The Escarpment Watch
A Rex Striker Mystery
Part 1: The Body on the Escarpment
I got the call at 5:40 in the morning, which in my business is either very good or very bad, and never anything in between. Chuck Bartlett’s voice came through the radio thick with the kind of gravel that only forty years of black coffee and half as many cigarettes can carve into a man’s throat.
“Rex,” he said. “You’re gonna want to see this one yourself.”
I was already dressed. I’m always already dressed at 5:40, because I stopped sleeping properly the year my wife left, and I’ve since made peace with the idea that a homicide detective who watches the sun come up over the Thames River Valley six mornings out of seven is not a broken man. He’s a man who’s found himself an office with the best view in London, Ontario, and he doesn’t need to pay rent for it.
The Lookout sits above Pond Mills Road, up on the escarpment where the ivy’s gone so thick over the old limestone retaining wall that in July you can’t tell where the rock ends and the green begins. From up there the whole Thames River Valley opens like a hand — the water silver-black in the pre-dawn, the tree line ragged with sumac and white pine, the city’s lights still burning small and orange to the west where downtown hunches around the forks. I’d been coming here since I made detective. It was where I did my thinking. It was, apparently, also where somebody had decided to leave a body.
Chuck was standing at the edge of the gravel turnout when I pulled up, his coat collar up against the September chill, his flashlight beam cutting through ground fog that was just starting to burn off gold at the edges as the sun cleared the far ridge. Chuck’s got fifteen years on me and twice the patience, which is why we’ve worked homicide together since before I made lieutenant. He’s the kind of partner who tells you the truth even when the truth is going to ruin your morning.
“Female, mid-thirties,” he said, without preamble, because that’s Chuck. “Patrol found her at four-fifteen. No ID on her yet. No obvious cause.”
I walked past him to where the body lay, half in the ivy, half on the limestone shelf that juts out over the valley like the prow of a ship. She was dressed for an evening out — a dark green dress, one shoe missing — and she’d been arranged, not dumped. Whoever did this had taken the time to fold her hands.
“Somebody wanted her found here,” I said. “Not just anywhere. Here.”
“Best view in the city,” Chuck said, and there wasn’t a shred of irony in it. “Whole east side wakes up to that sunrise. River, valley, the old Pioneer Village smoke stacks poking up through the tree line if you know where to look. My grandfather used to bring me up here Sunday mornings before church, tell me about the Ice Age carving this whole valley out, the glacier grinding down through what’s now Fanshawe, leaving us this ridge to stand on and look at what it left behind.” He crouched by the body. “Whoever left her here was making a statement. Question is who reads that kind of poetry.”
The sun kept climbing while the forensics team worked, throwing long gold bars of light down into the valley, catching the mist rising off the river like the whole Thames was exhaling after a long night. I’ve seen that sunrise maybe eight hundred times from this exact spot, and it never once felt like it did that morning — beautiful and obscene in the same breath, indifferent to the woman cooling on the limestone twenty feet from where I stood.
“No purse,” Chuck said. “No phone. But there’s this.” He held up an evidence bag with a small brass keychain fob inside — a stylized letter L, wreathed in what looked like hop vines and barley.
“Brewery merchandise,” I said.
“Old brewery merchandise. This design, Rex — I haven’t seen this mark since I was a rookie. This is Labatt’s, but not the Labatt’s on the shelf now. This is heritage stuff. Collector stuff, or company stuff nobody’s supposed to still be carrying around.”
I turned the bag over in my hand, watching the fob catch the sunrise. London’s practically built on beer money — Labatt’s roots go back to 1847, when John Kinder Labatt bought into a small London brewery and built it, over generations, into a name that put this city on the industrial map long before the university or the hospitals did. The old brewery lands down by the Thames employed thousands of Londoners across three centuries’ worth of families, and even now, the Labatt name carries weight here — civic pride bottled and shipped. If this fob meant what Chuck thought it meant, our victim had a connection to something that ran deep into the bones of the city.
“Get onto the historical society,” I said. “Somebody there will know what era this fob’s from, and who’d still be carrying one.”
Chuck nodded, already dialing. Below us, the fog had burned off entirely, and the Thames ran clean and bright through the valley, indifferent as ever. I looked at the folded hands one more time before the techs bagged her, and I made her a promise the way I make every victim a promise up here at the Lookout: I’d find who did this before the sun set on the same city that had watched her die.
Next: Part 2 — Ashes and Alibis. Back at the precinct, Rex and Chuck chase the brass fob to a name nobody expected — a Labatt family descendant with a grudge decades in the making. But when the victim’s identity finally surfaces, it throws suspicion onto three people who all swear they were somewhere else that night. As Rex digs through decades-old company records, he finds a secret the old brewery families have been burying since before he was born — and a motive written in cold, hard cash.
