by Mel Bradshaw
After forty-five minutes, he had an incoming call on his cell.
“Yes, Nancy,” he said.
But it wasn’t Nancy. Brian Neuberger of the CBC wanted to ask him about the break-in at his house. Ted said he wasn’t up to giving interviews. He had to say it several more times as other news organizations phoned, from CTV to 680 News, from the big Toronto dailies down to the Clarkson Echo. It was uncanny how at more or less the same time they had all got his cell number from somewhere—whether a website, a friend, or a professional contact no one would say. As Nancy would have little chance of getting back to him through this swarm, Ted tried to call her, but got only her answering machine.
This was the point at which a taxi brought Markus home from the hospital with a diagnosis of atrial fibrillation, two prescription medicines, and a considerable amount of attitude.
“The little pharmacist asked me if I was related to the Karin Gustafson that was killed last night. Apparently it’s been on the radio. I informed her that, including variants with double S and with V in place of F, Gustafson is probably the fifth commonest name in Sweden. Have you been blabbing, Ted?”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Ted retorted. “I’ve actually been fending off a media onslaught. There must have been a press release of some kind. Just be glad they haven’t found your address yet.”
The doorbell rang right on cue.
“There’s the first,” said Ted.
“I’ll decorate the doorway with their entrails, and they’ll be the last,” snarled the cardiac patient.
Ted peeked out the living room window. “Hold your fire. It’s Nancy.”
Her arms were full of brown paper bags and Styrofoam containers that tumbled towards Ted when he opened the door.
“Ms. Meals on Wheels,” observed Markus. “Haven’t seen much of you this summer.”
“Chinese food. I didn’t know if you two liked Cantonese or Szechuan, so there’s lots of both.”
“We’ll get through it all, won’t we, Ted?”
“With Nancy’s help,” said Ted, more grateful than hungry. Under the kitchen lights, he saw that her eyes and nose were red. He thanked her for coming.
When the dinner had been deposited on the counter, Nancy turned to the men with freshly brimming eyes and gave them long, wet hugs.
“You better be well stocked with tissues, Markus. I cry buckets.”
Markus’s guest room was as blandly and cheerfully furnished as an IKEA showroom; notwithstanding, Saturday night brought Ted little rest.
In the talk over supper, Nancy—half a day newer to the tragedy—had expressed more shock than rage. She didn’t stay long, however, as she had Raj and their daughter to pick up at the multiplex after the seven o’clock show. And, as soon as she left, Markus started sounding off about the prevalence of violent crime and the failure of the authorities to control it. However unscientific Ted adjudged such generalizations, the raw outrage behind them found its counterpart in him, releasing floods of sleep-killing adrenalin. Then too he kept listening for noises from the basement, in Markus’s bungalow only one floor below his bed. Ted’s most protracted doze ended at nine Sunday morning when he sat up with the realization he could no longer delay talking to his own parents.
Without mentioning the pregnancy, he told them that Karin had died in the course of a break-in. They were stunned. The crime hadn’t made it onto the French television news, nor had either seen it written up in La Presse. Ted’s father fumed at the injustice; his mother grieved the loss—both without tears, for which he was grateful. They each inquired supportively about funeral arrangements. He could tell they were relieved to hear nothing had yet been organized. They disliked travel, even as far as Toronto, and needed time to plan. Now it was health, now home repairs, now social engagements that kept them from coming to visit. In recent years, face-to-face contact had been limited to the times Ted and Karin could get to Montreal. Not above once or twice a year. Whenever he did see them, it struck Ted what a close, happy relationship they enjoyed. He’d always love them for having shown their children what lasting romance looks like.
Ted spoke also to his twenty-five-year-old brother Patrick, the only one of his siblings still living in the Montreal area. He was acting in summer theatre in the Laurentians before returning to graduate school. Free of their parents’ travel hangups, he made a strong offer to come down to keep Ted company. Ted told him not to. Patrick had commitments enough finishing a run as Orestes in Les Mouches and preparing his directorial debut for the McGill Players. Besides, Ted truly could think of nothing for the kid to do in Mississauga.
