back to Margie, tongue lolling happily.
“You’re having a great time, aren’t you?” Margie encouraged, trying to put on a burst of speed to keep up with the dog. Of course she couldn’t keep up, but she got a little bit more speed despite how tired she was. It was good to have someone to motivate her to get more exercise. She certainly needed it. She spent too much time sitting at a desk doing database searches and paperwork.
But then, if she had more time to spend at the computer, that meant she was probably spending more time on cold cases and other crimes and less looking at freshly-dead bodies, which was a good thing, both for her and the community in general. Fewer homicides was the goal, after all.
“We have to stay in shape, don’t we, girl?” she asked Stella, the next time she ran up to Margie for more attention.
Margie’s phone started to ring, and she pinched her earbud stem to answer it. “Detective Patenaude,” she announced, only slightly breathless.
“Is this Detective Parks Pat?” the dispatcher teased.
Which probably meant that Margie did have a freshly dead body to look at. In a park. “What’ve you got?”
“Beaver Dam Flats. Or rather, Refinery Park, but it’s all one thing.”
There were sirens in the distance, as if to alert Margie of her duties. She stopped running and stretched her back, hands on hips. It was a beautiful autumn day, the leaves on the trees just starting to change color. A fine day she would now miss attending the scene of a murder or body dump. She gathered her long black hair together in both hands, pulled out her hair elastic, then twisted the elastic back on again, capturing the stray hairs that had escaped while she was running. She would need a quick shower when she got home, and would braid it and pin it up before she got to the park.
Maybe it would just be an accidental death. Maybe there would be nothing for her to follow up on, and she could go back to enjoying nature with her furry companion. Christina was off somewhere with Tracy, and Margie had the whole day to herself to do whatever she wanted. But only if there were no dead bodies to clutter up her schedule.
“And where is Beaver Dam Park?” Margie asked the dispatcher.
“I’ll text you the coordinates. It’s not far from your residence. Over in Lynnwood, if you know where that is—”
“The coordinates would be good, then I can use my GPS.”
“I’ll get them to you. And the other detective on call, Detective Gagnon, will be there as well.”
“Great,” Margie agreed. Maybe Gagnon would take care of everything, and she wouldn’t have to do anything more than be a second witness that the appropriate procedures were followed in dealing with the body. She was not close to Gagnon, but he was a competent detective. She didn’t have any complaints on that score.
“It will be a while before I can get there,” Margie advised the dispatcher. “I’m not near my car, so I’ll have to get back to the road where I can catch an Uber.”
If she made them wait while she ran all the way home, it would take at least twice as long.
“I’ll let them know to expect a delay,” the dispatcher advised.
Margie turned around and called Stella to her. The dog seemed confused by the change in direction, but she obeyed and ran with Margie. They’d been interrupted or had their plans amended enough times that Stella would accept the change in routine. At least she’d gotten out for a good run. When she got home, she would sleep and not get into anything because she was bored.
Margie had been running along the lower irrigation canal pathway, beside the Inglewood Golf Club, where there was no vehicular traffic and only the occasional runner, cyclist, or dog walker. Still, she hadn’t quite made it to her usual turning point near Peigan Trail. She took the hill up to Twenty-Sixth Street at a slow run, and was breathing pretty heavily when she got to the top. But she knew that she wasn’t going to get much more exercise, so she might as well go all-in for the last stretch. Once she was by the road where a vehicle could pick her up, she opened her rideshare app and requested a car. There was one just five minutes out, so she did a cooldown routine while she waited. A quick shower and change when she got home, and then she could head out to the scene at Beaver Dam Flats.
If Margie remembered correctly, Lynnwood was near Ogden, a town that had been annexed by Calgary but which still looked very much like a small town within the city. She loved the atmosphere and some of the old buildings there. There were a number of old Indigenous families still living in Lynnwood, cousins she had played with as a child or hung out with when she was an older, jaded teen. Lots of old families there, long roots.
The Uber driver did not appear pleased to have a dog as a passenger. Margie had not thought to clear it with him beforehand. But since she was only a few minutes from home, he conceded and drove them home.
Fifteen minutes later, Stella was settled in her bed, snoring from the exertion of the run with Margie, and Margie was on her way to Beaver Dam Flats in her own car. Or Refinery Park, as the dispatcher had told her.
