Dream Chasers (26 page)

Green nodded grimly. “I've tried to put out fires, but the sooner we can
ID
this Jane Doe, the better. When can MacPhail give us something definite to go on?”

“He's doing the autopsy this morning, but the formal
ID
is going to be tricky. With no teeth for dental records, it'll be down to fingerprints and
DNA
. Paquette is going to try to lift the skin from the fingers today, but it's iffy. It'll take a couple of days.”

“But there must be some clues—medical records, blood type, height and weight...”

“Yeah, but even that will still take a day or two.”

“What about time of death? Can he at least tell us that? We >know Jenna's been missing since Friday, so...”

“Yeah. Lots of time to breed flies and maggots, so we shipped the little buggers off to Dr. Narwa. At least we should have some answers on that by the end of the day.”

Green had to smile. Dr. Narwa was a wild-eyed entomologist with an unusual enthusiasm for his subject that sent all but his most devoted colleagues fleeing from the room. He would spend all day and night with his magnifying glass, microscope and calculator identifying the species, stage and generation of every bug found in Jane Doe's body.

“But at this point Jenna Zukowski is our best working assumption,” Green said. “I mean, we don't have any other likely candidates.”

Sullivan shook his head and was about to reply when his cell phone interrupted him. After glancing at the Caller
ID
, he switched it to speaker phone. “What's up, Bob?”

Gibbs' tinny voice filled the room. “I'm still trying to find Crystal Adams, sir. I haven't had much luck, but I did find out something interesting I thought you'd want to know. I spent most of yesterday afternoon at her high school, tracking down her friends. None of them have seen her since school on Friday. They said she was in a weird mood—”

“Weird how?” Green interjected.

“Oh!” Gibbs sounded startled to hear Green's voice. “Um... uptight. She was s-supposed to meet them Sunday afternoon at the mall, but she never showed.”

“Were they worried? Was that unusual?”

“Not worried, sir. More pissed off. She does this, they said. Ditches her friends when something better comes along.”

“What would be something better, according to them?”

“Well, it looks like she's a serious puck bunny, sir.”

Green raised a questioning eyebrow at Sullivan. “Hockey groupie,” Sullivan explained. “Passed from player to player.”

“Yessir,” Gibbs said. “So I tracked down some members of the Ottawa 67's who are still in town, but they haven't seen her.”

“Was she seeing anyone in particular?” Green asked.

“Half the team, it sounds like, but some of the guys said she had her sights set on Riley O'Shaughnessy.”

Why wouldn't she, Green thought. Hannah had said these girls liked to shoot for the top. The ultimate power trip. And if that pesky girlfriend was out of the way...

The idea came out of the blue, so obvious that he wondered why he hadn't seen it before. If Crystal had supplied the drugs, she herself was in the best position to doctor them. Getting rid of the girlfriend would give her a clear run at the boy. The only trick was how to keep the boy from taking the bad drugs too.

“Did you talk to Riley O'Shaughnessy himself?” Sullivan was asking.

“N-no, sir. I knew you were working that aspect of the case, and I didn't want to interfere. But this is the thing. I did learn one other thing that might be important. Crystal Adams had an appointment with Jenna Zukowski the day after Lea's death. The secretary in the guidance department remembers her running out of Jenna's office.”

Green almost shouted aloud. The pieces were falling into place. It was a safe bet Crystal had told Jenna something about Lea, and rather than report the information to the police, the misguided fool had decided to make inquiries on her own. Did she think she was helping Crystal? Or Lea? Or the killer? “Great work, Bob!” Green exclaimed. “Did any of her friends know what they talked about?”

“No sir, but...I didn't ask.” Gibbs' voice fell. “That Norman Bethune School is my next lead. I was planning to go there after... Is that..? D-do you want...?”

Sullivan rescued him. “Go ahead, Bob. We need to find that girl.”

Green's mind was racing as the disparate bits of information began to fit together. Gradually an appalling alternative emerged. Crystal Adams had confided something to Jenna, then Jenna had disappeared. And now, so had Crystal.

Two missing women...

