The Taken

11

It had been four days since the mannequin had been found in Gannon Lake, and so far, the meaning of what they’d learned was still far from clear. Hazel disliked the sense that someone else was in control here, was doling out the information at a pace that suited them. The case was like a dark wave forming in the distance and they couldn’t be sure when it would crash at their feet. She had to consider that there was no proof that the man in the internet sequence was actually being attacked, or that the images they had seen were anything more than a bad short film concocted by someone to make them look. But the connection of the mannequin to the internet address; the black photographs and the dirty shadowy wall in the film; Eldwin unreachable in Toronto, and Bellocque and Paritas at large for the whole weekend… it was a strain to think nothing was going on. But it was also a kind of law in policework that the most innocent things often turned out to have malevolent cores, and complex sets of interlocking clues just as often blew apart to vapour. What you learned was to pay attention to everything, presume nothing, and never be surprised. Her vigilance would not wane, but it felt like an impotent readiness, like she had her gun drawn on fog.

It was midday Tuesday and all was quiet in the detachment. Apart from the ongoing intrigue concerning the trapped man, there was nothing of interest to report. A couple of traffic tickets was all. The cityfolk had returned to their city, and the locals were sweeping up. Summer, with all its danger and amusement, was soon to be upon them. It was time for a coat of paint and a restocking of shelves.

PC Bail had been keeping an eye on the internet film. It was running in a window on her desktop, like an unimportant conference call. “Nothing,” she said when Hazel asked. “Just the same two minutes of depravity over and over.”

Hazel thanked her and went into her office. She opened the laptop there and confirmed what Bail had said: the film sequence had not changed. It made almost twenty-four hours of the same loop playing over and over. She would have to keep herself occupied with about three weeks of daily reports piled on her desk for her perusal. Most of these she’d seen already -Wingate had brought them to the house in dribs and drabs, but evidently, he wasn’t confident enough to have them filed with only his initials on them. There was still nothing more interesting than a stolen iPod in week one, and week two had a complaint from a Mr. Stoneham about a scratch on his car. The current week’s files, which she hadn’t seen, were three strong: a domestic, a stolen bicycle, a beef in a café that escalated into someone throwing a teacup. That might be the quintessential Port Dundas crime, she thought. A fight that ends with someone getting scalded by Darjeeling.

Wingate knocked. “Come,” she said.

“Are you busy?”

She screwed her mouth up at him. “Are you for real?”

“How’d your visit to Bellocque go?”

“It was fine. Better than fine. Too bad he’s not single.”

Wingate gave her a crooked smile. “I gather nothing has changed onscreen.”

“No. Every hour that passes though, I feel more and more the victim of a prank. What’s the deal with Eldwin?”

“Nothing yet.”

“Jesus.”

“Claire Eldwin promised she’d call the second he turned up.”

“She sure didn’t sound like she was baking him a Welcome Home cake. You kind of got the feeling she’d be happy if he stayed away as long as he liked.”

“You starting to think he’s tied to a chair in his own basement?”

“Can’t rule it out,” said Hazel. “He doesn’t sound like the kind of guy a lot of people would miss.”

“Well, the mannequin came up on Friday,” said Wingate, “which means whoever put that video on the net had it ready to go from that point, and that’s the day Eldwin went to Toronto.”

“Hmm,” said Hazel. “Where’s the loose thread here, Wingate? What about Jellinek? Do we know where he is?”

“We can find out.” He opened his notebook and flipped a couple of pages, then picked up the phone on her desk and dialled. “Is this Cal Jellinek?” He listened for a moment, then cupped the phone. “Do you want me to ask him if he’s currently being held in a basement and/or being threatened with a knife?”

“Ask him if Pat Barlow is there.”

Wingate did, and then passed Hazel the phone when she gestured for it. “Ms. Barlow?”

“Yes.”

“How did you know where that mannequin was?”

Wingate creased his eyes at her. “What?” said Barlow.

“You must have known exactly where it was if you drove your customers right to it.”

“Jesus Christ! Are you kidding me?”

“Well?”

“It’s bad enough the lake is full of fry this year, Detective Inspector. You really think I make up for bad fishing with jokes?”

“So you just happened upon that thing.”

There was a pause. “I had no idea what was down there,” Barlow said slowly. “I’m not lying.”

“If you were, that’s what you’d say anyway.”

“If you want to arrest me for something, do it,” said Barlow angrily. “But if you just want to blow smoke up my ass, leave a message next time.” She slammed the phone down and Hazel pulled her head back smartly. Wingate was looking at her with an unimpressed look on his face.

“It was worth a try,” she said.

“Was it?”

“Look, something has to give here! Someone is waving their hand in front of our face: hey! look here, look here! But what are we supposed to be doing?”

“What can we do?” he asked. “We can’t inspect every basement in the county.”

“It would be better than sitting on our rear ends.”

“I’m frustrated too,” he said.

She held up the last folder she’d been reading. “I’m starting to think I’ve got a better chance of clearing the Darjeeling Caper than making heads or tails of what turned up in Gannon Lake. Maybe there’s a next move, but I don’t know what it is. All I can think of is Eldwin now. You keep on his wife and try to nail down where her husband is.”

“Will do,” said Wingate.

She closed the files that were in front of her and pushed them to him across the desk. “I’m done with these.”

Wingate was about to leave the paperwork when there was a knock at the door, and Cartwright pushed it open partway. “Busy?”

“I was just leaving,” said Wingate, and he slipped past her in the doorway. Cartwright came in with a coffee and a giant chocolate muffin, both of which she put down on Hazel’s desk.

“Early birthday present,” she said.

Wingate bent back into the doorway. “Your birthday?”

