He crossed his arms. “Were you burglarized this summer?”
“Burglarized?”
He saw false surprise on her face, and he knew he had her nailed.
There was no mistake. She had been burglarized this summer. By a flea-infested petty criminal and drug addict named Ben Stirling, whom she had then bathed, fed, and slept with, for some unfathomable reason, and who had a day or so afterward disappeared, only to turn up dead and decomposing some months later — all of which, yes, caused him some fucking concern.
“Burglarized,” he repeated coldly.
She lifted her chin at him. She knew the game was up, and now he foresaw the rest of it, like a fast-forward preview of disaster. She was going to confess to the murder, and his relationship with her — so what that it was some kind of twisted platonic mad scientist hippy experiment — would take him and his career crashing down. So what if she had started out as a minor witness? Turned out he, once a rising star of a detective, had not only failed to recognize the killer, but dated her.
“Yes,” she said, and even though he had come charging over here knowing the truth, he was shocked by the confession. “Last summer I happened to meet the two drifters who stayed in that house. Joey and Gunner. Or Ben Stirling, as I now know. Yes, they broke into my house and took some of my things. It was a pathetic bunch of loot, Cal. One broken CD player, some pewter costume jewellery, a handful of parking meter money, and a diamond ring that my mother had inherited from her mother. They were tiny diamonds. I’m sure in the industry they call it ‘crush.’ If lucky, they might have gotten a hundred bucks out of the whole sting. Anyway, I asked for the jewellery back, and they gave it to me. They were shaking in their boots. Should I have turned them in? Of course. I was going to. For their own sakes, if nobody else’s.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No.”
He waited for her damn good reason why she hadn’t reported that there were two squatters living next door who had stolen from her, and would go on stealing in and around the neighbourhood until they escalated to home invasions and somebody got hurt or killed. Which quite possibly somebody did, that being one of the burglars himself.
“Why don’t you sit down,” Farah said.
“I’m not interested in sitting down.”
So she explained to him, standing. “I talked to him, to Gunner. About his situation, why he steals, how to get off that track, how to take on the system and use it for what it’s worth. You know, how to eke out a living, crimelessly, which isn’t as easy as those of us with privilege seem to think. Do you think my reporting him, and a bunch of cops descending on him out of the blue and throwing him in a paddy wagon, would really help?”
“That’s what bunches of cops are here for, to arrest criminals and protect people like you. You want to rewrite the law of the land? Maybe exempt everyone who’s a nice guy, but just a little misguided?”
“Oh, Cal,” she said. “Where’s your empathy? Have you never done anything wrong in your life?”
“I’m not talking to you,” he told her. “I’m taking you in.”
“It’s easy to judge if you weren’t there. You’re looking at this like it’s one of your typed-up reports. Gunner had never been in trouble with the law before. He stole because he didn’t know how else to feed himself.”
“Or his drug habit.”
“He had a plan. It was elaborate, and it was sound. What he needed was the benefit of the doubt, and I gave it to him.”
“You should have turned him in, Farah. You should have let the courts decide what benefit to give him. It’s a civilized country. We don’t cut off people’s hands.”
Dion was hot under the collar, but Farah was cool, and she was managing to keep the conversation level. As if from a separate self, he watched her with awe.
“Of course not,” she said. “But we don’t listen very well. I listened to him. I decided to give him a chance. We talked over the game plan and agreed to meet again. It didn’t happen, and now I know he’s dead, and I feel terrible about it. But that night, right or wrong, I didn’t have the heart to throw those kids away.”
“So you slept with them instead.”
“What?” she cried, for the first time raising her voice. “No, I did not! Where do you get that bullshit from? Jesus!”
Dion made a noise of disgust, though he was no longer sure about his last accusation, almost convinced by her reaction. But it didn’t matter. Whether or not she had slept with the vagabonds was moot. He looked at her squarely, himself the cool one now, and said, “I’m going to have to get your full statement. You know that? You know you’re a prime suspect?”
Her eyes flew open wide. “What?”
“Yes,” he said, with dark satisfaction. “You screwed up, Farah. If you had been up-front with me, we wouldn’t be in this fix. Fact is, I can’t even take your statement, because I screwed up too, by getting involved with you, which means you’ll have to tell it all to someone else. Probably David Leith, who isn’t half as nice as I am. And about a hundred times smarter.”
“Oh, calm down,” she snapped. “I didn’t kill Gunner. How ridiculous.”
They were staring at each other, and already she was back in control, more baffled than afraid. More curious than angry.
He gave up the contest and paced the length of the bedroom, fretting to himself. Farah seated herself on the bed, one knee slung over the other, to watch him pace. He stopped in front of her. “You’ll have to tell them all about us. It’ll come out one way or another. It has to.”
“Us?” she said. “What us?”
“Doesn’t matter how far we didn’t go,” he snarled. “We still had a relationship that went out of bounds. But that’s my problem, not yours. I’ll get in shit for it, but so what? They can’t demote me any further.”
