Victim Impact

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Victim Impact Page 8

by Mel Bradshaw


  “Follow me.”

  When they had reassembled, Nelson had some news. “We’ve had uniformed officers trying to talk to the neighbours. So far they’ve had no luck on either side of you or across the street. Seems everyone’s up in Muskoka. But there is an older gentleman two doors down who stayed home with his TV. Seems he glanced out his window last night in the break between his nine and ten o’clock programs and saw an unfamiliar black pickup parked in front of his house. He never did see the driver, and next time he looked, the truck was gone. He thinks it was a North American make, one of the big three. A shortbed with a regular cab, not the extended model. Know anyone with a truck like that?”

  “I don’t,” said Ted. “What’ll happen to the burglar if he’s convicted?”

  “That depends,” said Nelson, “on how much part he had in your wife’s death. Did she miss her footing and fall down those stairs by accident? Or did the intruder push or trip her?”

  Once again, Ted offered the evidence of his cellphone. “This is how I found her,” he said. “It looks like someone pulled her by the hair.”

  Nelson examined the displayed photo warily, Rodriguez looking over his shoulder.

  “This was before you or the paramedics touched her?” she asked.

  Ted nodded. “Yes, before.”

  “We’ll have to see what the post-mortem says,” Nelson cautioned. “Another question relevant to sentencing is whether—if the intruder did lay hands on her—he did so intending to kill her or intending only to push her out of his way.”

  “She wasn’t in his way,” Ted protested. “He could have left by the front door without her even seeing him.”

  “Breaking and entering in theory could get you life,” Nelson continued, “but as you must know, it never comes to that. Especially on a first offence. Then we have theft, and the penalty there depends on the value of what was taken, whether it was over or under five thousand dollars. Speaking of which, the crime scene boys and girls are still hard at work, but they’ve given us the green light to walk you through so you can tell us what’s missing or out of place. Okay by you if we go over there now?”

  Another ride in the black sedan, only five minutes this time, over to Robin Hood Crescent. Number nineteen was still surrounded by police tape and police vehicles, but Nelson’s badge got them past the gatekeepers. A man from Forensic Identification Services tagged along on their circuit of the house to tell them where they could walk and what they could touch.

  The house, not Ted’s house. Ted found it easier to think of it not as the matrimonial home into which he and Karin would have welcomed their child, but rather as the crime scene. The company of people not personally bereaved buffered him also. Ted expected much of the professionals. He was relieved to have a task to immerse himself in, a task initiated by others and one that—whatever its distressing associations—he believed necessary.

  As before, he found nothing amiss in the master bedroom. The little Florentine chest where Quirk kept her few pieces of jewellery remained in place on her dresser.

  Nelson used his ballpoint pen to raise the lid. Everything Ted believed should be inside—pearl necklace, silver brooch, gold cuff links, two pair of clip-on earrings—was there. Over the dresser hung a recent studio photo of Karin and Ted. Nelson asked to borrow it. Ted unhooked it for him.

  The second bedroom was Quirk’s studio. A chair and music stand occupied the middle of the room, and a writing table nestled under the window. One of the longer walls was decorated with a snapshot collection and a signed black and white photo of Yo-Yo Ma, the other with an oil landscape of Shield country—rock, waves and wind-sculpted pines under a dramatic sky. The FIS man used latex gloves to open the enclosed spaces. The closet contained a couple of black dresses Karin wore when performing, as well as overflow from the bedroom walk-in. A filing cabinet was stuffed with scores and miscellaneous personal files. Again, Ted noticed no absences: it was all here, everything but her. The guest room was easier to inventory, with nothing personal to trigger memories. Quirk had been meaning to repaint and redecorate but hadn’t found time. Or motivation. Spare moments always got soaked up by a new piece of music, or—and he was right back in the personal now—a walk with Ted in some forested park.

  For all their caution, the detectives were concluding there might be no need for fingerprinting on the second storey at all. There was no proof the house had been penetrated above the fourth step, where the wad of chewing gum still sat.

