“It’s a funny thing, the north,” she’d said. “If you grew up here, it gets under your skin. The schools were much better in the city, so the girls stayed with Kevin for a few years. It was a hard time, but it was the right decision. Kevin was a good father. And he always paid his alimony, as they used to call it back then. I bought this café and have been running it ever since.”
“And Kevin junior?”
She just shrugged her shoulders, the sadness heavy on her. “It’s so hard. He’s such a gentle soul now. I try to see him once a week. Take him out for dinner.”
“And your girls are doing well?”
She burst into a grin. “Both pregnant. Lucky me.” She yawned. “It’s a long day, Detective. I start making bread at five. Every day for the last twenty years.”
Greene had driven home impressed with McGill’s grace and fortitude.
Today the café was even less crowded than the last time Greene was here. He spotted a table in the far corner and made his way through the customers, mostly men wearing thick sweaters and heavy boots. The snowmobilers had their black, one-piece suits on, the tops unzipped and rolled down to their waists.
“Sorry to keep yous waitin’,” Charlene, the waitress who’d served Greene before, said. “Our fresh special today is spaghetti and meatballs, with a sauce made from our own tomatoes.”
Greene was hungry. He’d driven straight through after getting Kennicott’s call. “Sounds good. How do you get your own tomatoes this time of year?”
The waitress looked at Greene over her little notepad. “Ms. McGill studied botany. Bottles them fresh in the fall.”
Greene ate his meal slowly and waited patiently for the restaurant to clear out. The men looked much like those who’d been there the last time. Burly. Casual. Confident. And they were all white. Living in Toronto, Greene wasn’t used to being in a restaurant where there were only Caucasians.
Both times he’d walked into the café, there’d been a slight lull in the conversation. Small towns. An outsider really had nowhere to hide.
It was almost four o’clock when McGill finally emerged from the kitchen and joked with the last of the patrons.
“We’re going to miss your food on Monday,” a big man said as he rose from his table. Greene remembered the gregarious fellow from the last time he’d been here. “Wish you’d stay open,” he said, sounding like a petulant child who didn’t want to go to bed well past his bedtime.
“Jared, I deserve one day off a week,” she said as she shooed him out the door.
“You must like my food, Detective, to drive all the way up here just for lunch,” McGill said as she took a seat at his table after the last customer had gone. This time she sat beside him. She looked tired but relaxed. A dish towel lay casually on her left shoulder. Greene noticed that her hands were empty.
“The food’s well worth the drive, Ms. McGill,” Greene said. “What happened to the cigarettes?”
“Kicked the habit. Not many sixty-year-olds can say that. The damn things were ruining my taste buds.”
“And stunting your growth.”
She laughed her good, hearty chuckle. Greene waited until she stopped. “We found fingerprints of yours on something in Brace’s apartment,” he said, watching closely for her reaction.
McGill turned her head and looked squarely at Greene. Her eyes widened.
“They were in a contract,” Greene explained. “Kevin was offered a job at another radio station. For a lot of money. Can I assume you know about this?”
McGill seemed to relax. She spread her hands out in front of her, like a cat comfortably stretching, stifling another yawn.
“I knew about the contract, Detective,” she said. “I told you before, Kevin always paid support. It’s a miracle, because he’s useless with money, always has been.”
“He showed the contract to you?”
Her smile widened. “Kevin never signs anything important unless I see it. I’m the businessperson in the family.”
“When did he show it to you?”
“He would have sent it to me.”
“Sent it?” Greene was confused.
“Mailed it, of course. Two days for a package to come from Toronto, one day if it’s sent express.”
“That’s right. No phone. And I assume no fax machine.”
McGill smiled and started to sing. “‘No phone, no pool, no pets, I ain’t got no cigarettes . . .’ You old enough to remember that song, ‘King of the Road’?”
“Roger Miller,” Greene said. “My mother loved it.”
McGill kept singing. “‘Short but not too big around.’ Sounds like me, Detective.” She burst out laughing. “Kevin and I, we’re both Luddites. No credit cards. No cell phones. It took me years before I even put a dishwasher in the café.”
She turned her eyes from him to the uncleared dishes on his table. Greene saw her hand go to the towel over her shoulder.
“Do you remember when he mailed the contract up to you?”
“That’s easy,” she said. “The first of every month he sends me my monthly check and anything else he wants me to read or help him with. I would have got it in early December and mailed it back the next day.” She began to rise up from her chair. The towel was in her hand now. “I don’t want to be rude, Detective, but I still have a lot of cleaning up to do.”
“One last question,” Greene asked as he stood up. He’d left a very good tip under the far side of his plate. “What’d you tell him about the contract?”
She laughed. Her hearty chuckle reverberated around the empty room. “Detective, I might be old-fashioned, but I’m not an idiot. I told him, ‘Sign the damn thing, just skip the limo so you don’t get fat.’”
32
Albert Fernandez paced back and forth in his office, which meant he took two steps, turned, and took two steps back in the other direction. It was absurd. Here he was working on the biggest case in the country and his office was no bigger than a prison cell. Smaller, probably, he thought, when you consider all the space the five evidence boxes took up, dominating the north wall.