The police told Ted he could go back to his house Monday afternoon. The news left him ambivalent. He asked Markus, almost hopefully, if he needed Ted’s company. But Markus was itching to get back to his cottage and insisted he’d be fine on his own if Ted didn’t want to come. His condition, he said, echoing Dr. Patel’s reassurances, wasn’t serious. He’d been given no special diet, warned against no physical activity. The only medical advice was to keep taking his pills and to arrange with his family physician for periodic blood tests—and he had a doctor in Muskoka he liked better than any he’d seen in Etobicoke. And, yes, he’d let Ted know if his heart started pounding again.
So, sixty-four hours after the time of death, Ted returned to Robin Hood Crescent to begin the cleanup. He vacuumed carpets, repacked and replaced drawers, arranged books on shelves, and stacked in the hall the pictures that would have to be reframed. None of it seemed to matter in the least. Monday night, he lay alone upstairs in the big bed and ached for Karin.
On Tuesday morning, as soon as his bank opened, he went to his safety deposit box to drop off the Family Photos disk he had been carrying around in his briefcase, just in case the Dark Arrows made another attempt to steal it. The fact that the intruders had not reached the second floor made him queasily afraid that they might think they had unfinished business in his house. From his safety box, he also retrieved his second set of backup disks. These had not been updated since the spring, so he was missing the most recent chapters of the textbook he was writing, but he still had his list of references. Together with some handwritten notes in the filing cabinet in his campus office, these should be enough to let him reconstruct what had been lost, when he was up to facing it. He took advantage of the lull between morning and afternoon rush hours to drive all the way downtown. Being distracted by traffic in any case seemed preferable just now to having to occupy himself on the train.
Ted laid out the materials on his desk and launched his word processing program as soon as he got in. It was no use. He found it impossible to concentrate. The sight of his office computer made him wonder why it hadn’t been stolen as well. While burglarizing his office wouldn’t have the same intimidation value as breaking into his home, the gang had to reckon with the possibility that the files they were looking for were here rather than there. In fact, Ted kept very little data on his basic and rather boring work machine, but how were the bikers to know? And yet nothing appeared to have been disturbed. Then he remembered the missing blank disk, the one he had been about to give Graham on Friday, but couldn’t find in the desk drawer where he was positive he had left it.
Ted was not generally forgetful, though he had recently been joking with a student about keeping in his head all the meaningless passwords required for various research databases. Such half-serious gripes were apt to come up with Steve, who was writing a thesis on computer crime. Before Ted knew what was happening, Steve had Ted’s keyboard plugged into a keystroke data logger, and this inconspicuously small cylindrical device plugged into Ted’s keyboard port.
It was still there.
Ted opened the application. Now he had only one five-character password to remember. He typed it in—vErDi. The logger began listing for him everywhere the computer had been and everything it had done. There was even a time/date stamp.
Yes, a disk had been burned Thursday night between eleven fifteen and eleven t
wenty-one, at a time when Ted and Karin had been burning up the sheets at home. And yet he always locked his office on leaving it. He always found it locked when he came in—except for one time last June when the cleaners had accidentally left it open. Someone had clearly been on his computer Thursday evening.
The invasion of his workspace made him mistrustful and jumpy, not the best frame of mind in which to receive the colleagues who stopped by his open door to offer condolences and ask about the break and enter at his home. Most had by now heard something on radio or television, but he had repeatedly to go over details already available in the papers. Didn’t any of them read? A minority, it seemed. The rest were too busy, or too cynical, or too fed up with sensational crime reporting.