  “Beth, has this Dubble Bubble been photographed?” their forensics escort called to a camera-toting associate headed towards the living room.

  “From all the standard angles,” came the prompt reply. “Want anything special?”

  “No, that should do.” The FIS man stooped and captured the gum in a plastic bag, which he sealed and labelled.

  “Maybe this is as far as the burglars got when they heard Mr. Boudreau’s wife enter,” Rodriguez said to Nelson.

  “Do you think there was more than one of them?” said Ted.

  “I’m keeping an open mind,” Rodriguez replied.

  “Let’s do the ground floor,” said Nelson.

  In the living, dining, and family rooms—by contrast to the upstairs—drawers and cupboards had been opened. Contents had been stirred about. Pictures had been pulled from the walls and the paper backings ripped off. Ted hadn’t paid the mess any attention on his first quick search of the house but now concluded that the intruder had been looking for something he hadn’t found. Computer disks, perhaps? He didn’t think anything had been taken.

  In the den that served Ted and, less often, Karin as a home office, not only a state-of-the-art computer but every disk that held personally stored information was missing. All the research and a third of a draft of an introductory criminology textbook Ted had been working on—gone. His armoury of quizzes and exam questions—gone. His lectures, speeches, financial documents, personal letters, e-mail archives—none of it remained. Anticlimactically, even the music CDs he played on the computer had been taken, popular stuff Karin didn’t want in the bedroom. All that was left were plastic-wrapped and sealed blank disks, software backups and Quirk’s Verdi DVDs.

  “What do you think they were looking for?” asked Rodriguez.

  “Three thousand dollars worth of hardware,” Ted suggested, pointing to where the tower and monitor had been. “Wouldn’t that be a pretty good night’s haul?”

  “It would,” said Nelson, “but then why bother adding to the load a bucket of burned disks?”

  “Beats me,” said Ted, though he had a pretty good idea. Along with the downright sickening idea that if he hadn’t had an interest in bikers, Quirk might still be alive. Leaving the alarm unconnected wasn’t in the same league.

  The larger part of him wanted to tell the detectives what he suspected, and yet he couldn’t put it from his mind that they belonged to the same police service that employed Chuckles. Might the Dark Arrows’ grapevine not have penetrated even farther through Peel Regional than Ted knew? To change the subject, he asked the FIS man if he could really tell that the gum was Dubble Bubble just by looking at it.

  “Based on colour and consistency, that’s what I think the lab work will show. But I wouldn’t swear to it in court without doing the tests.”

  The forensics people wouldn’t let Ted and the detectives into the basement where work was still being done on the wooden stairs, the concrete floor and the broken window. Ted was given assurances that they would board over the latter when the collection of evidence was finished. No promises could be made yet as to when that might be. They let him take some toiletries and a change of clothes from his bedroom before he left the house.

  He walked out the front door with a sense of futility. His revisiting the crime scene had confirmed his impressions without adding to them. Then, as he was passing Quirk’s sundrenched roses, a straw presented itself for him to clutch. To leave behind gum with saliva traces—that suggested a thoughtless, cocksure kid
rather than professional criminals. Might it just have been computer theft after all?

  Nelson and Rodriguez drove Ted back to 11 Division to continue the taped interview. All three of them were tired, and the tone when they were sitting once more around the table was decidedly less cordial.

  “Were you on good terms with your wife, Mr. Boudreau?” Nelson asked abruptly.

  “Yes,” said Ted, as if the matter should have been obvious.

  “Was there any cause of friction between you?”

  “None.”

  Nelson asked whether the couple had had any money worries, whether Karin’s life had been insured, and whether either she or Ted had been seeing anyone else. Ted answered no, no and no. He was trying not to sound hurt. He knew that even if his alibi stood up, the detectives had to evaluate the possibility of a contract killer or a jealous mistress.

  “Before you leave here today,” said Nelson, “we’d like to get your fingerprints for comparison with what we’ve found in the house.”

  “Of course. How many people’s prints have they found so far?”