“Wow,” she said. “This is the happiest I’ve seen you. You really like being unhappy, don’t you? If it comes to it, I’ll tell them that we met and got talking, and I invited you over for dinner, and that’s as far as it went. I can’t believe you’d get in trouble for some dinner conversation.”
“The kind of trouble I get in depends on the kind of trouble you get in.” He spelled it out for her. “Cops don’t mess with witnesses. It can get a whole case thrown out. Follow me?”
She changed the subject. “You were going to tell me what Stefano has done.”
“That was before you became my prime suspect,” he said, through his teeth.
“Pretend for a moment I’m not. What did Stefano do?”
It took him a moment to remember why he cared about Stefano Boone, and when he remembered that particular line of inquiry, he almost let out a bitter laugh. “To your knowledge, is Stefano Boone a werewolf?”
Damp with anger, he waited for the absurd answer to his absurd question.
She said, “I don’t believe Stefano is a werewolf. As far as I know, he’s just a prep cook. Why? No, hold that thought. I’ll be right back.”
She left the room and he heard her step swiftly down the stairs. He sat on the bed and waited, looking at the narrow window with its great view of the murder house across the road. A minute later she came padding back in, probably with her father’s loaded Winchester in hand, cocked to kill. When he glanced over he saw that all she held was a tumbler of something that looked like Scotch.
“This one’s special,” she said, and handed him the glass. “I bought it to have on hand for your rare interludes of niceness.”
He had come here with accusations of murder and immoral conduct, and in turn she treated him with sympathy and Scotch. He took the glass and studied it minutely, looking for powder sediment at its base. She was beside him on the bed. She rubbed his back gently, like he was a child with the flu, not a grown man going through a personal hell.
Liquor laced with strychnine, then. He threw it back like medic
ine. The only effect, a moment later, was a migrating warmth and a slight easing of the knot in his stomach.
“I think we should sleep on it,” Farah said, her hand still on his back. He couldn’t look at her any longer. He didn’t have the nerve. He knew now that her plan was not poison, but seduction. She would knife him as he slept, leave his body in somebody else’s crawl space, blame it on the wolves. Probably get away with it, too.
“I think that’s a bad idea,” he told her. He took her hand, as they sat side by side. “I’m going to have to take you in, right now, and get it all on the record. There’s no other way.”
“Okay,” she said. ”Whatever you’d like.”
She leaned to kiss him, chastely, on the cheek.
* * *
Leith was minding Izzy, as Alison was out. He watched the child play and thought it was scary, how much he loved her.
He tried to imagine: what if she turned fifteen and decided to call herself Aphid and run away with a reprobate who burgled houses for a living? He tried to imagine the distance coming between them. How could he survive the hurt?
His phone rang, not the work jangle, but the personal bling-bling. He dug it out of his pocket, Izzy under his arm like a giggling sack of potatoes, and checked the number on display. Not a number he recognized, and he was struck with anxiety. Bad news was always out there, just waiting to pounce.
“Hello,” he said. “Dave Leith.”
“This is Patricia Klugman,” said a tense voice. “We met last week. You put an offer on our little teardown on Delbruck. I realize there’s been a delay, but there was some business we had to take care of. There’s no time limit on your offer, I see, which is kind of unusual. I haven’t heard from you, so I imagine you’ve made other arrangements.”
So this was a different kind of bad news, from the vendor of that perfect house he had bid on so pompously. She sounded unhappy, and he wondered what he had messed up for her. “No, but anyway. What’s up?”
He could hear rustling, then something clicking, then a flaring sound he recognized — a lighter combusting. She was firing up a cigarette. That’s how much she hated him: she had to pause mid-conversation and suck up some smoke. He had probably jeopardized that deal with the zillionaire. He couldn’t imagine how, but this conversation was clearly heading toward a lawsuit.
“We’ve accepted your offer,” she said, and sucked, and blew. “If you’re still interested, that is.”
“Excuse me?”
Silence, then he heard her speak away from the phone to somebody. He wasn’t sure, but he thought she had just referred to him, Leith, as a genius. Then she was back, apologizing for the delay. Not that he was hearing so well. This was news he couldn’t quite process. She said, “You want the house, it’s yours.”
They discussed further details and set up a time to meet.
He disconnected, stunned, as another call came in. Corporal Paley had just spoken to Cal Dion, who claimed to have a witness that Leith would want to interview, and it better be ASAP.
Twenty-Six
MERCY
Leith had to wait a few minutes for the apparently critical witness to arrive. And that was her, he supposed, being marched toward him in the company of Constable Dion. Dion was off duty, judging by the casual clothes, but there was nothing casual about his expression. The woman at his side was a dark-skinned woman around thirty years old.
Some instinct told Leith this was Joey Battar’s mystery woman, the one who had walked into the Greer house to set Ben Stirling on a more virtuous path.
With no evidence whatsoever, why did he think it was her? Because Dion had her in custody. Say no more.
Dion had directed the woman to go sit in the waiting area just outside the GIS office, and now he carried on to Leith’s desk alone. He began to rattle off the details. “I’ve brought in Farah Jordan, from Lynn Valley. She’s the witness I was questioning about the prep cook, Stefano Boone —”
“Slower,” Leith said.
