A Door in the River (15 page)

The baby had settled a little now, his snuffles coming spasmodically, and Mrs. Brennan was whispering to him and stroking his head.

“Mrs. Brennan?” Hazel said softly. “Do you think we can talk now?”

“I thought she was going to … kill Stephen.”

“How do you think your husband knew this Kitty?” Mrs. Brennan looked up, startled. Hazel put a hand on her knee. “Colleen? It’s okay. There’s no need to be afraid.”

“When is the hospital going to call?”

“Soon. They’re doing what they can. Was Terry involved in anything unusual you know of?” she asked, moving deftly over her omissions. “Or was he absent from the home a lot for unexplained reasons?”

“No … no. Terry taught math at Gilchrist Middle. She said she was a student of his. That he tutored her.”

“Do you think that’s true?”

“No,” she said quietly, wonderingly.

“Mrs. Brennan, did he ever go to Queesik Bay? You know, the reserve? It has a casino on it?”

The woman was clearly still thinking of something else, and her eyes drifted over to one of Spere’s SOCO crew, who was dabbing at a countertop beside her with a cotton-tipped swab. He examined the end of the swab and put the whole thing into a ziplock bag.

“Mrs. Brennan?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t keep tabs on him. Maybe I should have kept tabs on him.” The baby’s mood had changed and now he was grabbing at the necklace that hung down between Mrs. Brennan’s breasts. She smiled at him with a worried expression. “Can someone call the hospital?”

His pulse, she’d been told when she called, had been thready at the crime scene, his vitals almost non-existent. Spere’s team was packing up. “She didn’t go upstairs, is that right?” Spere asked the stunned wife.

“No, no. I think they were in the kitchen the whole time.”

“All right, then,” he said. When he walked past Hazel, she smelled hot mustard on his breath.

“I think he’s getting hungry,” Mrs. Brennan said, and for a moment, Hazel had thought she meant Howard. “Can I feed him?”

“Of course,” said Hazel, and she watched the woman going through the motions of putting the baby into his
bouncy chair on the countertop. She opened her freezer door and took out a couple of colourful frozen pucks off a cookie sheet, one green, one tan-coloured.

“I make his food,” she said to no one in particular. “It’s better for him.”

She put the little pucks into a bowl and stuck the bowl in the microwave. Hazel’s phone buzzed on her hip but only once and then it stopped. When Colleen’s back was turned to get the food, she quickly unhooked it to see if she’d missed a call. But it was a text message from Wingate:
IS HE ALIVE? …
She put the phone away. Janice Brennan was staring at her. “Was that the hospital?”

“No … no, something else. I’m sure they’re doing everything they can.” She moved to the other side of the counter, dismissing PC Quinn with a look, and Mrs. Brennan began to feed the squirming child. “Colleen … you said the girl wanted something from your husband. Did she say what it was?”

“No. Terry said he didn’t have it and the girl said she knew he didn’t have it, but then … then she –” She mechanically slotted the spoon into the baby’s open mouth, slipping in little loads of what Hazel thought was probably peas and chicken. She remembered briefly the pleasure of sating a baby’s hunger, how easy it was to know what they needed. “You think Terry was in trouble?”

“What kind of trouble?”

“Did he have debts? Did he have any … habits that were unusual?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.” The woman was keeping her mind focused on the baby, but she was in shock. She held the spoon too far from the baby, and he, in turn, was watching her very closely. Finally, she put the spoon in his mouth.

Hazel asked her: “Can you think of
any
reason a strange girl would come into your house and – ”

Suddenly, the other woman dropped the baby’s bowl and spoon onto the countertop and gripped its edge, as if to stop herself from spinning out into space. The baby caught its breath, his hands shooting up in front of him, motionless. Then he opened his mouth and an unholy, piercing scream came out of him.

“I don’t know! I don’t fucking know any fucking thing at all! Okay?” She breathed willfully, trying to regain control. The baby had lapsed into the silent part of a deep, terrified infant squall, the silence that presages the heartsick-making wail that follows. They both waited it out, and Mrs. Brennan took the baby out of his chair and held him. “I don’t want to know who my husband is right now. If he’s a low-life, lying, cheating, sleazeball, it can wait. I just want to know what’s happening to him.”

