“And what age would that be?”
“Twenty-eight.”
Aziz asked whether Byrne had a photo of the young man. He didn’t; nor did he have the address in Ireland where Duguald or any of his family lived.
“Why is that?” Aziz asked.
“Duggie left home early for a life at sea, and neither side of my family is given to staying in touch with the far-flung relations.”
MacNeice’s fuse was running short. “Describe him to us.”
“Whaddya mean?”
Aziz put her pen down with a slap. “Is he tall, short, heavy, slim, built like you or more like DS MacNeice? Does he have tattoos, as seamen often do? Any scars? Is he bald or does he have a full head of hair—if so, is it fair or dark? Are his eyes green, grey, hazel, brown or blue? Did he walk erect or hunched over—any limp or oddness in his gait?”
Byrne reacted like he was being smacked. When she’d finished, he exhaled. “I wasn’t in love with the fella, we were only related. Lemme see … he’s taller than me for sure, but not as tall as him.” He nodded in MacNeice’s direction. “He’s heavier, though—like I said, he’s a big boy.” Arching his eyebrows like he was running through Aziz’s list, he added, “Duggie has dark hair, lots of it. He says the ladies like it that way because they can run their fingers through it, if you follow.”
“He’s a lady’s man.” Aziz kept her eyes on her notebook.
“How should I know? We didn’t double date. He was my night clerk and when he wasn’t clerkin’, he was out fishin’.”
“Tattoos or other distinguishing marks?”
“He has a tattoo of the flag of Ireland on his chest over his heart, and a bathing beauty on his forearm that he can make shimmy when he flexes his muscles. Duggie is fit, but not the kind of fit you get in a fancy gym.”
“You said that Duguald is dark. How dark?”
“Well, no offence, but not as dark as you, detective.”
She let the comment slide. “Did he ever bring one of his girlfriends back to the hotel?”
“Nope. Never met a one.”
MacNeice leaned closer to study the memorabilia tacked to the corkboard: postcards and brochures from the Emerald Isle. He removed both postcards to check the backs—nothing written on them; they’d never been used. “Where is Duguald now, Mr. Byrne?”
“You asked me that already. I dunno.”
“Yes, but you suddenly remembered so much about him, I thought you might have gotten lucky there too.”
“You mean you thought you’d get lucky.”
MacNeice smiled. “Why don’t you show us where Duguald stayed.”
Byrne shrugged and led them upstairs to the room with sickly green curtains. He leaned against the door jamb after the detectives went in.
Without turning to him, MacNeice said, “Leave us now. We’ll see you downstairs when we’re finished.” He put on his latex gloves.
“Okay, but no funny business you two—not witout payin’ first.” He winked at Aziz, raising his eyebrows as she put on her gloves. She turned on him with a cold stare and the man retreated.
MacNeice opened the oppressive green curtains, sending a fog of dust particles floating toward the bed. The window was so filthy, it filtered the already grey light from outside.
They tore the bedding off the double mattress, lifted and turned it, then slid it off the frame and checked the structure and its stained headboard. Nothing. They put it back. They lifted the mirror and the cheap print of Boston Harbor off the wall to see if either had been tampered with. They tipped the chair, checked the drawer in the bedside table and lifted the edges of the crusty carpet, sending more dust flying up in their faces. They removed the shelf paper from the closet—nothing. Aziz ran a hand over the wallpaper and scanned the subflooring for any lumps or loose boards.
MacNeice sat on the bed frame while Aziz stood on the chair to check the fluorescent light fixture. Its diamond-patterned screen came off, but there was nothing behind it other than the tubes. She climbed down and sat beside MacNeice, who was staring at the curtains.
“Those curtains put me in mind of Wilde’s final words.”
Aziz dusted off the dead insects that had fallen on her when she removed the fluorescent cover. “You mean either they go or I do?”
“Exactly.”
MacNeice stood up and went to the window. He lifted the right side curtain and felt along the bottom hem from the outside in, then checked the left. That’s where he found it, tucked inside the hem: a piece of paper torn from a bar tab, neatly folded to make it smaller. In pencil were seven single digit numbers—4, 3, 7, 5, 2, 6, 1—and beside each, an initial with another number: B50, W100, S75, Z400, A50, R100, G500.