“Thursday,” said Hazel. “I’m going to be thirty-nine again.” He looked blankly at her. No one had got her Jack Benny joke in ten years. It was sad how things kept changing.

She was aware of the shadows of her personnel sliding by in the frosted window in the door, but for almost an hour, no one had disturbed her. She watched numbly the endless attack on the unknown victim unspooling on her laptop. It was like a song she couldn’t get out of her head, a song without lyrics, although the more she watched the sequence, the more she became aware of the dreadful music in it. The Percocet she’d taken before leaving the house had peaked and was wearing off: it made the footage seem more raw to her, it hurt more to watch it, and she thought of the other pill, the one wrapped in tinfoil, in her pants pocket, which she wasn’t going to touch unless she really needed it. She’d taken the morning pill as a precaution, although if she were being entirely honest with herself she’d admit she’d taken it because she wanted to. In general, she could feel various aches reasserting themselves at various times, but the truth was she was beginning to feel certain that she could get through the day on her own. She could keep the bottle of pills – and the one in her pocket – as a promise of comfort if she needed it. Needed it, she told herself.

She got out a scrap of paper from a drawer and wrote down in point form some of the things she thought she should bring up with Willan tomorrow morning. She’d try at first to focus on what they were actually doing in Port Dundas before he trotted out his ratios and his per-capitas. She wanted him to hear what they were dealing with, especially now, and how important the police department was in the community. Willan was going to use the word catchment and talk about efficiencies. He was going to tell her Port Dundas would take on the mantle of county HQ, and she’d be in charge of more people than she was now: it was going to be a challenge and he knew she could rise to it. And when she told him it would mean lost jobs and fewer services and maybe not being able to solve crimes like the one they were working on right now, he was going to shrug and tell her redistribution of employees would amount to a couple of lucrative early retirements, a couple of redeployments, no one was getting fired, and all they’d have to do after the rearranging would be to stay on top of their game… just like they are now! She’d never met this man – apart from the letter that had been sent around to her beat cops, she didn’t know a thing about him – and already she didn’t like him.

She let Melanie bring her a late lunch of a club sandwich and a Diet Coke, and stayed at her desk writing out facts and figures as they pertained to Port Dundas. While she wrote, she kept the laptop screen tilted discreetly away so as not to be distracted by it. But she saw the loop repeat and repeat in the corner of her eye.

She saw their detachment’s case clearly, but she knew he’d only hear her trying to save their own bacon. What did OPSC know about Westmuir? When did those clowns ever leave their desks and come and see the policing realities up here? Anything north of Central was a pin on one of their maps, a line on a graph. She hoped she wouldn’t be reduced to shouting.

Melanie knocked again about half an hour later, and Hazel didn’t look up from her notes, just told her she was done lunch and thanks, but Melanie was standing in the doorway. “What is it?”

“Surprise!” she said.

Hazel put down her pen. Cartwright was holding up a large box wrapped in bright paper. It seemed half the detachment was standing in the hallway behind her. “Come on, now,” said Hazel. “You guys are too much.”

Cartwright pushed the door fully open and came in to put the box down on her desk. Windemere, Bail, Wilton, Wingate, and Forbes followed her in with big grins on their faces. It was one of those department-store wrapping jobs: hospital corners, ribbon, and a rosette. “This better not be another cellphone,” she said, and they all laughed. She turned it around. “You all tossed five bucks into a hat, but you couldn’t manage a card?”

Cartwright turned on the officers and gave them an exasperated look. “You guys raised by wolves, or what?” “Hey, don’t look at me,” said Forbes.

“Never mind,” said Hazel, and she began to tear at the paper. Within was a child’s toy, a game called Mouse Trap. Everyone laughed and clapped, and someone said it was a very clever gift. Hazel remembered the game from Martha’s childhood: you won by building a Rube Goldberg machine that dropped a plastic net on top of a mouse. She looked up grinning at the officers. “Absolutely fitting,” she said. “Whose idea was this?”

They looked back and forth between them, but no one was taking credit.

“What? I have a secret admirer?”

“Well, I just followed the bright paper,” admitted Windemere. “I actually, uh, didn’t contribute.” She turned to her colleagues. “Yet!”

Hazel put her hands on top of the box. “So… this is from all of you?” No one said anything. She picked up the gift. “What’s going on?” she said, but then all at once she dropped the box on the table and stood, alarmed.

“What?” said Wingate, stepping forward into the room.

“That doesn’t smell right,” she said. “There’s something in there, that isn’t a… isn’t a -”

“Okay,” he said, “let’s everyone get out of this room -” but he didn’t finish what he was saying, because the box was moving. There was a sound from within it, like a mechanical whine, and then something was tearing frantically at the end of the box, moving it in short jabs toward the end of the table until it upended and went crashing to the floor.

“Jesus,” said Hazel, instinctively stepping away, but as she did something blew out of the top of the half-opened box, a red, screeching blur like a child’s firecracker, and she dove for the ground, batting at the air over her head. There was general disorder in the room, strange half-uttered cries, and a crush for the door, but then Forbes called out, “Hold on! Hold on -”

“Fuck!” yelled Hazel, now standing again. She stared at what Forbes was staring at. “What the fuck?”

It was a mouse. It was standing in the corner, its eyes shuttling back and forth between the two sides of the room. She supposed it was a regular white mouse, but this one was red, or at least it had been painted red, although she could see a darker line of what had to be blood dripping from its mouth.

“Why is that thing red?” said Hazel. “What the hell is going on here?” Forbes and Wingate stepped deeper into the room, walking carefully to the side of her desk where the game had fallen. Wingate toed the lids apart and then recoiled.

“Good god,” he said.