Stranglehold (22 page)

“Those are all of my instructions,” Carpenter said.

Greene stood slowly. “Thank you, sir,” he said.

They shook hands.

Two older women wearing white gloves were sitting in the lobby. The receptionist said a few words to them in Greek and they both smiled.

Greene made his way down the long staircase to the street.

The morning sun was out and it hit him in the eyes. His mind was reeling, so it took a moment for him to focus on the man standing right outside the door.

“Detective Greene,” Daniel Kennicott said.

“Hello, Daniel.”

Kennicott’s face looked ashen. Two uniformed police officers moved in on either side of him. He knew them both. To his left was Arnold Lindsmore, a big lug of a man whom Greene had been friendly with since they were in police college together. To his right, Clyde Newbridge, Hap Charlton’s nasty pal.

Good cop, bad cop, Greene thought. Nicely played, Daniel.

“Hi, Arnie,” he said to Lindsmore.

“Hi, Ari.” Lindsmore looked grim.

“Clyde,” Greene said to Newbridge

“Ari,” Newbridge replied, with a snarl.

Give me points, at least, for keeping you out of it.

Kennicott put his hand on Greene’s shoulder and looked him straight in the eye.

Exactly how I taught him to do it, Greene thought as he heard the young man he’d mentored for five years, making him into a very good homicide detective, say, “Ari Greene, you are under arrest for the murder of Jennifer Raglan.”

THE CN TOWER.

The second tallest freestanding structure in the world, and the first thing that came into view as Angela Kreitinger swung her old Toyota southbound on the Don Valley Parkway toward Toronto’s downtown.

The CN Tower.

It had been the last thing she’d seen in the rearview mirror of the same Toyota six years earlier when she’d headed out of the city. Humiliated. Her life and career flip-flopped from promise to disaster.

Six years, and Kreitinger hadn’t come back to Toronto once. She’d severed all ties with her friends, stopped reading the city’s four newspapers, and had even avoided using the airport. Last winter, when she took her first beach vacation in a decade, she booked her flights out of Montreal and drove two extra hours each way. Happily.

On Wednesday, she’d got the call to return to Toronto to prosecute Detective Ari Greene. Her chance at redemption at last. She’d had the file, two full banker’s boxes of evidence, couriered to her and had worked on it while packing up her life in Belleville, the town where she’d been marooned.

Her old vehicle must have muscle memory, she thought, because as her mind wandered over the rocky road of her past, it seemed to drive smoothly on its own down the DVP and through the city’s empty, early-morning streets.

At every turn she spotted election signs. Hap Charlton’s featured a photo of him with his two big fists clenched in front of his chest and the slogan
VOTE HAP. TAKE OUR CITY BACK
. She’d heard he was doing well in the polls, and he seemed to have more signs up than the current mayor, Peggy Forest.

She pulled into the parking lot north of the high court on University Avenue. It was before 7
A.M.
and few cars were there. One had a vanity licence plate that she recognized:
A F CROWN
. Some things never change, she thought. Albert Fernandez was an ambitious young Crown attorney who, like Kreitinger, always
got to work early and stayed late. A fellow workaholic. And a fellow true believer in early-bird parking.

She opened her car trunk. Careful of her bad back, she lifted the two boxes, marked
R. v. Ari Greene: First Degree Murder
, and roped them onto her old metal pull cart. It was the only thing she’d taken from the Toronto Crown’s office when she’d left. It was creaky and one of its wheels wobbled, but she felt a loyalty to the contraption she’d used to carry files to and from court for almost twenty years.

The code for the side door entrance had changed in six years, and she had to fish around in her too-large purse to find the sticky note she’d written the new one down on. Inside the Crowns’ office she inhaled the familiar smells of day-old pizza, stale coffee, and microwave popcorn, which seemed to have been stitched into the DNA of the place.

Fernandez, the only lawyer already in, was sitting at his desk in the head Crown’s corner office. A picture of his beautiful Chilean wife holding a dark-haired baby was displayed prominently on the credenza behind the desk. Seven in the morning and he was impeccably dressed in a suit and silk tie.

“Hello, Ms. Kreitinger.” He stood and extended his hand for a formal handshake.

