Dan Sharp Mysteries 4-Book Bundle (65 page)

“
The sexually insane may number in the thousands
,” Dan read. “
They are everywhere around us and are adept at hiding their unnatural urges from even the most highly trained professional. They may be hiding among your colleagues, or
” — shock and awe — “
even hidden within your own family …
”

He turned the page on a diagram of a tall, thin man in evening dress staring at a fit young man in working garb like a mongoose studying a cobra. The irresistible will of perversion.

“
They may be known by various names: inverts, sodomists, homosexualists, paedophiles …
”

The book was a fetishist's wet dream, an orgy of foreplay.
All that repression needed an outlet
, Dan reasoned. He placed it back on the shelf and pulled out another volume.

He'd been there half an hour when footsteps app-
roached, crossed the porch, and entered the cottage by the front door.

Dan's phone rang again, giving him a jolt. He looked around the corner and held up a warning finger.

“Sharp.”

He listened for a moment, a frown forming on his face. He hung up without a word and turned back to the new arrival.

“There's no sign of him on any of the ferries. He may have come by water taxi. We'll just have to wait.”

He looked out at the mist-covered lawn, the darkness gathering under the trees.

“Will he be safe…?”

Dan shrugged.

“They promised not to shoot him.”

“Oh, god, I hope not. He's all I've got left.”

Dan gestured to a sofa. “Have a seat,” he said.

The clock ticked menacingly. They tried not to look at one another. Dan kept his eyes peeled for an approach across the lawn. That was the way he'd come, he felt sure. He would assume there was no need to hide or slip in through the trees on either side of the cottage. Dan had promised to deliver what he wanted.

A floorboard creaked somewhere upstairs.

No. Was it possible?

They waited, but not for long. The legs appeared first, followed by the blue blazer. Dan held his breath as the figure he knew as Little Boy Blue appeared before them. Holding a crossbow cocked and ready.

For a moment, his sense of reality failed.
Rule Number Nine: The villain is never who you think it is
.

Dan felt a hand grip his own.

He's not dead
, he thought, as the figure descended one step at a time.

But of course, he wasn't dead. It was Gaetan Bélanger who was dead, no matter what the papers reported about the martyrdom of a heroic police officer, the gun found beneath the badly burned body.
No matter what anyone believed, it was Bélanger who'd died that night, or maybe even the day before, while Little Boy Blue had escaped via the back door, giving him just enough time to return as Constable Pfeiffer and start the fire himself, waiting till the camera feed died before slipping away unseen.

Somehow Pfeiffer had fooled them all again. He'd gotten here first. Maybe he'd been here since the night before, waiting for Jags to arrive.

They watched as a hand reached up and brushed the girlish nose, almost knocking the school cap from his head. The transformation was remarkable. Clean-shaven, with his hair combed down over his forehead,
you might have mistaken him for his fourteen-year-old self, the boy in the photograph. The same boy, a
decade earlier, standing with his father on one of
a handful of supervised visits. Anyone else might have accepted the make-believe that this was just a schoolboy come out for a bit of truancy, casing a rock star's home while he was out. Only this was a man, not a boy.

Pfeiffer looked from one to the other of them. Rage consumed his features. He glared at Dan. “You shouldn't have done this.”

“Pierre …” his mother said.

“Shut up!”

He swung the crossbow around. One arrow. Whose heart would it pierce? Whose red, red breast?

They sat there, unmoving. No one seemed to know what to do. The cellphone startled all of them. Dan feared for a moment that Pfeiffer's finger might slip accidentally. He looked to him for a sign.

“Go ahead,” Pfeiffer said. “They're expecting you to answer. Just be very careful what you say.”

Dan raised the phone slowly to his ear. “Sharp.”

He listened for a while, not taking his eyes off Pfeiffer. “No sign yet. I'll keep my eyes open for him.”

He closed the cellphone and set it back on the table.

Pfeiffer grinned. “They still don't know I'm here, do they?”

Dan shook his head. “No. You fooled them completely.”

“They set up metal detectors on the ferry docks.
I heard them talking about it on the phones. But I didn't bring a gun. They didn't even notice me when I walked past them.”

