Raw Bone

by Scott Thornley

  “And, I have a recurring dream about walking on cobblestones between ancient houses, a black and white dog follows happily along, but I haven’t any idea of where I am—somewhere in Europe.”

  MacNeice forced himself back into the moment. He looked down at Samantha’s hands, watching how they rose and fell as she spoke—punctuating, emphasizing. MacNeice knew about dreams and was certain he’d pay for this flirtation the moment he was asleep. “How are you getting home, Sam?”

  “It’s not that far. I’ve got my umbrella at the door.”

  “I’d be happy to drive you.”

  After glancing at the slashing rain on the restaurant window, she accepted.

  As he pulled up in front of her building, she laughed. “It was almost like my first date in Dundurn.”

  “Mine too, in a long time.” He eased the Chevy up to the curb and stopped, keeping it in drive, his foot firmly on the brake.

  “Would you like to come up, Mac?”

  Though it was almost eleven, he said yes. Soon he was climbing the stairs behind her. He smiled, noticing her slim ankles. God is alive in the details, he thought. Sam paused at her glossy blue door. “You’ll see blue’s a bit of a theme,” she said sheepishly as she opened the door and turned on the lights, easing herself out of her shoes. MacNeice removed his too and put them neatly beside hers. Samantha took his coat and hung it next to hers on a wall rack. She asked him if he’d like a glass of Chablis. “I opened it when I thought about making dinner at home. I don’t want it to go to waste, but I don’t want to drink it alone.”

  He agreed that would be a bad idea. As she went into the kitchen, he took in the room. What wasn’t white—the door frames with their panelled doors—was pale blue. Except for the sofa, which was a cobalt blue that reminded him of Matisse, but he wasn’t confident enough to say why. The wide-planked flooring appeared to be the original cherry, bearing the scars—nail and screw holes—of the building’s past.

  The galley kitchen was separated from the living room by a counter. Scattered across it was The New York Times and nestled between its sections was a near-empty glass of white wine. On one of the stools was a notepad and pencil. MacNeice resisted the urge to scan what was written.

  On the walls were French industrial drawings, schematics of machinery, most of which dated from the 1930s, but MacNeice found two from the mid-1800s. These were fine line reconstructions of circular staircases burnt to ash in the châteaux during the French Revolution. These were complex drawings, so sophisticated that one could be forgiven thinking that they were art and not a how-to guide for restoring what had been lost.

  “My father was a structural engineer and I’ve always loved that kind of drawing. They remind me of him,” Samantha said, handing him a glass as she came to join him. “Cheers.”

  “Indeed, cheers.”

  He would recall later that the evening ended the next morning, but he was less certain about the actual moment it began. He was sure of the music—Art Tatum, his choice, from her collection of LPs, played on a high-tech turntable. He remembered the moment she put her hand on his as she poured the first glass from the second bottle of Chablis, and her laugh. Apparently he’d said something funny, though whatever that was, he couldn’t recall.

  He remembered the kiss. He was at the door and he’d meant it as “thank you” and “I hope to see you again,” but it led immediately to another kiss followed by an embrace—initiated by her. He remembered not wanting her to let go, but not knowing exactly what to do.

  Was it too much wine or the years spent living without physical contact? He didn’t know, but he woke up with an untroubled mind, an utterly relaxed body and a foreign tingling in his groin. His eyes took in everything, the room and the duvet pushed down to their ankles, her body and on the bedroom wall another drawing of another ancient staircase. He could see that he had made an attempt to put his clothes neatly on the chair, but his socks looked like they’d been tossed. He had no idea where he’d put his underwear.

  She stirred beside him and rolled onto her back. “Good morning, Detective Superintendent.” She looked at him and smiled before closing her eyes again. Moments later, her phone buzzed urgently from the nightstand. She propped herself on an elbow to scan the display, then said, “Sorry, but I have to take this.”

  She slipped out of bed and walked to the window, the phone to her ear. She listened, said “okay” and “understood” and hung up.

