The Taken (27 page)

“To make it look like a suicide, you mean?”

“Yeah.”

He took the file from her. No signs of a struggle, the woman had been found alone. Blood alcohol of .17. Coroner ruled it accidental. “Someone could have gotten her drunk and stuck her in the tub,” he said.

Hazel thought about it and nodded. She put Janis on the
maybe
pile.

Georgia Marten had died going through the ice on Grenadier Pond. Her husband, who’d been taking a walk with her, had been ruled out as a suspect. Misadventure.

The next two had both drowned in Lake Ontario in the summer months. The first, they’d concluded, had jumped from one of the island ferries. There’d been a receipt for a ticket in one of her pockets. Lana Baichwell, thirty-two, single, no criminal record, no history of depression or drugs, lived with her mother. “I like her,” said Hazel. “She fits. She doesn’t look like a candidate for suicide. Someone could easily have pushed her over the side of the ferry.”

“Those ferries are full in the summer,” said Wingate. “No witnesses to some guy forcing a woman over the railings?”

“But what about no witnesses to a suicide?”

“If she wanted to do it, there are ways to slip over quietly. But you’d think someone would have heard the screaming if someone was pushing her.”

Hazel looked more closely at the file. “It happened on the last ferry of the night. Eleven-fifteen from the city. How many people could have been on the boat?”

He nodded. “Okay. Well, put her with the bathtub then.”

The next one had stolen a rowboat from one of the docks on the island side, out of her skull on Ativan and alcohol, a bad combination at the best of times. They’d found the boat bumping up against the south shore of Centre Island and her body in two feet of water at the edge of one of the island channels. Brenda Cameron, age twenty-nine, been brought in many times on drug charges in the four years before her death; she’d been a regular in the part of town known as the Corridor. Fined a bunch of times for drug misdemeanours – most for crack, but a few pot busts too – and, as the file said, “known to police.” History of depression.

“What do you think?” said Wingate.

“Possible,” said Hazel, “but she sounds like a suicide waiting to happen.” She flipped through the folder. The coroner had found a mark in the middle of her forehead where he figured she struck it on the edge of the boat, but the skin hadn’t even been split. Hazel could picture the girl, completely blotto, trying to get one leg over the rim of the tilting boat and then the other and barking her head on the gunwale.

“What’s the tox report like?”

“A recipe for disaster.” She turned to the last page. “Marijuana, blood alcohol of .19 –”

“– Jesus, and she could row a boat?”

“Evidently not … pot, lorazepam too, good level of that. I guess she didn’t want to feel it.”

“I guess not.” He considered the victim for a moment. “How do they know there was a boat involved? It sounds like she could have been dumped.”

Hazel scanned the rest of the report. “They found a rowboat drifting in the harbour with one of her earrings in it.”

They put her with Mrs. Marten and turned to the last file.

“But not least,” said Hazel. “Let’s hope this one has
suspicious
written all over it.” However, the last file was a clear misadventure: a sailboat mishap. Two drownings, in fact, one of which was one of the two men they’d set aside. Theresa Dowling. The boyfriend went down with her. Two amateurs out on a gorgeous August day. “How about Eldwin hired the boyfriend to knock her overboard and the guy screwed up and got himself killed too?”

Wingate just looked at her.

“That’s what I thought,” she said, laying the file aside. She swept the three possibles back down toward the edge of the table. “Janis Culpepper, Lana Baichwell, and Brenda Cameron. Well, ladies? Were any of you murdered?”

The three faces stared up from the front pages of the files. Cameron had been a slim-faced woman with bright, happy eyes set far apart and a wide nose. She might have had some East Indian blood in her, but it was a black-and-white photo, and sometimes that changed a person’s skin colour subtly. The morgue photo showed a tragically bloated face–they’d estimated she’d been in the water for more than thirty hours–but Hazel could still make out the impression on the woman’s head from her pre-drowning tumble from the boat. Culpepper had been fifty-five at the time of her death and she looked well
acquainted with the bottle. Her skin was edemic, mottled, her eyes unhappy. Suicide seemed a realistic diagnosis, if not an expectation. The other woman’s face was rounder, blanker. The expression suggested she didn’t want to be photographed. Lana Baichwell. What had happened on that ferry? There was no morgue photo of the face: they’d found Baichwell hidden, pinned between freighters at the Redpath sugar factory just east of the ferry docks and the boats rising and falling at the water’s edge had worn most of the skin off her face. Unless that kind of damage had been done premortem? Hazel put her hand on Baichwell’s file, and at the very same moment, Wingate put his on Cameron’s.

