The Taken

21

Caro opened the door and stood aside, looking on the small collection of law enforcement on her front porch with an expression verging on disgust. Hazel had to wonder what her face looked like when she needed help from the same professionals she obviously held in such contempt. “I’m not being quoted in any report, I’m just telling you that now,” she said.

“Hold on,” said Childress, getting out her PNB. “Let me just write that down… not being quoted. Okay, great. You can go back to your apartment now.”

Caro made haste up the stairs. Hutchins had his flashlight out. “Okay, we’re going to take it from here,” he said. “You two can wait upstairs or on the verandah.”

“All due respect, Officer -”

“Yes,” he said. “All due. We’ll make full disclosure afterwards.”

“Please,” said Hazel.

Hutchins and Childress traded a silent communication. “You have a gun?” asked Childress.

“They do arm us in the OPS.” She turned her hip to them.

“He has to stay,” Childress said.

“Oh, I don’t want to go,” said Andrew, and she narrowed her eyes at him and then threw a glance to her partner. He shrugged.

The entry to the basement was beside the door that led to the upper apartments. Hutchins took the lead, but he kept his gun holstered. She wanted to say something about that, but decided to stay silently grateful that she was invited along on her own ambush. And that Hutchins was in front of her.

The basement door wasn’t locked, and Hutchins opened it on a set of dark stairs. He tried the light on the wall, but it didn’t work. Hazel felt her insides go a little liquid as she recalled her terror at Bellocque’s house. Her breath came in short bursts. Hutchins turned to his partner and whispered, “This is where one of us breaks through a cracked step and lands in a pile of bodies.”

“I saw that one, too,” said Childress. She passed him her flashlight off her belt. It directed a powerful white beam of light into the space in front of them. The stairs were concrete. “So much for that theory.”

“Anyone down here?” called Constable Hutchins. There was no answer. Not much of an ambush, thought Hazel, but she realized as well that the space below them was completely silent. They went down the stairs, the beam of light juddering around in the dark, catching dust and webbing here and there. The basement was cool. Hutchins flipped the switch in the wall at the bottom, and they were standing in a large, single room that ran the length and width of the house. On one wall, standing nakedly against the grey concrete, were the house’s washer and dryer. A fragile drying tree was to one side with three bras hanging from it. There were five badly constructed wooden storage lockers at one end of the space and they went over to inspect them. Behind the flimsy wood-and-chicken-wire doors, four were empty, and one had a bike in it. Hutchins half-heartedly tried the doors of three that were padlocked. He turned to Hazel. “Nothing here, Detective Inspector. Not much reason here to do anything but turn around and go home. Or take in a show.”

She smiled, a little defeated. Hutchins got out his card and handed it to her. It gave his first name as Kevin and his division as Twenty-one. She snapped it against her hand. “I don’t suppose you know James Wingate?”

“Who?” said Hutchins.

“He came to us from Twenty-one. Last fall.”

“We’re, like, two hundred and fifty men and women at Twenty-one,” he said. “It’s the largest division in the city. Two guys could earn their pensions ten feet from each other at Twenty-one and never meet.”

The hair on the back of her neck was prickling, and she turned around to look behind her. The bare wall at the back of the basement was a smooth concrete surface. She turned back to Hutchins. “He’s a detective. Wingate.”

“Oh, well that’s the other side of the building, Ma’am.”

He shone the light toward the stairs. She kept waiting for something to catch her eye, but all the smooth grey surfaces were blurring together. She held her finger up and walked over to the concrete wall and stood close to it. It was a bare wall, no sign of human fluids on it at all. She smelled the wall, knowing how ridiculous she must look. “Are you a building inspector in your spare time?” Hutchins asked her.

“Not quite. There was blood on the wall in the video. I just wanted to see.”

The officers joined her at the wall, and they all inspected it together. It was a fairly smooth surface, but not so smooth that a recent bloodstain wouldn’t be worked into the small pocks. There was nothing. “If this had been recently cleaned,” said Childress, “we’d smell it. You need bleach to get that much blood out.”

“Why are we here?” said Hazel quietly. “I’m sure he wanted us to come here.”

“Maybe he wanted you here so you wouldn’t be there.”

She snapped around to the female officer, and her heart started pounding again. “Shit.”

“What could be happening back in Port Dundas with you occupied in Toronto?”

