Joe knew he and Lauren would have to take the lead as soon as they parked in the English Bay parking lot and he saw the look of pathetic relief on Al's face when they climbed out of their van. Al and Rachel had waited for them there, and together they were going to visit a woman who was in a lot of trouble, and Al was probably pissing himself at the prospect of what they might have to do, so of course it would be up to Joe and Lauren to keep everyone from panicking, never mind that they had two kids who would be without their parents if they got caught and sent to prison. He still couldn't believe Lauren had volunteered them for this mission, and if it hadn't been Rachel who'd needed their help because the woman had needed her help, he would have refused outright.

"The kids are with Sunny and Tej," Lauren told them, as if they might have opted for bringing them along. "We thought they might like to hang out with Harpreet and Ajit, since they had such a good time at our place last time. We also thought it would be safer for Sunny to be left out of this, as much as he wanted to know what was going on. We'll stay in contact by phone."

Rachel beckoned them all over so they could talk without any passers by overhearing them. "He's an officer of the court," Rachel said. "Is it wise for him to be kept in the loop? Isn't he obligated to report crime if he knows about it?"

"We never told him we were doing anything, just that you asked us for help with a friend, and that we might be a while. We'll only call him to let him know where we are and how long we'll be."

"He's defending me in that lawsuit filed by the now deceased CEO, remember?" Rachel said. "He officially hired you to get Julia on board. Won't he put two and two together if he finds out Martin died?"

"We have to make sure that man's name never comes up in our communication with him," Lauren said. "That way he has plausible deniability in all of this."

"Rachel," Joe said, "phone Julia and tell her we're near her building now, and ask her to meet us in the parking garage. Ask her if he parked his car in the parking garage, or if he found another way here, a taxi or walking, or something, so we know what to do if they try to trace a vehicle. Also ask her if we can park the van in the garage. I'd like to not leave a paper trail by paying for parking in this lot."

"My guess is he didn't drive here," Lauren said. "From the times I've photographed them, they've taken cabs."

"Jesus Christ," Al said in incredulity. "Have you done this before? The two of you remind me of that Wolf guy played by Harvey Keitel in Pulp Fiction."

Lauren and Joe both looked at him, and he cleared his throat and said, "Sorry."

"As a matter of fact, Al, we haven't," Lauren said, sounding as irritated with him as Joe felt. "We're just trying to think of all the possibilities and plan for them."

"When you're married to a P.I., you can't help absorbing information," Joe said, sounding calmer than he felt. "I've had to help Lauren on some sensitive assignments when her colleagues were otherwise engaged, but nothing like this."

"Like the time you punched that guy out in the nightclub?" Al asked.

"Well, that wasn't so sensitive. It felt good, though."

"That was before the kids," Lauren said.

Rachel called Julia. "We're almost at your place," she said when Julia answered. "Have you cleaned yourself? Are you dressed in fresh clothes? Okay, let us in the parking garage. Did he park in there? Okay. Five minutes." She hung up and turned to them. "No car."

"Good, it's easier to make him disappear this way," Lauren said.

They all piled into the van, and Joe drove them to the building, which had a sloping driveway into the underground parking lot on their right. Luckily, no one was around, and Julia spotted them and opened the retracting gate leading into the lot with a fob, waving them in frantically.

"Thank you," she said after they parked in a visitor spot and got out. Her face quivered in her effort to keep herself together. "Thank you so much, I didn't know what else to do or who to call..."

"Julia," Lauren said calmly, "I need you to take some deep breaths. I know you're probably in shock and panicking right now, but we're going to need clear heads if we're going to do what we need to do."

Julia tried to do what she said. Her hair was damp, and what skin Joe could see was red and irritated, and the clothes she wore had the wrinkled look of having sat folded in a drawer a long time, never used. Her panic seemed to ease after a few breaths, but Joe didn't think it was the breathing that helped, but the knowledge she wasn't alone in this anymore.

Joe opened the hatch of the minivan and pulled out Lauren's kit bag, which he handed to her.

"Take us to your apartment, now," Lauren said. "Let's take the stairs."

"I'm pretty high up, are you sure you want to do that?" Julia asked.

"Less chance of cameras, and fewer people take stairs than elevators in a high rise."

Joe was breathing pretty heavily by the time they reached Julia's floor, where they peeked out to make sure the coast was clear before emerging into the hallway. When they got to the door, Lauren shushed them with a finger to her lips and reached into her bag, pulling out booties and latex gloves for the four of them to wear. Julia didn't need them because it was her apartment. She unlocked the door and led them inside.

