The Taken

28

Hazel called in first thing in the morning and got Monday’s report from Costamides. As she’d expected, nothing had appeared on the website, in fact, the feed was dead. She salted this away: with both Goodman and Cameron in Toronto, that suggested the basement they were looking for wasn’t in the city. That bird was going to have to be killed with another stone. Costamides told her the Record had done as instructed: both of the missing chapters of “The Mystery of Bass Lake” had appeared in the Monday edition. Hazel wasn’t sure what value appearing to follow instructions would have now, but the abductors had threatened more bodily damage to their victim if the chapters didn’t run, and Hazel hoped they would keep their word, at least for the time being. The least powerful impression she’d formed over the last twenty-four hours was the one concerning Eldwin’s guilt. Whether he’d committed a murder or not, she was intent on bringing him out of that basement alive. If he was a killer, then he could stand trial; she would not let Goodman or Cameron mete out their own brand of justice. That would constitute the ultimate failure on her part.

She thanked Costamides and got Toles at his desk. He’d been able to work his charms: the results of the examination of the sweater would be ready sometime before lunch. Hazel thanked him copiously and then suggested that since he’d messed with CFS protocol, it might be a good idea for them to get his friend to fax her results somewhere unofficial. “Cover your tracks in case someone thinks ill of a new DC jumping the queue on his own say-so.” Toles saw merit in the suggestion. He called back half an hour later to say that his contact was faxing the results to the Kinko’s on University, above Dundas. He’d told her to use a cover sheet addressing the pages to “D. Hammett.”

“Good one,” said Hazel.

“The whole escapade is costing me dinner at Lucy Than’s new restaurant. Not that I’m complaining,” he added.

“Dinner’s on Westmuir County, Detective. With our thanks for a job well done.”

She waited until noon and then, under dark skies, she walked from the hotel to the Kinko’s Toles had told her the fax would be waiting at. The geniuses behind the desk searched through a pile of papers and insisted there was nothing for a Mrs. Hammett. Hazel went around the corner for a coffee, thinking perhaps Toles’s connection at CFS had a later lunch than most people. Wandering down Dundas toward Yonge Street with her hot coffee, she found herself thinking of Hammett and his heavily alcoholized detective Nick Charles: she knew why she felt the kinship. She’d always loved the elegance of The Thin Man, despite the sheer level of stupefaction in it. She hadn’t read it in years and wondered if Wingate had ever read it: she could repay his Dickens with something she loved. There was a used bookstore just down the street she’d seen wandering the day before and she went in and perused the crime section. No Hammett. But she browsed a bit longer, thinking if she was going to have to stay over another night in Toronto, she might want a book to read. A paperback with the title Utter Death caught her eye and she brought it to the counter to pay. “Is he very popular?” she asked.

“People like him,” said the guy at the cash. “We can’t keep him in stock.”

She put the book in an inside pocket of her jacket and returned to Kinko’s. This time there was something for D. Hammett. The document, with its cover sheet, was three pages long. She studied it, standing in the open doorway of the copyshop, and then folded it in three and returned to the hotel.

Wingate sat in his cramped hotel room with a plate of fries and a half-eaten burger in front of him and read the pages. “Wood and varnish on both the inside and outside of the sweater and within the fibres as well,” he said. He put the papers down and spread them across the desk. “Being in the water for any length of time could explain the varnish migrating through the sweater,” he said to her, “but not the wood fibre trapped inside it. It has to have been ground in.”

“Now, look at this.” She put her finger on one of the lines in the report. “‘The debris field comprises two strips – wood and varnish mixed together – transverse across the back of the sweater, each about four inches wide.’ What do you think of that?”

“I have no idea.”

Polarized light microscopy had separated the wool fibres from the varnish and the wood. There were at least two hundred tiny wooden shards, ninety percent of which were facing the same direction, like iron filings drawn by a magnet, or grass laid down in a footprint. “I’m drawing a blank. Maybe this all happened post-mortem.”

“They had to drag her out of the water, maybe they pulled her up on a dock in the channel?”

That made sense to her. In fact, the more she thought about it, the more she felt the door finally closing on their speculations. “That’s it, isn’t it?” she said. “A body sodden with water, she weighs double. They hook her out and pull her over the side of a dock, drag her over two planks. Four inches wide.”

“Combine that with the hemorrhaging in the lungs, calcium and potassium levels through the roof, massive heart failure, you name it. No scrapes, bruises, defensive wounds… where does it get you?”

“I know.”

“She went into the water within a hundred metres of the shoreline but nobody heard her cry for help. How can we not come to the same conclusions the coroner did in 2002?”

“We have to keep thinking this through. If she didn’t kill herself, this is her last chance to be heard.” She looked at the floor, tilting back slightly on her heels. “She was wrecked, right? We talked about this – what if someone knocked her out?”