“Albert, I think you can call me Angela. I was hoping that after all these years you’d loosened up a bit.”

“Not yet.” He smiled. “Welcome back.”

“Thanks. Feels strange.” She kicked the bottom box on her cart. “Looks like I jumped right back into the frying pan.”

Fernandez’s smile faded.

He was so well mannered and buttoned up that Kreitinger sometimes forgot that he’d come to Canada from Chile as a teenager. And although his English was excellent, he had no feel for nuance or slang. She had a hunch he’d never heard the expression “jumping from the frying pan into the fire.”

“Everyone is in shock,” he said. “First Jennifer is murdered. Then Detective Greene is charged.”

“Thanks for giving me this opportunity,” she said.

“We cleared out your old office for you,” he said.

“Thanks, Albert.”

Her cart seemed to have the same muscle memory as her car. It squeaked and rattled down the main corridor, turned left at the last hallway, and went down to the last room in the row. She’d always liked being at the end of the line.

Inside, the office was empty, except for the government-issue desk that had been there the day she’d started work here, a wood chair behind it and one in front. There was an institutional smell to the room. She could picture Esmeralda, the Portuguese cleaning woman she’d come to know over the years while working deep into evenings and over weekends, scrubbing hard to erase all traces of whoever had been in what she still thought of as her office.

All you get in the end is a box, she thought, looking at the blank walls.

After she’d finished university and her marriage had failed, she had packed up everything she owned, hauled it to a storage locker on College Street, and taken off. She’d spent a year hiking around the south island of New Zealand, travelling to distant parts of China that were barely opened to foreigners at the time, and fulfilled a lifelong dream by taking the Trans-Siberian Railway through all eleven time zones of what was then the Soviet Union.

She came back to Toronto in the middle of a steaming-hot summer. Opening her storage locker, she’d stared at the IKEA shelving units, three lamps that were even uglier than she remembered, a lumpy futon, two boring chairs, at least twenty pairs of shoes she would probably never wear again, boxes and boxes of books, and a coffee table she’d bought at a yard sale that desperately needed to be sanded down and refinished.

Her heart felt like she’d been walloped by a prizefighter’s punch. This is it, she thought. After all I’ve travelled, all I’ve seen, all I’ve done. Everything I own in the world is in this box.

“Jo, do you know who’s doing bail court this morning?” she heard a male voice say out in the hallway, steps from her office.

“I am,” a woman replied.

The Crown attorneys were drifting into work. Kreitinger shut the door behind her, lifted the first evidence box, and plunked it on her ancient desk.

That endless ache in her heart was digging at her. The list of “I won’t evers” played in her head like an old record stuck in a groove: I won’t ever be a judge like my father wanted me to be – so much for
Your Honour Justice Kreitinger
; I won’t ever be the successful politician that my mother had thought I would become – so much for
Prime Minister Kreitinger
; I won’t ever get married again, have children, or be the kind of wonderful aunt to my brother’s kids you see in the movies – so much for
Auntie Angie
. And when I retire, or get kicked out of here again, I won’t even have a best friend I can travel with on package tours to the Valley of the Kings or the fjords of Norway.

I’m going to be nothing more, and nothing less, than a damn good prosecutor.

Everyone loved to talk about how Crowns never win or lose a case. Well, fuck that, she thought as she lifted the second box too quickly and felt a sharp pain in her lower right back.

Know this, Detective Ari Greene, she thought, dumping the box on her desk and reaching to massage her back, it doesn’t matter that I never liked Jennifer fucking Raglan, or that you never liked me, because I’m going to get you convicted.

DANIEL KENNICOTT WAS SURPRISED THAT HE WAS NERVOUS. USUALLY HE WAS A CONFIDENT
public speaker. It came from growing up as the younger child in an accomplished family. His father was a judge, his mother an investigative journalist, and his older brother, Michael, a top student. It meant that from a young age he’d had to hold his own at the family dinner table in debates about everything from politics to law to journalistic ethics to bass fishing.

As a lawyer, he’d had no trouble appearing in court before the toughest judges, arguing cases before the Court of Appeal, and even once before the Supreme Court.

But tonight’s audience was a special group, and that’s why he felt shaky.

