The Taken

7

The body hung in the water like a closed fist. Dale held on to the railing, his fingers cold on the metal, and listened to himself breathing. His son was sitting on the cooler behind him, his head in his hands. Gus had thrown up three times after they realized what they’d found in the water. Some bonding experience, Dale thought. This lake was poisoned forever for them now.

He’d secured the body to the side of the boat by tying a rope to the ankle. To do this, he’d had to dangle over the side of the boat with Gus gripping his own legs in trembling arms. Dale knew nothing about bodies, but he knew they decomposed after death, fell apart, and this body was still, despite its missing head, intact. But the water was cold, and maybe that had helped to preserve it. When his fingertips brushed up against the bottom of the corpse’s foot, it had been as if a wave of electricity shot through him. He thought he’d light up like a fluorescent tube.

“Okay,” he said, sitting against the gunwale and panting for breath as his son puked onto the deck beside him. He laid the hand that hadn’t touched the body against Gus’s back. He felt like the other hand would never be clean again. He had the urge to cut it off and throw it away so it could not reproach him with what it knew. “It’s okay. We’ll calm down and we’ll call the police.”

“Aw Jesus. Jesus Christ,” sobbed Gus. He threw up again. “Who would do such a thing?”

“It’s not our job to figure it out,” said Dale, his hand moving in slow circles against his son’s back. “I’m sorry you had to see that.”

He helped Gus to his feet and sat him gingerly on the cooler. He took out his cell and saw he could still get a faint signal on it. He dialled a number and spoke to someone, keeping one eye on Gus to make sure the kid didn’t faint. He folded the cell and put it back into his pocket. “Someone’ll be here soon,” he said. “We just have to keep it together until then.”

Gus nodded, his eyes locked to the decking. Dale stood against the railing, looking out over the water and trying not to look down at what was secured against the hull, that sad, wrecked form.

A half-hour later, the two of them hadn’t moved from their positions, both of them lost in their thoughts. The sun was pouring down its light from a sharp angle, and Dale had to pull his cap down over his forehead to keep his eyes from watering. He heard the boat first before he saw it, and then, coming around the point of one of the larger islands, it turned on a direct heading toward them. Gus stood up. “Jesus, that felt like it took two hours.”

Dale dug in his jacket pocket and pulled out his car keys. “Listen to me, Gus. You can get the boat back to the dock, right?”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m going to go with this guy, okay? Answer some questions if they need me to. There’s no reason for you to get mixed up in this.”

“I’m not leaving you, Dad.”

“And then you get in the car and go home and you tell your mother I went to the Super C to get lemons, okay? I’ll be home after lunch.”

The approaching boat had cut its motor and the driver was angling the wheel to pull up sideways against them. The boat moved in a slow, unnatural skid toward them. The man in the boat wasn’t in uniform. “What’s going on, Dad?”

Dale took his son by the shoulders. “I want you to trust me. Tell me you trust me.”

“I do.”

“Can you get the boat back and then get home?” Gus was looking over his shoulder at the man standing in the other boat. Dale put his hand under his son’s chin and tenderly brought his attention back to him. “Gus?”

“Yeah.”

“I know you wish you never saw this, but I have to do the right thing, and you’ve got no place in it, do you understand?”

“No. But I’ll do what you tell me to if that’s what you want.”

“That’s what I want.” He released his boy and then stepped to the railing and put his foot on it. The man in the other boat held his hand out, and Dale gripped it and leapt the space between the two crafts. “Hand me the other end of that rope, Gus,” he said, and his son untied the rope where they’d secured it to the railing. Dale caught it and began to draw it in, hand over hand. The body bobbed in the water and then sank a little under the weight of being dragged. The other man leaned over, bracing his knees against the gunwale of his boat, and gripped the arm furthest away from him, and the two men began to lift the inert form into the other boat. And as it came out of the water, resisting them, magnetized to its resting place, Gus saw the corpse turning and his heart seized in his chest. It was a woman.

“Go!” said Dale, and Gus started from his staring and turned the key in the ignition. He pushed the throttle and the boat curved away from the scene in a wide circle.

The body was almost in the boat. “Where’s your truck?” Dale asked the other man.

“It’s backed up against the dock.”

“Anyone there?”

“We’ll be sure before we tie up.”

The other man put his boat in drive again, and headed back in the direction he’d come in. Dale sat in one of the leather seats, his eyes locked to the heartbreaking form, and for the first time, he wept. Even without her eyes to look emptily on him, it was as if her entire body could see him.

When they came around into the island’s lee, the shore seemed quiet, and they went directly to the dock. The other man backed his truck down as far as it was safe, and the two of them wrapped the body in a tarp and hefted it together into the flatbed. They drove the short distance to town and down into its streets. “There,” said Dale, pointing at one of the pretty gabled houses in the middle of the street. “Pull into that driveway.”