“You want to make a case for someone injecting her with enough alcohol and Ativan to sedate her?”

“Can we?”

“Why would anyone have had to force her, though?” he said. “Cameron was perfectly capable of getting off her head all by herself, to judge by the collars in her report.”

“Fine. So she gets herself high and hammered. Maybe after that, he talked her into it. Called her stupid, useless. Told her she was better off dead. Gave her enough drugs to addle her.”

“It’s still not murder. And what about the alibi Ilunga says is airtight?”

“He said watertight.”

“I know.”

“Fine – it’s not murder, but maybe it’s something else. Time-of-death, Eldwin is somewhere else, but he’s put the suggestion into her head. Isn’t telling someone to go kill herself a crime?”

“Look, I wanted as badly as you did for this sweater to turn up something conclusive. But it doesn’t. If we try to stretch this any further, we’ll be in Goodman’s league and then it’s the insane leading the blind.”

She absently picked a fry off the plate on his desk. “God-damnit,” she said. “We’ve been wasting time we could have been canvassing, you know.”

“We did our best.”

“Your old boss will be laughing up his sleeve.”

“Let him laugh. But let’s put Plan B into action. It’s time to figure out how to use this bait to get Goodman to show himself.”

She looked forlornly at the useless fax on the desk in front of them, and then shook her head slowly. “I haven’t had to outsmart him before now,” she said. “I’m not looking forward to trying.”

She went back to her room and tossed the lab report on the desk and sat in the chair, looking out the window at the blank wall of a building across the alley from her hotel. She wasn’t sure now how they were going to communicate with Cameron or Goodman, but she felt certain the two of them were still watching her, somehow. Perhaps she would have to wait now until one of them made contact, but when they did, she had to be sure she could control the flow of information.

She hadn’t wanted to risk speaking to Martha the day before, but now she felt she owed her a call, at least to smooth things over as much as she could before she returned home. She reached for the phone, but her hand froze in the air over it. A little uniformed man was bent over backwards on the receiver, his head lolling off his shoulders.

She wasn’t half out of the chair when she heard a slamming noise and Goodman burst from the closet beside the desk and drove her sideways to the floor. She heard herself shout and the pain burst in an electric shower down both her legs as she struggled beneath him, trying to push backwards toward the wall where she’d have some leverage. But he was so much larger than she was and he pulled her back toward the centre of the room, the carpet scraping at her clothes and burning her flesh. She felt him slide his hand down her flank to her holster and she twisted and drove an elbow into his face. He grunted in pain and he fell away, but she saw a flash of black metal pass over her head and she knew he had the gun. He stood and spat a ribbon of blood out of the side of his mouth. “Get up,” he said, gesturing with the barrel.

She stood with difficulty, the familiar feeling of numbness spreading down her backside. Her legs wouldn’t take her weight – whether due to injury or fear, she didn’t know – and she slumped on the floor against the foot of the bed.

“What did you say to her?” he asked.

“Who?”

“Joanne.”

“We said a lot of things to each other.” She leaned against the boxspring, trying to breathe. “I told her the truth about you. How you’d gone rogue well before she met you. It all made sense to her.”

“Sure it did.”

“Oh, and I complimented her on her necklace. You know, the one you give to all your victims?” His eyes were wild. The gun was shaking in his hand. Hazel said quietly, “She didn’t like you paying a visit to Martha, did she? A little too close to home for her, eh? Now she wants out.”

“Don’t kid yourself,” he said. “She knows there’s no out except for you doing what we chose you to do. What should have been done in the first place.”

She sneered a laugh. “There’s no should have, Goodman. There’s just what happened. There’s just a broken woman, you, and all the people you failed to protect, all of them still out there shooting themselves full of garbage and filling their crack pipes, if they’re not already dead.” She shifted a little and felt the sensation in her legs returning. “So where is she? Joanne? Did she walk away?”

“She’s exactly where she wants to be. Back with Eldwin, waiting to see how this all turns out.”

“You talked her into it again, huh?”

He took a step toward her with the gun raised and she pressed herself against the edge of the bed, her breath catching in her chest. “How hard would they come for me if I blew your brains out right now? What’s the chance you’d ever be a cold case, Detective Inspector?”

“I think they’d figure out pretty quick I hadn’t killed myself,” she said.

“They’d never rest. Never,” he said. “But why? Why you and not her? Because you’re inside the machine and she wasn’t? You ever thought how lucky you are that your death would actually move people to action?”

“The right kind of action. Due process. A conclusion based on the facts. I wouldn’t expect anything more.”

“That’s because you’re not prepared to see past the surface. I was wrong about you.”