He stopped and stared at the boxes. Each was filled with thirty or forty files. He’d handwritten the labels to each and handwritten an index for every box.
It was not that Fernandez was afraid of computers. He was very good with them. But when it came down to the final preparation of a case, he had to touch every document, organize every file, and sweat every detail by hand. That way, when he got to court, he knew exactly where everything was.
He went back to his desk, where a simple black binder sat alone. A label identified it as TRIAL BINDER—BRACE. He opened it to the first page. He’d written the heading “Key Facts,” underlined it, and listed them:
• Jurisdiction—85A Front Street—City of Toronto
• Identity—Kevin Brace—Age 63
• Condo 12A—one front door—no other exits, no forced entry
• December 17, 5:29 a.m. Brace meets Mr. Singh at the door
• Blood on his hands
• Torn’s body in bathtub—one stab wound
• No defensive wounds to victim
• Bloody knife hidden in kitchen
• No alibi
• No other suspects
• Confession
• Slam dunk
Fernandez smiled when he read the last phrase—slam dunk. It was uncharacteristically flippant, his own private joke. He closed the binder, got up, and started to pace again. One step, two steps, turn, one step, two steps, turn.
Ever since he’d gotten the Brace case, he’d stayed late at the office. It had been hard on Marissa. Last week, when the January phone bill arrived and Fernandez saw that she’d spent almost four hundred dollars calling her family back in Chile, they’d had their first big fight. She’d ended up in tears, saying she couldn’t stand how cold it was in Canada, that she had no friends or family here, and she threatened to go home.
“Come on, Marissa,” he’d said once he t
hought things had calmed down. “Let’s go to bed and make it better.”
“Bed, bed. With you it’s always bed,” she’d said, and slammed the bedroom door in his face.
For the next five nights he slept on the couch. The sixth day he brought home a very long, very ugly down-filled coat and a pair of equally ugly boots. “You’ll like the winter much better if you stop worrying about how you look and just keep warm,” he told her.
She took the coat grudgingly.
“Look in the pocket,” he said.
She reached in and pulled out an airplane ticket.
“I’m sending you home for a month in March,” he told her. “When you come back, the winter will be over.”
Marissa grabbed the ticket from his hand and ran back into the bedroom. Fernandez heard her talking excitedly on the phone for the next half hour. At last she emerged from their bedroom wearing only a towel and a big smile.
Tomorrow was Valentine’s Day, and he’d promised to be home by eight. He’d planned the whole evening. Dinner at a Mexican restaurant on Wellington Street; then he’d take her to a new gelato place down the block. It featured homemade South American flavors. Guanabana and lulo were her favorites. They’d be home by ten.
Yes. Fernandez smiled. Get to bed early with Marissa, that sounded like a very good idea.
As he sat back down at his desk, he was startled by a quiet knock on his door. The night watchman had been by ten minutes ago and Fernandez hadn’t heard anyone else come in. “Who is it?”
“Hola,” a familiar voice whispered. The door opened slowly, and Marissa was standing in the dimly lit hall wearing the down coat and the ugly boots.
“What are you doing—”
“Shhh,” she said, coming inside and closing the door behind her, lowering the light in the small room.
“How did you—”
“Don’t get up. I just spoke to the guard,” she said as she walked around his desk.
“What did you tell him?”
“I said, ‘Excuse me, sir. I am here bringing my husband some nourishment because he work so late.’” She turned his chair toward her.
“He works late,” Fernandez said. “And the word isn’t ‘nourishment,’ it’s ‘food’ . . .”
“No. Nourishment,” she said as she opened her coat. Even in the near darkness, Fernandez could see that she was naked underneath. “I’ve been studying my nouns,” she said as she straddled him and brought his head to her breast. “This is nourishment, no?”
Happy Valentine’s Day one day early, Fernandez thought as he felt Marissa reach down and undo his belt, then lower his zipper. As he slid inside her, his government-issue chair began to squeak as it rolled backward.
Just then he heard an outer door open. The sound came from the side entrance the Crowns used at night.
“Here’s the latest and greatest,” a deep male voice said. It was Phil Cutter. What was he doing at the office so late?
Fernandez put his mouth to Marissa’s ear. “Shhh . . .,” he whispered. She nodded her head, but he couldn’t tell if she was saying yes or if it was just part of her rhythmic rocking on top of him.
“Let me see that.” This second voice was softer, female. It was Barb Gild, Cutter’s constant companion.
Marissa’s rhythm was increasing as Fernandez heard Cutter and Gild’s footsteps draw nearer. She lowered his head to her breast again and buried it there.
“Brace—he thinks he’s so damn smart,” Cutter said. His laugh pierced the empty office space. They were almost right outside the door.
Fernandez held his breath. He spread his feet wide and held tight to the floor, trying to stop the old chair from squeaking and to slow Marissa down. But she was lost in her movements.
“What’s he written this time?” Gild said. The two had stopped to look at something right on his doorstep. Marissa squeezed the back of his head. He grasped her as tight as he could. Cutter and Gild must be able to hear them.
But Cutter started to laugh. “This is fantastic,” he said.