Marilyn was nearing some sort of breaking point. She couldn't keep silent any more. “Pierre …”

He swung the arrow in her direction. “What do you want?”

“I … I'm so sorry, darling.”

He sneered. “Really? Really, Mummy?”

She nodded.

“It's a bit late, but why are you sorry?”

“Oh, sweetheart. This has nothing to do with Jags Rohmer.”

“Yes it does. You remember what he did. I'm going to kill him.”

She shook her head. “It wasn't him.”

“You're lying.”

“It wasn't Jags.”

“But I remember. I remember waking up in bed with the two of you. I remember what he did to me. Time after time. Coming at me. How he always insisted on going to church together afterward. How we always had to take the host because” — here his voice changed, taunting — “because he said we were sinners.”

Marilyn choked back the tears. “It wasn't him.
I know I told you it was him, but it wasn't.”

“It was
him!
”

“Sweetheart, you never even met Jags.”

The eyes were crazed, the expression contorted. “You're lying again!”

She shook her head. “No, I'm telling the truth.”

“You crack whore. You wouldn't know the truth if it raped you.”

Dan felt her tremble.

“She's telling the truth,” Dan said.

Pfeiffer whirled on him. “You shut up!”

Marilyn pushed a strand of hair behind her ear. Dan saw the tiny hearing aid curled over the left ear. Her vanity. He wondered how long she'd had it. Maybe for years. He recalled their conversation at the house, how she'd struggled to hear him, not wanting to ask him to repeat himself. It wasn't what the killer wanted silenced, after all, but what hadn't been heard: all the cries for help.
It's like you don't listen to me
. His son's words, echoing Kendra's the night before.

The hair fell back in place. That was all. He didn't think about it again.

“It wasn't Jags,” Marilyn said insistently.

“Stop saying that,” Pfeiffer commanded.

“I never wanted you to know,” she said. “I never wanted you to face the truth. It wasn't Jags. I'm telling the truth now. You never even met him.”

Dan put his hand over hers, squeezing hard, willing her not to say it.

“It was your fa ...”

The arrow struck as the word was still forming in her mouth. The force of it threw her slight figure back against the cushions.

Dan heard the gasp, the whine as Death seized the opportunity. He saw it in her eyes, wild and backsliding, as her body recognized its predicament. She shuddered once and the breath left her. It was over in less than a minute, though to Dan it seemed to take hours while the clock ticked on and on.

Baa Baa Black Sheep

The days thinned and blew dry again till they felt reminiscent of a true Canadian autumn. Everyone welcomed the coolness, none more so than Dan. Colours swirled in the air as the leaves changed, the world dissolving
in primary hues, becoming a Tom Thompson painting for the briefest of moments. A week later they were gone, leaving a barren landscape, the circus having fled town for yet another year, the clowns and acrobats and jugglers put away with the tigers and elephants.
Duty done.

Two significant birthdays were celebrated back-to-back. Ked turned fifteen and grew one step closer to manhood. The previous day, Lester turned sixteen, making him legally responsible for choosing his place of residence. Applications were pending to make Donny his legal guardian.

“They wouldn't even call me Lester,” he griped of his mother and stepfather during his recent incarceration. “I told them I'm not Richard anymore. Why couldn't they understand that?”

Dan laughed softly. “How does it feel to be home?”

Lester shook his head. “Why did I ever leave?”

“Story of the world,” Dan told him. “One day you'll figure it out.”

He'd enrolled in a local high school, to everyone's relief. For all intents and purposes, it was as though he'd suddenly resurfaced from nowhere.
Except that no one can be nowhere
, Dan reminded himself.

They were outside on the balcony. Trevor tippled a Scotch on his knee, while Donny tilted a cigarette at the sky. Dan looked back inside the condo, where Ked and Lester hovered over a laptop on the kitchen counter. Lester's jeans were settled well down around his hips, exposing a good deal of his underwear-encased buttocks.

“Do you approve of that kind of dress?” Dan asked.

“Approve?” Donny repeated, exhaling a wreath of smoke. “No, but this is how all the other kids dress and I refuse to become a censorial parent, even step-parent. I draw the line at naked flesh in public, however.”

