The Taken

by Inger Ash Wolfe

  “What would your ID have said?”

  “Something that told you I was Gil Paritas. Fake ID’s easy to get, DI Micallef. But the point is, you didn’t question what you were being told. You took what you saw in front of you at face value, and that’s not going to work. Not for what we’re doing.”

  “And what are we doing?”

  Paritas turned and tilted her head at the camera, quizzically. “We’re solving a murder. I thought you knew that. Didn’t you ask me how to save her if she’s already dead?”

  “I did.”

  “Well then, don’t you want to know how?”

  Hazel felt crestfallen. She imagined Chip Willan on one shoulder and her old mentor, Gord Drury, on the other. Willan’s legs dangled down, his arms were crossed over his chest. Tsk, tsk, he muttered, stegosaur trouble. Drury leaned into her ear. You can never give them too much rope, he said.

  “Yes,” said Hazel. “I want to know how.”

  Paritas nodded approvingly. “Then let’s carry on.”

  “First… I want to know if that man in the chair over there is still alive.”

  “You mean Colin?”

  “Yes.”

  Paritas half turned away from the camera. “Colin? Dear? You still breathing over there?” Eldwin remained motionless in the chair. “He must be sleeping.”

  “I’ve got no motivation to listen to you if I think that man is dead.”

  “Oh, he’s not dead, just a little hard of hearing.”

  “Colin Eldwin!” Hazel called out suddenly. “We can see you! We know where you are and we’re coming to get you! Give me a sign that you can hear my voice!”

  Paritas appeared to be watching as intently as Hazel was, her eyes switching back and forth between Eldwin and the camera. She shrugged theatrically. “Maybe he doesn’t respond to bluffs. Or maybe he’s just lost in his own world.”

  “We’re turning you off,” said Hazel.

  “I’ll say -”

  “Give us proof Eldwin is alive.”

  “Hold on,” said Paritas. “Let me whisper in his ear.” She turned back toward the table and leaned down. Her face appeared to be close to the table’s surface. Hazel felt ice forming in the pit of her stomach. “Colin?” Paritas whispered quietly. “You awake? There are some nice people here who want to talk to you.” She sat up and looked over her shoulder at them. “I don’t know, guys,” she said. “Maybe you should talk to him.” She slowly raised a hand into view: she was pinching two small pieces of discoloured purple meat between her thumb and forefinger. It took them a moment to recognize them as a pair of human ears. Wingate staggered back from the desk with his hand over his mouth. “But I should warn you,” said Paritas, “he’s never been much of a listener.”

  “Oh fuck,” said Hazel, and she felt the damp heat rising in her throat -

  “Hold on,” said Paritas, and she got up now, and carried the dripping parts over toward Eldwin, who, feeling her footfalls on the floor, sat up stiffly in the chair and turned his face, his eyes gleaming wide in terror. They saw the dark red chasm in the side of his head, and when Paritas pressed the severed ear back into place, Eldwin began to scream. She turned back toward the camera. “I think he’s alive,” she called. “What do you two think?”

  Hazel and Wingate were standing behind the desk, unable to speak or move as Colin Eldwin continued to struggle, crying out incoherently, the chair bumping sideways, its feet shrieking against the floor like fingernails on a chalkboard. Paritas pulled the ear off the side of Eldwin’s head and looked at it, a string of thick liquid still connecting it to him. “They make excellent paintbrushes,” she said, coming back toward them. She walked past the table, dropping Eldwin’s ears on top of what she was writing, and continued directly toward the camera. “Now let me ask you: do I have your attention?”

  Hazel’s breath was coming in short bursts. “Yes.”

  “Good,” said Paritas. “You’ve already heard what you have to do next. Figure it out and we’ll talk again. Make yourselves worthy of my attention.” Her gaze went beyond the lens now, to behind it, as if she were staring through the wall they now stood against. “Dean?” she said, and the screen went black again and the green transmission icon vanished.

