Cut to the Chase (21 page)

Rhona withdrew an evidence bag from her shoulder bag. She dug deeper, pulled out latex gloves and handed them to Candace. Then she dropped the keys onto the coffee table. “These are Danson's keys, or at least they're the keys found with his other effects. Please tell us what doors they open.”

Candace stared at the gloves.

“Pull them on and check the keys,” Hollis said quietly.

Candace, operating on automatic pilot, fingered the first key that everyone could see was a car key. She puzzled over the next small brass key, before she said, “His bicycle.” The third one was easy for her and for the others—a safety deposit key.

“I didn't know he had a box,” Candace said. “What do you suppose he keeps in it?” She frowned. “I've seen his key ring many times, but I don't remember noticing it. I don't think it was there.” Her head lifted and tilted. “Maybe it belongs to someone else. Is that a possibility?”

Gregory's name popped into Hollis's mind. Had Danson killed Gregory for this key? A chilling thought.

Candace focussed on her assignment. “This is the key to his mailbox.” She dropped it and fingered a silver key. “I haven't got a clue about this one. Maybe it's for the club or for the lacrosse team's locker room. I don't know.”

She reached for the last key, flipped it and stopped. “This is wrong,” she stated flatly. “Wrong, wrong, wrong.”

She had everyone's attention.

“Danson and I have had funny rituals since he was a little boy.” Her eyes filled with tears that spilled down her cheeks. “Something is terribly, terribly wrong,” she gulped and began to cry—noisy, hacking sobs.

“What? Tell us what,” Hollis said as she reached into her jeans pocket, extracted a crumpled tissue, stood up and pressed it into her friend's hand. “Candace, hang on. Come on.” She patted Candace on the back. “It's terrible. We know it is, but we have to know what's so wrong that it's done this to you.”

The three waited while Candace fought to control her sobs. Several ragged breaths later, she quavered, “I'm okay.”

Clearly she wasn't. She scrubbed at the leaking tears with the back of her hand. Another deep breath. “Okay, I'm okay,” she said in a shaky voice.

Hands clasped tightly together, she turned inward as if pulling a memory from a storage depot deep in her brain.

“All families have private rituals,” she began then frowned. “They do, don't they? I'm sure we weren't unique.”

“They do,” Ian reassured her.

“We had two major ones that we've used ever since Danson was little. The first one,” she paused, “doesn't have anything to do with keys, but it was important.”

“Tell your story any way you want,” Rhona encouraged.

“I was sometimes afraid to open the door when someone knocked or rang the bell.” She was looking back in time, not at the other people in the living room. “Danson would be out, and if I was home he didn't always remember to take a key. He knew I was afraid, and he always whistled ‘Alouette', when he approached the door. It got to be a joke, and he's done it ever since.” Speaking of Danson and the familiar ritual, she choked up.

“It's okay. We understand,” Rhona said. “We'll wait until you're able to tell us about the key.”

Candace reached into her pocket and pulled out shreds of the crushed tissue Hollis had given her. After she mopped her eyes and blew her nose, her lips continued to quiver.

“I'll get you a glass of water,” Hollis volunteered.

Candace sipped the water, and the detectives waited. Finally she regained control. “When Danson was young, he went to babysitters. In grade school, maybe Grade Four, I trusted him to come home and let himself in. He stayed alone for a couple of hours until I got home from high school.” Her gaze swung from one to the other. “It wasn't exactly legal. He was too young, but I didn't know what else to do.”

“My mother also did that. She had to work, and she had no one to leave us with after school,” Ian said.

Relief washed over Candace's face. Even though this had happened eons ago, Candace wanted to know that what she'd done had been okay. It must have bothered her for years.

“I wanted him to be able to march right up to the door and quickly let himself in. I always had nightmares about pedophiles following him or someone intent on burglarizing the house. I needed to visualize him scooting to the door and whipping inside. The problem was that he had a bicycle key, a school locker key, the outside door key and the apartment key. He had to fumble through them for the right one.”

