Beneath the Icy Depths

Book 12: Parks Pat Mysteries (Police Procedural)

by P.D. Workman

Genres: Police Procedurals

Synopsis

Looking for a gripping police procedural series set in the stunning parks of Calgary?

A chilling death

Dive into the chilling depths of a cold-blooded murder that will send shivers down your spine.

Detective Margie “Parks Pat” Patenaude couldn’t think of a much colder way to die. They assured her that the woman probably didn’t feel a thing.

When a woman falls through the ice to the dark and murky depths, the shiver she feels is not the anticipation of a twisted mystery, but that is what she gets.

There is no indication that Mary’s death was a homicide, except for one niggling thing…

Skate into a new Parks Pat Mystery.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ The writing is excellent, the plot is nice and twisty and the the characters and situations are believable. I enjoyed this book and am looking forward to seeing where she takes these new characters.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ This is another well-written, briskly-paced mystery featuring great characters, lots of interesting glimpses into Canada’s Indigenous culture, and a satisfying resolution all wrapped up in delightful quick-read police procedural by an author who could make a description of drying paint sound fascinating.

If you enjoy gripping murder mysteries with a chilling atmosphere, you'll love Beneath the Icy Depths. Readers will find themselves captivated by this thrilling tale of murder and deception.

Dive into the depths of this bone-chilling murder mystery today and join Detective Margie "Parks Pat" Patenaude as she unravels the secrets hidden beneath the ice.

Read on for chills and thrills.

 

Read more

Release date: July 19, 2024

Publisher: pd workman

Sample

Chapter 1

Margie was working at her desk. Snoozing, if she were to be honest with herself. The bullpen was warm and Margie had hit her midafternoon slump, trying to push through some paperwork but making little progress.

The phone ringing jolted her awake. She nearly fell out of her chair. She reached for the receiver, looking at the phone number on the display as she did so. The number was familiar, but she couldn’t put a name to it until she picked it up and heard the voice.

“Detective Patenaude,” she greeted.

“Detective Parks Pat,” Gagnon’s French-accented nasal voice drilled into her ear. “They’re asking for you at this scene.”

She knew that Gagnon had been called out to a newly discovered body an hour or two earlier. She had envied his going out, even though she didn’t much feel like standing outside in the cold today. At least it was something to do.

“They’re asking for me?” she repeated.

“They need your particular area of expertise.”

Margie’s area of expertise was nothing more than having been called out to attend a few murder scenes at Calgary parks, which had led to her being dubbed Parks Pat, and now she was the expert on bodies found in parks and wilderness areas.

She also attributed it in part to her Métis heritage. It gave her a bit of mystique, with people thinking that due to her European explorer and Indigenous Cree ancestry, she must have some special connection with nature and have learned tracking and lore at her parents’ knees.

She was doing her best to learn more about Mother Earth and her secrets from Moushoom, her grandfather, but Margie had grown up a city girl and was woefully bereft of instinct in the area of tracking or even following a map. It was a standing joke how easily she could get lost, even following GPS directions.

But, despite Margie’s lack of skills or specialized knowledge, she was the proclaimed expert on deaths in parks, and they would keep calling her out to the scenes of murders or accidents in Calgary parks for as long as she worked homicide in the city. There was no shaking the name and reputation now.

“We’re at Bowness Park,” Gagnon told her. “You know it?”

“Sure, I know Bowness Park,” Margie agreed, happy she was familiar with this one. She remembered visiting Bowness Park as a child on vacations to Calgary. Most of her trips there had been during the summer, when they had enjoyed picnics and BBQs, riding the zip line, and playing tag on the other playground equipment. The couple of Christmases that she had spent in Calgary, they had gone skating on the lagoon in Bowness. There had been fires and hot chocolate, and it had been a lot of fun. Margie had enjoyed skating and had not been bothered at all by her fear of water. Frozen water held no terrors for her.

Boating during the summer was another story. But skating in the winter was a good memory. She had loved spending that time with her cousins and other members of her extended family.

“So you can get out here?” Gagnon pressed.

“Yeah, you bet. I have my car. It should take me about… half an hour to get down…” Margie hazarded a guess, even though she had no idea how long it would actually take.

“Dress warmly,” Gagnon warned.

Margie had her toque, gloves, and other winter gear in the car, so that wouldn’t be a problem. The weather had been mild the last few days, but she knew it would be colder in Bowness Park than downtown.

“I’ll be there as soon as I can,” Margie promised.

As Margie stood up and got ready to go, Detective Katelyn Jones was returning to her desk after getting coffee from the breakroom

“Parks Pat is on call,” Margie advised Jones. “Bowness Park.”

“Have fun,” Jones told her cheerfully. “Don’t worry about the rest of us, stuck at our desks flipping through dusty cold cases.”

“Well, I guess I’ve got a cold case of my own,” Margie laughed.

