Fifth Son

by Barbara Fradkin

  They were minuscule inconsistencies, certainly not enough to dispute the suicide idea altogether. It was possible the man had hoisted himself backwards over the wall, or that his back hem had draped over the entire top of the wall as he slid off the edge. But there was a much more obvious way the back hem of his jacket could have snagged on the inner edge of the wall. If the man had his back to the wall and had pressed hard against it. Perhaps been pushed with enough force to rip the fabric.

  They were very thin threads on which to hang a murder theory. But as long as they were there, he owed it to Lawrence to follow it through. After he returned the tin can to the evidence room, he’d get all the latest intelligence from the troops, and he’d go home to Sharon.

  Now more than ever, he needed her sane, experienced understanding of the deranged mind.

  * * *

  When Green finally made it back downtown, it was past six. He dropped into the forensics lab in the hope of finding Cunningham still at work over his fingerprint files, but there was no one there. He tagged Lawrence’s tin can back into the evidence room and left a requisition for Cunningham to fingerprint every item in it and to send the reddish stain to the RCMP lab for analysis. Any fingerprints and blood were to be matched to the dead man. Another small step towards unravelling the mystery, thought Green as he prepared to go home.

  One final minor detour, he promised himself as he made his way up to his office. Just to see what the troops have uncovered. Both Gibbs and Sullivan had gone home, but their email updates were waiting for him, along with Dr. MacPhail’s preliminary findings from the post mortem. Gibbs reported, with his usual apologies, that he was still waiting for word on Tom Pettigrew from the Toronto officer who’d released him, and that he had no useful leads on Derek’s disappearance. Berkeley, California, had responded snippily that according to its archived records Derek Pettigrew had been accepted but hadn’t registered in his program. To date, all other avenues that Gibbs had explored proved to be dead ends.

  Physical examination of the victim’s body during the post mortem had revealed no signs of bruising suggestive of coercion or struggling, and although a lot of dirt had been extracted from beneath his fingernails, none had been identified as human tissue. It did not appear as if Lawrence had put up any resistance. Based on the condition of the victim’s brain on autopsy, MacPhail refined his estimate on the timing of his death. Death had been caused by extensive intra cranial bleeding due to the trauma sustained in the fall, but that amount of bleeding would likely have taken four hours, give or take. Death most likely occurred between six p.m. and midnight, but the fall probably between two and seven p.m.

  Still a big window of time, Green thought, but at least a time when people would have been out in the village, walking their dogs, playing ball or attending Sunday services at the other two churches. It was worth another canvass of the village, with a focus on that time span. Sullivan’s email expressed the very same thought. Inquiries would resume in the morning.

  A later email from Sullivan, logged shortly before five o’clock, reported that the St. Lawrence group home supervisor had been unable to make a positive ID from the dead man’s photo. Mrs. Hogencamp thought it could be Lawrence, but she didn’t recognize the clothes, and on a matter as crucial as a man’s death, she was not willing to commit herself. Green flipped through his notebook for the supervisor’s number. As he reached for the phone, he glanced at his watch. Nearly seven o’clock. Sharon would have long since given up waiting for him and would have fed herself and the children dinner, assuming she had a kitchen in which to prepare it. Bob had skipped yesterday, leaving both fridge and stove in the middle of the floor, but had returned with a vengeance this morning, bringing a crew of four and a truck full of cabinets. A promising sign, Green had thought at the time.

  His fingers hovered over the phone pad. He ought to call Sharon first to show his support. When you have a toddler entering the terrible twos, a teenager who’d never left them, a massive mutt and a kitchen in non-functional shambles, you do not need a spouse who stays out well past the family witching hour without so much as a call. To drive her point home, Sharon had done it to him a few times. Empathy was not always his strong suit, but he’d got the hint eventually.

  Sharon’s tone when she answered told him he’d done the wise thing. She sounded perilously close to murdering someone. Bob, perhaps, whose hammering could still be heard in the background.

