The Taken (14 page)

Spere put the phone to his ear. “I’ll call you back in five.”

Jack Deacon wrapped the hand and put it back on dry ice, in a red cooler like the kind you’d use to store beer for a picnic. It was going to put Hazel off her beer for months.

She realized she’d never been in Jack Deacon’s personal office. She only ever saw him under those harsh blue lights in the basement, surrounded by the stench of preserving fluids and human flesh arrested in its decay by science. He took off his white coat, under which he wore a proper suit, also the first time she’d seen him look like anything other than a nice ghoul with a scalpel. He looked presentable.

“You can put him on speakerphone,” he said to Spere, pulling out his black leather chair so Spere could sit.

Barry’s voice came through the tinny speaker. “Who am I talking to?”

“Me, DC Wingate, DI Micallef, and Dr. Frankenstein.”

“Hi Jack,” said Barry. Deacon waved at the phone. “Okay, so listen. Those little black photos aren’t what you think they are. They
are
pictures, but not twelve individual pictures, like you thought. They’re one image.”

“One big black image?” said Hazel. “Is that more helpful?”

“I scanned them and got them into Photoshop. Once they were all laid out on one template, I moved them around fitting edges together. There’s enough texture in the images to see where one edge goes against another. Jack, what’s your email there?” Deacon gave it to him. “Okay, I’m sending the first image through.”

They waited, listening to Barry tapping his keyboard in Toronto.

“Don’t expect too much from this one. But you need to see the ‘before’ picture if you know what I mean.” They checked Deacon’s email and there was nothing. “That’s fine, I’ll keep talking. I brightened the image I had and then worked the contrast. Then brightened it again, recontrasted it, and so on; I had to do this four times. There’s information there.”

“And what is it?” asked Wingate.

“Hold on, it’s through,” said Deacon, and he clicked on the tiff file Barry had sent. It loaded: it looked like a picture of an oil spill, shot through with faint lines, like reflections off its surface.

“Okay, I’m sending the reworked image through. It’s not
going to look like a real picture, but you have to believe me, this is what was in that black mess.”

They waited as Deacon repeatedly clicked his “receive” button. They could hear Barry breathing over the line.

“You got it?”

“Just tell us what it is, Allen,” said Hazel impatiently. “Naw, you should see it.”

The email arrived. Deacon clicked it open, and over the pitch, swirling black image appeared something like a ghost emerging from dark smoke.

“What is it?” said Spere.

“I think it’s a dead animal of some kind,” said Barry over the speakerphone.

Deacon put on his glasses and leaned forward on the palms of his hands to look closely at the image. It looked like a pile of fur, but there was no face, no limbs. “Is it a pelt?”

“Maybe,” said Barry.

They all studied it. It seemed to have a shape; something about it seemed to infold on itself.

“Hold on,” said Hazel, putting her finger against Deacon’s screen. “Is that the end of a sleeve?”

With her eye, she traced up from the crushed edge of what had appeared to her to be the armhole. She moved her finger up. “This is a hem. Look …”

She waited for the others to see it. “So it is,” said Deacon. “It’s a black sweater.”

“Jesus Christ,” said Spere. “All this trouble for a fucking sweater?”

“Well, glad to be of service,” came Barry’s voice. “Now you folks get to figure out what it means.”

She’d successfully avoided visiting the offices of the
Westmuir Record
for almost twenty years. The last time she’d been through those doors had been to check the proof of her father’s obituary in person. She hadn’t wanted such a thing faxed, and her mother was so sick with grief she couldn’t do the job herself. Back then, at the end of the eighties, the editor had been an inoffensive old man named Harvey Checker. His
Record
had been the classic country newspaper, with jam recipes and pictures of kids dressed up in period costumes for the Sunny Days Parade. None of this “real” reporting that Sunderland liked to dream up. When Sunderland had taken over in 1997, he’d changed the paper’s motto from “Eggs, Coffee, and
The Record:
a Perfect Westmuir Morning” to “On
The Record
for All of Westmuir.”

The paper was housed in an old tool and die factory at the top of Main Street; it was one of the first businesses you saw
after crossing the bridge over the Kilmartin River. Hazel and Wingate went in and asked for Sunderland, but after a five-minute wait, a young woman with short black hair came out and offered her hand. “I’m Becca Portman,” she said. “Mr. Sunderland isn’t available.” She looked back and forth between the two officers, smiling mildly.