  Turning back to him, she said, “I have to pack. I’d proposed an in-depth article on the Greek banking system’s risk management practices before and after the economic collapse. At first my editor said no, but then I found a disgraced former bank president who was in a prison near Athens. He agreed to give me an interview in return for his wife and grown son receiving the equivalent of five thousand US dollars. My editor just told me that the paper will cover it, so I have to catch the next flight to Athens.”

  “When are you back?”

  “It depends on how co-operative people are. I can’t just take what the imprisoned banker says as the truth: I have to corroborate it. Maybe a week, maybe longer.” She came over and sat on the edge of the bed, and he reached out to run a hand along her thigh. “Please don’t do that,” she said. “It makes me not want to go.”

  Chapter 18

  The call to Anniken’s parents took all of six minutes—including the time it took for Markus Christophe to translate English to Norwegian and back again. The two daughters were both away, one doing her residency at a hospital in Oslo, the other in Frankfurt on business. Anni’s mother was in hospital following a hip replacement. Her father had just arrived home from the market when the phone rang. MacNeice told him what had happened to his daughter, and then Christophe repeated his words in Norwegian, his voice charged with emotion but steady. When he stopped, there was a pause that lasted at least thirty seconds.

  Then, over the crackling line, the father said, in English, “My Anni is gone?”

  MacNeice asked Christophe to ask if there was someone nearby so that he wouldn’t be alone. But before he could interpret, Mr. Kallevik said, “We will be well. Okay … okay. Well … goodbye. We talk soon, Markus. Goodbye.” The long-distance line burped twice. He was gone.

  “Markus, are you still on the line?” MacNeice asked.

  “I am.”

  “Do you know how to reach the sisters?”

  “I call my fiancée—she knows them. And I will phone him later too.” He cleared his throat. “The Kalleviks are strong people, ya—farmers in Norway must be strong.” He excused himself and blew his nose. “I come to you, ya? I come for Anni’s body. We should be going now … back to Norway.”

  It was just after noon when his cellphone rang. MacNeice realized he’d been daydreaming about soft flesh and warm sunlight.

  It was Dylan’s caseworker, and before she let him speak, she outlined the rules: MacNeice would have five minutes, no more, since Dylan had to eat lunch with his foster family. Second, MacNeice was not to upset him.

  She passed the phone to Dylan.

  “Hullo.” The boy’s voice was filled with fear and uncertainty.

  “Have they put you up close to your school?”

  “Yeah, pretty close.”

  “So how is the foster home?”

  “It’s okay, I guess.”

  “I just have one question for you, Dylan. It will help our investigation. In the night table next to your father’s bed, we found three keys in a metal box. One of them is a post office box key. Do you know anything about them?”

  “Keys?”

  “Yes, in a tin box: a post office box key and two others, fairly old. Neither of them fit the doors of your house.”

  “I saw them once, but I was just bored and snoopin’, so I never asked Dad about them.”

  The caseworker came back on the line to inform MacNeice that the conversation was over. When he protested, she said softly, “Dylan doesn’t want to talk anymore. He needs time to adjust … to a dif
ferent life. I’ll keep you informed, if you like, though I’m limited in what I can share.”

  MacNeice thanked her, put the phone down and slipped Nicholson’s keys in his pocket. He told Ryan he’d be back in an hour, and headed for the stairs.

  At the main post office, he asked to see the manager. When a middle-aged man with thinning hair emerged from a back office, MacNeice introduced himself, then put the key in front of him.

  Without picking it up, the man said, “It’s a P.O. box key.”

  “Right. I want the name that it’s registered under and the location of the box.”

  “No can do. Without a warrant I can’t give you a name. And to get information out of me, you’ll need a federal warrant, requested by the RCMP.”

  MacNeice looked at the name tag on the man’s shirt. “Tell me, Mr. Tekatch, do you have kids?”

  “Yeah—two, a boy and a girl—but you’re still gonna need the Mounties.”

  MacNeice pointed over the manager’s shoulder to a box wrapped up, down and sideways in two-inch packing tape. “That box behind you …”

  Tekatch turned. “So?”