There were twenty retired homicide detectives in the small banquet room. They got together every few months in this suburban Italian restaurant, to feast on pasta and veal and red wine. Over their after-dinner brandies they smoked cigars, and listened to young homicide detectives present their current murder cases.

Kennicott had heard about this legendary group, but this was the first time he’d been asked to attend. It was an honour, and a rare chance to get input from the top cops with years of experience in the field.

His turn didn’t come until after 11
P.M.
All of these men had worked closely with Ari Greene and Jennifer Raglan and so they’d saved his case till last. After everyone had pushed aside their tiramisu, he walked to the front table. He had their full attention.

“Thanks for inviting me,” he said, opening the binder he’d used to organize the key documents. “I know this case has special meaning to all of us in Homicide.”

He looked up and saw a number of people nod. Get right to it, Daniel, he told himself.

“At 10:39 on the morning of September tenth, police received a 911 call
reporting a murder in room 8 at the Maple Leaf Motel out on Kingston Road. You all know the motel strip.” Quick look back up. More heads nodded. “I arrived at 11:01 and was met by 43 Division’s lead detective, Raymond Alpine. He informed me –”

There was a crash at the other end of the room. Kennicott looked up. The door had flown open and in walked Hap Charlton, who had officially announced he was running for mayor a few days earlier. He was accompanied by Clyde Newbridge, one of the cops who had helped Kennicott arrest Ari Greene.

All heads turned. Then everyone stood and applauded.

“Hap, Hap, Hap,” someone chanted, and everyone joined it.

Newbridge dragged out a couple of seats for them near the front and sat in one of them. Charlton, still standing, took an exaggerated bow, then put his hands up to quiet everyone down. “Thanks, gents,” he said. “Who’s got a fucking cigar?”

Someone passed him a cigar and a lighter. Someone else poured him a glass of wine. He lit up, took a deep drag, let out a big cloud of smoke, and threw back most of the wine. “Ah, that’s better. Don’t let me interrupt. I came to hear about Ari’s case. Off the record, of course.”

All eyes turned back to Kennicott.

He walked them through the evidence step-by-step. Taking his time. Talked about the murder scene and showed them a blowup picture he’d brought of the kicked-in bathroom door. Then showed them the girl Sadura’s drawing and pointed to the boots the driver of the scooter was wearing.

“You all recognize these,” he said. “Same police boots everyone’s worn for thirty years.”

Everyone smiled.

He told them how he’d checked Greene’s attendance at the squad’s offices with Francine Hughes, whom they all knew very well. Then how he got Greene’s cell-phone records and saw that Raglan had called him from the Coffee Time at 9:56:12, and finally the arrest.

He scanned the crowd. All eyes were on him. “Greene’s bail hearing is set for Wednesday. Angela Kreitinger has been brought in to be the lead Crown. Judge is Norville. We think it’s fifty-fifty she’ll let him out. Questions?”

“How good a match is the footprint on the bathroom door to his boot?” one of the retired detectives asked.

“It’s not bad, but no slam dunk,” Kennicott said. “We’re getting an expert
opinion. I expect he’ll say that it is, at best, possibly the same boot. It will be a good piece of circumstantial evidence, along with the girl’s drawing. No more.”

“No defensive wounds on Jennifer?” another man asked. “What about under her fingernails?”

Kennicott shook his head. “No skin. No hair. Nothing to get DNA. There was a bit of glue and paper under the nail on her right forefinger. She was probably taking a label off something. And bits of leather under a few others. If you look at the girl’s drawing, it looks like he’s wearing a leather coat and gloves. Even if she’d tried to scratch his arms, nothing would have stuck.”

Someone else spoke up. “Rule number one in homicide is that the killer always leaves something behind. You telling us you don’t have anything?”

Kennicott shook his head. “Not yet. Detective Zeilinski is the ident officer, and you all know how good she is. But we don’t have a thing. Greene knew what he was doing. Gloves, boots, helmet, he’d totally sealed himself off.”

“What about the scooter?” Hap Charlton asked. “Find it and you are halfway home, aren’t you?”

“I’ve instituted a search in the area around Greene’s house,” Kennicott said.