Stray Bullets (10 page)

“Got another child-killer client?” Petersen asked when Parish hung up. “I’m going to be the last friend you have left before this is over.”

“I’ve got to go,” Parish said.

“Great. Next time you’re leaving that fucking cell phone at home.”

Parish waived Mr. Cutesy Waiter over and insisted on paying the bill. For all her pizzazz, Petersen went through money like water and was constantly, secretly, broke. The waiter processed the bill right in front of them. He angled himself so Petersen couldn’t see what he was doing, wrote something on a card, and passed it to Parish with her receipt.

It said:
I’m Brett. Here’s my cell number. I’m off shift at eight
.

“I don’t know how you go home alone night after night,” Petersen said.

Parish sneaked the waiter’s card into her back pocket. Bye-bye, Karl from Cleveland; hello, Boy Toy Brett. Petersen was right. This case was about to ramp up another notch, and she was going to need some distraction. To say nothing of the money she’d save on batteries.

The downtown bus depot was a place from another time. Steps away from soaring new condos, trendy coffee shops, and high-ceilinged gourmet food stores, it was a remnant of the 1950s Toronto still standing in the spanking downtown core. The tired old building was all gray walls and ceilings, harsh fluorescent light, and the lingering smell of exhaust fumes. Daniel Kennicott took a seat on a hard-backed plastic chair. The place didn’t have one redeeming quality, as far as he was concerned.

Most of the passengers looked tired, the staff worn down. The only real signs of life were the pigeons who fluttered about inside, avoiding the mesh netting and spiked ledges designed to keep them out. The sound of tinny rap music drifted in from the sidewalk, where a bejeweled guy was playing a radio at full volume in his illegally parked Camaro, all his windows down despite the cold.

Kennicott, out of uniform, wore jeans, boots, and a windbreaker, with a lightweight bulletproof vest on underneath. He was waiting for the bus down to Kingsville on the north shore of Lake Erie. There he’d get the boat across to Pelee Island and try to catch up with Dewey Booth.

“You could run down there in a police car,” Greene told him this morning, handing him a large file of background information on Booth. “But a few more hours won’t make a difference. Dollars to doughnuts, he took the bus. Follow in his footsteps.” An open-ended assignment such as this was typical of Greene, who always pushed and challenged him.

Kennicott had sent a copy of Booth’s picture to every bus and train station, airport, and police service in Ontario. Booth didn’t have a passport, but Kennicott alerted the border guards anyway. So far, no one had spotted him. Booth didn’t own a car or have a driver’s license, but to be sure he sent officers to every car rental place in the city armed with Booth’s latest prison photo. No one recognized him.

On the other side of the grimy station windows, his bus pulled into one of the open bays. Toting his knapsack over his shoulder, he headed
out the door and joined the line of travelers. The wind whipped through the breezeway and black soot spewed from the rear tailpipe. He found an open seat near the front, and fortunately, no one sat beside him. This made it easier to read through Booth’s file, which he settled into once they were on the road.

Dewey Booth’s mother had been an eighteen-year-old crack addict, and his father was a nasty piece of work who burned the baby with cigarette butts. When he was three years old, Children’s Aid swooped in and he lived in a succession of foster homes, causing more and more trouble as he grew. He had a particular penchant for torturing animals, and left a succession of injured kittens and puppies in his wake. Then, rather miraculously, when he was nine years old a gay couple, Richard Booth and Aubrey Cooper, who ran a bed-and-breakfast on Pelee Island, stepped in and adopted him. In a report that Kennicott found buried deep in the file, one of the social workers characterized this move as a “Last chance, Hail Mary pass.”

Booth first showed up on the police radar when he was eleven for smashing pumpkins and throwing eggs at neighbors’ windows on Halloween. By the time he was thirteen, he’d already been charged three times. When he was fifteen one of his fathers died swimming offshore when he got caught one night in the undertow. After that his life of crime ramped right up.

