Beautiful Lie the Dead

by Barbara Fradkin

  Frankie dragged his sleeve across his eyes. “I didn’t see her, I swear. I came around the corner and all I saw was white.”

  “If you didn’t see anything,” the woman interrupted, “then why were you back there yesterday, digging in the snowbank?”

  “I–I felt something.” He explained about the bump and about not thinking anything of it until a few day later. “But I swear to God I never saw her. She must have come out of nowhere, because there was nothing, nada, on the road!”

  He hoped it sounded convincing. He believed it. Goddamn it, yes, the more he thought about it, he thought—I wasn’t that asleep. Where the hell did she come from?

  ELEVEN

  Inspector Green was in the midst of an argument with Media Relations over the release of information about the dead woman when Gibbs phoned in their report on Frankie Robitaille. Green was grateful for the distraction. Two mystery women within a four-day span barely a week before Christmas had the public hungry for details. However somewhere, someone was frantically worried about a missing middle-aged woman with dark hair and, judging from the red purse and the turquoise nails, a flair for drama. She was someone’s wife or mother or daughter, and Green didn’t want them learning her gruesome fate in a sound bite on the News at Noon.

  He listened to Gibbs’s report carefully. “He seemed genuinely shaken up, sir,” Gibbs concluded. “Sue is gung ho to charge him with leaving the scene or criminal negligence, but he claims he never even knew he hit her. Didn’t see her at all.”

  Green massaged his temple. The old Sue was coming back with a vengeance. “Sounds sensible to me, Bob. At least for now we don’t have reason to believe there was a crime involved. Let’s wait for the PM.”

  “Do you want me to go to that, sir?”

  “Sergeant Levesque is there now. She’s handling the Jane Doe, you and Sue stay on the Kennedy case with Li.”

  “Oh.”

  Hearing the disappointment in the young detective’s voice, Green was about to fill him in on the latest developments in the Kennedy case—the cellphone call from the unknown caller and the purchase of winter clothes at The Bay. At that moment, however, he glanced up to see Sergeant Li himself at the door, waving some papers. Hastily Green told Gibbs to come back in to the station for details then signed off.

  Li set the top paper down on Green’s desk. “Kennedy’s cellphone. Lots of calls from the Ottawa area, usually short. Our girl doesn’t seem to be the chatty type. I’ll track them all down of course, but there’s one number that jumped out at me. It’s not local and there’s no record of it before ten days ago. Then six calls, both incoming and outgoing. The most recent one was at 8:32 Monday evening. Duration ninety seconds. That’s the last call ever made on Kennedy’s line.”

  That doesn’t bode well, Green thought. He studied the number, which had a 514 area code. Montreal. “Who is it?”

  “It’s registered to a Lise Gravelle. I called the number but got no answer.”

  Green frowned. Lise Gravelle rang absolutely no bells. Her name had not come up in the investigation at all, yet judging from the snippet Hannah had overheard, Lise wanted to ruin everything. A secret lover of Brandon’s trying to sabotage the wedding, perhaps?

  “I could get the Montreal police to interview her,” Li was saying. “She lives in an apartment in the Côte Des Neiges area.”

  Green tried to recall his paltry knowledge of Montreal. Côte des Neiges was a major shopping street that sliced through the mountainside deep in the heart of English Montreal.

  “Let’s hold off on that until Gibbs and Peters can do some background inquiries. We need to know how this woman fits in before we start asking her questions. Judging from what we do know, she and Meredith Kennedy were not on good terms.”

  Li shrugged. “Kennedy’s not such a priority any more, now that it looks like she disappeared on purpose—”

  “There are still some serious question marks,” Green interrupted. “Like the death of this Jane Doe so close to the Longstreet home. It could be a coincidence, but I’m not a fan of coincidence. Until we know the circumstances of her death, we keep Kennedy active.”

