The Sullivan Gray Series Box Set

by H. P. Bayne

  “Plenty of maybes there,” Eva said. “Hopefully Lachlan’s got some answers buried in here somewhere.”

  It had been some time since Dez had had opportunity to check out Sully’s file and, at that earlier opportunity, he hadn’t had longer than ten minutes with it. Sully always had questions about his birth family and, more specifically, his identity, and Dez had entertained the notion maybe he could use his then-job with the police to help.

  The file in the police records room hadn’t been as thick as the one Lachlan had, restricted to the immediate investigation surrounding the abandonment. Some of the same items were present in both instances, leading Dez to believe Lachlan didn’t just have copies; he had the real deal in his possession. The giveaway came early on in Dez and Eva’s scan, the note stating, “Please call me Sullivan” visible through the plastic evidence bag that protected it. Fingerprint dusting powder was still visible along the edges, although it had turned up nothing helpful, the only discernible prints belonging to the social worker who made the startling find upon going to collect her morning paper. There were witness statements from that worker, Denise Wilson, as well as the paperboy who’d seen nothing as he’d dropped the paper at the edge of the driveway and pedalled on.

  The first major stops for investigators were the maternity wards within KR and other hospitals within the province. But all the babies born within hospital walls could be accounted for and, as it turned out, so could all those brought into the world with the help of a midwife.

  Someone had given birth without anyone knowing, and had promptly given the child up. Blood was taken from Sully and compared against samples within the national criminal DNA databank, but it became apparent upon receipt of the results Sully did not come from anyone with a serious history of crime. Lachlan noted while the databank had grown and improved since, no further attempts at a match had been made.

  Sully had been placed with one foster family at the start, but he wasn’t an easy kid, so was moved from place to place until, at age seven, he ended up with the Braddocks. Dez could only guess, but it was an educated one, that Sully’s frequent crying and screaming as an infant and toddler had far less to do with bad temperament and everything to do with fear, his then-lack of understanding and acceptance of what he could see and feel around him.

  Dez didn’t dig too far into Sully’s past as it appeared on the page. He skimmed enough to know he’d heard the stories, and there were many things about Sully’s distant past he wished he could simply forget. And everything else, everything that had come since, Dez had been a part of.

  “Is there a chance any of his previous foster families might have held a grudge over something?” Eva asked.

  “One of his foster fathers was criminally charged with assaulting him, but he never did time for it,” Dez said. “I think the guy and his wife were just removed from the foster system. Sully was moved afterward, so I doubt there would be any lasting grudges there. Anyway, that was two decades ago.”

  “Yeah, that seems like a stretch. How about the fire? What were their names?”

  “The Blakes.”

  “Right. Did they have any other family, someone who might have held onto something since then?”

  “From what I understand, they didn’t have much for family, and those they did have were focused on the girl who did set the fire. Sully and the other foster boy living there had nothing to do with it. And, again ….”

  “Long time ago. I know,” Eva said. “What about you? Have you thought about whether you know of anyone who might want to hurt him?”

  “Sully was always pretty shy and kept to himself,” Dez said. “But the people who did know him liked him. I can’t think of anyone he could have rubbed the wrong way. He isn’t that kind of guy.”

  “He provided information to your dad over the years about the people he saw, didn’t he? Police were able to use his info to make arrests and lay charges in otherwise-unsolved homicides.”

  “No one ever knew it was Sully. Dad didn’t tell anyone where he got the info, just said it was from a confidential source. Major Crimes ran with it, and Sully didn’t have much to do with it afterward. There would be no reason anyone would know he was involved in those arrests.”

  “Maybe we should start looking at Lucienne’s file.”

  “In a second.” Dez flipped to the end of Sully’s file. Lachlan hadn’t added to it, so Dez figured anything new would have been placed in the file he’d started on Lucienne. It made sense. At some point, Lachlan would have to return Sully’s file to whomever had pulled it for him down at headquarters—unless, of course, he’d removed it himself just before his retirement. Either way, if anyone found out he had it, there would be hell to pay and, quite possibly, more people out there looking for work. Lachlan’s additions to the file seemed to be the social services records from Sully’s childhood as well as the handwritten cover page and several pages of notes on Sully’s life—easy enough to remove when the time came.

  On the other hand, the entirety of Lucienne’s file seemed to consist of handwritten notes and photocopied documents, along with a number of old family photographs depicting whom Dez assumed was the Lucienne Dule of the 1970s. A brief family history had been compiled during an interview with Lucienne, her heavy participation evidenced by Lachlan’s frequent use of quotes.

  She had two siblings, Artie and Rhona, but Artie—the baby of the family—had died young, drowned in the tub at just three years of age. His sisters were supposed to have been watching him and both were punished, locked up in their rooms for most of that summer, allowing their mother to grieve in relative privacy. Their father left shortly after Artie’s death, perhaps unable to cope, perhaps simply recognizing the incident as the excuse he’d been waiting for. At any rate, Lachlan seemed to have concluded the girls’ parents were far from close and shared little, including parenting styles.