“Did he see me standing in his lobby?” asked Hazel.

“Actually, no. He’s in Atlanta this week for a conference.” Hazel mentally added Sunderland to her list of the unaccounted-for. After all, it was in his newspaper that the short story was appearing. And he was no fan of hers. Although it was hard to credit how what was happening had anything to do with her. Portman leaned toward her and said, with a hint of embarrassment, “‘Reupping Small Market Ads: Supersize Your Customers, Supersize Your Revenues.’ It’s sorta gay, I know, but this is a business.”

“And what are you?”

“I’m the managing editor. And for three issues, I’m the interim publisher, which is, honestly,
so
…”

“Awesome,” said Hazel.

“Yeah.”

Wingate took her hand and shook it. “It’s good to meet you. Do you have an office?”

She did; it was Sunderland’s office. She led them to it and closed the door. There were pictures of Sunderland on the walls with celebrities who wouldn’t be recognized twenty kilometres south of Port Dundas. Wingate put a picture of the severed hand on her desk. Portman covered her mouth with her hand. “Wow,” she said. “That’s kinda gross, isn’t it?”

“Does Gord Sunderland know it’s my birthday tomorrow?”

Becca Portman narrowed her eyes. “I don’t think so. But happy birthday?”

“Someone sent that to me in a wrapped box.” She took her notebook out of her hip pocket and removed a Polaroid picture. She held it out to Portman. “And this was found in Gannon Lake on Friday. You’re running a story that features a body in a lake.” Portman was looking at the picture. “Can you get your boss on the phone?”

“I’m sorry, but what does that nasty hand have to do with this mannequin? Or the story?”

“There are aspects of our investigation we can’t discuss right now, Miss Portman,” said Wingate. “But you can trust me: it’s connected.”

“So,” said Hazel, “your boss?”

“All I have is a hotel number, I’m afraid.” She handed back the picture. “Mr. Sunderland told me to hold down the ship.”

“The
ship?”

“What?”

“Never mind.”

“Miss Portman,” said Wingate, “can you show us the next chapter of the story you’re running?”

“No,” she said, blithely. “I can’t.”

“We’re not rabid fans,” said Hazel, “who can’t wait until tomorrow morning. We’re police officers.”

“The problem is, we don’t have it yet,” said Portman.

“Don’t you have to go to press?” asked Wingate.

“Tonight.” She looked at her watch, as if the evening could creep up on her without her noticing. “Mr. Eldwin’s giving us the chapters one at a time now.”

“So when are you expecting him?”

“Expecting him?”

“You have a poor grip of English for a woman who works at a newspaper,” said Hazel. “Expecting, anticipating, looking forward to
his presence.”

She looked at Hazel queerly. “I’m not
expecting
him,” she said. “He sends the chapters in by email.”

“Fucking technology is going to be the death of policework, I tell you.”

Wingate brought her attention around to him again. “From where, Miss Portman? Where is he emailing from?”

“Um? His computer?”

Wingate looked at Hazel. Hazel said, “Can we see the last email he sent?”

Now she was happy to help. “Sure,” she said, and she leaned over Sunderland’s desk and brought up her email, turning the screen to them. Hazel went behind the desk, gently pushing Portman out of the way, and sat in Sunderland’s chair, turning the screen back to herself. There were dozens of emails still in the inbox. Two were from Colin Eldwin, and she opened the one that was from this past Saturday afternoon. It said, simply, “Hi Becca, I’ve had a couple of new ideas for the story, so toss what I sent on Thursday, okay? Here’s chapter three for Monday – I’ll get this Thursday’s to you asap. Thanks! CE.”

She opened the first email. It was dated Thursday, May 12. “First two chapters,” it read. “More in a week. CE.” Both emails were sent from Eldwin’s email address,
[email protected]
.

“Where are the original third and fourth chapters Eldwin sent?”

“I trashed them. Always respect the writer’s wishes.” Hazel thought,
Editorial Relationships, second year
.

“Did you read them?”

“Yeah.”

“And why do you think he wanted to rewrite them?”