  “Mr. Boudreau,” Rodriguez interjected, “it sounds like you’re impatient to nail someone for this crime and, believe me, we can relate to that. But you’ve got to help us by telling us why you think those computer disks were stolen.”

  Ted let the silence lengthen.

  “You’ve told us, sir, that you are a professor of criminology.” Nelson mouthed the word with mild distaste. He was doubtless thinking that police and academics rarely saw eye-to-eye on questions of law and order. “Would any of your research have been of interest to criminals?”

  “They might have thought so,” Ted confessed. “You see, there was a rumour going around university circles that I was researching motorcycle gangs. It’s not true, but someone in a gang might have believed it and come to see what I had.”

  “Ah!” said Nelson. “And were you keeping anything relating to biker gangs, either on your computer’s hard drive or on any of the stolen disks?”

  “No.” A factual, if weaselly, answer.

  “Trashed data can under some circumstances be recovered. Had you, Mr. Boudreau, erased or attempted to erase from those disks anything at all relating to biker gangs?”

  “Not a thing.” True also. Ted had scanned Melody’s documents on his previous machine, which he had sent to the dump after scrupulously destroying its hard drive. It had been due for replacement anyway. The stolen computer, as luck would have it, was brand new.

  “This rumour,” said Rodriguez, “have you any idea who started it?”

  “I don’t know.” Ted felt an imprudent urge to look at the camera, as if he would see there whether it had picked up the fact that he did indeed have an idea. He stared at an ink smear on the tabletop instead.

  “Your wife?” coaxed Rodriguez.

  “Definitely not. I think someone in my department misunderstood a question I asked him, and he may have spoken to someone else.”

  “Who did you ask this question of?” said Rodriguez.

  Ted saw that the police could sleuth around the department and find this out whether he told them or not. Still he said nothing.

  “Which gang,” said Nelson, “did this rumour relate to?”

  Ted didn’t answer.

  “Oh, come on, Mr. Boudreau,” said Nelson. “Your loose lips have already cost you your computer, your disks and your wife. What on earth can you have to gain by clamming up now?”

  Ted felt his face redden. After so much civilized and considerate treatment from the detectives, the rebuke was doubly stinging. He waited a moment to see if Rodriguez would dissociate herself from this attack, but she was nodding agreement.

  This was crunch time. Only Graham and Melody knew that Ted had received information about the Dark Arrows, and only Graham knew he’d kept it.

  Why then not give the detectives Graham?

  Why not give them Melody? Let them surround her with bodyguards. Let them use her information to roll up the whole Dark Arrows crew and put in prison everyone behind Karin’s death. Hey, he couldn’t even be sure that Melody hadn’t blabbed to someone else. Melody, not Graham.

  Ted couldn’t talk himself into it, though. The police might drop the ball, move too slowly. Let secrets out. He remembered the bikers’ power in Montreal. People that had pried into gang affairs had died or come terrifyingly close. And numerous violent crimes had been punished lightly or not at all before any of the gangsters got serious jail time. Could the Peel Regional force—represented by the two detectives across the table—do any better at protecting the living and at acting for the dead when bikers were involved? One thing for sure: justice for Karin at another woman’s expense would not be justice.

  Cold-eyed and unsmiling, Nelson and Rodriguez were waiting. Ted felt he had to say something. He told them about his discovery of the Grey Mare tavern and its Friday-night patrons. No more than that.

  Chapter 6

  The rest of the weekend, after the detectives had dropped him back at Markus’s house, Ted experienced as the beginning of a life sentence without Karin. The unreality attaching to the earliest hours of his widowerhood had faded—not to nothing but out of the foreground. There were still passages of numbness, but accompanied by too much lucidity to offer welcome relief. He saw ahead of him all the chairs she wouldn’t be sitting in, the bedclothes she wouldn’t lie between, the doors she wouldn’t come through. He saw them as clearly through dry eyes as through tears. It seemed the new normal was to be unheralded hot storms of grief alternating with locked-in winters of depression. Opposites that came to the same thing. Karin was gone.

