Inspector Green Mysteries 9-Book Bundle (131 page)

He glanced at the screen and nodded. “It’s part of uniform parade. The photos are being circulated to patrols, and they’re supposed to ask around and keep their ear to the ground. We also passed it on to the
RCMP
to cover the rural areas. No one’s had any missing persons reports that match. The Deputy Chief is thinking of making an appeal to the public, broadcast her photo and description.”

McGrath hesitated. Her backlog of work still beckoned, but if her instincts were correct, this was part of a once-in-alifetime case that had never been solved. “Before he does, I want to check something,” she said. “Let me requisition a file from archives, and then I’ll be right with you.”

Even with a rush on it, the file took several hours to arrive, giving her time to make a dent in her backlog. She watched as the boxes were unloaded onto the floor by her desk—stacks of statements, reports, warrants and futile leads, all neatly catalogued as she had left them ten years ago in the hope that someday she’d have a reason to come back to them. A new lead, a belated recollection or pang of conscience.

The memories of the case came back in a rush as she flipped through the pages, scanning the contents. Finally, she came to the photos. Before
CD
s and digital cameras, everything had been retained on colour Polaroids. There were dozens of photos of the crime scene, the autopsy, and the witnesses—at least those who were still in the bar by the time the first squad car reached the scene.

McGrath was looking for a single photo of a woman standing arm in arm with a young soldier, and she finally found it near the bottom of the pile. The woman was looking straight into the camera with her head cocked mischievously to the side and a broad smile lighting her face. The young man was sombre, his gaze fixed with purpose as if he knew the heavy responsibility that lay ahead. His features were tense, but at least they were intact, McGrath thought, which was more than could be said for the rest of his photos.

McGrath picked up the frontal photo from Ottawa and held the two photos side by side. The face of the woman in the earlier photo was younger and fuller, but ten years and a hard life would explain that. The particulars fit. Five-foot-seven, blonde hair, blue eyes. The estimated age fit. Even the last detail, the evidence of an earlier pregnancy, fit too.

She packed the files back into their boxes, picked up the two photos and went into her staff sergeant’s office. She laid the photos on his desk.

“What do you think? Could they be the same woman?”

He turned the earlier photo over to read the back, and his eyebrows shot up. “The Daniel Oliver case?”

“What do you think?”

He shrugged. “Anything’s possible. I can’t see it myself, but you were closer to the case. You’re thinking this is the girlfriend?”

“Patricia Ross. The specs fit.”

“Yeah, her and half of Nova Scotia’s female population. We’re thinking of releasing a request to the media.”

McGrath thought fast. The staff sergeant was a fair, experienced officer, but he always aimed for the most efficient route from A to B, and he rarely worried about the emotional fall-out. In the Daniel Oliver case, it was the emotional fallout that haunted her most.

“Can you hold off for twenty-four hours? Give me a chance to track her down?”

He frowned. “Ottawa needs answers
ASAP
. They’re sitting on a homicide, Kate.”

“But there may be family. Children. You don’t want their dead mother’s face plastered on
TV
to be their first inkling of the news. Twenty-four hours.”

He glanced at his watch. It was past four o’clock. “Seven a.m. Take it or leave it.”

She took it. Dropping all else, she returned to her desk and started to track down the current whereabouts of Patricia Ross. The address in the file proved a dead end. Not only had Patricia moved out years earlier, but the old house itself had been demolished for an office building. A Canada411 search uncovered no Patricia Rosses living in Nova Scotia, but seven P. Rosses in the Halifax area. Calls to all seven were negative. If Patricia Ross still lived in Halifax, she had no phone in her own name. Yet the province had no record of a Patricia Ross registering a marriage at any time in the past ten years.

Dinner consisted of a donair and a V-8 juice consumed at her desk while she turned to the next phase of her inquiries. Of the dozen witnesses she’d interviewed who claimed to be friends of Daniel Oliver, she was able to reach only four, but none of them had kept in touch with Patricia. Two thought she’d gone to stay with Danny’s folks in Cape Breton, but when McGrath phoned, Danny’s mother said she hadn’t spoken to Patricia since the wake. She didn’t even know if the baby had been born.

