“Hello,” Kennicott said, coming back down the steps. “Dr. Torn?”
“Call me Arden. No one ever uses the front door.” He extended a large arm to shake hands. “We always come through the garage.”
“Sorry to disturb you so early in the morning,” Kennicott said.
Torn smiled. His aqua-blue eyes popped out against his ruddy skin and white hair. “Been up since five. Took the tractor to the driveway. We’re trailering the horses down to West Virginia for a show.”
Kennicott kept his eyes fixed on Torn. “I’m Officer Daniel Kennicott from the Toronto Police.”
“Don’t let the dogs bother you. They’re country bred, that’s all. We always have two dogs, figure it’s cruel to have just one on its own.”
“Is your wife at home, sir?”
Torn let go of Kennicott’s hand. “She’s back in the barn.”
“Perhaps . . .”
He nodded and turned his head. “Allie!” His voice boomed across the wide driveway. “You’d better get out here.”
A moment later an older woman dressed in a bulky country coat, a large scarf tied comfortably around her neck, emerged from behind the barn door. She wore a pair of knee-high rubber boots.
Torn turned back to Kennicott as he pulled the lapels of his jacket together and held them with one hand.
“Thanks,” Kennicott said.
“I was in the war,” Torn said quietly, reaching down to pat the dogs with his free hand, never taking his blue eyes off Kennicott. “I know what it looks like when someone comes to deliver bad news.”
9
Albert Fernandez hated listening to the radio when he was driving. It was a total waste of the half-hour commute downtown to the Crown Attorney’s office at Old City Hall. Instead, he listened to tapes. Self-improvement tapes, books on tape, and speeches by famous politicians and world leaders. This month he was listening to the wartime speeches of Winston Churchill.
Fernandez was eleven years old when his left-wing parents fled Chile and brought their family to Canada. None of them spoke English. His little sister Palmira had learned quickly, but for Albert the new language was a struggle. Why were there so many words for the same thing—pig and hog, street and road, dinner and supper? No one who spoke English appeared to be fazed by this. But for Fernandez it was torture. He always seemed to choose the wrong word.
His most painful memory of that first year in Canada was the day in November when his class went on a field trip to a conservation area north of the city. Just after lunch the weather suddenly turned wet and cold. Fernandez, wearing entirely inappropriate dress shoes, slid down a riverbank into a stream. When he turned to look up at the other boys on the bank, who were all wearing boots and running shoes, they were smiling.
“Aid me,” he called back to them, reaching out his hand.
The kids all burst out laughing. “Aid me?” they said. “Albert wants help and he says ‘Aid me.’”
For the next three years, everyone at school called him Aid Me Albert.
It wasn’t until he took a linguistics course at university that he solved the language riddle. At his very first class, the professor, a thin young man with stringy blond hair and wire-rimmed glasses, strode into the crowded lecture hall, drew a line down the middle of the blackboard, and wrote the heading “Anglo-Saxon” on one side and “Norman” on the other.
He listed words with the exact same meaning on either side of the ledger: go in—enter; meet—rendezvous; help—aid. English, he explained, was not a language, but a car crash. All sorts of languages—Germanic, Latin, Nordic, even some Celtic—smashed together, but thanks to the French invasion of England in 1066, the two main ones, Anglo-Saxon and Norman, ran parallel throughout.
Fernandez sat up in class. All the confusion of this strange language suddenly became clear.
That’s where Churchill came in. A great student of English history and language, Churchill understood the power of the simple Anglo-Saxon words. He preferred them to the flowery, foreign Norman words.
His most famous speech, “We will fight them on the beaches . . . ,” was the greatest example. Every word was Anglo-Saxon, except for the very last one: “. . . and we will never surrender.” “Surrender,” the only three-syllable word in the whole speech, was a flowery French word instead of the simpler, Anglo-Saxon “give up.” In this way, Churchill underscored how the very idea of surrender was a foreign concept to his British audience.
Years later, Fernandez was sitting in court listening to a witness. At first the man seemed totally believable. But when he came to the tough part of his story, his whole tone changed. Fernandez knew immediately that the man was lying, but he wasn’t sure why. Until later, when he read the transcript and found himself circling the Norman words.