“All right,” said Hazel, holding up her hands in surrender. “I’m going to call the hospital in one minute. I, I was told the ambulance chopper will be putting down” – she
looked at her watch in a sort of vaudeville gesture – “right about now. I can call down in, five minutes. But anything that might help us get a jump, Mrs. Brennan, for instance, do you have any idea –
any idea at all –
what might have connected your husband to this Kitty? Even a hunch?”

“Well, I guess he was screwing her, wasn’t he? And she showed up looking to see how much her silence was worth to him. He was going to tell me … but then she …” Mrs. Brennan trailed off. “She cut him anyway.”

Not money, Hazel thought again. And whatever it was, the girl was still hunting it. Her phone buzzed again. Just once. She asked to use the bathroom, and once the door was closed behind her, she unhooked it and looked at the screen. It read,
Patient DOA
. She looked at herself in the mirror. It was fixed to the wall. She forwarded the text to Wingate.

On her way out, she pulled Quinn aside and quietly told her to check the contents of the Brennans’ medicine cabinet.

Back in her cruiser, she phoned Forbes. The young fellow was cottoning to the job. He’d rented a car for today’s stakeout, to keep his identifiability low, and simply drove back and forth along Queesik Bay Road every twenty minutes or so, stopping here and there, at different distances from the Eagle, and noting his impressions. He told her there was increasing activity as the day went on: a lot of people buzzing around, a lot of traffic. It was now a
week since Henry Wiest had told his wife he was going out to pick up some filters in Mayfair and had parked there, many kilometres from where anyone would have expected him to be, and been murdered. The case had put on flesh over the intervening week, and with the stolen vehicle and Brennan’s death, she felt that certain energies were gathering. The girl, this Kitty, had come out into the open. What did it mean? Was she done? Maybe, Hazel thought disconsolately, the case was already over.

What had happened in Queesik Bay a week ago had happened among a swarm of tourists coming through the region, as they did every weekend of the summer. Perhaps Henry or Kitty had used the cover of the crowds to conduct whatever business had been between them. If so, maybe the investigation could use the same cover to discreetly track one of those taxicabs. The traffic in the countryside on a mid-August weekend could be good camouflage for an unmarked to follow a taxicab. She called Wingate to ask him what he thought of that. He said it sounded risky. “But worth it?” she asked.

“It could be. As long as you’re discreet.”

“I’m the soul – ”

“Don’t even try. Just have an escape route in case anyone starts acting suspicious, okay?”

“Don’t worry about me.”

“I’ll have the cell.”

______

She called Forbes in and drove her own car, the Mazda, directly to Mayfair and then tracked back up through the reserve toward the centre of the settlement. She passed the casino on her right and carried on until she reached the Eagle about six kilometres away, toward the Westmuir County town of Dublin.

When she got to the smoke shop, she parked her car exactly where Henry Wiest had, to test the universe, but also to see if the appearance of a car in that area was a signal to anyone. She stayed inside five minutes, looking alternately through the windshield into the woods and backwards in the rear-view. Her car, stopped where it was, appeared to spark no one’s interest at all, so she backed up and parked halfway between the road and the woods. She was more or less to the side of the shop now. The taxi stand was in front of the store, but both taxis were out on errands. The stand, with a lamppost beside it so it would be visible at night, was in an oil-slicked patch of gravel behind a low brick wall that enclosed an oval of grass and flowers.

She hadn’t seen any cameras around the back of the building, but there was one on an overhang that covered the long porch in the front of the shop. It had a view of the parking area she was coming out of, and she saw, as she came around the front, there was another camera above the door and pointing toward the road. None of this had been on RC Bellecourt’s report. It would have been useful
to see those tapes. Why hadn’t they been collected? There were so many oversights in the reserve’s investigation that it made her furious.

She drove out to the position Forbes had taken when he’d started his surveillance on the smoke shop. It was a good spot, shielded from the road by trees, but with a clear line of sight to the Eagle. She continued to watch people file in and out of the store. It was coming up on five o’clock in the afternoon now, and she realized she could have a long wait in front of her. She had half a Tim’s club sandwich on the seat beside her, having been unable to stop herself from consuming the first half an hour earlier. With any luck, she’d see the sign she was waiting for before she got too hungry and then she’d be really grateful for it when she got to it. Fifteen minutes later, she’d eaten the other half of the sandwich and she was still hungry.