  “I’ve been making some inquiries on Jane Doe.” Li had another file in his hand, and now he held it out. “There’s no active MisPers case in our own system that fits her description, so I checked everything within a hundred kilometres. The OPP, Gatineau, Sûreté du Québec, Kingston, Brockville... No women aged 30 to 50, 190 cm., 60 kilos have been reported missing in the past month whose whereabouts are still unknown.”

  “She could be a visitor. It is the holiday season.” Even as Green suggested the idea, he thought it unlikely. Visitors and tourists stayed in the major downtown areas. Wellington Street past Parliament Hill, fashionable Elgin Street or the Byward Market. No visitor would be walking along the back roads of Rockcliffe at four in the morning. In a blizzard.

  “There may be more information once MacPhail finishes the PM,” Green said. Apart from the obvious clues like tattoos and birthmarks, a post mortem could tell them whether she’d had surgery or broken bones, whether she’d had children, when and what she’d last eaten, whether she used drugs, and sometimes even where her dental work had been done. All details that would help narrow the search for her identity. “My sergeant is attending, and I’ll let you know what she reports.”

  “Okay,” Li said, hauling himself stiffly to his feet, “I’ll keep tracking down these other phone numbers to see who else Kennedy spoke to in the hours before she disappeared.”

  After Li left, Green turned his attention to his own private Missing Persons case. Superintendent Adam Jules. Jules’s cell phone now went directly to voicemail as though it were turned off or out of battery power. He was not answering his office phone either, and according to his clerk, he hadn’t called in that day. She had been busy on the phone all morning cancelling his appointments with feeble excuses and lying outrageously to his colleagues. She was frazzled, annoyed and worried.

  So was Green. But Jules was a very private man. He might have a perfectly valid reason for his absence, and if Green launched a full-scale manhunt to find him, Jules would be outraged. Green didn’t even dare call the deputy chief to obtain Jules’s personal contact information. Instead he used his back door contact at Bell Canada to find out Jules’s unlisted home address and number. When the home phone also went to voice mail, Green hung up in disgust, threw on his coat and boots, and headed out the door.

  Jules lived in an old limestone school board building that had been converted to tasteful condo apartments. Living at the heart of Centretown only a short walk from police headquarters and from the pubs and restaurants of Elgin Street, he led the perfect bachelor’s life. When he was in charge of Criminal Investigations at headquarters, he had walked to work daily.

  Briefly Green debated walking to the condo himself, aware that it might take more time to find a parking space than to walk. However in the end, thinking he might uncover clues in that apartment that would lead him elsewhere, he took his Subaru.

  There was no answer when he rang at Jules’s apartment. Rousing the building property manager, he used his badge and some outrageous threats to bully his way inside the apartment. The property manager left him just inside the door, no doubt unwilling to incur the wrath of the austere, fanatically private Superintendent of Police.

  Green stood in the entranceway, astonished. The open-concept room before him was stunning. Huge, vibrant landscape paintings hung on the walls, each spotlighted by track lighting on the ceiling. The walls were painted the creamy yellow of a winter sunrise and the floor was a dark polished oak. The twin leather couches glowed like rich Merlot and the end tables were uniquely sculpted pieces of wood. Each lamp was an elegant, minimalist work of art.

  Opposite him was a wall of floor to ceiling windows with built-in, barely detectible Venetian blinds. They were closed against the western sky but Green could imagine the afternoon sunlight bathing the room in colour. Another wall was entire
ly covered with bookcases. More books were splayed open on the coffee table. General Rick Hillier’s memoirs of his time in Afghanistan, Senator Romeo Dallaire’s Shake Hands with the Devil, and the recent biography of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Just Watch Me. Stories of great men who had been given the reins of power and guided Canada through turbulent, controversial times.

  Jules also had a Bose sound system and a huge collection of CDs which ran from the classics to some startling surprises. Félix Leclerc and Claude Léveillée, classic voices of Quebec, but also Bob Dylan, Ian and Sylvia, and other folk voices of the Sixties. Green tried to imagine Jules as a child of the Sixties, singing protest songs and throwing himself into the peace, drugs and free love culture. He could not.