"Now," Lauren said. "Can you recall if he screamed when you..."

"No, thank God," Julia said. "I think he gasped, but he was in too much shock to scream. He just couldn't stop looking at the... stump."

"So, you don't think any of your neighbours might have heard anything?"

"I think most of them are out. This is party central, here in the West End. People go out to the beach or the clubs. Lots of gay men, so I don't feel threatened living alone." She shrugged. "Nobody pounded on my door asking what was going on, and no police have come around to respond to a noise complaint."

"Okay, so it may be safe to assume we're flying under the radar right now." Lauren took a deep breath and said, "Okay, let's see him."

Julia led them into the bedroom.

The corpse lay on the bed, covered from the waist down with the top sheet. His mouth was open, eyes bulging from what must have been his final agonizing moments trying to fight through a heart attack.

Lauren scanned the room, eyes assessing how widespread the mess was. "Okay," she said. "Most of the blood is here on the mattress. The clean-up job will be relatively easy."

Rachel leaned in and lifted the sheet covering the injury, and Joe was glad he was on the other side of the sheet and couldn't see it.

"You left it there?" Rachel said, looking up at Julia.

Julia wrapped her arms around herself and shuddered. "I don't know. I was just... so shocked when I realized I bit it off that... I think I just let it fall out of my mouth, and it landed where it landed."

"Good, it all goes together," Lauren said.

"So, just to be clear," Al said, "what are we actually planning to do?"

Joe and Lauren looked at each other. Rachel looked at them, then at Julia.

"Julia didn't call nine-one-one as soon as this happened," Lauren said. "Right away she's incriminated herself, and now that we're involved, every second we're here and not calling the police is making us complicit."

"Maybe I should just call the police and turn myself in," Julia said. "I shouldn't have asked you to put yourselves at risk for me."

"No."

Everyone turned to Rachel. She was shaking her head determinedly. "No. You do that, and then he's the victim, and you go to jail for just being fed up with his shit. This man sent one woman to jail, got me fired, and would have done the same to you, Julia. He was robbing from his own company and letting us take the fall for it. He doesn't get to be remembered as a tragic victim. He doesn't get to be mourned."

This was the Rachel Joe remembered from their days in Queensborough, the one who'd led them fearlessly on adventures, looking for lost dogs, helping runaway kids. This Rachel had been missing when they'd first reunited, and Joe was happy she was back. She shone when she was like this, and he couldn't help smiling and thinking You go, girl!

"So, what do we do? If we aren't calling the police then he can't just stay here," Julia said. "His wife is going to miss him, for one thing."

"His wife was clueless," Rachel said. "I really don't think she ever gave a shit where he was, as long as she could keep spending his money. I bet she even had a piece on the side for her own amusement while he was away. Hell, maybe she knew all about the embezzlement and benefited from it."

"Do you think anyone knew where he was tonight? Anyone at all?" Lauren asked.

Julia shrugged. "He always claimed he told his wife he was working late. I don't think he would have told the people he was working with that he was seeing his mistress, especially after... well... you," she said to Rachel. "And his phone hasn't pinged once since he got here."

"Okay, so he disappears," Lauren said, "and no one ever thinks to ask you where he was, because no one knows he was seeing you."

"But won't people miss him if he's gone too long?" Julia asked. "I know you say his wife is clueless, Rachel, but you'd think she'd start asking around if he's gone longer than a day."

"He's been embezzling," Rachel said. "We're pretty sure he hasn't stopped. Maybe people will just assume he flew the coop."

"Would he do that, though, while he has a suit against you?" Al asked.

"What?" Julia asked.

"It's really just the company that does," Rachel said. "I think the company can still proceed with the suit even without him there. Maybe his Board was already suspicious of him, and when they see he's gone they'll just have had their suspicions confirmed."

"Maybe we can even create a trail that makes it suggestive that he took off," Lauren said. "Where are his wallet and phone?"

Julia gestured to a chair on the other side of the room, where he'd draped his clothes. Lauren searched through his things until she found the wallet. She examined cards and nodded. "His driver's license stays with him. The credit cards and phone will be distributed to some characters with loose morals on Hastings and Main. They will then be hopefully used to make purchases all over the Lower Mainland, and the phone will hopefully be taken in another direction entirely, leading the authorities on a wild goose chase that leads anywhere but here."