At seventeen he was caught slipping out of a high-up window at a youth detention center. Apparently he was a good climber and an even better fighter. He broke the guard’s jaw in three places. “Mr. Booth is suspicious of authority and fearful of abandonment,” the pre-sentence report for the case said. “His personality features uncontrollable anger and rage.” No kidding, Kennicott thought as he flipped through the rest of Booth’s sordid story.

The one positive in Booth’s life seemed to have been his parents. “Yeah, I had two dads,” he told one of the probation officers who prepared yet another report. “Now I’ve just got Rich. He always takes me in.”

Kennicott put the file down and looked out the bus window. Yesterday’s sudden snowfall had petered out, replaced by a dull, sleety rain. A hundred miles south and west of Toronto, the bus left behind the last hint of the Canadian Shield, the great glacial rock that covered much of the northern part of the country. Everything had flattened out. Farms and fields dotted the tabletop landscape. The earth was lying fallow, preparing for its winter hibernation.

In the small town of Chatham, he got off to change buses. They were farther south and the weather was turning milder. Even the rain had stopped.

Before the American Civil War, this town had been the northern terminus of the underground railroad and was the “home of Uncle Tom’s Cabin Historical Site,” according to the brochure he read in the one-room station. A plump woman whose face was set in a permanent scowl sat behind the counter. He showed her his police identification and then Booth’s photo.

“You seen him in the last twenty-four hours?” he asked.

“Don’t recognize him.” She barely glanced at the picture.

“Were you working yesterday?”

“Work every day.” She shrugged. “Most of ’em don’t even come inside. It’s only a ten-minute wait.”

He went back outside just as his bus pulled into the parking lot. He was the only one to get on board.

“Where you headed?” the driver asked. He was a chipper man with a big smile.

“Kingsville, then the ferry over to Pelee Island.”

“Cold time of year to go island-hopping,” the man said. “You should come back in the spring.”

He showed the driver his police identification and the photo of Booth. “Recognize him?”

“Yesterday. Morning run. There were four Mexicans going to work at the winery, and him. Surly little kid. Sat in the back with his hood up.”

“He say anything to you?”

“Nope. I even drove them all the way to the ferry launch. Not supposed to. The little runt didn’t even say thanks.”

Sounds like our boy Dewey, Kennicott thought. He took a seat by the window, pulled out his cell phone, and called Detective Greene.

Ari Greene timed it so he got back to the Tim Hortons a few minutes before five in the afternoon. He wanted to be there exactly twenty-four hours after yesterday’s shooting. Get a sense of the place at the same time of day. And the light. Which was diminishing fast, like a film of a sunrise that was being fast-forwarded.

The parking lot was still cordoned off by police tape. The impromptu memorial shrine had grown exponentially since early that morning. More flowers, more cards. Candles were burning. Some people had written notes in colored chalk on the sidewalk.

Only two television news trucks were left. A steady rain had melted all the snow, but the dampness made the air even colder. The reporters looked miserable. The story was completely dominating the news and Greene knew they were just waiting for a shot of the police taking the tape down for the evening news.

Officer Ho and his forensic team had packed up and gone a few hours before. One cop remained on duty, a squat, Polynesian-looking young man.

Until about fifteen years ago, the Toronto Police Service had a height restriction. New recruits had to be more than five foot eight and weigh one hundred and sixty pounds. It made no sense. Especially since the city attracted an unprecedented number of people from everywhere in the world, including many nationalities that were just plain shorter. Thankfully the rule was dropped, and the formerly all-white face of the police was starting to change.

“I’ll be here about half an hour,” Greene said after he’d introduced himself to the officer, who was named PC Bambridge. “Then you can take the tape down. I’m sure you’re tired.”

“Comes with the job,” Bambridge answered.

He pointed to the shrine. “Get a squad car here and have them package up all the flowers and cards and candles. I want these carefully preserved for the family.”

“Right away.”

“I always take one last look around. Important to do before you close a major crime scene.”

“I’ll remember that, sir.”

He went inside the empty doughnut shop and took a seat at the table by the window where the video showed Larkin and St. Clair had sat. He pulled out the twenty-two witness statements, which he’d had transcribed during the day, and read over the most helpful ones carefully. Next he looked at Kennicott’s interviews with the Tim Hortons employees on shift at the time. The thing that had bothered him all day was this missing employee, Jose Sanchez. The other staff said he must have left by the back door.