The GPS led Margie back along Twenty-Sixth Street, the street she had just been running beside. She followed the GPS directions the best she could, finding the Fiftieth Avenue bridge and access point to Lynnwood and Ogden. Margie pulled onto Ogden Road but completely missed the quick turn into Refinery Park. Margie whipped her head around as the screen on her phone refreshed, showing a new route to the park that included a large loop through the neighborhood to return to the single access point she had missed. Margie checked her mirrors and turned on her lights in order to perform a turn in the middle of the road and go back to find the entrance of the park.
It should have been pretty obvious, taking into account the squad car with its lights on sitting at the entrance.
The cop grinned at Margie as she performed her illegal turn and pulled into the park.
Refinery Park wasn’t much to look at. Parking lot, dirt road, dead brown grass. There were some trees, but they were sparse, not like the woods she had just been running beside. There was an eerie feeling, like something was not right.
But she was likely just pushing her own emotions onto the landscape. She knew there was a body there, so she saw it as foreboding. There wasn’t really anything dark or portentous about the park.
“Just about missed it,” the cop posted at the entrance commented with a grin.
“I know,” Margie commented. “But I got here. That driveway isn’t really easy to see.”
“Just continue along this road,” he motioned to the left-hand, unpaved road. “You’ll see the other investigators.”
“Thanks.”
She pulled slowly past him and followed the gravel road through the strange landscape.
Chapter 2
Not only were the trees widely spaced apart with little undergrowth on the flat plain, but there were also a number of low white buildings that, from a distance, she had thought were beehives. Up close, she could see that they were too big for the boxy beehives she sometimes saw on farms beside the highway.
It wasn’t hard to find the scene with several emergency vehicles clustered together. Margie pulled up close to the marked police cars and got out of her car. Looking up the hill toward Fiftieth Avenue, she realized she had been just on the other side of the hill on her run with Stella. Maybe the sirens she had heard had been on their way to the scene. If she’d kept running in the direction she had been going with Stella, she would have reached the park faster on foot than she had going home first.
But she didn’t want to show up soaked in sweat. And keeping Stella from contaminating the scene would have been another challenge.
Margie spotted Gagnon, a heavyset, dark-haired Francophone detective standing outside the yellow tape, and joined him.
“So… what am I looking at?” she asked, looking at the small white shed, like the other she had seen on her way there.
“Pump house,” Gagnon told her. “There is a network,” his hands moved quickly to designate the other white buildings she had seen on her way there, “of pumping wells for the cleaning of contaminated groundwater.”
“Contaminated groundwater.” Margie looked down at her feet as if she might be standing in a pool of industrial waste. “Contaminated with what?”
“Used to be an Imperial Oil refinery here. When they shut down and sold off the land, it was all contaminated. No requirements to clean it up like there are now. They sold off to the city and developers, who built residential housing here in the eighties and nineties.”
Gagnon looked out at the spotty tree cover, as if he could still see the houses.
“But oil seeped up out of the ground. People couldn’t raise their kids in that mess. It was all purchased back and remediated, and these pumps are still doing their work, pulling up the groundwater, treating it, and returning it.”
“Wow.” Margie looked around at the quiet “ghost town” that had been left behind. No homes, just the widely spaced trees that had been planted in their yards, eerie reminders of a community that had lived there briefly and was gone again. “The contamination must have been pretty bad to be that visible, and for them to tear down the entire neighborhood.”
Gagnon nodded. “There were a few houses left on the ridge,” he swept a hand in the opposite direction, “Folks who wouldn’t take the buy-out package. Forced Imperial Oil to replace all the topsoil. More than a meter deep. Took years to get it all done, but they did.”
Margie understood now why the landscape looked so strange. But she doubted it had any bearing on why they were there now.
“And someone found human remains?” Margie asked, looking around for the reason she was there. She didn’t know whether to hope that they were old bones that might present a puzzle they couldn’t solve, or a fresher body which would seem like more of a tragedy, the emotions of the survivors closer to the surface.
“Inside,” Gagnon nodded to the pump house. “I’ve already seen.”
Either it was so disturbing or decomposed that Gagnon didn’t want to go back inside, or the space was too small to admit them both at the same time. Margie hoped it was the latter. She geared up to prevent contamination of the scene and approached the officer keeping a log of who entered and exited the cordoned-off area.
“Detective Margie Patenaude.”
She spelled it out and waited until the officer had filled in all of the details before proceeding.
“Medical examiner been here yet?” she asked. “Forensic techs?”
“On their way.”
Margie walked to the pump house, and another officer pushed the door open for her. Margie stuck her head in, not wanting to step inside unless she had to. Best to keep the scene as pristine as possible until all of the trace evidence had been collected.