  They dispatched a car to Gilmore anyway, but Bellocque’s house was dark and locked up tight. She knew a warrant to force entry would get them nowhere, but she put it in motion and left it with Sean MacDonald. He’d go in and check every meaningless inch of that cluttered mess of a house and she knew he’d find nothing. They discussed keeping a car on the site, but Hazel remembered Paritas’s words: if they could find them through the internet and in the streets of downtown Toronto, they were probably smart enough not to go back to Bellocque’s.

  She put Forbes on the Paritas name and told him to spend the rest of the afternoon unravelling it whatever way he could. A simple search of the telephone book and then county records confirmed, as they presumed, that there was no Gil Paritas anywhere in Westmuir, and Hazel kept her own rueful counsel on that fact, recalling the toss of Paritas’s head when she asked her what the name meant. Greek for woman-stuck-in-traffic. And Hazel had watched her flounce down the steps to her car. Not for one instant had Paritas worried that Hazel would not do exactly what was expected of her: she played good-cop/bad-cop all by herself, she laid a bluff, got called, and then showed Paritas her whole hand. And the woman had practically walked out of the station house whistling. Idiot, thought Hazel. You’ve been made to order.

  Forbes was waiting at her office door with some handwritten notes. He reported that web searches on the word had finally brought him to a Latin translation page that gave “paritas” to mean “equal.” But one site offered a more tantalizing translation: we are the same.

  “As what?” Hazel wondered aloud. “Who’s ‘we’?”

  “Her and Bellocque? Her and Eldwin?” said Forbes.

  “Maybe.”

  She went to find Wingate. “We have to tie Eldwin to that house. That’s our next move.”

  “I’ll call Childress back. See if she has anything for us yet. And I think it’s time we should get back in contact with Claire Eldwin. She has a right to know.”

  “Don’t tell her about the hand,” Hazel said. “Or the ears.” She thought for a second. “Don’t give her any details at all.”

  “I’ll handle it.” She seemed to be studying his face. “Skip?”

  “Three stories, Paritas said. We know two of them. The third is ‘already written.’ What is that third story, James?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And what can you save the dead from?”

  There was a long silence, as if they were watching something take shape in the air between them, and then Wingate said, “A lie.”

  “A lie.”

  He’d already picked up the phone. “If I call and Childress has something we can use, we’re going to have to get into bed with Twenty-one. Are we sure we want that?”

  “Will they help? They’re your people.”

  “They’ll help, but no one likes to be wrong. If something went south in their own backyard…”

  She thought about that for a moment. Then she said, “I don’t care. Make the call.”

  23

  Sunday, May 29

  Childress got back to Wingate at the beginning of her next shift, Sunday morning. It came through as a handwritten fax, a dated list on Childress’s notebook paper. The fact that it was off her PNB and not on a piece of scrap paper meant the matter had entered Twenty-one’s caseload on some level and they were already on the division’s radar, whether they wanted to be or not.

  There were twenty names covering all five apartments from 2000 to the present. Most of the tenants were long-term and their start and end dates were in full-year increments. Three rental terms ended prematurely, but there was no Colin Eldwin or Nick Wise or any other name that could resolve to Eldwin. But one of them was a “Clarence Earles,” and it seemed as good a place to start as an
y. Wingate called Mrs. Eldwin to give her an update and to take the opportunity to ask if her husband ever used pseudonyms.

  “That’s why you’re calling?”

  “We need to tick off all the boxes, Mrs. Eldwin. I’m sorry.”

  “Shouldn’t you be out there trying to find him?”

  “This is part of it.”

  “Why would he use a pseudonym?” she asked. “He’s never published anything anyway.”

  “What about when he gets hired to write something?”

  “You mean How to Use Your New Garage Door Opener? I don’t think those ‘texts’ get signed, Officer.”

  “Okay,” he said, trying to calm her down. “Can I ask you if the name Clarence Earles means anything to you?”

  “Clarence Earles,” she repeated, flatly. “Does it mean anything to you?”

  “They’re his initials, Mrs. Eldwin.”