They turned to each other and laughed.

“How quickly we grow old,” Donny said.

“Amen to that,” Dan agreed.

They both looked off for a moment. Ked's voice reached them from inside.

“Don't go away again, okay?” he told Lester. “You're the closest thing to a brother I have.”

“I'm not going anywhere for a very long time,” Lester told him. “No worries, bro.”

Dan smiled. “Weren't you concerned about being questioned for harbouring a minor?” he asked.

Donny, permanently wreathed in calm again, blew a considered exhalation of smoke and shrugged.

“Not really. His ID says he's eighteen.”

Dan laughed then grew serious again. “So what do you think about getting him to help with the case?”

Donny frowned, the only outward sign of inner perturbation. “I don't like it, but I'll let you ask him. If he says no, then you have to back off. He's out of all that now and doesn't want to be reminded of it.”

“Agreed,” Dan said.

Donny shook his head. “A former police officer, huh?”

Dan nodded. He thought of his recent conversation with Ed Burch. Pfeiffer's father had been the chief's best friend when they joined the force together, and later became his right-hand man. But the branch divided, one going up the light side while the other chose the dark.

“I gather deals were made that allowed him to disappear with dignity rather than spend his life in jail,” Ed told Dan.

“Unfortunately, it didn't stop him from doing his dirty deeds.”

“Bad cops are nothing new,” Ed said. “There are two kinds of people attracted to the uniform. The first come in as idealists. Some of them actually want to change the world.” He shrugged. “Ideals seldom last, however. Sometimes they get tempered by a more realistic outlook with time and experience. Others become soured. It's too bad, but it happens. You see them all the time, burning with rage underneath the surface. Rogue officers. Unpleasant. Unpredictable.”

“I've met plenty of those.”

“Then there are the other kind who come to the force looking for trouble. They want power and demand respect without necessarily earning it. We try to weed them out in training. Still, what it comes down to is the nature of the beast. Is it black-hearted or just weak-willed? The first type will always be trouble. The second can surprise you. You can appeal to their better natures. Let them know they can help others if they try.”

Dan nodded.

“But in my experience, a rogue officer will always be a rogue officer.”

“Which were you?”

“I was an idealist who hit the wall early and decided that I had joined for the wrong reasons. So I quit. Simple as that.”

“Meaning you operate on principles.”

Ed smiled. “Thank you for that.”

It had been a telling conversation.

Dan stood side by side with Donny now, staring out across the city. His new home lay somewhere just this side of the river. He'd stopped by again the other night, placing his hand against the brick, trying to envisage a future there. The images wouldn't come. Maybe Domingo was wrong after all. The future was impossible to conjure, nothing there to scry. Time was immutable. It formed one second at a time, the present sloughing off the skin of the past. How could you read into something that didn't exist yet?

Still, he had to give her credit: she'd been right about Jags and the light that went off and on. Self-extinction. Auto-asphyxiation. That was something, at least. And then there was Little Boy Blue, who disappeared into thin air.
It's like he doesn't really exist
, she said. Perhaps he hadn't really existed for years, not since his childhood was stolen from him.

Dan had read the stats. He knew what happened to abused kids. Suicide was common; others became drug addicts or alcoholics. Others lost all interest in life, a form of non-existence that must have seemed preferable to what they had.

He looked over at Donny.

“They say there are three things necessary for sexual abuse to occur: opportunity, power, and secrecy. He had all three. First of all, he was the boy's father. On top of that, he had friends in high places. If it wasn't for Ed Burch, this would have gotten nowhere. It was the chief of police who finally agreed to name him. Unofficially, of course. It was the main reason young Pfeiffer got away with so much — the chief felt he owed him because of his father. He still can't be charged with offences that occurred before the date he was granted clemency. That can't happen.”

Donny nodded sagely. “I understand.” He pondered this for a second. “Just how big is this investigation going to get? Politicians, celebrities … who's next, royalty?”

“Hush your mouth,” Dan told him.