Fernandez heard their footsteps start up again, moving down the hall. “Take a look, Barb . . .,” Cutter said. Their voices were quickly receding. Fernandez strained to hear, but now Marissa had her hands over his ears as she moved his mouth to her other breast.
“If Parish ever found out we had this . . .” Cutter’s voice was disappearing.
Fernandez tried to pull back from Marissa to hear better, but their voices had faded, covered by the rumble of the photocopy machine across from Gild’s office.
“What is wrong?” Marissa whispered, bending down to his ear.
That’s what I’m wondering, he thought. What are Cutter and Gild up to?
“Poor Albert,” she said, stroking his hair. “Too much working.”
Marissa’s touch on his face brought him back to her. Soon after they were married, it became apparent to Fernandez that although he was a virgin when they exchanged their vows, she was sexually experienced. It had been unspoken between them, but very quickly she became the teacher and he the willing pupil.
And now he’d been distracted. He’d disappointed her.
But she didn’t look upset. She looked determined.
“Too much work,” he said.
“No, no,” she said, reaching back down to take him in her hand. “Not enough nourishment.”
33
The foul odor was the first thing Ari Greene noticed as he walked past the bull pen—the big holding cell for male prisoners in the bowels of Old City Hall court. A hundred and fifty men, at least half of them who hadn’t had a shower for days, most wearing orange jumpsuits, shuffling around on the cement floor. The few men in street clothes would have been picked up the night before and would have slept at whatever police division they’d been taken to before being brought to the Hall for their bail hearings. The rest would have come from the Don or one of the suburban jails.
Greene made a point of not stopping or looking in. As far as any of the prisoners inside the bull pen were concerned, he’d be just another cop walking on the free side of the bars.
There was a small, windowless room in back with a steel table and two chairs, all bolted to the floor. This was the “P.C.” interview room. Protective custody was for prisoners who needed to be kept apart from the general population for their own safety—usually guys charged with sex crimes against children and, as the cops liked to joke, police constables, P.C.’s. Unlike the glassed-in gallery, where groups of prisoners met with their lawyers and had to lean down and yell through little screens to be heard, this room was private.
Greene took the seat farthest from the door and waited patiently. It took about ten minutes for Fraser Dent to be led in.
Greene had seen Dent three times in this room since the night they’d met at the Salvation Army. Dent nodded quietly at Greene. He wore his orange jumpsuit like a pair of comfortable old pajamas. On his feet he had a pair of prison-issue blue running shoes, the back stomped down for more comfort. Just like all the real cons.
The guard pulled out his keys. Hearing the jangling metal, Dent turned his back and waited patiently while his handcuffs were taken off.
After the guard left, Dent turned to Greene and shrugged his shoulders. He looked like a man who’d been in the jail for a few weeks. His stringy, clownlike hair was greasy, his face roughly shaven, and his fingernails bitten down. His light blue eyes were empty.
“Good morning, Detective,” he said in a grumpy voice.
“How ya doing, Mr. Dent?” Greene said. He’d risen from his seat to greet Dent when he came in. Now he sat down and pulled out a pair of cigarettes from inside his jacket.
“Could be worse,” Dent said. He sat on the facing metal seat and looked down. “I got Brace and me moved up to the fifth floor, hospital wing. Gets us away from all the punks and the noise. It’s no big deal to clean out a few bedpans. They got a TV and the sports channel. The bloody Leafs, eh?”
Greene smiled. In early January, the Leafs
had gone on an improbable run, beating clubs well above them in the standings and climbing back into the play-off race. The city had been energized by the team, the radio talk-show programs filled with optimistic chatter from phone-in fans who claimed they “bled blue and white.” Greene’s father had even made noises about actually going to a game.
Fat chance.
It didn’t matter. Predictably, in mid-January the team had returned to its losing ways, causing Greene’s father no end of heartburn, and all talk of going to see a live game faded. His dad’s newest theory for the team’s travails was that the goalie was no good, too young, and they needed to bring in a veteran.
“A team from Tampa and a team from Carolina can win the Stanley Cup,” he’d said in frustration a few nights earlier after the Leafs lost for the fourth time in a row. “They don’t even have skating rinks down there.”
“Dad, give it up,” Greene said. “The Leafs haven’t won since 1967.”
“I know, I know,” his father had said. “I’m waiting. I know how to wait for things.”
“My dad’s a big-time Leafs fan,” Greene said as he passed over some matches to Dent. “They’re driving him nuts.”
“That coach has got to go,” Dent said. “You see that last night? Two minutes left in the game and he’s got his third-line center out taking the face-off.”
Greene passed over his Styrofoam cup for Dent to use as an ashtray. He’d intentionally left a thin layer of water on the bottom. Dent lit up and took a few deep drags. Greene waited patiently.
“Brace still hasn’t said a damn thing,” Dent said, blowing the smoke to the side. He looked over at the wall to his left. “Not one fucking word. At first it was spooky, but now I’m used to it. I’m not sure what I’d do if he started to talk.”
“He still write notes?” Greene asked.
“Yeah. In his book. He’s got us all trained. He’ll write us little notes. And when we play bridge, he’ll just make his hand signs.”
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