Honour Among Men

by Barbara Fradkin

  He sat on the sofa, letting the chatter of the CBC National News wash over him. Campaign trail rhetoric, media overkill, yet another poll showing the Liberals trailing the Conservatives by a slim margin. Panic had not yet taken over the Liberal camp, but the mudslinging and cheap promises had ratcheted up a notch. Green tuned it out in disgust. He felt lonely, lost in recollections about Twiggy, and hoping Sharon would be home soon. But long before she arrived, he was fast asleep.

  FIVE

  With three murders on the go, an inexperienced staff sergeant in Major Crimes, and a superintendent snapping at his heels, Green was anxious to get an early start the next morning. He left Sharon to contend with the household and picked up a bagel and coffee from Vince’s Bagelshop on his way to the police station. When he arrived, however, Staff Sergeant Larocque was already out in the field, as was Bob Gibbs. But Sue Peters was parked outside his office, wearing yet another hideous suit, this one bright pink, perhaps to flatter her fire engine hair. Recently one of the female detectives had tried to encourage a more restrained palette, the result being the black and white checkerboard she’d worn yesterday.

  Normally, Green never paid the least attention to fashion, his own or others. He ran a perfunctory comb through his floppy brown hair once a day, but only got it cut when it began to seriously impede his vision. His slight, five foot-ten frame fit passably into a size 38 regular straight off the sales rack of the nearest chain store. Departmental dress code required that he wear a suit and tie, so he tried to wear one that had a minimum of stains and odours. The suits were always grey, which hid the dirt well and required no colour coordination expertise whatsoever. His male colleagues, and many of the females as well, seemed to agree that, in a job where you’re likely to get puked and spat on, grey polyester was the way to go.

  But Peters was oblivious. Standing by his closed office door with her notebook clutched to her chest, she was a beacon all the way down the hall. As he approached, her face lit.

  “Gibbsie’s tied up at the autopsy this morning, sir, so I thought I should report to you.”

  It was ridiculously outside departmental protocol, but Green’s curiosity won out. Balancing his bagel on his coffee, he unlocked his tiny alcove office and ushered her in. Without waiting for an invitation, she flounced into the guest chair and plunked her notebook on the desk. Green saw page after page of large, clumsy scrawl.

  “Do you have a summary report, Detective?” he cut in just as she drew breath to begin.

  She hesitated. “Not yet, sir, but I thought you should know what I’ve done, so you can give me my next assignment.”

  “Can you give me just the highlights then? I don’t need a blow by blow.”

  She pouted. “Our Jane Doe didn’t go to any of the shelters.”

  He wondered how much he could trust that information, given Peters’ sledgehammer interview style. “At least as far as the shelters remember.”

  “They’d have remembered the purse, sir. I took a picture of it with me. And she didn’t frequent any of the known street hangouts either.” Peters listed them off. It was an impressively thorough list.

  When he said as much, she beamed. “All right,” he said. “Next I want you to check the train station staff, especially—”

  “I already did. Last night, and again just now to catch the morning shift. One of the porters this morning remembered the purse. Our Jane Doe came in on the Montreal train a couple of weeks ago, she didn’t want any help with her bags—”

  “Bags? Plural?”

  “One other suitcase. More like a duffel bag. He remembers she asked him how to get to an address in Vanier. She didn’t want a cab, so he gave her directions for the bus.”

  “What address in Vanier?”

  “He couldn’t remember. He figured she had family or friends there.”

  Green digested this information with surprise. Not only had Peters used her initiative and tracked down a very useful lead, but she must have been up well before dawn to do so, if she’d slept at all. He felt a twinge of shame.

  “Very good, Peters. Put it all in your report and . . . have you had breakfast?”

  “Yes, sir. At the train station while I talked to the porter. I bought him a cup of coffee.”

  “Good. After you finish your report, I want you to return to the train station. Take a street map and buy the porter lunch. Read him every street in Vanier, and we’ll see if we can jog his memory.”