“I don’t know,” she replied.

The officers shared a look, and then Hutchins held his hand out to show the way back to the stair.

When they got back to the main floor, Hazel could see Andrew through the door sitting on the top step on the verandah. “Do you mind if I harass this Miss Caro one more second?”

“Be my guest,” said Hutchins. “She seems to delight in the company of the police.”

Hazel knocked, and after a moment, the door opened again. “Haven’t I done my duty for the day?” said Gail Caro.

“There are two empty lockers downstairs. Does that mean there are two empty apartments?”

“People come and go, Officer. And it’s the end of the school year.”

“You’re still here.”

“The university doesn’t only rent to students.”

Childress stepped forward. If Hazel had met her on the street, she would have assumed this strapping woman was a volleyball pro. “You didn’t answer her question.”

“The ground floor just turned over,” said Caro, rolling her eyes. “And the apartment beside me is empty. I don’t have the dope on anyone else in this sad shitbox, okay?”

“Who moved in down here?”

“I forgot to bring a cake over, so I didn’t meet him.”

“Him?”

“Or her,” she said. “I didn’t meet them.”

“What number is the empty one upstairs?”

“Three,” she said.

They thanked Caro again and she huffed back up the stairs. Andrew stood when they emerged from the house.

“You find the temple of doom down there?”

“Just actual dirty laundry,” she said.

“I guess that’s preferable to the alternative.”

Hutchins had squared to them, his hands on his hips. “The alternative was no bras on the line. I don’t think your guy wants to give up his hideout yet.”

“But he wanted us to see this house.”

“That’s what you say,” said Hutchins. “But you might want to entertain the possibility that you followed what you thought was a trail to something that doesn’t mean anything.”

“You read those chapters, Officer. Something’s going on.” She went down the steps behind him and stood on the lawn. There was an alleyway between thirty-two and thirty-four leading to the two backyards. “Just wait here for a second,” she said. She walked down the paving stones that forked to two gates and tripped the latch on the right-side one with the string that hung between the slats, as Nick Wise had done in the story. There was a small patch of garden behind the house with a couple of tomato plants doing poorly in the chestnut’s shade. A beaten-up plastic chaise lay to the side of the door that led from the house to the yard, and behind it was a stack of empty clay flowerpots. Their contents had not been transplanted to the garden: someone had long ago given up on growing flowers back here. She walked the perimeter of the garden looking for disturbed or sunken earth, anything that looked like it might be worth digging. She kicked at dry clods and pushed the toe of her shoe into patches, moving the earth around, but she realized if she was going to be serious about it, she’d need a reason, and so far, she didn’t have one. A feeling wasn’t going to win her a warrant to dig this place up.

She went back out front. Hutchins was standing on the lawn now, looking faintly amused. “See… the difference between us beat cops and you dicks is we’re led by our feet and you’re led by your nose. We just keep walking, you know, to see what’s what, but you ‘know’ there’s something at the end of the trail because you’re sure you smelled smoke.”

“I’m not sure I get you,” said Hazel.

“If I see smoke, I know I’m not imagining it,” he said. “But my taste for the here-and-now is what makes me what I am, right?”

“Does that mean you don’t look for what you can’t see, Officer?”

“It means we beat cops have enough on our hands with what’s right in front of us.”

“Well, that’s the difference, isn’t it?” she said, ignoring the little voice reminding her she’d gone into the backyard on a hunch. “We need both of us if we’re going to get the job done, though, don’t we?”

“Sure,” he said, and he sounded friendly, but she knew there were those police out there who saw the art of investigation as only one step above voodoo and she thought Hutchins was probably one of them.

“Anyway, speaking of the here-and-now, I better call in, see what’s going on back home.” She turned away from the other officers and made contact with the station house. Her nerves had been jangling ever since Childress had made the suggestion that she was here in Toronto in order not to be there, in Port Dundas. She got Wingate on the line. “Tell me it’s business as usual, James.”

“More or less.”

“Meaning?”

“The video changed again.”

“Shit.” Childress shot her a look. “What is it now?”

“Nothing. It’s nothing.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean it’s basically black. There’s a sound though.”

“A sound?”

“A scratching sound.”

“So you can hear now?”

“Yeah.”

“What do you mean by ‘basically black’?”