  “Yeah, he’s still here,” she said. “Or rather he’s here again. The hinges he brought this morning were all the wrong size, so he had to go back for new ones.” There was a slight pause. “You’re not still at the station, are you?”

  “Listen,” he said hastily. “Why don’t you pile everyone in the car—well, except Bob and Modo—and meet me at Swiss Chalet in half an hour. Sounds like we can’t inhabit the kitchen anyway.”

  “Hannah’s not going to like that. Chickens once breathed, you know.”

  “Then she can stay with Bob and Modo. Come on. Nice, succulent, barbequed chicken and ribs combo, fries drenched in sauce...”

  She surrendered and hung up even before he’d finished his pitch. Laughing, he returned to the task at hand.

  The St. Lawrence group home supervisor sounded relieved when her co-workers managed to track her down and put her on the line. “I’ve been thinking about that photo all day,” she explained. “It was so unreal looking. It’s not just that I want Lawrence to be alive, but I want to be sure.”

  “We wouldn’t rely solely on your impression, Mrs. Hogencamp—”

  “Please, Angie.” The name took him aback. Neither the name nor her anxious tone went with the two-pack-a-day, world weary cynic he’d pictured. He relinquished some of his formality. “I know it’s a hard call, Angie. We’d bring one of your staff up to identify the actual body, but before we put any of you through that, we’d like to be reasonably certain. What did you think?”

  “The man in the photo had a beard and longer hair. Lawrence is clean-shaven, and he is heavier. His face is rounder.”

  “But you haven’t seen him in over six weeks. In that time, he could grow a beard and longer hair, and he could easily lose ten pounds, especially if he was on the streets.”

  “I know. That’s why I’m saying I just can’t be certain.”

  “All right, what about his clothes? The brown cords don’t ring a bell?”

  “That I’m sure of. The last time I saw him it was summer. All summer he wore the same khaki pants and white T-shirt. If it was cool he’d put on a navy windbreaker. He’s had the same clothes for years. We’d practically have to tear them off him to wash them. So when he moved out of hospital, I helped him buy a whole bunch exactly the same—half a dozen white T-shirts and khaki pants. Lawrence is very set in his ways. Don’t try throwing him a curve ball, he doesn’t cope.”

  Green thought back. The dead man had been wearing a T-shirt blackened by grime and newspaper ink but conceivably white in its former days. However, it was a thin thread to hang an ID on.

  “What about personal effects and accessories? Any watches, rings...jewellery?”

  “Oh, he has a crucifix.”

  Bingo, Green thought, asking her to describe it.

  “It’s an ornate gold cross on a chain. It’s not his,” she added quickly. “It’s apparently his older brother’s, but he’s had it since he first arrived at the hospital. He loves that thing, wears it night and day. Never lets it out of his sight.”

  “Do you know how he came by it?”

  “The family didn’t say, if I recall. They just said that anybody who tries to take it away from him had better watch out.”

  * * *

  It was ten o’clock that evening before Green finally had the chance to catch Sharon alone. He returned from walking Modo to find her sprawled in his old vinyl easy chair in the living room, with her feet propped on the coffee table and her eyes closed. She looked done in. The house was quiet, Tony asleep and Hannah closeted in her bedroom with
her music miraculously turned down low. Only the bass beat pulsed through the ceiling.

  Modo padded into the living room to flop down in her usual spot at Sharon’s feet. Even that did not rouse her. Green vacillated in the doorway, loathe to disturb her, when he saw a faint smile curve the corners of her mouth.

  “Okay, Green,” she said without opening her eyes. “Fix me a cup of tea, and I’ll listen.”

  He hesitated, wondering what had given him away. She regarded him through eyes at half mast. “You have that look in your eye—Detective Green on the scent. What is it you want to know?”

  Humbly, he went into their ravaged kitchen, found the kettle and brewed up a pot of Sharon’s favourite Darjeeling brand.