“Cameron,” he said. “The name was on Constable Childress’s list.”

Hazel released Baichwell’s file. “You mean Brenda was one of the renters?”

“No …” He fell silent a moment and then got out his cell. “It was another name.”

“Hold on–did it start with a J?”

“Joanne,” said Wingate, remembering immediately. “You saw it on Childress’s fax, right?”

“No … I saw it …” She got out her PNB and opened it to the most recent page. Her hand was tingling. She turned the notebook to him where she’d written down the names on the tenant list at 32 Washington Avenue. He marked the J. Cameron she’d written there, and then lifted his eyes to meet hers.

“Joanne Cameron.”

“
We are the same,”
she said.

“Paritas is Brenda Cameron’s mother.”

“Oh my God, James. She’s renting the same apartment Eldwin was in for those eight months under the name Clarence Earles. She’s living at the scene of the crime.”

“What she thinks is a crime scene,” Wingate said.

“‘Eternal cry here,’” said Hazel, and he looked at her strangely. “Cherry Tree Lane was an anagram. Andrew worked it out. This is it, James. Brenda Cameron is the one we’re looking for.”

“Okay … okay, I buy that. So we know who Paritas is then.”

“Yes.”

“But who is Belloque?”

“He’s the boyfriend.”

“Are we sure?”

“I don’t know. But the man I met in Gilmore seemed to care a lot for her. Maybe he wants to prove his worth?”

“Kidnapping and torture is a pretty extreme way to show you’re boyfriend material. Whatever happened to chocolate and roses?”

“Shows what you know about modern courtship.”

He scanned Cameron’s postmortem report again. “Well, I think our next step is to have a discreet conversation with this investigating detective.” He ran his finger across the names at the top of the file. “Detective Dana Goodman caught the case. You want me to see if Toles can track her down for us?”

Hazel put her hand over the cell he was getting ready to dial. “Hold on a second. Did you know this Goodman?”

“Never heard of her, actually. I didn’t make detective until the spring of 2003. That’s when I got my placement at Twenty-one. But there was no Goodman here then.”

“What if she wasn’t here because she blew this very investigation? Paritas–I mean Cameron–and Bellocque obviously feel it was a cock-up. I think we keep this Goodman out of the loop unless we absolutely need her. In fact, I don’t think we should talk to anyone yet.”

“This isn’t our house, Hazel.”

“We’re
so
close, James. But there’s still something missing, something we need before we can be sure we’re safe talking to the people here.”

“You think there was a cover-up?”

“I don’t know.”

“Ilunga’s a hard-ass, but I don’t think he’s –”

“Do you feel strongly enough about him that you’d go to him right now with what we have? You’re
that
sure he wouldn’t show you the wrong side of his door?”

He thought about that for a moment. “Well, you’re not sure, and you’re my commanding officer. But what are we doing then?”

She was staring at the Cameron report, flipping pages. “Maybe now that we have a name, we expand the canvass. Start talking to other Camerons. Where’s the father, for instance?”

“If he’s not totally in the dark, then I doubt contacting him will do anything but blow our cover.”

“Fine. Maybe we can get Toles to dig some more for us.”

“For what, though?”

“Find out what happened to Goodman. How the investigation went. Maybe there’s something internal, something that got hushed up –”

“If that’s where this is all leading, we’ve got more on our hands than a misfiled suicide.”

“Do you have the stomach for it if we do?”

“We’ve come this far,” he said.

“That’s what I …” She frowned. “That’s …”

“Skip?”

She spun the file back toward Wingate. She’d idly flipped up two pages while she was thinking aloud, but now she creased them down and held her finger against a name on the third page. “What the hell is that?”

“Cameron’s arrest record.”

“No …
that.”

He leaned in. “Oh shit.”