“That’s rich.” MacNeice held the paper up to the light and laughed. Sitting down again beside Aziz, he told her about a case he worked as a young cop. It had involved an old guy that everyone—cops and crooks alike—called the Fox. “He was the real deal, right out of the pages of a Damon Runyon novel, a street-smart bootlegger and bookie, horse racing mostly.” MacNeice handed her the chit. “Each of those numbers represents a horse in the race, the initials are the person who placed the bet, and the number next to the letter is the amount of the bet. It’s garden-variety bookie accounting. But hidden in the hem—that’s the Fox—pure genius.”
He told Aziz that the Fox had had a faulty heart. One day, following his umpteenth attack, he was in a single bed recovery room at Dundurn General—tubed to the hilt with monitors measuring everything—when MacNeice and another young cop were told to turn the room over and be thorough about it. “He had allegedly been running bets with the other cardiac patients out of the critical-care unit. The fresh widow of one of those patients found a note about a bet in the drawer of the table next to his bed as she was clearing out his effects. He’d put it there perhaps because he knew he might not wake up, or that if he did, he might not remember—and nobody really trusts a bookie. She called the cops.”
MacNeice smiled as he remembered. “The Fox had somehow managed to get out of bed long enough to slide his record of the bets into the hem of the curtain.” MacNeice and his sergeant never found it, even though they tore the place apart, including the bed—they had the Fox moved onto a gurney for the purpose. He had a clear plastic oxygen mask over his nose and mouth and he was smiling the whole time. “When we came up short, the sergeant lifted the mask off the Fox’s face—the nurses went crazy. Sarge asks him, ‘What’s so funny?’ ”
“How did you learn about the hem?”
“Years later, the Fox finally had one too many heart attacks. My sergeant showed up at his funeral, either because he had a soft spot for a smart crook or he just wanted to make sure it wasn’t another scam. The Fox’s wife told him about the chit in the hem. She didn’t know it was there either, until he had asked her to retrieve it so he could collect on the bets.”
MacNeice looked over at Aziz. “The sarge says, ‘Well, I’ll be damned!’ The Fox’s wife laughed, then whispered to him, ‘Maybe you will be. But if you are, you’re sure to see him again.’ ”
Aziz laughed. She took one last look at the chit and handed it back to him.
“Pass me the photocopy of the register pages.”
She took them out of the manila envelope and he laid them out on the bed’s wooden slats. They compared the letters on the chit to the night clerk’s entries; there was a clear match in style, complete with a stroke through the seven.
“Fisherman, seaman, carpenter, bricklayer, night clerk and bookie,” MacNeice said, sliding the chit into the envelope with the pages.
“So it appears … But why would he leave it here?”
Chapter 14
They ran through the rain to the car. Once they’d pulled away from the bar, MacNeice called Ryan and asked him to find Anniken Kallevik’s travelling companion, the tall Norwegian. “I need to know if he made it to Whistler.”
“You think Duguald Langan killed them both?” Aziz asked after he hung up.
&nbs
p; “I don’t know, but I don’t think Duguald just wandered off.”
Back at Division, Aziz photographed both sides of the chit, slid it into a Ziploc evidence bag and took it down to Forensics.
“When you’re ready, sir, I’ve sourced the missing persons file on Jennifer Grant,” Ryan said.
“Thanks … Right after you find my Norwegian.”
MacNeice taped a copy of the chit and wrote “bookie” under Duguald Langan’s name, then drew a dotted line to Anniken Kallevik’s picture.
Ryan had soon found two Norwegian males, both twenty-three years old, working in or near Whistler, one in a bar at the Whistler Inn and the other with the ski patrol at Blackcomb. Only the bartender, Markus Christophe, was tall and blond, but since he worked nights, he was still in bed. Ryan was on hold with the inn. “He’ll be up by six p.m. our time. Do you want me to ask them to wake him up, sir?”