  “This key,” MacNeice said, “belonged to a man who was a teacher and father. He was stripped and duct-taped tighter and more completely than that box, to a child’s wagon. He was left in Gage Park. As a first responder was cutting him out of the tape, a grenade taped to his chin exploded. Several men were injured, some very seriously, and the teacher—”

  “I read about it.”

  “Well, his son is now an orphan. And, when I left him yesterday, he made me promise to find out who killed his dad.”

  “Jesus …”

  MacNeice picked up the key. “All I’m trying to do is keep a promise.” Offering the manager the key, he added, “Don’t give me anything other than the name that goes with this, but if that makes you uncomfortable, just give me the names of everyone who rents a P.O. box.”

  Tekatch looked around to see if his staff were watching, and when he was sure they weren’t, he swung around to his computer and began clicking away on the keyboard. After a few minutes, six pages of single-spaced names, organized five columns across, spilled out of his desk printer. He collected them and brought them back to the counter. “So we’re clear, detective, this could easily cost me my job.” He passed them to MacNeice, along with an envelope. “These are last names only, nothing else. You find the name, I’ll give you the location of the box. Fair?”

  MacNeice took the pages and started flipping through them, looking for Nicholson. His name wasn’t there. “Tell me, could someone rent a box under a pseudonym?”

  “You need a government-issued photo ID to get a box, but to be honest, with some effort you could probably get around that.”

  MacNeice thanked the manager, asked for his card, put the list and card in the envelope and left the building. It had started pouring again, so he tucked the envelope inside his overcoat and jogged the rest of the way back to Division.

  Not only was there not a Nicholson, Nicolson or Nickelson on the list, there wasn’t a Grant, either. MacNeice made himself an espresso and went through the list again, worried he’d simply missed it. He hadn’t.

  As he pondered another approach, Aziz arrived from Forensics. “All they have are clothes, travel brochures, souvenirs, toiletries and fingerprints. And on the computer, camera and cellphone, no mention of Duguald.” She looked over his shoulder at a page of small type. “What have you got there?”

  “The P.O. box key list,” he said. “The last names of every renter in Dundurn. Nicholson didn’t use his own name, or Jennifer Grant’s.”

  Their eyes met for a moment and a flash of guilt sliced through him. He quickly looked back at the page.

  “So maybe he invented a name?”

  “Not impossible, I’m told. Wait, he was an English teacher who loved history. If he was using a pseudonym for some reason, he likely defaulted to some recognizable figure. You take three pages and I’ll take three.”

  “What am I looking for, Mac?”

  “Great writers, authors, poets, living or dead—no, probably dead.”

  They found twenty-three candidates among the 1,453 names on the list, at least trusting that the two of them knew enough about literature.

  From Cooper to James, Fitzgerald to Johnson, they were all very common names except for one: Marlowe. MacNeice circled it. Aziz reached for the Dundurn phone book and found three Marlows, none with an e tacked on the end.

  “A contemporary of Shakespeare—it has to be him. Shakespeare would have been way too obvious.” MacNeice pulled Tekatch’s card out of the envelope and dialed the number.

  Within a half-hour, MacNeice and Aziz were on their way to check out Box 3220 at the post office on Railroad Avenue. Standing in front of the box, he handed Aziz the key.

  Aziz unlocked it. Inside, they found three envelopes, all bills addressed to Nicholson.

  “Why wouldn’t he just have them sent to his house on Tisdale? I mean, why come all the way out here?” Aziz asked.

  MacNeice shrugged. “Check the address … It’s not Tisdale. It’s another property, 1012 Ryder Road.”

  They drove east on Main Street until they were in farm country. Large farmhouses sat solidly on treed lawns next to the highway, some of them no longer attached to their farms, but spruced up for folks who loved country living without all the manure and flies. Ryder was a north-south access road beginning at the foot of the escarpment on one end and stopping at the lake on the other. On either side, a half-mile apart, were two modest homes used by itinerant labourers who came to work in the local orchards. However, on the east side of the road, there weren’t any fruit trees or vineyards, and the surrounding land, like the house, looked abandoned.