  Lorinda Dule was a hard woman, made harder by the life she’d been handed. Her estranged husband Robert Forrester went unwaveringly by the name Bobby, the choice of name suggestive of his attitude to life. Bobby’s youthful energy and lust for fun countered Lorinda’s near-puritanical existence, and while Lorinda was often too hard on the kids, their father was too lenient. It was Bobby who’d left his daughters in charge of their brother that weekend. His wife away on a religious retreat, Bobby had taken advantage of what he’d hoped to turn into a bachelor weekend and left the girls so he could head out on a bender with his pals. Unlike many Dez had known, Bobby sounded to be a happy drunk, but he was a drunk nonetheless, and his lack of responsibility led to tragedy on the Sunday his wife was to return.

  Lorinda had come back to a dead child, a husband shattered in both emotion and sobriety and two daughters whom—in Lucienne’s words to Lachlan—she had to keep from sending to the same place they’d sent Artie. She’d vented her anger initially on Bobby, who took that as his cue to exit stage left. According to Lucienne, none of them saw him again and, for all they knew, he’d died in a gutter somewhere.

  If the parents’ reactions to the death were very different, so were the girls’. Rhona fell silent and, in fact, didn’t speak for a full six weeks; Lucienne fell into a state of constant dread, unable to sleep as she was visited night after night by the ghost of her brother, accusing her of abandoning him to his death.

  Lucienne recalled this as her first experience with a ghost, a phenomenon that repeated itself throughout the course of her life.

  Rhona, older by two years, had just moved out by the time Lucienne got pregnant. Their mother had remarried by then, to a man more in line with her own personality. While Rhona hated Wayne Usher’s intrusion in their lives—even a full decade after he’d come into the picture—Lucienne had taken him more or less as her father. Wayne wasn’t an easy man, but he was responsible and present, which was a lot more than any of them could say about Bobby.

  Unfortunately, Lucienne’s faith in the man would prove ill-founded, as he provided no port in the storm that broke
upon her issuing the news of her pregnancy. Wayne had, in fact, led the initial charge that the baby be aborted. When Lucienne refused—thankfully backed by her ultra-religious mother—the decision followed that the baby would be given up. In the meantime, every effort was made to conceal the pregnancy, Lucienne forced to wear baggy clothes until, when that no longer worked, she was kept at the house. She ultimately delivered there, with only her mother and stepfather to guide her through the agonizing process.

  That was Lucienne’s story, as told by Lucienne.

  In true Lachlan style, he’d sensed some bullshit afoot and went looking for the truth.

  The cover pages in Lucienne’s file consisted of handwritten notes beneath two headings. The first—containing the details Dez and Eva had just read—was titled “Lucienne.” The second underlined heading, beneath which precious little had yet been written, read “Other.”

  Beneath that second heading, Lachlan had written the word “Lockwood,” underlining it twice for good measure. He’d also written the name Rhona, followed by a question mark.

  They flipped through the file, locating copies of birth certificates, little Artie’s death certificate and a copy of his autopsy report, as well as references to the mother’s work with her local church. There were also, Dez noted, certificates stating both Rhona and Lucienne had successfully completed their home schooling and earned their high school diplomas.

  “Huh,” Dez said.

  “What?”

  “Just something Lucienne said. She told me people used to say she’d slept through the entire male half of the school population.”

  The answering expression on Eva’s face suggested she, too, found that strange. “Maybe she still hung around those people, though. Nothing says you need to go to school together to have sex, right?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  He wasn’t convinced. Come right down to it, he was becoming less and less convinced about everything to do with Lucienne Dule. The only thing he was now satisfied about was that she was who she said she was. The photos Lachlan had gathered were plenty clear in substance and content. Lucienne Dule, the child and the teen—pictured in most of the photos standing next to Rhona—was without a doubt the Lucienne Dule, adult, currently sleeping in Dez’s bed back at the apartment.

  “What are you thinking?” Eva asked.

  “She’s holding something back. Something big. I just can’t get a handle on what.”

  “Maybe Lachlan did,” Eva said. “And that could be why he’s in the hospital right now.”

  “Maybe.”

  “I think you need to wait and talk to him when he’s more lucid, when he can give you some proper answers. Something’s not right here.”

  “Damn straight something’s not right,” Dez said. “Sully’s missing. I haven’t got the luxury of sitting around, waiting for Lachlan. He sent me here for a reason, and I think it’s that he needs me to get to the bottom of this. He solved the abandoned baby mystery when Lucienne turned up on his doorstep, but he’s landed himself another one in the process.”

  “One that might be behind him almost getting killed today,” Eva said. “We don’t know who he talked to or what he found, just that he had questions and suspicions. If this case is the reason for what happened to him ….”

  She trailed off, leaving Dez to finish the thought his own way. “Then it might be he was closing in on something that could lead us to finding Sully.”

  Eva smiled at him, but there was no humour there. Only sadness and defeat. “If this case is the reason Lachlan almost died, then who’s to say the same won’t happen to you?”

  20

  Dez arrived home to find Lucienne asleep on the pullout in much the same spot as Sully had spent last night.