  “ That’s your lead, Detective? You found his fucking initials? Did you find them carved on a fucking tree?”

  “Mrs. Eldwin, please -”

  “Why don’t you put out an APB for Clint Eastwood, then? Or Carmen fucking Electra? Surely a girl with tits that big must be hiding something.”

  He forced himself to continue over the sound of her furiously sucking on a cigarette. “Ma’am, did you ever live on Washington Avenue in Toronto?”

  “Yeah, I did. For ten years with Chris Evert. You know, the gay tennis player? Did you know I led a whole secret life with a lesbian tennis star who shares her initials with my husband? Hey, with me as well. Isn’t that something?”

  “Mrs. Eldwin,” he said firmly, but she interrupted him.

  “FIND MY HUSBAND!” she shouted. “Don’t call me with code words, addresses, trails of breadcrumbs, or smoke signals until you know where he is, do you hear me? That’s your job. You fucking… useless… piece of -”

  He hung up.

  He found Hazel feeding Mason a sunflower seed through the bars of his cage. “Um, I don’t think she knows anything. Claire Eldwin.”

  “Okay,” she said, watching the mouse eat.

  “She might be crazy, that one.”

  “You think so?”

  “She thinks Chris Evert was gay, for one.”

  Hazel squinted at him. “She wasn’t?”

  “No. It was Martina Navratilova. Evert was straight.”

  “They weren’t lovers?”

  He sighed. “No, they weren’t. Evert married another tennis player. I think.”

  “Why do you know this?”

  “Tennis fan,” he said. “Anyway, she never had a place on Washington.”

  “When was this Earles person in that apartment?”

  Wingate unfolded the fax from his pocket. “January to August 2002.”

  She took the sheet from his hand and studied it. “The rental was for eight months.”

  “So?”

  “So Earles moved out the beginning of September 2002.”

  She waited for him to cotton on, but she’d lost him.

  “That’s when the Eldwins moved to Mulhouse Springs. He rented that place for eight months and then got out of town.”

  “How can you be sure it’s him?”

  “Paritas sent us there for a reason. And the initials, the time frame… it all fits. That, or we’re being shined on for no reason at all.”

  “That’s a possibility,” he said.

  “Even so, between the choice of acting on what we think we know and doing nothing, what choice do we actually have?” She cracked a sunflower seed between her teeth and took the kernel out to feed the mouse. He took it from her between the bars with his tiny, pink paws. When he sat back on his haunches, he looked like a little old man eating a sandwich.

  “So,” he said. “January to August 2002. That’s our starting time frame.”

  “Right. We have a house, a picture of a sweater, and an eight-month window.”

  “There must have been thirty homicides in Toronto in the first half of 2002.”

  “No,” she said, and she came away from the cage. “It’s not a murder, James. That’s why we’ve been deputized. We’re investigating a murder, but whatever it was in 2002, that’s not how it was ruled. You get it? It was something else.”

  “But some of this is pretty contingent, Hazel.”

  “Something you can see right in front of your eyes doesn’t require a leap of faith.”

  Wingate pulled a chair out from the desk behind him and sat. He stared at the mouse cage. “So it looked like a natural death,” he said. “Or an apparent suicide. Or maybe it was an accident that wasn’t an accident – someone messing around with the brake cables, you know? It’s not hard to set it up. Someone falls out a window, leaves the gas on, tips over a candle.” He disappeared into himself for a moment. “We’re not talking about a missing person here though, because that suggests foul play and there’d still be an open file. If I kill someone and then want to get married and move away, I don’t want anyone asking questions. I want to be sure the body is in the ground and the file is closed.”

  “That’s right. So we have to find that file and reopen it.”

  “That’s a needle in a haystack, Skip.”

  “At least we have it narrowed down to a haystack.” She pushed herself off from the coffee table. “Let’s get back down to Toronto. Make an appointment to see them first thing tomorrow and sit down with them, show them some respect, get them onside.”