  She gave a broad smile as she slapped her notebook shut. “That’s what I thought, sir. I’ve already asked him his lunch hour. Will you tell Gibbsie where I’ve gone?”

  He let the nickname pass as he watched her leave. She’d no sooner clumped into the elevator than Green caught a movement in the squad room, and he looked up to see Bob Gibbs’s gangly form striding through the desks towards his office, clearly a man on a mission. Green’s hopes quickened. Could it be that this unlikely pair was going to crack this case all by themselves?

  When Gibbs had crowded into Green’s tiny office, the unmistakable odour of death and disinfectant permeated the air. Green had been about to close the door but thought better of it.

  “You’ve come from the autopsy.”

  Gibbs folded his lanky frame into the guest chair and nodded with alacrity. Green was pleased to see that he was flushed a healthy pink rather than sickly green. The young detective had only attended a couple of autopsies, but this was another sign that he was coming into his own. He didn’t even bother to consult his notes.

  “It was murder, sir. Without a doubt. There were big bruises around her neck and some abrasions on her arms and legs which MacPhail thinks are consistent with her thrashing about during a struggle.”

  “Did she drown?”

  “No, sir. Death was asphyxia due to manual strangulation. There was no water in her lungs and stomach, but several of the vertebrae in her neck were crushed.”

  Green visualized the scene. The victim was not a small woman, and she had obviously been conscious and resisting during the assault. It would have taken a powerful and ruthless assailant to hold her down long enough to kill her. “What else did MacPhail find?”

  Here Gibbs consulted his meticulous notes and began to read them off. “Victim is 167 centimetres in height, 49 kilograms in weight, estimated age between thirty and forty years, eyes blue, natural hair colour blonde turning grey. Poorly nourished and a heavy smoker and drinker, but no signs of other drug use. No tattoos, scars, or other distinguishing marks. Internal exam reveals a healthy subject except for early signs of lung and liver damage. Contents of the stomach negative for food, but there were traces of scotch. Blood alcohol at time of death was .04.”

  “Which is probably just one drink. What did he say about time of death?”

  “He was sticking by his earlier estimate. Based on ambient air temperature, body temp, frost in the ground and her early stages of rigor mortis, he estimated she’d been dead five to nine hours.”

  Green did a rapid calculation. “So she was killed between eleven last night and three this morning.”

  Gibbs nodded.

  “After consuming one scotch.” Green’s thoughts began to roam afield, making connections. The victim was thin and sickly, but even weak people put up tremendous resistance when they’re fighting for their life. Her killer would have had to be strong and determined, and he or she—more likely he—would probably have taken some hits during the struggle. Although the victim hadn’t been dressed to impress, the timing of the murder, the consumption of the single scotch, and the brute violence of the crime suggested a date gone bad. Pure speculation at this point, but a direction to pursue.

  “Anything under the fingernails?” he asked.

  “Some fibres and dirt, sir. I took it all over to the RCMP lab.”

  “Any signs of sexual assault or activity?”

  Gibbs shook his head. “But there was one other thing. She’d borne a child, quite a few years ago.”

  Green had jotted down som
e notes on his notepad, and he sat tapping his pen as he pondered their next move. Until they knew who the woman was, it was difficult to investigate her close associates and to track her recent movements. As he weighed ideas, he became aware of the silence that had fallen and of Gibbs’s anxious eyes upon him.

  “Sir? Now that it’s a confirmed homicide, are you g-going to assign the case to one of the sergeants?”

  Green considered his options. They were few. He had one sergeant on holiday and another tied up full-time on the Byward murders, which continued to draw media attention and to jam the phones with calls. The third had far less experience than Gibbs in homicide cases. Besides, Barbara Devine had told him to watch Gibbs’s every move, which gave him an excuse to be back in the field again.

  “Not at all, Bob,” he said. “I want you to get back onto the Halifax police with these new details about the Jane Doe, and tell them it’s now a priority one homicide case.”