Mrs. Oliver’s tone was high and querulous. “To this day I’ve never forgiven her. It was all her doing, Danny’s troubles. And then after he’d gone, she never even bothered to pick up the phone.” Belatedly her voice dropped. “Why? What’s happened to her?”

McGrath recalled that the mother’s feelings had been very different ten years earlier. Patricia was to have been her future daughter-in-law, and she and the baby were supposed to make the world of difference in Danny’s life. “I just need to get in touch with her,” McGrath hedged. “If you do hear from her, please ask her to call the Halifax police.”

There were two other official avenues of inquiry she could pursue in her search, but both the Health Department and Revenue Canada would not be accessible until business hours in the morning. She was just about to give up for the evening when her phone rang. It was one of Daniel Oliver’s old friends, for whom she had left a voice mail message earlier. He had a deep drawl with a hint of Cape Breton in his vowels.

“I did run into her a year or so ago, and we had a couple of drinks for old times. Never found out where she lived, but she seemed a regular at the Seamen’s Watch. They might know.”

McGrath glanced at her watch. It was just past eight o’clock—peak time in the Halifax bar scene. She dived for her jacket, clipped her gun and phone onto her belt, and went in search of a partner. The Seamen’s Watch was a well-known sleaze bar on Gottingen Street just a few blocks north of the police station. It attracted a prickly mix of sailors and students, as well as the whores who serviced them and the petty thugs who thought there was money to be made. McGrath knew better than to walk in there alone. She commandeered a beefy young constable who was just coming in to write up a traffic accident. Minor, he said, no injuries. It can wait, she replied and led the way to the car park.

At nine o’clock on a Tuesday night, the Seaman’s Watch was already crowded. The yeasty stink of beer and sour bodies choked her as they walked in, but she stifled her grimace. A lively, inebriated band was banging out drinking songs at the end of the room, and the audience was singing along. Ignoring the leers, McGrath sought out the bartender and drew him close so that she could shout in his ear. She gave him a vague story about needing to locate Patricia for her own safety. Once he’d deciphered her request, the bartender’s brow furrowed.

“Yeah, she comes in here regular like, but I haven’t seen her the past couple of weeks.”

“Do you know where she lives?”

He hesitated, then glanced at the table nearby, where a group of sailors were roaring lustily. “A few of the lads have taken her home, like, you know, not a regular thing, but from time to time. She’s kind of a sad case, is our Patti.”

You don’t know the half of it, McGrath thought to herself as she signalled her bodyguard towards the table. Five minutes later, they were back out in the crisp, salty night air, armed with a street name and number. They drove slowly up the street, scanning house numbers until they came upon a tall, narrow clapboard house perched near the top of the hill. It was impossible to be sure of the colour beneath the peeling layers of grime, but McGrath suspected it had once been robin’s egg blue. She rang the top buzzer. It had no name, but the sailors had said she lived on the top floor.

No answer. McGrath rang again. Still nothing, although she could hear the abrasive buzz reverberate inside. Her sense of foreboding grew.

It took an hour to locate and summon the landlord to open the apartment door. He was a familiar figure to the police, a low-level drug dealer who laundered his money through several of the less savoury properties in the downtown core. He fumed as he stomped up the stairs to her floor.

“She’s one of my most reliable tenants. Clean, quiet, always pays on time. Fuck, she better not have done a runner. She knows I need a month’s notice.”

McGrath didn’t even dignify his whining with a response. As he unlocked the door, she shoved past him into the room. It was almost bare. Only a bed, table and chair, dresser and an ancient
TV
with rabbit ears. On the bed were neat stacks of old letters, photos and a folded
Sunday Herald
. In the closet, jackets and pants hung on three forlorn hangers, and the dresser itself was half full of clothes. The cupboard above the sink in the tiny kitchenette still held crockery and pots. McGrath ducked into the bathroom. The shampoo and soap were still by the tub, but her toothbrush was gone. So was her purse.