Portman shrugged, an all-encompassing shrug of total incompetence. “I guess he wasn’t happy.”

“What were they about? What happened in them?”

“Oh gosh,” she said, searching the ceiling. “Let’s see, they drag that poor girl into the boat and Gus throws up some more, and then they take it to the police and it turns out it’s some girl that’s been missing for months and the police, like, they hold Dale and Gus, but they’re innocent and they let them go. But Dale has a bad
feeling.”

“A bad feeling. What kind of bad feeling?”

“I think that’s where the fourth chapter ended. I can understand why Mr. Eldwin wanted to revise. It was a little too
on-the-nose
for a mystery story. I like what he’s doing with it now.”

“Do you?”

“Oh yeah, it’s goosebump stuff, don’t you think?”

Hazel stared at the girl for a moment, lost for anything to say, and then she returned her attention to the computer screen and scrolled down the inbox. There were emails from Sunderland, from other columnists and writers, from advertisers. Nothing looked out of the ordinary. She went back to the Eldwin emails. “I want copies of these,” she said. “You have a computer person here?”

“I’m a computer person,” said Portman. “What do you need?”

“I just told you what I need.”

Wingate stepped forward. “If you could just make us printouts of the emails, with full headers, that’d probably do for now.”

“Hey, no problem,” said Portman, and she flounced behind the desk. Hazel got up and stood in the window, trying to control the urge to smack the girl. Portman disconnected the computer from a scanner, then unplugged the scanner and plugged in a printer, connected the USB cable from the printer to the computer and tried to print the two emails. “Whoops,” she said, “wrong cable. Hold on.” She fiddled for a couple of minutes, failed to find the problem, smiled emptily at Wingate, and called in an associate, a gangly guy with a mass of uncombed hair and a worried expression on his face. He fiddled with the cables for a couple of minutes before plugging the printer into the right sockets.

“Okay Mizz Portman, that should, that should do ’er.” He almost hit the doorframe on the way out.

“He has a crush on me,” said Portman.

“Well, you’re adorable, aren’t you?” said Hazel.

“Thank you,” she said.

“And you run a tight fort,” she added.

“Well, there you go,” said Portman, handing Wingate the printouts. “Let me know if I can be of any more help.”

She hop-skipped to the office door and opened it for them, relieved to have the visit over and done with. Hazel stopped halfway out. “One more thing, Mizz Portman.” The young woman waited behind the officers, a benign smile on her face. “Regardless of when the next chapter comes in, don’t print it.”

“Sorry?”

“You heard me. I don’t want you to publish another word of this story unless you have permission, personally, from me.”

She looked to Wingate, hoping for a sign that Detective Inspector Micallef was joking. But she found no assurance in his
eyes. “Well, I can’t do that,” she said. “I mean, I can send you the story as soon as we get it, but our readers are expecting –”

Hazel took a step back into the office, and Portman quickly retreated. “What your readers are expecting is seven interesting things to do with celery and cream cheese. But if you run any more of this story without my permission, you’ll be directly interfering with an open police investigation. Do you want to do that?”

“I, I’d have to ask Mr. Sunderland for permission to –” She stopped talking, staring at Hazel’s eyes. “If it’s that serious …”

“If I even see a
mention
of ‘The Mystery of Bass Lake’ in tomorrow’s paper, I’m coming back here, alone. And your office crush won’t be any use to you if things go wrong in here again. You understand?”

“I understand,” she said, making violent little metronomic nods with her whole face. “No story Thursday.”

Hazel offered her hand, and the girl took it immediately. “Nice talking to you,” she said.

Wingate walked with his hands in his pockets, his face pointed straight up the sidewalk. “What?” she said.

“You ever heard the saying that you catch more flies with honey?”

“Are you going to turn into my mother now, James?”

“No.”

“Because one is too many.”

“It’s not Rebecca Portman’s fault she works for a man you hate. That’s all I’m saying.”

“You’re the one who called her a fly.”

“It’s your call.”

“You’re right,” she said. “It is my call.” She looked at her watch. “I don’t think we can wait any longer to get news from Claire Eldwin. We better go up and see her. You call and make sure she’s there, but don’t tell her why we’re coming.”

He got out his cell and dialled. There was no answer. “I’ll keep trying her,” he said.