When the question was put to him, and he was assured that the man who abused him would be put away for a long time, Lester agreed to identify him. The clothes he'd been wearing the night he was raped were bundled in a locker in a friend's basement. If they were still there, as he believed, forensics would be able to find physical evidence linking the man to the crime.

“Does this make me a snitch?” Lester asked Dan as they walked up the steps of the police headquarters together.

“Guess you could say that.”

“Good. It's my turn to make
him
feel bad.”

“Keep your mind on justice rather than revenge,” Dan told him. “This is about making things right for you and making sure it doesn't happen to others.”

Lester considered this. “Uncle Dan, how come you're so smart?”

Dan was glad it wasn't going to be a live identification parade, even through one-way glass. He waited, a prayer hovering on his lips as Lester looked over the photographs laid out on the desk before him. Despite Donny's trepidation about letting the boy face his past, they both knew it needed to be done. In the year Lester had spent with Donny, he'd grown from a grasping, devious adolescent into a young man with a sense of self-worth. Dan was fairly sure this wasn't going to hurt him. Rather, he suspected it would help Lester walk away from whatever hold the past had over him. Hadn't he been smart enough to realize that any chance of having a normal life with his mother was impossible as long as she stayed with the monster she had married? He might take a while getting there, Dan felt, but he knew which way the wind was blowing. No, Lester was going to help put away the man who had raped him, once and for all. And the world would be better for it.

They watched him flick over a page then glance back at it. With a look of gratification, he put his finger to the bottom of the page. It looked like an older version of Constable Pfeiffer, the father who had left his family when his son was still a baby.

“That's him.”

“Are you sure?” asked the female detective.

“I am sure,” Lester said, without a hint of emotion. He looked up at her and nodded.

Germ alerted Dan to the updated blog on Gaetan Bélanger's website. While Pfeiffer had added occasional contributions to the site under Bélanger's name, including his own death notice, the real Gaetan had prepped his final entry to be automatically released.

In it, he outlined his plan to kill Little Boy Blue and then himself. The taunting tone was gone. There was a sense of finality to the words.

When you read this, I will be dead. It's time to end this torture. I am going to kill the person I thought was a friend, and then I am going to kill myself. I tried hard to avoid him, but he found me. I don't know how he did.

What Father Thierry did to me was wrong, but what was done to him was worse. I don't believe in love. I don't believe in forgiveness. But I did not kill him. It was Pierre. I am going to kill Pierre then I am going to kill myself.

He wrote briefly about his tortured life, about being sent from one home to another before finally feeling he'd found a place to belong when he became an altar boy at the church where Father Thierry worked. Sadly, the feeling didn't last. It was a typical Lost Boy story, one Dan related to. After the sexual abuse, the boy grew up hating his life and everyone who tried to befriend him.

“I know I don't really have any friends,” Gaetan wrote. “And I don't think I feel anything any more, but I still like Pierre, despite what he did.”

Sadly, the one person he'd trusted turned out to be his worst enemy. He probably hadn't once been allowed to choose his own fate in his short life, Dan reflected.

Domingo was beside him while he read the entry. They were discussing their own pasts, how they'd both suffered through their familial relationships.

“Yet we grew up to be decent human beings,” Domingo said. She looked Dan in the eye. “We were lucky, of course. We still have the capacity to love and trust.”

Dan nodded.

“Even though we like to joke about our early sexual proclivities, I sometimes wonder if those urges were because of the people we missed out on building relationships with.”

“How so?”

“My father left home when I was young. My mother didn't want me, so I found someone who did. I just wonder if your urge to have sex with older men as a teenager was some way of making up for your father's drinking, for his abandoning you emotionally.”

Dan shrugged. “You may be right. To tell you the truth, I don't worry about it now. I like who I am.”

She looked at him. “Good. That's important. You and I are survivors. We know who we are and what matters to us. What matters is today, not yesterday.”

“It's the Gaetan Bélangers of the world we have to worry about,” Dan agreed. “I just wish …”

She waited. “What, honey?”

Dan drew a breath. “I just wish he would have talked to me that day. Maybe I could have said something to change his mind. Are there people who are past help? Too far gone for hope?”

Domingo shrugged. “No one can be nowhere.”