“No. Just get the best number to reach him. And find out when he was hired.”
After a minute or so more on the phone, Ryan put a hand over the receiver. “He arrived on November 15th and started at the bar the next night.”
Though MacNeice’s gut was telling him otherwise, this news meant there might not be anyone at the bottom of Cootes after all.
He heard Vertesi and Williams coming before they were halfway up the stairs, bantering about the rain. Williams said, “It’s like the tropics out there, without the heat, the palm trees and the bikinis.”
“So what, you’re not from the tropics?”
“Stallion, my ancestors have been living in Canada since yours were hanging out in caves over in Sicily.”
“Calabria—the mountains of Calabria.” Vertesi was the first to notice that MacNeice was there. “Hey, boss,” he said, shaking the water off his coat.
“To some, Nicholson was a saint. Nobody had anything negative to say about him,” Williams offered, shedding his equally drenched coat.
Vertesi pushed the wet hair off his forehead and said, “Yeah, but even the ones that thought he was a mensch admitted they didn’t know him all that well.”
“Even though he’d been teaching there a long time.” Williams shrugged as he said it, like either it was a sad comment on the man or that Nicholson’s colleagues weren’t being honest.
Vertesi tapped David Nicholson’s name on the whiteboard. “Somebody really didn’t like the guy. That school’s in shock, so it’s hard to tell for sure what they think. All of them asked about Dylan.”
“Whatever questions we might have about his dad, that kid is a hero at Mercy,” Williams offered.
Vertesi opened his notebook. “Elana Roane was the only teacher to mention Nicholson’s wife leaving him. She said …” He looked for the precise quote. “ ‘I thought his wife was lovely and she appeared to adore Dylan, who was in Mercy’s junior kindergarten.’ Roane was really surprised when she bolted.”
“Tell him what she said then,” Williams nudged.
Vertesi returned to his notes. “David was a bit darker back then. She said moody would best describe him.”
Referring to his own notes, Williams added, “ ‘He seemed much sunnier afterwards, so I just thought it was a bad marriage. At Mercy, Dylan and his father were inseparable.’ ”
“Understandable, with the mother deserting them,” Aziz said as she returned.
MacNeice’s head was resting on his hands. He seemed to be studying the fake grain of his desk. “Ryan, let’s hear what you’ve got on Jennifer Grant.”
“Quite a bit, sir.” Ryan spun his chair around and began tapping away on the keyboard. MacNeice felt some comfort in the sound. In seconds, the photocopier was printing out the missing persons report.
MacNeice turned to Aziz. “Fiza, find out if Dylan is still at home.” She nodded and turned to her phone.
“Boss, should we start checking old report cards?” Vertesi asked.
“No. There’s no way he was killed by a high school student.”
Aziz put the phone back in its cradle. “Nobody answered at Dylan’s, Mac. I’ll try again in a few minutes.”
Ryan handed MacNeice the report, and MacNeice quickly scanned it. He shook his head. “Nicholson and Jennifer Grant’s family filed MPRs on the same day but with different divisions. One week later, Jennifer called her parents from Silver Lake in Los Angeles. Said she just needed a break and was staying with a girlfriend who’d moved there from Dundurn. The grandparents said she seemed to be happy. Jennifer apologized for not telling them and admitted that she hadn’t told David either.” He looked up to see the raised eyebrows of his team. “Jennifer promised to stay in touch by cellphone. Her parents told Nicholson, along with her promise that she would be returning to the city in a few weeks. With that, the case was closed until two months later.” MacNeice turned the page. “Her parents called the police again because they hadn’t heard from Jennifer, she wasn’t answering emails and her cellphone message box was full. They’d called the girlfriend she’d been staying with, and the girlfriend said that Jennifer had left two weeks earlier to go up the coast before heading home.” He flipped through the pages and back again. “The rest is about what the cops did—standard stuff, engaged the LAPD, sent her photograph and description to law enforcement agencies across the continent. LAPD searched the girlfriend’s condo and found a bag of marijuana she claimed was Jennifer’s. They speculated that Jennifer might have disappeared into the drug culture.”