He was so distracted, he barely heard Sullivan's question. The big detective had signed off and was looking at him. “That is okay, isn't it, Mike? I know Bethune is Hannah's school.”

Green nodded. “What if it's Crystal Adams?”

“What is?”

“Our Jane Doe.”

To his credit, Sullivan digested the idea carefully. “The body'd been in the woods at least a couple of days. When was Crystal last seen?”

“Her mother said she took off early Sunday morning.” Sunday morning! A knot of nausea gripped Green's gut. “Jesus Christ. If it is Crystal, this is my fault.”

Sullivan stared at him. “How do you figure that?”

“The timing of it. She took off Sunday morning.”

“So?”

“Lea died last Monday night, and all week Crystal attended school as normal. She didn't take off. Sure, she was upset, probably from a guilty conscience because she's the one who supplied the drugs. She'd wanted Riley for herself, but I don't think she'd thought through her actions, so when Lea dies, she felt bad—”

“Not bad enough to miss school. Not bad enough that her mother noticed.”

Green snorted. “From what Gibbs said, I don't think that mother would notice trouble unless it was happening to
her.
But the point is, Crystal did feel bad enough to go to the social worker for advice, but whatever advice she got, she didn't like it, because she stormed out of the guidance office. But she didn't drop out of sight. She goes on with things, even makes plans with friends. Then suddenly, Sunday morning, she freaks out. What happened Sunday morning?”

“I don't know, Mike. Maybe Riley O'Shaughnessy rejected her, maybe she learned about the social worker's disappearance and thought it was her fault.”

Green whipped his head back and forth. “Could be. But there was one thing that happened Sunday morning that very clearly would have freaked her out. Something that was intended to shake the case up. I guess it did.”

“Riddles, Mike?”

“The
Ottawa Sun
article. The one I fed Frank Corelli about bad drugs being the real cause of Lea's death. The
Ottawa Sun
hits the stands about six a.m. in the morning. I remember Gibbs told me right after she got a phone call, she went out to get a paper. I'd bet a million dollars that wasn't a usual Sunday morning routine for her.”

Sullivan's eyes narrowed, and Green could almost see the connections forming in his brain. But he looked unconvinced. “Yeah, okay, but if she's the one who supplied the marijuana, she already knew about the bad drugs. That's why she was upset all week.”

“But when she saw the paper, she knew that we knew, and she realized we'll be looking for the drug supplier. She was probably afraid we'd trace it to her.”

“Okay. So she ran away. I still don't see how you get to her being the Jane Doe.”

“Because if my theory is correct, someone else was freaked out by the
Sun
article too. Someone who wouldn't want her found, or even identified. I think she was used, Brian. That's the story of this kid's life. Maybe she supplied the marijuana, but maybe someone else gave it to her. When Lea died, Crystal was worried. She didn't know what had caused it, but she was afraid she had a hand in it. When she opens the paper Sunday, there it is. Her fears confirmed. Not only was she tricked into selling bad drugs, but the cops know about them. No wonder she freaked.”

The pieces fit, but their conclusion gave him no sense of triumph. In releasing that story to Corelli, he might have signed Crystal's death warrant.

“Find out who she bought the marijuana from,” Green said grimly. “If she's the Jane Doe, that's who killed her. Get the drug squad on it and get medical and physical information on her to check against the body.”

“Mike, shouldn't we at least wait till we have some results from the entomologist and the autopsy? That's only a day or two. At this point we don't even know whose body it is, let alone what led up to the death.”

Green shook his head impatiently. “Something's happened to this girl. We should at least get a warrant for her phone records.”

Sullivan checked his watch. “Then I'll put Gibbs to work on it. He's handling the drug angle anyway. Jones is going to be back with the O'Shaughnessy warrants any second, and then I want to move on that house.” He reached for his cell phone, but in timing that bordered on prophetic, a knock sounded at the door, and Jones stuck his head in. He waved a sheaf of papers. “I got the search warrants signed and ready to go.”

“Excellent! We'll alert the surveillance team we're on our way.” Sullivan glanced at Green as he hauled himself to his feet. “You want in on this?”