She took the credit cards and phone and placed them in a plastic bag she took from her kit bag. The wallet and unusable cards and license she tossed on the body. She did the same with the clothes.

"Julia, do you use a shower curtain or a glass door?" she asked.

"Shower curtain."

"Good. We're going to need it. Joe, did we see a rug in the living room?"

"I think we did," Joe replied.

"Yes," Julia confirmed. "The living room is hardwood flooring. The rug's good for noise reduction."

"I guess you'll need to get a new one. Al, could you go get the shower curtain?"

Al went into the bathroom while Joe set about wrapping the body in the sheets on the bed. The entire bedspread was coming too; the blood had soaked through it all.

Al returned with the shower curtain, holding it as far away from him as he could. If anyone was going to get them arrested, it was this guy.

"Lay the curtain flat on the floor beside the bed," Joe said. When Al did, Joe maneuvered the wrapped burrito with the body inside to the edge of the bed. Rachel saw what he was doing and took one end of it while he took the other, and they slowly lowered it on to the curtain. Even Rachel was better at this than Al, and his opinion of the other man sank even lower, that he would let her do the job he should have been doing.

"Jesus, he's heavy," Rachel said.

Joe made no comment but immediately dragged the shower curtain with burrito on top out into the living room. All of them removed whatever furniture was atop the rug and maneuvered the curtain on top of it on one side. Joe wrapped the curtain as tightly around the burrito as he could, tucking it under all ends, then rolled the whole thing into the rug. Lauren grabbed a roll of duct tape out her sports bag and ripped long strips that Joe took and wrapped around the ends to prevent the whole thing from unrolling.

Lauren surveyed the result, nodded, and walked back into the bedroom. After a minute she emerged and said, "The blood has seeped into the mattress. Do you get visitors?"

Julia shook her head. "I think that's what he counted on. He always came here."

Lauren nodded and then asked, "How's your nerve?"

Julia's brow furrowed. "What do you mean?"

"Do you think you could live with a bloodstained mattress, for a while at least?"

"I don't think I'm going to be sleeping in there for a while anyway."

"Let it dry, then flip it. Then leave it. It's a small enough stain that you could plausibly say you had an accident during your period, and it's in the right place."

She looked at the rest of them. "Al, I'm going to need your help carrying this out. You and Joe will each take an end and put it on your shoulder. When we're out of the apartment, this is a rolled up rug. I will accompany you and make appropriate comments in case we encounter anyone on the way down to the parking garage. Rachel, you and Julia start cleaning the bedroom. Julia, do you have bleach?"

Julia nodded. "I have a lot of whites."

"Anywhere you see red, blot it with rags and diluted bleach according to the instructions on the label."

Lauren gestured to the rug with a nod of her head, and Joe took one end. Al rushed to take the other. Joe took most of the weight, as he predicted, and the differences in their height also made maneuvering the rug awkward.

"Okay," Lauren said, grabbing her bag. "Julia, can Al get back in once we're done?"

"You'll have to hold open the door at the parking lot. I think there's a cinder block on the inside of the elevator bay for movers."

"Okay. Al, once we've loaded it up, you go back upstairs and help them finish cleaning."

Al nodded but said nothing, straining under the weight of the rug.

Joe started moving, and Al stumbled after him. Lauren was already opening the door, holding them off with a hand behind her as she checked the hallway, then waving them on when the coast was clear.

They managed to get in the elevator without being seen, but as they descended, one or two residents entered, looked at the three of them with their gloved hands behind their backs and the big rug leaning vertically against the elevator wall, then looked ahead at the elevator doors, as unwilling to engage them as they were to be engaged. This was cold Vancouver, after all, and strangers simply pretended other elevator riders just weren't there.

The other riders eventually left the elevator on the main floor, leaving them alone again in the parking lot. Lauren found the cinder block and propped open the door for them as they brought the rug to the van. Joe had a fob that luckily opened the hatch for them, and Lauren folded the rear seats down to make room for the rug.

Joe closed the hatch, and they all stood looking at each other.

"Go back up now," Lauren said to Al.

"What are you guys going to do?" he asked.

"Let us worry about that."

"I have a couple of sites I might be able to take advantage of," Joe said, thinking furiously about which of them still needed their foundations poured.

"Jesus. Please, be careful," Al said, voice swelling with emotion. "This is so fucking crazy. Do not endanger your kids' futures, please."

Lauren took a deep breath, and tears came to her eyes. Joe might have cried too if he wasn't so resentful that Al got to go back upstairs, that they still had to deal with this. He cleared his throat and said, "We're all in this together now."