Patricia Ross had gone away, but she had intended to come back again.

McGrath returned to the main room to find the landlord rifling through the Sunday Herald. “Don’t touch that, please!”

He tossed the papers down sulkily. “Just seeing if she left me a note.”

The papers fell open to an inside page, half of which had been torn off. McGrath looked at it curiously. Page 10, which was full of local news. She hunted briefly through the rest of the paper, but there was no sign of the missing page. “Did you tear this?”

He scowled as if affronted. “It’s two weeks old! The kid downstairs probably took it. They fought all the time about that.”

He could be right, she thought. A torn page didn’t mean much, although it might be interesting to check its contents. “When was the last time you saw her?”

He scanned the room, then shrugged. “She brought April’s rent to my office three weeks ago.”

McGrath unfolded the photo of the dead Jane Doe and held it out. “Do you recognize this woman?”

The landlord glanced at the photo and to his credit, he blanched visibly in the dingy apartment light.

SIX

April 6, 1993. Zagreb, Croatia.

Dear Kit... We’re in the airport waiting for our ground
transport, so this is my first glimpse of the country. Zagreb
airport looks like any other modern airport. I don’t know what
I was expecting—snipers, tanks and big craters in the ground
from mortar fire. But there’s nothing but wall to wall
peacekeepers in the pouring rain. It’s wet and cold, but
everybody’s excited.

April 10, 1993. Pakrac, Sector West, Croatia.

We’re at our position now and getting dug in. Our section house
is a bombed out farmhouse in the middle of a field. There’s mud
everywhere from the winter rains. We’re all pitching in, learning the
jobs from the 3 Pats who are leaving. Today I did six hours at the
hot dog stand. That’s what they call a checkpoint. It can be boring,
you sit there and search each vehicle that comes through, write down
the licence plate, who’s in it and where they’re going. Sector West is
a
UN
protected area with a Serb side and a Croat side, and the
ceasefire line in between runs right through the Canadian
Battalion’s area of responsibility. The
CO
says they put the Canadians
in the toughest spot because we’re the only
UN
peacekeeping battalion
that has the equipment and the training to do the job.

Anyway, there aren’t supposed to be any weapons inside the
UNPA, but both sides are always trying to sneak them in, andit’s our job to stop them. Sometimes we have a translator but
a lot of times we just use hand gestures and it can get pretty
funny. Us pointing go back and them pointing forward.
There’s a Muslim kid Mahir from the nearby village who
knows some English, so we use him when he’s free.

April 15 1993, Sector West, Croatia.

Dear Kit... The past couple of days we’ve noticed this dog
hanging around the woods near the hot dog stand. She looks
like a border collie and shepherd mix with sores on her legs
and her ribs sticking out. Mahir says she belonged to a Serbian
family who abandoned their farm. She was so spooked it took
us three days to coax her to come near. Today we got her in the
APC
and took her back to the section house, and tomorrow
we’ll build her a dog house. She’ll probably end up sleeping
with us, but Sarge says when the Hammer’s around, she’d
better stay in her kennel. Rules are rules, after all. I’m looking
for a good name for her.

May 1, 1993. Sector West, Croatia.

Good things and not so good. Our dog’s been gaining weight
steadily and the platoon medic treated her sores with antibiotics.
Sarge swore him to secrecy. I swear she’s the smartest animal I’ve
ever met. She knows about fifty English words already, more than
the Croatian kids we’re trying to teach. I’ve named her Fundy.
The guys tease me about my new girlfriend, but I don’t mind.
She’s no competition for you, but she reminds me of home.

Today our section did patrol, which is more interesting
than the hot dog stand. We drove all around the countryside in
the
APC
checking for weapons caches and looking for troop
movement. The countryside’s green and beautiful, but a lot of
the villages are destroyed, and hardly anyone lives there any
more. Everything is bombed to hell. One of the patrols came
across this Serb village where there were no people, just stuff
left on the ground, like sneakers and kids’ clothes. Word is
there’s a mass grave there, but we’ll never know. Kind of creepy,
that only half a klic away, everyone’s just carrying on.