During the day he and Kennicott had run Sanchez’s name through the police computer and twenty hits came up. They went through every one and clearly none of them was the guy working in the kitchen here. Immigration was no help; neither was motor vehicle licensing, nor OHIP medical records. Nothing matched. There were thirty-four Jose Sanchezes listed in the phone book and they called them all. Dead end.

I have to find this guy, Greene thought.

He looked at his watch. Exactly five o’clock. He walked outside. Dusk had fallen, softening all the distances. In many ways, this was the hardest time of day to see, even worse than at night, when streetlights took over and created contrast between dark and light.

He walked down to the corner of the lot where Jet had parked his Cadillac and looked back at the spot by the side of the building where there was a chip in the walkway. Booth and St. Clair had stood there in the dark and from Jet’s vantage point, it would have been impossible to see them.

Greene clicked on his flashlight and, following the route that Officer Ho had shown with his ruler on his diagram of the scene, walked in a straight line to the chip in the walkway. When he got there he shone it up on the wall behind, following the same line. The bullet mark in the wall was right in the middle of his circle of light. And perfectly in line with the place where Jet’s car had been.

Greene tried to picture the scene twenty-four hours ago. The Cadillac pulls into the front corner of the lot and Jet gets out of his car. At the same time, Cedric Wilkinson and his son Kyle walk up from the street through the middle of the lot. When they are steps from the front door Suzanne Howett runs out from the other side of the
building, crosses behind the Wilkinsons, and greets Jet. Gunshots pierce the quiet of the night. Young Kyle is hit in the head and goes down. His father starts to scream. Howett jumps in the car and Jet takes off. Larkin St. Clair stumbles out of the dark; stuffs something, almost certainly the gun, down his pants; and takes off across the front of the parking lot toward the street. No one sees Dewey, but the back of the lot leads to an alleyway. Obviously that’s where he goes.

Jose, Jose, or whoever you are. Where were you? What did you see? What made you run?

Picture it, he told himself. Try to see it.

If Jose went out the back door before the shooting, maybe he heard Dewey and St. Clair talking. It’s dark here. The employees say he and Suzanne used to smoke out back. Officer Ho had found some cigarette butts there.

He lowered his flashlight so the beam was level with the row of bushes that lined the side of the building and walked with care toward the back, like a suspicious night guard in a cheap noir film. Halfway along, something cast a spiderweb-like shadow on the wall. He pulled a pen out of his pocket, reached over, and plucked out a black hairnet.

“You’re lucky to have such a nice day this late in November,” the uniformed woman on the ferry said to Daniel Kennicott. He’d just strolled off the boat, down the ramp to the wharf on Pelee Island. “And it’s never as cold over here. You should come back here in the spring.”

She was right. The air was noticeably warmer than on the mainland and the clouds had cleared. He’d read that the island was famous for its temperate climate due to the moderating effect of the surrounding lake. One of the reasons it was such a good place to grow wine.

“I first heard about Pelee Island when I was in grade five,” he said. “Always wanted to come here.”

“Can’t get any farther south in the whole country,” the woman said.

The big boat held space for a number of vehicles in its hold. When they cleared the parking area, he made his way down the gangplank. He heard squawking sounds when he got on shore. Overhead a flock of Canada geese gained a graceful curve in the blue sky. Outside the perimeter fence, an unmarked police car was waiting for him.

“You know the Hawk Haven Inn Bed-and-Breakfast?” he asked the dark-haired police officer who was driving once they’d introduced themselves. Her name was Françoise Gelante. She had wavy auburn hair and a smile that exposed a row of perfect white teeth.

“It’s in the southwest corner. Down the road from the lighthouse.” She drove slowly on the narrow road. There was only room for one car, and when a vehicle came at them from the other direction, both of them had to straddle the shoulders to pass.

On the boat ride across, he had bought a little replica of the Pelee Island lighthouse in the gift shop and attached it to his key chain. “Take me close, but I want you to stay back out of sight.”