  “Don’t forget to scald the pot,” she called from her chair. O ye of little faith, he thought. After five years of her exacting tutelage, he knew how to make a perfect cup of tea. When he brought it to her, complete with a saucer and oatmeal cookie, she took a sip and grinned at him.

  “Just keeping you on your toes. Okay, I probably have about half an hour of consciousness left, so shoot.”

  Cradling his tea, he sat on the chesterfield opposite her, propped his feet next to hers on the coffee table and summarized the case. Even though her eyes were closed, he knew she was absorbing every word.

  “I’m not ruling out homicide, because that piece of jacket bothers me,” he said as he finished. “But everything points to suicide. We have no signs of a struggle—no blood or disturbance up on the top. No defensive wounds, no abrasions on his hands to suggest he even grabbed at the wall to stop himself from falling. No witnesses to anyone else being in the area at the time. MacPhail’s pretty sure it’s suicide. Even Cunningham, who likes every minutia of physical evidence to fit, thinks it’s suicide. Lawrence’s group home supervisor says he hadn’t much to live for. And with his crazy delusions, he could have been thinking anything.”

  “So what do you want me to do?” she murmured. “Add my guess to the others?”

  He was about to protest, but stopped himself. “You’ve worked with schizophrenics for years. I want you to help me understand this guy. Would he be likely to kill himself, and if so, why? Or could he be so crazy that he’d jump off, thinking he could fly?”

  Her eyes were still closed, but a smile crept across her face. “That’s what I love about you. You don’t ask much. As to your first question, the answer is yes. Schizophrenics kill themselves all the time. It’s a devastating disease that robs both its victims and their families of normal, happy lives. It torments them with voices, fears and obsessions they can’t escape. Sometimes they make a very lucid choice to end it all.”

  “But I thought there are medications nowadays.”

  “Modern psychiatry has made amazing strides in treating this disease, at least to improve the quality of life, especially if it’s caught early. But in his case, after all these years of illness, what the disease hasn’t destroyed of his mind, our more primitive treatments probably have. Besides, you said he was off his meds, so he’d already be falling back into the grip of his delusions.”

  “In which case he might not realize the consequences of his jump? He might think he was immortal?”

  “Given the place he chose for his jump, I’d say that’s as good a possibility as the other.” She opened her eyes to take a sip of her tea. His exasperation must have shown, for she wiggled her toes to stroke his foot, the only exertion she could manage. “I know you want to understand why he jumped. That’s what I love about you. That driving force to solve the riddle of a case, to untangle people’s lives. But we will never be able to get inside his head that much.”

  “I suppose. Still, it helps to know that, psychologically, suicide is possible. Even likely.” He ceded the point reluctantly. “Much more likely than murder, twenty years later when his family had all moved away, and no one even knew he was in town.”

  She nodded, emitting an appreciative sigh as she took another sip. “There is an in-between possibility, you know. If he suffered from paranoid delusions, he might believe others were out to get him. Instruments of the devil, or something. I had a patient once who genuinely believed I was a witch, and she was terrified of me.” She shivered. “That was scary.”

  He leaned forward, his own tea forgotten. “So what’s your in-between theory?”

  “Well, simply that something scared him so much he jumped off the tower to escape.”

  “Something? You mean someone.” His thoughts were racing back to the crime scene, to the scrap of fabric on the wrong side of the wall.

  “Who knows? Perhaps something he saw—or someone— triggered his fear. Or perhaps it was all just a hallucination. Remember, by this time he was getting pretty sick.”

  Green struggled through fatigue to grapple with the elusive speculations she was tossing out. So much hinged on Lawrence’s mental state, but as Sharon said, no one could ever really know that. He grabbed onto the facts he had. “But his group home supervisor said with the meds he’d been on, he might still be in fairly good shape.”