Chapter 2

Margie worried at first that she had taken a wrong turn, it was taking so long to drive to Bowness Park. She didn’t remember it being so far west. She had thought it just the other side of Crowchild Trail, but it was a long way past that. The GPS wasn’t objecting that she had missed a turn, so she kept going, following the instructions as they were dictated to her and shown on the screen.

Then she did miss the turn into the park. The entrance was well-hidden. Margie swore when the GPS instructed her to perform a U-turn to get back to the park.

After she got turned around and took another run at it, she found the initial descent into the park familiar even after all the years since she had been there as a child. Margie knew she was in the right place.

She spotted a police car in the main parking lot and an officer stood nearby with a black mask, high-vis traffic vest, and orange baton, chatting with park patrons. It was evident that there wasn’t much for him to do there. All of the experts were probably there ahead of Margie.

She drove up slowly, waiting for him to finish talking with an older couple before turning his attention to her.

“Detective Patenaude,” Margie announced herself after rolling down the window and letting the brisk air in.

“Ah, Detective. You are this way,” he pointed the baton to the roadway she should take. “Just keep following it around. You won’t be able to miss all of the other vehicles.”

“Thank you.”

She rolled the window up again. Gagnon was obviously right about her needing to dress warmly. It was always colder near the water and there was a brisk wind.

She followed the road around and, after a couple of kilometers, found the site of the accident.

She had a lot more winter gear in her trunk than she needed walking only from her house to the car and the car to the office. But she always preached preparedness to Christina. A person couldn’t trust that the car would always work and that she wouldn’t have a breakdown or get into a motor vehicle accident and end up standing at the side of the road or pushing the car out of an intersection. Margie pulled on ski pants, swapped her shoes for boots, put a puffy vest on under her coat, and bundled up with her warmest gloves, hat, and face covering.

She felt like the Michelin Man as she walked to the line of vehicles and the people gathered there ahead of her. She found Gagnon with a couple of patrolmen with red noses and Tim’s coffee cups.

He was a heavy man, made to look even rounder with the bulk of his winter jacket. His face mask was pulled down to drink the coffee, and there was frost in his mustache.

He nodded a greeting to her. “I’m sure everyone knows Parks Pat,” he said, without bothering to introduce any of the other law enforcement officers to her. “Found it okay?”

“Yeah, no problem.” Or only one, anyway. Margie gazed out at the river. While there was ice and snow at the edges, there was still a wide channel of dark water running down the center. Too early in the season for it to be completely iced over. Even when it was, people would need to be careful and know how thick or thin the ice was. She had seen cars drive on the river when it was fully iced in, but she wouldn’t choose to walk on it herself. She would stick to the pond, lagoon, or irrigation ditches. Nothing with fast-moving water. She knew enough about the river to respect it.

There were a number of figures out on the ice dressed in dark coats, too far away for her to make out the insignia. A yellow raft had been inflated but sat unused on the ice. Some men in wet suits stood around talking as if they didn’t have a care in the world and were completely unaffected by the cold.

“So, what have we got?” she asked.

“Body discovered in the river,” Gagnon pointed to a bright fleck of color at the edge of the ice. “Got caught on a log. They’re going to attempt to retrieve the body in a few minutes.”

“Did anyone see it happen? Do we know who it is?”

“No. Someone walking over the bridge saw it,” Gagnon shifted his pointing finger to the wide bridge past the body caught on the log. “They called it in and, gradually, we got everyone out here to discuss the best way to retrieve it. The ice is thick enough over here,” he pointed to the larger group of people, “but not out there,” he indicated the men in the wet suits. “They are trained in cold water rescue, so this is their thing. I don’t know yet whether they will go out in the boat and approach it from the water or see if they can crawl out on the ice and pull it in that way.”

Margie shuddered. “Better them than me. I don’t think I’ll be volunteering to be part of that team.”

“Wouldn’t get me out there either,” Gagnon agreed. “I had a friend drown when I was a teenager. Playing on the ice before it was safe.” He shook his head. “Ice opened up right in front of me. Water was as black as pitch. Like a gateway to hell.”

Margie shuddered, even though she was warm in her winter clothing, at the thought of seeing something like that happen right before her eyes. Or worse, having it happen to her. She could imagine the ice water closing in around her, chilling her to the bone and pulling her under.

“That’s horrible,” she told Gagnon.

He made one of those indescribably French grunts of acknowledgment. “Oui.”

Margie smiled. “We say oui too, but we spell it w-i-i.”

He raised his brows inquiringly. “What?”

“In Michif. The Métis language. We say wii.”

“Ah.” He nodded. “It is all a bastardized French, is it not? Pidgin?”

Margie resisted the urge to snap at him. He knew something about Michif at least, and was making an inquiry to understand more. It was good to ask questions, even if she didn’t like his approach.

“From my understanding of the definitions, it is a creole, not a pidgin.”

“Creole like New Orleans?” He shook his head. “It’s not the same.”