Dion took a chair and started over. “Farah Jordan is the chef at the Greek Taverna, where Stefano Boone is a prep cook. She drives him to and from work. I told you about that, the carpooler.”
“Right,” Leith said. The conversation was almost lost in the shuffle of his mind, but he recalled Dion recognizing a face in the surveillance van shots.
“After reading Jagmohan Battar’s statement, it occurred to me Jordan fits the description of the B and E victim he was talking about, so I asked her about that, too. She admits she’d been at the Greer house and had met Ben Stirling. She only knew him as Gunner. I stopped asking questions right away and brought her in.”
“Okay,” Leith said.
Dion sped up again to finish his report. “She says she felt sorry for Stirling and Battar, and invited them over to her house across the road. She says she has no knowledge of what happened to them after that. Like I said, I didn’t inquire further. I knew you’d want to get a warned statement from her soon as possible.”
Leith nodded. “I’ll do that,” he said. “Soon as you tell me what’s really going on here. You planning to do that anytime soon?”
“What’s really going on,” Dion said stiffly, “is it came out in canvassing that Jordan works at the Greek Taverna. That’s a restaurant I go to sometimes, so when I was down there for dinner, we got talking, and it came up in conversation that she carpools with the prep cook. She pointed him out to me, which is how I later identified him in the surveillance shots. Just a string of coincidences, really.”
You’re a string of coincidences, Leith nearly said. He crossed his arms.
“I didn’t consider Jordan integral to the investigation in any way,” Dion continued, “so when she invited me over for dinner, I said sure. Nothing wrong with that. Later it turned out that things kind of linked up, so I told you right away.”
In a nutshell, Leith decided, the cop was dating the suspect. But it was true that the connections might be tenuous, at best. The prep cook named Boone could be a case of mistaken identity. But even if he was lurking in the night and scaring people, that was weird, but not necessarily criminal. Yet.
More damning was Ms. Jordan fraternizing with the victim of a gruesome murder, then not divulging this most important information to authorities. But that could be merely an unwillingness to get involved, which definitely did happen amongst the less conscientious citizens of the world.
“Okay, then,” he said. He rose and gathered his file folder. “Take her downstairs, set up the video, and let’s get on with it.”
* * *
Leith did the talking, and he allowed Dion to sit in. He allowed it because it helped him assess this relationship, which may or may not matter somewhere down the road. Jordan came across to him as a woman with nothing to hide. She described her meeting with the boys in the Greer house, and the pity she had taken on them. Fed and bathed them, like some kind of angel of mercy. She had a different name for what she had done — being human.
Looking Leith in the eyes, she apologized sincerely for not reporting to the police upon learning the identity of the dead man. As soon as she saw the composite drawing from the online news — that had been quite a few days after the police — well, Constable Dion, in fact — had first spoken to her, she realized it was Gunner. But by then she was afraid to get involved, and she didn’t think her input would be helpful, anyway. Even with those hours she had spent with the men, she really knew little about them. Again, she was dreadfully sorry.
Leith saw Farah Jordan as a flower child — or flower woman. Still, he wasn’t convinced of her innocence. After half a lifetime spent on the force, listening to the stories of frauds, thugs, sociopaths, commanding officers, and administrators, he didn’t take anything or anyone at face value, ever. Not until he had pressed whatever they had to say through the fine-meshed sieve of doubt.
Could he charge her with something? Probab
ly. Would he? Probably not. He asked her about the girl known only as Aphid. Jordan said she had never counted how many people were in the house, those few times she had seen flickering shadows over there. She had thought they were kids exploring, that’s all, and hadn’t given it much thought, until some things went missing.
Leith closed down the interview with an announcement of the time being 0136 hours.
As Dion shut off the tape recorder and applied himself to his notes, Leith told Ms. Jordan that he would like her to submit fingerprint impressions to help eliminate the unknowns found at the crime scene. She said yes, of course, not a problem at all, and accompanied him down the hall.
As they waited in the privacy of the fingerprint station, he asked how she would describe her relationship with Constable Dion.
“A good friend,” Ms. Jordan said, with that earnest warmth that could bake bread, if she turned it up high enough.
“It’s not a crime if you got romantically involved,” Leith told her, not adding that it sure as hell did complicate things, though. It showed a kind of deviousness on her part, one he had to take seriously, since it begged the question: had she gotten involved with the cop for her own nefarious reasons?
But this was all background building at this point, a fishing expedition, and he made sure to speak to her in a chummy, rapport-building way. “Seems to me good friendship takes time to develop. Romance is more of a brush fire. Just saying, in looking at the timeframe of how long you two have known each other, I have to wonder.”
She smiled. “A brush fire. Nicely put. Poetic!”
He returned her smile.
“Cal is such a great guy,” she said. “How could I not like him instantly?”
“But he’s also a police officer, one who would’ve been interested that you knew the murder victim. Why didn’t you tell him?”
“As I said, I didn’t think my evidence would advance your investigation in any way. And also, I guess, I didn’t want to spoil our friendship.”
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