  Art and culture aside, the living room yielded few clues as to the whereabouts or recent activities of its owner. There were no dirty dishes or take-out containers, no daily newspapers spread out on the coffee table. The air held a trace of Jules’s expensive French cologne but otherwise gave no hint of recent habitation.

  Green moved on to the kitchen, which was small but exquisitely designed. Here he found an immaculate granite counter, stainless steel appliances, and half a pot of cold coffee in the coffee maker. A single empty cup sat in the sink, sporting the dregs of café au lait. The thick skin on the top suggested it hadn’t been touched for at least a day. Had Jules been in a hurry yesterday morning and rushed off without his second cup and without cleaning up his first?

  There was more artwork in the kitchen along with a wall calendar of smiling third-world children put out by the Plan. A neat stack of mail sat on the corner of the counter, mostly bills and Christmas flyers, but there was no sign of a daily newspaper to give him a clue what day Jules had mostly recently been there.

  Feeling like a voyeur, Green hovered in the doorway to the bedroom, reluctant to invade his mentor’s ultimate privacy. The bedroom was small, and in contrast to the sleek living room and kitchen, it felt homey. A snowy winter landscape of trees and tobogganing children hung over the double bed, which was covered in cream satin sheets and an old-fashioned country quilt. An antique country pine dresser, armoire and rocking chair completed the impression of a French Canadian farm house.

  The surfaces were pristine, the clothes neatly folded in the drawers and the many Harry Rosen and Boss suits arranged by season in the closet. A single book sat on the country pine night table. Margaret Atwood’s latest release, The Year of the Flood. Hardly Green’s idea of bedtime reading. Beside it, however, stood a small photo album propped open as if he looked at it often. Curious, Green picked it up. There were photos of children smiling, blowing out birthday candles and posing proudly on shiny new bikes. Sometimes the same child growing older from page to page. There seemed to be at least a dozen children. His nieces and nephews, perhaps? Green pulled one photo from its plastic sleeve and turned it over. Alain, 12 ans. Merci, mon oncle!

  A nephew, then. Too bad there was no address. He slid out another, this one a young girl with big pink bows in her blond hair. On the back, in what was probably a parent’s writing: Heather at 9. A thousand thank yous. On the dresser was a single eight by ten picture in a silver frame of a young black man looking very serious in wire-frame glasses and a graduation gown.

  Green turned slowly, taking in the country feel. Here was a whole other side to Adam Jules. Not the austere, solitary, obsessively private man he knew, but a man who surrounded himself with children, enjoying not only their smiles but their milestones and triumphs. None of them his own.

  Green left the apartment more puzzled than ever. Jules had a private world that embraced children, art and Sixties folk music, all of which gave Green some bittersweet insight into the man, but none of it gave him the slightest clue where he had gone. Nor what he was up to.

  * * *

  At a loss, Green returned to the station. If this were a standard investigation, he would be working his sources to check bank and phone records, but he had no basis for doing that. Jules himself had asked his clerk to cancel his work commitments and no one had reported him missing, although to Green’s knowledge he had no close friends or family in the city who would notice his absence. There was nothing to suggest that he had come to grief.

  Nothing but the unease in the pit of Green’s stomach. By the time he arrived back at his office, he had resolved to have a confidential word with the deputy chief. Charles Poulin was an outsider from the Peel Police, and he had won the job over the head of Adam Jules, who’d been considered next in line. Poulin was as outgoing as Jules was taciturn, as folksy as Jules was austere, a family man who had quickly become engaged in a number of community agencies and charities. In a job that required both PR and people management skills, Green could easily see why he had come out on top. But it had been a crushing blow to Jules, who had borne his hurt and disappointment as stoically as always. Few other than Green noticed that his shoulders stooped a little more and his gaze was often distant, like a man who was detaching himself.

  To discuss Jules’s disappearance with Poulin would add a further layer of humiliation, but Green feared he had no choice.

  Back at the office, however, he found Marie Claire Levesque at her desk, busy on the phone. When she hung up, she caught sight of Green and snatched up her notebook with a flourish. Green was impressed. Despite all his years of attending autopsies, he’d always arrived back at the station looking and feeling noticeably green. Levesque was a healthy shade of pink, and her blue eyes sparkled.

