He glanced at her and smiled. “A different kind of feta,” he said. “It’s not in a brine.”
“Well, I didn’t know that feta came in a brine before,” she said, “so that doesn’t really matter. But I’ve never seen it in this shape either.”
“It’s just dry,” he said.
She looked at him. “So, are we having that for dinner?”
“More of a Greek pasta,” he said with a shrug. “I picked up a roasted chicken, which I’ll chop up. And we have black olives, fresh tomatoes, feta, and I’ll do a little bit of an olive oil sauce.”
“Sounds lovely,” she said. “Hot?”
He nodded.
“So, slightly different from the pasta salads I used to get with the artichokes?”
“Absolutely,” he said.
“Now that I remembered that dish,” she said, rubbing her stomach, “I could certainly go for some of that too.”
“Too bad,” he said instantly. And before long, he had a pan full of pasta warming up and took big cans of black olives from his bag, draining off the liquid from two of them, cutting the olives into quarters and tossing them into the pan. And then he diced up several big tomatoes that were really fleshy.
She looked at him and frowned. “Those are olive shaped.”
“Romas,” he said. “They’re a little fleshy or less juicy, and they go great for when you don’t want the tomatoes to fall apart.” He chopped them up, added them to the pan, then some mushrooms and a bit of olive oil, and sautéed it all together. She wasn’t even sure what else he put in.
“Wait,” she exclaimed. “What did you just add?”
“Diced garlic,” he said patiently. Then he added big dollops of butter to it all and gently sautéed everything together, while he chopped up all the chicken breasts from the chicken. With that added in too, the aroma made her superhungry.
“Can I do anything?” she asked as she watched.
“A salad would be good, if you have anything to go into it. I forgot to ask.”
She immediately went to her fridge and nodded. “I can do that.” She made up a simple green salad with cucumbers and was finished at the same time he served up two large plates of pasta. With the two bowls of salad and two pasta plates, they sat outside on her tiny deck, and she smiled. “It’ll be nice to have a big deck here.”
“I’ll take a look at what supplies we’ve got after this,” he said. “Sounds like a lot has arrived since I saw the pile.”
“In the meantime, you can tell me about the little old ladies too,” she said.
He remained silent and gave her a secretive smile.
She groaned. “Don’t go after the Bob Small stuff,” she said, “because that’s a big project.”
His eyebrows shot up, and he glared at her.
She shrugged. “It’s a cold case.”
“It’s probably thirty cold cases,” he muttered. “If not three times that.”
Chapter 3
Friday Dinnertime …
“Well, with long-haul truckers,” Doreen said, “it’s pretty hard to keep track of their routes and who they could have come in contact with. Easy to stay under the radar for decades.”
“Exactly the problem,” Mack said. “On top of that, a lot of issues helped killers who operate across the provinces. The lack of cooperation and information sharing among the authorities was a real problem. These cases are from way before we ended up with any of the tracking systems we have now. And before the internet too, so it’s not like searching for information on these cases was easy.”
“In other words, with a little bit of luck, he kept trucking across the country, doing whatever he wanted, without getting caught,” she said, shaking her head. “So many families have been affected.”
“So many families,” he admitted.
“And the little old ladies?”
“No mystery there. One died of what we’re assuming is a natural cause, but we’re still waiting for the autopsy to come back on the last one.”
“So the first woman had a heart attack and dropped?”
“It happens,” he stated.
“It does as long as nothing was done to help push that heart attack forward.”
“Like what?”
She shrugged. “If she was in bed, and maybe an intruder came, and she was afraid for her life or something …” Doreen said, grasping for straws. “I don’t really know, but …”
“She was walking on the sidewalk,” he said.
“And nobody came up behind her and yelled into her ear with a great big megaphone or something like that?”
His eyebrows shot up. “Well, I don’t know that for sure,” he said cautiously. “Nobody saw her fall. She was found dead on the sidewalk.”
“Interesting,” she muttered. “How many is that now?”
“Three,” he said in exasperation. “But remember. Old people die.”
She snorted at that. “Apparently, in this town, young people do too.” He coughed out a laugh, but a grim look was on his face. “What about the other two?”
“No way to know yet,” he said.
“Same circumstances on the street? But not expecting anything odd on the autopsies?”
“One in a parking lot,” he said, “and one in a park. Looks like heart attacks.”
“All alone, all unattended, and nobody saw anything. Right?”
He slowly lowered his fork, then looked at her and said, “That’s what I was afraid of.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“I was afraid that you would see it the way I saw it.”
“As in, it’s a problem, right?”
He nodded slowly.
“What are the chances of three gray-haired ladies—Within what? Five days?—all dying in a similar way and sharing what seems to be the same cause of death?”
“It happens,” he said. “We just don’t have the population where I would expect it to happen so closely together.”
She pointed her fork at him. “You know what? That’s a really good point. If we were in Vancouver with a population of maybe three million, or say Paris or someplace where we’re talking eleven million people, the numbers of gray-haired ladies dying from a heart attack would be much higher. And then maybe you would get three who died without people around them in a public