In contrast to Karin’s musical associates, these academics wanted to understand the situation thoroughly before they reacted emotionally to it, and of course there was no thorough understanding yet to be had. How many intruders were there? Who were they? How did Karin come to be there? How did she die? When Ted—despite his best efforts—failed to satisfy them, they went away shaking their heads. “Terrible,” they muttered, “horrifying,” and he had to take it on faith that they weren’t just referring to the dearth of information.
On the question of how Karin had died, Ted hoped to have some light shed when Detective Nelson phoned in the middle of the afternoon.
“Can I drop in on you this evening?” said the detective.
“Do you have the autopsy results?” asked Ted. “Is that what this is about?”
“Would you be home by seven o’clock, sir?”
“I can’t wait till then, detective. Could you please tell me now?”
“That’s not the way it’s done, Mr. Boudreau. Certain things are to be communicated face to face. Standard procedure.”
“I understand. However, I can save you a drive. I read this kind of evidence all the time in the course of my work. I’m not going to go to pieces and then sue the police service.”
Nelson took three long seconds to make up his mind. “Are you somewhere you won’t be interrupted?”
“I’ll just close my door. There. Now what does the pathologist say?”
“He doesn’t think your wife died from falling, or being pushed, down those stairs.”
“And I take it,” said Ted, “you don’t mean she had a stroke or something?”
“No, Mr. Boudreau, I most definitely do not. I mean that there turns out to be more than one blunt trauma to the posterior cranial region.”
“Someone clubbed her? I need to hear it straight, detective.”
“Ted, somebody lifted Karin’s head up by her hair as you surmised and smashed it down onto that concrete floor repeatedly until she was dead.”
Ted couldn’t speak. Yes, he had surmised, but never—even in imagination—had he spelled it out so starkly.
“You still there?” Nelson asked.
“Repeatedly?” Ted got out. “How many times?”
“Four at least. I’m sorry, man.”
“Thank you, detective. I’ll talk to you later.”
Ted’s office door remained closed till opened by Graham Hart late in the afternoon. Graham was fresh off the plane from Thunder Bay and still wearing his buckskin jacket.
“Well, that was worthwhile,” he said, helping himself to a chair. “My only beef is that the guidelines for what cases can be handled by sentencing circles are too timid. It’s time to extend the process to more serious crimes. When you’ve got, in Manitoba for example, aboriginal people representing eleven per cent of the adult population and sixty-eight per cent of the admissions to provincial custody, you know more people have to be diverted out of the system. I can see these circles working in non-aboriginal communities as well, as part of the whole move to restorative as opposed to punitive justice. Speaking of which, how was the conference? Hope the bloodthirsty rabble wasn’t too much of a headache Friday night. Whenever you invite the public onto campus, you’re liable to get—”
“Graham,” Ted interrupted, “you haven’t spoken to anyone in the department, have you?”
“No, I came to see you first. What’s up? You don’t look so hot. Has our budget been cut?”
“Karin’s been murdered.”
Graham’s heavy eyebrows contracted into a continuous brown hedge. “I don’t believe it.”
“Kind of defies the odds, doesn’t it?” said Ted.
A strangled sound came out of Graham’s throat. “Ted,” he stammered, “forgive me for rambling on there—I had no idea. You poor bastard. You two were the best—the best.”
Ted didn’t know if that were true, but it had certainly felt that way, and he thanked Graham for saying so.
Graham took a deep breath. “Look, let’s get a drink, and you can tell me as much as you feel like telling. How did it happen? Is the killer’s identity known?”
“Not yet.”
“Hoo-boy, that must be one sick puppy.”
Ted hoped so. He hoped the killer suffered from a chemical imbalance in the brain or had been an abused child, so that the social scientist in him would be able to see cause and effect, and he wouldn’t be tempted into the unscientific attitude of blame.
They chose a bar in the Yorkville neighbourhood not likely to be frequented by faculty, and Ted told Graham as much of the story as was known to the detectives. Then he broached a delicate matter. “Graham, did you tell anyone I was researching biker gangs, or any particular biker gang?”