  She followed him into his office and settled in the guest chair before he even had his coat off. Makes herself right at home, he reflected, feeling an unexpected pang. The only other person who made himself at home was Brian Sullivan, who’d spent hours in the little office with his huge feet up on Green’s desk. God, he missed the man!

  “How did it go?” Green asked.

  She spoke entirely from memory. “The victim was a mature female approximately fifty to sixty years old, 60 kilos, 194 cm. That’s five foot five, a hundred and thirty pounds,” she added, her tone suggesting Green was a dinosaur still stuck in the imperial system. He let it slide. “Natural grey hair, dyed brown, blue eyes, fair skin. She was healthy and physically fit, a non-smoker, non-drug user, moderate alcohol user. She’d had a hysterectomy long ago, and X-rays showed several poorly set old fractures, probably from childhood.”

  Green considered that. Poorly set implied that the child had been either poor or abused. A clue to her past, perhaps, but not her death. “Anything on time or cause of death?”

  Levesque smiled. She likes to control, Green thought, irrationally annoyed. “The body was completely frozen with a core temperature of minus seven degrees, equal to the snow she was buried in, so time of death is difficult to estimate. No decomposition, no insect activity, obviously. Using a formula of 1.3 degree loss in body temperature per hour, and assuming she’d been in the snow since death, MacPhail calculated she’d probably been dead a minimum of about thirty hours. Of course we know it was much longer, since she was hit at approximately four a.m. Tuesday morning. However, MacPhail’s not sure she was in the snow since death, at least in that position.”

  “Oh?”

  “There were some signs of lividity suggesting she was lying face down for several hours after death before being moved. Again because of the cold, hard to say for how long.”

  Levesque’s eyes shone, prompting Green to revise his earlier impression. This wasn’t about control; it was the science that intrigued her. The piecing together of the puzzle. His own curiosity stirred. “What did he find as cause of death?”

  “Well, sir, she had a broken arm, broken shoulder, broken neck—”

  “That would do it.”

  She smiled again. “No, sir, all those fractures were post mortem. There were also lacerations and gouges to the skin on her hips, legs and arms, but no bleeding or bruising, suggesting those were also post mortem.”

  Green tried to visualize the scenario. “So major damage was done to her bo
dy after she was dead. How long after?”

  “The doctor took tissue samples to examine microscopically, which will give him a more accurate picture, but judging from the lividity, at least several hours.”

  Green’s interest rose as he grasped the implications. No wonder Levesque had been excited. “So what you’re saying is that she’d been dead for several hours before the snowplow came along and hit her at four a.m.”

  Her grin was now ear to ear. “That’s the hypothesis, sir.” The grin faded. “I mean, not that I’m happy about that, sir. The woman is dead. But it means the snowplow operator is not a suspect and we need to modify our investigation.”

  “But I do remember a lot of blood. If all these injuries occurred post mortem, where did that come from and how did she die?”

  “The head had a compressed fracture at the back of the skull which produced extensive bleeding, both internally and externally, especially around the brain stem. MacPhail estimates it likely would have rendered her unconscious instantly and killed her within minutes.”

  Green pictured the dark snowy strip of road. “What caused the fracture? Could a car or another snowplow have caused it?”

  “He wants to examine the tissue and the lacerations on the skull more closely before he draws a conclusion.”

  “But surely he can give us a tentative opinion, something to go forward with.”

  She shrugged. “Too complex, sir.” Here she did consult her notebook. “With the disturbance and damage caused by the snowplow and with the freezing temperatures affecting bleeding, body cooling and oxygen use, he is not prepared to say.”

  Green snorted. MacPhail had seen hundreds of bodies in his career, and Green had never known him to be shy about his opinions. Perhaps he was trying to enhance the mystique of his powers for the benefit of the attractive new sergeant. Green snatched up his phone and dialled the man’s cell phone.