“It’s black, but there’s a small green triangle in the bottom left corner of the screen now. Like a ‘play’ button on a VCR.”

She wondered what that might mean and couldn’t come up with anything that calmed her guts. “Mute the mic, James.”

“Already done.”

“Now, what about Anonymice?”

“They’re in Grand Cayman.”

“Great.”

“I’ve made contact with the Royal Cayman Police Force. I’m waiting for a call-back.”

“You make sure they understand this isn’t about money laundering. We’ve got a crime in progress. A man’s life depends on their assistance.”

“Got it,” he said.

Childress was looking at her watch. “Detective Inspector, I can get in touch with the housing office on campus this afternoon. See if there’s a list of past tenants. Maybe something will crop up.”

“I’d appreciate that,” said Hazel. There was a strange hesitation, and then Hazel realized that Childress was waiting for her to pass her her card. She hoped she had one on her, but she didn’t. “Uh,” she said. “I’ll just tell you my number.”

“Okay,” said Childress, and she flipped her notebook open. “Shoot.” She wrote down the number and closed her pad. “Well… if we find anything…”

“Thanks,” said Hazel, and with that, another signal passed between the two cops, and they headed down the stairs. She and Andrew watched them drive off.

“I can’t tell if that guy was high-hatting me or just passing the time of day,” she said to Andrew.

“What do you care what he thinks?” he replied. “You’re in the right place and you know it.”

“Do I?”

“You’re just nervous because you’re off your turf, Hazel. But that doesn’t make them any less clueless.”

“I feel like I should try to get back in there. Look around without those beat cops’ eyes on me.”

“If there is a reason for you to snoop around again here, don’t you want to have the right paperwork? I get the feeling they could have given you trouble on a technicality if they wanted to, Hazel.”

“Fine. Then what do I do with this feeling?”

“Feed it sushi,” he said.

They sat at one of the tables in the back of the green-and-black restaurant on Bloor Street. The whole interior looked like the lacquered boxes they served the food in. Hazel had never been partial to Japanese food: she didn’t like its prettiness, its attention to the little detail. She preferred her food to take up the whole plate. Still, she had to admit it tasted good and they said it was good for you. She couldn’t think if she’d ever seen a fat Japanese person. It was just past one and the place was full of young people expertly wielding their little wooden sticks over plates full of bright squares of food.

The last time she’d shared a meal with Andrew, just the two of them, she’d been reduced more or less to begging. Here, too, he’d come to her aid, but at least it wasn’t as personal as before. She tried to think of the last time she’d ever done anything for him. That was something to store away.

“Five Japanese restaurants on a single stretch of road and the whole of Westmuir County can’t manage even one,” he said. He was holding a piece of salmon sashimi in the air on the end of a fork. In all his years of proclaiming himself a sushi aficionado, he’d never learned how to use chopsticks. It was this shameless confidence in himself that had long ago attracted her to him. He popped it into his mouth. “Fire was the worst thing that ever happened to fish,” he said.

She toyed with her avocado maki. “Maybe we call Martha and take her out for a coffee?”

“And let her call me Watson all afternoon? No thanks. Plus, I told Glynnis I’d be back in time to marinate some flank steak.” It was the first time her name had come up all day. Four hours and counting, Hazel thought. Progress, if she were foolish enough to think of it that way.

“I was expecting you to say you didn’t want to give her false hope. Seeing us together.”

His fork stilled, mid-air. “Is that how you see this, Hazel? A relationship-building exercise? I came because you asked me to help. Don’t make me think you had ulterior motives.”

“Moi?” she said, splaying a hand against her chest. “Never.”

He eyed her carefully, admitting the ghost of a smile. “I thought you did very well today.”

“Nothing happened.”

“I mean with your back. You drove almost two hours this morning and it’s going to be two hours back and you’re in tiptop shape. That’s an excellent sign.”

“You mean I’ll be moving out soon.”

“There’s that as well.”

“Maybe I’ll stub a toe and try to prolong my visit.”

He forked up a mound of white rice and dropped it into his mouth. “You are always welcome to stop by, Hazel.”