“You’ve been wrong about everything. For one thing, Eldwin was at home the night she died.” He was closer now and she wondered if she could get the upper hand. But she’d have to push herself up from the bed and be on top of him before he could shoot her and she was pretty sure he’d shoot her.

“Eldwin’s alibi is bullshit,” he said.

“So – what? He killed her and the wife covered for him?”

“There’s a thought.”

“Have you ever met Claire Eldwin? Take my word for it: she’d be thrilled to see him in an orange jumpsuit.”

He ignored her. “Joanne gave you the sweater. Did you keep your word?”

“The lab report’s on the desk. You can see for yourself.” He drew back and, keeping one eye on her, retrieved Toles’s fax and flipped through the three pages. Hazel carefully drew herself up against the end of the bed and sat on the edge. “I found the same thing you did. Except I can see it for what it is. It’s from a dock, where she was pulled up.”

“She was pulled out onto the grass.”

“How can you be sure?”

He threw the pages back onto the desk and leapt forward, shoving his face in hers. She smelled the sour taint of his mouth. “Are you fucking stupid? I caught the case, I wrote the report – my name is on it – so what do you think? I saw it on the news? She washed up at the bottom of someone’s garden. We pulled her onto the grass. No wood involved.” He shook his head in disbelief. “Is that what you’re hanging your case on?”

The hell with it, she thought, if I’m dead, I’m dead, and she pushed up from the bed and stepped quickly away from him. He trained the gun on her chest. She had pain, but the adrenaline was covering it. “You want to know what I’m hanging my case on?”

“You wanna get shot?”

“You’re not going to shoot me. You need me.”

“You still believe that?”

“Brenda Cameron was anaesthetized,” she said, ranging in a semi-circle away from him. She knew there was no escape, but she had to keep moving. “Her blood alcohol was.19. That’s more than twice the legal limit. You get to.26 and you might as well jam a swizzle stick in your brain and stir. And there were high levels of lorazepam in her blood, that’s Ativan -”

“I know what the fuck it is -”

“Then you know it increases the effects of alcohol. She was knocked out. She did it to herself.”

He said nothing.

She stood by the window, looking at him, the muscles in her thighs jumping. “Or, on the other hand, maybe someone did it to her. Maybe Colin Eldwin did it. Gave her so many drinks she didn’t know what planet she was on. The problem is that you’ll never know now. Nobody saw them together that night, no one saw anything happen on the lake, nobody heard anything at all. All we have is a stolen rowboat, a body, a griefstruck relative, and you. And that doesn’t add up to anything but a tragedy. Whether you shoot me or not, Brenda Cameron’s going to stay in her grave a suicide.”

He was still sighting her straight down the length of the gun. “Well, if that’s your conclusion, then tell me where you want Eldwin’s body. I’ll do you the courtesy of leaving a trail you can follow this time.”

“You’ve got no reason to kill him.”

“I told Joanne Cameron I’d get her justice. But it doesn’t matter to me what size his cell is. I think you know I’d just as soon put him in a box.”

“And then what? Are you going to bring Brenda Cameron back from the dead? Maybe she’ll sell that necklace you gave her for some rock.”

It was as if he hadn’t heard her – he stood in the middle of the room, staring past her, out at the city. “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe this time, she’ll get out alive.” He pulled his gaze back and he was looking at her, his expression stone cold. “You can’t be everywhere at once,” he said. “But you can tell them what happens to them matters to at least one person. You light the way a little, and maybe it saves a couple of them. Maybe they come in before it’s too late.”

“Or maybe it has nothing to do with you. Maybe you’re one of them, except there’s something else in your pipe.”

His eyes travelled to the gun at the end of his arm and he raised it to his face and stared at it like he was trying to remember a name. Then he pressed the side of it hard against his temple, gritting his teeth, his eyes boring through her, his jaw shaking like he was going to blow up. It was a strange, desolate gesture, and she thought this is it, she’d reached him and flipped the switch. She didn’t want to see him put the gun in his mouth and she closed her eyes, but then there was silence. She looked again and he’d turned the muzzle back toward her. He gestured her away from the window. She came toward the centre of the room and he grabbed her again, holding her at arm’s length, the gun cocked beside his cheek, and pushed her toward the bed again. A space opened in her chest; it felt like a massive expanse, a pit she was going to fall into. He powered her down to the bed, her back against it this time, and held the barrel of the gun hard to her forehead. “Goodman,” she said quietly, “Dana…”

His weight was concentrated on the Glock and it felt like he was driving a bolt into her skull. “I took what was in me and gave it to you. To help you see.”

The pressure on her forehead made her eyes water. She felt her mind emptying out. She took his wrist in both her hands, as if she were holding the gun in place against her own head. “I don’t need your demons to see clearly,” she said. “I have my own.”