“I might have said something to that dweeb at Simon Fraser when he was looking for someone to peer review an article on organized crime. This would have been a month ago or so. I don’t remember your swearing me to secrecy or anything.”
“No, of course. I’m not blaming you for anything. And until I heard the post-mortem results, I was hoping to keep your name out of the investigation. But I can’t do that now that I know Karin’s murderer is out there walking free. I have to give the detectives what I have.”
“Including your source on the holdout gang?”
Ted pushed his half-finished beer aside. “I told the cops I gathered the data myself by hanging around the bikers’ bar. As far as you know, that’s the truth.”
“No problem,” said Graham. He hesitated sympathetically before going further. “I can see you’re in a bind. If you have a source, that source has to be protected, from the law and the bikers. On the other hand, the police must be pressing you to tell all, and you have to wonder if telling all isn’t the only way to resolve the case. Do you have enough dirt on these jokers to identify a likely suspect?”
“I have practically nothing, Graham. When I raised this with you, I was talking big, but there’s nothing backing it up, really.”
“If you say so.”
If the Dark Arrows were behind Friday’s crimes, Ted believed the key role had to have been Scar’s. It wasn’t clear how the rumour that Ted Boudreau had a dossier on the gang might have got from the Simon Fraser academic back to the biker. But once it had, a Google search for Ted’s name on the Internet would have led to his publisher’s website, where Scar would have found a photo of the Kawasaki rider he’d lent a wrench to at the Grey Mare. Perusing the regional phone books would have yielded the Robin Hood Crescent address. According to Layla, Scar was the brother assigned to watch everyone’s back and to deal with nosy outsiders. The counter-intelligence officer, in effect. This didn’t mean Scar had done the dirty work personally, but he might well have been the one to assign the job to some expendable foot soldier, possibly not even a patch holder but a wannabe—a striker, a hangaround, a friend of the club trying to earn favour and a shot at membership.
When he got home, Ted called Nelson to tell him about Graham and Scar. The detective had by now had a long day, but didn’t grumble that Ted could have spoken up sooner.
“I’m going off duty now,” Nelson said, “but come to Police Headquarters at 7750 Hurontario Street. Tracy will meet you there and take your description of this biker. E
ven if we can’t find him in any police rogues’ gallery, we’ll get a sketch we can show around. And while I’ve got you on the line, I’ll give you a number your funeral parlour can call to arrange for the pickup of Karin’s remains . . .”
Funeral arrangements, thought Ted, suddenly nauseous. He couldn’t stomach the prospect of speaking to undertakers. Wouldn’t dealing with the grief trade workers be a good job for his father-in-law? Ted and Karin hadn’t been churchgoers, but if Markus wanted to involve the pastor who’d presided over Harriet’s send-off, it wasn’t going to add to Ted’s distress. It might even help take Markus’s mind off the horrifying results of the post-mortem. When Ted called, however, the only point to which Markus attached any importance was that Karin should be buried, not cremated, in case subsequent developments made further examination of the body desirable. That she had been murdered, Markus claimed never to have doubted.
“She was as nimble with her feet as with her fingers,” he said. “Catch her falling down stairs? In a pig’s ear.”
Peel Regional Police Headquarters was another fortress-like building—a three-storey L with the entrance at the inside corner. At the front counter, a uniformed woman established Ted’s identity and errand. Detective Rodriguez was said to be on her way down from her office on Derry Road. A quarter of an hour later, having entered by a back way, she appeared at a door you needed a security card to open.
“James says you’ve thought of a suspect,” she said, beckoning Ted in. “Let’s get your description on tape in an interview room. I’ve asked someone from FIS to sit in and see what she can make of it with EFIT.”
“Is that like Identi-Kit?” Ted asked.
“Yeah, sorry. Electronic Facial Identification Technique is the program we use, but the name is misleading. It gives us pictures of bodies and clothes as well as faces.”
“I don’t know that Scar executed the break-in and murder,” said Ted, “but he might have planned it.”