Sure enough, when the witness used simple, direct Anglo-Saxon words, he was telling the truth: “I walked into the kitchen. I saw Tamara. She was cooking supper.” But when he switched to Norman words, he became evasive: “To the best of my recollection . . . she maneuvered the frying pan . . . to be perfectly honest . . . I thought she intended to hurl it toward me . . . I was considering contacting the police for assistance . . .” He was lying.
Fernandez smiled as he flipped the tape into the car radio and roared out of the underground garage. Over the years he was amazed how many times this simple analysis of witnesses’ statements had proved correct.
Thirty-five minutes later he pulled into a parking lot northwest of the Old City Hall courthouse. Thanks to the traffic, which was snarled because he’d left so late, it was just before eight. Even worse than missing the early-bird parking, he saw three cars that belonged to other Crown Attorneys parked on the south side right beside each other.
Darn. For months, Fernandez had been in the lot by 7:25, before everyone else in the office. The one day he stays home for a little extra fun, look what happens. He grabbed the nearest parking spot.
To get to Old City Hall, he first had to walk through the large square in front of the New City Hall. Even at this early hour it was busy with people crisscrossing the vast space, rushing to work. Down at the south part, on the big open-air rink, skaters were gliding across the ice, some of them dressed in business suits, others in figure-skating outfits.
When he was a kid, Fernandez’s parents scraped together enough money to buy him used skates, and on Sunday afternoons they’d dragged him down to this rink with all the other immigrant families. Try as he might, he could never get his ankles to stop from bending over, never understood the effortless way young Canadian kids could propel themselves across the big white surface.
He sprinted across Bay Street and into the back entrance of Old City Hall. Waving his credentials at the young cop on duty, he raced up an old metal staircase and ran his pass card over the pad for the backdoor entrance to the Crown’s office.
The Downtown Toronto Crown Attorney’s office was one enormous room, stuffed full of warrenlike offices that ran crazy-quilt in all directions—the legacy of government planners who’d jammed thirty-five offices into a space built for twelve. Most offices were filled with stacks of paper and books, piles of white cardboard storage boxes with words like R.V. SUNDRILINGHAM—MURDER II—VOIR DIRE—RIGHT TO COUNSEL hand-printed in black Magic Marker on the side. Fernandez was the exception. He kept his little office tidy.
Most days, when he was the first lawyer to arrive, he would open the door to the pungent smell of cold pizza and stale microwave popcorn. But this morning the air was filled with the aroma of coffee brewing, bagels toasting, and fresh-peeled mandarin oranges.
Ignoring the murmuring of voices farther down the hall, he headed straight to his office. It wasn’t his style to mingle. Besides, this way his later-arriving colleagues would see him hard at work as they passed by.
Pulling a robbery file he was working on from the only filing cabinet in his office, he sat down at his desk. By eight o’clock, usually an hour when he was the only one there, the voices down the hall
were building. Someone had a radio on, and the announcer’s voice mingled with the sound of many people talking.
Finally, Fernandez couldn’t take it. He repacked the robbery file, picked up a yellow legal-sized pad, and walked through the hallway, past the photocopy machine parked halfway down, to Jennifer Raglan’s corner office.
Raglan, the head Crown Attorney for the Toronto region, was behind her paper-strewn desk, half seated, half leaning forward. Across from her, to her left, pacing back and forth, was Phil Cutter, the most aggressive prosecutor on the whole downtown team. Bald, in his late forties, he wore an old suit and a pair of crepe-soled shoes, well worn on the outside heels. To Raglan’s right, sitting on a wooden chair, was Barb Gild, a willowy brunette who was the best legal researcher in the office. A typical absentminded genius type, she famously left her papers and files all over the office and on every photocopy machine. The three were involved in an intense conversation. Fernandez cleared his throat. No one heard him. He took a few steps inside. Still no one noticed him. He was almost on top of her desk when Raglan finally looked up.
“Albert, I was wondering when you’d get in,” she said.