“A lot for a kid to manage,” Ian said sympathetically.

“I had to think of a way to make it easy,” Candace said. “It was vitally important.”

Hollis noted that they nodded in unison.

“One evening when I was doing my nails, Danson suggested I splash a dab of nail polish on both sides of the outside door key. He said only he would know why I'd done it.” Her smile was that of a proud mother. “He was a smart boy, and he's a smart man.” No past tense here.

“Anyway, we moved frequently in those days. Colouring the door key became a ritual. When Poppy tossed us keys for a new place, Danson would laugh and say, ‘What colour nail polish are you using?' I remember the year silver was in,” Candace said. “Do you remember? All the lipsticks and nail polishes were frosted.”

Again they nodded as one.

“I was worried that it wasn't bright enough and went out and bought red. Danson wouldn't allow me to paint the key with it, because our ritual was that it should be whatever colour I was using at the time. Even when he went to Concordia, he brought his keys home, and we did them. Every time he moved, we tagged the outside door with nail polish. Like I said, it was a ritual.”

Candace picked up one key and showed them both sides. “This is for the outside door to his place. Nothing.” She rubbed it with her latex-covered finger. “There never has been.” She laid the key down. “This key is shiny and new, but it's an old building. I imagine the locks are original. Danson's key was old and worn.”

She picked up the ring and moved from one key to another. When she fingered each one she raised her gaze.

“Besides the fact that the house key doesn't have and has never had nail polish, there's one more thing wrong with this ring.”

“Tell us,” Ian said.

“There's one key missing,” Candace said. She wasn't equivocal or tentative—this was a statement of fact.

“Which one?” Ian said.

“The key to Poppy's apartment.”

“How can you be sure?” Ian said.

“Poppy is extremely, almost fanatically security-conscious. Her key has a distinctive square top. It's made by a company called Medico that numbers and registers its keys. To get an additional key, you have to jump through hoops and pay major bucks. Her key isn't here.”

“Why would your brother have had it?” Ian said.

“Because he takes cares of her plants and sometimes, when she travels, he feeds her cats.” Candace crossed her arms over her chest. “I don't know what's going on. I'm afraid it's something terrible. I can tell you as surely as the sun will be in the sky tomorrow these are not Danson's keys. At least not all of them.”

Hollis digested what Candace had said.

“You're an astute observer,” Rhona said, laying the keys on the table. “Let's start with the car key and work our way around. You identify each one, and we'll make a record.”

They worked quickly. When they finished, Rhona tucked the keys back in the bag and stood up “I don't dispute what you're telling us. It adds even more complexity to the case. Thank you for the information. We'll get back to you when we know more.”

“Have you found out who Gregory is?” Hollis said.

Rhona frowned. “You know I can't discuss an ongoing case,” she said.

“Why do you want to know?” Ian asked Hollis.

“Everything pivots around Gregory, the mystery man. I haven't found anyone who knows him. Because I needed a password, I couldn't open his computer. You have experts to do that, and I thought the least you could do would be to tell us who he was,” Hollis said.

“We can't,” Ian said, and that was that. The detectives left.

Once they had the apartment to themselves, Candace shook her head. “I hope they figure that out. Let me see the translation.”

“Of course,” Hollis agreed. “I'll go one step better and make you a copy. Then, together, we'll see what we make of it.”

Upstairs, she checked her messages.

“Hi, it's Willem. Your mysterious message is driving me crazy. If you insist on pursuing this yourself, I have a couple of ideas for you. Come to lunch tomorrow. Twelve thirty at the law society restaurant. In case you aren't familiar with it, just look for the historic old red brick house on the corner of University Avenue and Queen Street. The food's great. Hope you're available and decide to join me. Since I couldn't reach you, I made a reservation. Let me know.”