  There was a small, weedy yard and gravel driveway at 1012 Ryder Road. The windows were boarded up, and the white plastic imitation aluminum siding was yellowed by the sun. The roof shingles were curling from neglect. And yet the front and back doors were steel, still carrying the primer and lot number. Neither had ever known paint. Both had been hit with graffiti, but there was no sign that anyone had broken in.

  Aziz looked up and down the road. “Not exactly a romantic cottage in the country.”

  MacNeice didn’t respond—he had a sinking feeling about the whole set-up. He tried one key, then the next on the front door. With the second, the heavy door swung free of its steel jamb with a loud groan, sending a knifelike shard of light into the otherwise black room.

  He turned to Aziz. “Flashlight and latex gloves.” He retrieved his own from the inside pocket of his coat and waited as she put on gloves and took out her pocket flashlight.

  MacNeice switched on his flashlight and stepped inside. He was struck by the smell of exhausted space; if it could, the room would gasp with the arrival of fresh air. There was nothing rancid, rotting or organic in the atmosphere; it was simply devoid of life. Aziz tried the switch and, surprisingly, a ceiling light just above MacNeice’s head clicked on. He put the flashlight away and surveyed the space.

  There were two wooden chairs, a worn-out sofa and an equally tired linoleum floor cracking in the middle, presumably from the plywood subfloor he could feel sagging beneath him. The bedroom had a single bed with a bare mattress, heavily stained in the middle and dirty all over. There was no other furniture—not a dresser or a chair—just the filthy bed. Though hinges were mounted on the door frame, the bedroom door was missing.

  The kitchen cupboards and ancient Frigidaire were empty, and the stove showed signs of a heavy infestation of mice. On the floor, scattered like tiny leaves, were the aging husks of dozens of cluster flies and ladybugs. They crunched underfoot and sent Aziz back into the living room, where she chose a clearing devoid of dead bugs to stand.

  MacNeice checked the bathroom. The tub had a permanent dark ring inside it and the toilet and sink were soiled almost black. He tried the flusher and it worked. Though there was no hot water, cold ran from both faucets. The bathroom wi
ndow, like the others, was boarded up from the outside but also featured an iron grid on the inside. “Check the thermostat, Fiza. On the wall just outside the bedroom.”

  Aziz tapped the small screen several times. “Sixty degrees. The place is heated, for God’s sake.”

  MacNeice opened the cellar door, which separated the bedroom from the kitchen, and flicked the switch. It worked too. He walked down the wooden stairs into a brightly lit space with a concrete floor. In the centre, a small table and a bookcase filled with classics from Shakespeare to Hemingway flanked an upholstered chair that sat opposite a sturdy wooden chair. On top of the table was a half-empty bottle of single malt with two glasses, one dusty, the other with amber residue in the bottom.

  The only sound was the hum of a decades-old gas furnace soldiering on for no particular reason. He looked at the small ensemble of furniture, the books and whisky, and called, “Fiza.”

  As she came slowly down the stairs, she said, “Oh, I hate this. Seriously, this is truly creepy. I want to go home.” She crossed the floor to him and looked down at the table. “What is this place?”

  Images of Jennifer Grant’s bruised face and stomach flashed before him. “Christ!”

  Terrified by his sudden reaction, Aziz instinctively grabbed his arm. “What? Shit. You’re scaring the hell out of me, Mac. This place is fucking awful.”

  He couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard her swear. Taking out his flashlight again, he stepped in front of the chair, squatted and shone the beam on the grey painted concrete floor. He got up and walked over to the outside wall, where he squatted again and looked back.

  “What are you seeing?” Aziz was looking the way people do when they’re standing on a rock in the middle of a river. She could see nothing but the concrete floor.

  “As seasons come and go, concrete floors that don’t have expansion joints—like this one—will develop stress cracks, often very fine.” He walked back and forth, shining his light along the surface, before finally laying it on the floor and rolling it along with his foot. “Look at this. Watch the cone of light.”