Her instinct every time she reached this juncture, when the temperature of an investigation went up beyond her comfort zone, when she knew time was flowing through her hands like water dashed from a bucket, was to
push
. Something seemingly immovable would have to be moved. And she had always been like this; she shared this trait with her mother, this inability to wait and see, to let things develop. She wanted to drive back to Eagle Smoke and Souvenir and lean on this Earl/Tate guy.
Just come out with it. A guy died in your parking lot a week ago. Something’s going on here. Or not. But you’re going to convince me one way or the other tonight
. She saw herself gripping the front of his shirt and yanking him forward over the countertop. This aggression was a good trait to have in her line of work. But if she braced the man who seemed to be in charge in there, she might never find out who Kitty was. And she wanted to know who Kitty was.

At six in the evening, just when she was getting so hungry that she almost left, she saw a man in a quilted, shiny black windbreaker get out of his car and walk into the Eagle. Two minutes later, he left the shop and walked directly to the one taxi that was waiting at the stand. There was something about the way the man walked that struck her. She got her binoculars out to look closer. When the man got into the back seat, he passed something small and shiny to the driver, and the driver looked at it, handed it back, and made a right-hand turn out of the driveway. To the north.

She let the cab get a good three hundred metres down RR26, and then she pulled out of her hiding place and got in behind it.

] 19 [

Early evening

Hazel adjusted her speed to keep a comfortable gap between herself and the taxi. She could just make out a head in the back seat, a wiry nest of black hair. The passenger’s hand kept coming up in front of him and it took Hazel a while to realize he was pushing his glasses up on his nose. A nervous gesture.

She was tempted to pass the cab and look, but by then it was turning off the reserve road and toward Highway 41a. The 41a was one of the county’s prettiest drives: it curved east-west along the north shore of Queesik Bay on its way to Westmuir’s main artery, the 41. But before the cab got to the 41, it turned north again and followed Sideroad 1, which was a road laid down by a surveyor some hundred years ago. This sideroad, and many like
it, did nothing more than divide fields into long tracts.

Sideroad 1 was straight and flat, although she was sure the curvature of the earth made it impossible to see farther than a few kilometres ahead. The taxi was driving at a leisurely pace between the deep green of the corn and soy fields, crossing the roads that ran east-west up through there, the “lines” on which the old farmhouses and homesteads had been built with the fields in front and behind. She stayed more than a kilometre behind and watched them pass: Seventeenth Line, Sixteenth Line. At the Ninth Line, the cab turned right again, heading east. This was an epic drive and she made herself fall farther back, to the point where she could no longer see the tires of the taxi. She watched it moving off east along the Ninth Line, and she reached the road herself and made the turn. In the distance, she was sure she saw another car, coming up another sideroad. Then she realized it was stationary, sitting in profile, below the Ninth Line. A long, black Mercedes. She kept up. The cab was still a few kilometres ahead of her. Before it reached the sideroad with the Mercedes parked on it, the black car pulled out and drove in front of the taxi by about fifteen hundred metres. Hazel lengthened her distance again. She passed the sideroad where the car had been waiting and, up ahead, saw it turn down another one, leading the taxi down another sideroad. The fields were lush and high here, mature soy undulating like the surface of a green sea. Less than a hundred metres below the Ninth Line, a
stand of trees extended irregularly into the field behind. Judging from the narrowing serpentine of trunks, the copse occupied a dried-up creek that no one had ever cleared. It was a vertical burst of green above the swaying heads of soy. That’s where they were going. Into trees? She decided to watch the rest from a distance; she made the next left-hand turn and stopped the car. Anyone looking behind at her would conclude she was driving away on a road to the north and dismiss her as a danger. The soy wasn’t high enough to hide her, but she felt that her presence pointing the other direction wouldn’t disturb the scene. She got out of the car and stayed low as she came around the back of it. She stilled the binoculars against the bumper.