Al offered him his hand, and they did the awkward bro-hug-back-slap thing again. "Call us as soon as you can," Al said, and Joe nodded.

Lauren offered her arms to Al, and he scooped her up and squeezed her tight. "We will," she said. "Whatever happens."

Joe watched Al watching them in his rear view mirror as he drove the van up and out of the parking garage. He resented him a little less for that, for not going back inside right away, for being worried for them, and for knowing the gravity of what they had to do.

To their great fortune, they were able to dispose of everything without being noticed by the authorities, even making a sweat-inducing stop in the Downtown Eastside, perhaps the most heavily policed part of the Lower Mainland, for Lauren to bring both the cell phone and the credit cards to a contact she knew who owned a bar there and would ask no questions about where she got them. Contributing to that fortune was Johnny, who came to Joe's aid with no questions asked, meeting them at the site they chose and helping Joe mix the concrete by hand with the quick efficiency of two Italian boys who'd gotten their start at Gastaldo Concrete. He barely batted an eye at the rolled up rug, only wanted assurance that they had nothing to do with it.

The next morning, a Saturday, Joe returned to the site to view their work. It was in a corner that was self-contained and hadn't required a large pour, so it hadn't taken long to cure. It was small enough that, when the crew arrived later, it was barely remarked upon; when his subcontractors saw him on the site, they probably assumed he'd arrived early to do it himself or with a pumping truck that had come and gone. It had needed to be done, and its timing wasn't odd enough to raise any eyebrows.

Once he made sure his foremen had everything in hand, he drove to the nearest car detailing place and had the van cleaned from the inside out. He didn't think there were any stains in the trunk from the body; the shower curtain should have prevented any blood from seeping out, and the rug should have absorbed any that might have gotten past the shower curtain. It didn't hurt to be sure, though; if the police got their hands on the van, they'd be able to detect the tiniest speck.

While he waited for the cleaners to do their work, he opened his phone and scrolled through his contacts. He thought about calling Lauren, but she knew he was coming here, so she would only wonder why he was calling, and he never called anyone just to chat.

He saw Rachel's number. He'd called it to book her for work, and once he'd called her to invite her and Al over to their place for a lunch. The two of them were together now, Lauren had gleefully told him, and he wondered if she would be with Al if he called her, and if Al would feel threatened by it.

He hoped he would.

"Joe?" she answered. "Is everything okay?"

"Hi, Rachel, yeah, everything's fine. I went back to the place where we... you know... made our deposit..."

"Uh-huh?" she asked, confused at the way he was trying to avoid talking about what they'd done over the phone.

"And no one seems to have noticed anything out of the ordinary," he finished.

"Oh! Well, good! When Lauren called me to tell me everything went according to plan last night, I was so relieved."

"Yeah. Anyway, I was just here getting the van cleaned, and thought I'd check in to see how you were doing."

She sighed, and he could tell she was really thinking about it. "It's nice of you to ask. I'm okay, all things considered. I'm more worried about you."

"Me?" he asked, startled.

"And Lauren. I mean, the two of you did the bulk of the work, and took the most risks. It can't have been easy for you."

He couldn't speak for a moment, he was so moved. "Thanks, Rachel," he said, voice heavy. "It was nerve wracking, for sure."

"I want to thank you again for helping. It wasn't your fight, but you did it anyway."

"I did it for you," he blurted.

If she heard what he'd said, she ignored it. Maybe she didn't want to acknowledge his declaration of... something. Love? Infatuation? Affection? "I'm sure Lauren convinced you to help, though. She's a force of nature."

He chuckled ruefully. "She sure is. So, what are you up to today?"

"Well, there's more work to be done cataloguing the contents of Mrs. Anderson's house. Al's booking a Modo car, and then we'll be on our way."

"Oh. So, you're with Al right now?"

"Well, yeah. We slept at my place last night. It's a bit of a chore commuting between our two places, but we only just started our relationship and it's a bit early to discuss who'll move in with whom." She paused. "Did I tell you we're together?"

"Well, Lauren told me. I'm... happy for you. You deserve to be happy."

"Thank you, Joe. That means a lot to me."

Something about what she'd said made him say, "Remember when we were seven, and you were yelling outside my window that you loved me, and then we thought we'd get married?"

She burst out laughing. "Oh, boy, we must have been so cute. I think I remember that I wanted to get a house next to the apartment we lived in at the time, because I didn't want to leave my dad."