“Long way to go for a few joints,” Vertesi said.
Williams added, “And a big leap from finding a bag of weed that might have actually been her friend’s to opium dens in East LA.”
“I suspect it was a convenient assumption at the time,” MacNeice said, and returned to the notes. He turned the page to the Dundurn Police Department’s confidential summary. “After interviewing her husband, parents and brother, DPD concluded that Jennifer Grant was a ‘wild child’ tired of parenting and disinterested in teaching—their conclusion based primarily on the fact that she didn’t inform her husband or the school that she was leaving. Though they never closed the case, it’s safe to say it’s cold.”
“Frozen.” Williams shook his head in disgust.
Referring to a note on his desk, Ryan said, “It wasn’t hard to find her parents. They own Grant Greengrocers out in Dundas. They still own the shop but it’s mostly run now by her brother, who was also a teacher before he took early retirement.” Ryan handed the address to Vertesi.
“It’s strange, now that Nicholson has been identified as the bombing victim by the media, that the grandparents haven’t called Dylan,” MacNeice said.
Aziz’s cellphone rang. She listened, then put it on hold and turned to MacNeice. “You spoke too soon, Mac. They’re at the house. The grandparents. I’ve got Dylan on the phone. Children’s Services brought them in because Dylan’s aunt refused to take responsibility for him.” She clicked back onto the line and then hung up, after promising Dylan that she’d tell MacNeice what was going on.
“It was a reasonable assumption that his grandparents are the next best option before foster care,” MacNeice said.
“The only trouble with that is that Dylan hasn’t seen them or his uncle Robert in years because his father had severed contact with them. When Dylan asked his dad why, he was told his uncle blamed Nicholson for Jennifer’s disappearance and her parents agreed with him.”
MacNeice stared at the photo of David Nicholson in the Hawaiian shirt. “The poor kid. The way this is going, he will end up in foster care.”
The main line rang and Ryan picked up. “Sir, there’s someone asking for you, but he won’t give his name.”
MacNeice nodded, and answered. “MacNeice.”
A man said, “There’s a café bar on Locke near Pine—you know the place?”
“Yes.”
“Be there in a half-hour.”
“What’s your name and how will I know you?”
“Don’t worry about that. I know you. And if you’re as good as the
y say, you’ll be able to figure it out. I knew David Nicholson well enough to know there’s a different story than the one you’re probably hearing.”
“And what might that be?”
The caller laughed or coughed, his voice crackling through nicotine or alcohol-clogged airways. “Come on, detective, that’s something we’ll discuss in person.”
Once MacNeice explained, both Vertesi and Williams offered to back him up.
“No reason why three of us need to check this out. I’ll be back soon.”
He parked across the street from the bar, then tried to peer through the rain into its interior, but it was too dark.
Standing on the threshold, he shook the rain off his coat. The bar was a long, narrow and immediately familiar space, shaped like a shoebox. There were elevated booths on the right and a long counter on the left. It was just after four, and locals out for an early evening or a late lunch occupied all but one of the booths. At the bar three men were talking to the bartender, and two others were pretending not to listen. The bartender was working the ornate handle of an on-tap lager into a pint. After she glanced at him, she whispered something that made two of the men look his way and nod. In the last booth a man sat alone with his back to the door. He didn’t look around. MacNeice made his way to him.
“See, that wasn’t too difficult. I’ve ordered you a lager.”
The man was in his mid-forties, his face lined not from age but from working outside in all kinds of weather. An ancient waxed Barbour raincoat leaned stiffly against the wall of the booth.
The bartender brought the lager over and placed it in front of him. “Cheers, detective,” she said, then walked away with an exaggerated wiggle.
“Out of interest, how did you know when to order the lager?”
“Easy. You had thirty minutes to get here. At twenty-six I asked her to pour another glass. Cheers.” He chinked his glass against MacNeice’s while it was still on the table.
Studying the pint for a moment, MacNeice at last smiled and lifted his glass. “Cheers.” He took a long draw before putting it down. “Name?”
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