  Far to the south, fog banked up over the ocean, but overhead the sky was blue and sunlight dazzled the whitecaps in Halifax Harbour. Sergeant Kate McGrath stood at the window of her Dartmouth condo, sipping her coffee and staring out over the shipyard into the harbour beyond. From her earliest childhood memory, the ocean always had the power to awe her. Chunks of pack ice still bobbed in the distance, but in the shelter of the inner harbour, the first brave sailboats were already dancing on the brisk spring breeze.

  She finished her coffee, changed into her spandex running suit, and pulled her Gore-tex jacket on top. Even though it was sunny, she knew the wind and salt spray of the ferry ride would chill her to the bone before she was halfway across.

  The two-kilometre run from her condo to the ferry terminal was barely enough to get her endorphins flowing, but when she stepped aboard and headed for her favourite spot at the upper bow, a sense of peace spread through her. The engine thrummed, the waves slapped against the hull, and in front of her, the City of Halifax rose steeply in a jumble of brick buildings and narrow streets towards the historic stone citadel at its crown.

  She’d been right to move here after Sean’s death. Not back to the craggy beauty of the Newfoundland coast where she’d been raised, but to this gentler, lusher landscape, where pain and privation weren’t etched so deeply into the soul. Sean had been blasted through the front door of a farmhouse by a shotgun during a routine domestic dispute call, ending her marriage barely a year after their honeymoon. The waterfront condo had cost her almost all his insurance settlement from the Truro Police, but it had been worth it. After twelve years here, the pain of his death had been worn smooth and soft.

  When the ferry docked on the Halifax side, she began the serious leg of her run, almost straight up the hillside from the boardwalk to the base of the citadel, where the sleek new headquarters of the Halifax Regional Police sprawled over an entire city block. She was always one of the first to arrive for her shift, which gave her plenty of time to shower, change and grab a snack before afternoon parade.

  Today she had to fight a fierce wind as she ran up Duke Street, so that she was gasping for breath by the time she reached the station. She refused to think it might be age. Thirty-seven was supposed to be the peak of womanhood, not the early stages of decrepitude. She took a long, hot shower, grateful to be alone, and changed into her professional attire. She kept a modest wardrobe of pantsuits and blouses at the station. Simple to clean but presentable if the media or the brass showed up. Only the colours varied.

  This time she selected a navy suit with a pale blue blouse to match her eyes and complement her cropped silver hair. She was feeling good. The ferry ride in the spring sunshine had been magical, and she was just returning after two days off. She’d never minded her prematurely silver hair, which lent an edge of experience when she was dealing with criminals and colleagues alike. She was an outport girl from a Newfoundland fishing cove who’d grown up in a household of salty men, and she thought women needed all the edge they could get.

  After she’d finished dressing, she raked her fingers through her damp hair and headed upstairs to General Investigations. She had a few minutes before her meeting with the day shift sergeant, so she flipped on her computer to check her email. After two days away from her desk, she had dozens of messages. Incident reports, follow-up reports, bulletins, requests and notifications of all kinds. Some were general distribution, others personal.

  She scanned the names and subject lines for messages of high priority or interest. Two messages from the Ottawa Police caught her eye. The first was a general distribution missing persons inquiry about a Jane Doe, and contained a photo and description. The second was directed to Criminal Investigations and was marked priority one pertaining to a homicide investigation. It included a more detailed description of the victim along with a series of autopsy head shots taken from different angles.

  McGrath studied the frontal head shot thoughtfully. The eyes were half shut and the mouth gaped open, making it difficult to picture what the living woman would have looked like. Yet something in the deep set eyes and round face touched a memory. She clicked on the profile shot and looked at the slightly upturned nose and the broad forehead. She frowned at the elusive memory. How many women looked like that? It was an ordinary Celtic face, like so many on the streets of Maritime towns.

  The day shift sergeant was heading towards her, impatient to hand over control. She gestured to the photos on her screen. “Has there been any action on this Ottawa request yet?”