“A creole is two different languages joining to become a new language. A pidgin is a simplified version of a language. Some say Michif is creole and some say it isn’t. But it is a mix of French and Cree and some other influences.”

Gagnon nodded. “I see.”

The men out on the ice began to move. Margie watched the men in wet suits begin to push the raft. But they didn’t push it out into the river as she had expected them to. They pushed it along the ice toward the point where the body was caught on a branch or log. Margie and Gagnon watched, both tense.

As the men in wet suits got closer to the body, Margie heard the ice cracking. She looked down at her feet as if cracks might appear there, but she was standing on the shore and didn’t need to worry that the cracks in the ice would extend to her feet. Then she looked at the other law enforcement officers and techs standing halfway out. What if the cracks in the ice extended to them?

But they watched, seeming unconcerned. Maybe someone had measured the thickness of the ice and had already established that it was safe at that point. There were a lot of them standing too close together for Margie’s comfort, putting a lot of weight on that one part of the ice. She could just picture the shelf breaking off and floating down the river with them still on it.

There were louder pops and cracks of ice under the raft, sounding like gunshots in the distance. There were shouts from the men in wet suits, and then, all at once, the ice beneath the raft broke, and they all slipped into the raft, as graceful as swans, as if that was what they had planned to do all along. Maybe it was.

They controlled the movement of the raft with paddles and poles and snugged it up against the log so that a couple of them could work on freeing the body while the other held the craft in place. Margie was breathing through her open mouth, panting as hard as if she were the one doing all the physical work.

If they went into the water, they would be fine. They were dressed for it. They had trained for it. But she could barely breathe, waiting for them to fall in. Gagnon too was tense, looking like he would grab her if things did not go well. They made a good pair.

Margie blew out a shaky breath and tried to laugh at herself, but the high giggle that came out of her would not fool anyone.

With a great heave, the rescuers managed to pull the body into the raft. They then pushed it away from the log and continued to travel downstream. A few meters farther down, there was a clean shelf of ice. They got close to it, and then two of them jumped out, grabbed the ropes along the side of the raft, and pulled it up onto the ice.

They pulled the raft to the shore, laughing and shouting as if they were having the time of their lives. Margie supposed they were high on adrenaline after tempting fate in the icy water.

Once the raft was pulled to the shore, everyone moved toward it, picking their way through the brush and rocks to reach it and look inside.

“There’s your ice queen,” one of the men in a wet suit announced. “None the worse for wear.”

“Nicely done,” said one of the law enforcement officers who had been watching the operation from the safety of the ice. “What about other forensics? Trace on the log? Any other foreign materials caught in the branches?”

“Nothing obvious. Just her and some twigs. Flotsam.”

Margie was close enough to see that the man who approached the body first was a crime scene tech she had run into at other sites. She stayed back and waited for him to take pictures and examine the woman’s outer clothing.

The victim had obviously not intended to go for a swim. She wasn’t prepared for the possibility like the men in the wet suits. The heavy clothing she wore would have pulled her down immediately, dragging her under the water. The icy water would quickly have incapacitated her and made it impossible for her to get herself back to safety. Margie’s throat closed as she thought of being dragged under the surface by the weight of her clothes.

The tech muttered to his companions as they examined the body carefully, documenting everything.

“Was her coat torn before you pulled her off of the branch?”

The foremost man in a wet suit shrugged. “It was after we pulled her off.”

The tech shook his head in irritation.

Margie thought that the men had done well, considering the circumstances. No one had been hurt or ended up in the water, and they were able to retrieve the body on the first try and not dump her back in the water. All in all, it was a pretty successful venture and not one that she would have volunteered for.

The tech eventually unbuttoned the heavy winter coat to give them a better look at the body.

It was a woman, as the rescuer had indicated. She had long hair frozen into intertwining sticks in a mass around her head. She had a couple of scrapes and bruises on her pale white face. The body under the coat was not slim. Not all of the bulk was the coat—a lot of it was the woman herself. The rescuers must have both been pretty strong to be able to move a woman of her size, especially a dead weight, clothing soaked in water.

The tech described the woman into a hand-held digital recorder, estimating her height and weight.

“She doesn’t look like she’s been dead long,” Margie said. She had seen bodies bloated up in the water, features unrecognizable. Maybe it took longer when the water was so cold.

“No, don’t think so,” the tech told her after turning off his recorder. “Last night, probably. And she wasn’t completely submerged, snagged on the log like that.”

Margie nodded. She didn’t take out her notebook to note down this information. She would save as much writing as she could for when she was back in her car with the heater on and the doors shut to keep out the wind. Her gloved fingers tingled from the cold despite the layers of insulation she had bundled herself in.

“Any identification?” Gagnon asked.

The tech patted her coat and shook his head. “Will have to check more carefully at the morgue. No obvious wallet. But most women carry their wallet in a purse, not coat pockets.”

“No purse?” Margie asked. “Nothing caught on the log?”

“No. Might want to conduct a search downriver, see if it washed up on shore.”