She might not be the most sophisticated woman in town, but she wasn't totally naïve. Without looking in a mirror, she knew she wasn't such a flaming beauty that she'd swept him off his feet. His line about worrying didn't ring true. More likely he wanted to know something. She shivered. The best thing to do would be to ignore his invitation. But what if he really did have an interesting insight to pass on? Wasn't her allegiance to Candace and Danson? If she didn't follow up on every lead, she'd be letting them down. Nine thirty. Not too late to call.

Willem's phone rang six times and clicked to a message. The first words were in what she presumed was Russian. Then it switched to English. “If you didn't get that, it's okay—not everyone speaks Russian. Leave a message, and I'll get back to you.”

After the beep, she identified herself, thanked him for the invitation and said she'd see him at lunch.

She made two copies of the translation, took the sheets downstairs and handed one to Candace, who was sitting at the kitchen table.

“Willem phoned,” Hollis said, pulling out a chair and flopping down.

“Willem. Who's Willem?”

“Professor Willem Andronovich, the linguistics specialist I went to see.”

“That was fast. You must have made quite an impression.”

“He asked me for lunch tomorrow. Said he'd had thoughts about the translation that he wanted to share.”

“Not a bad pickup line,” Candace said. She smoothed the paper. “No more conversation. I'm dying to read this.” She read and reread it before she raised her gaze. “What do you think it means?” she said.

“Before we get to that, doesn't it strike you as odd that Gregory would have stashed it in a book? The letter specifically instructed him to destroy it.”

“You're right.” Candace studied the letter before she spoke. “How about this scenario? He receives it in the mail, reads it, but doesn't have time to commit it to memory because he has to go somewhere in a hurry. When he gets wherever he's going, he's killed.”

Hollis reviewed the scene Candace had set. “Here's another possibility you're not going to like.”

“You're going to say Danson had a role, aren't you?”

“Right. What if Danson intercepted the message or walked into Gregory's room and somehow read it and killed Gregory because he knew what the message meant?”

Candace laughed. “Good try. A for effort, but Danson couldn't read Russian. He wouldn't know what it said any more than we did. Furthermore, I'm sure the police have already swept the place for traces of blood.”

“Maybe yes, maybe no, but they wouldn't have told us, would they?”

“Point taken. Okay. Let's agree that it's puzzling that he didn't destroy the paper and get on with figuring out what it means. What do you think?”

Hollis leaned forward and rested her elbows on the table and steepled her fingers. “It's a letter of instruction. Gregory had an important job to do for someone. He has to find out something, get the information, and kill the investigator.”

“And you think the investigator is Danson?”

“It would explain why Gregory wanted to move in with Danson.”

“Five and Seven?” Candace asked.

“People, I'd think. Maybe moles, agents.” Hollis shrugged. “Who knows.”

“It's a mysterious message and has scary implications. Don't you wish we knew what the Super Bug did?” Candace searched her friend's face. “Do you think your professor is involved?”

“That's too far-fetched. However, I didn't tell you that he volunteers or is paid to attend court as a translator for Russians who don't speak much English. That affords him a window into a larger segment of the Russian community than he might normally meet.”

“The criminal element,” Candace said slowly and paused before she spoke again. “I've read the Russian Mafia is big in Toronto. Could Gregory have been involved with them?”

“Could be. Willem would know who they were, even though the criminals would hire top notch criminal lawyers and have their own translators. I expect Willem translates for recent immigrants who aren't major players. Nevertheless, with those contacts he may have dug around and have an idea what this letter is about.”

Candace inhaled a quick sharp breath. “Did you tell him about us, about Poppy, Elizabeth and me?”

“I didn't tell him anything about your family. I also didn't say where I lived, and I don't plan to reveal any of that information tomorrow. He said he had something to share with me. I promised nothing. I intend to enjoy a delicious lunch at his expense.” Hollis yawned. “Now, if you're satisfied that that's all we can do tonight, I'm walking MacTee.”

Candace rose and banged her right fist into her left palm. The resulting smack startled both women. “I'm sick of this. I want Danson home, cleared of any involvement in Gregory's death, and I don't know what else we can do.”