  He glanced at the screen and nodded. “It’s part of uniform parade. The photos are being circulated to patrols, and they’re supposed to ask around and keep their ear to the ground. We also passed it on to the RCMP to cover the rural areas. No one’s had any missing persons reports that match. The Deputy Chief is thinking of making an appeal to the public, broadcast her photo and description.”

  McGrath hesitated. Her backlog of work still beckoned, but if her instincts were correct, this was part of a once-in-a-lifetime case that had never been solved. “Before he does, I want to check something,” she said. “Let me requisition a file from archives, and then I’ll be right with you.”

  Even with a rush on it, the file took several hours to arrive, giving her time to make a dent in her backlog. She watched as the boxes were unloaded onto the floor by her desk—stacks of statements, reports, warrants and futile leads, all neatly catalogued as she had left them ten years ago in the hope that someday she’d have a reason to come back to them. A new lead, a belated recollection or pang of conscience.

  The memories of the case came back in a rush as she flipped through the pages, scanning the contents. Finally, she came to the photos. Before CDs and digital cameras, everything had been retained on colour Polaroids. There were dozens of photos of the crime scene, the autopsy, and the witnesses—at least those who were still in the bar by the time the first squad car reached the scene.

  McGrath was looking for a single photo of a woman standing arm in arm with a young soldier, and she finally found it near the bottom of the pile. The woman was looking straight into the camera with her head cocked mischievously to the side and a broad smile lighting her face. The young man was sombre, his gaze fixed with purpose as if he knew the heavy responsibility that lay ahead. His features were tense, but at least they were intact, McGrath thought, which was more than could be said for the rest of his photos.

  McGrath picked up the frontal photo from Ottawa and held the two photos side by side. The face of the woman in the earlier photo was younger and fuller, but ten years and a hard life would explain that. The particulars fit. Five-foot-seven, blonde hair, blue eyes. The estimated age fit. Even the last detail, the evidence of an earlier pregnancy, fit too.

  She packed the files back into their boxes, picked up the two photos and went into her staff sergeant’s office. She laid the photos on his desk.

  “What do you think? Could they be the same woman?”

  He turned the earlier photo over to read the back, and his eyebrows shot up.
“The Daniel Oliver case?”

  “What do you think?”

  He shrugged. “Anything’s possible. I can’t see it myself, but you were closer to the case. You’re thinking this is the girlfriend?”

  “Patricia Ross. The specs fit.”

  “Yeah, her and half of Nova Scotia’s female population. We’re thinking of releasing a request to the media.”

  McGrath thought fast. The staff sergeant was a fair, experienced officer, but he always aimed for the most efficient route from A to B, and he rarely worried about the emotional fall-out. In the Daniel Oliver case, it was the emotional fallout that haunted her most.

  “Can you hold off for twenty-four hours? Give me a chance to track her down?”

  He frowned. “Ottawa needs answers ASAP. They’re sitting on a homicide, Kate.”

  “But there may be family. Children. You don’t want their dead mother’s face plastered on TV to be their first inkling of the news. Twenty-four hours.”

  He glanced at his watch. It was past four o’clock. “Seven a.m. Take it or leave it.”

  She took it. Dropping all else, she returned to her desk and started to track down the current whereabouts of Patricia Ross. The address in the file proved a dead end. Not only had Patricia moved out years earlier, but the old house itself had been demolished for an office building. A Canada411 search uncovered no Patricia Rosses living in Nova Scotia, but seven P. Rosses in the Halifax area. Calls to all seven were negative. If Patricia Ross still lived in Halifax, she had no phone in her own name. Yet the province had no record of a Patricia Ross registering a marriage at any time in the past ten years.

  Dinner consisted of a donair and a V-8 juice consumed at her desk while she turned to the next phase of her inquiries. Of the dozen witnesses she’d interviewed who claimed to be friends of Daniel Oliver, she was able to reach only four, but none of them had kept in touch with Patricia. Two thought she’d gone to stay with Danny’s folks in Cape Breton, but when McGrath phoned, Danny’s mother said she hadn’t spoken to Patricia since the wake. She didn’t even know if the baby had been born.