"Oh, yeah," he said sheepishly. "I'm really sorry your dad passed away. I didn't really tell you that time at Mrs. Anderson's memorial. I was too stunned, to tell you the truth. It made me think of my dad, and how he nearly died. I can't imagine him gone."

She was silent for a moment. "Yeah," she croaked, and Joe could hear her suppressing tears. "No one can imagine losing a parent, but it's the natural order of things, isn't it. Losing a child, though, that would be worse, wouldn't it."

"Lauren miscarried twice before we had Naomi," his mouth said before his brain could stop it.

Rachel was quiet for what seemed a long time. "What?" she finally breathed.

"I'm sorry, I shouldn't have told you, it just came out. Please don't tell anyone, especially Lauren. It's a very painful subject."

"I imagine it would be. Poor Lauren. Oh, Joe, I'm so sorry, for both of you. That must have been a very dark time for you."

He grabbed at his hair in an attempt to distract from the pain in his heart with the pain in his scalp. "Yeah," he said in a near whisper. "It was. It very nearly broke us. I think there were times she actually hated me."

"Oh, Joe, no, Lauren's loved you her entire life. There's no way she would hate you for something that was nobody's fault. She was just suffering, like you were, and that was just her way of expressing it."

"I don't know," he said, and to his embarrassment he found himself wiping tears from his cheeks. "I wasn't the best husband at the time. My parents were assholes to her and I didn't stand up for her."

"Jesus, I guess they've never really accepted her, have they? They had different ambitions for you, as your mother told me when we were seven and she was disabusing me of my own ambition to marry you. They wanted you to marry an Italian girl."

He sighed in frustration. "Yeah, well, that's an old story, and you'd think they'd have gotten used to her by now."

"I don't know what to say, Joe, I'm sorry. I won't tell anyone about the miscarriages, you can count on me."

"Where's Al, though, if you're mentioning it on the phone?"

"Oh, he's gone to get the car. I made him go on his own to give us privacy. I don't like talking on the phone and walking at the same time."

Joe felt a brief flicker of satisfaction that she'd sent Al away so she could talk to him in private. "Well, if you're about to leave, I should let you go."

"Thanks again for calling, Joe, and I hope you two will be okay."

"Well, time will tell. With our friends around, though, it'll be easier to weather any storm that comes."

She chuckled and said, "I don't think I've ever heard you say anything so sappy."

He groaned and said, "It must be getting old and having parents at death's door. We get sentimental, don't we?"

"I guess. Hey, speaking of friends, I promised Marjorie Wilson at the Historical Society, the ones who are getting Mrs. Anderson's house, that one day we'll all get together at the house and do a photo shoot and interview session with her; she's putting a display in the house when it becomes a museum, to show us as kids and as adults, a before and after thing."

"She's putting us in a display?" he asked in astonishment. "Why?"

"Mrs. Anderson told her all about us, apparently. She told her about the time we saved Danny Trybek, and about the LSDC. She thought it was a hoot, and thought Mrs. Anderson would have loved to see a display of us in the museum if she'd been around to see it."

Joe felt inordinately touched. "That's incredible," he said. "Who would ever think we were that interesting?"

"Who indeed?" she said. "Well, I'll let you know when we set up a time."

"Sounds good. Thanks for letting me know. I'll tell Lauren as soon as I can, she'll probably be thrilled. Maybe we'll bring the kids and make it a day."

"Great. I'll call Sunny and ask him to do the same. Take it easy, Joe."

"You too. Bye, Rachel."

She hung up, and Joe stared wistfully into the distance as the cleaners vacuumed and shampooed the carpets and seats. He'd have to tell Lauren about the call, since she'd wonder how he knew about Rachel's invitation to the house. He'd leave out the part about telling her about the miscarriages, and about their reminiscing about their marriage talk at seven; she'd get jealous because he'd never mentioned it before. All in all, though, he was glad he called.

Thanks for reading this far! If you've read the first two novels in this series, you'll have seen this chapter written from Al's and Lauren's points of view. This is another of those pivotal scenes in the story of the LSDC, so now it's time for Joe's. If you liked what you just read, hit "Vote" to send this title up the ranks. If something doesn't ring true about the pouring of concrete foundations and their effectiveness in hiding a body, leave a comment. I strive for authenticity. Let's get back to the present day, the girls' day out, and Tej's revelation of her real motivation for her snooping, by clicking on "Continue reading."