“I’ve been here for a while.” Damn it, he thought. “Working in my office.”
“We’re just mapping out our preliminary strategy—there’s no time to waste,” Raglan said, seeming to ignore his comment. “Looks like your number came up big. Hope you’ve done your Christmas shopping. You’ll be in bail court on this by Wednesday.”
What was going on? It was as if Fernandez had walked into a movie halfway through and everyone else knew what was happening.
“Just goes to show you never can tell,” Cutter said. His voice was so loud it was more of a bark than a normal speaking voice. Judges had been known to ask him to move to the back of the court before he addressed them. His bald head gleamed under the fluorescent light. “He’ll probably claim she fell on the knife. Kind of tough, though, with her dead in the bathtub.” Cutter started to laugh, a hard, choking cackle.
“What a bastard,” Gild said. “What a total hypocrite.”
Raglan peered up from her desk, tortoiseshell glasses perched on her aquiline nose. Her skin had the tattered look of too many late nights and cold cups of coffee, and her hair was mousy brown. But her eyes were a magical hazel and her mouth was wide. There was an appealing confidence about her.
“When did you hear about it?” Raglan asked Fernandez.
Fernandez shrugged. He couldn’t fake it anymore. “I hate to tell you, but I haven’t heard anything.”
All eyes in the room turned to him.
“You haven’t heard?” Raglan said.
“No.”
“Kevin Brace has been charged with first-degree murder,” Raglan said. “Early this morning his wife was found dead in the bathtub of their downtown penthouse condominium. One stab wound to the stomach. Albert, what an amazing draw for your first homicide.”
Fernandez just nodded.
“Unbelievable,” Gild said. “And people called Brace the first feminist man in Canada. Sure sucked me in good.”
“The press is going to have a fucking field day with this,” Cutter growled. “Albert, you lucky dog.”
Fernandez kept nodding. There was another cheap chair in the corner of the room. He pulled it over, raised his pad of paper, and clicked his pen. “Let’s get going,” he said, trying his best to sound up-beat. He had to make everyone think he was ready—which was close to the truth.
There was just one question he needed answered but didn’t dare to ask: Who the hell was Kevin Brace?
10
Just what was the Toronto police force coming to, Nancy Parish asked herself as she surveyed the bevy of food and beverage choices on offer at the spanking new police cafeteria: cappuccinos, lattes, mint teas, yogurt smoothies, fruit salads, granola bars, croissants, and mini-brioches. Mini-brioches. This was no cop shop, it was a café. Where was the weak coffee, the glazed doughnuts?
After some determined foraging, Parish managed to find a butter tart without any fancy pecans or walnuts in it and a cup of dark roast coffee that looked as if it had been brewed a few hours ago. It was a start.
Jet fuel, she told herself as she took a seat on a sleekly designed chair in the half-empty cafeteria. Sometimes you need some pure, unadulterated crap to power you through difficult situations, she thought, eagerly digging in.
The damn tart was so big, part of the filling squished out across her cheek. Just as she reached for a napkin, a tall man wearing a beautifully tailored suit, a well-pressed shirt, and gleaming black loafers approached her table. He was handsome in a rugged kind of way.
“Ms. Parish, Detective Greene,” he said, extending his hand.
“Hello, Detective,” she managed to mumble, grabbing for the napkin. It felt as though it took forever for her to wipe her face and reach for his outstretched hand.
“Mind if I have a seat?” Greene asked.
Parish gulped down a big slurp of coffee to try to clear her throat. “Please do,” she said. The coffee was burning hot, and it singed her tongue.
“Once you’re done with your breakfast, I’ll take you upstairs to see Mr. Brace,” Greene said.
“Hardly breakfast,” Parish said, wishing there was a hole in the table where she could ditch the rest of the butter tart. “Let’s go.”
Inside the elevator the floor numbers were written in English, French, Chinese, Arabic, and Braille. There were three other people in the car, and Greene didn’t say a word. As they rose through the plant-filled atrium, a mechanical voice said “Ground floor, floor number one, floor number two . . .” in about ten different languages. I’d go mad listening to this every day, Parish thought.