Green hesitated. He would love to be there when the search was conducted. Nothing in his deskbound life equalled the thrill of seeing a case break wide open. But this latest twist troubled him. Another teenage girl was missing, this one with half a dozen ominous links to the very heart of the case. She was a hockey groupie who had attended parties with both Riley and Vic McIntyre, she had set her sights on Riley, which gave her a good motive for wanting Lea out of the way, and she might have supplied the drugs that led to Lea's death. Most ominous of all, she had received a phone call Sunday morning right after the article in the
Sun
came out.

Then she had disappeared. Green recalled Hannah's cryptic words the other night about the adults who worked in the background, supplying the drugs and pulling the strings. Nobody opens a candy store for nothing, she'd said.

It might already be too late, but he couldn't wait around for another teenage girl to turn up dead. Much as he hated to miss the fireworks at the O'Shaughnessy house, he was needed elsewhere.

“Take Wallington and Jones,” he said. “I'll catch up with you later.”

If Sullivan was surprised, he masked it well as he organized his team, coordinated a plan and headed out of the building.

Once the flurry of activity died down, Green stood in the empty squad room, kicking himself for not hanging onto Jones, the warrants wizard. With the raid on the O'Shaughnessy house and the two homicide investigations in full swing, not a single Major Crimes detective was available to follow up on Crystal's cell phone records or her drug connections.

He phoned the heads of the drug squad and the school resource officer program to get them tracking down all all know crystal meth labs and suppliers, then he phoned Gibbs for an update on his search for Crystal.

“Nothing yet, sir.” Green knew it was useless to hound him, useless to add a phone warrant to his list of chores. Even at the top of his game, Gibbs had always been meticulous and thorough, but no one could ever have accused him of excessive speed. In his current state, any pressure would only throw him into a tailspin. Muttering a vague explanation about the urgency of the search, Green hung up and reluctantly turned his attention to the phone warrant.

Green hadn't drafted a search warrant in years. He hated the long, tedious exercise in nitpicky detail and precise legalese. As he was tracking down the latest guidelines in the procedural manual, he remembered the warrant Jones had drawn up to obtain Riley's cell phone records. Moments later he'd printed it off his computer, scribbled out the information on Crystal and handed the task of the new warrant over to a detective in General Assignment who looked eager for brownie points with the inspector.

Belatedly, he realized he hadn't heard any results from Riley's cell phone warrant, even though he was sure Jones had put a rush on it. Maybe it was time to light a fire under the phone company. He headed down to the incident room, where a clerk sat at a computer surrounded by stacks of papers. She was meant to be inputting all the information on the Lea Kovacev case into the Major Case file, but she was actually leaning back in her chair, slowly spinning in circles. She started at the sight of him, nearly tipping her chair. He ignored it.

“Has Bell Mobility faxed the cell phone report on Riley O'Shaughnessy yet?”

As if anxious to redeem herself, she spun around and dived for a stack of papers sitting in the fax machine basket. She rifled through them, squinting at the titles, then pulled one with a flourish. “All these things just arrived this morning, sir.”

Green snatched it from her, his eyes scanning the columns. It took a moment to decipher the dates, times and numbers, but two calls leaped out at him, made seconds apart in the early hours of Tuesday morning. The very night Lea had died. The first, logged at 12:01 a.m., had been to 911 and had lasted three seconds. Barely time for the operator to pick up the line before Riley had hung up. The second, logged at 12:02, was to a local Ottawa number. Green felt a rush of excitement. This was the person Riley had chosen to contact from his cell phone as Lea lay dead or dying beside him. Not the 911 operator, not one of his family in Gananoque, but someone right here in the city.

Green grabbed a nearby workstation and entered the phone number into the 411 database. Within seconds, a name and address leaped onto the screen.

V. S. McIntyre 51 Country Club Lane

Darren O'Shaughnessy's house looked quiet in the morning sun. The grass was freshly mowed, the shrubs under the window neatly clipped, and the plumbing van gleamed in the driveway. Darren's been a busy boy since our last visit, Sullivan thought as he drew his Malibu up to the curb behind the plain brown Impala of the surveillance team. Perhaps because of all the media attention his famous nephew had been getting this week. Wouldn't want the place looking like a dump when the photographers arrive.