Her finger was on the name
Constable D. Goodman
. “What’s the likelihood that there was a
Constable
D. Goodman and a
Detective
D. Goodman working here pretty much at the same time?”

“Pretty low.”

“So constable in 2001, detective in 2002?”

“There’s nothing strange about making detective, Hazel.”

“But she’s a beat cop with a link to a future suicide and then she makes detective and catches the case? A case that–later– at least two people think was botched?”

He started reading the file again. Cameron had been arrested too many times to count between 1998 and 2002, all misdemeanour drug busts. The ones made in ’98 and ’99 and a couple final arrests in 2002 were by a series of different officers, but almost all of the many dozens that were made in 2000 and 2001 were by Goodman. James locked eyes with Hazel. “So what’s the connection, then? Are we looking for Goodman? You think Goodman
murdered
Cameron?”

“No, James. This Goodman arrested Brenda Cameron –” she craned her neck to look at the rap sheet “– like eighty times in
a two-year period. Never charged her. Just kept her two hours, three hours, overnight once in a while. Why?”

“I don’t know!” He sounded exasperated.

“You can’t stop a dumb kid like this from destroying herself. But you can slow her down. Goodman was getting Cameron off the street. Giving her a cup of coffee and telling her there was help if she wanted it.”

“She was protecting her.”

Hazel could see it in his eyes. He was getting to the place she’d already got to.

“Oh Jesus …”

“Go on …”

“Dana’s a man’s name too, isn’t it?”

“There you go,” she said.

“Bellocque.”

She smiled at him tightly. “It’s not chocolate and roses, is it? Goodman’s working the Corridor and there’s a few of them out there that break his heart. Then he makes detective and next thing he knows, he finds one of them in the drink. Comes up a suicide, he’s not happy, and he’s
still
working the case. He must have pissed your boss off pretty bad to get turfed, too.”

“Why’d he try for detective if he had his hands full in the Corridor? If he was some kind of Mother Goose down there, why would he opt to leave the beat?”

“Maybe he wanted to go after the cause? Maybe he got kicked upstairs. I don’t know.”

Wingate had a far-off look. “And does he think it’s a murder because he can’t accept that someone he was protecting slipped past him? Or does he really have a case?”

“He’s convinced Joanne Cameron that he has a case.”

“Has he convinced you?”

She stared at him without blinking for a few moments. “No,” she said at last. “Not yet. And I don’t see the connection to Eldwin either. But I have to admit …”

“What?”

“He has my attention now.” She stood up. “I have to get back to that house.”

“But wait –”

“No. We’re there. We’ve got to the place they want us to get to. A man’s life depends on convincing them we’re working this.”

“But are we?” asked Wingate.

“Goodman doesn’t have to know our angle. Right now, I want to know if this really is a cold case, or if we’re just dealing with an obsessed cop. But either way, I have to get to them. I have to hear the rest of it from them.”

He was looking at all the paper on the table, his hands on either side of it like he was going to gather it into a ball. “What if you’re still doing exactly what they want you to do? What if it’s a trap?”

“What if it’s a trap? Of course it’s a trap, James. But I can’t get out of it until I’m in it.”

“Skip –”

“They’ve known our next move before we have ever since they sunk that mannequin in Gannon Lake. The rules aren’t going to change now simply because we’ve figured them out. You just keep a line open and be ready to move.”

Toles noticed her on her way out. “That’s it?” he asked.

“Not quite,” she said. “I need a break. The files are …”

“Hard to read,” he said. “I get you. You must not see a lot of that kind of stuff where you’re at.”

“Not much,” she said. “Listen, there a Tim’s anywhere near here?”

“Go out that door and turn right, left, or go straight. You’ll hit one in less than a block.”

“Thanks,” she said. She had her hand on the door when she turned back to him. “Detective Toles?”

“Yep?”

“You ever work the Corridor?”

“Oh yeah. Rite of passage for anyone in Nineteen or Twenty-one.”

“So you must have known a Constable Goodman at one point?”

“I knew him a little, more by reputation. I was over at Nineteen when he was working the Corridor down near Mercer and Peter streets. Why’re you interested in him?”

“Just his name was on a couple of arrest reports is all.”

“His name would be on a lot of arrest reports. He was an occupational hazard down there if you were dealing or buying.”