  She shook her head dubiously. “In good shape for him, honey. But some schizophrenics are hit worse than others, and he sounds like one of the sicker ones. His illness struck him early in his teens—a bad sign—and he had to have electroshock, which is a drastic treatment normally used as a last resort. Plus it’s unusual for St. Lawrence to keep someone hospitalized for almost twenty years. He’d have to be resistant to almost all the treatments they tried, and they had to think he presented a serious ongoing risk.”

  “Risk to what?”

  “To himself. Or to others.”

  “What if his parents just didn’t want him to ever get out?”

  She shook her head. “You know as well as I do that they don’t have that power. Especially before Brian’s Law came out in 2000. Lawrence couldn’t have been held indefinitely against his wishes.”

  Green himself had been a detective on the major crimes squad when popular Ottawa sports broadcaster Brian Smith had been shot dead by a schizophrenic who had refused treatment. The outrage of the community had spilled into the legislature as well, making it easier for doctors to force treatment on those without the power to judge wisely for themselves. But it was still a difficult feat unless the patient consented.

  “What if he wanted to be kept in too?”

  “He’d still have to be pretty sick, Mike. A lot of patients are afraid to leave hospital because it’s the only home they know. But part of the staff ’s job is to help them get ready.”

  He pondered the situation. The vague, uneasy feeling he’d had earlier after discussing the past with Sandy and his mother began to crystallize. “What if he did something really horrific?”

  “He’d have gone to a forensic facility.”

  “Only if people found out.” He sat forward excitedly. “Bear with me, honey. See if you see the same thing I do.” He picked up a set of Tony’s playing cards from the table and began to talk, laying them down, one for each point, as if arraying his forces.

  “First we have the father lecturing about Satan and using the strap to drive evil out of his boys’ lives. Second, we have at least two older brothers engaging in sex and other sins. Third, we have a boy spying on his brothers and believing he’s the agent of God’s will. Fourth, we have this same sick boy believing he can purify souls by bizarre blood rituals. And finally, we have a brother who seems to have disappeared from the face of the earth. You add to all this the fact that the family put Lawrence away for good, they burned down the shed he loved, they threw out all his things, the father and brother became drunks, and the mother killed herself.”

  By the end, Sharon was sitting straight up, wide awake. “Something horrific, you said. What, Mike? What exactly are you thinking?”

  As she posed the question, Green looked at his six cards and recognized the uneasiness that had been lurking in the back of his mind. About Sophia, Derek, blood-stained notes and the jacket that was torn on the wrong place.<
br />
  “I think he may have killed his brother,” he said. “And maybe somebody wanted revenge.”

  Nine

  The next morning, much to his own surprise, Green was already in his office on the phone before Brian Sullivan even arrived at work. Sullivan usually arrived at the first hint of dawn, freshly scrubbed and sunny. Today he lumbered over to his desk an hour late, balancing his coffee and turning on his computer before he’d even shed his coat. He looked like a man who’d rather be somewhere else.

  Green beckoned him through his open door, then held up his hand for silence as a voice finally came on the line. He had reached St. Lawrence Hospital’s administrator before she’d even showered from her morning jog, and she was not pleased. She had an entire day of labour negotiations booked for that day, she informed him, and had absolutely no time to speak to the police. No need, Green assured her blithely. When my detectives arrive, they will only need to speak to the physician in charge of Lawrence Pettigrew’s care and to the staff who treated him, as well as examine his file. The woman sputtered about confidentiality and privacy laws, but again Green was ready for her. You will have the necessary paperwork, he replied with more conviction than he felt. Legally, it was unclear who was Lawrence’s official next-of-kin, given his father’s current mental state, but Green hoped that Robbie Pettigrew’s signature together with Sullivan’s Irish charm would do the trick.

  After Green hung up, Sullivan fixed him with bloodshot eyes over the rim of his Tim Hortons coffee, looking very short on Irish charm. “You’re not still serious about the Brockville goose chase.”

  Green bristled but sidestepped the ill humour. Everyone was entitled to a bad day. “Now more than ever.”

  “Mike, I’ve got work backed up the wazoo.”