  “We’re the ones who’re going to have to get onside,” Wingate said. “If there’s a case, it’s theirs.”

  “Maybe I’ll let you do the talking.” He smiled uncomfortably at her. “Being the prodigal son’s got to be worth something,” she said.

  Cartwright was waiting in the hallway by Hazel’s office door. The door was closed. As Hazel approached, her secretary seemed to move to block her. “Skip?”

  “Melanie?”

  “I just want to say I asked him to wait somewhere else, but he insisted on going into your office.”

  “Who?”

  “I didn’t think it was right to insist.”

  Hazel leaned in and lowered her voice. “Is it that goddamned Willan with his fucking surfboard?”

  “Who?”

  “It’s your job to keep people away from me, Melanie.”

  “I did what I could,” she said.

  Hazel put her hand on the doorknob, straightening and pushing her shoulders back. She opened the door and the man sitting in the chair on the guest’s side of her desk turned and it was Ray Greene. She jerked to stillness and stood paralyzed in the doorway. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t want to start people talking by waiting around somewhere they could see me.” He stood up and turned to face her. He was in a dark blue suit, civilian uniform, and she saw he’d lost a good fifteen pounds. She couldn’t speak. “Did you get my bottle?”

  “I did,” she said. “That was thoughtful of you.”

  “I hear not all your gifts were as welcome.”

  “No,” she said, and she finally entered the room, closing the door behind them. “Where’d you hear that?”

  “I’m not totally out of the loop.”

  “The fact that you’re sitting in my office speaks volumes to that. You didn’t pour yourself a drink, though.”

  He smoothed down the front of his jacket. “I didn’t want to take liberties. But if you’re offering -”

  She took her seat behind the desk and reached down into a drawer to her left. It had been almost six months since she’d spoken to Ray Greene, and apart from his gift, she’d had no proof he was still in Westmuir. She had just the one glass and she poured and pushed it over to him before shaking her coffee cup over the garbage can and putting a shot in it. He held his glass up to her in an awkward, incomplete gesture and then drank it back. She put her mug down untasted. “You’re not here to ask for your job back.”

  “No,” he said.

  “You’re not the kind of person to butter someone up with a twenty-sixer an
d then show up hat in hand, are you?”

  “You know me that well.”

  “I guess I do. Then what is it?”

  “I wanted you to hear it from me.”

  “Shit,” she said.

  “Willan’s going to put me in as the CO of the amalgamated Westmuir force. Port Dundas is going to be headquarters.”

  “When?”

  “January one.”

  “Fucking hell.”

  He looked down into his empty glass. “I don’t like amalgamation any more than you do, Hazel, but standing on principle is just another way of doing nothing and being nothing. And I need to work.”

  “You couldn’t work under me, Ray, you think it’s going to be easier with the reins?” He hadn’t made eye contact again, not since he’d tried to toast her. “Jesus,” she said. “Are they just going to pasture me or are they hoping I’ll resign in a snit?”

  “They’re hoping for a resignation.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  Now he looked up. “Then you’ll have me backing you. I don’t want you to quit.”

  She pushed the meat of her palm into her forehead. “I can’t handle this right now. There’s too much going on -”

  “I can come back -”

  “Why’d you say yes? There’d have been a brand new desk anywhere you wanted in the OPS. You could have gone to the big smoke if you wanted to. Why come back here?”

  “Because this is what I know.” She waited for him to deliver the rest of the speech. How he could be put to best use here, how they’d be able to work out their differences and be effective together. But that was all there was, and she had to admit, she understood. He wasn’t just police, he was Westmuir police and probably six long months hung up drawing early pension was enough to convince him that taking over Westmuir was a good portion even if it meant coping with her resentment, her anger, perhaps her insubordination. Willan had calculated it would be her dinosaur moment, but she was already pretty sure she wouldn’t let him have the satisfaction.

  She was silent, not allowing him the release of a reply to his astonishing news. His shoulders were halfway to his ears, as if he might disappear into his suit jacket. Finally, she said, “Are you ready?”