She felt the withdrawal symptoms still nibbling away at the edges: a faint sizzle behind the eyes, of worry, or dread. And then she realized it wasn’t the lack of Percs she was feeling: it was grief. And she permitted herself, at last, the thought in full that she’d only let flit on the periphery: that she wished the last three years had never happened. And not just because she missed him and still loved him, but because they were not done; they had not finished telling the great story of their lives. It was true that it had not always been great, but it was their story, and it was going to be the only story they had. Well, the only story she had. Of who she was with him, of who they’d been together and what they’d done. What she had of him and he of her made it impossible that anyone else could know them as they’d once been. Letting herself think this, a too-big space opened in her chest and she realized how much grief she had over losing this most important friendship of her life. And at the same time, she realized that he was happy and that there was nothing she could do, or should do, to change things between them.

“Hazel?”

“You have rice on your chin,” she said.

“Well, you don’t have to cry about it.”

“Wasabi,” she said. “It’s two o’clock. We should get ourselves home.”

Back in Port Dundas, she sat in her office with Wingate. The screen showed a black as solid as a moonless night with the little green arrow at the bottom. The scratching sound was repetitive, like it was on a loop. They let it run with the mic off. “They serve a thousand warrants a year on the anonymizing services registered in the Caymans,” Wingate said. “There’s like eight of them down there and another five or six in the Seychelles. All the addresses are post office boxes and when they pick up the mail down there, they systematically challenge the warrants. The detective I spoke to said they’re still trying to get records from 1998.”

“Why don’t they just walk in and bust these people?”

“They have no idea where they are.”

“What about the ISPs? Don’t the providers know who’s using their service and where they’re located?”

Wingate had raised his eyebrows at her, like she’d grown a third head. “I guess Mr. Mackie gave you a crash course?”

“Well?”

“I asked the detective,” he said, a little defensively. “About the ISP. These companies are their own ISPs. They’re totally untraceable.”

She slapped the desk. “Then get in touch with the company directly. Do they have an email address? Tell them what their service is being used for.”

“Okay,” he said.

She turned the laptop screen back toward them. “So what is this now? Why is there sound? What is it?”

“It sounds like someone scratching a tabletop.”

“And this triangle. Is it possible there’s a link open now? Why would they want us to connect?”

“Tell them what we know.”

“Forget it. I want to get one step ahead of these people if I’m being asked to make contact. I want to have something they don’t think I have.”

“You know who the captive is.”

“They sent us his hand, James. They know we know. They wanted us to know.”

He was lost in thought, tracing the top of her desk with a finger. “What about we let slip we’re onto them through Anonymice? See if they react. Maybe we can catch them changing directions.”

“They might just go to ground, James. Turn off the feed and hit the road. Where are we then?”

“But they want us to see them,” he said. “To hear them too. Whatever we’re being asked to do by proxy can’t be done if they break off contact.”

“If they’re smart enough to cover all their tracks, aren’t they going to know their friends in the Caymans won’t give them up?”

“It’s worth a try.”

“Man,” she said. “I’m starting to understand what Hutchins was talking about.”

“Who?”

“ Toronto cop. He made a comment about the difference between beat cops and dicks. I didn’t much like it, but I see now why he thinks that way. Because we’re both sitting here throwing bones. Street cops see it differently.”

“Yeah,” he said, “they call in investigators when they get stuck and then stand around on the other side of the squad room mumbling about voodoo. Don’t listen to the beat cops, Hazel.”

But she was thinking that the searchers and prognosticators were too much like what bothered her about Glynnis. Never before had she worried that her work entailed any kind of blind faith, and yet it did. To her mind, spiritual investigation drew on the loosest of the goosiest presuppositions, beliefs that were, in fact, wishes. She’d always thought policework was not like that. And yet, this case was becoming more and more like an act of fortune-telling, an extended tea-reading. The risk, as it was in interpreting the unseen world, was that you’d pay attention to the wrong things.

“What about the backyard?” she said.

“At the house?”

“Doesn’t it make sense we should be digging back there? Why don’t we ask them if we should dig? See what they say.”

“I see where you’re going. Nick Wise has buried her in his backyard.” They both fell silent, working it through. “We need to know if Eldwin ever lived in that house, Hazel.”

“I agree.” She looked across the top of the keyboard for the button that would unmute the microphone. The laptop made a popping sound to indicate the connection had been reopened. Hazel leaned down toward it. “How do we save her if she’s already dead?” she asked, and although it was difficult to make out at first, they could both see the camera already pulling away from its black field.