They parked under the big willow. Its feathery flowers had gone to seed and a carpet of soft catkins lay on the asphalt. “He’s done well for himself,” said Dale. The garden was well kept, with rare trees and a small burbling fountain in the bend of a serpentine flagstone path that led to the door. They lifted the corpse out of the back of the truck and carried it down the path and laid it on the broad granite step in front of a heavy oak door. Dale took a note out of his breast pocket and, with a fishhook, attached it to the tarp. Then he rang the doorbell and the two men walked in a leisurely fashion back down the path. “What the good goddamn?” said Hazel Micallef. Wingate was looking at his copy and held his finger up. He was a slower reader. He was sitting across from her in her office, the first time she’d tried to occupy that chair since the end of March. She realized, a little surprised by the thought, that she was finally on the uptick. After a minute, Wingate laid the newspaper against her desktop.

“I didn’t see that coming,” he said.

“Is this Eldwin character back yet? I want him in here, like now.”

“I did try him again, this morning, but his wife doesn’t expect him back up until this afternoon.”

“Did she say where he went?”

“ Toronto. He had meetings, she said.”

“He writes three chapters of this thing, all hell breaks loose, and he’s in meetings in the Big Smoke? Who is this guy? Call his wife back. Tell her we want to talk to him. Now.”

“Okay -” He flipped open his PNB and found Eldwin’s number. “You want me to do this here?”

“On speakerphone.”

He dialled and a woman answered. “What is it?”

“Um, Mrs. Eldwin?”

“Speaking.” She sounded mad as hell.

“This is Detective Constable James Wingate calling again.” “You called this morning.”

He and Hazel traded a look. “That’s right, Ma’am. I was hoping your husband was home. You said you were expecting him.”

“‘Expecting’ is the wrong word to use in relation to my husband.”

“So he isn’t home?”

“Wow, you are a detective.”

Hazel bent over the phone. “Mrs. Eldwin,” she said firmly. “This is Inspector Detective Hazel Micallef. I’d advise you to drop your tone.”

“Jesus Christ,” Mrs. Eldwin muttered. “What did he do?”

“Why do you think he did something?”

“Well, you’re bloody eager to get him on the phone.”

“We just need to talk to him,” said Wingate. “Clear a couple of things up.”

The unmistakable sound of ice tinkling in a glass came over the speakers. “Let me ask you something, detectives. What do you know about PIs?”

“I’m sorry?” said Wingate.

“Do they even exist?”

“Private investigators?”

“Yes.”

“Mrs. Eldwin -” he began in an effort to get her back on track, but Hazel interrupted.

“Are you considering hiring a PI? Do you think something’s happened to your husband?”

Eldwin snorted derisively. “God no. At least I hope not. I wouldn’t want anything to happen to him before I got my hands around his neck myself.”

“What is going on here, Mrs. Eldwin?”

“He goes to town Friday, saying he’s got meetings and research – who has meetings on the May long weekend, huh?”

“Well, some people -”

“- and then calls and says he’s stuck in town until Monday. And then he stops answering his phone. What does that sound like to you?”

“I don’t know,” said Hazel. “What does it sound like to you?”

She swallowed something lustily. “It sounds like the same old story to me.”

“Is he not the kind of person to have meetings?”

“He’s the kind of person to penetrate other women.”

“I see,” said Hazel. “So you think he’s having an affair. And you want to hire a PI to catch him in the act?”

“So how much?” Eldwin asked.

“How much what?”

“How much for a PI? And do I have to pay expenses too?”

Hazel was getting frustrated, but she could tell this Mrs. Eldwin wasn’t going to turn out to be willing, so Hazel was going to have to be careful if she wanted to get anything useful out of the conversation. “I’d say a hundred a day is fair,” she said. “But you could save that money.”

“Oh yeah? You guys going to offer me a twofer?”

“We’ve got resources private eyes don’t. We might be able to track him down for you. But we need somewhere to start. Do you know the names of any of his associates in Toronto? What about the number of the person he went down to meet?”

“Look in the gutters,” she said. “Back alleys, whorehouses, dingy bars, that sort of thing. You’ll find him sooner or later. Let me know when you do.”

She took another big long drag on a cigarette and hung up. There was a pause and then a dial tone. “Wow,” said Hazel, “did you run her through CPIC?”

“I will.”

“Okay, so Eldwin’s gone to ground for whatever reason, his wife is drinking before noon, and we still have two amateur anglers at large. Where are we with Bellocque and Paritas? Do we have addresses?”

“Nothing for this Paritas woman, so I assume she and Bellocque live together.”

“How can there not be an address attached to her number?”

“Maybe it’s a cell.”

“Aren’t cells registered?”