She heard a click then and wondered if, in her last moment on earth, the world was breaking up into parts. First the trigger, then the firing pin, then contact and the flare and the sound of the bullet firing, all of it in discrete sequence, and she wondered if she’d be able to feel the nose of the bullet at the instant it touched her, right before it entered her: an atom of steel against an atom of flesh. But there was nothing, just the sound of something hitting the floor. She realized he’d released the clip and now he was leaning over and pocketing it as she rose to a sitting position, too weak to stand now, and he tossed the gun at her.

“If you open your door any time in the next twenty minutes, or if I see your partner in the hallway, I’ll kill you both.” And then he was gone and she spun to her right and vomited on the bedspread, hacking and choking, her head filling with spinning black lace. She sat there hunched over, her insides knotted, and then collected herself and lunged for the phone. “He’s heading out to the street,” she said when Wingate picked up in his room, her voice tight in her chest. “Get down there, get your safety off.”

“What’s wrong? Who’s in the street?”

“Goodman. He was just here. He’ll be on the sidewalk any second now.”

“I don’t un -”

“GO!” She hung up on him and went to the window, but she had a view of the wrong side of the building. She was pouring sweat and her legs felt weak. She pushed open the window and looked down to see if Goodman was running down the alley between buildings, but the alleyway was empty and all she could hear was the sounds of traffic out on the boulevard. She pushed her face out into the air as far as the window would allow and felt the wind against her, against her living flesh. She craned her head toward the front of the hotel, but if their man was out there, he wasn’t making a scene. She imagined Wingate bursting out onto the sidewalk brandishing his sidearm and the people there suddenly flying apart in panic. And she knew he would find nothing: Goodman would have melted into the stream of people heading back to work after their lunches, he would already have transformed into Dean Bellocque, perfectly invisible because he didn’t exist.

A minute later, Wingate knocked at her door and she let him in. “I couldn’t…” He leaned over, winded. She let him catch his breath. “What was he doing here? What did he want?”

“He was in my room,” she said. “He was waiting for me here, for fuck’s sake.”

“My God, Hazel. Are you okay?”

“He tackled me. He held a gun to my head.”

Wingate sat on the end of the bed. He stayed motionless for many moments, and when he raised his eyes, they were bloodshot. He saw the vomit on the bedspread and looked at her searchingly. “What the hell did he want?”

“He wanted to give me one more chance to see things from his point of view.”

“Did you?”

“What do you think?”

They fell to silence and she thought she could hear both of their hearts thudding. She blew a jet of air out from pursed lips. “We have to get out of here. I don’t think Eldwin’s got much time left.”

“I’ll get the car.”

“I’m going to wash my face,” she said. “I’ll meet you outside in three minutes.”

She turned on the too-bright light over the sink and shielded her eyes until the pounding it caused subsided. She felt dazed and overwhelmed. The thought of getting back into the car and making that long drive home, having to start the paperwork, initiating what was bound to be a long and difficult process of ending or suspending this sad affair – it made her want to go to sleep on the spot. When this was over, she realized, there was going to be no one to hand the finished thing to, no one to succour with the result. Because that was what an investigation was, it was a work, like a painting, and at the end of it, someone looked at it and saw what you’d done and knew you’d seen it through. But an unfinished work… who wanted that?

She ran cold water in the sink and cupped her hands under the flow. It sluiced over her mouth and cheeks and she pushed her hands up into her hair. Her eyes looked as if someone had pressed their thumbs into them and driven them into her skull. She was exhausted. She was spent. In the middle of her forehead, she saw the perfectly round, fading pink imprint of her own gun-barrel, a target pointing to the part of her that had failed. The pale circle was like a hazy sun hanging over a body of water and she imagined gulls circling her eyes. That was where all this had begun: at water’s edge. She’d been waiting in the cruiser while Wingate was in the boat. No idea what would be waiting for them down there, what it would mean to them. The boat had come back and the two wetsuits – what were their names, Tate and someone? – had hauled something off the boat wrapped in green netting. She’d hobbled down to the dock to take a closer look and Tate had peeled away the covering for her to see the plastic body within. “Someone was holding it down there, made sure it wasn’t going anywhere,” he’d said, and she looked at him, and the marks his scuba mask had made around his eyes made him look like a raccoon.

She looked at her own eyes again, the mark on her forehead. Her stomach fell two storeys.

She rushed downstairs, where Wingate was waiting in one of the chairs in the lobby. “What is it?”

“There’s something I want to do.”

“What is it?”

“Alone.”

He hesitated a moment. “Do you want me to wait?”

“No. I want you to get back to town. Get every available car out looking for Goodman or Cameron. I’ll be back tonight.”