  If anyone had told Ted, as he knew they would, that in a matter of years, if not months, he’d be smiling and laughing again, he would have found that prospect no consolation.

  For lunch, Markus walked him the two blocks up to the Irish pub on Lake Shore Boulevard and all through the meal made soldiering-on conversation. Ted couldn’t have said what about. He wondered why Markus found it necessary to be soldiering on. Why couldn’t he let himself show more grief? Perhaps he felt he’d already betrayed vulnerability by letting Ted drive him home from the hospital. Now he had ground to make up. Having already declared his loss greater than Ted’s, Markus must now demonstrate more stoic fibre in dealing with it.

  When the check came, Markus grabbed it from Ted’s hand. “You know what we should do?” he said. “There’ll be no news from the police over the holiday weekend. We should go back up to the cottage to keep ourselves from brooding.” Markus spoke of the tonic effect of sun, water, green trees, clean air—of opportunities for distracting activity.

  “No thanks,” said Ted. “I don’t think—Markus, what’s wrong?”

  It had happened all of a sudden. Markus had his hand on his chest under his T-shirt. His eyes had lost focus and were moving nervously. His breath came in gasps.

  “Your heart?”

  Markus nodded. “Pounding as if it wanted to break out of my rib cage. My God, Ted, can you hear it?”

  “Never mind. I’ll bring the car around.”

  By the time Ted had driven Markus to the nearest ER—no messing with 911 this time—the pounding had subsided, and Markus was given a low priority by the triage nurse who took his particulars. The two men sat an hour together in the waiting area.

  During that time, it came back to Ted what Markus had said at Ted and Karin’s wedding, on the dock at Lake of Bays: “Am I losing a daughter or gaining a son? I’ll tell you next fall after Ted and I go moose hunting.” There had been no moose hunt. Now Markus had truly lost a daughter and Ted had acquired the responsibility of looking out for her father in her stead.

  A wavy-haired man with a clipboard and a name tag reading Dr. Alex Patel eventually took Markus’s pulse and told him he seemed to be suffering from a minor arrhythmia. Likely not too much to worry about, but at age—Dr. Patel consulted a form—age seventy-two, it made sense to be cautious. Markus was advised to remain in hospital a few
hours for observation.

  Ted meanwhile went back to the bungalow. He tried to draw up the list he had promised the police of all the people that might know about the alarm system. He tried straight Scotch. He tried to sleep. He tried to listen to Saturday Afternoon at the Opera on Markus’s stereo. He couldn’t stick with anything.

  Eventually he sat down to the task of phoning Karin’s friends and musical colleagues. The members of her chamber group, the gang she did Tai Chi with. Although it would be the hardest call, he had to start with the woman Karin had been closest to, Nancy Malik.

  “Ted! Let me guess—you’re calling to invite Raj and Rita and me up to that gorgeous cottage of your father-in-law’s.”

  “No, I need to talk to you. Is this an okay time?”

  The question hung a long moment between them.

  “You sound awful,” Nancy said at last. “What’s happened?”

  “Karin . . . Bad news. She’s been hurt.” This was not at all what Ted had meant to say. He tried again. “She’s dead.”

  “I can’t be hearing you right.”

  “Yes, last night.”

  Nancy’s next words came in sobs. “I rehearsed with her yesterday afternoon. She was fine.”

  All the time Ted was telling her what had happened, he could hear her weeping. He started with the basics—a burglar surprised, a confrontation. While he was trying to add another sentence, his voice trailed off.

  It sounded as if Nancy were blowing her nose. He followed suit.

  “Look, Ted,” she said, “I want to talk to you some more, but I need a time out first. What’s the best way to get back to you in half an hour?”

  He told her he was at Markus’s, but gave her the number of his cell rather than the land line.

  When Nancy hung up, Ted went on with his phoning on Markus’s line. Many of Quirk’s friends were away for the holiday weekend, but the few he spoke to were magnificent—shocked, sensible of their own loss, sensible of his, and ready with offers of help. Karin had had a talent for friendship, he thought.

 

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