He looked at her, a little sadly, she thought. “Well, they can be but you can also walk into Loblaws, buy your groceries, a bunch of flowers, and a prepaid cell with nothing but a handful of cash.”

“Fine. But you have an address for this Bellocque?”

He put his finger on it. “It’s a Gilmore address. You know where that is?”

“Yes, James. I live here, remember?” She shook her head. “Jesus, it’s been three days and we still don’t have a single statement. What the hell ever happened to the police called, call back as a working notion?”

“I’m sorry. I should have been more active yesterday, but the truth is, with this thing not changing much” – he gestured at the laptop – “and most of our primaries out on long-weekend DUIs and fender-benders, I guess I just thought some of this could wait until today.”

“There’s a man tied to a chair somewhere, James. A man we were pointed to by a broken, drowned mannequin. What about that seems not urgent?”

He breathed slowly to get his heart to stop pounding. “I hear you, Skip. But the truth is, we don’t know if that man is ‘tied’ to a chair, or if he’s in any danger, or even if what we’re seeing is real. And the truth is…”

“What? What is the truth?”

“The truth is, I’m not sure who’s the lead on this now. Is it me? Because if it is, I think you need to trust me to run it my way.”

She looked at him flatly, but he saw the fire behind her eyes. “Thirty-six hours have passed in idleness over a question of chain of command? Is that why you’ve been sitting on your ass?”

He stilled his face. She’d never spoken to him like this before. “I should go run Mrs. Eldwin through the database. Is there anything else you want me to do?”

“Go see Burt Levitt and show him a picture of the mannequin. See if it means anything to him. Ask where a person could buy one or find something like it.”

“Fine,” said Wingate, and he left without another word. The space he’d been standing in seemed to be buzzing. She had an instinct to call him back in and apologize right away, but she let him go. She’d been itching for weeks to come back to work, but now that she was here, she wasn’t sure her head was right.

She’d spent much of Sunday in Glynnis’s office with the door closed, reading the newspaper and keeping an eye on the site, but nothing had changed from the night before. Against their expectations, the camera’s pan hadn’t progressed anymore. It was as if someone had jarred it during that first hour after Wingate had discovered the page. It had been panning through the same visual field since then and it was making her more and more nervous. Maybe this was why she’d snapped at Wingate. She wanted them to make something happen.

She returned her attention to the screen. The camera was midway through its usual movement. In a minute, it would terminate on that mysterious, nervous leg. She watched it until it did. Was this the house? The house where a corpse with a note attached to it had just been dropped off, according to “The Mystery of Bass Lake”? She didn’t want to make the wrong connections, but her mind was eager to find a link, any link, between these things.

She looked at her watch. It was just past noon. In three hours, the highways heading south were going to fill with sad revellers returning to the city, and she was going to have to have more cars on the road to deal with the inevitable mess. Like the first snowfall of the year, when it seemed as if people simply lost their minds, the end of the Victoria Day weekend always meant a massive traffic snafu. By 5 p.m. every tow truck in the county would be on call.

She popped the lid of her Percocets and gazed into the vial. There were still twenty or more left in the bottle. She put one of the white pills in her mouth and swallowed it dry. On Sunday, she’d taken only two, and at their correct intervals. And she’d had only one this morning, but foresaw it would take at least three to get through the day, and she knew the next one she took would be more out of want than need. If she could get down to only the ones she needed, then she’d come off them. It was probably a good idea to come off them. Soon.

She knew, and she’d been told, how addicting these pills were, but she’d been on them in one form or another for almost three years, and although she depended on them now, she still told herself she was not dependent on them. And if she was, wouldn’t someone tell her? Wouldn’t someone notice? In any case, if she really wanted to stop, she would and could. Of course she knew addicts always told themselves they could stop at any time, so her confidence was not evidence one way or the other.

But she knew herself. She knew her weaknesses were things she could exercise her will over when she wanted to. The things you told yourself tended to come true, and Hazel told herself she did not have a problem. If she did, she’d have to wait until she was out of the woods before she dealt with it.

She checked the screen on her desk again and watched the feed from the beginning of the pan. Now that she knew how it ended, just the sight of the waterstained back wall of the space was enough to get her heart pounding. She stared at it, willing it to show her something new, and her phone rang. She jumped.

“Jesus,” she said into the receiver.

“No, Spere.”

“Tell me you’ve got something for me, Howard.”

“Nothing good,” he said. “The DNS number resolves to gobbledegook. Not even a provider we can trace comes up. It’s just out there, beaming in from outer space, for all we know.”

“What about those pictures James sent you? What are they?”

“Just badly exposed snaps, I’m afraid. I’ve sent them to Allen Barry, our imaging guy, but he’s in Toronto, so it might be a while before he weighs in.”

“Thanks for nothing.”

“A pleasure as usual,” said Howard Spere.