  While Pax found a comfortable spot on the rug to sleep, Dez took a moment to study his visitor in the light of the lamps she’d left on, as if he could spot the truths she was concealing if he watched long enough. When that venture proved as fruitless as anticipated, he allowed simple curiosity to take the place of suspicion, searching her features for similarities to her son’s. He supposed he could see something there, the two sharing what his wife called “fine bone structure.” He recalled her eyes were a similar shade as Sully’s, somewhere between grey and blue, and that Sully’s hair, as blond as hers until age had darkened it, still took on a golden cast in the summer months.

  But all in all, Dez didn’t see a whole lot of his brother in this woman, this relative stranger who had shared nothing with Sully in his twenty-four years but blood, eye colour and high cheekbones. Then again, it was possible there were other similarities escaping Dez’s immediate notice; he wasn’t exactly skilled at this sort of thing. Eva had made apologies for him once when he’d inadvertently angered a friend of theirs, a new mother who he later learned had been fishing for remarks on how much her new baby’s features mirrored hers. Dez thought he’d been offering the woman a compliment by telling her the two looked nothing alike; the mother didn’t resemble a prune in the slightest.

  Dez checked his watch. A little past two in the morning, the sun long past set. And it occurred to him his energy levels had sunk as well.

  Not bothering to change, Dez slumped into his living room chair and covered himself with an afghan his mom had crocheted during the brief period she’d taken it up. It had been helpful in this at least, Dez often having to look long and hard for quilts and blankets that fully covered him when lying out flat. He turned slightly in the chair, enough to enable him to rest his cheek on the cushioned backrest, and closed his eyes. Sleep, in his current state, was only moments away.

  “Where were you?”

  Dez’s eyes shot open. Lucienne was sitting up on his pullout, eyes accusing as she regarded him.

  Dez tried to decide how much to tell her, how much to leave out. “I wasn’t tired so I went to see Lachlan.”

  “All this time?”

  Not “How is he,” Dez noticed. Lucienne’s first thought wasn’t of Lachlan’s condition, but rather her own. Then again, the way she’d been raised, self-preservation had become the rule rather than the exception. Dez had seen plenty of that during his years in policing, still saw it in many of the street people whose company he’d been keeping.

  “No,” Dez said. “He sent me to check out a lead.”

  “I thought we agreed you would involve me in this.”

  “You are involved,” Dez said. “Far too involved, if this investigation is the reason Lachlan was attacked. He had some information he’d gathered on Sully and he wanted me to see it. He sent me expressly on my own. Lachlan took a pretty good shot to the head, by the way. He’s in and out of consciousness and is likely to be recovering from this for some time.”

  Recognition settled across Lucienne’s face, the realization she’d made something of a social blunder. “I’m sorry. You’re right. It was thoughtless of me not to ask. Is he in much pain?”

  “Whatever painkiller they’re pumping into him helps, but he’s not a happy camper. And I’d imagine that’s not likely to improve once they start weaning him off the drugs.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. Is there anything I can do?”

  “Just don’t try to visit him right now,” Dez said. “They’ve got him under guard until they can get to the bottom of this.”

  “Do they know about me?”

  “They know of your existence, to some degree anyway. Lachlan hasn’t told anyone much, and he’s essentially sworn me to secrecy, too.”

  Her eyes closed briefly as she released tension in one heavy exhale.

  Dez hadn’t intended to get into these questions tonight, but patience had never been his strong suit—particularly given the current situation. “Lachlan had some questions, didn’t he? Questions about your family. So do I.”

  Whatever stress she’d just exhaled, she drew right back in. “What do you want to know?”

  “Tell me about Artie.”

  “I can’t talk about that.”

&nbs
p; “Why not?”

  “It’s too hard.”

  Dez took a deep breath of his own, sensing some quid pro quo might be needed to get the ball rolling. “I think I understand better than you think I do. When I was a kid ….”

  “You lost your brother. Aiden. I know.”

  Dez felt the blood drain from his face. “How did you know that?”

  “The same way I know a lot of things. He’s around you, you know. I’ve seen him a couple of times. He doesn’t always come right out, mind you. He likes to hide.”

  Hide and seek. Aiden’s favourite game.

  The last game he played.

  “Dez? Are you all right?”

  “Yeah. Fine.”

  “You don’t look fine.”

  He drew in several long, deep breaths, quelling the desire to walk out and leave everything behind, just go find the guys in the park and drown all his sorrows for another night.

  Drown. Like Aiden had drowned.

  Because of him.

  “I understand, you know,” Lucienne said. “What it’s like to feel responsible for a sibling’s death. Artie was the best of us. He was tiny and gentle and loving. He had this wild blond hair and these chubby little cheeks that made him look like an angel. And he was an angel. But Rhona and I were just kids ourselves, and I’ve tried to remind myself of that when I get lost in the guilt.”

  Dez could still see Aiden, strawberry blond and freckled, dashing off joyfully at the prospect of playing the game with his big brother. Dez had rarely seen Aiden’s smile brighter than it was that afternoon ….