The inside of the pump house was crammed with equipment, humming and warm, smelling of oil. There was, thankfully, no pungent smell of decomposing flesh. A narrow aisle alongside the equipment allowed just enough space for a fit person to slip in and check the dials and gauges. And that space was currently occupied by a man in khaki trousers and a solid blue shirt. Glasses sat askew on his face. He had dark hair, neatly trimmed in a short corporate style. He lay on his side, one arm thrown out over a piece of pump equipment. There was blood and a goose-egg on his head, and his skin was pale and grayish. Margie assumed someone else had already checked for signs of life and did not see the need to enter the cramped quarters herself.
She pulled back and walked back to Gagnon. “Have we got an identification?”
“Not yet. He was found by another worker, who did not recognize him. There is a manual log-in sheet inside, but he did not log in when he entered. The worker who found him got out as quickly as possible. These buildings can fill with gases.”
“Gases?”
“From the hydrocarbons in the soil or groundwater. Trapped pockets of methane. Maybe carbon monoxide from the machinery, I don’t know.” Gagnon shook his head heavily. “Not my job to know the details. They are supposed to follow certain protocols. To avoid this…” He motioned toward the pump house.
“So you think it was probably accidental. He suffocated on built-up gases.”
“Probably.”
“He was hit on the head.”
“Or he hit his own head when he passed out. Why would anyone hit him?”
Margie shrugged and shook her head. “We’ve both investigated enough homicides not to bother asking that one.”
Gagnon grunted, not disagreeing.
The white van from the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner approached. “Looks like help has arrived. Why don’t I talk to the guy who found him while you supervise here, since you’ve already talked to him?”
“Oui. He is the one over there,” Gagnon pointed to a lean young man standing a few meters away, outside the tape. His arms were folded as he watched the various crime scene investigators coming and going. “Jeff Stevens,” Gagnon advised.
Stevens wore blue coveralls and steel-toed boots, unlike the man in the pump house who had been wearing dress shoes. That seemed incongruous. Was the victim someone who was not supposed to be there?
She approached the worker. “Mr. Stevens? Can I talk to you for a moment? I’m sorry, I know you’re going to be talking to half a dozen different people today, telling the same story over and over again.”
That seemed to at least quell the protest that he had already talked to someone else. He looked at Margie and sighed, nodding. “I suppose everyone and his dog has to hear the story.”
Margie frowned, wondering whether he had intended the “and his dog” as a slur against her either as a woman or Indigenous. She chose to ignore it and assume that it was just an ill-advised attempt at levity.
“Yes, unfortunately, that is the way it goes with these things,” she agreed. “Can you tell me why you were here today?”
“It’s my job. I was here to check on the equipment, make sure everything was operating correctly, and update the logs. But when I opened the door and saw him lying there…” He shook his head. “I got out of there and called 9-1-1. Sixty percent of people who die in enclosed spaces are rescuers. Or people who tried to rescue someone else. Best you can do is get someone who is properly equipped to go in after them. I didn’t have a respirator.”
“So the paramedics showed up?”
“Firefighters. They have respirators.”
Maybe from the fire station on Twenty-Sixth Street beside the pathway. Maybe that had been one of the sirens Margie had heard. But no, when she was talking to the dispatchers, they already knew they were dealing with a dead body. She might have missed the siren of a firetruck dispatched before that, listening to music on her earphones. Or the truck might have been called from a different fire station; maybe there was one in Ogden that was closer.
“My colleague said that you didn’t recognize him? The dead man?”
“No,” Stevens shrugged. “I don’t remember ever seeing him before. Not anyone who shoulda been here. I know all the guys who work on this equipment. And nothing needed to be fixed. It should have just been routine checks. Just me,” He pointed at himself, “no call for anyone else to be in there.”
“How is it secured? Who has access to the pump house?”
“It’s just a padlock. No fancy electronic locks out here.”
“And who has keys? Are they kept in a central location, or are they given to you individually?”
“I pick them up at the beginning of the day, return them at the end of the day. I don’t keep them.”
“Just a regular padlock? Easy to duplicate a key? Pick the lock?”
“I don’t know about picking locks. The key says not to make duplicates. So if you take it to a key cutter, they’re gonna tell you no.”
“Can you think of any reason anyone would want to be in there?”
Stevens shook his head, frowning. “That’s what I don’t get, man,” he admitted. “It’s a pump house… there’s nothing valuable in there. There’s nothing interesting to anyone. Even if you were interested in the process of cleaning contaminated water… it’s a closed system. There’s nothing to see.”
I hope you enjoyed this sample of
Ghosts in the Ground
By P.D. Workman