Looking down, she saw that the pants she’d put on didn’t quite cover the salt stains on her boots. Get your priorities straight, Nancy Gail, she thought, imitating her mother’s voice in her head. First white vinegar, then Kevin Brace.
When they got off the elevator, Greene led her down an empty hallway and plunged into his narrative. “We received notification of this incident by way of a 911 phone call from a Mr. Gurdial Singh at five thirty-one a.m. Our information at this moment is that Mr. Singh delivers newspapers at Mr. Brace’s condominium each morning at this time. The Globe and Mail. Mr. Singh reports that Mr. Brace came to the doorway in his bathrobe with blood on his hands and stated he’d murdered his wife. Mr. Singh found the body of the victim, Ms. Katherine Torn, the common-law wife of Mr. Brace, in the bathtub. There’s no known relationship between Mr. Singh and Brace or Torn, except for Mr. Singh’s delivering newspapers. Mr. Singh is seventy-three years old. He immigrated to Canada four years ago. Canadian citizen, married, with four children and eighteen grandchildren, no criminal record and no previous police contacts.”
Greene spoke with the precision of a veteran actor performing the same part for the hundredth time. He walked at a rapid, sure pace. Yet there was nothing mechanical about him—in fact, he was quite warm amid all the highly professional polish. As constant as a metronome, Parish thought, a fine wood metronome.
“Mr. Singh informs us that he’s a former engineer with Indian Railways. We’ve been able to confirm this independently. He has extensive first-aid experience. Before he called 911, he checked the body for vital signs, and they were absent. It was cold to the touch. Mr. Brace was arrested without incident by P.C. Daniel Kennicott at five fifty-three a.m. He’s been informed of his right to remain silent and his right to counsel. He’s made no statement to the police at this time. We have charged him with first-degree murder.”
Greene stopped. They’d arrived at a nondescript white door.
“Any questions so far?” he asked.
Parish wanted to ask, “How about another cup of coffee? How do you get your shoes to be so shiny? At what precise moment did Ms. Katherine Torn, common-law wife to Mr. Kevin Brace, cease to be a ‘she’ and become an ‘it’?”
Instead she just asked, “Is he handcuffed?�
�
“Absolutely not. Mr. Brace was cuffed at the time of his arrest and throughout transport. We removed the cuffs as soon as he was secure in this building.”
Parish nodded. Keep it simple, she told herself.
“The apartment is on the twelfth floor. No balcony. It looks south over the lake,” Greene said, the metronome staying on beat. “There’s only one front door. At this stage of the investigation there’s no evidence of forced entry, and all exterior windows appear to be intact. There are no signs of a robbery having taken place. There are only two units on the twelfth floor—12A and 12B. Suite 12B is occupied by an eighty-three-year-old widow. I trust that’s clear.”
Greene was deliberately showing her how strong his case was right from the get-go. Don’t react to this barrage of bad news, she told herself. Just listen. Think. How many times have you seen this? The police always present the evidence as if it’s an open-and-shut case. They want you to think your case is hopeless. Remember, it’s not what they say that matters, but what they don’t say.
What’s Greene not telling you? Parish thought, rubbing her burnt tongue along the top of her mouth. What’s missing?
“I’m afraid we’ll have to lock you in the room, Ms. Parish,” Greene said. “I’ll post a police constable at the door, stationed across the hallway to ensure that your conversation is entirely confidential. If you need anything, simply knock, and she’ll assist you. Please take all the time you need. We’re still scrambling for transport, so he’ll be here for a while. I hope that’s sufficient.”
Parish nodded again. It was seductive to be treated in such a courteous, professional manner. Most of her twelve-year career had been spent clawing for every ounce of cooperation she could get from the authorities. This was her first murder case. Just an hour or so in, and she could see why defense lawyers liked homicides. Sure, the stakes were impossibly high and the hours brutal, but at least you were treated with respect.
“That’s fine,” she said. Brace has the right to counsel, she told herself. You have the right to be here. Greene’s not doing you any favors.
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